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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.

Introduction: Mad History of the World – Hannu Salmi, University of Turku

PART I: COMEDIANS AND COMIC REPRESENTATIONS

Buster Keaton’s Comedies of Southern History: Our Hospitality and The General – Susan E. Linville, University of Denver

From Ideal Husbands to Berserk Gargoyles: Comic Representations of the British Past in the 1950s and 1960s – Harri Kilpi, University of Helsinki

Comedians and Romance: History and Humour in Kalabalik – David Ludvigsson, University of Uppsala

Woody Allen and History – Maurice Yawocar, University of Calgary

PART II: NO LAUGHING MATTER

No Laughing Matter? Comedy and The Spanish Civil War – David Archibald, University of Glasgow

A Killer Joke? World War Two in Post-War British Television and Film Comedy – Rami Mähkä, University of Turku

“Holocaust-Nostalgia”, Humor and Irony: The Case of Pizza in Auschwitz – Hagai Dagan, Sapir College

Comedy and Counter-history – Marcia Landy, University of Pittsburg

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HISTORY

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Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	27 mai 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781841505220
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Historical Comedy on Screen
Historical Comedy on Screen
Subverting History with Humour
Edited by Hannu Salmi
First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2011 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose Copy-editor: Rebecca Vaughan-Williams Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978-1-84150-367-7
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
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 M hk , 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
H istory 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 M hk , 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 tait cont (Royal Affairs in Versailles, 1954), Mario Monicelli s L armata Brancaleone (Brancaleone s Army, 1966) and Jean Yanne s Deux heures moins le quart avant J sus-Christ (Quarter to Two Before Jesus Christ, 1982). On the other hand, the articles also focus on the role of comedy in historical narration, which is a mode usually founded on tragedy. This includes films like Moshe Zimerman s documentary Pizza in Auschwitz (2008) and tragi-comedies such as Carlos Saura s Ay, Carmela! (1990). Time travel films, such as Jean-Marie Poir s Les Visiteurs (The Visitors, 1993), in which the eleventh-century knight Godefrey de Papincourt and his servants are unexpectedly transported to 1990s France, also traverse the zone between history and humour.
It is important to make a distinction between comedy, being comedic and being comic. Since laughter is always communicative, the quality of being comic is linked to the question of the reception of any particular film. In his classic Laughter (Le Rire, 1899), the French philosopher Henri Bergson links three individual elements to the quality of being comic. Laughter, he claims, is always associated with humanity: no comedy exists without the presence of human beings. This is why a landscape, for example, may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly [but] it will never be laughable . Another important element is a certain absence of feeling : indifference is a fruitful ground for laughter, while dispensing with pity and compassion liberates laughter. Bergson (2008: 11) calls his third identifying characteristic a connection between intelligences: laughter appears to stand in need of an echo , he writes. In theatre, the spectator laughs: the fuller the theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience! Cultural researchers have for decades discussed and argued about the relationship between text and conte