The dawn of the motion picture industry began with a sneeze.
It's no joke-or is it? In fact, the first flickering bud of cinematic magic was captured in Thomas Edison's Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, a short film featuring Edison's assistant inhaling snuff and promptly, you guessed it, sneezing.
The first motion picture was, in essence, a comedy. And ever since comedies have evolved to compliment a changing culture.
Leap forward three decades and the world was introduced to Charlie Chaplin and the slapstick humor of silent comedies. Farther up the road, film comedy traversed the far-flung regions of human emotion, brandishing physicality or wit (or both) to survey the potency of romance or the allure of pessimism.
"Some of the movies I grew up with- some of my favorite comedy movies-are like Planes, Trains & Automobiles and Uncle Buck," said comedic it-guy Dane Cook, who will soon appear in the comedy Employee of The Month. "The comedy was broad and yet based in deep heart-almost sad."
When asked how he thinks comedies have changed over the years, Cook is open-minded but a bit nostalgic.
"Movies like Anchorman or even Talladega Nights, I think rely heavily on a more skit-y type of comedy, which is fine," Cook said. "I mean, there's definitely a place for that kind of humor. But I like story.
"I'm not saying there isn't a place for just insanity in comedy, but I guess [story] is something I'd like to see even more."
Though Cook is still a young'un against the century-old backdrop of film comedy, he brings to light an interesting point. Have story and characterization been abandoned in what seems to be the age of spoofs, skits and wanton sexual innuendo?
The general consensus among older comedic talent is yes, according to the testimonies of comedic figures interviewed in 2005 for the American Comedy Archive at Emerson College.
Project Manager Jennifer Matz, who conducted many of the interviews with icons such as Budd Friedman, Andy Rooney and Lewis Black, said many lamented the profusion of vulgarity and the loss of structure.
"The overall sentiment that was shared by the bulk of the interviewees when they were asked directly about this was that comedy is becoming too vulgar without a reason," Matz said. "They don't think it's any funnier that you can say the 'F'-word and 'goddammit' and you can talk about sex acts. None of them could point out a case where that succeeded and that being an advancement for the comedic arts."
As for the factors that make for quality comedy, Matz said most of the comedians drew on old names like Sid Caesar and films like The Graduate, which 40 years later remains just as influential. Rather than focus on the actors, these classics thrived on story and characters.
"All these old movies, it wasn't about you," Matz said. "It was about the character you were portraying. Today it's like, 'I want to go see a Dane Cook movie or a Will Ferrill movie. It was so different in the '50s. If you wanted to go see someone like Chaplin, it was about the characters he was portraying. You went to go see what he was going to do, not just his name."
The classics also seem to have become prey to commercial Hollywood do-overs. Consider the like-named remake of the 1960 British film, School for Scoundrels. When news of the 2006 version of Scoundrels reached the press, TimeOut London squirmed in protest and urged viewers to see the original.
But Jon Heder, who plays the film's loser protagonist, didn't take the advice to heart and said he had not seen the original. Co-star Billy Bob Thornton, though acknowledging the quality of actors like Terry Thomas, also hadn't studied the classic.
"I saw it a long time ago, but I didn't want to be influenced before doing this project," said Thornton.
It's understandable that a contemporary actor would want the chance to reinterpret a role. But many of these recent reinterpretations, swept up by the tide of Saturday Night Live graduates, have morphed the comedy scene into a culture of caricatures-entertaining, quote worthy, but somewhat uninspired.
With the exception of indie gems (Little Miss Sunshine being the most recent), mainstream comedy seems to be bereaved of a couple IQ points.
Wedding Crashers and Napoleon Dynamite might be the classics of the new age, but their comedic luster pales in comparison to Oscar-winning comedies It Happened One Night, or Woody Allen's Annie Hall.
While these modern comedies might dabble too generously in the inane, they are being swallowed whole by modern youth in search of relief from the seriousness of the past five years. After all, the function of comedy is relief.
For now, the genre is doing its job, as long as audiences are still cringing in painful mirth-even if that requires Vince Vaughn getting walloped in the nether region by a dodge ball.
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