Film- The Origins of Film Comedy: The 20th Century

Vaudeville and the British Music Hall

(United States: ~1880-1930; United Kingdom: ~1850-1960)

The style of performance known as Vaudeville began to appear just a few years before the invention of the motion picture. The term “vaudeville” comes from the song parodies of Eighteenth Century France.  Vaudeville focused not on a narrative or order of events, but rather on the performer herself.  There was no director of the performances, aside from the owner of the venue that would choose the order of acts and determine which performer received the best audience response.  This absence of a director left the performer as the controller of timing, audience rapport, and content.   Later in the Twentieth Century, the Vaudeville tradition continued in the form of stand-up comedy.

Vaudeville, and the British equivalent of the Music Hall, had more influence on the style of comedy film than on any other genre. The episodic style of Vaudeville introduced a performance rhythm that became expected in film comedy and ultimately led to television variety shows.

With its widespread influence, the style of Vaudeville and Music Hall affected many later filmmakers and theorists, including the great Russian filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, who wrote more about the art of montage than any other filmmaker or film scholar.  He credits the inspiration of creating meaning through the juxtaposition of separate elements to Vaudeville and the Music Hall. The rapid-fire delivery of antecedent-consequence, set up-punch line style of comedy that audiences come to expect with film comedy has its roots in Vaudeville.

Another innovation that came from within the context of Vaudeville is the duality of the comedienne as a character and the comedienne as herself. By the 1930s, it was not uncommon to find examples of comedians, like the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, or (for that matter) Cary Grant, who appeared in films impersonating themselves instead of a fictional character.

Of course, studios at the time could not help but encourage this trend.  If a comedienne, or more importantly, if her style, were popular with audiences, succeeding pictures featuring this comedienne were more likely to be successful, as audiences members knew what to expect from the comedienne’s performance.  Vaudeville also presented the mindset that a successful comic performance should be judged not on the creativity of the performer or the variety of his or her performances, but on the number of laughs that the performer elicits.

The Motion Picture

(Beginning: ~1895)

Since the birth of the motion picture in the late 1800s, film comedy not only developed due to the influence of other art forms, but also within the film medium as the techniques and styles of filmmaking became conventions of expression.  It is important here to note that the film genres that we know today did not appear fully formed, but rather developed gradually over a period of a couple decades.

The major genres of the infant years of film were melodrama, comedy, and historical epic.  Comedy was successful critically, as well as financially. In the 1920s, film reviewers and audiences saw the comic Chaplin as at an equal level as that of the dashing Fairbanks. There was no difference between the comic performer and the dramatic performer.  

Some of the most influential comic characters and situations that are familiar today come from the silent film comedies. Silent film comedy had true universal appeal, as knowledge of the language was unnecessary. As was the case with Vaudeville, the character and her routine of gags is more important to the silent film comedy than the narrative.  

However, film comedy would not remain the prominent genre that it had been in the 1920s. While audiences seem to be forgiving of dramatic films that reuse plot elements and character identities from film to film, audiences immediately notice when the same gag or comic situation is reused. As I stated before, similar gags not only kept their impact over a period of a couple decades, but rather for centuries.  Consider the influence of Vaudeville’s episodic structure on film comedy, and how the medium of film allowed for the filmmaker to insert gags at any moment of the film.  A gag recycled from earlier films may even recur in the same film, if the context allows.

Film comedy changed style more drastically than any other genre out of necessity, 
meaning that verbal comedy became the main form of comic expression.  Comic style also became more diverse as the homogenous style of slapstick comedy branched out into “comedian comedies” and Screwball comedies. But verbal comedy did not eliminate all forms of physical comedy, as some of the most successful comedians developed trademarks with their physical mannerisms. Indeed, physical comic styles did not die completely in favor of purely verbal comedy.  Rather, they remained ever present, synthesizing a greater comic impact than verbal comedy could alone. In the 1930s, comedy did not simply coexist with drama, it complemented it. Sometimes only comedy is daring enough to show society as it really is.

The next major technical innovation after the sound film was television, which became the primary showcase for comedy in the 1950s.  As a result of this transition, among other causes, few notable film comedies came from American studios in the 1950s when compared to other decades.

