I need help

...so I watched The Starlet again the other night. Thankfully, the judges didn't say "the Starlet" once.

What was interesting, though, was that the category, or lesson, or whatever for the week's show was comedy; that is, for their "screen test", the actresses (or actors, if you're one of the people who prefer the all-inclusive term for both male and female performers) took a class in comedic acting and then had to perform a scene from Friends, in front of a live studio audience and the judges.

First of all, I question the validity of teaching comedic acting. Part of my reasoning for this stems from the fact that I believe that to a large extent, comedic acting cannot be taught. You can't really teach someone to "be funny" because a big part of being funny is timing and delivery. Comic timing involves knowing the pace of a joke - knowing when barrelling through lines full speed will make it funny and knowing when a big pause can be used for comic effect. To a certain extent, you find that in rehearsals, but since in tv or movies you don't get too many of those, if you want to be successful in a comedy you have to have a certain knowledge of that. Delivery, meanwhile, is completely unique to every performer. Take standup comics, for example. Comics spend a lot of time working on their delivery as they develop, because your delivery is as much a part of the performance as the material. Every comic develops his or her own style, one that works for them and for the material they perform. Imagine Chris Rock's delivery and Jerry Seinfeld's material, or vice versa. How bizarre would that be? And chances are it wouldn't work; or at the very least, it wouldn't be as funny.

The one point that the teacher for the episode made that was valid was that comic acting is about taking risks, and about not being afraid of looking stupid. But then, I would argue that that applies to dramatic acting as well. Any time that you act, if you're thinking about how you look you're going to look stupid, and your actions will not be as effective as they can be if you simply lose yourself in the moment, which is the goal of any actor.

Second, I think it's a crying shame that they gave them scripts from Friends. The scene was a little bit between Rachel and Phoebe talking about Chandler and Monica getting married, and how they weren't jealous at all, but then Rachel said she was maybe 2% jealous and that was like nothing, and then she says maybe 80-20 and then they talk about having a friend that you agree to get married to if you hit a certain age and you're still single and Phoebe says she has that with Joey and ha ha ha.

Honestly, it's not very funny. I suppose you could make the argument that scripts like that are probably the high end of network comedies that you could realistically expect people to perform with relatively little preparation time (not to mention involving 2 women), but any time you perform, the script plays a huge role in how well you will do. Michael Caine said, (and I paraphrase, cause I don't feel like pulling out his book) "You can have the hardest days of your life acting out a bad script and the movie will still look like crap, and you can breeze through shooting a great script and win awards for it." The more work I do, the more I realize just how many factors go into an actor's performance. It starts with the script - is it a good script? Are there fake moments there? How good is the dialogue? Then, the other people in the scene - are they talented? Have they done their work? Do they listen? Do they react? Director - what kind of blocking are they giving actors? How do they interpret the scene, and does that differ from what the actor things? Not to mention all the technical on-set worries - being on marks (positions set in advance so you'll be in the camera's frame - onscreen - when you're supposed to be and where you're supposed to be), lighting worries, special effects, etc. And even after all that, after you've shot the scene and it's all forgotten about, the editor comes into play, cutting and splicing different angles of the scene to make it into a narrative whole. I don't believe editing can turn bad acting into great acting, but it can make decent performances very good - but then, the reverse is also true.

Comedy, of course, always gets knocked for somehow being "less" than drama. In my opinion, like the differences between stage and screen acting, they are simply different, with pros and cons for each. I do think comedy is more difficult, though, and here's why: drama is often inherent in a scene - people get drama because everyone has events in their lives that are dramatic, that they can relate to a scene through. Comedy is harder to write and harder to perform, ESPECIALLY for a live audience because there's nothing more excruciating to watch or perform than a comedy where no-one is laughing. If you've never experienced it, trust me.