Film Comedy

Abstract

Film comedy is a ubiquitous form of cinema, present from the medium’s earliest days with little “mischief joke” movies such as the Lumière brothers’ L’arroseur arrosé (1895) in which the “hoser gets hosed.” Comedies were popular not only in turn-of-the- century France but also in the United States, with Thomas Alva Edison producing shorts such as A Wringing Good Joke (1899) in which a boy ties his grandfather’s chair to the wringer of a washer and mayhem ensues. While some consider comedy a film genre, it is such a broad category that others liken it to a mode (e.g., melodrama) that itself is divided into various genres: romantic comedy, satire, parody, and the like. Comic movies were popular throughout the silent era, with the first major stars being comedians (for instance, Charlie Chaplin or Max Linder). While much of the humor was physical and slapstick (pies in the face, people falling down, and machines run amuck), more sophisticated works were soon produced by directors such as Ernst Lubtisch and Cecil B. Demille—who adapted comedies of manners (about high society, romance, marriage, and divorce) to the screen. Parodies were also soon produced as when Buster Keaton made Three Ages (1923), a send up of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916). With the coming of sound, the nexus of comedy shifted to the vocal register with performers imported from Broadway, radio, or the vaudeville circuit. Hence, cinema saw the appearance of fast-talking performers such as the Marx Brothers, mumbling comics such as W. C. Fields, and sexually suggestive dames such as Mae West. With sound came the expansion of romantic comedy (in which sexual repartee substituted for lovemaking) as well as the development of other genres more consonant with dialogue: screwball, satire, and parody. With comedy’s coming of age in the cinema, new themes and perspectives emerged: although in the early days, women were frequently butts of the joke (for instance, the characters played by Margaret Dumont in the Marx Brothers films), in more contemporary times they became forceful comediennes (for instance Roseanne). While at the 20th century’s dawn ethnic minority characters were often maliciously stereotyped, beginning in the later 20th century, they would become comic heroes in their own right (as Eddie Murphy or Woody Allen did). All the genres pioneered in the first days of film history remain vibrant today (including slapstick) and the range of comic forms remains emphatically international.