• • A critique of ANOTHER FINE MESS: A History of American Film Comedy by Saul Austerlitz [Chicago Review, 512 pages] was spotted in The Boston Globe. A portion appears below.
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• • Reviewer James Sullivan writes: Film comedy, Woody Allen once claimed, is harder to produce than drama. Still, the perpetually unsatisfied director was convinced that comedy is “less valuable than serious stuff.’’
• • In “Another Fine Mess,’’ a survey of the most significant artists — — yes, artists — — to make us laugh at the movies, from Charlie Chaplin to Will Ferrell, writer and critic Saul Austerlitz takes rigorous exception to Allen’s line of thinking. Addressing sexual, racial, economic, or political tensions, comedy has always helped its audience sort through the vagaries of the way we live now. Slapstick, screwball or spoof, comedy serves a function.
• • “We turn to drama to experience a heightened version of the world as we know it — — life, puffed up,’’ writes the author. “Comedy releases all that hot air; our laughter is a bemused acknowledgment of our own collective foibles and inadequacies.’’
• • Perilously, Austerlitz set for himself the task of identifying the 30 most representative comic figures in Hollywood history. Many are obvious — — Mae West, Charlie Chaplin, Woody Allen, the Marx Brothers, Peter Sellers. Others, such as Dustin Hoffman, a dramatic actor who has done lots of comedies, or Judd Apatow, the director of a recent spate of ribald, dude-centric cash cows, might need a little splainin’.
• • But the writer, who contributes occasionally to the Boston Globe, and whose first book was a history of the music video, makes his case as deftly as Groucho lanced metaphorical balloons. W.C. Fields, the master of the withering aside, was in his early silent-film appearances “a juggler performing with one hand tied behind his back,’’ the critic observes. And if Preston Sturges, director of the classic comic testimonial “Sullivan’s Travels,’’ gave frequent leading man Joel McCrea the power to bend “the world to his will,’’ McCrea’s successor, the “pint-sized neurotic’’ Eddie Bracken, “could hardly convince his own extremities to comply.’’
• • Austerlitz notes that his biographical chapters are intended to create a conversation among comedy’s most influential practitioners. Arranged in rough chronological order, the effect is cumulative. Mae West’s brazen sexuality primps the pillow for Marilyn Monroe’s bombshell self-awareness; unlikely bedfellows Jerry Lewis and Richard Pryor somehow manage to conceive Eddie Murphy. ...
• • ... The author would not be the first to linger over the genius of Chaplin’s beloved Tramp, or the directors Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, or Cary Grant’s canny subversion of his own good looks. “If Mount Rushmore were dedicated to comedians instead of statesmen,’’ he suggests, “Grant would have found himself climbing across his own face in ‘North By Northwest.’ ’’ ...
— — Excerpt: — —
• • Book Review: "Great film comics help us live with ourselves"
• • By: James Sullivan
• • Published in: The Boston Globe — — boston.com
• • Published on: 14 September 2010
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