Film- The Origins of Film Comedy: Medieval Comedy

(Europe: 500~1400 AD)

Although popular accounts of the general mood of Europe in the Middle Ages is rather morose, focused on plagues, wars, and poverty, comedy had a vital place in those societies. Out of this era, we not only find a great number of comedies, but a great variety of comedy as well, 

The comedies of this time appear in the vernacular, contrasted with “serious” writing in Latin.  Of course, this trait affected how widespread a comedy’s influence may be as only one who can understand the language may appreciate the comedy without the aid of a translation—physical comedy excluded, of course.  The early Medieval definition of comedy was actually quite free and many works could qualify as a comedy as long as it included a happy ending. 

Often this idea has been confused with the Classical definitions of comedy, which were actually much more detailed and explicit in what qualified as comedy.  This Medieval definition is possibly one of the reasons why today there is so much debate over what qualities make something a comedy.  It is important to remember that only the wealthiest in the Middle Ages had the luxury of even knowing about Classical Comedy through reading it.  The majority of the population was illiterate and therefore we see examples of characters like devils and vice figures.

As I said above, the wealthy, educated members of the societies would have access to the Classical comedy of Menander, Plautus, Terence and others, but the majority of society would not have had this experience.  Without knowing the existing conventions of written comedy, crafters of comedy in the Middle Ages had to determine their own ideas of what made a comedy, with the aid of their experience of comedies that would have been handed down orally across cultures.
   
Medieval carnivals became the showcase for comic performers. For a brief time, commoners and royalty alike could escape the reality of the world around them by means of comedy. This sense of Carnival returns in later comedies, including the works of Shakespeare, Mozart, and of course, Monty Python.  As I have stated in earlier posts, comedy is a group activity, and we can clearly see its roots in the Medieval Carnival.  However, in this same atmosphere of the Carnival, one can see a reinforcement of the notion of comedy as being a lesser art.  For indeed, comedy in the Middle Ages came from the lowly Court Jester, not the royalty. Once again, we find the comic hero coming from a low social order, as he will continue to do throughout Shakespeare, Mozart, Chaplin, and more.  Note how the comic hero in any era is quite different from the contemporary tragedies and their heroic figures.

Dante

 Many examples of Medieval comedy demonstrate an appreciation of crude humor. It does not need to be argued that crude humor still exists today, regardless of how low it resides on the comic spectrum. Crude humor was a large part of the early Greek comedies as well, continuing in Dante’s Divine Comedy, considered not only one of the greatest vernacular Italian works but one of the greatest works in any language.  Consider that writing in the vernacular gave Dante (ca. 1265-1321 AD) the opportunity to experiment with crude humor, as crude humor would not have been as acceptable in a work written in the “high” language of Latin.  Scholars praise Dante not only for his comedy but for the depth of his allegorical and theological sense as well.  This endurance marks the power of comedy, even when it is seemingly at its most profane.  Dante’s comedy works as a foil to his serious nature of his journey through Hell.

As a Twentieth Century analogy to Dante’s exploration of the profane, consider the reaction to nudity in motion pictures throughout the Twentieth Century.  Nudity was understood as an artistic exploration in pre-Code American motion pictures that mostly appeared in art museums and the like.  However, once the Hays Code was established and films were intended for mass audience appeal, people then understood nudity as pornographic.  Later in the century, we see the same discrepancy based on the context in which the nudity is framed when nudity in a 1960s art house picture would be “tasteful” while nudity in a mainstream picture would be “exploitation”.  As it has been in the debate of aestheticism of the human body versus pornography for centuries, the actual subject of nudity did not change; the societal reaction to that subject did, based on the contextual framing.  In much the same way, a comic work like Dante’s can have the reputation of being licentious in one era while in another era it can have the reputation of being one of the greatest works of Western literature—depending on how one wishes to interpret the nature of his comedy.  

In the centuries since Dante, many artists like Jonathan Swift, Mozart, and Mel Brooks have followed his example and explored crude humor. Out of this canon of Medieval comedy, we find the origins of farce,  When a film attempts to enter the realm of farce, it encounters a type of comedy that has existed for hundreds of years, but one that has never really been critically well recognized.

Boccaccio

The next significant comic writer after Dante has to be Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375).  Boccaccio studied Dante extensively and was influenced by his Divine Comedy, but Boccaccio often seems to use humor much more explicitly than his predecessor.  Boccaccio’s most significant contribution to the genre of comedy is his Decameron. In The Decameron, a frame narrative occurs across ten days, and each day’s stories feature a different style of humor.  The Decameron became popular as soon as Boccaccio wrote it.

The fact that the Decameron appeared in translations across Europe meant that it could reach a wide audience and have great influence on writers from many different cultural backgrounds.  Although there are litterateurs that question the originality of the stories that Boccaccio includes in his work, it is because of Boccaccio that the stories reached writers from other countries, and 
even filmmakers have followed Boccaccio’s example of using comedy as a tool for teaching moral lessons.Even more than Dante, Boccaccio demonstrates how crude humor can sometimes be the most effective means of delivering social criticism.

Chaucer

Many Medieval scholars argue that no writer was more influenced by Boccaccio than William Chaucer (1343-1400). But just like any great craftsman, Chaucer learned from the style of Boccaccio to create a work distinctly his own.  Chaucer continues with Boccaccio’s ability to teach through comedy.  Through humor, Chaucer leaves his readers with a memorable experience, but one that will cause them to reflect on their own moral dilemmas.

From the Sixteenth Century theatre of Italy came the stylized Commedia dell’Arte, of zany situations and physical stunts.  It is curious that something with the word “Art” in its title so closely resembles the slapstick film comedies, which are not held in so high a regard. The Commedia dell’Arte method of incorporating numerous gags and stock characters influenced many artists, including Shakespeare and Mozart.  In addition to the comic routines and stock characters, Commedia dell’arte also exemplified physical comedy.  So out of this one style of Italian comedy comes the seed for not only the anarchic slapstick comedies of the 1930s, but the stock characters of the Screwball Comedies as well.