Analysis Of Comic Cinema

Comic Cinema has become more inept to show the visual comedy and instead rely on sound, particularly dialogue. Take the scene from comedy film Old School where Will Ferrell tries to explain to a group of college kids why he cannot drink. (Figure 1.9) In a cinematic standpoint the scene just seems is a simple shot reverse shot of a grown man and a couple of college kids who seem to disapprove of his decisions. The chunk of the humor lies solely in the dialogue and the way the characters in the scene react to the one speaking. Since the introduction of sound and cinema, audiences have been more drawn to the pleasures of the act of hearing and seeing that they need less and less from both instead of a masterpiece of both. Visual comedy will always

Jackie has the ability to use any prop in his fighting scenes from ladders to dresses. He uses this to introduce comedy in his action with the coexistence of natural everyday objects into fighting mechanisms. This is similar to Keaton’s “Impossible gags” that he used in his early days of cinema before he joined MGM. (Figure 1.5) Not only has Jackie Chan been influenced by the stunt work of Buster Keaton but also in several of his films Jackie pays homage to several stunts Keaton is famously known for creating. Doing so reveals these scenes as sort of an artifact of the silent era’s movement. Specifically in the action movie Project A where a falling partition literally crashes on top of Jackie Chan. (Figure 1.6) This scene is an exact replica of Keaton’s film Steamboat Billy Jr. where a partition of a house literally comes crashing down on

Slapstick enables the beleaguered audience to stay here on earth and have the best good time; with a perfect sense of completeness, the clown’s martyrdom becomes the good time the audience is having. The significance of the silent era in film history cannot be overstated. During the first decades of the twentieth century, a truly commercial popular art emerged bound closely to the image of a modern America. Movie making luminaries such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton lead the way of comic cinema with their unforgettable films. Regardless of the development of synchronized sound, the era drew to a close, but the modes of production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption inaugurated during the silent film era persisted, creating the film industry, as we know it