Understanding Comedy through College Comedies

By Norman Kagan

Understanding Comedy through College Comedies explains the nature of comedy through the study of college comedy films, including classics (College, The Freshman); romantic/screwball comedies (Where the Boys Are, Ball of Fire, Sterile Cuckoo); famous comedian comedies (Horse Feathers, The Nutty Professor, The Klumps); intergenerational college comedies (That’s My Boy, Back to School, Old School); social comedies (The Graduate, Breaking Away, Risky Business); political comedies (Getting Straight, Strawberry Statement, Last Supper); ethnic comedies (School Daze, Soul Man, How High); and college farces (Charlie’s Aunt, Animal House, Revenge of the Nerds, Slackers). In this book, Norman Kagan explains comic terminology, concepts, and theories, including Freud’s “displaced sexual content” in Decline of the American Empires, Langer’s “vitalism” in Slacker, Bergson’s “anesthesia of the heart” in The Squid and the Whale, and Frye’s “reversal of literary modes” in Storytelling. The reader will discover the reasons why they are laughing, new reasons to laugh, and new films that will provide new sources of laughter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Aug 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9780761870630

Book preview

Understanding Comedy

through College Comedies

From antiquity to Freud or Bergson, every attempt to define comic seems to be jeopardized by the fact that this is an umbrella term (referring, In Wittgensteinian jargon, to a network of family resemblance) that gathers together a disturbing ensemble of diverse and not completely homogeneous phenomena, such as humor, comedy, grotesque, parody, satire, wit, and so on.

—Umberto Eco

Through humor we see in what seems rational, the irrational; in what seems important, the unimportant. It also heightens our sense of survival and preserves our sanity.

—Charlie Chaplin

Understanding Comedy

through College Comedies

Norman Kagan

Hamilton Books

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Printed in the United States of America

To my sister,

Joan Ellin Feinberg

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor Kenneth Koch for his illuminating input on this subject, and freelance editor Carol Cartaino for her knowledgeable assistance at all stages of this book’s creation.

Thanks too, to my editors at Rowman—Holly Buchanan, Brooke Bures, and Emma Richard, for their cheerful and timely helpfulness.

Chapter 1

College Comedies

and Comedy

Why a study of college comedies?

Studying college comedies illuminates nearly every type of comedy. As the table of contents of this book suggests, there are college comedies that employ every sort of comedy in almost every sort of film: social college comedies, political college comedies, racial/ethnic college comedies, intergenerational college comedies, college musicals, and college farces. College comedies also provide performances by and insights into some of the greatest comic talents—Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, Jerry Lewis, and others. Finally, college comedies illustrate the ideas of leading comedy theorists, including Sigmund Freud, Susan Langer, Wylie Sypher, George Meredith, Henri Bergson, Northrop Frye, Robert Heilman, and others discussed here.

Moreover, college comedies lend themselves to film study and film classes, since they often share very similar settings, character types, and plot basics, yet can employ different comic styles, attitudes, and points of view. Hence it’s easier to catch on to the fine points, subtleties, and evolution of comic devices, techniques, and concerns, as well as filmic ones. As a new kind of text suitable for film, comedy, or other courses, this book begins with a brief survey of comedy theories, genres, and forms, before going on to provide chronological examinations of the various kinds of comic college film, with detailed discussions of the more significant films, well known or otherwise, that illustrate the ideas discussed.

This approach allows reflection on how the films comment on larger social, political, and cultural concerns in the United States over the years, from an often detached and sarcastic viewpoint.

On a personal note, as a longtime college teacher and student of film, I feel that my background has been an optimum preparation for understanding and elucidating these films’ comedy in the contexts of the various theories and analyses of the subject.

Going to college today is often extremely stressful for many students in terms of costs, the need to work while attending college, adolescent and other emotional traumas, career decisions, and so forth (the average college student in the United States now needs five years to graduate, whereas two decades ago it was four). In addition, many students sadly lack the cultural or filmic background to appreciate many classic film comedies, and so find them boring, incomprehensible, or alienating (e.g., Chaplin’s tramp comedies, The Philadelphia Story, The Italian Straw Hat, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday). This book’s focus on college comedies improves the chances that these students will profit from, and enjoy, a course in the subject. And then be ready for the sophisticated comedies!

