Week 10: That's Not Funny! (Pushing the Envelope)

In many ways, comedy functions as a coping mechanism through which we attempt to make sense of our world. As Scott Weems notes in his recent study on laughter, “Humor isn’t just about being funny; it’s also about how we deal with complex and contradictory messages” (14). He also claims that it is "a process of conflict resolution” (8). Basically, comedy is one of the primary methods through which human beings resolve the anxieties created by internal conflict. Laughter provides a necessary release to this tension, and popular comedies are those which tap into the concerns that are most common among their audiences. We have seen this in all of the films that we have watched so far, and we will continue to witness this phenomenon throughout the semester. With that in mind, we should also consider that the inverse of the above statement is also true. That is, by looking at the humor in popular films, we can get a pretty good sense of what some of the dominant cultural anxieties were at the times of their production. In this way, comedy films provide an invaluable lens into what was in the hearts and minds of middle-class American audiences throughout the past century. 

In early American cinema, slapstick was the dominant form of comedy. This was largely because physical humor could be conveyed without sound. But that still does not explain why so many people people liked it. After all, the U.S. wasn't the only country making movies at the time, but we did have the market pretty well cornered on slapstick. So why did Americans think that it was so damn funny to watch others almost-but-never get hurt in the comedy films of the 1910s and 20s? Some scholars have argued that it was a reflection of the increasingly dangerous working environments that people faced in the boom of industrialized labor that was taking place at that time. In the first part of the twentieth century, day-to-day life was suddenly a hell of a lot more dangerous than it had been in recent memory, and so people laughed at that which they otherwise had very little control over. The popularity of slapstick may also have had something to do with the fact that World War I (as well as the flu outbreak of 1918) had killed and maimed so many, and so in order to deal with these fresh scars in our society, comedy that drew on the ever-present fear of physical harm provided a much needed outlet for laughter. 

Consider also that Looney Tunes cartoons and the Three Stooges reached the pinnacle of their popularity during the Second World War and the buildup to it. By laughing at the absurdity of the violence on screen, it allowed people to be better equipped psychologically to deal with the very gruesome violence that was taking place in reality. On a personal note, this may also explain why, as someone who grew up in a time of relative peace, I have never liked either the Three Stooges or Looney Tunes. Frankly, I've always found their celebration of violence to be rather appalling, which is to say that I get it but I don't. It's just not my cup of tea. A person's sense of humor, precisely like the sources of his or her anxieties, is a little different for everybody, but they frequently share common traits with members of the same generation. 

After all, it’s not just anxieties about violence that manifest in comedy films. If you look at the romantic comedies of the 1930s, the 1950s and the 1980s, class was very much at the center of a lot of these films. They typically featured some kind of cross-class romance in which socioeconomic status of the lower-class character is transcended by the time end credits roll. This is because class was very much on people’s minds at these times. During the Great Depression, there was a clear delineation between the haves and the have-nots. By the 1950s, Americans were staking out their positions within the various strata of the middle class and keeping up with the Joneses became a national pastime. The 1980s saw the rise of neoliberalism (basically, rule of the financial market) as a commonly held ideology, where wealth and power are thought to be rightfully synonymous. In each of these periods, class consciousness was the source of a great deal of anxiety, and the comedic films that found popularity at these times reflect that. If you want to know what your parents or grandparents may have been worried about, watch the films for which they were the target audience. You'll find a lot of really interesting clues.  

Of course, generational conflict is itself another perennial source of anxiety. Children tend to see the world differently than their parents, and so on. Subsequent generations often experience contrasting cultural environments during their formative years and therefore have very different ideas of what it means to find one's place in the world because the world itself is quite different. When children don’t fulfill their parents’ ideas of what constitutes success, this creates a great deal of anxiety, both on a personal and a cultural level. It should therefore come as no surprise that comedies aimed at teen audiences tend to draw a great deal of their humor from this anxiety. In American Pie, for example, sex represents the passage into adulthood. Sex with a pie represents a comical regression to some earlier stage of psychological development. Within that incongruity (there it is again), its audience finds humor. Teen comedies exploit the friction that exists at the boundaries between immaturity and adulthood (i.e. the id and the superego), which are precisely the anxieties that their target audience is most likely to experience on a daily basis. 

We tend to laugh at the things we are the least comfortable with, whether it's jokes about sex, mortality, the current state of American politics, or racial inequality. On some level, our senses of humor ultimately reflect our deepest anxieties. This is why I think that it's probably safe to say that most purveyors of racist jokes are secretly terrified of minorities (or their own inadequacies), just as homophobes are, on some level, most likely afraid of their own sexual impulses. Humor is a complex psychological process that reveals insights into the characters of both individuals and the cultures to which they belong. Laughter is often the product of emotion and intellect pulling in opposite directions, and comedy can therefore serve as a logical counterbalance to our irrational fears. Again, it's a way of trying to make sense out of the world in which we live.

