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April 2021
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 Discussions--the opportunity for students to share their thoughts and opinions and to explore content at a deeper level can be fantastic. But how can we organize discussions so that they do not turn chaotic or devolve into arguments? Just like we teach students how to line up, when to raise their hand, etc, we can teach students the procedures for a successful and respectful class discussion. In this post, I recommend several steps that have worked for me over the years. 1) Introduce mini-discussions with unemotional topics No matter what age your students are, they can learn the procedures of a class discussion by practicing having discussions about really mundane things like chocolate vs. regular milk or pants vs. shorts. In this way, students work on taking turns, critical listening, and speaking to each other respectfully. 2) Have students use “I” statements to express opinions By phrasing opinions with “I” statements of “I feel...”, “I think...”, “I like...”, it allows students to put opinions in the context of perspective vs. right and wrong. For example saying, “I do not like the music of The Beatles” sounds a lot different than “The Beatles are stupid”, but the student may mean the same thing. It may take some practice to put thoughts into “I” statements but the result will be much more respectful discussions. 3) Build upon the thoughts of others with “yes, and” connections By using the phrase “yes, and…”, students are required to consider different perspectives without completely rejecting them as they would with a “but…” response. A good example could be Student 1: “Swimming is my favorite sport”, Student 2: “Yes, and Football is my favorite sport”. This example is simple, yet the same structure works with more difficult discussions that could easily turn into an argument. By continuing a classmate’s thought with “yes, and…”, the responding student admits that what the first student says is equally as valid as what they are about to say. 4) Get to the point when students can monitor their own conduct Once the teacher establishes procedures for class discussions and the students have had opportunities to practice and learn the procedures, the accountability of following the established procedures becomes the responsibility of the students. In this way, students are actively aware of their own speech and relationship to others instead of reacting to a teacher overseeing their participation.
These four tips should provide you with great starting points for future class discussions.
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 The first successful comedies of the sound era were the dialogue-driven situational comedies of Ernst Lubitsch and George Cukor, most notably Trouble In Paradise (Lubitsch 1932), Design For Living (Lubitsch 1933), and Dinner At Eight (Cukor 1933). The films depicted taboo social situations and most always featured wealthy protagonists of the upper class. While the films were popular at the time and are still critically recognized, the films have become quite dated and seem dull when compared to the later Screwball comedies, which drew their foundations from the situations and banter of these films. In a sense, these almost purely verbal pre-Screwball Comedies were eclipsed by the Screwball comedies not much later in the decade. At the same time, other comic performers were developing a completely different style of comedy from Lubitsch and Cukor. The Marx Brothers—one of the most influential comedy teams of all time—practically defined the subgenre known today as Anarchic Comedy.  The Marx Brothers Starting as performers on Vaudeville stages and on Broadway, the Marx Brothers (active as a group, 1912-1949) recognized quickly how film would broaden their audience. In fact, they would often try out their material in front of a live audience before shooting began, this preview giving them live feedback. Unlike Chaplin before them, the Marx Brothers were solely performers, not filmmakers. Many film historians credit the Marx Brothers for being the first comic performers to realize that true sound comedy was a hybrid between verbal banter and physical gags. Whereas, Harpo’s comic manner could have worked quite well in silent comedy, Groucho’s comic manner could not have existed in motion pictures until the advent of sound technology. The Marx Brothers were the first film comedians to realize the synergistic possibilities of combining the physical and visual humor previously mastered by the silent film stars with the new verbal possibilities of the sound film. Groucho’s verbal style acts as a foil to Harpo’s physical style and vice versa. One could call Harpo’s persona the successor to Chaplin’s Little Tramp. Like Chaplin, the Marx Brothers spent weeks rehearsing gags to get them just right. In order to get the most complete picture of the Marx Brothers’ genius, one needs to consider the contrast between their earlier Paramount films, which ended with Duck Soup, and their later MGM films. The MGM films were their greatest successes commercially, but not necessarily critically. Today, the Brothers’ gags are just as effective as they were when their films premiered. The films continue to entertain audiences and engage film reviewers. So much of the Marx Brothers antics follow the Id drives theorized by Freud—the same drives that society dictates are to be restrained by the individual. The Brothers’ total disregard of social constraints makes them so appealing, because each one of us has, at one point or another, wished for the courage to break outside social boundaries.  Reception Not only was Duck Soup released in the midst of the Great Depression, but also audiences still remembered World War I while the threat of a Second World War was on the horizon. The critics’ reactions were not much better than the public’s.
