Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 8 No. 15, May 2004
Lisa Trahair
Comedy and Beyond:
Geoff King's _Film Comedy_
Geoff King _Film Comedy_ London: Wallflower Press,
2002 ISBN
1-903364-35-3 230 pp. Geoff King's recent
monograph, _Film Comedy_, true to its word, undertakes an
historical overview of film comedy: its modalities, genres,
and cycles; the consequences of its industrial mode of
production; and the debates in film studies it has
generated. It is not the first book to undertake these
tasks, but it is the most recent and, by virtue of this fact
alone, is able to address significant recent developments in
cinematic comedy and summarise the current state of play of
its theorisation. [1] _Film Comedy_ does both of
these things very successfully. Three of the five chapters,
'Transgressions and Regressions', 'Comedy and
Representation' and 'Comedy Beyond Comedy', respectively
identify such recent trends or areas of interest in
cinematic comedy as gross-out comedy, the comic exploration
of the performativity of identity, and the reconfiguration
of comic affect in contemporary independent cinema. The
first chapter 'Comedy and Narrative' covers a range of
debates in the theorisation of film comedy, while the
chapter 'Satire and Parody' considers the participation of
comedy in two distinct aesthetic forms. In addition to an
Introduction, and the five chapters mentioned above, the
filmography boasts in excess of 400 titles, the films of
which are referred to extensively. Extending Umberto Eco's
sentiment that from 'antiquity to Freud or Bergson', the
term comic 'gathers together a disturbing ensemble of
diverse and not completely homogeneous phenomena, such as
humor, comedy, grotesque, parody, satire, wit, and so on',
[2] King, at the very outset of the book, states
that there is 'no single adequate theory of comedy, despite
various efforts to produce an all-embracing account' (5).
Because of this, King's self-avowed approach to the
philosophy of comedy is an eclectic one. He utilises a range
of theoretical approaches, 'but only as they appear useful
in the understanding of particular issues' (4). To be sure,
King draws from time to time on such prominent thinkers from
the field of comic theory as Mikhail Bakhtin, Henri Bergson,
Sigmund Freud, Elder Olson, Umberto Eco, and Northrop Frye.
But it is also the case that the *incongruity theory of
humour* dominates his analysis and discussion of the comic
more than any other theory. Incongruity is defined by King
very simply as that which departs from 'the normal routines
of life or the social group in question', such as when there
is 'a sense of things being out of place, mixed up or not
quite right, in various ways' or 'temporal, geographical or
other forms of displacement' (5). The work he refers to here
is M. S. Davis's, _What's So Funny? The Comic Conception of
Culture and Society_, and in an end note he elaborates every
so slightly that the 'roots of incongruity approaches to
comedy are usually traced back to a brief definition given
by Immanuel Kant in his _Critique of Judgement_ and later
elaborations by commentators including Herbert Spencer,
Arthur Schopenhauer and William Hazlitt' (203). In defining the parameters
of this field of analysis, King considers whether cinematic
comedy is best understood in its adjectival or nominal form,
as a mode (adjective) or genre (noun). Like Steve Neale and
Frank Krutnik before him, and David Bordwell before them,
[3] he notes that, to the extent to which the 'law
of genre' of cinematic comedy is the criterion of a happy
ending, the generic approach is too restrictive at the same
time that it indicates nothing of the manner of
representation. Because of this, King opts for a conception
of comedy as mode rather than genre. A significant advantage
of focusing on comedy as modality is that it licenses King's
discussion of 'Comedy Beyond Comedy' in the final chapter --
one of the books most significant innovations -- which
couldn't have been broached within generic classifications
of comedy. In defining the nature of comic modality in
various films, King's examines degrees of plausibility,
reality, and authenticity, and degrees of implication, such
as audience sympathy, empathy, identification, and
distanciation. This emphasis on mode rather than genre
matches up well with the emphasis on the incongruity theory
of humour because defining modality entails attending to the
specificity of incongruity as the blend of the plausible and
the implausible, the rational and the absurd. King only partially avoids
the concept of genre, however, replacing the term with
*format*. And in three of the five chapters, he attends to
two distinct formats -- comedian comedy and romantic comedy.
