A Companion to Film Comedy E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1300

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A wide-ranging survey of the subject that celebrates the variety and complexity of film comedy from the 'silent' days to the present, this authoritative guide offers an international perspective on the popular genre that explores all facets of its formative social, cultural and political context * A wide-ranging collection of 24 essays exploring film comedy from the silent era to the present * International in scope, the collection embraces not just American cinema, including Native American and African American, but also comic films from Europe, the Middle East, and Korea * Essays explore sub-genres, performers, and cultural perspectives such as gender, politics, and history in addition to individual works * Engages with different strands of comedy including slapstick, romantic, satirical and ironic * Features original entries from a diverse group of multidisciplinary international contributors

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Notes on Editors and Contributors

Editors

Contributors

Comic Introduction: “Make 'em Laugh, make 'em Laugh!”

References

Further Reading

Part I: Comedy Before Sound, and the Slapstick Tradition

Chapter 1: The Mark of the Ridiculous and Silent Celluloid: Some Trends in American and European Film Comedy from 1894 to 1929

Fred Ott's Infectious Sneeze (1894)

A Plot Underfoot: The Lumière Brothers' L'Arroseur arrosé (1895)

Documentary of a Slap Shoe Hero: Little Tich et ses “Big Boots” (1900)

Georges Méliès, “Fantasist Filmmaker” (1896–1902)

Fantasist Filmmaking in Britain (1900–1901)

Cut to the Chase (1907–1909)

Silent Super Star: Max Linder (1905–1912)

Ethnic Comedy and the American Character (1900–1916)

Mack Sennett's Commedia dell'Arte (1912–1917)

American Comedy Gets Some Manners: Flora Finch, John Bunny, Mr. & Mrs. Sidney Drew (1908–1917)

The “Mark of the Ridiculous” of Charlie Chaplin's “Pierrot” (1914–1918)

The Mark of the Ridiculous and American Middle Class Silent Comedy of Manners (1915–1929)

Conclusion: The Loss of Silents

Notes

References

Further Reading

Chapter 2: Pie Queens and Virtuous Vamps: The Funny Women of the Silent Screen

Pioneers of the Pie: Early Silent Comediennes

The “Rough Gals” of Slapstick

Flappers, Flirts, and “Polite” Comedy

Conclusion

References

Further Reading

Chapter 3: “Sound Came Along and Out Went the Pies”: The American Slapstick Short and the Coming of Sound

“To put it unkindly”: Sound and the Historiography of Film Comedy

“The artistry of the Actor in Delivering the Spoken Lines”: Playlets and the Uses of Dialogue

“The Funniest Sound Effect Yet Recorded”: Slapstick and the Uses of Noise

“They Love it in the Small Towns”: Early Sound Slapstick and the Short-Subject Market

“You Don't have to Speak Funny Words to Make Things Funny”: Charlie Chaplin versus the Three Stooges

Notes

References

Further Reading

Part II: Comic Performers in the Sound Era

Chapter 4: Mutinies Wednesdays and Saturdays: Carnivalesque Comedy and the Marx Brothers

Unaccustomed Laughter

Plurality Humor

Rabelais on Celluloid

Delirious Abandon

Notes

References

Further Reading

Chapter 5: Jacques Tati and Comedic Performance

Notes

References

Further Reading

Chapter 6: Woody Allen: Charlie Chaplin of New Hollywood

The Nebbish

The Artist

Notes

References

Further Reading

Chapter 7: Mel Brooks, Vulgar Modernism, and Comic Remediation

The Last Gas(p) of Vulgar Modernism

Be a Clown!

Chicken Fat and Blackouts

Bodily Eruptions and Generic Transformations

Sound Gags and Silent Movies

“Hey, It Worked in Blazing Saddles”

References

Further Reading

Part III: New Perspectives on Romantic Comedy and Masculinity

Chapter 8: Humor and Erotic Utopia: The Intimate Scenarios of Romantic Comedy

References

Further Reading

Chapter 9: Taking Romantic Comedy Seriously in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Before Sunset (2004)

References

Further Reading

Chapter 10: The View from the Man Cave: Comedy in the Contemporary “Homme-com” Cycle

Introduction

The Man Cave

The Lair

Homme-coms

Conclusion

Notes

References

Further Reading

Chapter 11: The Reproduction of Mothering: Masculinity, Adoption, and Identity in Flirting with Disaster

References

Further Reading

Part IV: Topical Comedy, Irony, and Humour Noir

Chapter 12: It's Good to be the King: Hollywood's Mythical Monarchies, Troubled Republics, and Crazy Kingdoms

The Genesis of Ruritanian Comedy

The 1910s: America is Ace High

The 1920s: Forbidden Paradiso

The Talkies: See Sylvania First!

The Pinnacle: Hail Klopstokia! Hail Freedonia!

