Someone told me once that generations are separated by–among other things–the sort of humor they enjoy. I’ve always thought that this was an interesting idea.
As a kid, I watched a lot of I Love Lucy. I can’t really remember if I laughed at it or not, but I must’ve been entertained, because I watched it religiously–it was my favorite TV show. In the past few years, I’ve revisited a lot of the old episodes without being quite so enamored with the humor. I can’t help but wonder if I’ve been socially conditioned by my generation not to find Lucille Ball funny anymore.
I bring this up because I noticed a lot of similarities between Bringing Up Baby and I Love Lucy–and I did the same with The Awful Truth. They are all contemporaries of each other, and there are similar elements of humor in all of them, what we learned to be “screwball comedy” in class. The action in The Awful Truth happens as a result of suspicion and misunderstanding–there are characters we understand are meant to be comical, and they end up in situations which seem almost too ridiculous to be true (I’m thinking of the scene where Cary Grant’s character “hides” in the same room as Irene Dunne’s music teacher).
I know we discussed in class that upon first viewing, The Awful Truth is not the most likable film. I wondered, at least in the case of our class, if this might be a generational thing–we simply don’t find this sort of comedy funny anymore. I felt the same way with Bringing Up Baby–we, as a class, did not respond in quite the same way that audiences must’ve at the time it was released.
This relates to Benjamin’s idea of how film has changed our perceptions, our expectations–does it also have the power to mold and create a brand of humor for us?
