We follow a bunch of different characters, and they end up intersecting at some point(s)- my first thought is madcap comedy, but I’m unsure and Wikipedia has no page called madcap comedy.
The Gods Must Be Crazy
and 2
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Also, let’s name all the movies, even non-comedies, that follow different characters in different segments who sometimes intersect:
Pulp Fiction
Traffic
Crash
The 3 comedies I listed above
Go
Nashville
Ensemble?
Sometimes the word “Mosaic” is used: lots of stories and characters intersecting in various ways. Robert Altman used the form a lot (in addition to Nashville, there was A Wedding, Short Cuts, Ready to Wear (not very good), **Kansas City, Gosford Park, Dr. T and the Women[b/] and Cookie’s Fortune.
Other films: Magnolia, Screen Door Jesus.
No sure what you call that type of movie, but two more examples I thought of are Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch.
Picaresque?
No, picaresque follows a single character through a eposodic adventures (Don Quixote, Til Eulenspiegel, Simplicimus, Felix Krull, etc.)
Rat Race, which is essentially a remake of IAMMMM(however many Mads there are)W.
It shames me that I know this, but…Love Actually is of this form.
…or like that scene in The History of the World, Part I when Mel Brooks’ Moses holds aloft the Fifteen Commandments in three tablets and drops one? 
I did a quick Google search on “coincidental comedy” and turned up squat. Mosaic it is…
Many episodes of Seinfeld also follwo this pattern. Kramer will be off donig something, Jerry doing something different, at the end, it culminates into…somethng else.
[quote=bouv]
Many episodes of Seinfeld also follwo this pattern. Kramer will be off donig something, Jerry doing something different, at the end, it culminates into…somethng else.[/bouv]
When my 10th grade english class read Les Miserables, a classmate compared the book to an episode of Seinfeld- all the threads come around to intersect. The teacher said he’d never heard that one before :D.
Can anyone name any literary authors who tend to have stories like these? How about Dickens, does he?
One word for these types of stories: awesome. It’s just so exciting when the different characters finally intersect.
[QUOTE=andrewdt85]
Just about any Charles Dickens novel does this to some extent. It is also very common in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time uses this device. Jack Chalker does it in the Well World books. Modesitt often uses it in the Recluce books as well as the Legacies series. Donald Westlake used it to great effect in the Book Dancing Aztecs.