funny situations to which such a
complication might lead in farce.

_Burlesque_ takes a well-known and often a serious subject and hits
off its salient points in an uproarious manner. One might burlesque
"Hamlet" by causing a red-nosed Prince of Denmark to do a juggling
act with "poor Yorick's" skull.

_Extravaganza_ deals with the unnatural and the impossible. The
super-human antics of the acrobatic buffoons in Hanlon's perennial
"Superba," and those of the Byrne Brothers in "Eight Bells," are
familiar examples.

_2. Comedy a Difficult Art_

A writer in one of the photoplay journals, advising writers who are
struggling to succeed, concludes by admonishing them either to avoid
stories which because of prohibited themes are likely to make them
unpopular with editors, or else to "try comedies."

It may be that this writer is one of those who have never tried to
write comedy scripts, or possibly he is one of the favored few who
have a special talent for humor. Whichever may be the case,
notwithstanding this well-meant advice, the truth is that the
thoroughly effective comedy script is the hardest of all to produce,
and this is proved by the fact that, no matter how many manufacturers
announce that they "will not be able to use any more Western, slum
life, or war stories for some time to come," they _never_ declare that
they are "over-stocked with good comedy scripts." There is _always_ a
market for a fine, clean comedy.

_3. Comedy Requires a "Full" Treatment_

But superior comedy scripts, we insist, are hard to write. One of the
less obvious reasons is that there are generally about twice as many
scenes in a comedy script as in any kind of dramatic story. This does
not mean, of course, that the comedy script is hard to write merely
because it takes longer to write it. The labor expended on its
mechanical preparation is trivial compared to the brain-work necessary
to the building of a story which, while having almost double the usual
number of scenes, must still display lively action, logical sequence,
and convincing (which in the case of comedy means probable) situations
from beginning to end.

Especially in comedy must each scene tell; hence there can be no
excuse for "writing in" a number of scenes which have no dramatic
value whatever, for that is palpable padding. True, you may have seen
many comedy subjects in which one or two fairly good ideas were
stretched out until you could almost picture the dire