Cramer Q&A: Comedy Short Films
We sat down with Ben Thompson, VP of Shorts Programming at Tribeca, to answer some questions about comedy short films...
Hello! I’m Keelin Ryan, contributor to the Cramer Comedy Newsletter and a development exec at Tribeca Productions.
Recently, Cramer Comedy Newsletter Editor Carly Hoogendyk and I sat down with Ben Thompson, VP of Shorts Programming at the Tribeca Festival, to talk about comedic shorts.
We cover some common do’s and don’ts, the general festival landscape for comedic short films, and what festival programmers look for when selecting a program.
KR Ben, thank you for talking with us! I know you speak a lot on the topic of festival programming, so I was wondering if you’d want to kick the conversation off talking a bit about comedic shorts.
BT Well, for a start, we get a lot less comedy than anything else: last year our total submissions were over 8,000, and around 5,500 were narrative drama. When I'm speaking to filmmakers, I say comedy is something that all festivals are looking for; we really only get a few hundred each year.
Comedy is really hard to do. Drama is so much safer in terms of audience reaction; comedy is so subjective and could work for one festival or one type of audience but not for another. Last year we had a late night off-the-wall comedy program called Batshit Crazy. I was speaking to one of the filmmakers who had attended all three different screenings. He had a great reaction on the first night. And then on the second night, like, hardly anybody laughed. And then on the third night, it was kind of in the middle.
So it was the same film, just shown to three different audiences with three different reactions. That's part of the reason I think it's so hard to do comedy. And the risk you take as a filmmaker is the risk you take as a comedian standing up in front of the audience.
KR When you’re sitting down to watch something, what’s the general criteria and how are you evaluating if it's right for Tribeca?
BT In terms of comedy specifically, Tribeca is primarily an English-language festival, so a lot of what tends to resonate with us are US-based comedies in English. But what we're always very on the lookout for is international comedy; comedy that goes beyond the language barrier, that translates.
Some of my favorite comedies that we've played have not been English language; it’s more visual, more situational. When I was growing up in the UK, a popular comedian was Mr Bean - you can speak to people all over the world and whenever you mention Mr Bean, it resonates. Because it was physical comedy that didn't need subtitles, didn't need translation.
CH The invisible drum kit bit? I mean.
BT Oh, yes. Oh, my gosh.
CH Iconic. And, actually, I have to bring this up just because I think you'd love him, but there's a comedian named Andreas Parada. He's based in LA. He's part of the Groundlings, he speaks Spanish and he does clown. He was on America's Got Talent with this clown character [Papayaso]. Like, it's so funny. I think that's what you're talking about, where it's in another language, but can transcend that barrier.
BT That's one of the things we're always on the lookout for. We had a great Finnish short film a couple of years ago called The Bouncer, which is mostly physical; the character's mostly silent.
I mean, there's different types of comedy. There's cringe comedy. There's physical comedy. There's very dialogue-driven, clever, witty comedy. If you're putting together a program, you don't want one type because you don't have just one type of audience.
Last year we had a really fun comedy, a kind of meta satire called Proof of Concept - it played in front of First Time Female Director. So it was this wonderful kind of synergy between these two films. It's about a filmmaker making a short film, and getting that feedback of: “oh, no, you don't want to do that.”
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