With this in mind, Americans tend to associate fear with childishness, and it is therefore no coincidence that the man-child character has pretty much always been a staple of American comedy films. He is the man who, for various reasons, is afraid to grow up, and his dramatic goal often hinges on his ability to overcome this fear, at least in part. Harry Langdon. Harold Lloyd. Harpo Marx. Bud Abbott. Jerry Lewis. Steve Martin. Adam Sandler. Chris Farley. Jim Carrey. Will Ferrell. Seth Rogen. Jonah Hill. Jack Black. Even more recently, consider the Hangover films. These are fundamentally about grown men behaving like children (i.e. acting on their ids), as is every single motion picture project with which Judd Apatow has ever been involved. I would even argue that the recent movie Sisters is basically just taking the man-child comedy formula and applying it to women, but it’s the exact same idea. These movies provide a catharsis for the people in the audience who experience anxiety about the demands of adult life, which is precisely why they are so popular. Even Wes Anderson films are all essentially about adults acting like children and children acting like adults, and they all draw the bulk of their humor from the blurred line between these social constructs of “childhood” and “adulthood.” 

As you will read this week, King uses psychoanalytic theory to explain gross-out and man-child comedy as regressions to [male] pre-Oedipal impulses. More broadly, he suggests that all of these films, as well as those that I have discussed, appeal to the subconscious desire that people have to return to the freedom of being a child, where one could be excused from not following the rules of a given society. This is why poop jokes tend to be fairly universal. All cultures have basic rules about the disposal of human waste, and to joke about it is to transgress those rules. Telling people what they can and cannot laugh at is a way of exerting power over them. To laugh anyway is to disarm that power. If we subscribe to the commonly held assumption that the target audiences for gross-out and man-child comedies tend to be white, male, middle-class teenagers, then it becomes fairly clear that these anxieties of defining oneself as an adult are precisely what are being worked out by laughing at these movies. 

Dark comedy tends to blur the line between comedy and tragedy, and this week’s films all test the boundaries of good taste in order to address other kinds of anxieties. In fact, they are all about topics that tend to make a lot of people uncomfortable, because they are all rooted in deeply contentious issues within the public discourse. These are topics that even dramatic movies seldom want to touch. Citizen Ruth is about abortion, World’s Greatest Dad is about teen suicide, and Hamlet 2 is about the desecration of sacred texts. Frankly, I think it takes a lot of guts to make movies like these, and they are certainly not for everybody. That said, the filmmakers undoubtedly recognize that there are people who will be deeply offended by their work, but in my opinion, one of the great things about comedy is that it does allow filmmakers to address emotionally charged topics from somewhat of a safe distance. This is one of the reasons why comedy films are such an important part of the national discourse. They show us other, more palatable ways of looking at the things that we may be otherwise inclined to ignore or that exist entirely within the blind spots of the ideologies to which we subscribe.

Ideology isn't usually something we consciously think about. According to French philosopher Louis Althusser, "Ideology represents the imaginary relationships of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (1264). Basically, it is a set of beliefs that shapes a person's understanding of reality, whether consciously or otherwise. For example, Christianity is an ideology, as are nationalism, capitalism, veganism, progressivism and conservatism, among countless others. They are lenses through which we see the world, and so everybody subscribes to some ideology or another, often several. This is why I say that an ideological reading of a film can generally be thought of in terms of theme, because when you are looking at the underlying message of a movie, you must also consider that it is almost certainly informed by a common ideology shared by the principle filmmakers. Theme is therefore the ideal window into better understanding the ideology behind a film, and as I explained on week two, it can be extrapolated by analyzing the film's narrative structure. 

With that in mind, as you are watching this week’s films, I want you to be thinking about ideology and theme. Once you have also done this week’s reading and read the student blog posts for context, please answer the following question:

What position do the filmmakers seem to take regarding the film’s central issue (whether abortion, teen suicide, or the desecration of sacred texts)? Use examples from the movie you chose to write about in order to support your case, as well as quotes from any of the reading that we have done so far. 

This week, all students will be answering the screening question, as there are no blog posts assigned for the following week.

However, I would like everyone to send me an email to let me know your intentions regarding the final project. Are you doing a short film or a research paper? And what will it be about? If you're making a film, it should be comedic and it should have a beginning, middle and an end. If you're doing a research paper, it should be about a comedian or comedic filmmaker who we have not discussed in any depth, but that can be related back to American film comedy in some way. Give this some thought. Send me an email with your idea and/or any questions that you might have.