From an article on Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)
"During the past three or four years, many directors have tried to put revue humor on film, and except for some of the early comedy sequences in The Graduate, it has failed, painfully - as in Luv, The Tiger Makes Out, The Eleanor Bron-William Daniels bits of Two for the Road, parts of Bedazzled, the Elaine May role in Enter Laughing, The President's Analyst, and so on. Revue theatre is a form of actor's theatre; even when it is written by a Murray Schisgal (or, in England, transformed into more serious drama by Harold Pinter) -- the meaning comes from the rhythm of clichés, defenses, and little verbal aggressions, and this depends on the pulse and the intuition of the performers. It would be as difficult to write down as dance notation. Typically, as in Nichols and May routines, the satire is thin and the thinness is the essence of the joke. We laugh at the tiny, almost imperceptible hostilities that suddenly explode, because we recognize that we're tied up in knots about small issues more than about big ones, and that we don't lose our pretensions even when (or especially when) we are concerned about big ones.
The style developed here (and in England) in the fifties, when college actors went on working together in cabarets, continuing and developing sophomoric humor. That word isn't used perjoratively; I like sophomoric college-revue humor, and one has only to contrast its topicality and freshness with the Joe Miller Joke Book world to understand why it swept the country. In revue, the very latest in interpersonal relations - the newest clichés and courtship rites and seduction techniques - could be polished to the point of satire almost overnight. Mort Sahl and the stand-up comics might satirize the political them, but cabaret, with its interacting couples, satirized us. We laugh at being nailed by these actors who are cartoons of us, all too easy to understand, and though there's a comic discomfort in listening to what our personal and social rituals might sound like if they were overheard, it's a comfortable form of theatre - the dishevelled American's form of light domestic comedy.
But it didn't work in the movies."
Kael was a fine critic and she almost always has interesting things to say, but she doesn't remotely justify her comment that so-called revue humor doesn't work in the movies. It seems that an awful lot of very successful movies (and TV shows) have been written and directed by alumni of the citadel of American revue humor: Second City. GHOSTBUSTERS, GROUNDHOG DAY, the better Will Farrell comedies, Tina Fey's projects ...
ReplyDelete