E-Book Overview
Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik take as their starting point the remarkable diversity of comedy's forms and modes - feature-length narratives, sketches and shorts, sit-com and variety, slapstick and romance. Relating this diversity to the variety of comedy's basic conventions - from happy endings to the presence of gags and the involvement of humour and laughter - they seek both to explain the nature of these forms and conventions and to relate them to their institutional contexts. They propose that all forms and modes of the comic involve deviations from aesthetic and cultural conventions and norms, and, to demonstrate this, they discuss a wide range of programmes and films, from Blackadder to Bringing up Baby, from City Limits to Blind Date, from the Roadrunner cartoons to Bless this House and The Two Ronnies. Comedies looked at in particular detail include: the classic slapstick films of Keaton, Lloyd, and Chaplin; Hollywood's 'screwball' comedies of the 1930s and 1940s; Monty Python, Hancock, and Steptoe and Son. The authors also relate their discussion to radio comedy.
E-Book Content
Popular Film and Television Comedy What is comedy? Can it easily be defined and described? Despite its immense and longstanding popularity, comedy has been relatively neglected in recent theoretical and historical work on film, television, and other popular media. This book seeks to redress the balance. Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik take as their starting point the remarkable diversity of comedy’s forms and modes – feature-length narratives, sketches and shorts, sit-com and variety, slapstick and romance. Relating this diversity to the variety of comedy’s basic conventions – from happy endings to the presence of gags and the involvement of humour and laughter – they seek both to explain the nature of these forms and conventions and to relate them to their institutional contexts. They propose that all forms and modes of the comic involve deviations from aesthetic and cultural conventions and norms, and, to demonstrate this, they discuss a wide range of programmes and films, from Blackadder to Bringing Up Baby, from City Lights to Blind Date, from the Roadrunner cartoons to Bless This House and The Two Ronnies. Comedies looked at in particular detail include: the classic slapstick films of Keaton, Lloyd, and Chaplin; Hollywood’s ‘screwball’ comedies of the 1930s and 1940s; Monty Python, Hancock, and Steptoe and Son. The authors also relate their discussion to radio comedy. This wide-ranging and comprehensive discussion will be of particular interest to students of cinema, television, the mass media, and popular culture. Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik both lecture in Film Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury. POPULAR FICTIONS SERIES Series editors: Tony Bennett Professor School of Humanities Griffith University Graham Martin Professor of English Literature Open University In the same series Cover Stories: Narrative and ideology in the British spy thriller by Michael Denning Lost Narratives: Popular fictions, politics and recent history by Roger Bromley Popular Fiction: Technology, ideology, production, reading Edited by Tony Bennett The Historical Romance 1890–1990 by Helen Hughes The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis by Barbara Creed Reading the Vampire by Ken Gelder Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction by Damien Broderick P OPULAR F ICTIONS S ERIES Popular Film and Television Comedy Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 1990 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. © 1990 Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik All rights reserved. No p