Film Comedy Research Articles

Is fashion stupid? Ironic representations of fashion in popular Hollywood films

Popular culture, especially cinema, tends to view the world of fashion from a distance, often in admiration but mixed with feelings of incomprehension, perplexion and even derision. The current article will analyse the films Pret-à-Porter (), Zoolander () and The Devil Wears Prada () as expressions of general approaches to the fashion industry in the comedy film genre. As high profile films, they embody a pattern of representation endemic to film comedy at the turn of the 1990s and 2000s and emphasize a frivolous, ironic attitude to the superficial and exploitative nature of the fashion industry, reflecting a wider sense of postmodernist cultural critique in American cinema of the shallowness of commercialism and pop culture (while, ironically, being part of precisely the same system as the target of its critique). By conducting narrative analysis of these films, we will show how they use stereotyping as a mechanism to satirize the fashion industry, creating superficial flashes of ridiculous behaviour and excessiveness, while they reinforce these approaches themselves through the use of genre and aesthetic conventions. In doing so, the films highlight the idea that fashion, as a form of popular culture, functions as an exemplary locus of cultural critique to satirize hyper-consumption and hyper-commercialism. As these films evoke wider questions about the concept of irony within and towards fashion, the chapter is a part of a larger project on the theme of fashion irony that aims at defining it as a field of academic study.

Engineering Comedy In The Mekah I'm Coming Film Based On The Structure Of The Hero's Journey

Mekah I'm Coming is a comedy film. This film shows the drama of love and the conflict of hajj travel fraud. The comedy in this film seems exaggerated. The purpose of this study is to describe the journey of Heroism in the development of the main character. It is based on 12 structures of the hero's journey and analyzes the story's comedy techniques. This study uses a descriptive qualitative method. The data collection scheme used in this study is to watch the movie "Mekah I'm Coming". Furthermore, it is studied based on the 12 structures of heroes' journeys. Then determine the humor in the film. The analysis uses Arthur Asa Berger's comedy technique with four basic categories: language, logic, identity, and action. The study results show that the hero's journey contains the story of the main character, Eddy, who directs his adventures in pursuing love. The storytelling of the Mekah I'm Coming film uses comedy techniques in the language category, followed by logic, identity, and action. The comedy technique in this film does not only serve as the packaging of humor. But also as an introduction to character characteristics, building conflicts, and messengers to display social life problems that occur in society.

Through a Comedic Glass, Darkly: Ethics, Humor, and Home Ownership in Spain’s Early Technocratic Years (1957–1963)

The current essay analyzes three oppositional film comedies produced during Franco’s totalitarian regime, after Spain transitioned to an Opus Dei technocratic rule and after the Ministry of Housing was created to solve the chronic lodging problems of the time. My analysis focuses on how La vida por delante/ Life Ahead (Dir. Fernando Fernán Gómez, 1958), El pisito/ The Little Apartment (Dir. Marco Ferreri, 1959), and El verdugo/ The Executioner (Dir. Luis García Berlanga, 1963) humorously critique the contemporaneous housing predicaments and the existing residential legislation. The article argues that these comedies effectively breach the hegemonically sanctioned thresholds of ethical, political, and aesthetic decorum of contemporaneous Spain by successfully resorting to an eminently materialistic, antimelodramatic discourse and to unsympathetic characters, prone to successive moral capitulations in their desperate chase for a decent housing and social advancement.

The Pattern and Translation of Chinese Address Terms in Contemporary Film Happiness Around the Corner

This paper discusses the translation and classification of Chinese address terms by selecting a representative film with a range of contexts. The data for this study were collected from a Chinese comedy film Happiness Around the Corner screened in 2018 with a length of 91.34 minutes. This film was chosen firstly because it was highly rated by the Chinese mainstream media People’s Daily Overseas Edition for its conveying of positive energy in a humorous manner. Furthermore, considering a range of contexts and interlocutors in this film, the data collected from this film would be sufficient to reach the expected goals of the study. This study employs a qualitative approach to explore a proper classification of Chinese contemporary address terms. The Chinese address terms found in the selected film were classified into seven types: namely nickname, professional title, kinship terms, fictive kinship terms, professional title with surname, offensive address terms and full name. The findings show that professional title, nickname and kinship terms appeared with higher frequency than offensive address terms and full name in this film, which could be explained from the perspective of sociolinguistics. Literal plus liberal translation strategies are recommended to translate address terms using homophonic puns, and equivalent words in target language are advised in most cases. These findings could not only throw light on the classification of address terms in Chinese, but also promote translation studies.

