I'll start with an anecdote. Bear with me. I'll get to the point before you know it.
Back in 2009-2010, my family and I lived in the Republic of Moldova for one academic year. Only after we got there did we learn that about half of the people in Moldova speak Romanian and the other half speak Russian, and very few speak any English. Suffice to say, in order to function within this culture, we had to learn the languages, at least enough to get by. So I learned as much Romanian as I could and Jamie, my spouse, learned as much Russian as she could. Looking back, it seems that I got the easy one.
Unde sunt pantalonii mei? = Where are my pants?
This is good to know in any language.
This is good to know in any language.
By about halfway into our Eastern European adventure, my grasp of the language had progressed to the point where I could usually understand more or less what was being said and offer an appropriate response. If someone told me that they needed directions to the hospital, I wouldn't inadvertently thank them for my noodle jacket. On most days, the only people that I spoke to in English were members of my immediate family. I wouldn’t say that I was fluent by any means, but I was proud of how far I had come since we had been there. For me, the trick to a Romanian accent was to imagine the Count from Sesame Street. The hard part was not saying, “Ah, ah…” after everything.If you've never lived abroad, which I never had up until that point, you should know that no matter where you are, you can count on some things being way cheaper and some things being way more expensive. Cable television, for example, costs significantly less in Moldova than it does in the U.S. For about twelve bucks a month, we got about fifty channels, which included HBO Romania. Most of their programming consisted of current American movies with Romanian subtitles, but every once in a while, there would be a standup comedy special that was in Romanian. When I watched these shows, which I tried to do whenever they were on, I could usually get the gist of what was being said, but I generally had no idea why it was funny.
Which brings me to my point: Comedy requires a familiar context in order to be effective, and to study comedy can therefore tell us something about that context.
In this week's reading, Mitch mentions that, "Peekaboo is everybody's first routine" (2). I have two children and I can attest that in my experience, this is 100% true. Until they developed object permanence, I can say with some certainty that for a little while there, in my children's eyes, I was the funniest man alive. I had this routine where I would be there one minute and then I'd disappear behind my hands really quickly the next. It was pure comic gold. Laughter was the first form of verbal communication that I ever shared with my children, just as it was likely among the first forms of verbal communication ever used by early human beings. Anthropologists believe that laughter developed as a way of signaling to others that a moment of tension had passed, that everything was ok. From there, we developed language... and eventually poop jokes.
Think about it, though. What is peekaboo but a sudden disruption and reconstruction of one's perception of reality? For that matter, what is a poop joke but a benign transgression of societal norms? According to Misch, "Surprise is the key to all humor," as well as "the key to all art and entertainment" (2). If art fails to surprise us, then it is a cliché In comedy, this translates as a stale joke. With comedy as with peekaboo, we laugh at the incongruity between our expectations and reality. A skilled practitioner of comedy sets us up to expect one thing and then presents us with something else. This leads us to make connections where they did not previously exist, which causes us to incrementally adjust our perceptions of the world. This is comedy and this is art.
As we also read in the Misch book, comedy has a long history of calling attention to perceived flaws in our civilization and its hierarchies. For thousands of years, the character of the Trickster has subverted power and illuminated the truths that we now take for granted. This character, in whatever its form, marks the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behavior, and between the way things are versus the way we think they should be. In order for the Trickster’s antics to be amusing, therefore, we must understand what is acceptable and have somewhat of an idea of how things are. Humor requires some common frame of reference. I would also add that if you think of the Trickster in terms of its social function, then in many ways, comedy films in and of themselves can play much the same role as the Trickster -- if the intent behind their production is to stir things up, to open a discourse. I think you will find that this is particularly true with the films we will be watching this week.
In Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, psychologist Henri Bergson claimed that, “The comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human” (4). Human beings, he noted, are the only animals capable of laughing at their own folly, which he believed is fundamentally the source of all comedy: the limitations of humanity in spite of our imaginations and ambition. Bergson also said that, “To understand laughter, we must put it back in its natural environment, which is society, and above all we must determine the utility of its function, which is a social one” (5). To Bergson, comedy is the negotiation of perspective between the individual and society. In this process, an idea becomes detached from its emotional underpinnings so that the audience’s engagement with it is purely intellectual. The unspent emotion is then redirected and expressed as laughter.
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud took a similar stance on the matter. To him, comedy (like most things) represented a point of tension between the id and the superego as expressed through the ego — an incongruity between the desires of the individual and the demands of civilization. Laughter, in this sense, functions as a sort of steam valve, a release of repressed emotion in a socially acceptable manner. Freud also offered a distinction between jokes that are completely innocuous and those which contain a hidden agenda, arguing that the latter serve a “social purpose” and tend to speak more of a culture than they do of an individual. Tendentious jokes, as he called them, imply that the speaker is seeking to intellectually align the audience with the perspective presented in the joke (89). In other words, this type of comedy is inherently political. Comedy, Freud contends, can form a common identity through a shared understanding, but it can also be a way of shaping this understanding, as well as a means of exclusion.
