Occasionally a script and an actor would give us a sense of tragedy in an old Hollywood movie that was otherwise melodrama. Montgomery Clift in From Here to Eternity and Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (1954) are famous examples, but my current favorite is Jeanne Eagels as the protagonist in The Letter whose unscrupulousness is so depleting that self-preservation becomes self-destruction. Comedy, however, is the only genre besides melodrama, and thus the only great genre, that American movies have consistently dispensed at full strength, and in all its variety.

We get the Old Comedy of Aristophanes, typified by Birds and Lysistrata, and later by Shakespeare’s Tempest, in which "there is usually a central figure who constructs his (or her) own society in the teeth of strong opposition, driving off one after another all the people who come to prevent or exploit him, and eventually achieving a heroic triumph." 1  We get it not by direct adaptation but indirectly due to the enduring impulse to outrage and reorder whatever is rigidly dysfunctional in the world. It may be relatively rare in American movies because it takes an enormous amount of authority for a moviemaker to strike out against society in this way using as a surrogate a "comic hero [who] will get his triumph whether what he has done is sensible or silly, honest or rascally," 2  but it’s persistent.

You sense it any time the lunatics have taken over the asylum and you’re meant to side with them. Walter Burns in The Front Page and His Girl Friday stands out as our premiere Old Comic protagonist, and Horse Feathers (1932), Duck Soup (1933), The Great McGinty (1940), The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), The Music Man (1962), Hello, Dolly! (1969), M*A*S*H (1970), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), Beetlejuice (1988), The Mask (1994), and School of Rock (2003) all have affinities with the form. At the same time, we’ve had a number of performers, including the Chaplin of the early shorts, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Bugs Bunny, and Jim Carrey, who impose themselves on the world around them in a way reminiscent of Old Comedy protagonists, with or without the plot.

Festive comedy is an anarchic form developed from occasions when disorder was officially permitted to turn the hierarchically organized social world upside down. The ceremonies of Lords of Misrule of medieval and early Renaissance England (knitted by Shakespeare into the action in the riotings of Sir Toby Belch and Falstaff, for instance), in which a low-born person was invested with the title of Lord "to no other end, but to countenance the Bacchanalian riots and preposterous disorders of the family where he [was] installed," 3  are particularly relevant to our comedies. C.L. Barber has written of these occasions, "The custom seems to have been a secularized version of the Feast of Fools, when the solemn decorum of cathedral services would be suddenly turned upside down...," 4  and Albert Bermel has further described these services, in which "the lower orders of the clergy ... burlesqued the Mass by waving sausages and black puddings as if these were censers, let out a chorus of drinking songs, and generally made asses of their superiors and themselves." 5  Both kinds of parodic hellraising served to liberate in controllable bounds "the vitality normally locked up in awe and respect." 6 

This kind of festivity gives vent to disruptive and even destructive impulses, and its importance is not in the material sense in which the Marx Brothers, for example, bring down a production of Il Trovatore in A Night at the Opera, but in the social sense in which the uneducated sons of poor immigrant Jews assert themselves against the cultural prestige of the Met and its audience. Festive comedy in America functions as an anti-epic ethos, outraging the culture and dignity of the people who made a claim to be the root-stock people. East Coast schools could keep deserving Jewish students out with quotas, but they couldn’t keep the Marx Brothers from making a travesty of college life in Horse Feathers (1932), or the mass audience from eating it up.

Altogether it seems significant that much of the best low comedy, right up to the movies of Adam Sandler, the Farrelly Brothers, Jim Carrey, Ice Cube, and the Wayans clan, have been made by Jews, Catholics, and African-Americans, people who had reason to look askance at the dominant culture with its hypocritical propriety. There’s overlap between Old Comedy and festive license, but you can perhaps distinguish them by saying that whereas Old Comedy engages in a fantastic reordering of law, festive comedy is a holiday from the decreed hierarchy, which we know will return. (It’s actually present in the theater with us--Tickets, please; No Smoking; etc.)