Queer Temporalities: Boredom and Bodily Intelligence in Early Italian Slapstick Comedies

The adoption of cross-dressing by male characters in Italian comedy films of the 1910s has previously received little critical attention. Far from being isolated representations of queer behaviour, cross-dressing was more prolific both on-screen (and off) than was previously thought. 
 Within the early comedy canon lie the male-female cross-dressing films where the narrative is suspended to allow the audience to gaze upon the cross-dressed character. These films offer audiences a trans-perspective as their gaze is directed by the cross-dressed character to the transgendered body. The queerness of these films lies not only is the visibility of the queer characters but also in the productivity of the queerness. The film itself becomes queer as the narrative economy is replaced by a luxuriating of the queer body. 
 For the spectator a conflict occurs as the cross-dressed character’s visibility, through the materialisation of the body, disrupts the perception of a trans-corpo-reality. Exposure of the cross-dressed character ruptures the heteronormative construction of the cinematic space. In the early Italian comedy films, knowledge of the cross-dressing comic star is the visibility that threatens the transgender character. The queerness of the cross-dressed character in Italian comedy films opens up temporalities and suggests the possibility of different modes of living, and of reading film texts. This paper argues that the popularisation of the cross-dressed male served as a transgressive force that provided an articulation of social tolerance in Italy at a time when gender roles were undergoing renegotiation.

Beyond Labourer’s Love: Rethinking Early Chinese Film Comedy

Abstract This article examines three lost short comedies produced alongside Labourer’s Love by the Mingxing Film Studio in 1922: The King of Comedy Visits Shanghai (Huaji dawang you hu ji), Havoc in a Bizarre Theatre (Danao guai xichang), and The Naughty Kid (Wantong). I propose to look beyond the extant Labourer’s Love and instead to delve into the broader intertextual, intermedial fabric of early film comedy for a re-evaluation of this neglected genre. Drawing on advertising texts, stills, and film reviews, this study corrects misinformation and supplements new data, based on which I posit two notions for a reconceptualization of early Chinese comedy film. First, I propose the Chinese concept of renao (“hot noise”) as a particular sensorial-somatic mode of experience to account for the Chinese engagement with film comedy in the tumultuous 1920s. Second, I borrow the Chinese poetic device of allusion to interpret their widespread references to Hollywood films in structural, narrative, and visual terms. Through the prism of allusion, the appropriation and re-production of Hollywood elements can be regarded as a means of adding authority to inchoate Chinese filmmaking, while at the same time complicating familiar topoi, symbols, and imageries in culturally sensitive ways.

Effect of Watching Comedy on Affect in Young Adult Runners

In many studies, researchers have investigated the positive effects of distractions while exercising. In most gyms, there are usually televisions playing random channels. Young adult undergraduate runners (N = 125; 64 female and 61 male) completed one mile on a treadmill at their selected pace. Approximately half the participants (n = 63) were randomly assigned to watch the comedy video while completing their mile, and the other half (n = 62) completed their mile with no video. The Feeling Scale (FS; Hardy & Rejeski, 1989), which asks participants to rate on a scale from -5 (very bad) to 5 (very good) was administered to all participants before starting the mile and after completing the mile. A repeated-measures ANOVA was used to compare group means over two observations. Results revealed statistically significant greater change in affect from pre- and post-mile in the watch group than in the no watch group. These results indicate there was an increase in affect when participants watched the comedy film while completing the mile versus the participants that only completed the mile and did not watch the video. This suggests that, on average, watching videos, such as a comedy film, is an effective option to distract gym patrons from their exercise, which may further increase their affect.

