“You can laugh while Rome is burning, but believe you me, Poppy, it is burning, and if you don’t wake up, then you will be burnt to a cinder . . . I mean, look around you. What do you see? Do you see a policy of bringing happiness to people?” — Scott in Happy-Go-Lucky
Category: Comedy
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
Ernie Kovacs: An American Secret
“Ernie’s contract is reported to contain a clause forbidding him ever to consult a psychiatrist. The network is afraid if he ever became normal he’d be ruined.” — Dorothy Kilgallen
Asian · Comedy · Festivals & Awards
The New-Style Comedy: Wai Ka-Fai and the Hong Kong International Film Festival (2011)
“This wonderfully flexible approach to movie-making explains why Wai and To’s films seem so alive to every implication — unlike most current U.S. comedies, where directors carefully steer around obstacles and pretend not to notice flaws in the set-up.”
Comedy · Essays · LGBT & Queer
Between a Rock and a Soft Place: Queering/Queered Heterosexuality in “Career Girl” Films of the 1950s and ’60s
“Perhaps Hollywood, in trying to engage in queer possibilities for its narratives and with its audiences, could only put up a resistance to the binaries in the dominant culture through[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Looking at Charlie – Monsieur Verdoux: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“What’s all this about good and evil?” With the release of The Great Dictator late in 1940, Charlie Chaplin had done it again. He had made a movie that, with[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Pierre Etaix: Revisiting a Forgotten Master
“The man’s a genius!” —Jerry Lewis
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
Forgotten Charleys I: Charley Bowers: Silent Comedy’s Wizard of the Bizarre
“He is Aladdin and the camera is his lamp.” — James R. Quirk
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Silents
Forgotten Charleys II: Charley Chase: Mr. Normal Unleashes His Comic Demon
“He could be suave or awkward, likable or pesky, average or eccentric, a winner or a loser, a fussy nerd or the life of the party, all the while remaining Charley Chase.”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · War
Looking at Charlie: The Great Dictator: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke it is written, the kingdom of Godis within man, not one man or a group of men but in all men.”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
Nuts and Nice Messes: On Laurel and Hardy
“Life isn’t short enough . . .” Laurel in Sons of the Desert (1934)
Serious Joke: The Coen Brothers’ Emergence as Jewish Humorists
“The films of the Coen brothers seem to take place in a postmodern Chelm, displaced chronologically and geographically.”
Here Come the Bromides: Living in the Era of the Bromantic Comedy
“Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.” — Vladimir Nabokov
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Looking at Charlie: City Lights: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“If you could only see me as I really am, not as I appear but as I really am, as I am in my heart.”
Vicky and Woody and François: On Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona
The return of Jules and Jim?
Blood, Sweat, and Canvas: How Barton Fink Can Set You Free
“All the world’s a hell ten feet square”
Who Do You Love? Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game Reconsidered
Was Le Grande Jean too soft on the aristos?
The Double Standard: The Twins of Two-Faced Woman and Sylvia Scarlett
“She is both sentimental and shameless.”
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