Comedy

Comedy is diagnosed, not prompted for laughs. The character never knows they are funny.

Comedy and register [proven]. These are internal notes for you, never printed in a client document:

• Each gag names its mechanism: unexpected behaviour, an unexpected place or size, or escalation.

• Each comic character's profile names their attitude: what they take as normal (see Performance → The master acting profile).

• A persistence beat: they try again after a normal person would stop.

• No pause is written before a punchline. The beat lives on the listener's face.

• Restraint is a short, plain ban on the wrong acting, in your own words: "plays every second as if it matters; no winks, no faces pulled for the camera".

Comic timing comes from the reaction clock, chosen gag by gag: instant for a freeze, or held and then late for a take (see Performance → The reaction clock). The genre's wider craft: Genres → Comedy and dialogue.

The movement register [official guidance], only where the treatment names a heightened or stylised register (deadpan bodies, game-like characters, theatrical comedy): three to five countable movement rules for the whole film, copied unchanged into each PERFORMANCE block of the film. They cover tempo, how heads turn, what arms do, who stays still and how people walk. For example: "every head turns in a single motion, then freezes; hands rest flat on the thighs; seated people never shift; everyone walks at one slow, identical pace". Naturalistic films get none.

Why: Rowan Atkinson's lecture on visual comedy names the same mechanisms, the character's attitude, and the habit of trying again after a normal person would give up. Outreal Production's "rule of seriousness" keeps the image grave however absurd the action. The 2026 Cannes Lions Grand Prix in Film Craft for direction, Coinbase's "Your Way Out" (dir. Oscar Hudson), drilled its cast in the way video-game characters move. Higgsfield's team writes dance as countable steps because they are easy to check.

Sources

• Rowan Atkinson, Funny Business (summary); Outreal Production, VARMINTS (project); @retail_octopus (project) (comedy played straight inside a grave frame); Coinbase "Your Way Out", dir. Oscar Hudson, movement director Maëva Berthelot (TechEBlog; IDIDTHAT); Higgsfield, "Secret Workflow to Make Cinematic AI Commercials (Seedance 2.5)" (video).