Leaving Ruritania

Acknowledgments

References

Further Reading

Chapter 13: No Escaping the Depression: Utopian Comedy and the Aesthetics of Escapism in Frank Capra's You Can't Take It with You (1938)

Notes

References

Further Reading

Chapter 14: The Totalitarian Comedy of Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be

Notes

References

Further Reading

Chapter 15: Dark Comedy from Dr. Strangelove to the Dude

Comic Nightmare

Critical Responses; or, The Half-life of Not Getting the Point

Charlie Don't Surf

The Dude Abides

Notes

References

Part V: Comic Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity

Chapter 16: Black Film Comedy as Vital Edge: A Reassessment of the Genre

The Specter of Amos ‘n’ Andy and the Anxiety about Minstrelsy

Killing the Messenger: Tyler Perry and the Crisis of Black Representation

Bamboozled: Spike Lee's Political Satire of the Black Image in the White Mind

Barbershop as Both an Internal and External Spectator Film

Conclusion

Notes

References

Further Reading

Chapter 17: Winking Like a One-Eyed Ford: American Indian Film Comedies on the Hilarity of Poverty

References

Further Reading

Chapter 18: Ethnic Humor in American Film: The Greek Americans

The Greeks: Language

Comic Persona

It's Greek to Me

My Big Fat Greek Wedding

Curtain Calls

Notes

References

Further Reading

Part VI: International Comedy

Chapter 19: Alexander Mackendrick: Dreams, Nightmares, and Myths in Ealing Comedy

References

Further Reading

Chapter 20: Tragicomic Transformations: Gender, Humor, and the Plastic Body in Two Korean Comedies

Introduction

Remaking Korean Female Bodies

“It's Tough Being Beautiful”: The Pain and Labor of Beauty

Skinny Unruliness, Fake Innocence, and a Happy, Unromantic Ending

Feminist Black Humor in 301, 302

From Abject Housewife to Liberated Cannibal: 301's Volatile Body

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

References

Further Reading

Chapter 21: Comedy “Italian Style” and I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958)

Comedy “Italian Style”

I soliti ignoti: Monicelli's Comedy “Italian Style”

Closeup on Comedy “Italian Style”

The Beginnings of commedia all'italiana

The Final Stages of Comedy “Italian Style” and its Heritage in Italian Film Comedy

Notes

References

Further Reading

Chapter 22: “Laughter that Encounters a Void?”: Humor, Loss, and the Possibility for Politics in Recent Palestinian Cinema

Is Film a Refuge for Politics?

Humor, a Divine Intervention?

Rashid Mashrawi's Laila's Birthday (2008)

At the Limits of Representation: Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention

Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now (2005)

Notes

References

Further Reading

Part VII: Comic Animation

Chapter 23: Laughter is Ten Times More Powerful than a Scream: The Case of Animated Comedy

“I'm a Toon. Toons are Supposed to Make People Laugh”

A Patient in a Lunatic Asylum

Girls' Nights Out

Taigu and Laughing Gods

That May Not Be All, Folks!

Notes

References

Further Reading

Chapter 24: Theatrical Cartoon Comedy: From Animated Portmanteau to the Risus Purus

Introduction

Preamble: Definitions, the Human and Metamorphosis

The Joke in Language

Animated Portmanteau

The Advent of Sound and Sonic Portmanteau

Cartoon Anarchy and Noncompossibility

It's All in a Name: Caricature and Parody

Animated Paranomasia, Idiom, and the Parodic Grotesque

The Risus Purus

Notes

References

Further Reading

Index

This edition first published 2013

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Wiley-Blackwell is an imprint of John Wiley & Sons, formed by the merger of Wiley's global Scientific, Technical and Medical business with Blackwell Publishing.

Registered Office

John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

Editorial Offices

350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA

9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to film comedy / edited by Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4443-3859-1 (hardback : alk. paper)

1. Comedy films–History and criticism. 2. Comic, The. I. Horton, Andrew. II. Rapf, Joanna E.

PN1995.9.C55C675 2012

791.43′617–dc23

2012023048

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design by Simon Levy Design Associates

Cover images: Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp © Bettmann / Corbis, from the Archives of Roy Export Company Establishment. Banana skin © leeavison / iStockphoto

Notes on Editors and Contributors

Editors

Andrew Horton is the Jeanne H. Smith Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma, an award-winning screenwriter, and the author of 24 books on film, screenwriting and cultural studies, including Laughing Out Loud: Writing the Comedy Centered Screenplay (University of California Press, 1999). His films include Brad Pitt's first feature film, Dark Side of the Sun (1988), and the much-awarded Something In Between (1983, Yugoslavia, directed by Srdjan Karanovic).

Joanna E. Rapf is a professor of film in the English Department at the University of Oklahoma. Periodically, she also teaches at Dartmouth College. Her books include Buster Keaton: A Bio-Bibliography (1995), On the Waterfront (2003), and Interviews with Sidney Lumet (2005). Recent publications in the area of comedy have been on Roscoe Arbuckle, Harry Langdon, Fay Tincher, Marie Dressler, Jimmy Durante, Jerry Lewis, and Woody Allen.

Contributors

Kristen Anderson Wagner received her Ph.D. in critical studies from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Her dissertation, Comic Venus: Women and Comedy in American Silent Film, explores the often overlooked work of silent-era comediennes.

Suzanne Buchan is Professor of Animation Aesthetics and Director of the Animation Research Centre at the University for the Creative Arts in the United Kingdom. She is also a curator, a festival advisor, and the editor of animation: an interdisciplinary journal (Sage). Recent publications include The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

Celestino Deleyto is Professor of Film and English Literature at the Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain). He is the author of The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy (Manchester University Press, 2009).

Maria DiBattista teaches English and Comparative Literature and film at Princeton. She is the author of Fast Talking Dames, and, most recently, Novel Characters: A Genealogy.

Roberta Di Carmine teaches film studies at Western Illinois University. She received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Oregon (2004) and a master's degree in foreign languages and literatures from West Virginia University (1996). In September 2011, Peter Lang publishers released her first book, Italy Meets Africa: Colonial Discourses in Italian Cinema.

