A stranger's baby in the closet, a chicken walking around freely, a tiger in the bath and the suite trashed ‘The Hangover’ is about a bucks night gone completely wrong.
After a bucks night out, three friends wake up in a hotel suite in the morning with no recollection of the previous night due to intoxication- hence the movie title ‘The Hangover’. The Hangover employs several comedic techniques to make the audience laugh, and it delivers well on its promise as a ‘lighthearted’ easy to follow along movie. The Hangover is an enjoyable movie to watch, and to explore why this movie makes us laugh I will analyse the characters, film structure and comedic techniques.

The structure of The Hangover is told in non-chronological order. The film begins …show more content…
The narrative sequence begins in the opening scene with one of the groomsmen telling the bride “Listen, we fucked up” (The Hangover,2009) advising her that there's no possible way for the wedding to commence. Then cutting back to before this happened we learn about the characters and get to know crucial background information.

This narrative sequence employed by the director adopts a time-tested narrative technique of opening with a dramatic sequence that sets up the mystery and suspense; and following it with flashback narrative that reveals and unravels the suspense. It makes us question if the groom will make it to his wedding on time, acting as a ticking clock.

Some reasons as to why the writers used this narrative approach is that follows an actor's rule ‘if the actor cries, the audience won’t. If the actor laughs, the audience won’t. A drunk making a fool of himself may be hilarious to him, but not to the sober people watching’(Truby,2010). Meaning that if the writers wrote this movie in chronological order it most likely wouldn't be as funny. As it would lack in narrative drive and plot, all we would in actual would be the characters trying to one up the previous in events in order to generate