As a political satire, the political leanings of the publications that review it can partly explain the starkly contrasted views of the film and some reviewers chose not to address the political humor at all. Most critics at the time considered it a fair to poor effort, but many reviewers also indicate that they would not expect much better from the Marx Brothers—although it is unclear if the critics’ low expectations were for the Marx Brothers specifically or for film comedy as a whole, since we have already learned that film critics have difficulty approaching comedy. Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times described it as “extremely noisy without being nearly as mirthful as their other films”. Joe Bigelow of Variety gave the film a rather positive review, praising the way that the Brothers were able to combine physical and verbal gags, “Radio has killed all the good gags”. He adds that “Practically everybody wants a good laugh right now and Duck Soup should make practically everybody laugh”. Harold W. Cohen of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette also presented a favorable review, saying “It’s good to see the madcap Marxes back”. Some might argue that Duck Soup’s message was a success internationally, since Mussolini saw it as a threat. Tim Dirks of The American Movie Classics Filmsite adds that it was “devoid of any Academy Award nominations”, which is not a surprise considering the relatively poor reviews that it received. Mussolini seems to be the only one who addressed the politics of the film, for the remaining reviews all address the comic structure of the film, using terms like “noisy”, “not mirthful”, and “laugh”. Just as the reviewers of City Lights' approached it as part of a larger Chaplin canon, these reviewers approach Duck Soup in the context of all the Marx Brothers pictures. Also, in the same way critics praised City Light’s balance of comedy and pathos, these critics praise the film’s balance of physical and verbal humor. In a few years, Duck Soup became virtually forgotten, and the Marx Brothers’ career declined in the 1940s. Renewed interest came to Duck Soup and the Marx Brothers beginning in the 1950s, mostly due to their presence on television, with further reviews appearing over the years. In these later reviews, many critics addressed the political humor of the film, not only aided by the perspective of a different political landscape, but also influenced by later anti-war sentiments, particularly during the Vietnam era. In 1976, Roger Rosenblatt of The New Republic praised the film and the Smithsonian Institution for presenting it once again. In 1978, John J. Puccio of Movie Metropolis also praised the film, “It’s all quite zany and delightful, a mixture of clever wit, low humor, and outright anarchy” regretting that “the world appears to have outgrown [it] or maybe just lost sight of somewhere along the road to high-tech sophistication”—echoing the contemporary reviewers’ praise of the mixture of many different types of comedy, and describing the genre of Anarchic Comedy. He uses the terms “zany”, “delightful”, “clever”, “wit”, “low humor”, and “anarchy” to describe the comedy of the film. Notice how close these terms are to the ones used by reviewers in 1933. Just like with City Lights, Duck Soup’s reputation has only grown and it is now more accessible than ever in the Twenty First Century because of home video technology. Many critics focus on the film’s longevity and continued relevancy, especially in its exploration of politics and war. In 2000, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times commented on the innovative nature of its comedy, “Dated as Duck Soup inevitably is in some respects, it has moments that seem startlingly modern…. The Brothers broke the classical structure of movie comedy and glued it back again haphazardly, and nothing was ever the same”. Jeffrey M. Anderson of Combustible Celluloid, echoed Ebert’s sentiments, “The ridiculous reasons for going to war and the awkward, hysterical war itself are especially relevant today”, as does M.P. Bartley of eFilmCritic.com, “Duck Soup still has an edge today, because it’s the best film to remind us just how dangerous the Marx Brothers were”. Like earlier critics, many critics still speak of the film within the context of the Marx Brothers’ overall style. Michael Koller of Senses of Cinema called Duck Soup, “indisputably the Marx Brothers’ greatest film…. their most creative and anarchic”. John Sinnott of DVD Talk called it “Not only… the best Marx Brothers film, but… also one of the best comedies ever made”. In 2005, Dennis Schwartz of Ozus’ World Movie Reviews gave the film an A+, dubbing it “The Marx Brothers high water mark in film; their one true claim to a masterpiece”. Ian Nathan of Empire magazine called it, “The Marx brothers on top form”. These reviewers focus on the innovative combination of visual and auditory comedy in the film as well. In 2004, Jamie Russell of the BBC praised it for its “delirious verbal banter… and a total lack of respect for the rules”. Most