This one's all the fault of Shakespeare, too. Stupid bard. You imbued our nineties teen movies with a sense of literary importance and weight, but you were also indirectly responsible for Jar-Jar Binks. If he'd just kept to the rules of the Greek tragedy we'd've never had to suffer wisecracking sidekicks or bumbling fools literally stumbling into dramatic films and mucking things up with some poorly-timed and just plain unfunny jokes. It's a concept he introduced to lighten the mood a little in Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet and, hey, if it's good enough for Bill, it's good enough for Hollywood! Both McKee and John Howard Lawson were evangelical about going back to the classics when wanting to understand story structure, and the most successful way to pen a script (Lawson even got his start in the theatre), referencing the likes of Aristotle alongside Shakespeare. It was the latter that inspired the need for comedic characters in even the most po-faced Hollywood productions, however, because what could be a safer bet than a form of writing that was funded and patronised by the English monarchy back in the day? Thanks to this trope we got Jar-Jar, but we also got the double act of C-3PO and R2-D2 in the original Star Wars trilogy; Alan Cumming's dorky hacker Boris in Goldeneye; Chekhov's comedy accent in the Stark Trek movies; oh, and pretty much every pairing in a Disney film, from Timon and Pumba to Olaf and Sven. This one's so formulaic that it almost always uses a twosome as the comic relief, something shown to work from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Laurel and Hardy.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