Detective Chinatown Pursues the “Tao” First: An Interview with Director Chen Sicheng

Abstract This interview was conducted between Chen Sicheng, a Chinese actor, director, and screenwriter, who is known for his leading roles in the films A Young Prisoner’s Revenge (Faguan mama, 2001) and Spring Fever (Chunfeng chenzui de yewan, 2009) as well as his directorial blockbuster comedy film series Detective Chinatown, and Wang Haizhou, a professor of Film Studies at Beijing Film Academy. In this interview, drawing on his own artistic experience and creative practice, director Chen Sicheng focuses on the themes, genre, scriptwriting, performance, production values and other aspects of the Detective Chinatown series. He expresses his artistic views and creative thought at length and expounds the exploratory significance of the Detective Chinatown series for China’s film industry. He emphasizes that creative works should have both “Tao” and “Technique,” and that “Tao” should be located first to clarify the theme and value of the work. He also discusses the intention behind the Detective Chinatown series to create a subgenre in which mystery, suspense, detective work, and comedy combine, and gives a multifaceted analysis of the actors’ performance in Detective Chinatown 3. All of this will enlighten the audience and enable a deeper appreciation of Detective Chinatown 3.

블랙코미디 장르 영화에서의 아이러니 표현기법

This study researched the irony expression technique used in the genre of black comedy film <Don’t look up> released in 2021 on Netflix. Black comedy is a genre that has the purpose of criticism, and proper delivery of this critical viewpoint through films is critical in this genre. To expose the theme, a film <Don’t Look Up> makes full use of ironic expressions. The comical effect of these expressions maintain the light atmosphere of this film, while emphasizing the parts to be criticized. A variety of ironic expression techniques in this work are worth analyzing since they are used as devices that can convey its message well. The investigator uses the classification of irony by Lee, Jeonggook, which classifies irony into dramatic irony, plot irony, irony of character, irony of place, irony of music, etc., to analyze the ironic expression techniques used in this film. The purpose of this study is to analyze how the irony occurs and find what effect it has on the narrative which may be helpful of creating scenario.

Tout simplement noir: Simply Parody or Complex Paradox in France’s (Post)Racial Utopia?

In July 2020, the comedy film Tout simplement noir by Jean-Pascal Zadi and John Wax was released at the height of “Black Lives Matter” marches around the world. This compelling text of the times can be interpreted either as a simple parody of identity politics discourses, black rights movements, and celebrity self-aggrandizement, or a complex paradox demonstrating the antinomic potentialities of the film exposing both racial and post-racial utopias. This article aims to explore briefly these two possible interpretations of the film, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive and can co-exist to further understanding of both the particular text and the underpinning context. Ideological positions examined include communitarianism, universalism, republicanism, utopianism and Afrotopianism.

О интерсемиотической передаче комического в аудиодескрипции к советским кинокомедиям

Audio description (AD) is an additional soundtrack in a film containing concise, verbal information about what is happening on the screen. The language of the AD should be appropriate to the genre of the film lexically and stylistically. This means that the language of AD in film comedies should contain some verbal ‘signals’ of the comic as an aesthetic category. The author of the presented research has attempted to analyse lexical and stylistic means of conveying situational comic and character comic as the two main types of comic, apart from the verbal one expressed directly in the characters’ speech. The material for the research included the following Soviet film comedies: We are from jazz (directed by K. Shakhnazarov, 1983), Autumn marathon (directed by G. Daneliya, 1979), and The twelve chairs (directed by L. Gaidai, 1971). The analysis proved that the verbal track of the AD reflects the most important peripeteia of the characters, and together with them the features of the characters (appearance, character traits), the manner of their behaviour. The set of llinguistic and stylistic means is determined by the type of the comedy.