Each format functions in accordance with accepted
definitions of genre, partaking in a set of clearly
recognisable thematic, stylistic, and iconographic traits,
and combining the imperatives of standardisation and
innovation. At various times, King makes allusion to these
two formats functioning quite differently as regards
modality and implication, but is less explicit about it than
he might have been had he posed the two ways of thinking
about comedy (adjectival and nominal) as intersecting with
each other. King states in the
Introduction that his study will combine three different
approaches: formal, socio-historical-political, and
industrial. He also qualifies the scope of the book: while
it addresses a number of prominent issues relevant to
cinematic comedy and considers a wide range of examples, it
does not claim exhaustive coverage of the field. King
brackets out televisual examples, but includes discussion of
animation. And beyond Hollywood, he examines comedy across
the breadth of world cinema, referring to films from
Britain, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Australia,
and South and Central America. Throughout the book, King
combines extended analyses of individual films with short
references to many more films, in most cases considering the
relation of comic moments to larger narrative movements. He
indicates theories relevant to the kinds of comedy he is
investigating, explicating where necessary the work of other
commentators. Does the book advance our
philosophical understanding of the image as it operates
comedically? Certainly, it advances our understanding of the
operation of the image as regards the formal aspects of
cinematic comedy. The section in the first chapter entitled
'Framing Comedy' considers the visual dimension of cinematic
comedy in terms of the debate between montage theory and
Bazinian realism and demonstrates that the comedy can be
generated from editing techniques as well as from the
dimension of 'performance within the frame provided by the
longer take' (46). There is also the more
difficult question of the extent to which this theorisation
of cinematic comedy extends our understanding of the
philosophy of comedy. The book's success is this regard is
mixed. I'm not a big fan of the incongruity theory of humour
-- especially as it is utilised in this instance. King
undoubtedly needs a very general conception of the comic in
order to be able to undertake the breadth of analysis that
the book aspires to, but the risk here is that the concept
of incongruity is itself too broad to be of much use.
Furthermore, the concept generates a binary approach to the
comedy examined, which is invariably understood as a
transgression of the normative. This limits the analysis of
the comic to the issue of the relation between the norm and
its transgression instead of providing for a closer analysis
of what the comic itself, in any of its particular
manifestations, involves (which is not, however, to say that
King's readings of films do not, at times, go further than
this). There is something disingenuous about King's tendency
to repeatedly advocate the particularity of the significance
of comedy in the various films by measuring them against
universals. He questions, for example, whether comedy
subverts narrative, diminishes the impact of horror,
deactivates the political, and so forth, when he makes it
very clear at the outset that he doesn't think it is
possible to account for comedy in terms of
universals. In terms of its
identification of the range and types of cinematic comedy
currently and historically on offer, and of its articulation
of contemporary debates, the book is very well thought-out.
It also makes an important contribution to our understanding
of comedian comedy and to the on-going debate about the
relationship between comedy and narrative. The first chapter
investigates the intersection between the modalities of
comedy and narrative throughout the history of film comedy.
In the first section of the chapter, 'Gags vs Narrative in
Early Cinematic Comedy', King provides a succinct overview
of the main strands of the debate concerning the relation
between comedy and narrative and his take on it. As King
represents it: 'The kind of comedy that disrupts, or has
little investment in, narrative coherence has been both
celebrated and criticised; seen as either a wonderfully
free-form and potentially anarchic force or as inadequately
developed or 'immature' comedy' (22). Certainly, there was
an argument between Tom Gunning and Donald Crafton about the
prominence of one form over the other in early cinematic
comedy, [4] but the views represented in the above
quotation express the opinion of theorists writing in
different periods: Patricia Mellencamp and Henry Jenkins and
their celebration of early Marx Brothers films on one side,
and Gerald Mast and Walter Kerr as detractors from
Sennett-style comedy on the other. [5] King is right
to argue that Mast's and Kerr's negative assessments of
Sennett's broad slapstick are essentially teleologically
formed on the basis of subsequent developments in the
format, particularly a greater emphasis upon narrative and
characterisation in the refined slapstick of the 20s. But it
is worth noting that those who celebrated 'anarchistic
comedy' did so on the basis of much broader debates in the
wider field of film studies concerning the ideological
function of classical Hollywood narrative. It is also worth
remembering that it was the identification of this dimension
of cinematic comedy that brought the genre to the attention
of 1970s Screen theorists. Also of interest in this
chapter is King's utilisation and refinement of Steve
Seidman's work on comedian comedy. [6] Seidman
coined the term 'comedian comedy', identified it as a
*sub-genre* of comedy, and delineated its major conventions.
