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The masters of comedy know how. For instance, our opening film is Duck Soup from the Marx Brothers. Groucho Marx made a distinction between amateur and professional comedians: An amateur thinks it is funny if you dress a young man as an old lady, put him in a wheel chair and push the wheel chair down a hill toward a stone wall. For a pro, said Groucho, it's got to be a real old lady. To elaborate, in order for comedy to work it must be true. It must be authentic. It cannot rest at the level of mere mimicry. It must be believed. The events of our lives that impact us at the deepest level of our being are the ones which also give us the biggest laughs. Both tragedy and comedy take human imperfection into consideration. Tragedy is about the human striving to achieve the divine, but falling just short. It is an upward reach for the divine. Comedy is about the downward pull - the very things that make us fallen creatures. The more serious the subject, the more comic potential exists. Mel Brooks said getting a hangnail is tragedy. Walking down a street, falling in an open man-hole and dying is comedy. As such, comedy inherently transgresses. It focuses on the underbelly of humanity and opens it to ridicule. Tragedy is the substance of drama, but comedy is the further reflection. Walter Kerr writes, "There is a strong probability that when the comic tone first became recognizable, it became recognizable as burlesque of the solemn and sacred." This year's festival explores many facets of the sacred through its negation in our foibles and imperfections. Perhaps laughter is a form of grace. A gift which enables us to cope with lacking that which seems both so close and so far away simultaneously - the divine. Michael C. Smith, Producer of the 2005 City of the Angels Film Festival |