106.20 When do we have 1 + 1 = 11 and 2 + 2 = 5?

The phrase "$ 2+2=5 $" is a clich\'e or a slogan used in political speeches, propaganda, or literature, most notably in the novel "$ 1984 $" by George Orwell. More recently, we came across a You-Tube short film comedy, Alternative Math, produced by IdeaMan Studios (see \cite{Danny}). It is a hilarious exaggeration of a teacher who is dragged through the mud for teaching that $ 2+2=4 $ and not $ 22 $, as Danny, a young student, kept on insisting. In the movie, Danny and the whole community sincerely believe $ 1+1=11 $ and $ 2+2=22 $. Jokes aside, we ask the question whether a polynomially defined group law "$\oplus$" defined over the field of rationals such that $ 1\oplus1=u $ and $ 2 \oplus2=v $ can simultaneously be satisfied for arbitrary integers $u$ and $ v $. Answer to this question takes us through a fascinating journey from Brahmagupta all the way to the modern works of Louis Joel Mordell and Ramanujan!

Круглый стол «Эстетика советской кинокомедии». Эксцентрика, авторское начало, официозный контекст

In the modern period the aesthetics of comedy in cinema was on the periphery of the attention of the science of art. Not least, this was due to the fact that the analysis of the comic was relegated to the background by the study of the playful relativity characteristic of postmodern trends in the screen arts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Meanwhile, Soviet film comedy remains one of the pinnacles in the development of this genre in the cinema of the 20th century. And the decline of comedy in modern Russian cinema prompts a return to the experience of the masterpieces of the Soviet era. The relevance of the topic is connected with this: the contexts of the comic and laughter in Soviet comedies, their functions of a social, communicative, aesthetic nature were not studied in detail and comprehensively in their time. The novelty of approaches today is associated with the possibility of free from ideological pressure and the most detailed consideration, and in part are vision of the formal and substantive features of the film comedy of the Soviet period. This scientific process combines the methods of art history, cultural studies, folklore and anthropology. This text reviews the reports at the Round Table “Aesthetics of Soviet Film Comedy”, organized by the Mass Media Arts Department of the State Institute for Art Studies and which brought together scientists of different generations from VGIK, the Union of Cinematographers of the Russian Federation, the Russian State University for the Humanities, the Higher School of Economics, the Academy of the Media Industry, the Free University and other institutions. The purpose of the round table was to identify the main phases of the evolution of comedy in the Soviet cinema, and therefore the order of the reports took into account the historical chronology of the appearance of certain films and genre varieties of comedy. Since the formation of film comedy in the 1920s – 1940s, a change in philosophical paradigms, the transformation of an eccentric principle, the formation of new artistic images and motives have been recorded. The attention of researchers to the problems of the relationship between society and the state, concepts and theories of the comedy principle in the context of government orders was also obvious. Particular attention of researchers was directed to the polymorphic nature of comedy, capable of combining lyricism and farcicalness, serious and frivolous, openly conditional and life-like. A number of speakers addressed to the individual elements of the comedy film poetics, the relationship between visual and sound, transformations of characters’ images, inclusions of theatrical forms, grotesque, and absurdity. Aspects of the film language of Sergei Gerasimov, Ivan Pyryev, Stanislav Barei, Edmond Keosanyan, Georgy Danelia, Leonid Gaidai were analyzed.

DIRECTING A DRAMA-COMEDY FILM ENTITLED “HANI”

Early marriage remains a social problem, especially among less-educated urban people, including in Tamanan District, Bondowoso Regency, East Java Province. The community has a distinctive and unique Pandalungan language that offers an interesting idea source for filmmaking. Thus, this creation seeks to illustrate how “Hani”, a drama-comedy film, was directed with a local-culture approach. The production of “Hani” referred to the existing Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) in the audiovisual profession and combined the visual comedy and slapstick approaches. The direction of “Hani” indicates that using local culture (Pandalungan language) in each storyline and local actor character can create an entertaining and educating comedy film. Further, the film produced is an audiovisual work that is easily understandable by the local community.