By far the most common form of comedy in American movies has always been romantic comedy, which derives from the New Comedy as practiced by Plautus and Terence, which

normally presents an erotic intrigue between a young man and a young woman which is blocked by some kind of opposition, usually paternal, and resolved by a twist in the plot which is the comic form of Aristotle’s "discovery," and is more manipulated than its tragic counterpart. At the beginning of the play the forces thwarting the hero are in control of the play’s society, but after a discovery in which the hero becomes wealthy or the heroine respectable, a new society crystallizes on the stage around the hero and his bride. 7 

The more hectic the pace, the more artificial the intrigue, the more central and confused the sexual element, the more likely people are to identify the romantic comedy as farce; at the other end it blends into sentimental realism. In all cases successful heterosexual coupling is at the heart of the opposition between comedy and tragedy. As Susanne Langer has pointed out: "What justifies the term ’Comedy’ is not that the ancient ritual procession, the Comus, honoring the god of that name, was the source of this great art form ... but that the Comus was a fertility rite, and the god it celebrated a fertility god, a symbol of perpetual rebirth, eternal life." 8 

But comedy doesn’t celebrate the couple in isolation from the rest of the world, no matter how much resistance that world--in the form of family or other institutions--may have thrown in their way. As Benjamin Lehmann has put it:

The vision of comedy ... keeps its eye on lovers, its foresight upon their prosperous mating and on implied procreation.... [It] fixes its eye on separateness, on diversity, even on oppositions, but it insists at last on togetherness for lovers and on the restored social fabric, on solidarity for the group. From its world are excluded insurmountable barriers, unassimilable evils, and suffering that strikes at the core or is irremediable. 9 

Allegorically, Malvolio must be cast out of the flexible society at the end of Twelfth Night, but by the same logic his newly happy mistress has to send after him. Comedy is also readily adaptable to changing mores and so it no longer need be tied to marriage or procreation or even heterosexuality, celebrating instead the end of the individual’s sexual and social isolation, by whatever means. Brian Sloan’s I Think I Do (1998), a gay romantic comedy that finds total and compelling satisfaction within the conventions, is the charming proof.

Comedy overlaps with the genre of irony and satire, which Northrop Frye refers to as "attempts to give form to the shifting ambiguities and complexities of unidealized existence." He states that the "central principle of ironic myth is best approached as a parody of romance: the application of romantic mythical forms to a more realistic content which fits them in unexpected ways." In other words, you present a romantic story of the kind that usually excludes unidealized reality, but put that reality back in, in such a way that it functions as a comment on the form of the romance. (As true of Don Quixote as of Kingpin (1996), which starts by debasing The Natural (1984) and ascends to greater depths from there.) The unidealized reality turns the romance into self-parody, which works by exploiting incongruities and results in reactions we experience as comic even when the story turns out quite badly.

Frye further sets up a gamut with the two terms at either end:

The chief distinction between irony and satire is that satire is militant irony: its moral norms are relatively clear, and it assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured. Sheer invective or name-calling ... is satire in which there is relatively little irony: on the other hand, whenever a reader is not sure what the author’s attitude is or what his own is supposed to be, we have irony with relatively little satire.... Irony is consistent both with complete realism of content and with the suppression of attitude on the part of the author. Satire demands at least a token fantasy, a content which the reader recognizes as grotesque, and at least an implicit moral standard, the latter being essential in a militant attitude to experience. 10 

Parody, puppy-nibble satire, has been more popular with moviegoers than more purposeful satire since the appearance of Mel Brooks. It’s a form of irony in which the romance form isn’t necessarily undercut by unidealized reality but simply by incongruities--the Doctor and his Monster singing "Puttin’ on the Ritz" in Young Frankenstein (1974), for instance, or a dog yapping alongside a fighter plane as it takes off from a naval carrier in Hot Shots! (1991). This gives parody the free-for-all wackiness of festive comedy and doesn’t require you to take it seriously as critique.

As for satiric movies, they usually either reprove general foibles or are smugly topical, probably because almost no one who has made movies in America has had the intellectual stature to do much more. Alexander Payne’s movies Citizen Ruth (1996), Election (1999), and About Schmidt (2002) are exceptions, taking satire beyond the predictable ideological alignments of such movies as Bob Roberts (1992) and Wag the Dog (1997). Payne brings the cleverness of American pop entertainment closer to the outlook of a total ironist like Luis Buñuel, with his utterly unenchanted view of human activity.

