Abstract
Comedy films as a genre have often been defined by their common narrative structures or recurrent character types, but their formal and affective strategies have often been elided in scholarship. This paper, the first chapter in an ongoing dissertation concerning aversive strains of contemporary humor, attempts to codify the formal design of at least one major tradition of film comedy: the classical—roughly prior to the end of the Hays Code—Hollywood studio comedy. Drawing from psychologist James Frey’s concept of the “play frame of humor”, this paper considers comedy primarily in terms of its intended affect of positivity and frivolity, landing on two context-dependent tendencies termed “eccentricity” and “lightness” that together create, to borrow a term from Gerald Mast, a “comic climate” which may cue humorous engagement and emotional distance by fostering a sense of both transgressive or unruly incongruity and comfortable familiarity. These two tendencies in tandem characterize the Hollywood comedy across decades of performers, subgenres, and comic traditions, and only becoming destabilized in the contemporary era by the infusion of cruder and more brazen content, but more importantly by the post-modern blending and subversion of generic borders in this same period. This paper attempts to establish a formal and historical baseline from which contemporary traditions represent a rupture and profound expansion of comedy’s understood generic boundaries.
Presenters
Lance St. LaurentPhD Candidate/TA, Communication Arts/Film, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Formal Analysis, Hollywood History, Industry Studies, Humor, Comedy, Style