Twenty First Century critics that review the film inevitably compare it to the later MGM pictures, and prefer Duck Soup because it does not include musical interludes or a romantic subplot. As for its detractors, Christopher Null of Filmcritic.com, complained that the plot was too simple, “Take the comedy, leave the story”. Total Film Magazine echoed this when it said, “the plot is just a flimsy backdrop” and that the “political nose-thumbing now seems a little dated”. Obviously, both reviewers do not know how to approach the narrative/gag balance of comedy. David Nusair of Reelfilm provided one of the harshest criticisms in 2006, when he said: “the majority of this just isn’t funny (something that’s particularly true of an excruciatingly prolonged sequence involving Harpo and Chico’s harassment of a blustering street vendor). The conclusion, which is action-packed and mind-numbing, does the movie absolutely no favors, and it’s extraordinarily difficult to understand why this is generally regarded as some kind of a comedy classic”. In Nusairs’ review, we can see that he does not know how to approach the Principle of Comic Logic nor the way in which the film borrows conventions from the war subgenre. The fact that more reviews have been written about Duck Soup in the past ten years than in its first ten years of existence is a testament to the power of the film and to its longevity. Critics at Turner Classic Movies call Duck Soup, the Brothers’ “last opportunity… to be at their most outrageous. But more than them running amok in front of the camera (and they had plenty of experience being let loose in front of an audience in vaudeville and Broadway), the Marx Brothers made a comedy that was cinematic…. The Duck Soup plot was absurd, but it was not so ridiculous that you didn’t care what was going to happen to the characters. This was one aspect that Irving Thalberg did not abandon when he produced their next picture, A Night at the Opera (1935), at MGM. The Brothers’ films at MGM became their most commercially successful. Thalberg had determined that the reason why the Brothers’ earlier films had not fared well commercially was because there were never any characters to which the viewer could relate. The Brothers themselves were too wacky to be relatable and Margaret Dumont was almost too proper, so Thalberg incorporated romantic leads and more mainstream narratives into the Brother’s MGM films. Even so, Zeppo, who sometimes played a romantic foil to the other three Brothers in their earlier pictures, decided after Duck Soup to move on to a career on the business side of the motion picture industry. Perhaps Thalberg had thought that the addition of romance to the Marx Brothers pictures would have made them more approachable to audiences that were now accustomed to Screwball comedies. Most film historians today agree, however, that the romantic stories often detracted from the overall pictures, considering them to be inferior to Duck Soup, the poster child of the Anarchic Comedy. Later examples of this subgenre, including Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick 1964) and M*A*S*H (Robert Altman 1970), were greatly influenced by it, sharing many of the same themes, devices, and character types. In the decades since the Brothers’ last film, most critics and scholars acknowledge that Duck Soup was in many ways superior to the later MGM pictures. In 1990, the National Registry of Historic Films decided to preserve the film. In 2006, Premiere Magazine named Duck Soup one of The 50 Greatest Comedies of All Time. The film is thoroughly enjoyable and I highly recommend it. (Europe: ~1400-1600 AD)  The Renaissance period presented a renewed appreciation for art and creativity and scholars still revere many of the comedies written during this period. Many writers of this time acknowledged the profound potential of comedy, understanding that a genre that prides itself in avoiding seriousness could still make serious statements about life, society, culture, and humanity, just as earlier writers had discovered and contemporary writers still explore. However, despite the growing inspiration of artists during the Renaissance, comedy still remained a lesser form of expression in the eyes of critics. In the same vein as the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, that continued into the Renaissance, was the Comedy of Humours of Renaissance England. It is due to the influence of Commedia dell’Arte and the Comedy of Humours that we see stock characters in many comedy films. For example, the character of the wealthy woman (usually an older relative of the protagonist) appears in Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks 1934), The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey 1937), Bringing Up Baby (Hawks 1938), and His Girl Friday (Hawks 1940), just to name a few. The narratives are not the same, simply the replicated character.  