FILM2216 · Fine Arts

Philosophy of Comedy: Classic Hollywood Film

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

What does comedy do to us? What is the nature of our corporeal response of laughter and how does it relate to our intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional responses? What kind of philosophical perspective does the mode of comedy provide on issues of self-knowledge, agency, identity, taste, free will, fate, gender, race, individuality, the relation of body to mind? In this course, we will use classic Hollywood film comedies as a field for exploring these questions. From the slapstick acrobatics of Chaplin and Keaton in the silent comedies, to the madcap horseplay of the Marx Brothers and the exhilarating tap dancing of the Nicholas Brothers in the musical comedies, to the spitfire exchanges on the topic of sex and love in the screwball comedies and the metatheatrical Nazi impersonations in the wartime comedies, these films of the first half of the 20th century offer a wealth of performances, narratives, and gags for philosophical investigation. The course will provide an introduction to the major comedic directors and performers of this period. We will engage closely with the formal construction of individual films as well the biographical and historical conditions of their production and reception, focusing on how the films reflect on the major political events of the time the Depression, the second World War and the Great Migration as well as on the nature of comedy itself. A major theme will be the contradictory power of the film comedy, its capacity for transgression and its reliance on stereotypes, its utopian transformative potential and its entanglements with death, despair, and violence. Through readings in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and film theory, we will develop vocabulary to think and speak about our experience of comedy.