Mark Eaton is Professor of English at Azusa Pacific University, where he teaches American literature and film studies. He is co-editor of The Gift of Story: Narrating Hope in a Postmodern World (2006), and a contributor to A Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900–1950 (2009). He is currently at work on a book about religion in contemporary American fiction.

Lucy Fischer is a distinguished professor of English and film studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where she serves as Director of the Film Studies Program. She is the author of eight books including Jacques Tati (1983), Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women's Cinema (1989), Cinematernity: Film, Motherhood, Genre (1996), and Designing Women: Art Deco, Cinema and the Female Form (2003). She has held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art (New York City) and The Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), and has been the recipient of both a National Endowment for the Arts Art Critics Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Professors. She has served as President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (2001–2003) and in 2008 received its Distinguished Service Award.

Dan Georgakas is on the editorial board of Cineaste and is director of the Greek American Studies Project of the Center for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY). He has published on film in academic and popular journals in the United States and abroad. He has taught film at New York University, Columbia University, the University of Oklahoma, Empire State College, and Queens College. His film books included co-editing The Cineaste Interviews, In Focus: A Guide to Using Film, Cineaste Interviews 2, and Solidarity Forever, a work based on the film The Wobblies. His most recent work is compiling the Greek film entry for the new Oxford University Press On-Line filmography, coediting an issue on Greek film for the Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, and preparing a Greeks of Hollywood issue for the annual Journal of Modern Hellenism.

Leger Grindon is Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. He is the author of Shadows on the Past: Studies in the Historical Fiction Film (1994), Knockout: The Boxer and Boxing in American Cinema (2011) and Hollywood Romantic Comedy: Conventions, History, Controversies (2011).

Tamar Jeffers McDonald is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Kent. She is the author of Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre (2007), Hollywood Catwalk: Exploring Costume and Transformation in American Film (2010), and the forthcoming Doris Day Confidential: Hollywood Sex and Stardom (2012).

Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California and the former director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is the author or editor of 15 books on media and popular culture, including What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (Columbia University Press), Classical Hollywood Comedy (Routledge), and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press).

Catherine A. John is an associate professor in English and film and media studies at the University of Oklahoma. She has published Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing (Duke University Press in 2003), and she is currently writing The Just Society and the Diasporic Imagination. She hopes to produce a book-length text on black film comedy.

Rob King is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute and Department of History, where he is currently working on a study of early sound slapstick and Depression-era mass culture. In addition to The Fun Factory, he is the co-editor of the volumes Early Cinema and the “National” (John Libbey Press, 2008) and, with Tom Paulus, Slapstick Comedy (Routledge, 2011).

Frank Krutnik is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sussex and has written In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (1991) and Inventing Jerry Lewis (2000), co-authored Popular Film and Television Comedy (1990), and co-edited Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (2007).

Charles Morrow is a librarian at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at the Lincoln Center, where he catalogs moving image material for the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive. He writes essays on the arts, and contributed entries to Broadway: An Encyclopedia of Theater and American Culture.

Claire Mortimer teaches film and media studies at Colchester Sixth Form College and has written Romantic Comedy (2010) and co-authored AS Media Studies—The Essential Introduction (2011).

Joshua B. Nelson, a Cherokee Nation citizen, is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. His current project, Progressive Traditions: Cherokee Cultural Studies, explores the potential of adaptive, traditional dispositions. His work has appeared in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal and Studies in American Indian Literatures.

Jane Park is a lecturer in gender and cultural studies and the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Along with her first book, Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema (Minnesota Press, 2010), she has published in World Literature Today, Global Media Journal, and Asian Studies Review.

William Paul is a professor of film studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy and Laughing Screaming: Contemporary Horror and Comedy. He is currently writing Self-Actuated Romances, a book about contemporary romantic comedy.

Najat Rahman is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Montreal. She is author of Literary Disinheritance: Home in the Writings of Mahmoud Darwish and Assia Djebar (2008) and co-editor of Exile's Poet, Mahmoud Darwish: Critical Essays (2008). She also managed the production of the documentary Ustura (Legend) (1998).

Frank Scheide is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Arkansas, where he teaches film history and criticism. He has co-edited a series of books on Charles Chaplin, and has been co-chair of the annual Buster Keaton Celebration in Iola, Kansas since 1998.

David R. Shumway is Professor of English, and Literary and Cultural Studies, and Director of the Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University. His most recent book is John Sayles (University of Illinois Press, 2012).

Kevin W. Sweeney is a professor of philosophy at the University of Tampa. He has published an anthology of interviews with Buster Keaton, Buster Keaton: Interviews (2007). He has also published in Film Criticism, Film Quarterly, The Journal of American Culture, Literature/Film Quarterly, Post Script, and Wide Angle.

Paul Wells is Director of the Animation Academy, Loughborough University, UK. He has published widely in the field of animation studies, including Understanding Animation (Routledge), Re-Imagining Animation (AVA Academia), and The Animated Bestiary (Rutgers University Press). He is also an established writer and director for radio, TV and theater, and conducts workshops and consultancies worldwide based on his book Scriptwriting (AVA Academia). He is chair of the Association of British Animation Collections (ABAC).

Comic Introduction

“Make 'em Laugh, make 'em Laugh!”

Make 'em laugh

Make 'em laugh

Don't you know everyone wants to laugh?

