by TheMadDreamer

Created on: May 07, 2008

Comedy is a universal concept. Although very little comedy is straight comedy, more often than not, the humour of a situation is derived from an element within. This leads to many variations on the concept of comedy, and hence the comedy genre itself. There is romantic-comedy, action-comedy, horror-comedy, the list goes on and on, and then there are even more generalised types of humour like gross-out/toilet humour and slapstick. To this writer, there are five kinds of comedy; gross-out, slapstick, black comedy, classic 'screwball', and the undefinable smart comedy

Gross-out comedies are generally thought of as the lowest form of comedy. Achieving cheap laughs from graphic imagery and jokes, it's commonly assumed that you need little or no intelligence to make or watch a gross-out comedy and so they are pushed to the bottom of comedy pile. However, great comedy can be found in films such as 'South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut' and 'Jackass: The Movie, 2. Film fans forget that Trey Parker and Matt Stone ('South Park', 'Team America') are also great satirists and their comedy is far above the fart gags that people associate them with. Likewise with the Jackass boys, they are commonly misunderstood as a pile of idiots. When, really, they're just doing the stupid things we would like to do, if only we had the courage.

Slapstick comedy was pioneered by the likes of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, in a time where no sound meant that all humour had to be conveyed in a physical way. People usually refer to 'slapstick' as silly or stupid comedy, because it's seen as 'easy' or as a 'cheap' laugh. Little do they realise how hard it is to get slapstick wrong, see eighties comedies for good examples of this. The best slapstick is apparent in early cinema masterpieces; 'The General' (Keaton), 'Safety Last' (Lloyd), 'Modern Times' and 'City Lights' (Chaplin).

As the title would suggest, black comedies are usually quite dark... metaphorically speaking. Black comedies derive their humour from the concept that comedy exists everywhere. Because, even when things are at their worst, life is generally surprising and laughs can be appropriated from any sort of situation. Take the film; 'Harold and Maude. The story of a teenage boy and an elderly woman who are both trying to commit suicide, 'Harold and Maude' is awash with comedic observations on the idea of such a serious concept as death. For more evidence of this kind of comedy, watch; 'Little Miss Sunshine', 'High

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