moive assignment

9/1/2017 The Demise of Physical Comedy | The New Yorker

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Max Winter beat me to the punch: I was prepared to write something on the and the absence of anything in the way of

physical comedy to take its place, when his post “ ” went up at rogerebert.com. It’s a good piece that’s

pegged to Criterion’s welcome DVD release of Lloyd’s 1923 silent classic “Safety Last!” and a trio of shorts, but it only brings up the excellent question and doesn’t hazard an answer. Here goes: a new Harold Lloyd is unthinkable because physical comedy depends on the proximity and possibility of death, which no longer seems acceptable to viewers who are completely aware of the prevalence of stunt doubles and digital effects, and who are repelled by the idea that a performer would actually face death for what is, after all, only a movie. In other words, physical comedy—the kind that made silent comedies famous—has been moralized out of existence.

Mel Brooks gets at the core appeal of physical comedy with his about the difference between tragedy and comedy: “Tragedy is when I cut my �nger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” Jerry Lewis, one of the most brilliant physical comedians, for the sufferer of pratfalls, but he has paid a terrible price for the ones he took. Here’s Lewis, in in USA Today:

From 1936 on, I have taken more

falls than any other 20 comedians

put together. From the time I was

21, I’ve taken them on everything

from clay courts to cement to

wood �oors, coming off pianos,

going out a two-story window,

Richard Brody

The Demise of Physical Comedy June 28, 2013

exhaustion of present-day verbal comedy Slapstick Last: Why a Modern-Day

Harold Lloyd Is Unthinkable

famous dictum

built his persona on deep sympathy a 2002 article

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landing on Dean, falling into the

rough. You do that and you’re

gonna have problems. I had pain

during the last eight �lms; I’ve had

pain in 37 straight telethons. I’ve

never had a day without pain since

March 20, 1965.

In the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, :

March 20 of 1965 I was closing at

the Sands in Las Vegas and I did a

�ip off the piano, a wild thing that

I shouldn’t have done.… And I

landed on my spine and I did

something to it… I’m laying out

there, can’t move, paralyzed.…

And I had to have two musicians

carry me off the stage.… And for

37 years, I had pain every morning,

every afternoon, every moment.

Constant, unremitting pain.

Buster Keaton, who also from his falls, even said that his very nickname came from stunts that came with the risk of injury. The great anti-physical comedians, such as Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, and Woody Allen, are great comic cowards who know and avoid the risks of slapstick. Their heirs are today’s hyper-verbal comedians, who are rooted in standup, not in fall-down, and who put their souls, not their bodies, on the line. Yet, paradoxically, rough physical comedy is everywhere now. Take “This Is the End.” It’s a story of comedians—including Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, and Danny McBride—playing themselves, attending a party at James Franco’s house, when apocalyptic disaster strikes, trapping them there. The movie is �lled with violence—death spirals into a sinkhole; tumbles over guardrails, through �oors, and down staircases; a stabbing and an impalement (of Michael Cera, no less)—all of which is supposed to be funny, but which is obviously the work of stunt doubles and digital-effects artists. Or take “The Heat” (please). It’s almost completely unfunny, but it’s certainly full of comedic falls and injuries (including

he elaborated

suffered terrible injuries

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a stabbing of Sandra Bullock that’s almost identical to the one endured by Jay Baruchel in “This Is the End”) that involve the characters played by comedians but are not the work of those comedians.

Harold Lloyd dangling off a clock face in “ ” or off a scaffold in “ ,” Buster Keaton letting the front of a house fall around him in “ ”— these comedy scenes are astonishing, but they’re hardly funny, because viewers know that the actors risked dying to realize them. The world has changed; just as classic-era Hollywood, with its unchallenged prejudices on matters of ethnicity and gender, re�ected the dominant presumptions and exclusions of the time, so the endurance of suffering during a rough-and-tumble period when many more Americans did physically hard and dangerous work found its re�ection in a comedy of danger. Just as, now, by the complex speci�cs of modern love, and has thereby lost its own identity, so physical comedy, with its mortal implications, has become well integrated into comedy at large precisely by the elimination of the risk factor. With stunts and effects, it’s now so common as to be invisible.

“This Is the End” is a superb example of how comedy and comic violence have become subordinated to a conspicuous ethical order. It’s really two movies in one. The �rst, a goof on the strained relationships among the comedians forced to survive together, hardly ever catches �re. The second—a peculiar quasi-religious fantasy—had me slack- jawed with astonishment at the comic imagination of the movie’s creators, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. The idea is weirdly simple: the catastrophe that the comedians �ee involves the supernatural element of a blue beam that teleports people up from the Earth and into the sky. In his fear and bewilderment, Baruchel (whose performance is superbly straightforward) reads from the Bible and �nds the story of the apocalypse; he declares that the Last Judgment is upon them and realizes that they are facing a great moral test. What begins as panicky speculation turns into a full-blown religious head trip. I won’t spoil what ends up as an astonishing, effects-driven series of gags, and I do mean “ends up”: eighty per cent of the movie, I’d estimate, goes by in relatively inert sketch comedy before it hits its metaphysical groove, but when it does so it bears comparison with Jared Hess’s grandly religious comic vision in “ .”

Hess’s �lm is far superior, because, to all appearances, he takes religion much more seriously, and so derives a more joyful wonder from it. Rogen and Goldberg seem to

Safety Last! Feet First Steamboat Bill, Jr.

romantic comedy has been sublimated

Gentlemen Broncos

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have distilled religion into a conventional, generic, common-sense conception of virtue that’s devoid of doctrine and that they reinscribe in the popular mythological trappings of Christianity. Nonetheless, the swift and grand loopiness of their climactic conceit (complete with one extraordinarily touching moment, involving halos) makes it well worth sitting through the long schlep to reach it.

P.S. I agree with A. O. Scott, who, in ,” cites the “naked wrestling match in ‘Borat’ ” as the funniest scene in recent movies. But it’s worth adding that the riotousness of that scene depends precisely on its existential element. Not only are Sacha Baron Cohen and Ken Davitian indubitably there in the �esh but the entire �lm, the entire movie career of Sacha Baron Cohen the auteur depends on the documentary basis—and that’s why his movies, spilling outside the bounds of �ction into life, consistently spark a sense of ethical discomfort.

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his review of “This Is the End