Jazgol: Comedy Genre

The film genre comedy is one of the oldest styles of film and originates back to the beginning of film itself as being the leading forms of silent films in the 1920s. Comedy films main focus obviously is to create a humors film which is very enjoyable for the audience and provokes laughter and amusement. Evolving over time, the comedy now has several sub forms such as the romantic comedy, slap stick and the black comedy which will be reviewed in this post.

During the 1920s, the beginning of the film era, films relied on the use of popular comedians, very easy to follow narratives, cartoons such as Betty Boop, and in particular slap stick comedy which was easy to follow without the use of sound. The Slap stick comedy does not require sound to be effective as it relies on the most basic forms of comedy, people hurting themselves or silly behavour. The use of pies in the face and over exgaddergated visual action made slap stick comedy very popular with children as well as non English speaking people. Although in contemporary film, slap stick ceomdy has evloved into characters such as Mr. Bean.

The comedy genre has continued to be extremely popular since the beginning of film making, and continues to create new froms of entertaining its audience, the romantic comedy may be one of the oldest sub forms of comedy but continues to be one of the most popluar. The romantic comedy usually follows a narrative storyline centring around two protagonists who may argue or overcome an obsticle which has stopped the two from uniting and ultamitely come together as a romantic couple. The ‘happy ending’ is usually present within romantic comedies which affirms the belief of love concuring all. Of course each film has variations of this basic plotline but it seems the majority of romantic films follow this style.

The black comedy differs from the slap stick and romantic comedies in that generally the black humor takes on taboo or serious issues in a serious tone. Unlike the other forms of comedy, black comedy deals with issues such as racism, sexism, drug addiction, insanity etc. Black comedies usually have deeper meaning then the simpler comedy, although are just as humorous. The film 'The Royal Tenenbaums' (2001) is a perfect exmaple of black comedy starring Gene Hackman, Bill Murary and Ben stiller.