The most successful American comic director of the 1950s would have to be Billy Wilder.  His definitive comedies The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959), described by some film scholars as “sex comedies”, form practically a subgenre of their own.  Also, I would argue that none other than Marilyn Monroe was the most successful American comic film performer of the 1950s. Nearly every comedy film in which she starred was a commercial and critical success, in part because she worked with some of the most critically acclaimed directors of the time.  Keep in mind that, although she has now been dead for fifty years, she remains one of the most popular cultural icons.  Licensing fees for the use of her likeness alone still earn millions for her estate every year.  Her legacy is indisputable as is her influence on American popular culture and on comedy.

While the American film industry suffered during the Red Scare of the 1950s, British film comedy found a sort of renaissance. Ironically, the successful British comedies of the mid Twentieth Century had their roots in documentary—a genre that relies on a strict narrative structure, unlike comedy. It seems as if the filmmakers of the United Kingdom had to wait for the output of American comedies to stall in order for international audiences to appreciate their distinguishing brand of comedy.

The two most influential British comic performers of the mid Century were Alec Guinness, who was equally as comfortable in the historical epics of David Lean as he was playing multiple roles in Ealing Comedies, and Peter Sellers. These two performers introduced the world of comedy to the unprecedented feat of one actor portraying multiple roles within one film—and sometimes within one scene, as Guinness does in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).

Although I admit that many so-called “character actors” populate dramas, if one performer were to play multiple roles in a single dramatic film, it would give the impression of a low budget production that could not hire enough talent.  But in the realm of film comedy, the ability of one actor to portray multiple convincing characters in a single film is a demonstration of that performer’s prowess.  Note how this quality of performance unique to comedy in the field of motion pictures comes from the theatre, in which a one-performer show—whether comic or dramatic—seems to denote an accomplished performer.

By the early 1960s, British and American filmmakers seemed to return to a uniform style of comedy.  For 1960s and 1970s comedy, parody was the order of the day. In the United States, Mel Brooks imitated classic Westerns in Blazing Saddles (1974) and classic Horror with Young Frankenstein (1974).  Woody Allen used an actual Japanese film that he redubbed in order to lampoon poorly dubbed foreign films in What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966) and he parodied documentaries with Take The Money and Run (1969) and Zelig (1983).  The team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker satirized the disaster movies that had become popular in the 1970s, including notable entries like Airport (George Seaton 1970), The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame 1972), Earthquake (Mark Robson 1974), and The Towering Inferno (John Guillermin and Irwin Allen 1974), with their critically acclaimed Airplane! (1980).  Although some scholars may argue that Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) parodies Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe (1964), I disagree with this assessment.  Kubrick released Dr. Strangelove in January 1964, while Lumet released his film in October 1964—nearly a year later.  It is quite possible that Kubrick had read the novel Fail-Safe (published 1962) and was aware that a film version of the novel was in the works.  However, if Kubrick had wanted his film to function as a parody of Fail-Safe, he would have waited for Lumet to release the aforementioned film.  In addition, the credits of Dr. Strangelove clearly attribute the story to Peter George’s novel Red Alert (published 1958).  For these reasons, I believe that Dr. Strangelove is not part of the parody tradition.  Instead, it most closely follows the methods of the Anarchic Comedies.  Concurrently, versatile filmmaker Blake Edwards parodied the James Bond franchise with a series of films beginning with The Pink Panther (1963).  The success of this series owes much to the performances of Peter Sellers and to the music of Henry Mancini.  In the 1970s, the Monty Python comedy troupe lampooned historical epics in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979).

One curious point that I wish to make about parody is that so often the resulting parody is of a higher caliber of technique and aesthetics than the original film that it parodies.  Filmmakers begin work on a parody with the assumption that the viewer will be familiar with the original source, but a well-made parody can succeed on its own without requiring the viewer to have any existing knowledge of the source.  Most viewers will arrive at a parody knowing the rules for the particular genre or genres that the comedy film parodies. The most successful parodies work because they purposefully go against the rules of the parodied genre.

The 1970s ended with a return to romantic comedy as the primary subgenre of comedy with films such as Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979) and Edwards’ 10 (1979) finding popular and critical success.  Arguably, this trend continues into later comedies, like Moonstruck (Norman Jewison 1987), Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell 1994), Bridget Jones’s Diary (Sharon Maguire 2001) and more recently, The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius 2011).