Selling Physical Comedy with Camera Cuts (or lack thereof)
Cary Grant’s physical stunts are stuff of legend; he’s suave, sexy, smooth, and hilarious, all at once, trained in dancing and pantomime, a vaudeville performer before he was a screen actor.
Still, cinema isn’t circus, and doesn’t always work best in “one big viewpoint.” How you frame, edit, or don’t edit can emphasise or undercut your physical gags.
Two scenes in The Awful Truth (dir. Leo McCarey) use different approaches: one cuts, one doesn’t, and each is the best approach to ‘sell’ its comedy.
First is a 'simple' bit of physical comedy:
The piano was established earlier, but once we cut from Jerry’s (Cary Grant) medium shot (the better to enable having several goes at the stunt) what really sells Grant’s physical reaction is NOT cutting after the piano falls on his hand and he flops to the floor. Instead, the camera follows Jerry as he bounces up and moves away from the offending percussion piece.
The other, more famous bit takes the opposite approach, using several edits to heighten the comedy:
We see Jerry enter and sit in a chair very conveniently placed in a gap in the crowd; then a cut to his ex-wife-whom-he-wants-to-be-his-wife-again Lucy (Irene Dunn) so we can see her face as she also registers his arrival.
Though the shots of Jerry will change size and move, the shot of Lucy established here will remain constant.
0:11 is the first shot of Jerry without the crowd in frame; it establishes the table and an older gentleman listener, and gives a beat for Jerry to awkwardly place his hat on the table and cross his arms. Cut back to Lucy, eyeballing him sharply; like the first piano gag above, this shot is so the director knows they’ll have as many takes as necessary to get the stunt.
0:20 cut to a single of Jerry, arms still crossed, trying to seem nonchalant, leaning back . . . BANG! over he goes.
0:22 cut back to the wide where we saw Jerry enter, only now he’s nowhere to be seen by the crowd is rubbernecking and the sound of clattering can still be heard.
In quick succession the shot goes again to Jerry and the gentleman (watching with deep disapproval); then Irene again (watching with deep amusement); then back to Jerry and the gentleman as Grant does some hilarious disentanglement-but-only-making-it-worse work with the chair, table, and drawer.
Likely they did this a couple times with just Grant, and a few with the extra, knowing they could take the best bits from the best takes, and break it up with the shot of Irene to elongate the comedy.
The last we see of Jerry he’s holding a drawer because he’s no idea what to do with it, tie and hair rumpled, foot resting on the unseen table in a half-nonchalant, half-awkward-as-all-get-out stance.
The scene fades out on Irene finally losing it and laughing at this ridiculous, handsome husband she just can’t seem to get rid of.
And we fade out on this thought: when you’re shooting physical comedy, one of the more important things to consider (of course taking into account the practicality of performing it multiple times, the reset of props, etc) is whether it’s funnier and/or more believable if you shoot it in one smooth motion, or plan to cut it all up in post.