SSC Film Studies

Re-cap report

The article is written by Steve Neale and appeared in a book called Genre and Hollywood

This text tells me about different books which focus on genre and how the authors of the books have interpreted the comedy genre with links to social issues. 

The text says that since the days of Chaplin, the frameworks of concern ‘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.’ – important because I can see which social issues are apparent in more recent comic films compared to earlier comic films.

This text also talks about the conventions of comedy ‘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)’ – the only way of defining comedy as a whole is making people laugh.

‘most discussions of comedy being 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.’

The second resource I used was a Laurel and Hardy silent film called “From Soup to Nuts’