Having taught film courses for years at several colleges and universities, I’ll even propose that this book and a suitable related course could improve students’ adjustment to college and college performance overall or even make the difference between graduating or leaving. Studies have shown that college students can go through five years of college without seeing themselves as increasingly cultured and trained young adults, instead identifying only with their families and/or friends. Or they may just remain totally alone—isolated, struggling outsiders in what seems a hostile, exploitive institution. Seeing the college experience in other contexts, through these films, even as just playful or joyful, can be a start toward seeing college life as having goals and values—the search for truth, the upholding of ethics, and ideas they can believe in and participate in. Or if intuiting that these purposes are not being sought, asking why not?

Comedy—Some Analysis

Comedy has been studied and analyzed by professors, scientists, comedians, and many others, without clear agreement on definitions or conclusions about its nature or creation. Historically at least, it has always been a quicksilver form, constantly changing its makeup. Major Hollywood talents—writers and directors and comic actors—have spent years and tens of millions of dollars on a comedy project that turns out to be a failure (e.g., Ishtar), while outsiders with little experience or money have produced blockbusters (e.g., My Big Fat Greek Wedding, The Full Monty).

Nevertheless, there is general agreement on things like the nature of comic attitudes, comic tools and devices, story structure, mythic design, visual comedy, and the construction of jokes. The great philosophers and great comedians have also proposed principles of comedy, and finally, comedy’s changing nature and ultimate incompleteness have been probed to their core. At the end of this book, the major formal theories of comedy are outlined, with examples.

The Comic Point of View or Comic Climate

It’s been argued that comedy is a perspective or point of view—how a subject is seen rather than the subject itself—as signaled by titles, characters, and the general impression a work gives. Support for this view includes the fact that there are comedies about almost every imaginable subject—comic westerns, comic romances, comic war movies, comic detective stories, and so on. For this reason, scholars call comedy a mode, not a genre.

If comedies have a common element, it is this—that what’s going on could never really happen, so relax and laugh! The comedy simply doesn’t see the world straight, or in a matter-of-fact way. That’s why comic characters are often funny looking, talk funny, or act funny.

The types of comedy people speak of are the ways the real world is distorted. Parody and satire tend to mock the social side of life—social institutions and social roles (e.g, Police Academy, Horse Feathers), and in doing so challenge and expose hypocrisy, lies, and shams. Farcical and shock (or black) comedy tend to mock basic human nature and humankind’s assumptions and values—at least until the happy ending (e.g., The Nutty Professor, Animal House). Dramatic comedy, romantic comedy, and comic romance are concerned mostly with one-on-one human relationships, gently questioning our assumptions about love (e.g., The Wild Party, Where the Boys Are), the family (e.g., Take Her, She’s Mine, Back to School), and other emotions linked to these things (e.g., Legally Blonde—love, ambition; Pumpkin—love, compassion). Overlaps and arguments about comic forms and types are common.

Comic Point of View in Wordplay and/or Bizarre Imagery

The comic point of view is often created or reinforced through the use of wordplay or imagery that depicts human behavior via institutions, beliefs, or situations. Comedy can be classified by the type of distortion sought.

Exaggeration, including hyperbole and overstatement, increases the scale of things, producing comic surprise. For example, in the movie Risky Business, when an expensive sports car rolls into a lake, the repairman asks the driver, Who’s the U-boat commander?

Understatement Decrease the scale of things to provide another sort of comic shock. For example, an eager general in Dr. Strangelove describes nuclear war this way: I don’t say we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but no more than ten or twenty million killed, depending on the breaks.

Absurdity takes ideas to ridiculous, nonsensical extremes, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary:

He had a girl and found out she was untrue.

"How did he do that?

He caught her with her husband.

Incongruity takes ideas that don’t usually go together and unites them, prompting humor, such as this line from T.R. Baskin: We’ve got this medical plan that is really great—if you get run over by an armadillo.