Donald O'Connor as Cosmo in Singin' In The Rain (1952)

We need laughter more than we need a sheriff.

Larry Gelbart, Laughing Matters

Our goal is simple: we hope that our readers' enjoyment of worldwide comedy will be enriched by insights offered in these essays. Comedy is important, as Preston Sturges reminds us in the conclusion to Sullivan's Travels (1941), when Sullivan gives up his desire to make the serious Depression drama O Brother, Where Art Thou? and is ready to return to Hollywood and once more make comedies: “…there's a lot to be said for making people laugh…did you know that's all some people have? It isn't much…but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan…”

Given the universality of film comedy, and its importance as a genre to the development of the motion pictures and as a reflection of social, political, and cultural trends, it was a natural subject for our anthology. It has been argued that all genres can be conceived in terms of dialectic between cultural and counter-cultural drives where, in the end, the cultural drives must triumph. But between the inevitable “fade in” and “fade out,” screen comedy has been free to work its complex and often subversive purpose, revealing and commenting on the preoccupations, prejudices, and dreams of the societies that produce it.

Our collection celebrates both the variety and complexity of international film comedy from the “silent” days to the present. We are well aware that it is by no means comprehensive. There are huge gaps; we do not cover queer comedy, for example. But the genre is so vast, drawing on human behavior in its many and manifold forms, that our selection of essays can only touch on some areas, while ignoring others. Since Gerald Mast's second edition of The Comic Mind (1979) went out of print with his lively and provocative “opening up” of cinematic comedy's diverse nature and characteristics, there has been no complete history of comic film, and again, this Companion does not provide that. Like Geoff King's Film Comedy (2002), ours is only a selective analysis of the genre, but it does ask us to take it seriously. Comic films raise questions that have no easy answers and explore social and personal problems that have no easy resolution. In short, they expose folly and present no cure, for folly is an incurable human disease for which, as Beckett wrote in Waiting for Godot, there is “nothing to be done.”

There are other useful anthologies, such as Andrew Horton's Comedy/Cinema/Theory (1991), Kristine Karnick and Henry Jenkins' Classical Hollywood Comedy (1995), and Frank Krutnik's Hollywood Comedians (2003), but our collection embraces not just American cinema, including Native American and African American, but also the comic films of Europe including Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Middle East, and Korea. Hopefully, this anthology will begin to map out some of the myriad ways in which comic films have helped to reflect and influence history, culture, politics, and social institutions globally.

There are many fine studies on specific film comedy topics including Neale and Krutnik (1990), Jenkins (1992), Harvey (1998), Dale (2000), on slapstick in American movies, and Glitre (2006), to mention just a few, along with recent studies by some of our contributors: Claire Mortimer's Romantic Comedy (2010), Tom Paulus and Rob King's Slapstick Comedy (2011), and Leger Grindon's Hollywood Romantic Comedy: Conventions, History, Controversies (2011). These works will be cited throughout this volume and referenced in the authors' lists of suggestions for further reading.

As an overview of the significance of this wonderfully complex topic and of some of the myriad ways of approaching it, we want to lay out six of what could easily be dozens of observations on comedy in general that go beyond film, television, theater, books, or the Internet. Some of these were initially discussed in Horton (2000: 1–16).

1.Comedy is a way of looking at the universe, more than merely a genre of literature, drama, film or television. Scientists and psychologists all agree that each of us tends to have or to lack a “comic” view of life, which is in part genetically determined. Furthermore, studies have shown that laughter can often be a healing factor in life as Norman Cousins (1979: 43) found in helping to cure his cancer through watching Marx Brothers' films and other comedies. “I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain free sleep.” Those who laugh more live longer. As Allen Klein (1989: xx) notes, “humor helps us cope because it instantly removes us from pain.”

2.Comedy is a form of “play” that embraces fantasy and festivity. As part of the larger category of “play,” comedy shares what Huizinga (1950) and others have pointed out is a form of activity in which individuals (Homo ludens) do not feel threatened because all forms of play have their boundaries that must be followed while in the “game.” The festive and fantasy level of comedy as celebrated in communities around the world also points to the spirit of carnival during which participants have “fun” and do not feel threatened as they act out fantasies. As Mikhail Bahktin (1968: 7) has written about carnival, it “is not a spectacle seen by the people: they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people.” In this carnivalesque spirit, we can better understand the Greek origin of the word “comedy” as komos, which meant a drunken chorus in the Dionysian spirit, singing, drinking and calling out insults while dressed in costumes that Aristophanes' comedies suggest could be frogs, birds, angry women, and more. There is also the Latin origin, in Comus, the playful and lecherous god of springtime revelry, emphasizing that there is in comedy the essential idea of “rebirth” and “renewal.”

3.Comedy and tragedy are near cousins whose paths often cross. Plato's Symposium ends as Socrates and Aristophanes agree that comic and dramatic moments often come very close to each other in life. This observation helps us better appreciate so many comedies including Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life (1946) in which George Bailey (James Stewart) wishes to commit suicide on Christmas Eve but is saved by Clarence (Henry Travers), a gentle angel sent from Above, who not only saves George, but his family, the town, and the Spirit of Christmas in a festive “happy ending.” But comedies differ from tragedies in their emphasis on the social rather than on the individual. Indeed, as Kathleen Rowe (1995: 45) has rightly observed, “comedy often mocks the masculinity that tragedy ennobles.” In a similar vein, we can observe that comedies are seldom simply “comedies,” but are often a mixture of genres, moods, and implications. Many would call George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) a western comedy but others would label it a western with comic moments, while it can also be called a “buddy film,” and even a “loosely biographical” film as William Goldman's script is based on real outlaws.