Erasmus The foremost comic theorist of the Renaissance was Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), Erasmus wrote along the lines of art for art’s sake. He felt that one should appreciate comedy as something that has value in itself, not for what comedy can teach or to what it can lead. He also used humor in his critical writings, Erasmus’ best-known work that discusses comedy is his In Praise of Folly. In the writings of Erasmus, we find support for the argument that critics and scholars should judge comedy works for what they are, not how well they can approximate another genre.  Shakespeare The greatest comic writer of the Renaissance, and perhaps the most celebrated playwright of all time, William Shakespeare (1564-1616), was as much a master of comedy as he was a master of tragedies, romances, and histories. He crafted comic situations and characterizations that are still relevant in today’s comedy, and no two of his comic plays are exactly alike. As we are able to see in his plays, Shakespeare inherited his treatment of comedy and his methods for crafting it from many older comic sources. We know that the works of Menander, Plautus, and Terence were part of the curriculum in most European schools at the time. From this fact, and from the similarity of some of his comedy to that of the Classics, we can surmise that Shakespeare would have encountered the comic works of Classical and Medieval comedians during his schooling. He used all of this acquired knowledge of past comedies in order to synthesize his own. Shakespeare had the ability to take both paths of artistic innovation—he followed the styles of earlier writers and created scenarios uniquely his own. A lot of literary scholars conclude that the Medieval Carnival played an important part in the shaping of Shakespeare’s approach to comedy. However, one cannot discuss Shakespeare without mentioning his exquisite originality. As I mentioned in the post about Classical Comedy, the works of Plautus and Terence were taught in Renaissance schools, plausibly linking Shakespeare’s comedies as a continuation of the Classical New Comedy. Shakespeare used comedy to instruct because it is a form that could have been understood by the wealthy Globe patrons in the balconies as well as by the ‘Groundlings’. Comedy has the power to address all social classes. Unlike the comic characters of Ancient Greece, Shakespeare’s comic characters exist for a purpose beyond comic relief. Most often, his comic characters are deep and fully formed. As genuine, convincing, and believable comic characters, they live on in dozens of like types and in the comic situations of film. Through the convincing realism of his comic characters, we once again see that comedy stays close to reality. Unlike the ironic characters seen in some forms of comedy, Shakespeare’s comic protagonists are often willing to admit their flaws. There is a sense of self-discovery in his character studies. Maybe this humanness is why Shakespeare’s comic characters, just like George Webber of 10 (Blake Edwards 1979) or Felix and Oscar of The Odd Couple (Gene Saks 1968), are so appealing to audiences—they are not all “put together” and they do not know in what direction they are headed. Unlike the heroes of non-comic works, that often seem to have a clear purpose and clear objectives, the comic hero is much like the typical viewer that focuses more on the present and life’s little mishaps than on his or her “destiny”. Comedy is the only genre that can comfortably and successfully deal with subjects that are taboo. One of these subjects, of course, is death. Death is present in so many narratives of Shakespeare, but in his comedies, death does not have the final say. For example, consider Claudio’s ruminations on death in Measure for Measure or how The Comedy of Errors begins with a death sentence for Aegeon. Following Shakespeare’s influence, numerous film comedies deal with death—consider Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra 1944), Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer 1949), or M*A*S*H (Robert Altman 1970)—but often, as in Shakespeare, as an afterthought. With Shakespeare, we first see the term Comedy of Manners as applied to New Comedy social situations. Just as Shakespeare can discuss death through comedy, he is also able to discuss law, class differences, and government through the same lens. The films of Chaplin, Sturges, and the Marx Brothers all exploit the nature of encounters between people of different classes. Shakespeare often used foreign settings in order to criticize his own government without becoming too overt. In much the same way, Duck Soup (Leo McCarey 1933) mocks governments and war without directly mentioning any real countries by creating the fictional countries of Freedonia and Sylvania. Shakespeare’s The Tempest, his last play and one of his most acclaimed, is laced with social critique. Shakespeare is free to discuss social issues in The Tempest, because of its setting on an unknown island. Impersonation in film comedy has had a lasting impression over the years, whether it is Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis disguised as women in Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder 1959), Chico and Harpo Marx both dressed as Groucho in Duck Soup (1933), or Jack Lemmon seemingly taking on the traditional roles of a woman in The Odd Couple (1968). Shakespeare’s comedies include many instances of deception and imitation. Often important plot points revolve around a character that is disguised for a particular reason, which Mozart later expands upon in his Cosi Fan Tutte and Marriage of Figaro. Recognize though, that the place of cross-dressing as a part of performance in Shakespeare’s day was much different from that of Mozart’s day and later eras. Male actors filled both male and female roles in a Shakespeare play during his lifetime, making a cross-dressed man not an unexpected joke, but something taken for granted as commonplace. Shakespeare’s comedies have retained their status among critics and scholars, but the popularity of specific plays may rise and fall in cycles over time. In much the same way, we find films that are praised by critics and yet fail at the box office, only for audiences to rediscover it years later. Regardless of their popularity at any given time, the conventions that Shakespeare both adopted and synthesized continue to influence new comedies.  Cervantes A contemporary of Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) is one of the most praised Spanish writers of all time, especially for his creation of Don Quixote, one of the world’s favorite characters of any genre. Much of the humor of the character comes from that which he imagines, just like when the character of Richard Sherman in The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder 1955) thinks of the women in his life, or George Webber in 10 (1979), as his fantasy eventually becomes a reality.
This quality of authenticity both of the comic characters’ demeanors and of their actions is an essential attribute of many comic characters. The comic heroine does not see herself or her own actions as funny. She behaves in a way that is logical to her—following the Principle of Comic Logic. A great film example of this is the character of Inspector Clousseau in Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther series. Throughout his antics, Clousseau views himself as a gifted investigator, clever sleuth, and shameless womanizer—not the bumbling idiot that the viewer and most of the other characters see. Don Quixote was (and still is) successful critically and popularly. No proper study of comedy is complete without it.  Music is an artform that combines multiple modes of thinking. It is limitlessly both subtle and expressive while at the same time exact and mathematical. Today’s topic of rhythm comes from the mathematical side of music. Rhythms come from combining shorter notes into longer sounds and dividing longer notes into shorter divisions. If you remember from earlier posts, the beat is the underlying pulse of a piece of music. Fitting within that beat we can have longer notes that take up several beats or smaller divisions that are just a fraction of one beat. The easiest example (and most common time signature) is based around 4 beats per measure. The largest note would be the whole note that takes up all 4 beats. As one can understand, only one whole note can fit within a measure of 4. When we divide the whole note into two equal parts we get two half notes (notice the math connection). If the whole note is 4 beats, each half note gets 2 beats. Dividing each half note equally again provides 4 quarter notes. Each quarter note would then receive 1 beat. It is with these quarter notes that you can start to see how important these smaller divisions are to the overall sense of the beat. Counting each measure as 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4 is a lot easier to follow than counting as whole notes 1---, 1---. Without the divisions, it is very difficult to feel a steady pulse.  Of course, quarter notes can be divided into 8 eighth notes in a measure of 4 beats. Smaller still would be 16 sixteenth notes in a measure of 4 beats. With the possibility of these small divisions, comes the necessity to use them to keep the beat. If a measure includes eighth or sixteenth notes, simply counting 1-2-3-4 gives us less of a chance of playing a rhythm accurately than if we were to count 1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and (eighth notes) or 1-e-and-a-2-e-and-a-3-e-and-a-4-e-and-a (sixteenth notes). When writing music, we find that smaller divisions of the overall beat can help to propel the music forward and give it a sense of movement. Even if a song is based upon 4 beats per measure, the drummer dividing the beat into 8 eighth notes or 16 sixteenth notes on the cymbal helps to keep the music exciting. Also think about how 8 eighth notes or 16 sixteenth notes in a measure allows the player that many more opportunities to vary the dynamics (volume) for each note. Next time you play or listen to music, I encourage you to try to hear and feel the divisions of the overall beats and think about how it changes your perception of the music.  |