Another approach to irony and satire is to think of satire as the purely moral end of the gamut (Swift, Orwell) and irony as the purely aesthetic end (Madame Bovary, and, amazingly as both book and movie, Lolita). This distinction at least makes it clear why American audiences, who prefer the explicit to the implicit, have usually been more comfortable with satire and parody than irony. The view of the world in irony, at once highly stylized in form and seemingly unvarnished in attitude, is faithful to internal rather than external reality. Thus, the ironist looks through realistic surfaces to the puzzling void beneath and exerts so much creative authority that his view of the world becomes, in effect, a world in itself.

Frye has further written of it that

the incongruous and the inevitable, which are combined in tragedy, separate into opposite poles of irony. The archetype of the inevitably ironic is Adam, human nature under sentence of death. At the other pole is the incongruous irony of human life, in which all attempts to transfer guilt to a victim give that victim something of the dignity of innocence. The archetype of the incongruously ironic is Christ, the perfectly innocent victim excluded from human society. 11 

This helps you to recognize in irony an American movie tradition. If romance is a dream of accomplishment, irony as a genre is the nightmare version, featuring protagonists who fall short of the ideal in beauty, brains, muscle, courage, chivalry, grace, honesty, luck, success, or funds. This is familiar from the work of Chaplin (until he traded irony for pathos and became the deplorable international artist), Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Brian DePalma, Martin Scorsese, Elaine May, John Waters, and, more recently, Terry Gilliam, Michael Tolkin, Quentin Tarantino, Joel Coen, Paul Thomas Anderson, Neil LaBute, and Nicole Holofcener.

The inevitably ironic protagonists are the ones who think they’re smart but who can’t stop fate, from Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) to The New Age (1994) and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). These movies are ironic and often amusing but not really funny-ha-ha. In fact, but for the absence of heroic qualities in the protagonists and the artists’ ironic remove, they would border on tragedy. (This sense of "ironic" is what John Travolta means in Lucky Numbers (2000) when he says, "Yeah, ironic: just another word for saying, You’re getting screwed.") The incongruously ironic protagonists are the sweet losers who start low and fall even lower, only to rise, from The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) to The Wedding Singer (1998) and Punch-Drunk Love (2002). These are worst-case-scenario movies, but they make you laugh and end happily and as such border on romantic comedy.

Another form of irony, black comedy, in which baleful action onscreen elicits comic reaction in the audience, has been more popular than ever recently. The key to black comedy is the use of comic timing, which makes it actively funny in a way a work of pure irony isn’t. You may laugh thinking back on how Barbara Stanwyck entangles Fred MacMurray in her web in Double Indemnity, but when a man is killed in a car you don’t laugh out loud, in the moment, as you do in Pulp Fiction (1994). In this respect the ’90s was the Tarantino Era, though black comedy is not altogether unprecedented in American movies, e.g., Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). Black comedy challenges the audience not to identify with the characters, which means that when bad things start happening you get tickled just at the point at which in a tragedy you’d be gripped. The ironic attitude is no more articulated or motivated than this reversal, and so it upsets people, especially those who don’t engage with movies consciously as aesthetic constructs. The more literally you respond to what’s happening on the screen the less you’ll enjoy black comedy.

What has been far less remarked on is that ironic romance was one of the strongest genres in the 1990s. In the American literary tradition Melville, Faulkner, and Mailer are such difficult romance writers because their protagonists are on quests for a comprehensive system of values, which for their medieval and Renaissance predecessors precedes the quest and bestows meaning on it. Furthermore, in the works of these modern writers the system of values remains elusive.

They write in a form that C.S. Lewis calls "symbolism," in a sense "the opposite of allegory," which arises from this sequence of perceptions:

If our passions, being immaterial, can be copied by material inventions, then it is possible that our material world in its turn is the copy of an invisible world. As the god Amor and his figurative garden are to the actual passions of men, so perhaps we ourselves and our ’real’ world are to something else. The attempt to read that something else through its sensible imitations, to see the archetype in the copy, is what I mean by symbolism or sacramentalism.... The allegorist leaves the given--his own passions--to talk of that which is confessedly less real, which is a fiction. The symbolist leaves the given to find that which is more real. 12 

