American Film Comedy
"Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." (Attributed alternately to Apocryphal [a fourth-century Greek actor, the first to work with mini-malapropisms, called kittycatachreses], and to everybody else.)
This class will read thirteen or fourteen American feature films - along with a number of short films - that best typify distinctly American genres like screwball comedy, or American treatments of standard genres like slapstick comedy, farce, satire, and black comedy.
We will trace several motifs - the romantic couple, the body, the team, the outcast - through several films. Using classical, traditional and contemporary theory and criticism, we will attempt to arrive at general and specific definitions of the comic. We will be more generally concerned with defining the impulse toward comedy: why do we laugh? At what and whom do we laugh, and when? Why is so much comedy offensive or obscene? How does comedy change over time? Is there a national humor? What contributions can gelotology - the study of laughter through neurology, sociology and psychology - make to the study of film humor? What affinities exist between film comedy and literary humor? Why is so much comedy cruel?
We will treat some of the political issues that film humor raises: race, ethnicity, gender, and class, treating their representation from the nineteen-aughts to the present, in films ranging from Buster Keaton's The General (1926) to Spike Lee's BlackKlansman (2018).
The critical reading will range from the straightforward to the advanced, and will be drawn from both film theory and theories of the comic. We will examine several luminaries drawn from both antiquity and the present, including Cary Grant, Laura Mulvey, Katharine Hepburn, Sigmund Freud, Woody Allen, Aristophanes, Rosalind Russell, Henri Bergson, Charles Chaplin, Clark Gable, Plato, Frank Capra, Jacques Lacan, Billy Wilder, Ruth Gordon, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Spike Lee, Robert Downey, Sr., Robert Benchley, Karl Jung, Groucho Marx, Molly Haskell, and Luigi Pirandello.
Grade based on the usual bollocks: a couple of exams, an oral presentation or two, and a term paper.
Taught by Mark Winokur.