4.Comedy implies a special relationship with and to its audience. Whether directly or indirectly, comedy through the ages has delighted in breaking down the “fourth wall” so that the actors can see and communicate with the audience, thus acknowledging the sense of “play” or gamesmanship that comedy creates. In many of Aristophanes' comedies, characters talk to and even walk into the audience to make a point. Similarly, when a comedian such as Woody Allen faces the camera and thus “us,” the audience, in Annie Hall (1977), he is directly involving us in the laughter that is generated. This was a common technique in even early “silent” comedies, where Roscoe Arbuckle, for example, gestures to the camera (and thereby us) to look away as he is undressing in films such as The Knockout (1913) or Little Band of Gold (1915). Drama and tragedy, on the other hand, depend on being complete narratives that do not acknowledge the presence of an audience.

5.In the world of the truly comic, nothing is sacred and nothing human is rejected. Comic filmmakers, like comic writers and performers throughout history, have had to deal with censorship in many cultures for political, social and religious reasons, yet within the spirit of carnival and the truly comic, everything and everyone is potentially “on camera” for laughs, be it satire, parody, or an open celebration of sex and life itself. Certainly this celebration of “nothing is forbidden” from laughter helps us appreciate and enjoy films such as Luis Buñuel's Phantom of Liberty (1974) and Monty Python's The Life of Brian (1979), which take on religion with much outright humor, or Sweet Movie (1974), directed by Dušan Makavejev of the former Yugoslavia, which looks comically at sexuality and the horrors of real warfare as we witness cross-cutting between an orgy of group sex in a vat of sugar and documentary footage of digging up the bodies of hundreds of Polish officers murdered by the Russians in World War II.

6.Comedy is one of the most important ways a culture talks to itself about itself. No study is needed to underline that people in every nation enjoy laughing and that, even if festival awards such as Oscars tend to go to “serious” and/or “art” films, the box office in each country reflects the popularity of comedy. And sometimes the awards and popularity do cross paths. Danis Tanovic's dark comedy about the Bosnian War, No Man's Land (2001), for example, won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2001. It begins with one soldier asking another, “Do you know the difference between a pessimist and an optimist?” The soldier answers, “A pessimist says things are as bad as they can be and the optimist says they can always be worse,” and throughout the film, everything does get worse. The point is that in many ways one can learn as much or more about the Bosnian crisis in this comedy made by a young Bosnian who had been through the war himself as through a traditional TV documentary.

Comedy is obviously a slippery genre, as is the language used in describing it. “Comedy” and “humor” are often seen as interchangeable, although etymologically the words have quite different meanings, with “comedy” coming from the Dionysian komos, as described above, while “humor” has its origin in the ancient idea that the body is made up of four “humors”—black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood—which control a person's temperament. Categories or types of comedy overlap. Romantic comedies can contain slapstick elements and they often deal with gender, for example. Because of this element of pastiche or mélange, readers may wonder why some of the chapters in this volume fall under one heading and not another. Some headings are clear. We begin at the beginning, with “Comedy Before Sound,” and the development of the slapstick tradition as it carried into the sound era in the American slapstick short. We end with “Animation,” another obviously distinct category, and one that is perhaps growing in significance in our digital age. In between, there is a certain amount of fluidity, although the titles of the chapters identify the focus.

Beginning with French audiences laughing at the Lumière Brothers' The Gardener and the Little Scamp (1895), cinema has created comedies that have made the world laugh. In France, George Méliès was making trick films and Max Linder became the first internationally known comic film star at the turn of the century, while in the United States, the Biograph Company was soon turning out one-reel comedy shorts. Although D.W. Griffith is sometimes said to the “the father of film,” at least in the United States, it might well be argued that it was in the area of comedy that film experienced its most spectacular growth and popularity worldwide, as Frank Scheide's chapter covering key performers in Europe and America during the so-called “silent era” from 1895 to 1929 clearly suggests. Like other chapters in this volume, Scheide talks about the tradition of the Commedia dell'Arte, and he emphasizes some of the early comic films before the heyday of Max Sennett and the Keystone Kops, with sections on Max Linder, Bert Williams, Flora Finch, John Bunny, and Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew; he ends with Charlie Chaplin. Kristen Anderson Wagner also discusses Finch and Drew, but her chapter, “Pie Queens and Virtuous Vamps,” is a more complete look at many of the largely neglected women comics who were so popular in those early years.

Donald Crafton and Tom Gunning have identified the “pie” along with the “chase,” the gags that disrupt the narrative, as defining elements of early slapstick. Rob King, writing on early sound shorts, such as those produced by Hal Roach and Educational Pictures, looks at the waning “pie tradition” as sound begins to dominate. He traces the distinction between speech and noise in these films—speech aligned with sophistication and culture, noise with the “lower” aspects of life and suggestively argues that “the history of film comedy might finally be said to have ‘begun again’ with sound…sundering once again standards of ‘low’ versus ‘sophisticated’ comedy that it was the legacy of the silent era to have mediated and reconciled.”

