The Truth About Comedy with Rich Peppiatt

There’s no such thing as an easy laugh, darling. The truth is, perfecting a raucous tone requires an orderly planning and meticulous thought. Comedic excellence demands painstaking tonal precision. 

“Tone is the least talked about thing and the hardest thing to land in film. So many projects miss by a couple of degrees just because they haven’t quite nailed their tone,” says Rich Peppiatt.

From journalist gone rogue to world-touring stand up and now an acclaimed comedy director, Rich Peppiatt knows well the diligence and craftmanship that hones razor-sharp humor. 

Peppiatt’s riveting and rowdy feature Kneecap exemplifies a comedy film that succeeds in it’s riotous humor because the storytelling was brought to life with careful attention to tonal precision. 

Rich says, “The beauty of Kneecap was the starting point was the music. It gives you a strong sense of what the tone will be, anarchic and fun.”

Sweeping the awards season with wins across the globe BAFTA and BIFA, Kneecap was celebrated for how it manifested the defiant spirit of the Irish hip hop band across the screen. A rebellious ode to Irish language, Kneecap could only be told with a colorful and revolutionary visual language. 

Behind every wild cinematic moment that seems to explode across the screen there were long hours of historical research, a carefully written script, meticulous storyboards. 

For Kneecap, “There was a huge amount of planning, really boring, tedious, sitting at a table, drawing everything out and really coming up with a plan,” explains Peppiatt.  

Comedy perfected, the hilarious storytelling with wit sharp enough to cut deep into profound human truths, is rarely off the cuff. It is an art demanding rigor and intention. And yet, such rigor is rewarded, producing stories that are uniquely resonant. Comedy offers us both laughter and revelation, it connects us with brilliant truths that are otherwise left in shadow. 

“A lot of things tend to exist in silence, exist unsaid. The responsibility of humor is to shine a light on those places and to say the things that no one else wants to say. It’s the hardest thing to nail, but we’re naturally drawn to it as human beings. It unites us. One of the most natural human impulses is laughter.”

The truth is, the art of comedy requires attentive, tedious craftsmanship. When comedic excellence is realized, that humor becomes a unifying voice, telling the yet untold and resonating with audiences.