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Did the winter movie season—with its prestigious yet completely depressing crop of cattle-bolt murderers, paralyzed wink-authors, Alzheimer's sufferers, and the like—get you down? Fear not: As the NY Times reports, a massive crop of Hollywood comedies are coming down the pike. Didn't care for the potty-mouthed Russian Roulette humor of Semi-Pro? No matter, as every taste will be accounted for in The Great Comedy Rush of 2008: Apatowian sex farce, period screwball, and the wacky worlds of surrogate pregnancy and Mossad have all been covered. To predict how they fare, we might look to the past—in 1988, the Times notes, a recent writers strike and weakening domestic economy provided the backdrop to four comedies (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Coming to America, Big, and Crocodile Dundee II) that dominated that summer's box office. But as it turns out, there's a far simpler method to determine how much your dumb comedy is going to rake in:

Thomas Pollock, a partner in the Montecito Picture Company, whose "Old School" helped put Mr. Ferrell on the fast track five years ago, pointed out that heavily tested, carefully tuned comedies were on the whole wonderfully predictable.

"Multiply the number of big laughs in the movie times $10 million, and you get the ultimate domestic box office," Mr. Pollock said. "Ten big laughs, $100 million."

With the secret of the astonishingly simple Pollock's Principle now out, we imagine it won't be long before the curtain is drawn back, and Hollywood's other closely guarded theorems—such as Bay's Law (stating that the Force between any two screen explosions multiplied by 4000 pi times the number of stone-foxes in midriff-baring croptops is equal to the opening weekend take) and the Fanning Formula of Depreciating Precocious-Child-Actress Returns—become a matter of public knowledge.