He noted, for example, the dominance of a central comic
figure, the utilisation of a vaudevillian or
performance-based aesthetic, the peculiarity of the genre's
mode of enunciation and, related to this, the central
performer's license to break the rules that governed
conventional narratives and diegetic continuums. In his discussion of the
subordination of comedy to narrative, King, without being
explicit about it, takes issue with one of Seidman's central
tenets. The view articulated by Seidman, and subsequently
taken up by Peter Kramer, [7] is that in the genre
of comedian comedy the transgressive behaviour of the
central protagonist (behaviour from which much of the comedy
is derived) presents the problem/obstacle that the narrative
must work to resolve/eliminate. In this view, the question
of which mode dominates, comedy or narrative, is interpreted
in favour of the latter. The incorporation of the central
performer into the social/symbolic order from which he had
previously been excluded, happens on the basis of his
relinquishment of his transgressive, comic behaviour and
thus signals a subordination of the comic to narrative and
hence a neutralisation of transgression. The narrative,
Seidman argues, works to ensure the triumph of normative
society over acts of transgression. King disagrees with this
view. He acknowledges that the narratives of such films set
the central comic performer 'against formal institutions',
but he maintains that comedian comedy (like comedy in
general) is concerned with the on-going transgression of
establishment of norms. They are committed to asserting 'the
value of creative individuality in the face of dehumanising
abstraction' (40). To illustrate this point, King considers
how the theme of creative individuality works in the cycle
of comedian comedies with a military subtext, finally
concluding, against Seidman, that: 'In ideological terms,
comedian comedy can be read as a celebration of the
individual in opposition to restrictive social or collective
institutions' (42). King suggests that the question of the
dominance of one mode over the other is in fact badly
formulated because both modes -- narrative and comedy --
offer modes of pleasure upon which the market seeks to
capitalise. In this chapter, King also
undertakes a brief history of film comedy, introducing the
reader to the formats of comedian comedy and romantic comedy
and accounting for some of the formal and narrative
conventions that dominate each format. It becomes apparent
here that modality operates quite differently in the two
formats. In comedian comedy, slapstick gags have the
capacity to disrupt the narrative or pursue ends that are
counter-productive to the economic function of narrative,
whereas in romantic comedy narrative plays a much more
primary role. While King devotes a separate section to the
formal aspects of comedian comedy, thereby suggesting that
the comedy of comedian comedy can have a distinctive
cinematic form, there is no such equivalent for romantic
comedy, which might deploy slapstick but otherwise emerges
from the narrative. Indeed, King's discussion of romantic
comedy, not uninteresting in itself, is almost entirely
focused on narrative. The content and argument
of the chapter 'Transgressions and Regressions' is to some
extent supported by King's adherence to the concept of mode
rather than genre. The first half is devoted to a discussion
of the operation of transgression in the contemporary
phenomenon of gross-out cinema (a phenomenon which is found
in both comedian comedy and romantic comedy); the second
half examines the notion of pre-Oedipal regression as one of
the prevailing themes of comedian comedy. Gross-out films,
like the Farrelly brothers' _Something about Mary_, _Dumb
and Dumber_, _Shallow Hal_, and _Me, Myself and Irene_, John
Waters's _Pink Flamingos_ and Paul Weitz's _American Pie_,
are films which evidence a pre-occupation with bodily fluids
-- whether they be urine, semen, faeces or snot -- and a
focus upon the lower body stratum. King finds historical,
cultural, and theoretical references for gross-out in the
American Indian trickster, the medieval carnival, and
abjection. Bakhtin's work on the carnival, for example,
provides an account of the content of transgression that is
directly relevant to gross-out comedy: carnival is
degradation; it is 'the lowering of all that is high,
spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material
level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble
unity' (65). [8] More vividly, carnival concerns
