Topic for Spring 2022: American Film Comedy
What makes us laugh? Comedy is one of the American film industry's most lucrative genres and yet one of the least critically dissected. This course takes comedy 'seriously' in order to understand our own relationship to laughter, how American filmmakers construct humor and what kinds of social expectations in the United States these comedies rely upon. Because humor often upsets presumed categories, many scholars view comedy as a particularly transgressive genre. We will consider how comedy can both subvert and reinforce cultural parameters surrounding social groups based on identifiers such as ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. The course will be organized around three main units: comedy theories, comedy construction, and comedy cycles and subgenres.