Thus, while romance normally works deductively from a given system of values, it can also function astonishingly as an inductive process, where the universal system of values is not known but sought from the evidence of experience. This form of romance is a modern innovation that fits perfectly within the genre. It has become increasingly prevalent as religious certainty has faded in the west. (You could say it expresses in narrative form Durkheim’s concept of anomie.) The symbolic quest for salvation within an accepted universal theological system becomes a search for the system itself. Moby Dick is the greatest example American fiction has come up with, but there are a lot of first-rate works that fit this description. It is arguably our strongest vein, from Melville through Mailer and Pynchon and on to Michael Tolkin, whose work is rich with metaphors for the need for this kind of sense-making. (From his latest book Under Radar: "He returns to the world under a new astrological sign, the ellipsis, the invisible constellations discovered by their effect, not their light." 13  )

Citizen Kane (1941) is the most famous movie romance about the search for meaning, but it’s foxy in a Hollywood way, showing us the single, material missing piece to the puzzle that Thompson never finds. It was only more recently that our movies would permit themselves to be open searches after elusive meaning, though Sunset Boulevard comes close. William Holden might have felt different about his dilemma if the star he shacks up with were still a "name," but Wilder wouldn’t. He’s a Jewish refugee whose cynicism extends to the "magic" world the previous generation of Jewish refugees created in Hollywood. Finally, Sunset Boulevard is the romance of a world in which transcendent meaning is unavailable--that’s why the (inevitably ironic) protagonist is a dead man.

In movie romances such as Six Degrees of Separation (1993) and The New Age, by contrast, the protagonists devote themselves to the search for meaning and the moviemakers neither give us the answer nor disparage the activity. The irony is very different in the two kinds of pictures: in Sunset Boulevard there’s a much lower ceiling of possibility; in Six Degrees and The New Age the skies are no limit. Of course, Six Degrees and The New Age aren’t exactly upbeat, but the hope of such works of irony is that by clearing the dead wood you may permit new growth. The Fisher King (1991) manages to be more optimistic, and, by reopening to symbolist speculation the medieval Christian outlook of Parzival, updates and preserves the romance tradition for contemporary audiences. These movies are among the glories of the decade.

There were also a number of good ironic romances with strong female characters, Miami Rhapsody (1995) and Two Girls and a Guy (1998), in which the probing for a basis for values is unusually articulate. In The Opposite of Sex (1998), Lisa Kudrow resists the basis that everyone else takes for granted, romantic love, and then falls into it. Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day (1993) and John Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), hers is a case in which the void that irony left in the romance is filled in by the form and meaning of romantic comedy. Irony strips the decades of overpainting off the genre so you can enjoy it in something that feels closer to its original design.

Comedy comes in combinations of all kinds, but perhaps the most recurrent one is comic melodrama. The comic form of melodrama is actually preferable because you’re not asked to take the polarization of good and evil seriously. It plays as stylization, an aesthetic pleasure if the villain has enough skill. At the realistic end of the stylistic gamut, the line between comic and straight melodrama would separate All About Eve from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). Kramer’s movie takes its attitude to race too seriously to be "merely" a comedy. The worst part is that we have to accept poor Sidney Poitier as the comic hero for programmatic reasons--he never has a chance to win us by charm or ideas, the God-given right of a white romantic comedian like Cary Grant facing a disapproving father in Holiday (1938). Moving toward greater stylization, the musical comedy Singin’ in the Rain (1952) incorporates a melodramatic plot while the grotesquely stylized Ace Ventura, Pet Detective (1994) parodies one. The way some comedies make fun of our dramas is one of their best features, not just because you don’t want to take things too seriously but because the serious movies, so many of which verge on self-parody, deserve to be made fun of more than they ever are. Finally, you can’t hope to pin all the possible forms of comedy down because comedians are protean figures and come up with new ones all the time.

Looking back over the genres, it’s clear that while tragedy maintains its prestige American artists and audiences have never consistently wanted to make or see tragedies. Is this necessarily a loss? For Christians who believe literally in the promise of salvation I imagine tragedy wouldn’t offer much, since nothing so bad can happen on this earth that your life can’t end happily, after death. The central Christian narrative contains a tragic action, of course, but one that ends in divine comedy. At the same time, Christ suffers consequences for sins not his own and thus stands at the far end of the spectrum from tragic protagonists who bear responsibility for actions that make a kind of sense in the circumstances but the consequences of which are horrible.

