Comedy Cinema Theory

508 Pages·1991·2.59 MB·English

by  Andrew S. Horton

title: Comedy/cinema/theory
author: Horton, Andrew.
publisher: University of California Press
isbn10 | asin: 0520070402
print isbn13: 9780520070400
ebook isbn13: 9780585299488
language: English
Comedy films--History and criticism,
subject
Comic, The.
publication date: 1991
lcc: PN1995.9.C55C65 1991eb
ddc: 791.43/617
Comedy films--History and criticism,
subject:
Comic, The.
Page iii
Comedy/Cinema/Theory
Edited by Andrew Horton
Page iv
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
Oxford, England
© 1991 by
The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Comedy/cinema/theory / edited by Andrew Horton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-06997-8 (alk. paper). ISBN 0-520-07040-2 (pbk.:
alk. paper)
1. Comedy filmsHistory and criticism. 2. Comic, The.
I. Horton, Andrew.
PN1995.9.C55C65 1991
791.43'617dc20 90-42213
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Stills by courtesy of Avala Film, Columbia Pictures, the Museum of
Modern Art, Paramount Pictures, Samuel Goldwyn Company,
Slovenska Filmova Tvorba, Warner Brothers, and the authors.

Page v
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Andrew Horton
Problematics of Film Comedy
Notes on the Sight Gag 25
Noël Carroll
Penis-size Jokes and Their Relation to Hollywood's 43
Unconscious
Peter Lehman
Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child: Comedy and 60
Matricide
Lucy Fischer
In Search of Radical Metacinema 79
Stephen Mamber
Mock Realism: The Comedy of Futility in Eastern Europe 91
Charles Eidsvik
Page vi
Comic Occasions
Charles Chaplin and the Annals of Anality 109
William Paul
The Light Side of Genius: Hitchcock's Mr. and Mrs. Smith 131
in the Screwball Tradition
Dana Polan
Cartoon and Narrative in the Films of Frank Tashlin and 153
Preston Sturges
Brian Henderson
The Three Stooges and the (Anti-)Narrative of Violence: 174
De(con)structive Comedy
Peter Brunette
Paralysis in Motion: Jerry Lewis's Life as a Man 188
Scott Bukatman
Woody Allen's Zelig: An American Jewish Parody 206
Ruth Perlmutter
The Mouse Who Wanted to Fk a Cow: Cinematic Carnival222
Laughter in Dusan Makavejev's Films
Andrew Horton
Selected Bibliography and Works Cited 241
Contributors 245
Index 247

Page vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Odette who has laughed with me so often in cinemas around the
world.
To the National Endowment for the Humanities for a yearlong College
Faculty Fellowship (19771978) to participate in a seminar on comedy,
to the University of New Orleans for various summer research grants,
to Bill Nichols who encouraged this project from the beginning, and
to various friends and colleagues in film studies, including John
Belton, Fredric Jameson (who had contemplated an essay on Jacques
Tati and the image of the clown in postindustrial capitalism!), Dan
Georgakas, Douglas Gomery, Srdjan Karanovic, and Jacek
Fuksiewicz, who have read different versions of proposals and
chapters and made useful comments.
To all of the contributors. They have patiently supported the project
through its evolution with good humor and cheer, especially Lucy
Fischer, who initially helped me to focus the concept of this work.
To Ernest Callenbach, my editor, who deserves an Aristophanic
Award for his large-hearted and clear-sighted guidance of the
anthology through the numerous stages at the University of California
Press.
And to all of those comics who have made me laugh, ranging from
Buster Keaton and Luis Buñuel through to Preston Sturges, Woody
Allen, the Coen Brothers (Raising Arizona), and Gyorgy Szomjas of
Hungary.
Page 1
INTRODUCTION
Andrew Horton
Let the wise and philosophic
choose me for my wisdom's sake.
Those who joy in mirth and laughter
choose me for the jests I make.
Aristophanes, Assemblywomen
Nobody's perfect.
Joe E. Brown, the closing line of Some Like It Hot, upon learning that his
bride-to-be (Jack Lemmon) is a man
Beginnings: The Unbearable Lightness of Comic Film
Theory
Matters comic have recently begun to receive systematic and
theoretical attention (see Selected Bibliography). But a few years ago
only one broad survey, the late Gerald Mast's The Comic Mind, had
been devoted to the subject of film comedy. His study wisely
recognized the danger of the "swamp of abstract debate on the nature
of comedy and the comic" and provided us with some broadly useful
concepts about film comedy, especially in terms of the "comic
climate" that cues viewers to expect comedy ''even if we do not know
what Comedy is" (9).
Nevertheless, his analysis of comedy in terms of eight comic
structures and what he calls "comic thought" appears incomplete and
restrictive in light both of theoretical work available in film, literary,
and dramatic studies and of theoretical perspectives that have proven
fruitful since 1979. Jerry Palmer (2021) has recently detailed these
main shortcomings. The difficulty in trying to locate the comic in plot
structures, as Palmer rightly identifies, is that "the plot structures
either are not specifically funny, not specific to comedy in any sense
of the word, or they are not in fact plot structures, but refer to the
minimum unit of comic plot, the individual joke or gag" (28).
No plot is inherently funny. Put another way, as we shall see, any plot
is potentially comic, melodramatic, or tragic, or perhaps all three at
once. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, for instance, is constructed on what
Mast identifies as comic structures 3 and 4: the reductio ad absurdum
in which a sin-