Letters From the Editor

Gags I’d Like to See in Movies/TV

Sometimes all you’ve got is a gag, and no plot. And that’s exactly what I’m providing to you here (no charge) with some guesswork as to the surrounding circumstances that could be cooked up, were you to actually write something that had one of these.
Some guy rides an escalator, gets off, and then walks to a set of stairs and just stands on the first step, expecting it to propel him upwards like an escalator.
This would probably be best if the guy had on a bowler. Plus, the bowler means he’s French, right? (In Comedyworld, the answer to that is Yes.) So what we have here is really like two gags at once. You could maybe have a guy who’s obviously British bump him from behind, but since the British may wear bowlers too the whole thing could just be rife with nineteenth-century political implications.

Some sort of player-piano music would work well here, come to think of it.
A woman, walking down the sidewalk, obliviously tosses away a lit cigarette and it goes straight into a baby pram.
This would be great to show how someone is really self-centered, or it could just be played for laughs. The G-rated version of this would show the mother of the child holding the baby and looking on in total astonishment. (That way we’d know the baby doesn’t get injured – kind of like how on G.I. Joe cartoons you always saw the COBRA guys parachuting from their planes when they blew up. It’s a wonder anything ever got done in that war or whatever it was.)
Somebody goes into a store somewhere in the U.S., has a slight tiff with the cashier over something or other, gets their bill rung up, which comes to something-something ‘.02,’ then purposefully slips in a Canadian penny when they pay.
This gag could be the centerpiece of a whole counterfeiting scandal episode (proposed title: ‘Funny Money’). Except that people are pretty sure that Canadian pennies are just Canadian pennies and not fake. Pretty sure.

The relative to this gag could be one where somebody pays with a buffalo nickel, thinking it’s a regular U.S. nickel, and the cashier refuses it, not realizing it could be worth thousands of dollars. Then a little French boy steals a loaf of bread, is caught by a man wearing a bowler, and we’re all sued for plagiarism.


inspired by Christian Havins
biopic

Andrew Womack is a founding editor of The Morning News. He is always working on the next installment of the Albums of the Year series at TMN. More by Andrew Womack

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