The superhumanly innocent Christ figure, by contrast, is the highest example of what has become the unjustly accused victim of melodrama (the incongruously ironic protagonist presented not with detachment but for our emotional attachment), only he needn’t submit to crucifixion anymore. Melodrama gives him the power, the unquestioned right, to turn when cornered and wield righteous Old Testament violence against his persecutors (or, in the more restrained version, to morally condemn them beyond question or appeal). The tragic protagonist offers exaltation in the contemplation of his failure, in contrast to the consolation of literally effective religion or the violent release of fantastically effective melodrama.

American movie audiences prefer a combination of romance and melodrama to the more rigorous genre of tragedy because of the fantastic way romance heroes achieve their quests, against rivals and obstacles that are heightened to maximize the brief experience in the dark, and because melodrama gives them their favorite actors as good guys in an everyday world more tormented than ours but one in which virtue is rewarded, vice recognized for what it unambiguously is and punished, and hence all tensions resolved. Furthermore, because evil has no cause in melodrama, it can be dressed up realistically but nonetheless attributed, i.e., limited, to an aberrant personality to be vanquished like an enemy rather than conquered like a temptation (or simultaneously lived with and addressed like a complex social problem).

This is comforting as long as there are strong-armed heroes to hunt those personalities down and destroy them for the rest of us, who are affirmed to be good people and may thus get off on the violence guilt-free. This means the model for melodrama isn’t the Passion but Judgment Day, when the good will be publicly distinguished from the wicked, and the ultimate parental figure will kick the asses that need kicking, permanently. Melodrama is more gratifying than religion, however, because it doesn’t make you wait for the end of time.

Northrop Frye has written, "Without tragedy, all literary fictions might be plausibly explained as expressions of emotional attachments, whether of wish-fulfilment or of repugnance: the tragic fiction guarantees, so to speak, a disinterested quality in literary experience." 14  Romance and melodrama in our movies are both deep fantasy modes, substitutes for (or counterprogrammed concomitants of) Christianity that blur the boundaries of reality to import a sense of deliverance to the conflicts over law, justice, virtue, truth, and loyalty of this world. For this reason they can end happily against any odds, and in a sense must if they are to fulfill their ritual function. (Though they don’t always, but even if the innocent perish, the truth is unambiguously revealed.) Which is to say that American moviegoers want their experience of drama to resemble the experience of comedy as much as possible.

This basic reluctance to engage with intractably difficult drama is often explained by the corporate structure of the movies and the pachydermic businessmen who have made them. Pauline Kael was no doubt right when she wrote:

The story of [American] movies is the story of how, by the grandeur of its aspirations and the lowness of its taste, a small, stunted community--intermarried, interacting, full of crown princes, and run by favoritism--affected the whole world. That community was dominated by a group of tyrant dreamers who imposed their wills on producers, directors, and writers. They were pirates, ransackers of other people’s ideas, talents, and inventions, and they were merchants. They imposed their own unexamined cultural and sexual wish-fulfillments on us all and had a marvelous time doing it. 15 

But blaming the low artistic quality of American movies on the studio chiefs actually seems like a melodramatic explanation. Surely if tragedy had paid, they would have made tragedy. The audience can’t be blameless for the product they’ve consumed so happily for so long.

As Neal Gabler has written about the Jews who founded the studios (except 20th Century-Fox):

[They] also had a special compatibility with the industry, one that gave them certain advantages over their competitors. For one thing, having come primarily from fashion and retail, they understood public taste and were masters at gauging market swings, at merchandising, at pirating away customers and beating the competition. For another, as immigrants themselves, they had a peculiar sensitivity to the dreams and aspirations of other immigrants and working-class families, two overlapping groups that made up a significant portion of the early moviegoing audience. "They were the audience," a producer told me. "They were the same people. They were not too far removed from those primitive feelings and attitudes." 16 

I think this indicates that the Hollywood moguls, opportunists if nothing else, didn’t impose their tastes on the audience, they shared their taste, and still do (Jew and Gentile alike). And that taste hasn’t improved significantly with the expansion of the middle-class and the spread of education over the 20th century.

