The Rise of the Gag Comedy Film

It seems to me that the gag-based comedy film (the comedy that rather than using gags was a showcase for gags), like the action film (the film that rather than including action is, likewise, a showcase for action), emerged in the '60s, and began to become a Hollywood staple in the '70s, with a similar logic at work in both--a post-television elevation of image over conventional narrative in more fragmentary work, with an onslaught of momentary shocks prevailing over the traditional pleasures of storytelling, to the point of such storytelling being merely a connecting thread between one shock and the next. In the action movie those shocks were intended to thrill, in the gag-based comedy to keep the audience in stitches. Still, the similarity was such that, reading the remarks of reviewers of the old Bond movies so critical to the emergence of both genres, critics just encountering the action movie thought they were looking at some sort of gag comedy (with the view of From Russia, With Love, a relatively serious Bond film, taken at the time for some kind of parody of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, in spite of the Bond novel having come first).

Such thinking, one might imagine, may have also made it seem the more natural for Hollywood to emphasize spoofing of the Bond series so much in trying to capitalize on its popularity--with the ultimate expression of that how Charles K. Feldman's Casino Royale, at one point conceived as a tough noir helmed by The Big Sleep director Howard Hawks, ended up the biggest and silliest of such comedies, and itself a key moment (though none but myself and Robert von Dassanowsky seem to think so) in the development of the gag comedy form.

It seems notable that, just as the befuddlement of those critics looking at the first Bond films, and the slowness of Hollywood to assimilate Bondian filmmaking (Star Wars was the breakthrough here, fifteen years after Dr. No, and just as the Suits failed to understand Bond they failed to understand Star Wars initially--simply thinking SPACE! where in the '60s they had thought SPIES!), it took onlookers some time to get used to gag comedy, if perhaps less. The pre-middlebrow Woody Allen was important here (scripting Feldman's earlier What's New, Pussycat? and making films like What's Up, Tiger Lily?), and Mel Brooks and ZAZ (the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker team) more deeply and enduringly associated with it--the former hitting an early career peak with Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, the latter with Airplane! (while the spirit of such comedy was so pervasive that the Salkinds' Superman, to go by the legends surrounding the script, would seem to have nearly gone in this direction).*

Just as with the innovators who made the action movie what it is today it is not the kind of place in film history in which the middlebrow are apt to take an interest, but it is a place nonetheless meriting some attention.

* Of course, others were involved--like Richard Lester in his films with the Beatles, and Monty Python, especially as they moved their work from the small screen to the large, but the focus here is on Hollywood's own offerings.