This manuscript, written during Horvath's Disney Studio days and dated February 22, 1937, was found in his personal scrapbook of mementos. The sequences on the following pages illustrate these points.
In m.m.o. (here and hereafter this abbreviation stands for: "my modest opinion') the most effective gags are those that will take the audience by complete surprise. The absurdity of the situation is an important factor.
Take for instance Captain Noah (in an old Fable Cartoon) diving overboard his ark to save his crew. Nobody in the audience knows what his purpose might be going overboard. We follow him to the bottom of the waters – keying up suspense. He reaches the bottom and without much fumbling, pulls out a plug. The flood waters start to whirl and to drain off rapidly in the best bathtub fashion, and the water running from beneath the ark leaves it high and dry atop a convenient cliff. I have never seen any gag yet in all these years that went over in a bigger way.
This – in m.m.o. is a typical example of a surprise gag: it seems logical, there seems nothing Impossible about it. It is easily put over, clearly comprehensible to anyone, and yet the audience would expect anything else in the world to happen but that. There was no prop visible that would have given the gag away. It is for this reason that I think that gags of this sort are always superior to gags that necessarily need a lot of planting. Gags around convenient props that naturally lend themselves to gag situations are more or less anticipated by the audience. Take a sack of potatoes spilled on the cellar floor, and you will expect some character to take a spill when coming in contact with them. Flypaper ditto...precariously balanced dishes...garden rake to be stepped upon.
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