Finding the funny

"You saw my Bottom?" Stephen Pelinski asked a fellow actor. "Last time I played Oberon, and now I've descended to Bottom."

Pelinski was faux-lamenting his recent portrayal, in the Guthrie's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," of a long-eared, slack-jawed ass. Unlike regal Oberon, his braying Bottom was a laugh machine.

The actor and a few of his "Midsummer" cohorts are gearing up to deliver more hysterics in "The Government Inspector," a comedy that opens today at the Guthrie.

In the play, which is about mistaken identity and the mayhem that ensues after a bureaucrat pays a surprise visit to a town with lots of people on the take, Pelinski plays the police chief.

"A very peripheral and woefully underwritten role," he said half-seriously. To which playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, who adapted "Inspector" from Nikolai Gogol's original and was also at the table last week after a rehearsal, replied with silence.

Oh, well.

The late comedian George Carlin said that dying is hard, but comedy is harder. Fueled by martinis, wine and a cheese plate one late night after rehearsal last week, Pelinski and a group of actors from "Inspector" took a stab at figuring out what makes something funny.

'Like surfing'

Sure, you can map the rhythm of a show; timing and physical dexterity are important. Dire consequences, too -- they sharpen tension. And, if you are Hunter Foster, who was in "The Producers" on Broadway and who was nominated for a Tony for his turn in "Urinetown," it also helps to have a good singing voice.

But even with all the ideal ingredients, eliciting laughter is no sure thing.

"Comedy, when it's really good and the audience is laughing, it's almost like surfing," said Foster, who plays Hlestakov, a poor man mistaken for a high-ranking government official. "You just ride the waves."

"Isn't there just an instinct with comedy?" asked Guthrie veteran Sally Wingert, who plays the mayor's wife. "When it's good, it's more in the moment than anything else. ... Sometimes, we're rehearsing and the whole room is alive with laughter. And sometimes we're rehearsing and the whole room is flat. You're not doing a different play, a different line, but there's some zizz that you're not tapping into."

The thing about doing a comedy is that you have to get serious in order to be funny. But "you can't overwork or overthink it," said Kate Eifrig, who plays two smaller roles. "We call that overkneading the dough."

And the stakes have to be high. "I remember Emma Thompson talking about how she became funny because there was nothing else funny in her life," Eifrig said. "She became funny out of necessity."

Foster said that in "Urinetown" the company played it straight.

" 'Urinetown' was [like] a Brecht play," said Foster. "We were doing 'Threepenny Opera' and it was deadly serious. This one ["Inspector"] is pretty broad ... but you still have to find the truth in it."

Found in translation

An irrepressible wit, Hatcher built his "Inspector" on Peter Raby's mid-1970s version that played at the Guthrie. Hatcher, whose credits include "Compleat Female Stage Beauty," "Three Viewings" and "Tuesdays With Morrie," which he co-wrote with Mitch Albom, said that he worked on the script with specific actors in mind.

"I wrote for people's rhythms and the way they can color a bit," he said, listing Wingert and Peter Michael Goetz. To which Pelinski, still hamming it up, frowned.

Hatcher responded with a shrug of his shoulders.

Hatcher is "absolutely the most genius craftsman of rhythm," said Wingert. "If rhythm equals comedy, with that man ... you could almost put gibberish in."

Often, when a work is translated from another language and century, some humor is lost in the process.

"You translate something literally and it comes out, 'Huh, that fish has three eyes if I've ever seen,' " said Hatcher. "You don't change the plot or even the entrances or exits but you do play with the dialogue. You play with the characterization."

Hatcher and the creative team reworked one role so it would work for actor Luverne Seifert. "Originally, the servant was somebody really ancient," he said, but after seeing Seifert in auditions, "I reworked a couple of things for it to be more Luverne-like than old-guy."

Hatcher has also rethought the daughter character, "who tends to be sweet, more of a simpleton in other versions," he said. He has made her "a little Goth and quite pissed off."

During the impromptu roundtable last week, the "Inspector" actors agreed: Things that make them laugh in rehearsals often fall flat with a live audience.

"That's why previews are so important," said Pelinski. "They give you information."

All agreed that the death knell of a joke comes the moment someone points it out.

"That's when somebody says, 'You know what the funniest part of what you're doing is?' " said Eifrig. "The next time you do it, you can't do it quite the same. You can't name it. You can't point it out."

Eifrig had a question for the playwright. "As an actor, you feel funny based on timing, interaction with people and things like that," she said. "How do you write funny?"

"We go into a fugue state," said Hatcher, humming. "Comedy is, by and large, unsentimental. Most comedy is kind of cold." And, let's hope, funny.

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390