The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies

401 Pages·1973·21.816 MB·English

by  Gerald Mast

the Movies
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THE COMIC MIND is a lively and informative study of film comedy
from the silents to the present, focusing on those screen comics
and comic directors who have developed and influenced the form.
It examines the principal traditions of film comedy and the artists
who have worked in them, tracing a line of evolution from the first
crude efforts of Edison and Lumiere to Woody Allen and What's Up,
Doc? Illuminating the meaning as well as the manner of each film-
maker. Gerald Mast offers a new perspective on the great achieve-
ments of the silent era: the knockabout comedy of Mack Sennett;
the pantomimic artistry of Chaplin and Keaton; the comedy of per-
sonality represented by Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon; the
buffoonery of Laurel and Hardy.
With equal brilliance Mast explores the comparatively neg-
lected area of sound comedy, with special attention to the great
clowns of sound (W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Jacques Tati,
Jerry Lewis); the foremost directors of dialogue comedy (Hawks.
Capra, Preston Sturges, Wilder); the comic stylists (Jean Renoir,
Ernst lubitsch, Rene Clair); and the European ironists. He also
considers many lesser-known comics of historical or artistic im-
portance
Through detailed discussions of specific films, Mast reveals
the comic style, the cinematic technique, the human concerns, and
the philosophic vision of each filmmaker. He ultimately arrives at
a general theory of film comedy, successfully demonstrating that
the greatest films are comic films.
Merging description with analysis, and information with in-
terpretation, THE COMIC MIND is the most comprehensive yet de-
tailed book on film comedy available. It is indispensable to anyone
interested in film history or in comic films and filmmakers.
The text is illustrated with eighty stills from the movies under
discussion.
Gerald Mast is the author of A SHORT HISTORY OF THE MOVIES,
which has become a standard text on college campuses around
the country. He teaches literature and film at the City University of
New York. He was a child actor in television and films and has
worked as an extra in Hollywood, appearing in about a hundred
movies.
51819 1
lie C o m i c M i n d
Also by Gerald Mast
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE MOVIES
T H E
C O M I C
M I N D
Comedy and the Movies
BY
G E R A L D MAST
The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.
INDIANAPOLIS NEW YORK
The BobbsMerrill Company, Inc.
INDIANAPOLIS /new YORK
Copyright © 1975 by Gerald Mast
AU rights reserved
ISBN 0-672-517 68-X
Library of Congress catalog card number: 72-89705
Designed by Vincent ' one
Manufactured in the United States of America
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank all those who helped this book to be and those who
helped it to be what it is. First, there are those who gave their wise and gen-
erous advice that I might not always have been wise or gracious enough
to accept. To Joe Adamson, Diane Giddis, and Burnell Sitterly my thanks
for working their ways through the heavy manuscript —a nd more than
once at that. To Leo Braud v, Marshall Cohen, Herman G. Weinberg, and
Joel Zuker my thanks for contributing their expertise and insight to those
chapters in which their knowledge and experience far exceed mine.
Then there are those film archives which, over the last three years, have
made it possible for me to see (or see again) all the films discussed in this
book. Not only can seeing films be terriblv expensive; it is often impossible
to see certain films at all. To Charles Silver and the Museum of Modern
Art, Patrick Sheehan and the motion picture collection of the Library of
Congress, James Card and the George Eastman House, Jeremy Boulton
and the British Film Institute, my thanks for their care, attention, and
courteous senice. Without people and collections of this kind, film re-
search would be impossible.
I would also like to thank several commercial film companies who gra-
ciously lent me prints of films that could not be seen in any archive. To
Adam Reilly of Contemporary Films-McGraw-Hill, Walter J. Dauler of
Audio-Brandon, and Murray Glass of the Em Gee Film Library, my thanks
for caring about the study of film. To Man- Corliss of the Museum of
Modern Art and Paula Klaw of Movie Star News, my thanks for helping
me gather the book's stills. To Bill Reiter, my thanks for making frame
blow -ups of films when the stills were not sufficient.
Finally, mv thanks to the Research Foundation of the City University
of New York, which provided the funds that helped make the costly busi-
ness of film research possible.

Contents
Introduction ix
I
ASSUMPTIONS, DEFINITIONS, AND CATEGORIES
chapter i. Comic Structures 3
chapter 2. Comic Thought 14
chapter 3. Comic Films— Categories and Definitions 20
I I
PRIMITIVES
chapter 4. Jests, Tricks, and the First Comic Personalities 31
chapter 5. Mack Sennett 43
I I I
CHAPLIN AND KEATON
chapter 6. Chaplin: From Keystone to Mutual 61
chapter 7. Chaplin: First Nationals and Silent Features 8=:
Contents
viii
chapter 8. Chaplin: Sound Films 105
chapter 9. Keaton 125
I V
OTHER SILENT CLOWNS
chapter io. Harold Lloyd 149
chapter 1 1. Harn- Langdon 16 5
chapter 12. More Fun Shops 179
V
SOUND COMEDY
chapter 15. Sound and Structure 199
chapter 14. Ernst Lubitsch and Rene Clair 206
chapter 15. Jean Renoir 232
chapter 16. The Dialogue Tradition 249
chapter 17. The Clown Tradition 280
chapter 18. The Ironic Tradition 302
1 he Case for Comedy 320
Notes 22 c
Selective Bibliography 328
appendix a. Distributors of Comic Films 331
.appendix b. Photo Credits 333
Index yyy