Historical Comedy on Screen: Subverting History with Humour - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841503673 ISBN 13: 9781841503677

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

In 1893 Friedrich Engels branded history "the cruelest goddess of all." This sorrowful vision of the past is deeply rooted in the Western imagination, and history is thus presented as a joyless playground of inevitability rather than a droll world of possibilities. There are few places this is more evident than in historical cinema which tends to portray the past in a somber manner. Historical Comedy on Screen examines this tendency paying particular attention to the themes most difficult to laugh at and exploring the place where comical and historical storytelling intersect. The book emphasizes the many oft-overlooked comical renderings of history and asks what they have to tell us if we begin to take them seriously.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hannu Salmi is professor of cultural history at the University of Turku in Finland and coeditor of the series Studies on Popular Culture, also published by Intellect.

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Historical Comedy on Screen

Subverting History with Humour

By Hannu Salmi

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-367-7

Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: The Mad History of the World Hannu Salmi, University of Turku, 
PART I: Comedians and Comic Representations, 
Chapter 2: Buster Keaton's Comedies of Southern History: Our Hospitality and The General Susan E. Linville, University of Colorado Denver, 
Chapter 3: Comedians and Romance: History and Humour in Kalabalik David Ludvigsson, University of Uppsala, 
Chapter 4: From Ideal Husbands to Berserk Gargoyles: A Survey of Period Comedies Representing the British Past in the 1950s and 1960s Harri Kilpi, University of Helsinki, 
Chapter 5: Forms of History in Woody Allen Maurice Yacowar, University of Calgary, 
PART II: No Laughing Matter, 
Chapter 6: No Laughing Matter? Comedy and the Spanish Civil War in Cinema David Archibald, University of Glasgow, 
Chapter 7: A Killer Joke? World War II in Post-War British Television and Film Comedy Rami Mähkä, University of Turku, 
Chapter 8: 'Holocaust-Nostalgia', Humour and Irony: The Case of Pizza in Auschwitz Hagai Dagan, Sapir College, 
Chapter 9: Comedy and Counter-History Marcia Landy, University of Pittsburgh, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Mad History of the World

Hannu Salmi, University of Turku

'History about the most cruel of all goddesses', wrote Friedrich Engels in 1893, 'she leads her triumphal car over heaps of corpses, not only in war, but also in "peaceful" economic development' (cit. Carr 1961: 105). In Engels's view, history is a cruel tragedy, and the conception of history as something profoundly tragic has made our image of the past grim and joyless. Although one might assume there would be plenty of amusement to be found in the past, historians rarely laugh at the objects of their study. The same can be said for historical films: there is no doubt that the majority of filmed portrayals of the past paint a sombre tone. Examples from the past decades include such films as Oliver Hirschbiegel's Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004), Roland Emmerich's The Patriot (2000), Ridley Scott's The Gladiator (2000) and Luc Besson's The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999). While the past is always noble and majestic, it is, first and foremost, tragic.

This linking of history and tragedy can be traced far back into the history of Western civilization. While the tragedians Euripides, Sophocles and especially Aeschylus wrote exclusively about an ancient era of heroic deeds, the comic playwright Aristophanes found his subject matter in everyday life and politics. The contemporary environment of the author's audience was considered more appropriate raw material for merriment than the past. Methods of characterization would also vary in tragedy and comedy. In the Poetics, Aristotle considered tragedy – like the epic – 'an imitation in verse of characters of a higher type', while comedy would mainly portray 'characters of a lower type' (1449a, 30–35; 1449b, 5–10). Because we normally have no reason to laugh at human beings suffering from ethical dilemmas, the overall tone of tragedies is therefore serious. Aristotle does not appear to have had a particularly favourable opinion of satirists and comic authors. In the Rhetoric, for example, he calls them 'evil-speakers and tell-tales' (1384b, 10–15).

Ancient Greek notions of gravitas and ridiculousness, the tragic and the comic, are so deeply ingrained that they still affect our ways of imagining and portraying the past. Filmmakers – like historians – have no desire to appear as 'evil-speakers' when it concerns history and those who are no longer with us. Nevertheless, films do manage to laugh at the past surprisingly often. This collection of essays is devoted to exploring this comic treatment of history on screen.

Only little has been written on historical comedy so far. This book aims at offering new insights and openings on this rarely discussed theme, not only on historical comedy as a generic entity but, more broadly, on the role of the comic in the audiovisual representation of the past. The first part of the book deals with comedians and comic representations: Susan E. Linville analyses Buster Keaton's silent comedies on Southern history, especially Our Hospitality (1923) and The General (1927), while David Ludvigsson raises up a more recent example, the Swedish historical comedy Kalabaliken i Bender (1983) which starred several nationally known film comedians. Both Linville's and Ludvigsson's articles show comic history in the making. Obviously, humorous representations of history can be studied through different methodological approaches. Harri Kilpi makes an interesting experiment by not focusing on any particular moment in film history or any single example of comic storytelling. Instead, he makes a survey of period comedies about the British past in the 1950s and 1960s and shows how historical comedy can be studied by considering larger trends in film production. Maurice Yacowar, instead, writes on one comedian, Woody Allen, who has dealt with history throughout his career, with ample references to earlier films, and who draws much on his own filmic history. For Allen, history is not something external; it is part of one's identity.

The second part of this book is comprised of articles dealing with the comic treatment of traumatic historical events. David Archibald points out that there has been a place for laughter even in the middle of the Spanish Civil War tragedies. Rami Mähkä, in turn, concentrates on the description of World War II in post-war British film and television. Most serious and tragic features of European history have received a comic treatment, through various modes of comic narration, from parody to irony. Hagai Dagan continues to explore traumatic events in his in-depth analysis of a documentary Pizza in Auschwitz (2008) which interestingly combines irony with nostalgia. The book ends with Marcia Landy's essay 'Comedy and Counter-History', arguing that parody and satire are effective rhetorical techniques for producing a counter-narrative of the historical past. Landy's examples range from such hilarious portraits of history as Mario Monicelli's L'armata Brancaleone (Brancaleone's Army, 1966) to Stanley Kubrick's ironic studies about the past.

Before going more deeply into the subject, it is important to track down basic features of historical humour. This introduction starts by dealing with conceptual questions and, after that, tries to outline the practices and devices of historical comedy, including the conscious use of anachronisms, the deconstruction and revision of genre conventions, and the 'othering' of the past, i.e. making it strange and absurd which often seems to be the case.

History, Comedy and Humour

The question of the relationship between history and humour in film is a complex one. As already implied, the articles in this collection not only focus on one subgenre of historical film, namely historical comedy, but also on the ways of being comedic that have been used to inject comic relief or critical edge into history films. Many of the films examined in this volume are historical films that can be classified as comedies, such as Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Sacha Guitry's Si Versailles m'était...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1841503673
• ISBN 13: 9781841503677
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Herausgeber: Salmi Hannu
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland