Film- Origins of Film Comedy: The Baroque and Classical Periods

(Europe: ~1600-1750 AD)

One of the major showcases for comedy in the last few centuries has been in the form of musical presentations.  The musical form that we now know as Opera began as a reaction against the musical style of the late Renaissance period.  Unlike the musical works performed in the courts of monarchs and wealthy families, Opera was a public presentation made of content that reflected the tastes of the expanding audiences.  

The early Opera Seria, or “Serious Opera”, told stories of deities, demigods, and epic heroes.  These Opera Seria included three Acts and a prescribed number of arias per singer.  At first, the Opera Seria had no comic counterpart.  But after some time, audiences became bored with the strict structure of the Opera Seria and the esoteric nature of the characters and narratives within them.  As a response to this dissatisfaction, composers began to write short comic intermezzi to present in between the acts of the Opera Seria.  Unlike the Opera Seria, the comic intermezzi featured characters to whom the common people could relate.  Once again, as with Terence, we see one of the major aspects in the development of film comedy: the influence that audience taste exerts on what comic writers create.  The plot of the early intermezzi usually came in a two-act structure (one act between each act of the Opera Seria) and often involved humorous, realistic situations, such as an older man trying frantically to woo a younger woman.

The unexpected happened when these comic intermezzi became more popular than the Opera Seria for which the composers had created them to accompany.  These comic intermezzi evolved into the standalone Opera Buffa, or “comic opera”.  One could argue that the leading expression of comedy at this time, and the one that reached the widest audience was in the form of Opera Buffa.

Opera Comique
(France: ~1680-1800 AD)

   In the same era, the French musical scene explored forms of parody and we find the first use of the term vaudeville. These forms of light entertainment soon developed into comic operas, known in France as the Opéra Comique. The Opéra Comique appealed to audiences of a higher class when compared to the lower class patrons of earlier vaudevilles, much as the American vaudeville attracted mostly low-income patrons.  Consider that the visual character, as well as the fast pacing and episodic form, of both the early French and later American Vaudeville could appeal to likely illiterate French lower class audiences and the barely English-literate immigrant American audiences.  The performances could be entertaining without a need to understand the subtleties of the language.

The Age of Enlightenment

(Europe: ~1700-1800 AD)

In the realm of literature,few writers, save for Machiavelli, can claim to have as much possession of dark irony and biting satire than Jonathan Swift (1667-1745).  The comic subgenre of satire was forever changed when he published Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift demonstrated how far straight-faced satire could really go, and multiple comedy films follow in his footsteps, most notably Duck Soup (1933) and Dr. Strangelove (1964).

In the world of music, “child prodigy”, “musical genius”, and “one of the world’s greatest composers”, are just a few of the dozens of adjectives one could use to describe Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791).  I would like to add to this list that he is also one of the world’s greatest craftsmen of comedy.  Comic Opera reached its pinnacle with Mozart. His trio of operas with librettos by Lorenzo Da Ponte, Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, and Cosi Fan Tutte, and his German singspiele, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (with libretto by Christoph Friedrich Bretzner) and The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte, with libretto by Emmanuel Schikaneder) remain both popular today and praised by scholars as prominent works.  The recurring theme of disguises and role-playing within comedy appears in both Così Fan Tutte (when the protagonists masquerade as Albanians) and in The Marriage of Figaro (when the Countess and Susanna trade places).  

Mozart adapted the conventions of existing comedies to suit his comic operas, which in turn went on to influence future comedians, including filmmakers.  Consider the subject of mistaken identity, as seen in Duck Soup (1933) when Chico and Harpo impersonate Groucho.  The same subject appeared earlier in Così Fan Tutte, when Guglielmo and Ferrando disguise themselves as Albanians, and in The Marriage of Figaro, in which the Count believes he is flirting with Susanna but it is actually the Countess.  The comedy in Mozart’s operas continues to impact the comic writing of others and the scholarly writing about comedy.