Comedy effectively takes the familiar and turns it upside down, thereby allowing us to see it in a new light. Exaggeration is often used as a device to accentuate faults, much like how caricature drawings tend to be less than flattering portraits that highlight certain characteristics over others. Comedy makes us reevaluate the things that we take for granted and the most popular comedies tend to be those with which people can most easily identify. For this reason, movies like Jackass, which draws its humor from the incongruity of grown men behaving like terrible children, had no problem finding an audience on HBO Romania, but something like Little Miss Sunshine, which is far more nuanced in its subversion of cultural norms, might not make a whole lot of sense in a foreign market. This is an idea that we will return to later in the semester, when we discuss the place of American comedy films within the context of international distribution.
For those of you who have taken film classes before, either with me or with another instructor, you are likely familiar with how to perform an ideological analysis of a movie. At the very least, I can assume that you have taken an English course at some point or another in which you talked about the theme of a book. It’s more or less the same idea. The point is to come up with an argument of your own in which you speculate what the movie is really about when you look deeper into the subtext, then support this claim with evidence from the film.
If any of you need a refresher in thematic analysis, I think it’s best explained by looking at just about any children’s book, where the point of the story is right there on the surface. Green Eggs and Ham is about being open to trying new things, Where the Wild Things Are is about engaging your imagination, and Stone Soup is about a community being better than the sum of its parts. Notice how all of those statements contain a verb? “True love” is not a theme. Despite what your high school teacher may have told you, “Good versus evil,” is also not a theme. “True love overcomes all obstacles" is a theme (a theme that we will come back to when we discuss romantic comedies, in fact), and “poverty encourages crime" or "revenge ultimately leads to self-destruction" are also possible themes, but the point is that it needs to have a verb.
To offer some examples from films, I would say that the theme of Forrest Gump is that ordinary people can live extraordinary lives. This could also be a central theme to any number of films/books, including Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and the Terminator franchise. For something like Happy Gilmore, I would say that the theme is: Through hard work, determination and sacrifice, even a loser can become a winner. Actually, that's kind of the theme of most Adam Sandler movies. (As much as I pick on Adam Sandler, one of the options on week eight is Punchdrunk Love, in which he actually does show some surprising depth and complexity in his acting ability.) In any case, it is important to understand that comedy films can be completely goofy on the surface but have very serious implications if you look a little deeper. To use an example from something that I know you all have seen, I'd say that the theme of Sullivan's Travels is the idea that human beings need laughter, especially when they don't have anything else going for them. Like many great themes, it connects to something about what it means to be human, but also what it means to be alive at a certain time and place. In 1941, when Sullivan's Travels was made, Europe was at war and America soon would be, the economic scars of the Great Depression had not yet faded, and it seemed to many that things would only get worse before they got better. People needed to be reminded of the value of laughter.
Typically, some kind of thematic question is asked early in a movie, either explicitly or otherwise. In Sullivan's Travels, it was "Will I ever make an important film?" At the end of the movie, this question is answered: "Yes, because comedy films are important." With this in mind, I would say that the theme of a film doesn't usually make itself clear until the end, which is part of how movies sustain our interest until the final credits.
I want you to think about theme as you’re watching this week’s movies, and particularly after it has concluded. Consider how the theme has been validaded at the end of the film, how the thematic question has been answered. Give this stuff some serious thought. I happen to believe that a large part of the writing process comes from just dedicating time throughout your day to think about what it is you are writing. One should also not underestimate the importance of rewriting. The first draft should be about getting the ideas on paper; subsequent drafts are for making sure that what you're writing means the same thing to your reader as it does to you.
This week, as with most weeks from now until the end of the semester, you have a choice of which movie you want to watch. Your options are Idiocracy and/or Team America: World Police. As always, you are encouraged to watch both, but you only need to watch and write about one of them. Once you have done the assigned reading (Film Comedy by Geoff King, Introduction, pg. 1-18), have read the student blog posts that offer context for these films and then have watched at least one of them, please write a response to the following prompt:
Explain what you believe to be the theme/underlying message of the film you chose to watch for this week. Support your argument with specific examples from the movie, as well as quotes from this week’s assigned reading.
Upload your responses to Canvas (under Screening Question #1 or #2, depending on if you did a blog post last week or not) by 6:00 pm on Sunday, January 24. Should you encounter any technical difficulties, you may also email them to me by the aforementioned deadline.
The following students, however, are exempt from writing screening question responses this week, as they are assigned blog posts, which are also due by 6:00 pm on Sunday:
Paige Boos - Biography: Mae West
Isaac Bouyack - Biography: The Marx Brothers
Michael Bretigan - Biography: Charlie Chaplin
Finn Burres - Social/Historical Context: The Hays Office (early censorship)
Richard Cole - Social/Historical Context: Depression-Era Hollywood
Melanie Cross - Review of Reviews: She Done Him Wrong
Thomas Cyphert - Review of Reviews: Duck Soup
Isaac Fletcher - Review of Reviews: Modern Times
Regarding blog posts, please do not upload/send them to me as a Word document, as I have learned that it is somewhat of a pain to reformat the pictures and text for a webpage. Please either copy and paste the pictures and text directly onto the Canvas submission page for Blog Post #1 or email them to me with the text and pictures simply contained in the body of your email. Thank you.
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