Contrast produces humor by directly comparing an unlike pair or odd couple.

Irony is a subtle type of humor that involves making a statement that also includes its opposite, but still criticizes its target: When I said I wanted to be a comedian, everyone laughed at me. Well, they’re not laughing now.

Outrageous humor is frequently shocking, disrespectful, or irrelevant. In a farce, a misunderstanding can be the basis for the whole work.

Innuendo and double entendre are the use of words with double meanings, or euphemisms, often with a sexual meaning.

Special wordplay includes apparent nonsense with amusing second meanings, e.g., If I want your opinion, I’ll tell it to you! (Samuel Goldwyn).

Insult humor includes vicious attacks, usually more mocking and witty than hateful, e.g., What’s black with an asshole at either end? A welfare line!

Taboo topics include death, disease, disabilities, or sexual proclivities, which are made playful rather than grim or upsetting.

Comedy Story Structures

Some critics propose that the key to understanding comedies is analysis of their story structures. Gerald Mast, in The Comic Mind, argues that there are just six comic story structures.

Improvised, strung-together gags are probably the oldest comic story structure. Early comedies, such as The Pinch Hitter (1917), about a bumbling college athlete, a butt of many jokes until he triumphs in the big game, fall into this category. Many recent films such as Animal House and Back to School have something of this thrown-together feeling.

Reducio ad absurdum is a second major form of comedy storytelling—simplification and exaggeration of a reasonable conflict into an idiotic struggle, familiar social relationships and structures and turning on themselves. A number of comedies by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes were of this sort. Modern college comedies of this type include Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor, in which a social failure becomes a ruthless, womanizing counterpart with whom he competes. Another such comedy is Horse Feathers, in which rebel college president Groucho Marx sings the song Whatever It Is, I’m Against It! and in the process of making his college a success, works to destroy it.

Groups in conflict may also go to extremes, clashing over issues until their society is finally in complete disarray (Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing). College comedies with such groups creating comic chaos include the sixties protest comedy Getting Straight, the farce Animal House, and (in slow motion) the film Slackers with its collection of off-campus college outcasts. This is reducio applied to groups.

The parody comic plot, first used by Aristophanes, is a deliberate exaggeration of a straight drama, or even a tragedy, transformed into comedy. Lloyd’s The Freshman and Keaton’s College are parody plots of early earnest silent dramas about college athletes struggling to win success. More recently, Risky Business and Soul Brother are comedies about rich students who go to extreme lengths (including depravity and dishonesty) to advance their university careers, so slyly done that the audience is supposed to root for them.

The plot about loving couples getting together despite obstacles was developed by the Romans. College comedies include many variations on the Roman New Comedy, including The Wild Party (professor and student), She’s Working Her Way through College (professor and student/stripper), and Teacher’s Pet (female professor and older male student).

Picaresque hero plots involve a wise critic of society, whose words and actions show up society’s failures, hypocrisies, and absurdities. College comedies of this type include Mr. Belvedere, With Honors, and The Graduate.

Protagonists who must carry out difficult (but comic) tasks, and protagonists who must rectify grave (but comic) mistakes are variations of the above comic story line. Difficult task college comedies include Ball of Fire (professor rescues stripper from gangsters), and The Strawberry Statement (student protestor seizes the dean’s office). Other college comedies that deal with rectifying mistakes include The Trouble with Women (a professor supposedly propounds the view that women are inferior to men), and That’s My Boy (old jock dad pushes nonathletic son onto the team).

Mast’s comedy types are well thought out. Though many comedies can be put into more than one category, the categories are useful as a start toward analyzing comic plot designs, and arguing why particular comedies succeed or fail.

Gags or Visual Humor

The gag is recognized as a fairly brief film sequence that is seen as humorous. The early college comedies The Freshman (1925) and College (1926) for example, have many gags that mainly involve showing the main character as extraordinarily skilled, if indifferent to this (e.g., Keaton’s soda jerk sequence), or bizarrely awkward though paradoxically graceful (e.g., Lloyd’s football practice and big game sequence).

