Sounding Funny: Sound and Comedy Cinema ed. by Mark Evans and Philip Hayward

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sounding Funny: Sound and Comedy Cinema ed. by Mark Evans and Philip Hayward Jessica Getman Sounding Funny: Sound and Comedy Cinema. Edited by Mark Evans and Philip Hayward. (Genre, Music, and Sound.) Sheffield: Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2016. [vi, 259 p. ISBN 9781781790991 (hardback), $100; ISBN 9781845536749 (paperback), $29.99; ISBN 9781781792766 (e-book), varies]. Illustrations, music examples, index. Though music and sound are essential to the success of comedy on film, the methods employed by composers and directors to this end are difficult to pin down. Producing a compact definition of comedy itself is a slippery task, something Liz Guiffre and Mark Evans emphasize in the introduction to Sounding Funny: Sound and Comedy Cinema. Though often invoked as a generic label, comedy is better understood as a mode of expression that uses a diverse collection of techniques that vary according to context. To get around this, the essays in this book focus not on comedic theory but on texts: films and sequences in which the use of sound in the service of humor has been particularly successful. Topics addressed in this approach include influential franchises, prominent composers, and famous scene formulas and comic routines. The book has an international scope, engaging not only the dominant practices of Hollywood but also comedies coming out of Britain, Finland, Spain, Japan, and India. It reaches across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, from the Three Stooges beginning in 1934, to Yuji Nakae's Nabi no koi (Nabbie's Love) in 1999 and Philip Claydon's Lesbian Vampire Killers in 2009. Sound Funny excels at drawing out and analyzing an impressive variety of comedic and musical moments in film. In privileging text over theory, the book's authors nevertheless illuminate many comedic tools and techniques. Essays touch on parody, intertextual reference, and the interplay of aural and physical gestures. They also highlight the oft-employed tension between high and low culture, emphasized through the juxtaposition of musical styles. A recurring theme is the central role of incongruity—the unexpected collision of moods, modes, styles, and ideas that elicits surprise and delight—for which sound and music are especially effective tools. This idea is considered at length in the book's second essay, Marshall Heiser's "The Soundtrack as Appropriate Incongruity," which considers the "playful tolerance of paradox" (p. 37) in a number of films from the mid-twentieth century, including the Three Stooges' shorts (which began in 1934), Jacques Tati's Jour de Fête (1949), Michael Powell's They're a Weird Mob (1966), and several spoofs by Mel Brooks in the late 1970s [End Page 661] (including Blazing Saddles [1974] and High Anxiety [1977]). Heiser's conclusion is that that humor in these cases exhibits an "emergent property, rising from contradictory aural and visual cues to become more than the sum of their parts (p. 26). Whether by design or chance, composer Elmer Bernstein dominates the book. Ben Winters, in "The Sound of Satire; or Trading Places with Mozart," considers social commentary in the film by John Landis (1983), noting how Bernstein's score highlights the film's "overdrawn opposites" between high and low culture (and between white and black culture) by juxtaposing classical music and popular song (p. 30). In so doing, Winters demonstrates how the film more successfully satirizes the social policies of the Reagan administration than the more obvious racial issues on the film's surface. Winters reads this film as a modern-day opera buffa modeled on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. Erik Heine's chapter, "Parody, Self-Parody and Genre-Parody: Music in The Magnificent Seven and ¡Three Amigos!," considers Bern stein's parody of his own work in The Magnificent Seven (1960) in the 1986 comedy about three hapless Hollywood actors in Mexico. Heine analyzes similarities between the films' scores and title cues, as well as the use of popular song by Randy Newman. Finally, Jon Fitzgerald and Philip Haywardtackle one of the best known and most influential of Hollywood's comedies, Ghostbusters (1984). Their essay addresses how the principle elements of the score—Bernstein's orchestral music (drawn from horror conventions), its rock-pop tracks, and the film...