'the lower stratum of the body, the life of the body and the
reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of
defecation and copulation, conception and pregnancy and
birth' (65). [9] Kristeva's work both reinforces the
emphasis on the body and suggests why a preoccupation with
it might be considered gross: the abject is the 'in-between,
the ambiguous [that] disturbs identity, system,
order' (65). [10] King's discussion of
gross-out comedy supplies a welcome and long overdue
introduction to a particularly *in your face* cycle of film
comedy. He identifies the origin of the cycle in the late
1970s and early 1980s, the period in which the baby-boomers
became adolescents and thus presented a targetable audience
for the film industry. The films appeal to an adolescent
sense of humour which derives from the audience's
indeterminate status between childhood and adulthood, and
its experience of a body itself undergoing a dramatic
process of transformation. Gross-out, in this sense, is
comedy which responds to the troubled teenager's need to
master once again the animal that lies within. But in the
broader socio-historical context provided by Bakhtin and
Kristeva, the basis of such comedy in animal functions
constitutes a recognition of what is considered off-limits
and not open to discussion in polite society. Film culture
here provides an avenue for communicating concerns deemed
inappropriate in other social contexts. Addressing the point
of contact between individual experience and social
expression, most broadly, and perhaps least complexly, these
films expose the fluid underbelly of that which is subject
to the processes of inhibition. Bakhtin's work on Rabelais
also provides an account of the origins, scope, and social
function of ritualised transgression. King questions, in
this regard, whether the overturning of conventional
hierarchies that takes place in carnival is radically
liberating, a means of reinforcing the most rigid strictures
of social life, or perhaps something in between, a safety
valve that enables a limited and momentary relief from
social constraint (67). The question of transgression thus
emerges at the point that it becomes necessary to consider
whether this *exposure* involves a perverse celebration of
the disgusting, a public repudiation of it, or something
that can satisfy both demands at the same time. Here, as
elsewhere, King's discussion of various films makes it clear
that there is no single answer to this question -- the
strategy and effect of gross-out comedy varies from one film
to another. There are also indications
in King's relaying of Bakhtin's thought (which King himself
doesn't pursue) that the transgressive function of the body
in carnival goes further than simply constituting an
abstract negation of the spiritual, ideal, etc. In carnival,
King tells us, emphasis is placed on the parts of body that
engage with the world and the body is conceived as
inseparable from the world. The body is unfinished; it
outgrows and transgresses itself at the same time (65). The
body must be seen to operate, then, not simply in its
capacity to disgust, but with its own specific contents,
dispositions, and behaviours. The significance of the
precise figurations and utilisations of the body would have
been an interesting avenue to pursue with regard to the
cinema of gross-out comedy. King might have considered, for
example, the relation between the contemporary focus on the
emissions of the body and the early emphasis on action in
cinematic comedy. In the second half of this
chapter, King, divulging a list of contenders that spans
from Harry Langdon to Peewee Herman, turns his attention to
the comic protagonist's tendency to dwell in a pre-Oedipal
fantasy world. King goes so far as to suggest that the
format of comedian comedy can be understood as 'a
dialectical exchange between something like the pre-Oedipal
and the Oedipal' (78). The realm of the comedian performer
would be the pre-Oedipal world of 'fluid, unstructured and
unstable possibilities, before the erection of social
inhibitions . . . of freedom and play, of unfixed identity
and polymorphous perversity . . .' (78). Significantly, King
returns to Seidman's work here, explicitly this time, in
order to discuss his contention that the narrative
trajectory of comedian comedy is a uni-directional movement
from the pre-Oedipal to the Oedipal, from freedom/aberration
to social integration. Here, too, King argues against
Seidman from both an empirical and industrial perspective.
