Affective Humor, or Laughing Alone

[Greathinker]

The idea for this thread came to me in the middle of watching a film by Renoir. It occurred to me that his films have such incredible naturalness-- that ability to capture life with no sign of premeditation, it's like the camera isn't even there. And I thought that because of this, this truthfulness perhaps, one aspect of his films that excels in particular is his humor.

Using Renoir as a good example, what I want to try to explain is that there are films that have these moments of humor that go beyond the typical arrangements we're used to, that ring with a sort of great truth that compounds what's initially funny about them. In Boudu Saved from Drowning, the scene of Boudu hanging around the house and grabbing the maid with his legs is one of the scenes that makes the film in my mind, for reasons I couldn't explain if I tried. Its both the context and the act itself-- but the scene really can't be deconstructed, I can't seperate its components and prefer one over the other-- and because of this, as Tarkovsky says about the artistic image, because of this it points to an infinity... "for the great function of the artistic image is to be a kind of detector of infinity… towards which our reason and our feelings go soaring, with joyful, thrilling haste."

It's late and I can barely write but I wonder if anybody else has any clue what I'm talking about, these instances in film. Another example is that in all of Woody Allen's work, the single most funniest thing that springs to my mind is a scene in Sleeper. It's when those Fahrenheit 451 red suit guys are coming around in their truck and setting up their flame thrower. They do it repeatedly throughout the film, it always malfunctions, until in the climax when it finally works but blows up their own truck. I realize this is quite subjective, not everybody sees truth in the same things, but I'd like to hear any examples from anyone else who has felt scenes like these.

[Cinesimilitude]

Woody Allen films and Dark comedies are pretty much the only thing I can laugh to when Alone. Allen's lines are just fantastic, and his exploration of cosmic irony throughout his oeuvre is probably why I find every film he's ever made to be excellent. Great thread, hopefully Dylan can expound on why we like Allen so much since he often tells my feelings better than I could.

[Highway 61]

I certainly laugh at Allen's work when alone, and I think it's because Allen's persona imbues everything he does, making the viewer feel as though an old friend is recounting a story or telling a joke. The intimacy of laughing with friends is substituted by the forthrightness of Allen's self-depricating humor, making one feel closer to him and less isolated.

[Belmondo]

Woody Allen's screen persona is inherently funny; but his intellectual concerns are deeply serious. This has resulted in a happy combination of both broad and highbrow comedy in which we find ourselves laughing at subjects which include death, disease, religion and God's Silence. It is no accident that even one of his early slapstick comedies was titled LOVE AND DEATH. As he progressed and got a bit darker, he got even more funny in my mind as the cinematography occasionally turned to black and white, the surrounding characters resembled Fellini, and the upbeat Gershwin score accented the irony of a man who resembles his own portfolio - "something isn't flowing". If you want to do slapstick, you had better be the the Marx Brothers and not Abbott and Costello. If you want to do highbrow humor, you had better have a legitimate intellectual base of knowledge. In the rare cases where you have both, then you have what this thread, and Woody, and the rest of us are looking for - humor that you can laugh at even if we are all alone.

[Robotron]

I've never enjoyed Woody Allen, although it may have to do with the fact that I've only seen some of his lesser movies, but his jokes strike me as being far too obvious to be clever, and not interesting enough to be funny in any other respect.

Comedy strikes me as an incredibly difficult genre to pull off successfully, and I mean comedy that has a lasting power beyond the funny gross-out jokes of Borat or South Park. I can think of only two comedies I've ever seen that really stay with me both as witty humor and having real commentary on the human condition, namely The King of Comedy and Being There. Maybe I'm a snob, but I've never been remotely taken with any slapstick.

[mikeohhh]

Maybe I'm a snob, but I've never been remotely taken with any slapstick.

nah, just a robot

[Greathinker]

I didn't quite intend for this to be a discussion of Woody Allen, I was just using him as an example. Humor is one of those things that always defies any convincing analysis, so why try? I wanted to focus on its subjectivity (laughing alone because you're the only one who finds it funny), and those scenes that make a lot of sense to you and maybe nobody else, that have truth in them that takes them into new territory, going beyond traditional one-liners, slipping on banana peels. Maybe I'm being too idiosyncratic here, but there are occasions like what I've described that elevate films for me in the same way that they can in an artistic sense.

[godardslave]

um...