Representing the kind of comedy defined by Steve Seidman (1981) as “comedian comedy,” four essays discuss comedy in the era of sound with the Marx Brothers, Jacques Tati, Woody Allen, and Mel Brooks, although Jacques Tati, of course, does not rely on dialogue, as the others do, but is a master of sound (noise). Kevin Sweeney identifies the pattern of repetition in his gags—gags that help us to see the comic in the mundane. Influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin, Frank Krutnik puts the Marx Brothers in the anarchistic tradition of carnival, quite different from Tati, and explores a critique of hegemonic orthodoxy that bubbles beneath their fun. Seeing Woody Allen as a modern incarnation of Charlie Chaplin, not in his style of comedy but in the fact that he writes, directs, and stars in his films, David Shumway examines two fairly distinct Allen personae: “the Nebbish,” more characteristic of his earlier films, and the “Artist,” predominating in his later, more realistic comedies. With Mel Brooks, Henry Jenkins uses J. Hoberman's concept of “vulgar modernism,” a style of comedy he sees emerging after World War II across a range of media, to look at how Brooks plays different media against each other for comic effect. He centers his discussion around a close analysis of Silent Movie (1976).

Romantic comedy, as opposed to comedian comedy, obviously involves comic pairs and it tends to be narrative oriented rather than episodic. Celestino Deleyto's essay deals with this sometimes uneasy balance between comic moments and narrative in three films, The Smiling Lieutenant (Lubitsch 1931), The Palm Beach Story (Sturges 1942), Man's Favorite Sport (Hawks 1964), his remake of Bringing Up Baby (1938), and Green Card (Peter Weir 1990), noting changes in the genre as it developed through evolving social, cultural, and political climates, and how the comic moments he analyzes are also narrative in nature and contribute to the overall structure of the films. Romantic comedies are founded on what may be an irrational belief in the ability of human beings to transform a drab reality into a “utopian scenario.” Drawing on this idea, Leger Grindon takes this genre from the twentieth century into the twenty-first with two films from 2004: Before Sunset (Richard Linklater) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry). Celestino Deleyto has called Before Sunset a romantic comedy “on the margins” (Deleyto 2009: 157–74), but Grindon explores them specifically as comedies of infidelity, portraying doubts about romance without abandoning completely something of the utopian vision seen in their predecessors.

The chapters by Tamar Jeffers McDonald and Lucy Fischer both look at variations of romantic comedy from a male perspective. Jeffers McDonald identifies what she calls the “Homme-com Cycle,” comedies that center on the humorous misadventures of a male pair or ensemble but preserve an allegiance to the generic tropes of romantic comedy, such as I Love You, Man (John Hamburg 2009) and which feature what is known as the Man Cave or the Lair, and she makes a distinction between them. Lucy Fischer, on the other hand, gives an in-depth reading of Flirting with Disaster (David O. Russell 1996), a comedy about the search of a young man (Ben Stiller) for his birth parents. The search becomes fertile ground for a good deal of topical humor on race, religion, and politics. Fischer observes that although adoption comedies are rare, in recent years they have proliferated on that harbinger of what is new and important: YouTube.

Like Celestino Deleyto, Charles Morrow also examines the Smiling Lieutenant, and his essay might seem to belong, at least in places, under the category of “Romantic Comedy,” but he is more specifically concerned with a unique genre he calls “Ruritanian Comedy”—comedies about mythical kingdoms that flourished between World War I and the years of the Great Depression. Some of these comedies, such as Harold Lloyd's Why Worry (1923) are gag-oriented, while others, such as Lubitsch's Love Parade (1929) are indeed romantic comedies. Morrow gives us an invaluable survey of this genre, through the 1920s and 1930s, including Will Rogers in Ambassador Bill (Sam Taylor 1931), W.C. Fields in Million Dollar Legs (Edward Cline 1932), and, of course, the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (Le McCarey 1933). Morrow speculates on some of the reasons for the fascination with these fantastic places, and like William Paul in his essay on You Can't Take It with You (Frank Capra 1938), sees the need for escapism during the dark years of America's Depression. Paul's essay might fall under the category of “Romantic Comedy” too but it is specifically “topical” in its concern with what he calls an “aesthetics of escapism,” seeing romantic comedy not simply in terms of Deleyto's “utopian scenario,” but as a way of engaging with the real world.

The “real world” emerges vividly, darkly, and comically in Ernst Lubitsch's wartime farce, To Be or Not To Be (1942). Maria DeBattista's detailed analysis of this film that she calls a “totalitarian comedy” is deliberately “disquieting.” As other essays in the Companion suggest, laughter can sometimes be the best way of saying something about dictatorship, the slaughter of civilians, the repression of individual freedoms, all kinds of human atrocities. Totalitarian comedy, she writes, is a modern marriage of “the not-serious and the dreadful.” They are comedies that “refuse to silence their insolent wit or suspend their unruly farces just when they are most needed and least tolerated—during reigns of unfreedom.” Such a comedy is To Be or Not To Be. In conclusion she cites both Renoir's Rules of the Game (1939) and Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) as two other films that show totalitarianism as vulnerable to farce, and it is Kubrick's film, along with some of the work of the Coen Brothers, that concludes this section in our volume on “Topical Comedy, Irony, and Humour Noir” in the essay by Mark Eaton.

