Back to School Special: The American Film Comedy Tradition

At the very start of my career, more than three decades ago, I taught.a class on the comedian comedy tradition at the University of California-Santa Barbara, and I began the class with a screening and discussion of Laurel and Hardy’s The Music Box. This term, I am returning to this terrain with a class on the American Film Comedy, which again, out of nostalgia, I am beginning with The Music Box. So much has changed in my understanding of film comedy between the two that I thought have The Music Box as a constant might keep me somewhat grounded. It occurs to me as I am about to post this that my first two books, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic are mirrored by the two classes I am teaching this term. Everything old is new again

What motivates me to get back into film comedy is the sheer range of film texts which are available now that were impossible to access three decades ago. These new discoveries are surfacing as a consequence of archival restorations, silent film festivals, small dvd publishers, and the writings of film buffs and collectors. As a consequence, I am trying to introduce students to canonical works (Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon, and Lloyd still structure the opening weeks of the class) but also to disrupt that canon by showing how those performers are connected, existed alongside, and drew upon many performers who are today much less well known. For example, generations and generations of women as comedians, as directors, have been written out of the classical accounts of film comedy, but we now can see many of their works if we care to focus our attention in their direction. Similarly, we can start to locate today’s minority comics in a larger historical context and thus to reappraise the range of radicalized representations within the film comedy tradition with a greater engagement with Black creative agency.

As a consequence, the class places much greater attention onto screening works of comedy from all periods and writing responses to what you see than it places on film scholarship per se. I plan to tell my students that given the necessary choice to either watch films or do the readings, they should watch the films. And I am including many films, accessible online, to watch outside the class time, even as I am cramming the class period with clips, shorts, and features which we will watch together, hopefully with some collective laughter, despite the fact that we will all be wearing masks.

My book, What Made Pistachio Nuts? explores the intersection between film comedy and comic performance in other media. I plan to extend this work by showing connections between film comedy and comic expression in circus and popular theater, radio, television, recorded sound, standup, printed comics. and other related media practices. I will similarly be putting American film comedy into conversation with other international traditions and I am going to look for points where I can connect historic film comedy with contemporary comic texts.

If there’s a weak point here, it is that I give disproportionate attention to comedian-centered comedy at the expense of the romance comedy tradition — this reflects my interest in performance and my own knowledge and investments as a film scholar. I need. to figure out how to integrate that romantic tradition more fully into the course the next time I teach it, but I opted to follow my passion this go around.

CTCS 688: Moving Image Histories: Methods and Approaches 

The American Film Comedy

Fall 2021 | 4.0 Units

COURSE DESCRIPTION AND LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Across the semester, we will explore the American film comedy tradition -- from the role of slapstick in early cinema to the role that contemporary screen comedies play in fostering debates around gender, race, and sexuality. My approach is decisively revisionist with canonical figures and text read alongside those that history has tended to forget -- for example, what happens when we re-center silent film comedy from Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Langdon, to incorporate a broader range of recently rediscovered silent performers, including a number of women who had their own followings at the time? Performance is a recurring focus here, in speaking not only about comedian-centered comedies but also romantic and social comedies. Performance is understood in relation to a broader range of media traditions -- particularly those associated with popular theater (the circus, Vaudeville, music hall, Commedia Dell'arte) but also radio, records, nightclubs, and television. Through this focus on performance, we gain core insights into bodies, pleasure, and emotions, but also disruption and transgression, as central attractions of the cinema. Along the way, we will be asking what it means to write the history of a film genre as pervasive as comedy.

Note: As we will discuss across the course, I do not guarantee that any given film will make you laugh. Comedy as a genre is only partially defined through laughter. Laughter, like comedy, has a history. Comedies may be especially interesting when they confront us with things that once made people laugh -- in specific cultural contexts -- but challenge us to understand why they were meaningful in the past. I also am pretty sure at some point in this class, you will find something you will find offensive. These films deal with stereotypes and show us more directly than many other genres do attitudes about race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, class, etc., which are problematic. There is a power in confronting these moments directly and understanding how they fit into the larger history of American film comedy rather than avoiding them and simplifying our understanding of the past.  Performers of color often struggled to nuance or disrupt these stereotypes through their staging of them, and we do them a disservice if we ignore these important sites of struggle. 

REQUIRED BOOKS AND SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS

Henry Jenkins and Kristina B, Karnick, Classical Hollywood Comedy

Rob King, Slapstick Comedy

Additional readings will be accessed via Blackboard or online. In addition to viewings via the SCA Viewing Portal, many viewings will be accessed online. See the Media Resources List attached to this syllabus for a full listing of required viewing/listening for the semester.

