I think that something had to be cut down in order to make the movie less than like five hours long, and even though it was dissapointing to have those funny parts cut out, what can you do? The length of the movie, in my opinion, was great. If it had been longer it probably would've lost some of it's audience and stuff like that.

Plus, it's another reason why we can tell those people that only watch the movies (*grr*) that the books are 10 times better!