Class, Language, and American Film Comedy

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by Christopher Beach

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published December 2001, 272 pages, paper

ISBN 0521002095

Examining the evolution of American film comedy since the beginning of the sound era (c. 1930), Christopher Beach focuses on how language, class, and social relationships in early sound comedies by the Marx Brothers, the screwball comedies of the 1930s by Capra, Sturges and others, and 1950s comedies of Frank Tashlin and Vincente Minnelli, and contemporary films by Woody Allen, Whit Stillman, and the Coen brothers. Beach argues that sound and narrative expanded the semiotic and ideological potential of a film, providing moments of genuine social critique and also mass entertainment.

 Contents

Introduction
1. A troubled paradise: Utopia and transgression in comedies of the early 1930s
2. Working ladies and forgotten men: class divisions in Romantic comedy, 1934-37
3. 'The split-pea soup and the Succotash': Frank Capra's 1930s comedies and the subject of class
4. Is class necessary?: Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks in the early 1940s
5. Desperately seeking status: class, gender, and social anxiety in postwar Hollywood comedy
6. Is there a class in this text?: Woody Allen and postmodern comedy
7. Yuppies and other strangers: class satire and cultural clash in contemporary film comedy.