Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 American Film Comedy and Cultural Critique: Glitches in the Smooth Running of the Social Machine
- 2 The Feeding Machine and Feeding the Machine: Silence, Sound and the Technologies of Cinema
- 3 The Constitution of the Real: Documentary, Mockumentary and the Status of the Image
- 4 Parody: Targeting Cinema's Narrative Technics
- 5 The Unspeakable and Political Satire: Performance, Perception and Technology
- 6 Conclusion: Between the Machine and the Event: Film Comedy
- Index
1 - American Film Comedy and Cultural Critique: Glitches in the Smooth Running of the Social Machine
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 American Film Comedy and Cultural Critique: Glitches in the Smooth Running of the Social Machine
- 2 The Feeding Machine and Feeding the Machine: Silence, Sound and the Technologies of Cinema
- 3 The Constitution of the Real: Documentary, Mockumentary and the Status of the Image
- 4 Parody: Targeting Cinema's Narrative Technics
- 5 The Unspeakable and Political Satire: Performance, Perception and Technology
- 6 Conclusion: Between the Machine and the Event: Film Comedy
- Index
Summary
To a joke, then, I owe my first gleam of complete consciousness – which again has recapitulatory implications, since the first creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory (19)Contrary to what it seems, comedy was in reality the most serious genre in Hollywood – in the sense that it reflected through the comic mode the deepest moral and social beliefs of American life.
André Bazin, 1948 film reviewOne does not yet know what the image will give or show, but the interval must be objectively calculable, a certain technology is required, and this is perhaps the origin or the essence of technology.
Jacques Derrida, Athens, Still Remains (19)If tragedy is about the fact that people are mortal, then comedy is about the fools we make of ourselves on the way to the grave. The traditional distinction between Tragedy and Comedy, however, has always been difficult, at best, to maintain, especially when any moment or statement, depending on context, has the potential to be funny. In fact, comedy has been able to perform a great deal of analytic work that typically was the domain of tragedy or drama, especially since the end of the First World War. The emergence in the twentieth century of a host of literary and cultural figures, from James Joyce to Samuel Beckett to Eugène Ionesco to Flannery O'Connor to Joseph Heller to Günter Grass to Gabriel García Márquez to Salman Rushdie to Don DeLillo to Martin Amis and many others, reminds us of the great traditions of comedic cultural critique often ceded to other expressive arts.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film , pp. 1 - 21Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013