The Film Journal...Passionate and informed film criticism from an auteurist perspective.

Film Comedy

By Richard Armstrong

Richard Armstrong is an Associate Tutor affiliated to the British Film Institute. His book, Billy Wilder, American Film Realist, appeared from McFarland in 2000. He is currently writing Understanding Realism for the Bfi's Understanding the Moving Image series and Chocolate Biscuits and Italian Neo-Realism, a blend of reception aesthetics and personal memoir. He is a regular contributor to the websites Audience, Bright Lights Film Journal, Senses of Cinema and Talking Pictures, and contributes book reviews to the Times Higher Educational Supplement.

Shallow Hal

Film Comedy

By Geoff King
London: Wallflower, 2002, 240 pp, (pbk)
£13.99 (hbk) £42.50 ISBN 1-903364-35-3/36-1.

Life's a funny business, or so they say, and according to this book, comedy is everywhere. You have only to look through the extensive filmography to find Alien alongside Airplane! Natural Born Killers alongside National Lampoon's Animal House and Sleepless in Seattle alongside The Sixth Sense. Whether the key ingredient of American Pie, the sneaky twist in Scream, or audience relief in Schindler's List, film is a funny business.

Geoff King's survey of comedy and the theory behind it is about as thorough an introduction to the genre as you're going to find. It takes three approaches, looking at aesthetic form, the socio-historical and industrial backdrops to a range of traditions. He must have sat through masses of comedies from the silent films of John Bunny (1863-1915) to Jim Carrey, alongside animation from the American Bugs Bunny to the Yugoslav Zid (The Wall, 1965).

Resurfacing constantly and linking formal, socio-historical and industrial issues is the distinction between 'high' and 'low' comedy. In the 1900s and 1910s, American comedy courted an urban audience of recent European immigrants with slapstick humour and frantic visuals. Meanwhile, film companies attempted to attract an educated middle class audience with 'polite' comedies based upon narrative and dialogue, (although the golden age of dialogue comedy had to await the coming of sound in 1927). The distinction between high and low recurs, for example, in the wit of One Fine Day (Hoffman, 1996), as opposed to the 'gross out' humour of There's Something about Mary (Farrelly Brothers, 1998). The essential difference between polite and slapstick comedies has implications on all levels, from the cultures out of which they emerged, to formal aesthetics, to the assumptions comedies make about their audiences. Currents intermingle frequently. The 'screwball comedy' blends often outrageous slapstick humour into a literate romantic comedy narrative. A classic example is Bringing Up Baby (Hawks, 1938) in which the hapless hero inadvertently rips a woman's dress in such a way that he must follow close behind her wherever she goes! The scene was regarded as bordering on indecent much as Farrelly-style situations have been considered excessive. When Harry Met Sally (Reiner, 1989) directly anticipated the '90s gross-out cycle, clever dialogue interrupted by a scene in which Sally simulates orgasm in a restaurant, prompting another customer to exclaim: "I'll have what she's having." For all their appeal to lower body functions, gross out comedies invariably revolve around a traditional romantic scenario: There's Something about Mary, Shallow Hal (Farrellys, 2001).

King is good on issues around gender. In the screwball comedy the female character is: "a positive influence, a source of zest that transforms dull and lifeless male characters." Drawing upon work done on this 'unruly woman', King traces her evolution from the golden age of the screwball in the '30s and '40s to harmless domesticity in the conservative '50s, to her post-feminist resurgence in the '80s and '90s. Many of the laughs in Married to the Mob (Demme, 1988) and My Best Friend's Wedding (Hogan, 1997), for example, find female characters creating havoc, wisecracks giving way to pratfalls and crushed egg cartons! Feminist politics and audience expectations intersect in shaping the modern unruly heroine. Trace the evolution of Michelle Pfeiffer's image from Married to the Mob to One Fine Day to see how the wackiness that we are used to became re-branded as progressive thinking.

King asks whether cross-dressing blurs or reinforces gender lines, discussing the rapid transformations of Some Like it Hot (Wilder, 1959) and Mrs Doubtfire (Columbus, 1993). In 1934 the enforcement of Hollywood's Hays Code forbade instances of gender impersonation which appeared too realistic. But by 1993 King sees irony in a bus driver's finding a dragged-up Robin Williams' hairy leg all the sexier for being naturally feminine! Starring respectively Marilyn Monroe and Pierce Brosnan, who epitomize popular ideas of femininity and masculinity, these films reinforce the idea that gender is importantly performative, a matter of making the right impression.

King really enters into the spirit of his subject: "Comedy can provide a thrill of transgression offered in an environment that renders it largely safe and unthreatening; it can have its cake, ice cream (or its shit!) and eat it." He traces how excessive comedy, in the '60s associated with the exploitation niche, has, along with a range of 'youth movies', gone mainstream to cash in on the multiplex 'date movie' audience. The comparison between the shit-eating episode in the arch-exploiter Pink Flamingos (Waters, 1972) and that in Me, Myself and Irene (Farrellys, 2000) captures in gruesome detail what in recent decades happened to mainstream comedy. Seen from the perspective of star image, notice how Gwyneth Paltrow went from costume drama - Emma (McGrath, 1995) - to gross out - Shallow Hal, a shift which reiterates the 'mainstreaming' of the gross out temper.

The book makes a key distinction between comedy built around the comedian and comedy built around the comic situation. Again, the distinction resonates with the class-based appeal with which Hollywood has sought to draw crowds. Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey epitomize comedy's mass appeal, the bread-and-butter of its day. The comedy of romantic complication built around an essential conceit and its repercussions, on the other hand, strives to appeal to middle class values of literacy and subtlety of execution.

King draws upon comedian comedy and situation comedy from around the world. His discussion of what is British about British humour is particularly good, showing just how rooted in history ideas of 'Britishness' are. Watch three films: Passport to Pimlico (Cornelius, 1949), Confessions of a Window Cleaner (Guest, 1974), and East is East (O'Donnell, 1999) to see how fragmented British comedy is. In a challenging chapter, King looks at 'comedy beyond comedy'. Why did the sight of someone getting their head blown off cause hysterics at screenings of Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994)?

Nicely illustrated, richly referenced, easily read and usefully supported with detailed bibliography, Film Comedy brings rigour, respect and humour to what is perhaps the most complex genre in Film Studies.