My favorite law in cartoons is that gravity waits for eye contact.
Wile E. Coyote can run straight off a cliff and remain level with the road. For a second he is not falling. He is standing on his own error. Then he looks down. Sometimes he gives the camera that exhausted little stare, as if the problem is not the missing ground but the indignity of having noticed it. Only then does the desert collect him.
Real gravity is automatic. Cartoon gravity is social. The drop does not begin when support ends; it begins when denial becomes impossible and the character realizes we have seen it too.
An immediate fall would just be impact. The pause gives disaster manners. The coyote gets one clean beat to inspect the shape of what he has done. So do we. Physics becomes timing, then embarrassment. We are not laughing at the fall yet. We are laughing at the audit.
And animation makes the wait feel exact. The feet stop pedaling. The dust settles. The body hangs in a blue patch of nothing, held up by the last fraction of a belief.
Then the whistle. The tiny puff. Gravity, having received acknowledgment, proceeds.