Film- Origins of Film Comedy: The Renaissance

(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.