Why Are Comedy Films So Critically Underrated?
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The University of Maine DigitalCommons@UMaine Honors College 5-2012 Why are Comedy Films so Critically Underrated? Michael Arell Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/honors Part of the Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons, and the Film and Media Studies Commons Recommended Citation Arell, Michael, "Why are Comedy Films so Critically Underrated?" (2012). Honors College. 93. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/honors/93 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UMaine. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors College by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UMaine. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WHY ARE COMEDY FILMS SO CRITICALLY UNDERRATED? by Michael Arell A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for a Degree with Honors (Bachelor of Music in Education) The Honors College University of Maine May 2012 Advisory Committee: Michael Grillo, Associate Professor of History of Art, Advisor Ludlow Hallman, Professor of Music Annette F. Nelligan, Ed.D., Lecturer, Counselor Education Tina Passman, Associate Professor of Classical Languages and Literature Stephen Wicks, Adjunct Faculty in English © 2012 Michael Arell All Rights Reserved Abstract This study explores the lack of critical and scholarly attention given to the film genre of comedy. Included as part of the study are both existing and original theories of the elements of film comedy. An extensive look into the development of film comedy traces the role of comedy in a socio-cultural and historical manner and identifies the major comic themes and conventions that continue to influence film comedy. Ten comedy film case studies are then presented, analyzing the recurring themes and conventions in practice and extracting the existing critical language used in the analysis of comedy film. The final chapter of the study brings together the recurring themes of comedy as they exist in the film medium and identifies several distinct principles and conventions of comedy that make it unique and that lead to explanations of why critics and scholars have difficulty approaching the genre of comedy. The study concludes with the presentation of practical solutions to the established, inadequate state of comedy film criticism. iv Dedication To the memory of those who made us laugh: the motley mountebanks, the clowns, the buffoons, in all times and in all nations, whose efforts have lightened our burden a little, this thesis is affectionately dedicated -Adapted from Preston Sturges’ dedication to Sullivan’s Travels v Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Phyllis Brazee (Education) for her advice on several sections of this thesis and Reference Librarian Joe Fernandez for his help in the research portion of this study. vi Table of Contents I. Introduction …………………………………………………………………………… 1 II. The Origins of Film Comedy ……………………………………………………..… 26 III. Comedy Film Case Studies ………………………………………………………… 94 IV. Discussions and Conclusion ……………………………………………………… 249 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………….. 277 Filmography ………………………………………………………………...………… 311 Author’s Biography …………………………………………………………………... 319 1 I. INTRODUCTION “Amid all the lofty discussions of epic cinema and its status as art, one- and two-reel comedies poured out of the film companies, attracting little or no critical notice beyond the laughter of the common filmgoer” (Sklar 61). Forward Why are comedy films so critically underrated? How can one of the inaugural genres of film that brings so much pleasure to audiences be so overlooked by scholars? Is comedy as a whole held with disregard, or is it just certain types of comedies or certain comic personalities or situations that are? These are just some of the questions that I hope to answer in my study. Very little scholarly consensus has been reached in regards to comedy: [film scholar Brian] Henderson cites the absence of a master theory of comedy as blocking other understandings of the genre: It is a scandal of culture that there has never been a widely accepted theory of comedy to organize the general sense of the subject and to orient particular studies within it. Since Aristotle’s Poetics, there has been a theory of tragedy, more or less the same one…. Lacking such a founding text and oddly unable to form a later tradition, theorists of comedy have operated in a vacuum, each writer setting out boldly to do the whole job (Karnick and Jenkins 70). Until a common critical language evolves to analyze comedies, critics and scholars will continue to approach comedy film rather haphazardly. Yet despite the absence of a disciplinary map that includes all types of comedy, one can easily categorize comedies into subgenres based on shared traits. While discovering recurrent threads shared by all subgenres of comedy (as I will explore in Chapter IV) will help clarify the field, trying to create an all-encompassing definition of comedy to include