Comedy

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Comedy film

A comedy film is a genre of film in which the main emphasis is on humour. These films are designed to make the audience laugh through amusement and most often work by exaggerating characteristics for humorous effect. Films in this style traditionally have a happy ending (black comedy being an exception). One of the oldest genres in film – and derived from the classical comedy in theatre –, some of the very first silent movies were comedies, as slapstick comedy often relies on visual depictions, without requiring sound. When sound films became more prevalent during the 1920s, comedy films took another swing, as laughter could result from burlesque situations but also dialogue.

Comedy, compared with other film genres, puts much more focus on individual stars, with many former stand-up comics transitioning to the film industry due to their popularity. While many comic films are lighthearted stories with no intent other than to amuse, others contain political or social commentary (such as The King of Comedy and Wag the Dog).

The Sprinkler Sprinkled - L'arroseur arrosé (1895) by Louis Lumière

Ever since film established itself as a viable storytelling medium, one of its largest goals has been to entertain viewers through laughter. In fact, one of the Lumiere Brother’s first films was a comedy piece entitled The Sprinkler Sprinkled (or Watering the Gardener). Included in their first public screening in 1895, the film’s predicable subject matter featured a man with a garden hose who is tricked into being soaked by a young prankster. Given the initial technological limitations of film, comedy quickly became an ideal genre for the early silent films, since it could successfully be conveyed through visual action and physical humor. This early form of comedy in cinema was entitled slapstick, and brought fame to three silent clowns – Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd.

Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was also one of the earliest silent film comedians (as well as director and screenwriter). He started out with the Selig Polyscope Company in 1909 (his first film was Ben's Kid (1909)), and then went onto Universal Pictures in 1913 where he appeared in several of Mack Sennett's Keystone Comedies films, noted for fast-paced chase sequences and 'pie-in-the-face' segments. Arbuckle was the first of the silent comedians to direct his own films, starting with Barnyard Flirtations (1914). His teaming with Mabel Normand at Keystone, in a series of "Fatty and Mabel" films, were lucrative for the studio.

Silent Comedy:

In the early days of comedy, technology was extremely limited. Therefore, comedy was silent, in black and white and typically focused on visual humor, especially the slapstick style made popular by Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton. Charlie Chaplin, seen in several short films and feature films like The Tramp (1915), was known for his signature physical comedy. Buster Keaton's somber expression and ability to do his own stunts made him a household name. Harold Lloyd was famous for his glasses and straw hat and ability to appear like an anonymous, unassuming office worker right up until the moment he was hanging off the hands of a giant clock.

Slapstick:

Slapstick was predominant in the earliest silent films, since they didn't need sound to be effective, and they were popular with non-English speaking audiences in metropolitan areas. The term slapstick was taken from the wooden sticks that clowns slapped together to promote audience applause.

This is primitive and universal comedy with broad, aggressive, physical, and visual action, including harmless or painless cruelty and violence, horseplay, and often vulgar sight gags (e.g., a custard pie in the face, collapsing houses, a fall in the ocean, a loss of trousers or skirts, runaway crashing cars, people chases, etc). Slapstick often required exquisite timing and well-honed performance skills. It was typical of the films of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, W. C. Fields, The Three Stooges, the stunts of Harold Lloyd in Safety Last (1923), and Mack Sennett's silent era shorts (for example, the Keystone Kops). Slapstick evolved and was reborn in the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s.

One of the greatest and most-beloved of the comedy teams was the one of British-born Stan Laurel and the fat-faced Oliver Hardy, first purposely teamed together toward the close of the silent era by producer Hal Roach in the slapstick film Slipping Wives (1926). They had first met, by accident, during the filming of Lucky Dog in 1917. Director Leo McCarey at Hal Roach Studios recognized their potential as a team and capitalized on their contrasting, disparate physical differences.

With the advent of sound, the popularity of slapstick comedy declined and the genre underwent a significant transformation. Instead of relying exclusively on physical mishap and acrobatic stunts, comedic humor of the 1930s focused much more on witty dialogue, which was most notably displayed in the humor of the Marx Brothers. Moreover, with the Marx Brothers, comedy developed into a satirical tool for mocking the establishment through situations that were often absurd and risqué (e.g. their 1933 film, Duck Soup, which functioned as a political, anti-war satire piece). Nevertheless, with Laurel & Hardy and the Three Stooges rising to fame during the 1930s, the slapstick subgenre still managed to demonstrate its comedic worth to talkies.

These films combine farce, slapstick, and the witty dialogue of more sophisticated films. In general, they are light-hearted, frothy, often sophisticated, romantic stories, commonly focusing on a battle of the sexes in which both co-protagonists try to outwit or outmaneuver each other.