A gag may be a simple movement or gesture, like Lloyd’s Step right up and call me speedy! jig, made funny by repetitions in different contexts. Or it may be funny and go on for a while—performed, twisted, scrambled, redeveloped, twisted, and finally topped. Keaton’s performance in The Freshman, trying to get on the football team, includes several examples of beautifully elaborated gags.

Comic film history shows a decline in the classic visual gag, at least in part because fewer and fewer comedians are gymnasts. Instead, other sorts of visual humor have been devised—like the food fights and tank attack on the victory parade in Animal House, the sinking of Dad’s sports car in Risky Business, or the fantastically bloated bodies and uninhibited behavior of the characters in The Klumps.

Wit and Jokes: Verbal Humor

Jokes and wit are wordplay designed to produce laughter, either by themselves and/or because of the setup of circumstances and characters. In The Lady Eve, a gold-digging Barbara Stanwyck tells an innocent young man (Henry Fonda) the ways she’d love to be seduced, then tells him he’d better go to bed: I can sleep peacefully now. His reply, Yes, well I wish I could say the same, always produces much laughter.

Jokes and wit have been classified, such as:

Mocking characters. For example, holdup man: Your money or your life! Jack Benny: I’m thinking, I’m thinking!

Truisms, brief truths about the world involving wordplay, e.g., As we get older, romantic pickings get slimmer, but the people don’t!

Putdowns, insults that also amuse, e.g., An actor’s a guy who, if you’re not talking about him, isn’t listening!

Books continue to be written proposing principles for writing jokes. These principles usually involve taking an unconventional view of a subject or situation, one that can verge on the cruel or controversial, but somehow defusing the viciousness. Jokes often involve hostility enjoying itself, through a mild attack on people, situations, or institutions. For this reason, as society changes, new jokes can be devised—hence the popularity of the opening monologues of late-night comedians.

Scholars and Comedians Define Comedy

A number of great thinkers as well as great comedians have proposed definitions and principles for comedy and comic writing. It’s interesting that each approach does explain some types of comedy, often very well, but as Columbia University’s Professor Kenneth Koch has pointed out, none explains all sorts of comedy. There’s no Theory of Everything Comic.

Thomas Hobbs saw humor as a displaced cry of animal triumph over a foe. For example, when a fan asked an elderly movie star if she was Martha Raye, the thespian called out in triumph, I’m what’s left of her, darling! Much silent film slapstick humor also seems to fit Hobbs’ definition.

Sigmund Freud saw much comedy as displaced sexual content, including a return to infantile irresponsibility. He once made a joke that marital fidelity was like carrying an umbrella—if the storm was fierce enough, sooner or later you took a cab (turned to other women, presumably).

Arthur Koestler thought humor and comedy was produced when two different frames of reference, ways of looking at the world, overlapped, as in the Charlie Chaplin film The Pawnshop, when the pawnbroker treats a broken alarm clock like a person, listening to it with a stethoscope.

Henri Bergson saw comedy as the encrusting of the mechanical on the living. An example he gave was how a man who slips on a banana becomes a flying mechanical object. Silent slapstick comedy is often mechanical in various ways.

Major comedians have also proposed rules for comedy that seem to hold for types of jokes and comic plots.

Charlie Chaplin said: All I need to make comedy is a park, a policeman, and a pretty girl. In fact, Chaplin and Keaton both made comedies that used policemen and pretty girls, and filmmaker Mack Sennet built his Keystone empire on this idea.

Groucho Marx proposed that every trouble had its funny side, and was thus a basis for comedy. Certainly without their fast talking and comic ingenuity, most of the Marx Brothers comedies would be disasters. Woody Allen once joked, Sex without love is an empty experience, but as an empty experience, it’s one of the best!

Lenny Bruce proposed, somewhat like Groucho Marx, that comedy is tragedy plus distance. It’s true some film comedies do at least start out dealing with tragic circumstances, including Down and Out in Beverly Hills (homelessness), Fun With Dick and Jane (unemployment), High Anxiety (insanity), The Lonely Guy (social isolation), and Life Is Beautiful (Nazi death camps!).

