There is a lot more to comedy than I thought. Coming into this class I honestly thought there were only a few types of comedy, romantic, action, and some old school slapstick. Now I know that there is Black, dark, deadpan, verbal, screwball, satire, parody, slapstick, romantic. I’m sure there are many more, but for just 2 weeks that is a pretty exciting upgrade in my knowledge on comedy. Through Sleeper, Some Like it Hot, Dr. Strangelove and various in class clips, I have seen detailed examples of each of these type of comedies. Black and dark comedies deal with matters that are usually too taboo and not funny, and make them funny. Such things would be murder and theft. In serial mom Kathleen Turner kills people on her spare time. This would normally be horrific, but for some reason it is really funny. Deadpan is a form of comic delivery in which a persons facial expressions do not change. There is a lot of deadpan humor in Sleeper, Woody Allen does ridiculous things to the people around him, and the people around him do not flinch. Verbal comedy is the back and forth bickering between two of three people where they go back and forth, with short witty and wrapped exchanges. There is a lot of this in Sleeper between Diane Keaton and Woody Allen. Screwball Comedy is a type of comedy where the people in the film will go from being friends to foe, from hating each other to loving each other in a matter of seconds. In satire comedy, people’s vices or shortcomings are exposed and made fun of. A parody is the act of poking fun at something that has previously been done. An example of this would in how in Dr. Strangelove; they make a parody of the atomic bomb. Slapstick comedy is when the comedian does exaggerated physical violence or things with their body that are outside the boundaries of what most people normally do in public. This is the type of comedy that Charlie Chaplin made so famous. Last but not least, the romantic comedy like all the other sub-genres I just mentioned, there is a little bit of this in every genre of comedy. This type of comedy is pretty self-explanatory. It is when in a film there is some type of love interest that turns into "true love" and manages to survive through the funny obstacles of the film.