Erich Auerbach dates much earlier the modern "coarsening of taste," noting it accompanied

the tremendous and ever increasing expansion of the reading public since the beginning of the [19th] century … accelerated by the commercial exploitation of the tremendous demand for reading matter on the part of publishers of books and periodicals, the majority of whom ... followed the path of least resistance and easy profits, supplying the public with what it wanted and possibly even with worse than it would have demanded if left to its own devices. 17 

What Auerbach says of publishers sounds like Kael’s assessment of the studio heads, but what would it mean for a mass audience to be "left to its own devices"? How would such a market function? Both a supply-side and a demand-side explanation seem incomplete.

Auerbach comes at the problem from another direction with a reasonable explanation for middle-class taste being what it is:

[A]cquiring and preserving property, exploiting opportunities for advancement, adjusting to quickly changing conditions--all as part of the bitter competitive struggle for survival--made such great and ceaseless demands on [their] strength and [their] nerves as had never been known in earlier times.... It is not surprising that these people expected and insisted that literature, and art in general, should give them relaxation, recreation, and at best an easily attained intoxication, and that they objected to the triste et violente distraction, to use an expressive phrase of the Goncourts, which most of the important authors offered. 18 

What Auerbach says in this passage describes young adults in any large city in this country. When you remember that movies are for people to go to after work, or on weekends, and that even a moderately successful job or career takes a lot out of you, it’s not surprising that more people don’t want to plumb the existential significance of failure ... on a date.

Robert Warshow, writing in 1948, saw something zombieish behind America’s commitment as a social and political organization to the cheerful view of life familiar from our pop entertainment:

The sense of tragedy is a luxury of aristocratic societies, where the fate of the individual is not conceived of as having a direct and legitimate political importance, being determined by a fixed and supra-political--that is, non-controversial--moral order or fate. Modern equalitarian societies, however, whether democratic or authoritarian in their political forms, always base themselves on the claim that they are making life happier.... If an American or Russian is unhappy, it implies a certain reprobation of his society, and therefore ... it becomes an obligation of citizenship to be cheerful.... Naturally, this civic responsibility rests most strongly upon the organs of mass culture. 19 

It does make sense, once the moral order has become potentially controversial, that law, representing the resolution of controversy by means of a political compromise among the wills of the represented, would substitute for religion as the basis of public drama. (As Pacino exults of law in The Devil’s Advocate, "It’s the new priesthood, baby!") But is the cheerful view of things--shared by producers, moviemakers, and the audience alike--entirely sinister? Maybe in the Soviet Union, but haven’t most Americans had more cause to be happy than any other nationals on earth?

Perhaps if African-Americans had had access to education and capital early in the 20th century they might have both had the means and been detached enough from the society to express tragedy in our movies. (Remembering, however, that tragedy doesn’t just provide a political platform; it plays for higher stakes.) But with education and capital African-Americans might not have had the motivation any more than any other group. 20 

This may get at why Americans don’t produce tragedy. The American outlook is fundamentally optimistic because the majority of Americans, taken statistically rather than individually, have been able to contain devastating experience. Wars are infrequent and have not taken place on our soil in living memory. Death is inevitable but thought of in highly clinical terms. Our news programming does indicate that we equate news with bad news, and there is a fascination with the awful things happening to other people, from violent crimes to extreme weather, but we think of them as actual events, not existential dramas. Underlying even the most morbid outlook is the fact of how much better off we are than the forebears who first came here, those coarse-clothed peasants who look like they’re arriving in the late 19th and early 20th centuries straight from the 15th.

We respond to comedy because we want to imagine ourselves as part of the big American picture of triumph over the material. That’s how we redeem our fall--we make a very good life for ourselves from the sweat of our brow, bringing forth our children in pain but rearing them in comfort and educating them to do even better than we did. The survival and success of this country is highly improbable and that’s a fundamentally comic outlook. The explosion of the black middle class in the ’90s and since, the enshrining of diversity as a national value during an enormous wave of immigration, and the integration of gays into middle-class life, all show how vital the comic view of America continues to be. Comedy is what we aspire to as a nation. The reflection of this in our movies doesn’t represent the whole picture, but it doesn’t distort the portion it shows, either.