Peter Ustinov conjectured that comedy is a simply a funny way of being serious. By this he may have meant that comedy is a way of exploring and revealing true feelings and ideas that are otherwise hard to express, as in Dr. Strangelove (a global nuclear standoff), and Richard Pryor . . . Here and Now (drug abuse).

George Carlin has said, I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn, and to cross it deliberately. Certainly, Carlin has built comic routines around social taboos, such as Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV, If God had intended us not to masturbate, would have made our arms shorter, and Little girls, send for your Lolita kit . . . you can pick up a little cash after school.

Comedy as a Work in Progress

It’s been argued that comedy and humor will never be defined or explained because they never stand still. Society and individuals are always coming up with new hopes, fears, and problems, and comedy inevitably attempts to comment on or otherwise deal with these newest topics of the moment.

Support for this position emerges from the history of American comedy. Comedy in the 1900s was often preoccupied with the country’s new industrialization—featuring machines that ran wild, and people who acted like machines, fighting, chasing, and seducing. The great comedians—Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and others, added ballet grace and mime to the comic repertoire. Sound allowed comic characters to individualize and elaborate on their aggression and silliness. Comic drama and romance, and comic social relationships soon followed, with increasingly sophisticated dialogue and stories. The crises of the Depression and World War II led comedy to move into more serious areas, and take more radical points of view. After the war, comedy gradually fragmented into more specialized topics and genres, attitudes and stylization, as discussed in the chapters of this book. Presumably, comedy will continue to transform and evolve as society and individuals’ lives change, always moving in clear but also totally unexpected ways.

Organization, Treatment, and Availability

The college comedies examined in this book are organized by genres and types into different categories, discussed in each chapter in roughly the chronological order of the films’ release. However, films often fit into several categories. In such cases, I’ve discussed a film in the genre group in which it seems to fit most surely, mentioning it in the others. The Graduate, for example, seems most interesting and significant as a social comedy, although it is also an intergenerational comedy.

I’ve sought to at least mention all of the American college comedy films that I could find in each category, as well as some interesting foreign ones. I feel this better clarifies the development of the form. Major films, both longtime critics’ choices and others that seem to be significant, are discussed at some length. I understand how scholars and specialists are highly impatient with story summaries, but many of these films can be hard to access, and even experts can have poor memories. And without at least a brief description of the story, attempts at analysis are often futile.

The availability of the best-known college comedy films is assured from public libraries and internet outlets such as Turner Classic Movies (TCM), Movies Unlimited, American Movie Classics, Classic Movies, Classic Movie Hub, and Reel Classics.

While many streaming services such as Netflix have emerged into the film distribution market, the giant Netflix itself—which, for many, has become synonymous with cinema—offers a somewhat disappointing collection of classic films since it switched to the streaming format. Amazon’s movie rental service offers a considerably more comprehensive selection of classic films. The most recent college comedies can even be found at retail outlets such as Walmart.

Virtually any major release is available on eBay. One reason I’ve listed so many films is so that students assigned papers can find films related to their interests and experiences, get them via eBay, and so find new relevance and meanings in the works.

Chapter 2

College Athlete Comedies

Comedies about college athletics were made as early as 1917, and were elaborated into romantic comedies and musical comedies in the twenties and thirties. The physical action and competition in these early college athlete comedies were a natural beginning for silent comic rivalry plots, comic student characters, and comic characters of other kinds, as well as providing a sense of jeopardy and excitement to the stories.

Perhaps the earliest such film, The Pinch Hitter (1917), was the prototype of many later projects. The hero is a shy country boy who goes to college because of a deathbed promise his father made to his mother. On campus the other students play pranks on him, but a girl at the soda shop befriends him. The baseball coach puts him on the college team mainly for luck, but during the critical game of the season he hits the winning home run, also winning his girl’s love and the student body’s affection.

It has been argued that’s Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman (1925), which he wrote, starred in, and directed, is an elaboration of The Pinch Hitter moved to the gridiron. Yet The Freshman is exquisitely timeless in its jokes, characters, and structure, a supreme case that true comic art is a matter of endless refinement and attention to detail. The Freshman has been extensively