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
4 - Parody: Targeting Cinema's Narrative Technics
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
Wherever one things stands, another stands beside it.
Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (145)Aristotle's thoughts on comedy are limited to a pile of fragments, now duly and very usefully gathered and annotated (see Richard Janko's excellent work on this). As fragments go, these are very fragmented indeed, and we glean not a great deal more than what is on offer in The Poetics, in which Aristotle's general disregard for the form is apparent. In this work, though, he does mention Hegemon of Thasos as the founder of parody, a mode of address, Aristotle claims – as with comedy generally – that makes men out to be worse than they are. Tragedy, on the other hand, presents men as better than they are. In both instances, representation does too little and too much at the same time, imitating life in a less than sufficient manner, but being productive as well, as the earlier discussion of mimesis examines. Hegemon of Thasos, though, makes an important mark on the Attican dramatic scene with his Battle of the Giants, which parodies a war that is under way in Sicily. The story about it runs as follows: news of a horrible defeat reached the citizens' ears during his performance, but the audience did not leave the theatre to mourn. Rather, they stayed to laugh and weep at the same time.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film , pp. 93 - 124Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013