An examination of the films in question, he argues, quoting
Seidman, reveals that it simply isn't the case that: 'The
comic figure 'must be made to conform to cultural values by
divesting himself of his creativity, or else face
rejection'' (87). [11] On the contrary, there is 'a
significant investment in the world of comic nonconformity
and play is maintained even in the midst of movements
towards integration' (87). King also points out that it
makes no sense from an industrial perspective to do away
with the dimension of play because it is the major source of
audience attraction: people go to see these films precisely
because they explore and delight in the realm of the
pre-Oedipal (87). One of the most
interesting things about this chapter is King's placement of
gross-out comedy in the context of his discussion of the
pre-Oedipal explorations of comedian comedy in general. King
notes that the comedy of regression can include 'the
immature foolery of slapstick . . . the antics of the
comedian star . . . [and] the gross-out moments
explained above' (77), and although he doesn't say as much,
the pre-Oedipal world embraced by earlier comedians has
consonances with the realm of gross-out. King might have
further interrogated the basis for this relationship. How,
for example, does the focus on bodily fluids in the recent
cycle relate to the fluidity of form that resulted in the
condensation and displacement gags that dominated the comedy
of the silent era and that characterised the comic antics of
the likes of Chaplin and Keaton. Is the more recent comedy a
literalisation of the former, or something else
altogether? Chapter Two also evidences
a recurrent concern about the political capacity of
transgression on the one hand and the ideological
ramifications of regression on the other. This concern plays
an increasingly important part in the next chapter, entitled
'Satire and Parody'. The section on satire is another
welcome inclusion, given satire's very limited examination
by film theory. King offers what is perhaps an overly
succinct definition at the outset of the chapter, and one
that privileges the object of satire rather than its form:
'Satire is comedy with an edge and a target, usually social
or political in some way' (93). Noting satire's prevalence
in periods of 'public excess, hardship, impropriety and
aberration' (94), [12] he identifies corresponding
periods in the last century, and satirical films that sought
to challenge them. Here he draws on examples from both
capitalist and non-capitalist regimes -- the US and Britain
on the one hand, the USSR, the Eastern Block, and Cuba on
the other -- in order to contrast the impact of industrial
imperatives upon the notion of free representation in
Western liberal democracies, with the impact of state
censorship on films in totalitarian regimes. According to King's
analysis, what distinguishes satire from other kinds of
comedy is the emphasis placed on message, but what threatens
the message is precisely the comic mode it utilises. Satire,
however, straddles a wide span; at one end of the spectrum
it is 'a deadly earnest means of voicing criticism', at the
other a 'relatively light and playful' expression of
derision (93). The question of the political effectiveness
of comedy as an expressive mode resurfaces here, as does the
theme of comedy's capacities to liberate repressed
expression, act as a pressure valve to prevent melt-down, or
undermine otherwise very serious issues. To explore them,
King examines the discursive positions within which satire
is mounted and the degree of implication in a number of
different films. Satire, he argues, is better when the
audience doesn't identify with the object exposed and when
it is generated from the message rather than when it is used
to simply make a heavy point more palatable. As a means of
demonstrating the political effectiveness and
ineffectiveness of comedy, King contrasts the comic
deployment of playful and childish innocence in _Bulworth_
and _Being There_. In the former, he claims that Warren
Beatty appropriates the posture of childishness in order to
attack the political system in which he is entrenched, but
does so 'in a voice of rebellious individualism that fits
rather more easily [than _Bob Roberts_] with
prevailing and dominant ideologies' (102). The latter goes
further, offering a critique of the appropriation of the
trope of 'childlike innocence/insight so widely employed in
Hollywood comedy' (104). King also contrasts _Broadcast
News_'s deployment of innocent and incidental slapstick to
_Network_'s embedding of comic moments within the film's
satirical thrust. Similarly, _Catch-22_ is more effective
than _M*A*S*H_ because it pushes the comic to the point of
absurdity, whereas the latter presents only cases of
'individual comic rebellion against institutional absurdity'
(105). Parody, like satire, is
also comedy with a target, but a formal or aesthetic target
rather than social or political one. Parody can aim to
debunk or criticise the formal, aesthetic, discursive, or
representational conventions to which it draws our
attention, or it can simply celebrate them. A film can be a
parody of an individual film, a genre of films, the
techniques or constraints of the medium, 'non-film specific
items' like pop-stars, or even a number of different films,
techniques, genres, and conventions at the same time, as is
the case in the relatively recent scattershot mode of comedy
(108). King refers to the work of D. Harries [13] in
order to locate and explain the mechanism of parody,
suggesting that it has three axes (semantic/lexical,
syntactic, and stylistic) on which it can work and six
strategies that it can combine to produce its effects:
reiteration, inversion, misdirection, literalisation,
extraneous inclusion, and exaggeration (115). King registers the
parallels between parodic intentions and a postmodern ethos
and acknowledges that parody can be viewed as a
manifestation of postmodernism, to the extent that
postmodern culture is one which 'turns on itself, recycling
and reworking the products of the past, rather than moving
forward', and one in which existing forms 'are recombined
and played around with, originality taking the form of new
juxtapositions of old material' (120), but he calls into
question any direct causal relation between postmodernism
and parody. Film, he argues, is a popular form, and as such
has always regenerated itself through a 'recombination of
existing elements' (120). Instead, King attributes the
recent upsurge in cinematic parody to a number of factors:
an increase in cinematic literacy among film audiences, the
development of film studies as an academic discipline, the
invention and availability of domestic play-back machines,
the birth of a generation of American filmmakers who grew up
with these changes, and the emergence of a radical cultural
climate in the 60s and 70s, willing to take the burden of
exposure/defamiliarisation upon itself (120-121). King foregoes altogether
the opportunity to reflect here upon Frederic Jameson's
claim that pastiche replaces parody or Jean Baudrillard's
contention that in the post-modern epoch parody, has given
ground to a stronger imperative toward simulation.