Maoist Laughter ed. by Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath

Reviewed by: Maoist Laughter ed. by Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath Howard Y. F. Choy Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath, editors. Maoist Laughter. Hong Kong UP, 2019. 224 p. In the beginning of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Karl Marx adds to G. W. F. Hegel's remarks that history always appears twice: "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." Could it be tragedy and farce at the same time? With the trademark smiley faces of Chinese artist Yue Minjun's 岳敏君 hilarious acrylic pink painting The Sun (Taiyang 太陽, 2000) as its cover image, Maoist Laughter is a groundbreaking addition to laughology, after similar works like Not Just a Laughing Matter: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Political Humor in China, coedited by Kingfai Tam and Sharon R. Wesoky (Singapore: Springer, 2018). The new publication's ten essays represent the most recent American and British studies of laughter in modern and contemporary Chinese literature, culture, cinema, dance, and theater. Zhu's introduction begins by discussing the healing effects of laughter, arguing that the Mao era actually "institutionalized laughter as a social practice and an ideological discourse" (1). Such "socialist laughter" had a "class identification function" (5) and "was closely intertwined with the production of Maoist discourse" (7). Dating the genealogy of Maoist laughter back to the Yan'an period (1935-1948) when Mao Zedong advocated Lu Xun's 魯迅 (1881-1936) [End Page 161] satirical essays and transformed the libidinal energies of humor into the revolutionary, militant spirit, Zhu traces the regulation of cartoons and comedies to the time of turmoil from the 1940s through 1976. Her claim that laughter marked the end of the Mao era's legitimacy and the beginning of "a new historical force" (12) is quite unclear and it is uncertain whether "Maoist laughter" is limited only to its historical context or a specter that is still haunting post-Mao China. The volume is divided into three parts: "Utopian Laughter," "Intermedial Laughter," and "Laughter and Language." Based on Zygmunt Bauman's assertation of socialism as an "active utopia," Zhu suggests that utopian laughter is "a revolutionary apparatus" for "a collective dream" (12). In the two case studies of film comedies, Wang Jiayi's 王家乙 Five Golden Flowers (Wu duo jinhua 五朵金花, 1959) and Guo Wei's 郭維 Happily Ever After (Hua hao yue yuan 花好月圓, 1957) based on Zhao Shuli's 趙樹理 novel Sanliwan Village (Sanliwan 三里灣, 1955), Ban Wang observes in the former that eulogistic and transethnic laughter was essential to the socialist agenda of national unity with ethnic minorities, while Charles A. Laughlin addresses the problem of socialist leisure in the latter where "no rigid boundaries in space or time between physical labor and rest and relaxation" exist (52). Using cross-cultural comparison with the "joke rite" found in post-WWII US sitcoms and "interracial buddy film" (67, 69), Emily Wilcox points out the "unpredictable, surprising, and rebellious" (64) potential represented by the choreography underneath the joke pattern of "conformist humor" (57) in the Chinese military dance "Laundry Song" ("Xi yi ge" 洗衣歌, 1964), created to promote Han-Tibetan and soldier-civilian harmony after the 1959 Tibetan uprising. In the second section, Xiaoning Lu demonstrates how the film Wandering in the Zoo, Awaking from a Dream (You yuan jing meng 遊園驚夢, 1956) innovated the interplay between cinema and Hou Baolin's 侯寶林 xiangsheng 相聲 or "cross-talk" to produce "sociopolitically appropriate laughter"—even though Hou himself "named satire as the first and most important element in the humor of a good xiangsheng piece" (73, 75n)—before the suspension of film comedy projects during the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957-59). Yun Zhu's chapter illustrates how Yang Xiaozhong's 楊小仲 1963 screen adaptation of Zhang Tianyi's 張天翼 novella "The Magic Gourd" ("Bao hulu [End Page 162] de mimi" 寶葫蘆的秘密, 1958) played between "satire" (fengci 諷刺) and "extolment" (gesong 歌頌) in the aftermath of the hyperbolic Great Leap Forward (1958-60) that resembled the young protagonist's unrealistic ambitions. Then Li Guo investigates how adaptations between traditional pingtan 評彈 storytelling, film, folk performances, and radio-broadcast songs negotiated between individuals and the nation-state through vernacularization and redefinition of "'laughter' as an ideological act" with class consciousness (108). The final four essays explore laughter as a popular...

