The Comedy of Philosophy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick (Suny Series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature)

The Comedy of Philosophy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick (Suny Series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature)

Lisa Trahair

Language: English

Pages: 276

ISBN: 0791472485

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The Comedy of Philosophy brings modern debates in continental philosophy to bear on the historical study of early cinematic comedy. Through the films of Mack Sennett, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and the Marx Brothers, Lisa Trahair investigates early cinema s exploration of sense and nonsense by utilizing the contributions to the philosophy of comedy made by Freud and Bataille and by examining significant poststructuralist interpretations of their work. Trahair explores the shift from the excessive physical slapstick of the Mack Sennett era to the so-called structural comedy of the 1920s, and also offers a new perspective on the importance of psychoanalysis for the study of film by focusing on the implications of Freud s theory of the unconscious for our understanding of visuality."

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correspondence to the two opposed forces—tension and elasticity—that life brings into play.10 The comic constitutes a form of rigidity, whereas drama gives rise to flexibility.11 Bergson proposes, for example, that repetition is funny because it is the opposite of life “which is the complete negation of repetition” (L, 34) and that the comic illustrates “a certain rigidity of body, mind and character that society would still like to get rid of in order to obtain from its members the greatest

operates in terms of deceitful appearances: he presents a sham to his girlfriend, hides from his landlady, steals his friend’s phonograph, and so forth. At its most potent, the film subjects the notion of the smooth surface of the American Dream to comic exposition. The motif of the façade that surfaces in multiple ways in relation to Lloyd’s comedy provides an interesting segue into a deeper consideration of what is entailed by the concept of the comic. For the distinctiveness of the deployment

nipples on a woman’s dress with the bolts on the conveyor belt. In Modern Times, laughter comes to the rescue—just as it does for Bergson. The moralizing of the film is also Bergsonian to the extent that comic contrasts between the vital and the mechanical, and between human beings and abstract relations (such as employment and the law), deny the needs of individuals and turn people against each other. In the comic comparisons that take place “the ought” is without doubt, for the most part, the

engendered. What still makes it worthy of attention is the way its poststructuralist position is produced by opening up the discourses of linguistics and psychoanalysis to aesthetic considerations. Central to Lyotard’s project are the eponymous “concepts” of discourse and figure, although precisely what they entail is not easily encapsulated. Throughout the book they are mobile terms that designate different things in different places. Considered as oppositional, commentators have noted the

coconspirator has to leave town in a hurry, the manager recruits another, more formidable opponent for him. The Tramp calls on all available resources to diminish the likelihood of losing the fight: he borrows the good luck charms of another fighter, flutters his eyelashes, tries to seduce his opponent into taking it easy (this, while the camera gaily swings back and forth between them) and, finally, failing in his efforts, resorts, in the ring, to using the referee as a shield to protect

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