[14] This is somewhat surprising, given his
suggestion that reaffirmation has increasingly become the
dominant tone of parody. Indeed, a significant part of the
chapter is devoted to detailing the structure of
reaffirmation in Hollywood's more well-known industrial
successes and to remarking upon the extent to which this
success emerges from an increasing inclination toward
reiteration. According to King's own analysis, films like
_Galaxy Quest_, _Scream_, and _Die Hard_ don't work by
'deconstructing' their originals but by self-consciously
reiterating their conventions while developing their own
independent and dynamic plot-lines. In Chapter Four, King asks
how comedy bears on the politics of representation of
gender, race and ethnicity, and nationality. In the section
on gender, King speculates first about the relative absence
of female performers in cinematic comedian comedy,
[15] and then surmises that the relative absence of
female comedian comics by no means precluded the comic
treatment of gender identity in comedian comedy or the
centrality of 'female' performers in many films. Discussing
such films as _Mrs Doubtfire_, _Big Momma's House_ and _Some
Like it Hot_, he analyses the comic subversion of gender
norms by male performers through cross-dressing and
masquerade. King also speculates that
Whoopi Goldberg's success as one of the very few female
comedian comics is due to her participation in a
pre-established cycle of 'coon' comedy. The deployment of
the 'coon' stereotype, he elaborates, is a dominating
stylistic trait in the work of Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy,
Martin Lawrence, Chris Tucker, and Chris Rock. King
comments, for example, on Eddie Murphy's utilisation of coon
stylistics in his 'high-pitched voices, popping eyes and
other excesses of diction and gesture' (147). As with gender
performativity, King notes the emphasis in these comedies on
the virtuosity of performance skills and suggests that such
emphasis foregrounds the performative dimension of all
articulations of identity. In considering the political
implications of this kind of comedy, King analyses a number
of films and questions the extent to which the performers
really can distance themselves from the stereotypes they aim
to subvert. The answer, he concludes is by no means
clear-cut. The excessive deployment of a racial stereotype
might be a successful attempt at transcendence for some
viewers, while appealing to the inherent racism of others.
