Liquid Laughter. A Gendered History of Milk & Alcohol Drinking in West-German and US Film Comedies of the 1950s — Page 2:
6 Cinema serves as an apparatus for such forms of social transmittance, in which the audience and its role in constituting legitimate laughter additionally enhances the described setting. The audience takes the position of the third person and judges whether a joke is funny or not. A laughing spectator legitimizes the aggression and the fictitious victim of the film becomes a real victim in his or her head. This image thus finds its way out of the cinema into the field of everyday social discrimination. Should the aggression not succeed in disguising itself as a joke and is judged as not funny, the joke only provokes feelings of shame, embarrassment, guilt, and disgust.
7 This paper suggests using the Freudian argument for a historical analysis of feature films. It raises particular questions, e.g. who laughs about whom and who collaborates in the process of making a joke successful. Moreover, it may be brought to light which aspects were not considered funny or which remained in a zone of taboo. From a present-day perspective, it might also be interesting to see the differences of what was considered funny during the 1950s and today or vice versa. In the following, we would like to raise these questions with regard to West-German and US film comedies in order to scrutinize the contemporary social relevance and the social effectiveness of this genre.
Romantic Comedies
8 Comedies were and remain popular both with film producers (as they are easy and inexpensive to realize) and the audience. One reason for this genre's success might be its first-glance harmlessness. Critics attest subversive capacity to explicit satires or "black" comedies, but generally "comedy is often taken to be the epitome of light relief or 'just entertainment'" (King 2). This corresponds with the underestimation of film comedies in historiography which we want to challenge by closely examining the represented gender relations.
9 From a perspective of Gender History, we are first of all interested in the romantic comedy, which focuses on the establishment of heterosexual relations despite several obstacles and difficulties. Many of these films stress an individualistic worldview in which "the love" between two social actors is endangered by social and cultural conventions but nevertheless proves to be invincible. Implications of social dichotomies add dynamic to the plot, but a happy end is certain. This setting provoked the ever-recurring assessment of romantic comedies as "escapist entertainment," but it also stimulated not only our analytic curiosity but also the interest of Geoff King:
Their implicit "don't take it too seriously" helps, potentially, to inoculate them against close interrogation: those who subject comedies to ideological analysis are more likely than most to be criticised for making too much of works of "mere" entertainment [...] If romantic comedy can have ideological implications, in its imaginary reconciliation of both characters and thematic oppositions, these need to be located in the specific socio-historical contexts in which it has been produced, particularly in terms of prevailing notions of gender relationships. (56)
10 Like melodrama, the romantic comedy usually and typically revolves around gender conflicts, and female protagonists very often occupy a central role in the plot. But while melodramas were rather frequently analyzed by historians, romantic comedies were not (Byars; DiBattista). On a primary level, this paper draws from ideas formulated by film historian Kathleen Rowe:
Making fun of and out of inflated and self-deluded notions of heroic masculinity, romantic comedy is often structured by gender inversion, a disruption of the social hierarchy of male over female through what might be called the topos of the unruly woman [...] When romantic comedy fully realizes the potential of this topos, it dramatizes a resistance to the law of Oedipus, a carnivalization of sexual identities and gender hierarchies that posits a new and more inclusive basis for community than the social order it takes as a point of reference. (1994, 41-42)