GRADING BREAKDOWN

• Collaborative Writing Round 1 20%

• Collaborative Writing Round 2 30%

• Collaborative Writing Round 3 30%

• Final Paper 20%

DESCRIPTION AND ASSESSMENT OF EACH ASSIGNMENT 

Collaborative Writing: Students will be paired and asked to engage in a written conversation each week around the class materials. This is your space to frame questions, offer reflections on what you have read and seen, and help to set the class agenda. I will write feedback intended to further push your thinking. Each student should right at least 500 words per week. Ideally, each group will go back and forth twice each week so you want to allow time in your course preparation to do this.  This will be the primary means you demonstrate mastery over the course material. I will give grades three times across the term (Round 1 20 percent, Round 2 30 percent, Round 3 30 percent)

Final Paper -- Students will write a 10-page paper on a topic of their choosing related to the course content. They should consult with me as your plans are taking shape.

 WEEKLY SCHEDULE 

The following weekly schedule is subject to change. Please consult the Blackboard site for the most current information, assignments, and due dates. 

Each week, we will be watching (and listening to) a range of different media artifacts—short and long—which help us to explore diverse aspects of that week’s topic.  Many weeks, we will be watching films prior to class as part of the assigned homework. We will be providing information about the best way to access this material. If you have to make a choice between watching the films and reading assignments, focus on watching the films. But where possible, do both and incorporate reflections on each into your collaborative writing. I will be assuming familiarity with video/audio material assigned prior to class as we discuss each week’s material.  You should be asking questions as you watch and you should bring those questions to bear on our discussions, in class and on Blackboard.

Week 1 Rethinking the History of American Film Comedy (Thursday, August 26th)

Readings:

James Agee, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” Life, 1949, https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2019/11/17/comedys-greatest-era-james-agee/.

Henry Jenkins and Kristine Brunovska Karnack, “Introduction: Golden Eras and Blind Spots -- Genre, History, and Comedy,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

Louise Peacock, “Clowns and Clown Play,” in Peta Tait and Katie Lavers (eds.), The Routledge Circus Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2016).

Rob King, “Historiography and Humorlects,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58(3), Spring 2019.

Maggie Hennefeld, “Looking for Leontine: My Obsession with a Forgotten Film Queen,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 24 September 2019, https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/looking-for-leontine-my-obsession-with-a-forgotten-screen-queen/.

Recommended Reading: 

John Rudlin, “Playing Commedia,” Commedia Dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook (London: Routledge, 1994).

Henry Jenkins, “How Is It Possible for a Civilized Man to Live Among a People Who are Constantly Joking,” What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

In Class Screening:

The Music Box (James Parrot, 1932) (27:42) 

The Sprinkler Sprinkled (Louis Lumiere, 1895) (1:12)

Une Histoire Roulante (Alice Guy Blache, 1906) (2:35)

The ? Motorist (W. R. Booth, 1906) (2.26)

Lea and the Ball of Wool (Lea Giunchi, 1913) (3:36)

Polidor contro La Suocera (Ferdinand Guillaume, 1912) (8:18)

Onesime Clockmaker (Jean Durand, 1912) (8:04)

Be Reasonable (Roy Del Ruth, 1921) (15:34)

Mable’s Strange Predicament (Mabel Normand, 1914) (11:54)

Week 2 The Pie and the Chase (Thursday, September 2nd)

Readings:

Donald Crafton, “The Pie and the Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

Tom Gunning, “Response to Pie and Chase,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

Douglas Ribblet, “The Keystone Film Company and the Historiography of Early Slapstick Comedy,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

Murial Andrin, “Back to the ‘Slap’: Slapstick’s Hyperbolic Gesture and The Rhetoric of Violence,” Slapstick Comedy.  

Recommended Reading: 

Peter Kramer, “Derailing the Honeymoon Express: Comicality and Narrative Closure in Buster Keaton’s The Blacksmith,” Velvet Light Trap 23, Spring 1989.

Noel Carroll, “Notes on the Sight Gag,” in Andrew Horton (ed.), Comedy/Cinema/Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

In Class Screening:

His Wooden Wedding (Leo McCarey, 1925) (19:35)

Pass the Gravy (Leo McCarey, 1928) (24:40)

What’s the World Coming To (Richard Wallace, 1926) (10:36)

The Playhouse (Buster Keaton, 1921) (22 mins.)