Using André Breton and Matthew Winston to define what is known as humour noir, Eaton distinguishes it dramatically from romantic comedy, for example, in its unsentimentality, and its emphasis on the fantastic, the surreal, the grotesque, its shattering of expectations, and the way it disturbs our sense of moral certainty. These characteristics, he argues, made it a natural form of comedy for that period of antiauthoritarian upheaval, the 1960s and early 1970s, as antiwar protests proliferated. In this context, he looks specifically at such films as Dr. Strangelove, M * A * S * H (Altman 1970), Catch-22 (Mike Nichols 1970), and Slaughterhouse Five (George Roy Hill 1971). To illustrate the re-emergence of dark comedy over 20 years later, but with less political emphasis, he focuses on The Big Libowski (Coen Brothers 1998). Eaton concludes with some reflections on the state of the post-9/11 world, with the “war on terror,” and other wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and wonders why they seem incompatible with the moral disturbance of black comedy. He cites Four Lions (Christopher Morris 2010) but, as pure farce, that film may fall more into a genre of “escapism” than social critique.

We offer three essays touching on comic perspectives regarding race and ethnicity. Catherine John writing on African Americans and film comedy builds on Mark Reid's innovative study, Redefining Black Cinema (1993) with three objectives as she examines how white stereotypes of African Americans continue, how Tyler Perry's films have opened a variety of truly Black levels of comedy, concluding with a close-up analysis of Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000) and Tim Story's Barbershop (2002). Joshua Nelson similarly notes the past Hollywood stereotypes, in this case of American Indians including John Ford's films up through more contemporary films such as Dances With Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990), and he explores how, as he explains, “Indian comedic film takes aim at mainstream misrepresentations and their tried-and-true caricatures of Indians,” using examples such as Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals (1998) and Sterlin Harjo's Four Sheets to the Wind (2007). Dan Georgakas focuses on Greek Americans appearing in American film comedies covering My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), of course, and also others. It is important that he emphasizes that “Genuine cultural patterns only emerge by looking at how they manifest themselves over a very long period in a multitude of films,” an observation that clearly could be used in taking on many other immigrant identities in American film comedy.

Film comedy is so much a part of every nation's cinema, as we have noted, and while the majority of our essays focus on American film comedy, we include a selection on international comedy. Claire Mortimer treats us to insights about the comic ambiguity between myth and reality reflected in the Ealing Studio comedies such as Whisky Galore (1949) and The Ladykillers (1955), directed by the Scottish American director Alexander Mackendrick who, as she observes, “brought a sensibility to Ealing Studios which reflected the fractured times in the wake of the Second World War, with shifting populations having lost their roots and connections.” Jane Park introduces us to film comedy that developed in Korea after the Korean War and a period of censorship. She gives a close reading of two comedies, 301,302 (1995) and 200 Pounds Beauty (2006), focusing on how urban Korean women are portrayed. Roberta Di Carmine takes on comedy “Italian style,” explaining how comedies between the 1930s and 1970s were able to be both satirical and supportive of social and cultural changes that Italy was experiencing during and after World War II. Her analysis of Mario Monicelli's I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958) allows her to depict clearly the double vision of such a comic style, which, as she observes, “although inclined to provoke laughter,” also “offers a dark portrayal of the illness of society.”

Finally, in our international section, Najat Rahman clearly depicts how recent Palestinian films have made constructive use of comedy in taking on the difficult realities of the Middle East. Building on film scholars of Middle Eastern cinema such as Hamid Naficy who observes that Palestinian cinema is “…one of the rare cinemas in the world that is structurally exilic…made either in…internal exile in an occupied Palestine or under the erasure…of displacement and external exile,” he provides insight to the surprising humor of films such as Rashid Mashrawi's Laila's Birthday (2008), Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention (2002), and Abou Assad's Paradise Now (2005). Rahman's conclusion touches on how multifaceted film comedy can be to a nation that continues to endure a complex reality. As he states, “the films discussed in this essay push through humor and beyond humor to reconfigure the assault on senses and lives delivered by occupation and by discourses that maintain it, to an aesthetic that neither harmonizes the violence into a simple effect of the beautiful nor falters on its innovative possibilities.”

Our volume concludes with a section on “Comic Animation.” Paul Wells reminds us that, while animation does share many techniques of comic construction with other kinds of comedy, it also offers “particular and distinctive forms of visual and verbal ‘gags’,” and his chapter, along with Suzanne Buchan's, illustrates this uniqueness. Wells discusses early animation in the United States, from Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) to productions at Disney and Warner Brothers during the golden era between 1928–45. But he also emphasizes animation elsewhere, in Canada, Japan, Poland, Eastern Europe—notably the Estonian animator, Priit Pärn, and the innovative work done in this area by women such as the Czech animator Michaela Patlatova and the English animator, Joanna Quinn. Suzanne Buchan covers some of the same ground as Wells with the early years but her approach is more theoretical, using Henri Bergson, Freud, and even James Joyce to illuminate some of the comic techniques animation exploits. A primary feature of animation's film form is its unique ability to express metamorphosis, and a wonderful example of this is Porky in Wackyland (Bob Clampett 1938). She discusses the figures in this film as “visual portmanteaus” that can be compared to the way James Joyce uses language. Tex Avery's King-size Canary (1947), she argues, utilizes ideas of Freud and Bergson, while also suggesting some of the grotesque characteristics of black comedy and surrealism. The idea of the surreal and the dark are integral to her essay as she quotes from Samuel Beckett's Watt (1959) where he describes the risus purus as the highest laugh in the world, “the laugh that laughs at the laugh, the laugh at that which is unhappy.” Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and others covered in her essay, were all masters of this risus purus, exploiting a range of comedy as only animation can do, from the silly to the absurd, from the whacky to the dark recesses of humour noir. Her essay, along with Wells' international perspective, reveal how varied and provocative animation can be, and how, like its human forms, it points to new ways of seeing the world. Today sources of laughter include everything from video games to cell phone gimmicks but especially the comic websites and worlds offered on the Internet including the ever-increasing number of YouTube films. Perhaps there may well be a Companion to YouTube down the line (and online too!). But in the meantime, cinematic laughter has offered audiences everywhere, and will continue to offer them, a chance to escape and transcend the often harsh failures, losses, disappointments, fears and despair in the huge gaps between the ideal and the real. Since movies began, filmmakers from Hollywood to Hong Kong and everywhere else have been working and playing hard to “make 'em laugh.” As we have been suggesting, comedy that celebrates the human capacity to endure rather than to suffer, is, as François Truffaut once said, “by far the most difficult genre, the one that demands the most work, the most talent, and also the most humility.” We hope this Companion will help to illuminate that difficulty, expose that talent, reveal that humility, and celebrate our capacity to endure.

