How Do Actors Get To Laugh So Naturally In Movies?

There Are Some Techniques…

I graduated from Teatro-Escola Célia Helena, one of Brazil's best drama schools, for almost two decades. I worked with theater, television, and cinema, and I can tell you how things happen in the three environments and the techniques we use.

First of all, it starts with the joke itself. When the scene is well written, and the actors are good, the laugh comes naturally. You put yourself in the proposed situation — which is funny — and end up really laughing. That works well on TV and in the cinema, where we do some repetitions, but not many. When the scene is good, it takes concentration to NOT laugh before the moment.

In theater, things change a little bit. We rehearsed each scene thoroughly and presented the same story every night. That makes a joke, however good it is, start to lose its fun for us. There are some jokes that we know how to work well with the audience, so the awareness that the audience will laugh already “puts us in the mood.” But others are not that good, or that should only cause laughter in the actors and not in the audience. These require the use of techniques that we learned in drama school.

The main one, for me, is the “emotional memory.” When I first came across the concept, I misinterpreted it. I thought it was enough to think of something funny to provoke laughter — or tears, anger, etc. — but it was not quite like this. To build a good collection of emotional memory, you need…