Week 3 Crazy Machines and Their Inventors (Thursday, September 9th)

Before Class Screening:

Buster Keaton: The Art of the Gag (2015) (8:35)

Backstage (Roscoe Arbuckle, 1919) (19:39)

The Electric House (Buster Keaton, 1922) (23:30)

One Week (Buster Keaton, 1920) (22.24)

Readings:

Tom Gunning, “Crazy Machines in The Garden if the Forking Paths: Mischief Gags and the Origins of American Film Comedy,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

Henry Jenkins, “‘That Keaton Fellow Seems to be the Whole Show’: Buster Keaton, Interrupted Performance, and the Vaudeville Aesthetic,” in Andrew Horton (ed.), Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Rob King, “The Art of Diddling: Slapstick, Science and Antimodernism in the Films of Charlie Bower,” in Daniel Ira Goldmark and Charles Keil (eds.), Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-era Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

Recommended Reading:

Tom Gunning, “Mechanisms of Laughter: The Devices of Slapstick,” Slapstick Comedy.

(cont.)

In Class Screening:

Sherlock Junior (Buster Keaton, 1924) (45 mins.)  

Now You Tell One (Charles Bowers, 1926) (22:19)

It’s A Gift (Hugh Fay, 1923) (10:12)

Plastered (Norman Taurog, 1930) (10 mins.)

Jackie Chan: Master of Silent Comedy (9:13)

This Too Shall Pass (O.K. Go, 2010) (3:53)

Week 4 Tramps, Immigrants, and Other Outsiders (Thursday, September 16th)

Before Class Screening:

Easy Street (Charles Chaplin, 1917) (23:27)

The Immigrant (Charles Chaplin, 1917) (24:31)

Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936) (1:27:24)

Readings:

Jennifer M. Bean, “The Art of Imitation: On the Originality of Charlie Chaplin and Other Moving Images Myths,” Slapstick Comedy.

Tom Gunning, “Chaplin and the Body of Modernity,” Early Popular Visual Culture 8(3), 2010.

Elizabeth L. Sanderson, “Bert Williams: Minstrelsy and Silent Cinema,” Spike Lee’s Bamboozled and Black Face in American Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019).

Recommended Reading: 

Alan Bilton, “Accelerated Bodies and Jumping Jacks: Automata, Mannequins and Toys in The Films of Charlie Chaplin,” Silent Film Comedy and American Culture (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013).

In Class Screening:

Sidewalk Stories (Charles Lane, 1989) (1:40:45)

Cinderella Cinders (Alice Howell, 1920) (19:23)

Just Imagination (Harry Watson Jr., 1916) (13:59)

Week 5 Comedy and the Modern City (Thursday, September 23rd)

Before Class Screening:

It (Charles G. Badger, 1927) (1:16:25)

Readings:

Steven Jacobs, “Slapstick Skyscrapers: An Architecture of Attractions,” Slapstick Comedy.

Charles Musser, “California Slapstick Revisited,” Slapstick Comedy.

Recommended Reading: 

William Solomon, “Harold Lloyd’s ‘Thrill’ Films,” Slapstick Modernism: Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy Pop (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

Alan Bilton, “Consumerism and Its Discontents: Harold Lloyd and the Anxieties of Capitalism,” Silent Film Comedy and American Culture (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013).

(cont.)

In Class Screenings:

Safety Last (Fred Newmeyer and Sam Wood, 1923) (1:13:33)

A Thrilling Romance (Jess Robbins, 1926) (16 mins.)

On the Loose (Hal Roach, 1931) (20 mins.)

Week 6 Comedy and Sound: Radio (Thursday, September 30th)

Before Class Screenings:

Jack Benny Show (radio)

Buck Benny Rides Again (Mark Sandrich, 1940) (82 mins.)

Readings:

Rob King, “Sound Went Along and Out Went the Pies,” in Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (eds.), A Companion to Film Comedy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, “Eddie Anderson, Rochester, and Race in 1930s Radio and Film,” Jack Benny and The Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017),

Recommended Reading: 

Scott Balzerack, “Queered Radio/Queered Cinema,” Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2013).

In Class Screening:

Lambchops (Murray Roth, 1929) (8:01)

It’s A Gift (Norman Z. McLeod, 1934) (1:07.53)

Week 7 Vaudeville, Music Hall, and Comic Anarchy (Thursday, October 7th)

Before Class Screening:

Love and Hisses (Sam White, 1934) (17:47)

Dumb and Dumber (Farrelly Brothers, 1994) (117 mins.)

Readings:

Henry Jenkins, “A Regular Mine, a Reservoir, A Proving Ground,” What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

Henry Jenkins and Kristine Brunoska Karnack, “Acting Funny,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

Rob King, “The Cuckoo School,” Hokum!: The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).

Recommended Reading: 

William Paul, “Animal Comedy,” Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

In Class Screening:

Hotel Anchovy (Al Christie, 1934) (17:52)

Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1934) (1:09:42)

Thursday, Oct 14th Fall Recess

Week 8 Comedy and Femininity (Thursday, October 21st)

Before class screening:  Booksmart (Olivia Wilde, 1929) (105 mins.)

Readings:

Kristin Anderson Wagner, “Pie Queens and Virtuous Vamps: The Funny Women of the Silent Screen,” in Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (eds.), A Companion to Film Comedy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Henry Jenkins, “Don’t Become Too Intimate with That Terrible Woman?” What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

Mary J. Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994).

Natalie Zemon Davis, “Woman on Top,” Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975).

Recommended Reading: 

Henry Jenkins, “You Don’t Say That in English,” The Wow Climax (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

In Class Screening:

The Patsy (King Vidor, 1928) (78 mins.)

The Introduction of Mrs. Gibbs (1930) (10 mins.)

Week 9 Comedy and Masculinity (Thursday, October 28th)

Before Class Screening: 

The Chaser (Harry Langdon, 1928) (1:02:46)

Readings:

Scott Balzerack, “Someone Like Me for a Member,” Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2013).

 Tamar Jeffers McDonald, “The View from the Man-Cave,” in Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (eds.), A Companion to Film Comedy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Joanna E. Rapf, “Doing Nothing: Harry Langdon And the Performance of Absence,” Film Quarterly 59(1), Fall 2005.

Recommended Reading: 

Alan Bilton, “Shell-Shocked Silents: Langdon, Repetition-Compulsion and World War I,” Silent Film Comedy and American Culture (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013).

Scott Bukatman, “Paralysis in Motion: Jerry Lewis’s Life As A Man,” in Andrew Horton (ed.), Comedy/Cinema/Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

In Class Screening:

The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Judd Apatow, 2005) (116 mins.)

Week 10 From Screwball to Rom-Com (Thursday, November 4th)

Before Class Screening:
Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938) (102 mins.)

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941) (94 mins.)

Readings:

Kristine Karnick, “Commitment and Reaffirmation in Hollywood Romantic Comedy,” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

In Class Screening:

Game Night (John Francis Daley/Jonathan Goldstein, 2018) (100 mins.)

Week 11 Comedy and Race (Thursday, November 11th)

Before Class Screening:

Dolemite Is My Name (Craig Brewer, 2019) (118 mins.)

You Must Remember This: “Hattie McDaniels” (podcast) (30 mins.)

Readings:

Mel Watkins, “Race Records and Black Films,” On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1994).

George Derk, “Inverting Hollywood from the Outside in: The Film’s within Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman,” Screen 59(3),Autumn 2018.

Recommended Reading: 

Bambi Haggins, “The Post-Soul Comedy Goes to the Movies,” Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007).

Racquel Gates, “Subverting Hollywood From the Inside Out,” Film Quarterly 68(1), Fall 2014.

In Class Screening:

The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996) (90 mins.)

Week 12 Vulgar Modernism (Thursday, November 18th)

Before Class Screening:

Hellzapoppin (H.C. Potter, 1941) (84 mins.)

The Stan Freberg Show (1957)

Bob and Ray (1955)

Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, “2000 Year Old Man” (1950s/1960s)

The Goon Show (1955)

Readings:

Frank Krutnik, “A Spanner in the Works?” Classical Hollywood Comedy.

Henry Jenkins, “I Like to Kick Myself in The Face,” in Daniel Ira Goldmark and Charles Keil (eds.), Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

(cont.)

Henry Jenkins, “Mel Brooks, Vulgar Modernism, and Comic Remediation,” in Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (eds.), A Companion to Film Comedy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Ethan De Seifie, “Tashlin, Comedy and the ‘Live-Action Cartoon’,” Tashhlinesque: The Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012).

Recommended Reading:

Ethan Thompson, “What Me Subversive?” Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010).

In Class Screening:

Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974) (93 mins.) 

Thursday, November 25th Thanksgiving NO CLASS

Week 13: Comedy, Politics and War (Thursday, December 2nd)

Before class screening:

You Nazi Spy! (Jules White, 1940) (18 mins.)

To Be or Not to Be (Ernest Lubitsch, 1942) (99 mins.) 

Readings:

Maria DiBatista, “The Totalitarian Comedy of Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be” in Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (eds.), A Companion to Film Comedy (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Louis Kaplin, “It Will Get a Terrific Laugh,” in Henry Jenkins, Tara Mcpherson, and Jane Shattuc (eds.), Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

In Class Screening:

The Death of Stalin ( Armando Iannucci, 2017) (107 mins.)