all, as Aristotle does for Tragedy, would remain nearly impossible: 2 Comedy is notoriously resistant to theorization. There is, after all, something inescapably comic and self-defeating about the scholar, oblivious to comedy’s charms, searching out its origins or trying to account for its effects. In Cicero’s De Oratore, one of the interlocutors in the discussion of the comic notes that everyone “who tried to teach anything like a theory or art of this matter proved themselves so conspicuously silly that their very silliness is the only laughable thing about them” (Leggatt 3). As I have learned through my work on this study, to even attempt a “serious” study of comedy seems counterintuitive. Not only do most institutions even largely ignore comic subjects themselves, but also these institutions ignore any academic studies of comedy. I agree with literary critic Johan Verberckmoes, who feels that “Laughter and humour no longer need to be legitimized as proper subjects for historical research...They are interdisciplinary topics par excellence and invite thorough reflection on the working methods of historians of all kinds” (1). In this study, I have acknowledged the interplay of the history of comedy and audience expectations with the critical evaluation of comedy as an art. Much of the meaning behind this project concerns me personally. I began making my own films—particularly comedies—at the age of seven, and I have always questioned why film comedy rarely seems to be recognized as possessing aesthetic value. My experience with the creation of comedy is significant in the scope of this study, since many who have written about film comedy before me have never attempted to create comedy of their own. Philosopher and (at times) comic writer Umberto Eco describes the major scholars who have attempted to study comedy: Not one of those who have written on the Comic could be called a Comic writer. Among them we do not find, for instance, either Aristophanes or Lucian, or Molière or Rabelais—not even Groucho Marx. On the other hand, we come across the following… as serious a thinker as Aristotle, who introduces the Comic precisely as a final explication of the Tragic…. a fussy, moralizing, austere philosopher such as Kant… another philosopher who was just as austere, boring, 3 and not at all inclined to joke, such as Hegel… a romantic, morbid, whining— although reasonably desperate—poet such as Baudelaire… a somewhat gloomy and existentially anguished thinker such as Kierkegaard… a few psychologists with little sense of humor, as, for instance the German Lipps… of all the contemporary French philosophers, not the amiable conversationalist Alain, but the metaphysician Bergson and the sociologist Lalo… and… the father of neurosis, Sigmund Freud, who revealed the tragic aspects and the death wish lying at the bottom of our unconscious (“Pirandello Ridens” 164-5). Personally, I feel that comedy is a more approachable topic when the writer has knowledge of what the making of a comedy entails. The Current State of Film Comedy Research Many before me have written about the history of film comedy, the significant comic minds of the Twentieth Century, and how the films are a reaction to the times: Overemphasis on evaluation can lead to a reductive historical approach which simply assumes a linear progress from the ‘bad’ films to the ‘good’ films, without striving to understand the historical context or conventions in which those unfamiliar or unappealing films were produced (Riblet 170). The significance of the historical and cultural contexts in which films exist cannot be overstated. The effect of historical events and changes in the culture are important to the comedies that appear at specific times, and sometimes the films themselves may influence the culture (as the reader will see in Chapter III). The resulting socio-historical compendium of comedy films results in ebbs and flows of many successful comedies of one style, featuring one performer or one filmmaker, contrasting with periods of few notable comedy productions. Some academics catalogue the various comic styles, defining them as “comedian comedies”, “slapstick”, or “Screwball”, among others. Although a few scholars have tried to discover what makes a comedy funny or to compare or contrast comedies to non-comic genres, to the best of my knowledge, no 4 scholar has ever tried to determine why critics do not give comedies the recognition that I argue they deserve: Is film comedy a genre? If we are tempted to argue that it is, what are its distinctive features? There are no elements of setting or iconography that distinguish comedy as a genre. There is no plot structure that encompasses all comedies. Nor is there shared subject matter…. What pattern of narrative development can we point to that could encompass films as diverse as The Awful Truth, Dr. Strangelove, Tampopo, Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, and Modern Times? (Karnick and Jenkins 69). Perhaps films classified as comedies are so diverse that one cannot create criteria by which to judge a quality comedy.