History of American Screen Comedy

The Silent Clowns

Charles Chaplin:  Silent actor & pantomimist  recruited to Keystone from an English variety act, became Mack Sennett’s most important discovery.

Chaplin’s second picture Kid Auto Races in Venice (1914) he invented his immortal, trademark Little Tramp character.  The target of Chaplin’s resistance was the modern world. His most memorable comic battles were with machines

In Modern Times (1936), Chaplin played a factory worker victimized by machines; in one scene, he served as a human guinea pig in an experiment involving a machine designed to feed workers automatically, which malfunctioned.  In another, after working a shift tightening bolts on an automated assembly line, he went berserk w/his wrenches, twisting everything in sight, from his foreman’s nose to the buttons on a woman’s dress).  From Chaplin’s perspective, urbanization & industrialization threatens the human spirit.

Buster Keaton:
Another one of the great silent clowns of the early comedic period was Buster Keaton, known for acrobatic visual gags, physical action, and for his deadpan, unsmiling expression-less “stone face.”

While Chaplin rejected the modern world, Keaton embraced it.  More often than not, Keaton’s comic costar was a machine.  In The General (1926), it was a locomotive; in The Navigator (1924) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) it was an ocean liner and in The Cameraman (1928), it was a motional picture newsreel camera.  Buster’s relationships w/machines often proved more harmonious than those with human costars, especially his love interests, whom he could never quite understand as well as he understood the workings of his machines. 

His most acclaimed feature-length production was the fast-paced Civil War adventure tale of a railroad engine called The General (1927), which he soon followed with College (1927) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928).  The latter film is known for one of the most suicidal stunts ever filmed – a falling wall with only a top-floor window to save him from being flattened!!

Harold Lloyd:

Harold Lloyd, a popular silent clown, has been dubbed the ‘third’ genius or master of silent comedy – after Chaplin & Keaton.  An actor/producer, he actually out grossed his better-known counterparts, by retaining ownership of his films & their profits.  Like them, Lloyd also spent some time in the early years with Mack Sennett, became known for realistic, daredevil stunts, and for his bespectacled, neat, innocent, noble-hearted, ‘average Joe’ characters.  He became most identified with his ‘boy’-next-door character (normally named Harold) with his most famous trademark-horn-rimmed glasses. His most-remembered film, the feature-length Safety Last (1923), featured his perilous memorable climb up a tall skyscraper’s face that climaxed with his hanging off a giant clock.   

 

A SHORT HISTORY OF AMERICAN SCREEN COMEDY

Earliest Comedy
Cinematic comedy can be considered the oldest film genre (and one of the most prolific & popular).  Comedy was ideal for the early silent films as it was dependent on visual action & physical humor rather than sound.

The first comics were trained by performing in the circus, in burlesque, vaudeville (music halls), or pantomime. 

Mack Sennett, nicknamed “the King of Comedy” & “The Master of Slapstick Comedy,” formed the Keystone Company & Studios in 1912 – it soon was the leading producer of slapstick & comic characters.

The major hallmark of Sennett’s career work was inventive, visual, improvised comedy displayed in short silent films that moved frantically.  Sennett often cast vaudevillian, burlesque & circus performers in his films.  Those w/exaggerated or grotesque looks (obese, cross-eyed, lanky, leering, pop-eyed, etc) were chosen to add to the unreality of the situations.  His most popular pictures involved his bumbling comedy policemen, the Keystone Cops.

*Comedies usually come in two general formats:  Comedian-led (with well-timed gags, jokes or sketches) and situation-comedies that are told within a narrative (story).  *Both comedy elements may appear together and/or overlap. 

‘Comedy hybrids’ commonly exist with other major genres, such as musical/comedy, horror/comedy, and comedy/thriller. 

Comedies have also been classified in various subgenres, such as romantic comedy, crime/caper comedy, sports comedy, teen or coming-of-age comedy, social-class comedy, military comedy, fish-out-of water comedy, and gross-out comedy.

There are also many different kinds, types or forms of comedy including:
Silent Comedy

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.

Slapstick is a primitive & universal comedy with broad, aggressive, physical and visual action, including harmless or painless cruelty & violence, horseplay and often vulgar silent 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). Often this action led to an extended chase sequence, often featuring Max Sennett’s silent era shorts the “Keystone Kops” produced by his Keystone Studio. Slapstick often required exquisite timing and well-honed performance skills. 

