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Comedy/Cinema/Theory

University of California Press

Although claims about "firsts" always seem disputable when it comes to the history of film, a case can be made that the first film was a comedydepending on whether one dates Fred Ott's Sneeze as having been made in 1889 or 1892. In any case, comedy appeared early in film history. Thomas Edison provided peep shows of clowns and a kinetoscope series entitled Monkeyshines , which, at least, suggests comic doings. In terms of films made for the screen, the first Lumihre show in 1895 contained one comedy, L'Arroseur Arrosi , in which a hapless gardener gets a face full of water when a prankster toys with his hose.

Comedy of a sort, of course, also figures largely in the films of Georges Milihsalthough not comedy of the variety one usually associates with gags or jokes. It is more a matter of joy borne of marvelous transformations and physically impossible events: bodies blown apart and then reassembledwith unwanted fat emulsified. This is comedy that derives from exploiting the magical properties of cinema, a comedy of metaphysical release that celebrates the possibility of substituting the laws of physics with the laws of the imagination. Milihs's experiments gave rise to the early genre of the trick film, which promotes levity by animating the inanimate and by visualizing a fantastic physics. Here, the undeniably high spirits evoked seem less concerned with what we typically call humor and more involved with indulging a newfound freedom, the power of molding the physical world in accordance with the fancyin short, a kind of cosmic wish fulfillment.

Early comedy also gravitated toward roughhouse and slapstick. Here the major theme was mayhem. Buffoons, marked by only slightly disguised clown outfits, would be set into exaggerated fisticuffs, discharging

pistol shots into each other's behinds, jabbing each other with pitchforks, and clunking each other on the head with bricks. Because these clowns were signaled to be not quite human, they could be pummeled, dragged, hurled, hosed, burned, and stomped with impunity. Their fantastic biologies allowed the free reign of sadism in terms of either comic debacles or sprawling accidents, after the fashion of the Keystone Kops. In these cases, comedy was generally less a function of structure than of the transgression of social inhibitions about the proper way in which to treat the human body.

Whereas the trick film transgressed the laws of physics, films by people such as Mack Sennett tended to transgress the laws of society, especially in terms of the norms of respect appropriate to the handling of persons. In both cases, the comedy in question proceeded simply by displaying transgressive material. Gradually, however, a more structural type of comedy became a major source of humor in silent film. This was the sight gag.1 And it is about the sight gag that this chapter is concerned.

The sight gag is a form of visual humor in which amusement is generated by the play of alternative interpretations projected by the image or image series. Sight gags existed in theater prior to their cinematic refinement, and sight gags, although they are regarded as a hallmark of the silent comedy, can occur in films that are neither silent nor comic. To orient our discussion, consider a famous example of a sight gag in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1934). The character played by Robert Donat has been manacled to a woman who positively hates him. They come to an inn, where the landlady takes them to be intensely affectionate newlyweds. Their closeness is in fact mandated by the handcuffs, and when Donat pulls his prisoner toward him, this is in order to get more control over her. The landlady misinterprets these gestures as further signs of the "lovers'" infatuation, although we hear them exchanging hostilities. The scene is shot and blocked in such a way that we not only know how things actually stand between these "lovers," but we also simultaneously see how someone in the landlady's position could systematically misinterpret the situation. Our amusement is generated by the fact that the scene is staged to show not only what is actually going on but how that set of events could also visually support an alternative, and in this case conflicting, interpretation. And it is this play of alternative, often conflicting interpretations, rooted first and foremost in the visual organization of the scene, that primarily causes the amusement that attends sight gags.

The type of humor of which the sight gag is a subcategory is often analyzed in terms of incongruity. On this view, amusement is provoked by the juxtaposition of incongruous elements. Comic duos, for example, are

often composed by pairing a very fat man (or woman) with a thin man (or woman), or a tall, thin actor with a short, fat one, and so on. In the preceding example from Hitchcock, what is juxtaposed are two incompatible interpretations: that of a loving couple versus that of a hateful couple.

Stated schematically, the incongruity theory of humor says that comic amusement is an emotional state. Like all, or at least most, emotional states, comic amusement is identified by its object. The object of comic amusement is humor, where among the central criteria for what can be humorousits formal object , to revert to philosophical jargonis incongruity. The perception of incongruity in an event or situation amuses us, which in turn causes the risible sensationslaughter, for examplethat we feel in response to humor. With sight gags, the loci of the relevant incongruities are the alternative, generally opposed interpretations put in play visually by the image.

Sight gags differ from verbal jokes. Verbal jokes generally culminate in a punchline that at first glance is incongruous by virtue of its appearing to be nonsense. Once the punchline is delivered, however, the audience has to give it an unexpected, although latently predictable or retrospectively comprehensible, interpretation that makes sense out of the incongruity. Succeeding in this, the audience is amused and the result is standardly laughter. For example: what do you get when you cross a chicken with a hawk? Answer: a quail. At first, this answer is nonsensical until you realize that "quail" is a pun on "Quayle" and that "chicken" and "hawk" are being used metaphorically, not literally. In order to appreciate this joke, one must reinterpret the riddle in light of the punchline in a way that effectively amounts to retelling the joke material to oneself. One is initially stymied by the incongruity of the punchline, which leads to a re interpretation of the joke material that makes it comprehensible.

Sight gags also involve a play of interpretations. But with sight gags, the play of interpretation is often visually available to the audience simultaneously throughout the gag; the audience need not await something akin to the punchline in a verbal joke to put the interpretative play in motion.

To get a better handle on the nature of the sight gag, let us examine some major recurring types of this sort of cinematic humor. The following list does not pretend to be exhaustive; nor would I claim that some of these categories might not be so interwoven in specific cases that classifying a given gag neatly under one or another of my labels might not become daunting. In other words, I am aware of some conceptual slippage in this incomplete taxonomy, but I offer it nevertheless in the hope that future...