The problem of film comedy in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT

Radical comedy liberates spectators from their compulsive attachments to volatile objects. In that spirit, modernist film theorists placed their hopes in the raucous, world-shattering laughter elicited by violent slapstick comedies to explode the crises of the present and their foothold in habituated perception. But what remains of laughter’s revolutionary modernist project in the twenty-first century? In this article, I rethink the concept of cine-genre to pursue tropes of uncanny, uncontrollable laughter that have proliferated across all genres of contemporary cinema. Conventional genre provides an aesthetic contract of solid expectations (brokered between audiences, media-makers, and producers) to sustain the hope for what’s possible through the repetition of what’s imaginable. But in times of escalating crisis, genre itself falls apart, spawning perverse hybrid mutations. Cinema, I argue, in its renewed capacity for dialectical ‘hybridity’ can give rise to radical forms of embodied perception and affective experience that slam the brakes on the nightmare of postmodern carnival and reveal new ways forward toward a less dystopian future.

KEYWORDS:

• Slapstick
• laughter
• genre
• modernism
• politics
• cinema
• affect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Léontine s’envole (Pathé, France, August 1911).

2. Rosalie et Léontine vont au théatre (Pathé, France, 1911).

3. Sianne Ngai (2015) associates ‘zaniness’ with exploitation of comical affect in post-Fordist society. And Ngai and Berlant (2017) refer to the problem of ‘permanent carnival’ as characteristic of the crises of our current moment.

4. See Bean and Negra, 2002; Wagner, 2018; Hennefeld, 2018.

5. The capacities that I assign to genre-hybrid film comedies – to elicit indigestible laughter – have also thrived in recent television series while they have apparently declined in direct-to-platform cinema during the pandemic. Shows such as I May Destroy You (HBO, 2020), Lovecraft Country (HBO, 2020-), Succession (HBO, 2018-), WandaVision (Disney+, 2021-), and The Watchmen (HBO, 2019) play with the collision of genres to defamiliarize the past, reimagine the future, and (to varying degrees) to politicize the present. In other words, the argument I make in this article is not medium specific; but it is elaborated through the form, collective reception, and archival histories of cinema. Therefore, it would at the very least need to be substantively reframed in the context of prestige television series, which likewise often present themselves as aesthetically ‘cinematic.’ That said, and if for no other reason than to play advocate for the devil, I would argue that the momentum of genre-hybrid television comedy is serially diluted by the medium’s sprawling textual format. Injecting affective hybridity into postmodern television is like taking coals to Newcastle. While hybridized cine-genre is arguably politicized by the collapse of genre expectations (in ways that I have already elaborated), television series are merely prolonged by eating off their own tail to spawn a new episode or season or narrative arc in its wake. Therefore, laughter’s shattering confrontation with non-meaning is episodically deferred in its concrete implications (even if binge-watched with consecutive attention) by the domestic consumption and pro forma self-mutation of television series. I say this not to denigrate television (which has by now long eclipsed cinema), but to ontologize cine-genre.

6. This article is featured in a special issue, ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore: A Critical Exploration of Joker,’ edited by Sean Redmond, who emphasizes the film’s deeply divisive reception in his introduction. ‘Into this yawning gap’ between polarizing reactions ‘falls numerous projections, phantoms, interpretations, readings and counter-readings,’ observes Redmond. (‘Introduction’, 2.)

7. Matthew Rozsa paraphrases a sprawling, ugly social media debate about Joker: ‘Is it a dangerous manifesto that could inspire incels to commit acts of violence, as some of its critics fear? An edgy character study teeming with social commentary, as director Todd Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver seem to have intended?’ https://www.salon.com/2019/10/04/joker-review-todd-phillips-incels-alt-right-warner-bros/

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Maggie Hennefeld

Maggie Hennefeld is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and McKnight Presidential Fellow at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of the award-winning book Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia UP, 2018), an editor of the journal Cultural Critique, and co-editor of two volumes, Unwatchable (Rutgers UP, 2019) and Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (Duke UP, 2020). She is currently writing a book about the history of women who allegedly died from laughing too hard, considered alongside theories of female hysteria and historiographies of early cinema. In addition to her academic writing, she is a cultural critic and international curator of silent cinema.