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* Cartoons are the quintessential form of slapstick

The major comic stars of the 1920s, such as Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton & Harold Lloyd, developed the art of slapstick into a form of ‘self-expression’, tailoring their comic routines to the unique nature of their screen characters.

Much as Chaplin’s slapstick was often aimed at others, Keaton’s was just as frequently directed at himself.

Lloyd also made himself the butt of physical humor, serving as a tackling dummy for the college football team in The Freshman (1925); but unlike Keaton, who tended to be the unintended target of gags that inadvertently boomeranged back on him, Lloyd’s comedy had a somewhat masochistic edge to it, complicating the audience’s identification with him with a profound uneasiness.

Slapstick was typical of the films of Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, W.C. Fields, the Three Stooges, the stunts of Harold Lloyd in Safety Last (1923). Slapstick evolved & was reborn in the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s.

 

More recent feature film examples include the comedic mad chase for treasure film by many top comedy stars in Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963),
French actor/director Jacques Tati’s mostly dialogue-free Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953, Fr), the Blake Edwards series of Pink Pantherfilms with Peter Sellers as bumbling Inspector Clouseau (especially in the second film of the series, A Shot in the Dark (1964) with Herbert Lom as Clouseau’s slow-burning boss & Burt Kwouk as his valet & Martial arts judo-specialist), and Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura, Pet Detective (1993) and The Mask (1994, i.e., The Roadrunner and      Wile E. Coyote, and others. 

2) Deadpan:
This form of comedy was best exemplified by the expression-less face of stoic comic hero Buster Keaton.

3) Verbal Comedy:
This was classically typified by the cruel verbal wit of W.C. Fields, the sexual innuendo of Mae West, or the verbal absurdity of dialogues in the Marx Bros films, or later by the self-effacing, thoughtful humor of Woody Allen’s literate comedies.

4) Screwball:
Screwball comedies, a ‘sub-genre’ of romantic comedy films, were predominant from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s.  The word ‘screwball’ denotes lunacy, craziness, eccentricity, ridiculousness, and erratic behavior.

 

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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.  They usually include: visual gags (with some slapstick), wacky characters, identity reversals (or cross-dressing), a fast-paced improbable plot, and rapid-fire, wise-cracking dialogue & one-liners reflecting sexual tensions and conflicts in the blossoming of a relationship (or the patching up of a marriage) for an attractive couple with on-going, antagonistic differences (such

5)  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:  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 & military institutions with Peter Sellers in a triple role (as a Nazi scientist, a British major & the US President), and Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H* (1970), an irreverent, anti-war black comedy set during the Korean War.  

6) Parody or Spoof – also Satire, Lampoon and Farce:

These specific types of comedy are usually a humorous or anarchic take-off that ridicules, impersonates, punctures, scoffs at, and/or imitates (mimics) the style, conventions, formulas, characters (by caricature), or motifs of a serious work, film, performer, or genre including:

*The Marx Brothers’ satiric anti-war masterpiece Duck Soup (1933) with anarchic humor.

*The ‘genre’ films of Mel Brooks (the quasi-western Blazing Saddles (1974) or the quazi-horror film Young Frankenstein (1974).

Examples of modern parody/spoof films:

*Jim Abraham’s and the Zuckers’ Airplane! (1980) – a sophomoric parody of the earlier disaster series of Airport (1970) films; their The Naked Gun (1988) series parodied TV cop shows, and Top Secret! (1984) ridiculed Cold War agents & spy films (and Elvis
Presley films); Abrahams’ military comedy Hot Shots! (1991)  was a genre parody/spoof of Top Gun (1986).

*The Austin Powersfilms (1997, 1999, 2002) – parodies of the James Bond 007 films

*the Scream films (1996, 1997, 2000) – spoofs of slasher horror films

*Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black (1997) – a sci-fi comedy farce that poked fun at
alien invasion films, with Tommy Lee Jones & Will smith as government agents
battling Earth-welling extra-terrestrials.
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*Galaxy Quest (1999), about the cast (including Tim Allen, Alan Rickman & Sigourney Weaver) of a 70s sci-fi TV series in reruns, was a parody of sci-fi TV, Star Trekitself and cultish “Trekkie” activities

Last Action Hero (1993) – a spoof of action films

This category may also include these widely diverse forms of satire – usually displayed as political or social commentary, for example:

*Terry Gilliam’s tasteless but hilarious Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) and
The Life of Brian (1978) – an irreverent parody of religious films: and the witty Monty Pythonesque A Fish Called Wanda (1988) co-scripted by veteran John Cleese,