Popular film and televison comedy

Review by Giovanni Varazzani

To have a different opinion about comedy, I will read and use for my essay the book titled “Popular film and television comedy”, which answer questions like “What is comedy?” and “Can it easily be defined and described?”

The authors are Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik and Routledge releases the book.

The authors try to individualize the diversity of comedy’s forms and modes and to explain the nature of those conventions. From their point of view they tell that all forms and modes of the comic involve deviations from aesthetic and cultural conventions and norms.

They discuss conventions of comedy with a wide range of programmes and films from Blackadder to Bringing up baby and the Roadrunner cartoons.

With this book I’m basically trying to understand the basic rules of comedy, rules that applied to animated film can be slightly different from a live action film, because with the power of animation to exaggerate situations, those rules can go to endless directions.

This book also considers the different kind of comic as sit-com, cartoons, short, television etc. thus to have a wide view and a clever idea about the argument of comedy.

At first impact this book seems to me easier to read than the article, part of book on communication language, I described previously. It is also focused on the argument of comedy more than communication in general.

The last task for me will be, after understood the set of comic rules, to discover how those are mutated and evolved during years and years of laughing.