"something for everyone a comedy tonight..."

Here, in a nutshell, is the plot of John Still's play Gammer Gurton's Needle from the mid-1500's (considered the second extant comedy written in English):

Gammer Gurton is fixing her servant, Hodge's, pants. When she puts them down, her needle is lost [keep in mind that decent sewing needles were both rare and expensive in the 16th century, to it's a big deal]. Pandemonium breaks loose as characters come in and out, accuse one another of stealing needles, pigs, chickens. There are threats of hanging, and eventually Hodge gets kicked in the backside. The needle, which is still in the seat of his pants, sticks him in the rear; he yells; everyone is relieved the needle is found. The end.
It seems improbable that such a thin plot could support an entire play, but the short piece is actually fun and funny. It's layered with a lot of physical comedy, slapstick, farce, even satire. So comedy is often more in the presentation, the action, the language than it is in the actual plot of the story.

This leads us to the question that will form this week's discussion: just what is comedy?

There are lots of different kinds of comedy, and there are recognizable elements present in these different kinds. Rather than answer the larger question for you, I'll share a few terms and details and examples. See if you can come to a determination about what comedy is and is not, about what sorts of things make people laugh, about what that says about humans in general.

slapstick and farce


W.C. Fields's deals with Mr. Muckle in It's a Gift

Often peppered with violence and action, wildly absurd plot mix-ups, chase scenes, hiding in closets and under beds, slipping on banana peels, horseplay, visual gags, this is one of the simplest, most universal sorts of comedy. The name refers to an English version of notched club used in old commedia dell'arte; when someone is whacked (even lightly) with the stick, the two parts slap together to make an exaggerated smack. The Three Stooges, Tom and Jerry, Laurel and Hardy, Jerry Lewis, Jacques Tati and much of Charlie Chaplin's work all rely on slapstick, and it's still popular on television and in movies today (Happy Gilmore, Rat Race, and so on).

Think of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, and you have a pretty good sense of this broad form of physical comedy.

verbal comedy (and wordplay)

Here are a couple of classic exchanges which demonstrate verbal sparring, wordplay, witty exchanges.

"One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know."
Groucho Marx as Captain Spaulding in Animal Crackers
CAPTAIN CUMMINGS: "Haven't you ever met a man who could make you happy?"
LADY LOU: "Sure, lots of times."
Mae West in She Done Him Wrong

Comedy of manners might be seen as a subset of this because the banter (see Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest or Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, for example) is often so barbed and clever. These comedies also have elements of social satire and, on occasion, bits of farce as well.

LADY BRACKNELL: "I had some crumpets with Lady Harbury, who seems to me to be living entirely for pleasure now."
ALGERNON: "I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief."
exchange from The Importance of Being Earnest

A quick search of YouTube should lead you to any number of versions of the famous "Who's on First?" routine by Abbott and Costello. This is wordplay at its finest.

screwball comedy


Hitchhiking Scene from It Happened One Night

This type of comedy was especially popular in the 1930's and 40's and usually blends two elements--romantic comedy (often peppered with the witty wordplay of comedy of manners and what would then have been called "sexy" bits--really mildly suggestive scenes which were racy enough for earlier audiences)) and a sense of crazy, goofy, loony, silliness (which is what the word screwball means here). This type of comedy spans several sorts of films, from straight romantic mix-ups to wise-cracky detective films (such as The Thin Man series). The list of films in this category is long; here are just a few titles:

It Happened One Night, Frank Capra (1934)
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Frank Capra (1936)
My Man Godfrey, Gregory LaCava (1936)
Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks (1938)
Holiday, George Cukor (1938)
His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks (1940)
The Philadelphia Story, George Cukor (1940)
That Uncertain Feeling, Ernst Lubitsch (1941)
Arsenic and Old Lace, Frank Capra (1944)
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Preston Sturgess (1944)
One interesting element present in a lot of the screwball comedies is the blending of classes (often a rich woman can't stand a virule, common man who happens to be helping her out of a jam; in the end, of course, she falls head over heels for him (but, usually, only after he puts her through some humbling, often physically challenging situations. Even though they may be separated by class, they are most-often matched by wit and eccentricity.

satire, parody, lampoon

Capturing some of the look of an Arthurian (knights of olde) film, the above scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Also being ridiculed are extreme religious ritual, the ignorance and meanness of a rough peasantry, and the primative logic (sophistry) of the so-called educated/aristocratic classes, even the clumsy, innacurate technology (the balance scales which are wildly out of balance). The incredible illogic and silly comments ("She turned me into a newt!"..."I got better"), what could have been a tense, horrific witch trial is made laughable. The scene is highly exaggerated, but, really, the dark and middle ages were marked by roughness, ignorance, superstition, and violence.

There are different sorts of satire. Some are thoughtful and thought-provoking, bitter attacks on social injustice, for example. Others are more teasing, showing weakness in different aspects of the human condition (relationships, politics, the workplace, religion, and so on). Probably the earthiest of these are lampoons (sometimes called burlesques) which take a given thing (say a classic film) and re-create them as ridiculous, exaggerated comedy versions. Star Wars becomes Spaceballs, 300 becomes Meet the Spartans, a whole string of popular horror movies are poked fun at in the Scary Movie franchise.

dark comedy and so on

The term "gallows humor" fits here. When, at the end of the "To Serve Man" episode of The Twilight Zone we learn that the book with that title is actual an alien race's cookbook and that much of the population of the earth is being taken to another planet to be killed and eaten, we laugh at the irony twist (well, I do). Laughing at questionable, violent, dark, sombre situations may seem impossible, but people do, perhaps as a sort of release or relief that "it's not happening to me...at least this time." Dark comedy often has elements of satire and/or farce, but the situations are human, based on real dangers. Robert Altman's M.A.S.H. (and, to a lesser extent, the television series that followed), managed to draw laught laughs in the midst of all the adrealine and gore in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during wartime. Terry Gilliam's Brazil shows a grim future ruled by a bullying bureaucracy, dwindling resources, vanishing freedom, encroaching (and failing) technology, but scenes like Robert De Niro's cameo as a rebel plumbing-and-heating repairman who will work on broken ducts even though police-state troopers are trying to eliminate him is light and unexpectedly whacky; and when we realize this could be the hero of the future, it feels ludicrous (but just maybe, oddly, real).

Very few comedies fit wholly into just one class. Stories with verbal twists are often satirical. Parodies often transform the original works by turning them into slapstick comedies. Irony and incongruity weave their ways through most forms. But the common element is this--comedies make (some) people laugh. It's the target of that laughter and what it says about audiences that is the subject of your discussion this week :)