Comedy

Features

Slapstick

Slapstick's origins are firmly rooted in the silent movies of the early 20th century. This type of comedy relies heavily on exaggerated visual action and uses harmless violence to bring forth laughter. Timing and polished performance skills are essential to effective slapstick. The name slapstick comes from the wooden sticks that clowns slapped together to induce laughter and applause. Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello and Harold Lloyd typify slapstick comedy.

Screwball Comedy

The mid-1930s saw the advent of screwball comedies. This subgenre typically features satirical views of society combined with madcap, energetic action accurately timed. The mixture of sophisticated and off-the-wall characterizes screwball comedy. Screwball comedies poke fun at society and use sarcasm to explore romantic conflicts whereby the usually upper class male suffers disorder and chaos in his life at the hands of a socially mismatched female. The resolution involves a happy settlement of differences between the protagonist male and the antagonistic female characters. Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn play their screwball comedy roles to perfection in "Bringing Up Baby.

comedy history

Comedy (from the Greek: κωμῳδία, kōmōidía), in the contemporary meaning of the term, is any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or to amuse by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, television, film and stand-up comedy. This sense of the term must be carefully distinguished from its academic one, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters.[1] The theatrical genre can be simply described as a dramatic performance which pits two societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye famously depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old",[2] but this dichotomy is seldom described as an entirely satisfactory explanation. A later view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose obstacles to his hopes. In this struggle, the youth is understood to be constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to take recourse in ruses which engender very dramatic irony which provokes laughter

Charlie Chaplin

Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977) was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work in the United States during the silent film era.[1] He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I. Chaplin used mime, slapstick and other visual comedy routines, and continued well into the era of the talkies, though his films decreased in frequency from the end of the 1920s. His most famous role was that of The Tramp, which he first played in the Keystone comedy Kid Auto Races at Venice in 1914.[2] From the April 1914 one-reeler Twenty Minutes of Love onwards he was writing and directing most of his films, by 1916 he was also producing them, and from 1918 he was even composing the music for them. With Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith, he co-founded United Artists in 1919.[3]

Chaplin was one of the most creative and influential personalities of the silent-film era. He was influenced by his predecessor, the French silent film comedian Max Linder, to whom he dedicated one of his films.[4] His working life in entertainment spanned over 75 years, from the Victorian stage and the music hall in the United Kingdom as a child performer, until close to his death at the age of 88. His high-profile public and private life encompassed both adulation and controversy. Chaplin was identified with left-wing politics during the McCarthy era and he was ultimately forced to resettle in Europe from 1952.

1

The Simpsons

2

looney tunes

3

Comedy!

South park

4

The Ren and Stimpy show

5

Animaniacs.

what are the top 5 rated animated comedy shows?