Although he’s a film professor at Ball State University, Wes D. Gehring eschews the academic cant and pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook proffered by many of his colleagues, His latest book, Gehring Lost & Found (published by Bear Manor Media), is a collection of essays written over the years, many of them concerning film comedy.
Gehring’s observations hit the point succinctly. Take his comments on Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Both comedians transcend their era but Keaton’s stature has risen with time. He was, as Gehring writes, existential before the term gained currency, a Yankee counterpart to Kafka in his Sisyphean efforts to stave off catastrophe. However, Gehring prefers the larger humanity of the Little Tramp and—unlike Keaton who floundered in the sound era—Chaplin enjoyed several triumphs in later years.
Comedy is too big a concept to be called a genre. Gehring helpfully partitions film comedy into five categories: screwball, populist, black, parody and personality driven. He argues his definitions well and cites stimulating examples, calling Fred Astaire movies screwball comedies in the form of musicals. But Gehring isn’t inerrant. Calling Chinatown a black comedy in the form of film noir is pushing it. The humorous moments in the Polanski film don’t add up to comedy. Laughter isn’t the impression it leaves behind.
