comedy text from 'genre and Hollywood' book

The text I have chose to study is from a book called 'genre and Hollywood' by Steve Neale, this is the first edition of the book and was published in 2000. I studied the text about comedy genre from this book which talked about conventions, ideologies and social issues at the time each type of comedy was introduced to Hollywood.

The text begins with telling us how 'comedy has always been a significant staple in Hollywood's output' therefore we know that comedy is an important genre.

The text says that since the days of Chaplin, the frameworks of concern have 'tended to focus on issues of aesthetic integrity, self-expression and direct or indirect social and cultural worth'.
However in more recent books the focus has changed, the text says 'Aesthetics, evaluation and socio-cultural issues are by no means absent from more recent books. But the agendas within which they are working are in general rather different from those governing earlier writing and research. They include feminism, gender and sexual politics; structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis; cultural studies, race and ethnicity; and the 1980s turn towards archival and historical research.' - i think that this information is very useful as I can see which social issues are apparent in more recent comic films compared to earlier comic films.

'Comedy can also entail an array of defining conventions (from the generation of laughter to the presence of happy endings to the representation of everyday life)' - this is more evidence linking to the point on my previous research of a wiki page, it tells us that it is hard to collect the conventions of comedy and the only way of defining comedy as a whole is making people laugh.

The text tells us how we can identify a comedy film by saying 'most discussions of comedy begin by acknowledging a basic distinction between what might be called its comic units - gags, jokes, funny moments and the like - and the narrative and non-narrative contexts in which they occur'.