This reality, King suggests, is all the more disturbing in
the light of New Hollywood's attempt to cater to a diversity
of audience tastes and predilections within a given
cinematic text. In direct contrast to this, King
acknowledges Mel Brooks's inclusion in his films of a number
of Yiddish in-jokes that remain beyond the comprehension of
most viewers. A similar utilisation of comedy's exclusionary
and inclusionary capacities is evident in a cycle of comic
films in Hong Kong cinema whose specifically Cantonese jokes
made them nonsensical to outside audiences. The last chapter of the
book deals with one of its most interesting subjects -- the
case of comedy beyond comedy -- conceived by King either as
comedy that borders on another affect or unintentional
comedy. The chapter sets out to examine 'the function, or
effect, of the presence of comedy in contexts that are not
usually considered to be primarily those of 'comedy' in its
more substantial or clear-cut forms' (171). The question
this chapter poses concerns the extent to which comic
moments leaven, undercut, or reinforce the impact of serious
messages. Throughout the chapter, King presents a subtle
argument against the notion that mixing serious and
horrifying subject matter with comedy detracts from the
import of what is being said. The first section, 'Comic
Relief', considers the varying comic techniques used in
non-comic films and their impact on the film's overall tone
by contrasting John Ford's _The Searchers_ to a number of
relatively recent films. King discusses: the use of comic
quips, one-liners, and the topping device in _Con Air_, and
their impact upon what would otherwise be a pretty unsavory
storyline; the use of comic slapstick and comic interludes
in _The Searchers_ to leaven a narrative of obsessive
racism; and the comic treatment of Schindler's womanising
and the inclusion of pre-holocaust ironies in _Schindler's
List_ in order to respectfully lighten the impact of
history's greatest atrocity. The deployment of comedy in
such films is in turn contrasted with the combination of
comedy and violence in films like _Reservoir Dogs_ and
_Bonnie and Clyde_. Both of these, King observes,
destabilise the position of the viewer by undertaking much
more dramatic shifts of tone, mostly between high drama and
the comic rendition of everyday banality. King cites the
Production Code and the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock as key
contributors to the development of this kind of aesthetic.
He analyses, for example, the way humour in _Shadow of a
Doubt_ initially seems to provide relief from the film's
darker themes, only to end up being implicated in them. In
analysing such films as _Pulp Fiction_, _Natural Born
Killers_, _Happiness_, _American Psycho_, and, blackest of
all, _C'est arrive de chez vous_, King notes the varying
implications of the mixture of affects, from _Natural Born
Killers_'s complicity with the stylised violence it takes
issue with, to the complexity of emotional experience
created by _C'est arrive de chez vous_. At the end of the chapter,
King attempts to make sense of this 'comedy beyond comedy'
by referring to Freud's theorisation of gallows humour,
wherein the super-ego behaves in a paternal kind of way to
protect the ego by making light of the harsh realities of
the world, pretty much as Roberto Benigni does with his son
in _Life is Beautiful_. This is an interesting way of
thinking about the operation of comedy in such films, but as
King himself admits, its explanatory value is not sufficient
to all instances in which a mixing of tone occurs. Quite
often, the mixing of tone has the result of amplifying the
violence. This last chapter doesn't
offer a definitive interpretation of this very contemporary
utilisation of comedy in ostensibly non-comic films. Its
strength is rather in its identification of new and
important territory. Indeed, the book's most substantial
contributions are in its inclusion of the material on
gross-out comedy and comedy beyond comedy, and its attention
to the work of recent performers, all of which are
relatively under-represented in the available literature. It
also provides a number of interesting ways to approach this
material and will thus contribute to further study of the
mode of cinematic comedy. University of New South
Wales, Australia Notes 1. The book has a number
of significant precursors: Raymond Durgnat's _The Crazy
Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American Image _, Gerald
Mast's _The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies_, Jerry
Palmer's _The Logic of the Absurd_, and Steve Neale and
Frank Krutnik's _Popular Film and Television Comedy_ come to
mind, in addition to two important anthologies, _Classical
Hollywood Comedy_, edited by Henry Jenkins and Kristine
Brunowska Karnick, and _Comedy/Cinema/Theory_, edited by
Andrew Horton. 2. Umberto Eco, et al.,
_Carnival!_, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok (Berlin: Mouton
Publishers, 1984). 3. Steve Neale and Frank
Krutnik, _Popular Film and Television Comedy_ (London:
Routledge, 1990); David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin
Thompson, _The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and
Mode of Production to 1960_ (London: Routledge,
1985). 4. See Donald Crafton's
'Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick
Comedy', and Tom Gunning's 'Crazy Machines in the Garden of
the Forking Paths: Mischief Gags and the Origins of American
Film Comedy' and 'Response to Pie and Chase', in Kristine
Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins, eds, _Classical
Hollywood Comedy_ (New York: Routledge, 1995). 5. Patricia Mellencamp,
'Jokes and Their Relation to the Marx Brothers', in S. Heath
and P. Mellencamp, eds, _Cinema and Language_ (New York:
American Film Institute, 1983); Henry Jenkins _What Made
Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville
Aesthetic_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992);
Gerald Mast, _The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies_
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979); and Walter
Kerr, _The Silent Clowns_ (New York: Da Capo,
1975). 6. Steve Seidman,
_Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film_ (Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1979). 7. Peter Kramer,
'Derailing the Honeymoon Express: Comicality and Narrative
Closure in Buster Keaton's _The Blacksmith_', _The Velvet
Light Trap_ 23, Spring 1989, pp. 101-116. 8. King quoting Mikhail
Bakhtin, _Rabelais and His World_ (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), pp. 19-20. 9. King quoting Mikhail
Bakhtin, ibid., p. 21. 10. King quoting Julia
Kristeva, _Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection_ (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4. 11. King quoting Seidman,
_Comedian Comedy_, p. 141. 12. See M. E. Snodgrass,
_Encyclopedia of Satirical Literature_ (Santa Barbara:
ABC-CLIO, 1996), pp. 406-407. 13. D. Harries, _Film
Parody_ (London: British Film Institute, 2000). 14. Fredric Jameson,
_Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism_
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1992); Jean Baudrillard,
_Simulations_, trans. by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip
Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). 15. The exceptions here
are Mae West, Goldie Horn, and Whoopi Goldberg -- he misses
Bette Midler -- but King also reminds us of some lesser
known 'unruly women' (to use Kathleen Rowe's term), such as
Gale Henry, Alice Howell, Dorothy DeVore, and Fay Tichner of
the silent era (130). King contrasts the demise of the
unruly woman in comedian comedy in the 30s and 40s with the
'madcap heroines' like Katherine Hepburn and Barbara
Stanwyck of the 1940s screwball comedy (131). Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail _Rabelais
and His World_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1984). Baudrillard, Jean,
_Simulations_, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip
Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). Bordwell, David, Janet
Staiger and Kristin Thompson, _The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960_ (London:
Routledge, 1985). Crafton, Donald, 'Pie and
Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy', in
Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins, eds,
_Classical Hollywood Comedy_ (New York: Routledge,
1995). Durgnat, Raymond, _The
Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American Image_
(London: Faber and Faber, 1969). Eco, Umberto, et al,
_Carnival!_, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok (Berlin: Mouton
Publishers, 1984). Gunning, Tom, 'Crazy
Machines in the Garden of the Forking Paths: Mischief Gags
and the Origins of American Film Comedy', in Kristine
Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins, eds, _Classical
Hollywood Comedy_ (New York: Routledge, 1995). Gunning, Tom, 'Response to
Pie and Chase' in Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry
Jenkins, eds, _Classical Hollywood Comedy_ (New York:
Routledge, 1995). Harries, D., _Film Parody_
(London: British Film Institute, 2000). Horton, Andrew, ed.,
_Comedy/Cinema/Theory_ (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991). Jameson, Fredric,
_Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism_
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1992). Jenkins, Henry, _What Made
Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville
Aesthetic_ (New York: Columbia University Press,
1992). Jenkins, Henry and
Kristine Brunowska Karnick, eds, _Classical Hollywood
Comedy_ (New York: Routledge, 1995). Kerr, Walter, _The Silent
Clowns_ (New York: Da Capo, 1975). Kramer, Peter, 'Derailing
the Honeymoon Express: Comicality and Narrative Closure in
Buster Keaton's _The Blacksmith_', _The Velvet Light Trap_
23, Spring 1989, pp. 101-116. Kristeva, Julia, _Powers
of Horror: An Essay on Abjection_ (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982). Mast, Gerard, _The Comic
Mind: Comedy and the Movies_ (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1979). Mellencamp, Patricia,
'Jokes and Their Relation to the Marx Brothers', in S. Heath
and P. Mellencamp, eds, _Cinema and Language_ (New York:
American Film Institute, 1983). Neale, Steve and Frank
Krutnik, _Popular Film and Television Comedy (London:
Routledge, 1990). Palmer, Jerry, _The Logic
of the Absurd_ (London: British Film Institute,
1988). Seidman, Steve, _Comedian
Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film_ (Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press, 1979). Snodgrass, M. E.,
_Encyclopedia of Satirical Literature_, (Santa Barbara:
ABC-CLIO, 1996). Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2004 Lisa Trahair, 'Comedy and
Beyond: Geoff King's _Film Comedy_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol.
8 no. 15, May 2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n15trahair>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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