You might argue that the material bounty of the U.S. should lead to more works of tragic vision because we’re that much more the victims of our own drives, but that’s not how public taste has developed. So if dramatic movies are going to downgrade both art and reality to melodrama, there’s no reason not to prefer comedy, which can leave the artists’ impulses free and still gratify our taste for traditional form. Compare recent comedies and melodramas about the disempowered--My New Gun (1992) versus Thelma & Louise; Friday (1995) versus Boyz n the Hood (1991); I Think I Do versus Philadelphia. The emotional range of the melodramas is narrower, restricted to the easy sympathy and outrage that artificially polarized conflict can squeeze out of you. The comedies are more aesthetically satisfying in no small part because they’re fundamentally more honest, less shaped by antecedent ideological commitment. You get the feeling that dramatic moviemakers are afraid that if they represented women or blacks or gays as we encounter them in life, as we know them intimately, as we know ourselves, they might accidentally provide ammunition for bad people and hurt the cause. 21 

At their best, the many forms of comedy leaves the artists’ imaginations freer to romp than any other genre. It’s fine for comedy to go after its group effect opportunistically, anarchically, that is, to tell a joke because it makes people laugh, and for no other reason. (The Marx Brothers, for example, never have to justify anything, and their movies don’t even have to be especially well-shot or -directed to seem classic.) You can’t take offense easily, and at some level you have to be interested in aesthetic experience for its own sake to be able to enjoy Jim Carrey or the Farrelly Brothers, who explore popular comedy at its most irresponsible. It isn’t a question of moral irresponsibility (as a category, though it might be in individual instances), rather it’s social irresponsibility: they make the audience experience as a group in public the things we’re socialized, appropriately, to keep hidden. I’ll take this over Peter Brooks’s "rhetorical breaking-through of repression" in melodrama, with its hypocritical moralizing, any day.

Of course, not all comedies have been good lately. Some readers may notice right away what’s missing from this book: the star vehicle studio output hits, i.e., the comedies that will be on the cover of other movie books about the decade--Pretty Woman (1990), Father of the Bride (1991), A League of Their Own (1992), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Forrest Gump (1994), Jerry Maguire (1996), Mother (1996), My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), As Good As It Gets (1997). Some of them pique people’s interest with the edgier material imported into comedy in the past decades, but then subject it to the immemorial Hollywood processing. In other words, they go for the expected laugh even if it makes hash of the characters or situation; slow the timing down; schizophrenically ask for pleasantly familiar responses to troubling material but without the ironic awareness of black comedy; make everything come out okay in the way it does in the standard fare, no matter how much the edgy starting concept has to be distorted or abandoned.

As interesting or sensitive as a moviemaker may otherwise be (Cameron Crowe), or as enjoyable as a source work may have been (Winston Groom’s wildly grungy Three Stooges festival of a book Forrest Gump), to produce a success on this scale a moviemaker has to follow commercial thinking that may be inimical to his or her own or to the project itself. Such movies got so much attention that it’s not surprising if critics and intelligent moviegoers don’t think of the comedies of the ’90s as special.

The archival retentiveness of our pop culture made possible by technological advances should correct this in time. Comedy is hugely popular in the movies right now, yet it’s considered mostly disposable. But sitting there on video store shelves are some extremely pleasurable movies with high critical reputations that people don’t seem adequately aware of (My New Gun, Six Degrees of Separation, Citizen Ruth), some movies that were underrated (Lost in Yonkers, The Ref, Miami Rhapsody, Kingpin, Grosse Pointe Blank, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, Booty Call), some small and smaller movies that didn’t stand a chance in theaters (The New Age, Bottle Rocket, Two Girls and a Guy, I Think I Do), at least one overhyped movie that deserved to hit but didn’t (A Life Less Ordinary), some hits people may have enjoyed without noting their distinctive qualities (The Fisher King, Groundhog Day, Mrs. Doubtfire, Clueless, Friday, The Wedding Singer), and several critical darlings about which I felt there was more to be said (Pulp Fiction, Fargo, Election).

As for the good stuff not in the book: I left out The Mask, Leaving Las Vegas, and The Nutty Professor because I wrote about them, and Jim Carrey more generally, at the end of Comedy Is a Man in Trouble. I left out Miami Blues, Dumb & Dumber, and Rushmore because I wrote about other movies by the same makers. I left out Cadillac Man, Quick Change, Frankie & Johnny, White Men Can’t Jump, and Honeymoon in Vegas because I had read such good reviews of them by Terrence Rafferty and Michael Sragow in The New Yorker 22  that I couldn’t get started on my own. I left out The Object of Beauty, Impromptu, SoapDish, Diggstown, Bullets Over Broadway, and Swimming with Sharks because you can’t write about everything.

