Keeping The Basics But Changing For Society

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Keeping the Basics but Changing for Society
Throughout cinematic history, despite all advancements and mutations, comedy has remained the most untouched of all genres. While the early Godzilla films had to endure a modern remake in order to regain the earlier fear factor and movies like Gone With the Wind (1939) have given way to sappy love songs and pretty faces in order to keep modern movie-goers interested, slapstick humor, as seen in Charlie Chaplin’s timeless comedies and again, years later, in the stupid-humor films like the Farrelly Brother’s, Dumb and Dumber (1994) has remained the most untouched form of entertainment. Someone falling down a flight of stairs or hit by a pie is always funny – whether done in black and white or watched in a surround sound multi-screen theater.
What technology and time have done for comedy, however, was to introduce the “talkies” and make “bathroom humor” a socially acceptable form of entertainment. In Stanley Kubrick’s dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), few laughs were injury-induced but instead were results of absentminded authority, sexual innuendoes and impeccable comedic timing. The names alone suggest so much of this film, their sexual connotations or preposterous resonance give that same simplistic flare that ached the sides of Farrelly’s viewers and made Chaplin’s audiences laugh generations earlier. Dr. Strangelove may have a more elaborate plot than the other films, but the many of the same comedic elements still apply. For example, a character in Dr. Strangelove, named General Jack D. Ripper who is an obvious parody of the prostitute-killing, “Jack the Ripper,” is overwhelmed by fear of Communist conspiracy. He insanely orders a fleet of military bombers to attack, out of extreme lunacy. His nervous jumpiness represents the same physical humor that Chaplin thrived off and that made Dumb and Dumber successfu...