The Comedy Genre Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

The Comedy Genre - Essay ExampleThe first commercially boffo romanticistististic comedy to posit an alternative notion to this underlying concept did not get make until the 1970s. Woody Allens Annie sign of the zodiac is dictated by the external social forces of that decade just as frequently as the screwball comedies were dictated by the economic and social upheaval of the Depression. Annie third house stakes stunned a claim for being the first romantic comedy to display the multiple neuroses inherent in a existent sexual relationship. It is the neuroses of Alvy and Annie that present the obstruction that leads to what becomes the films most unconventional upending of genre of romantic comedy the two do not end up together. Until Allens film the very concept that the romantic leads would not end up together was the definition of a romantic tragedy film.In other Woody Allen film, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Lester, the successful TV producer, manages to boil down the entire es sence of comedy into one fair equation If it bends, its funny. If it breaks, its not funny. Lesters unctuous delivery of his theory of comedy undermines the serious contemplation of its message, just now Lester is basically simplifying one of the elements of the far more philosophically expansive suppositions about what makes a person laugh forwarded by Henri Bergson, who writes of comedy that Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion (Bergson 4). The implication is that comedy must by its very nature be distanced from the natural emotions involved in an otherwise realistic situation. Annie Hall establishes distance from the pain experienced by Alvy and Annie as their relationship crumbles by subverting the mechanics of the romantic comedy genre. The traditional arc of a romantic comedy since the screwball era is one that begins with an antipathetic relationship between the man and woman that evolves into mutual attraction before final ly ending with consummation. Annie Hall reverses this trajectory by presenting Alvy and Annie as immediately attracted to one another and ending with their romantic parting. The distancing from the undercurrent of tragedy within the story arc of Annie Hall is also accomplished through its insistence on faulting down another convention of the romantic comedy. More so than any other type of comedy, the pre-Annie Hall romantic comedy eschews any intrusion into its carefully constructed sense of reality. Annie Hall, by contrasts, blasts through the fourth smother and at times also becomes an exercise in surrealism the scene with the subtitles showing what Alvy and Annie are really thought as they engage in phony small talk the scene with at the movie battlefield at which Alvy magically produces Marshall McLuhan. These devices distance the audience from the heightened emotions at stake ultimately, it becomes clear this relationship is not just going to bend, but break. Annie Hall bec omes the first American romantic comedy to find the laughable potential not in two people falling in love, but in what happens subsequently the consummation that climaxed the earlier examples of the genre.Annie Hall may have given rise to a new sub-sub-genre of comedy, the anti-romantic comedy, but external social forces served to collide with