Screwball:

Screwball comedies, a sub-genre of romantic comedy films, was predominant from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s. The word 'screwball' denotes lunacy, craziness, eccentricity, ridiculousness, and erratic behavior.

The comedy genre continued to evolve throughout the course of the 1930s with the screwball comedy subgenre, which offered escapist entertainment for Depression-era audiences and was characterized by social satire that often took an anarchic tone or irreverent view of domestic or romantic conflicts. Frank Capra was the star director of this particular subgenre, and his film It Happened One Night (1934) provides a seminal example of the screwball comedy. German director Ernst Lubitsch also left his mark on comedy at the time by poking fun at the idle rich and embracing a sophisticated comedy style that was aptly named “The Lubitsch Touch).” When the 1940s were ushered in, most comedy films embraced a more serious tone and focused on topics pertaining to politics, materialism, and the war, which were geared towards a more mature audience (e.g. Sturges’ satires The Lady Eve, released in 1940, and Sullivan’s Travel, released in 1941). With the 1950s, the comedy genre welcomed the comic duo of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (who starred in films such as 1955’s, You’re Never Too Young), but was largely characterized by an era of sanitized, formulaic, courtship romantic comedies, such as Pillow Talk (Gordon, 1959). This trend of comedies catering to a more mature audience continued throughout the 1960s, with Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964) using satire to address social change, and The Graduate (Nichols, 1967) acknowledging the sexual revolution.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the comedy genre really embraced satirical humor and parody, allowing directors like Woody Allen and Mel Brooks to thrive. Around this time, the British comedy troupe, Monty Python, also established themselves as significant contributors to the genre, embracing an over-the-top approach to humor similar to that of the Marx Brothers. The 1980s additionally saw a flood of teen comedies that included Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Heckerling, 1982) and Sixteen Candles (Hughes, 1984). As for the 1990s, during this period of time, actors created larger-than-life characters that relied on exaggerated speaking, movement, and expression, similar to slapstick comedy from the silent era. Of all the comedic actors from the 1990s, Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, and Adam Sandler particularly dominated the genre and became household names.

Black or Dark Comedy:

These are dark, sarcastic, humorous, or sardonic stories that help us examine otherwise ignored darker serious, pessimistic subjects such as war, death, or illness. Two of the greatest black comedies ever made include the following: Stanley Kubrick's Cold War classic satire from a script by co-writer Terry Southern,  Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) that spoofed the insanity of political and military institutions with Peter Sellers in a triple role (as a Nazi scientist, a British major, and the US President), and Robert Altman's M*A*S*H (1970), an irreverent, anti-war black comedy set during the Korean War. Another more recent classic black comedy was the Coen Brothers' violent and quirky story Fargo (1996) about a pregnant Midwestern police chief (Oscar-winning Frances McDormand) who solves a 'perfect crime' that went seriously wrong.

Hal Ashby's eccentric cult film Harold and Maude (1972) was an oddball love story and dark comedy about a suicidal 19 year-old (Bud Cort) and a quirky, widowed octogenarian (Ruth Gordon), with a great soundtrack score populated with songs by Cat Stevens. (See examples of other feature films below for more.) John Huston's satirical black comedy Prizzi's Honor (1985) starred Jack Nicholson as dimwitted Mafia hit man Charley Partanna for the East Coast Prizzi family, who fell in love with West Coaster Irene Walker (Kathleen Turner) - another mob's hitwoman. The film included an Oscar-winning performance from Anjelica Huston as the vengeful granddaughter of Nicholson's Don. Tim Burton's dark and imaginative haunted house comedy Beetlejuice (1988) featured Michael Keaton as the title character in a dream house occupied by newlywed spirits Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin. The shocking but watchable first film of Peter Berg, Very Bad Things (1998) told the dark and humorous story of a 'bachelor' weekend in Las Vegas gone bad for five guys when their hired stripper/prostitute was accidentally killed.

Comedy films from the 21st century are R-rated films that contain generous portions of profanity, sex, and debauchery. This inclusion of raunchier lines and content seems pretty alarming in regards to what society deems humorous, and really begs the question of whether or not the comedy genre can continue to be taken seriously.

Some of the R-rated comedies are 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) starring Steve Carell and The Hangover (2009). These comedies used obscene or vulgar jokes and situations to stun the crowd.

Although the comedy genre’s intended goal has always been to entertain viewers, the recently adopted gratuitous inclusion of shocking content makes audience to wonder how the comedy genre will continue to evolve.

Nevertheless, the history of the comedy genre remains a fascinating subject for discussion and given its longevity, should be recognized and appreciated as a significant aspect of film history.