“Comedy is and always will be an amusing story humorously told,” says Mr. Drew.  “If it is a good story, well told, then it is a comedy, but if it has no story or cannot be told humorously, then no amount of bolstering will ever make it into a comedy.  You may add a lot of knockabout and perhaps get an acceptable farce, or you can write in sensation and get travesty, but you cannot by these means change the unfit into comedy, and the broad use of ‘comedy’ to apply to anything intended to be diverting is a misuse of an ancient and honorable word....  To my way of thinking comedy is first of all a good story.  It is a story and not merely an incident or a collection of incidents.  There must be a plot to obtain and hold the interest.  This plot does not necessarily require profound depths, but there must be a distinct and clearly defined objective upon which the interest may be centred, and the interest must arise from mental processes and not from mere mechanical appeal....  Humorous action does not mean gross horseplay.  The action itself may not always be marked to be amusing.  To take a crude illustration, suppose that a character in the story is about to thrash his ancient enemy.  He feels so certain of victory that he bribes the policeman on the beat not to interfere.  Now he goes to the field of battle and unexpectedly gets the worst of it.  He is the first to call for the police, and the scene flashes between the suborned officer placidly smiling at the sounds of the affray and never dreaming that it is his patron who is calling for aid.  There is nothing humorous in the spectacle of a policeman on a street corner.  In a comedy of incident he would have to suffer indignity to get a laugh.  In the comedy with a plot, the plot makes the action humorous.  We are not, in reality, laughing at the policeman.  He is merely the symbol of the idea.  We are laughing at the predicament into which our hero has thrust himself.  It is this thought, and not the sight of the policeman, at which we laugh.  The policeman merely stands for the thought, yet it is humorous action within my meaning of the term in that the policeman represents the thought.

“In our own comedies Mrs. Drew and I seek to appeal to the mind as well as to the eye, but to appeal to the mind through the eye.  We value the advantage of brightly-written sub-titles, but believe that these should supplement and not replace the comedy in the action.  The clever leader may either prepare for the comedy-situation or may follow and intensify it, but it is always an accessory and not the chief aim.  It is absurd to talk of the leader as an intrusion to be avoided.  It should be avoided only when it really is an intrusion.  The cleverness of an author displays itself in the expertness with which he handles leaders rather than in his skill in avoiding them."[31]

[Footnote 31:  Sidney Drew, “Comedy Picture Production,” in The Moving Picture World.]