Naked weekends, white sheets, and masked erotica. The changing limits of decency in the Spanish sexy comedies of the transition to democracy

Spanish sexy comedies of the 1970s have become an ambivalent touchstone of contemporary cinema. Both rejected by national intelligentsia and entertained by local audiences, they have traditionally been understood as a psychosocial projection of Franco’s repression, establishing a dialogue between legal and religious oppression and the social need for escapism. This article questions the limits of decency and obscenity in film comedy. Through the study of films directed by Mariano Ozores, a leading figure of sexy comedies but one of the least studied filmmakers of Spanish film history, the paper traces the different aspects of sexual representation in comedy. Turning to the genre’s cultural appreciation, political commitment and social analysis, the article focuses on three films: Fin de semana al desnudo (1974) for the study of the sexual discourse of the last years of the Franco regime; Cuentos de las sábanas blancas (1977) for the analysis of the new possibilities after the end of the censorship and, finally, El erótico enmascarado (1980) for the legacy of the sexy comedies in the first democratic cinema.

Queer Korea

Queer Korea

The problem of film comedy in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT Radical comedy liberates spectators from their compulsive attachments to volatile objects. In that spirit, modernist film theorists placed their hopes in the raucous, world-shattering laughter elicited by violent slapstick comedies to explode the crises of the present and their foothold in habituated perception. But what remains of laughter’s revolutionary modernist project in the twenty-first century? In this article, I rethink the concept of cine-genre to pursue tropes of uncanny, uncontrollable laughter that have proliferated across all genres of contemporary cinema. Conventional genre provides an aesthetic contract of solid expectations (brokered between audiences, media-makers, and producers) to sustain the hope for what’s possible through the repetition of what’s imaginable. But in times of escalating crisis, genre itself falls apart, spawning perverse hybrid mutations. Cinema, I argue, in its renewed capacity for dialectical ‘hybridity’ can give rise to radical forms of embodied perception and affective experience that slam the brakes on the nightmare of postmodern carnival and reveal new ways forward toward a less dystopian future.

Billion dollar madness: examining the paradox of financial satire through the 1980s economic crisis in Israeli comedy films

ABSTRACT Can anti-capitalist satire exist within show business, or is this an oxymoron? How can mainstream films claim to be socially conscious and rebellious, when at the same time they are products of an industry which aim to appeal to the masses and maximize profits? These questions were recently raised in relation to the popular and critical success of Hollywood hits like The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street, which followed the 2008 financial crash. This paper uses a group of Israeli financial satires as a case study and contributes a significant transnational addition to the debate. During the first half of the 1980s, the Israeli economy struggled with rampant inflation. The crisis inspired comedies such as Million Dollar Madness, The Plumber, and The Man Who Flew in to Grab. Although these films failed, they express a unique zeitgeist in Israeli history, and they are useful to examine the paradox. This analysis of these films provides valuable insights that can guide filmmakers toward overcoming and even resolving the paradox.

Осмысляя «красный смех»: англоязычные исследования о советской кинокомедии

In this article, I address foreign English-language works on Soviet film comedy, tracing the waves of researchers’ interest to it, and identifying the time periods as well as film directors attracting scholars most often. The first surge of interest in Soviet film comedy came in the first half of the 1990s and was largely associated with the fall of the Iron Curtain. The major subject of research during those years were Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, musical comedies of the 1930s, and films of the Perestroika period. The second wave came in the 2010s with the emigration of a large number of Russian scholars who had personally witnessed the Soviet Union. Thanks to them, the range of the studied material has significantly expanded through the analysis of film comedies of the 1960s and 1970s. The main thematic directions and topics in the study of the comedy genre are structured in accordance with the history of film timeline. Soviet comedies of the 1920s–1930s are of specific interest to foreign researchers in terms of the ideological regulation of art, as well as in terms of how the mythology of the new socialist society was formed, and how Soviet filmmakers adapted or rejected Western standards. In the comedies of the 1960s and 1970s, scholars analyze the discordance between declared and unspoken humor and study the Aesopian language of famous comedy film directors (Ryazanov and Gaidai above all). Finally, in late-Soviet films, researchers note the growth of absurdist motifs as a sign of a complete and no longer hidden disillusionment with communist ideals.