For something in a movie to provoke me to laughter, I have to be taken by surprise in some way. With outright comedians like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Jack Benny, and some of the modern stand-up comedians, I find myself reveling in their personas and even their philosophical implications, but they seldom make me laugh. Yet when I’m watching a newspaper movie, a society melodrama, or even a heavy drama, an actor or actress can deliver a line and have me on the floor laughing with some unexpected little explosion of meaning.
An example: In the middle of a colorful crime film called Blood on the Sun (1945), Sylvia Sidney sorrowfully notes that in Japan, women are not allowed to think. James Cagney gives her a quick look and cracks, “They must bootleg a thought every now and then.” I roared at that, not because the line is particularly funny, but because Cagney delivers it with just the right amount of pretention-puncturing sass and it came as a shock because I was expecting that the movie was meant to be entirely or only serious.
This kind of wisecrack was a thirties staple that gradually got phased out after World War Two. It has seldom been revived, except as deadpan nineties slacker sarcasm, which reflects a sense of powerlessness, while the thirties wisecrack has an up-with-people, aggressive, positive energy. Its proponents included Cagney, his frequent film partner, Joan Blondell, Glenda Farrell, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Eve Arden, and, supremely, Ginger Rogers in Stage Door (1937), who manages to meld thirties wisecrack/nineties sarcasm into a wary, sexy and frankly anti-social package that to me is the ultimate in screen comedy.
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