Seriously Silly

On a list of clichés about the French, near the top you will find the words, “love Jerry Lewis.” As a kid who learned this trope via Animaniacs, I took this to mean that French people collectively had a juvenile sense of humor.

As I got older, I came to realize that this love is moreso an outgrowth of their cultural cinephilia. Just as they were able to look at a bunch of crime and detective stories and extract Film Noir, French Critics were also able to look at a bunch of candy-colored, man-child movies and find high art. And while major, award-granting bodies might have you think otherwise, they are not alone in their elevation of cinematic silliness.

In his 1968 book The American Cinema, critic Andrew Sarris placed Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton in the “Pantheon” of great directors alongside names like Josef von Sternberg and Orson Welles. And lest you think he’s biased because he’s the man who brought The Auteur Theory to America from France, there are numerous other scholars and critics form all over who will tell you the same. So what is it about comedy?

I could go on (as many have) about how comedy represents an anarchic worldview that helps breed a healthy mistrust of the status quo, but on a purely cinematic level, comedy is great because comedy is a laboratory for invention!

Unlike “serious” pictures, comedies can literally do anything for a laugh. They are not bound by the laws of drama or the laws of physics. A technique that would jolt you out of a romantic drama will have you doubled over with laughter in a comedy. Breaking the fourth wall, rubber limbs, and avant-garde editing techniques are all fair game. This is the frontier where esoteric ideas are allowed to enter the mainstream.

It’s no accident that when Waiting for Godot playwright Samuel Beckett decided to dip his toe into film, he did so with Buster Keaton as his star. And did you know that Salvador Dali desperately wanted to make a movie with The Marx Brothers?

A child acquainted with the likes of Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis will already have a leg up when they get to the comic book colored worlds of Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.A. and Pierrot le Fou. But of course you don’t tell them that. Just let them be surprised that the broccoli tastes better because they ate candy first!