References

Bakhtin, M. (1968) Rabelais and his World (trans. Helene Iswolsky), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Cousins, N. (1979) Anatomy of an Illness, W.W. Norton, New York, NY.

Dale, A. (2000) Comedy is a Man in Trouble, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.

Deleyto, C. (2009) The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy, Manchester University Press, Manchester.

Glitre, K. (2006) Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union, 1934–1965, University of Manchester Press, Manchester.

Grindon, L. (2011) Hollywood Romantic Comedy: Conventions, History and Controversies, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.

Harvey, J. (1998) Romantic Comedy In Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges, Da Capo Press, New York.

Horton, A. (ed.) (1991) Comedy/Cinema/Theory, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.

Horton, A. (2000) Laughing Out Loud: Writing the Comedy Centered Screenplay, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.

Huizinga, J. (1950) Homo Ludens: The Study of the Play Element in Culture, Beacon Press, Boston, MA.

Jenkins, H. (1992) What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic, Columbia University Press, New York.

Karnick, K. B. and Jenkins, H. (eds.) (1995) Classical Hollywood Comedy, Routledge, New York, NY.

King, G. (2002) Film Comedy, Wallflower Press, New York, NY.

Klein, A. (1989) The Healing Power of Humor, Penguin Putnam, New York, NY.

Mast, G. (1979) The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies. 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

Mortimer, C. (2010) Romantic Comedy, Routledge, New York, NY.

Neale, S. and Krutnik, F. (1990) Popular Film and Television Comedy, Routledge, London.

Paulus, T. and King, R. (2010) Slapstick Comedy, Routledge, New York, NY.

Rowe, K. (1995) Comedy, melodrama, gender, in Classical Hollywood Comedy (eds. K. B. Karnick and H. Jenkins), Routledge, New York, NY, pp. 39–59.

Seidman, S. (1981) Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, MI.

Further Reading

Bermel, A. (1982) Farce: A History From Aristophanes to Woody Allen, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY.

Cavell, S. (1981) Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Denby, D. (2007) A Fine Romance: The New Comedy of the Sexes. The New Yorker, July 23, 58–65.

DiBattista, M. (2001) Fast Talking Dames, Yale University Press, New Haven, NJ.

Gehring, W. (1996) American Dark Comedy: Beyond Satire, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT.

Gelbart, L. (1998). Laughing Matters: On Writing M*A*S*H, Tootsie, Oh,God! And A Few Others, Random House, New York, NY.

Kerr, W. (1967) Tragedy and Comedy, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY.

McDonald, T. J. (2007) Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre, Wallflower, New York, NY.

Sikov, E. (1994) Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s, Columbia University Press, New York, NY.

Vineberg, S. (2005) High Comedy in American Movies: Class and Humor from the 1920s to the Present, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, New York, NY.

Part I

Comedy Before Sound, and the Slapstick Tradition

Chapter 1

The Mark of the Ridiculous and Silent Celluloid

Some Trends in American and European Film Comedy from 1894 to 1929

Fred Ott's Infectious Sneeze (1894)

Throughout its history silent film comedy was affected by the technology with which it was produced, the culture and mindset of the filmmakers, and the intended audience's desires. When Thomas Edison expressed interest in combining moving pictures with his phonograph in 1888, other inventors around the world were already experimenting with sequential imaging. Edison's approach to inventing was to encourage his “muckers” (technicians, machinists, and engineers) to come up with new ideas by “playing” with state-of-the art resources at his lab (Spehr 2008: 75–82, 649).

Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze/Fred Ott's Sneeze, the studio's nineteenth film, was produced from January 2 to 7, 1894. Fred Ott was an engineer credited with making major contributions to Edison's early Kinetograph movie camera, but most film historians remember him for sneezing in an early motion picture. Initially considered a comic novelty for the way it used technical innovation to make much ado about nothing, the title of this film succinctly informs us of its content. The filming of an entire action from conflict to resolution, although only a few seconds in duration, gives the movie a kind of narrative structure. One reason this documentary is associated with comedy is that the subject's loss of bodily control, a condition that theorist Henri Bergson described as “something mechanical encrusted upon the living,” makes Fred Ott a comic figure characterized by the “mark of the ridiculous” (Bergson 1956: 92).