In any case, this book is not meant to be an encyclopedia, but a suggestion of what comedy can do and of a way to talk about it that recognizes that talking about it cuts against what it can do. Comedy comes near the bottom of the hierarchy of genres nowadays in part because it operates to produce a group response in an audience without recourse to a paraphrasable discursive meaning, 23  and that hierarchy is established by critics, who are word people. (Which is probably why satires, which do have statable meanings, are so often praised beyond their deserts, and other kinds of comedies that people want to praise are mislabeled as satires.)

Determining the narrative structure of a work is trickier in the case of irony than of comedy, certainly, but translating the communal ritual of comedy into language is harder yet. There’s probably no popular movie subgenre less dependent on language than silent slapstick, but even high comedy, which achieves its effects by means of wit, uses that wit to an end that it shares with lower forms of comedy: the resolution of romantic conflict, the coming together of pairs within larger groups, the promise of personal and social regeneration continuing after the resolution. I’m interested in tragic vision and the full splendor of romance, so I read more books because the movies don’t provide these experiences on a regular basis. But the affirmative fact that comedy is what our moviemakers, responding to the deep and not unjustified optimism of Americans, have done and continue to do best, is in itself something to celebrate.

1. Old Comedy: Frye, Anatomy 43. (return to text)
2. comic hero will get his triumph: Frye, Anatomy 43. (return to text)
3. Lords of Misrule: Barber 26. (return to text)
4. The custom seems to have been: Barber 25. (return to text)
5. Albert Bermel: 81. (return to text)
6. the vitality normally locked up: Barber 7. (return to text)
7. New Comedy: Frye, Anatomy 44. (return to text)
8. Susanne Langer: 331. (return to text)
9. Benjamin Lehmann: 163-78. 165-66. (return to text)
10. The chief distinction between irony and satire: Frye, Anatomy 223-24. (return to text)
11. the incongruous and the inevitable: Frye, Anatomy 42. (return to text)
12. If our passions, being immaterial: Lewis 45. (return to text)
13. He returns to the world: Tolkin, Under Radar 132. (return to text)
14. disinterested: Frye, Anatomy 206. (return to text)
15. Pauline Kael: "Running" 179. (return to text)
16. Neal Gabler: 5. (return to text)
17. Erich Auerbach: 501. (return to text)
18. [A]cquiring and preserving property: Auerbach 502. (return to text)
19. Robert Warshow: "Gangster" 127-8. (return to text)
20. African-Americans: It’s worth noting that the heroism of the African-American moviemaker Oscar Micheaux involved funding and distributing his full-length, all-black movies for black audiences. In terms of literary and moviemaking quality they’re no better than the average Hollywood B-picture of the day, the 1920s through the ’40s. (return to text)
21. gays as we encounter them in life: Don Roos, the writer-director of The Opposite of Sex had problem raising money for that movie precisely because of this problem. As he said in an interview, "Even the smaller art-house theatres couldn’t see that there would be an audience for the film because of all the gay themes and gay characters. These weren’t the kind of fuzzy, warm, square gay characters that Hollywood likes to have in movies. These were the gay people I know. Gay characters have really suffered with all this political correctness in Hollywood" (Roos interview). (return to text)
22. Terrence Rafferty and Michael Sragow in The New Yorker: See Works Cited for citations to these reviews. (return to text)
23. without recourse to a paraphrasable discursive meaning: People who object to this insistence on the non-discursive, non-thematic idea of comedy propose works such as Major Barbara as counterexamples. But it’s not difficult to separate the quite standard comic plot of Major Barbara, which involves both Dolly’s pursuit of Barbara and the reconciliation of her family with their father, from the idea put forth that high-minded idealists need to protect themselves with weaponry as much as anybody. This idea is brought into the play by means of a romance plot, Shaw’s adaptation of Brünnhilde and Wotan’s tangled relationship, with Barbara and Undershaft as thesis and antithesis and Dolly as the synthesis. The plot clearly shows Shaw intended this but Dolly’s character is a bit underdeveloped to bear the meaning. His comic function is much plainer, and as Denis O’Hare played him opposite Cherry Jones on Broadway in 2001 he functioned as the very spirit of comedy, beating his drum. (return to text)