Film comedy from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Lucy FischerCall Number: Electronic resource
ISBN: 9780199791286
Film comedy is a ubiquitous form of cinema, present from the medium’s earliest days with little “mischief joke” movies such as the Lumière brothers’ L’arroseur arrosé (1895) in which the “hoser gets hosed.” Comedies were popular not only in turn-of-the- century France but also in the United States, with Thomas Alva Edison producing shorts such as A Wringing Good Joke (1899) in which a boy ties his grandfather’s chair to the wringer of a washer and mayhem ensues. While some consider comedy a film genre, it is such a broad category that others liken it to a mode (e.g., melodrama) that itself is divided into various genres: romantic comedy, satire, parody, and the like.