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  PRIMO: If you give people time, they learn.

  SECUNDO: I don't have time for them to learn. This is a restaurant. Not a fucking school.

  Secundo leaves the frame. Primo goes back to his paper.

  (Big Night)

  Part of what we appreciate here is not just the comic repetition but the "jumps" in the dialogue caused by switches within the characters. Ultimately we sense that these brothers know each other so well that they play games. Thus Primo's surprise "OK," which turns out to be complete irony when he brings up "hot dogs," and then the straightforward exchange at the end that nails their differences exactly.

  3. A carnivalesque balance between visual and verbal comedy. The film embraces the clever photography and montage presentation of food as a definite character in the film as well. This attention to detail immediately adds realism and fires the audience's taste buds. It is visual "comedy" when the brothers prepare and serve the food to Louis Prima's bouncy music and when the assembled group devours the food, dances, goes into ecstasy and finally fades away.

  4. A bittersweet embrace ending that leaves the future open. If this were an anarchistic comedy in the Aristophanic tradition, we could close with a triumphant victory for the brothers, with Louis Prima in the Paradise, being photographed by the papers. The good nature and artistic talent of the brothers would have been rewarded.

  But Tucci and Tropiano do not create such a fairy tale. Instead we are left in the kitchen with the sense that the restaurant has failed and the brothers have fought and offended each other. And yet, as Secundo quietly cooks an omelet and serves it to Primo, we have a beautifully written and realized "silent" comedy of renewed brotherhood and thus of hope for their futures, whatever they will be. The script says:

  Without looking up from his plate, Secundo reaches over to Primo and places his hand on his back, tentatively. Primo looks at Secundo and Secundo looks up and meets his eyes.

  (Big Night, 46)

  The actual film is even stronger: their eyes do not meet, but Primo reaches over too and places an arm around his brother. The camera pulls back as the brothers are still eating, embracing each other, silently.

  That image says more than the pages of dialogue that most films feel they need to wrap a narrative.

  And one final note: the last line of dialogue in the film is Secundo to Primo as he comes in: "Are you hungry?" Primo doesn't answer, just sits down, and then the above scene plays out. To end this at times joyful and at times bitter comedy about food and fellowship with a question about hunger is perfect!

  Women and American Comedy: Penny Marshall's A League of Their Own

  If we speak literally of women "in" comedy, we mean the actresses in front of the camera: bright and brilliant women such as Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, Barbara Stanwyck and Rosalind Russell. In more recent years we've seen smart and sassy comic performances from the likes of Shirley MacLaine, Whoopi Goldberg, Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn, Barbra Streisand, Diane Keaton, Melanie Griffith, Lily Tomlin, Jamie Lee Curtis, Amanda Plummer, Meg Ryan and Holly Hunter. But there is an equally long tradition of dumb blondes and actresses used and abused by the comic male leads. Where would Groucho be without Margaret Dumont to make fun of? Marilyn Monroe was that rare individual who, though cast as the sexy dumb blonde, managed through strength of personality to turn her roles upside down and inside out, so that we came off respecting her for who she was.

  Women in comedy behind the camera becomes a much more problematic topic. There have not been many. Two of my choices in this section are a tribute to that rare and talented breed that one hopes will grow in number: women directors. Certainly Diane Keaton has jumped into the circle of the chosen few women who direct comedies, and we can also mention Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan, 1984), Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle, 1993), and Penelope Spheeris with Wayne's World.

  Let us now examine one female-centered comedy up close. A League of Their Own is an ensemble character film that starts within a highly comic climate and moves toward a much more sober "embrace" conclusion.

  Beginning as an actress herself, best remembered for playing Laverne in Laverne and Shirley, Penny Marshall has gone on to direct a number of highly successful films, including the comedies Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986), Big (1988), A League of Their Own (1992) and Renaissance Man (1994).

  Based on a script by Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz from a story idea by Kim Wilson and Kelly Candaele, A League of Their Own is clearly an anarchistic ensemble comedy grounded in a little-known page of American baseball history: during World War II, the lack of professional male ballplayers made it possible for a female pro league to catch on with moderate success. We could almost call this Aristophanes' Lysistrata goes to bat!

  The audience is a very wide one: baseball lovers, women who wish to see at last an all-star female cast, and children as well. The film was rated PG, and ticket sales reflected a very diverse audience indeed.

  The plot is the basic Aristophanic one of a crazy idea-creating a pro women's ball league-that gets carried out. Thus most of the laughs come from turning the typically male sports-centered story upside down: women in the locker room, women on the field stealing bases and hitting home runs, women swearing and riding the team bus around the country from game to game.

  The script is structured as a circular tale, framing the World War II plot with a present-day gathering of the surviving "old ladies" in Cooperstown, New York, for the unveiling of a monument and exhibit dedicated to the team. This "then and now" set-up builds instant nostalgia by film's end, as we enjoy seeing the aged but familiar faces of Geena Davis, Madonna and others.

  Within this overall narrative structure, two stories unfold. The primary tale is a sisterhood plot about Dottie (Geena Davis) and Kit (Lori Petty), two Oregon farm girls who are tapped for the big leagues. Dottie is the beauty and the apparent athlete, but Kit turns out to be the pro who goes the full distance, as Dottie drops out once her husband returns from the war, wounded but ready to start a family.

  We see once more how comedy and melodrama cross, as the second half of the film concerns the rather somber development of Kit's growth and Dottie's departure from the pros. The ending becomes a solid embrace between sisters. Taking place in the present, the soulful hug is a "happy ending" that unites past and present and washes away all past antagonisms and hurt feelings in true sisterly concern-for the ending in the past is a World Series in which Kit's Racine, Wisconsin, team beats out Dottie's Rockford Peaches.

  The second plot line revolves around Tom Hanks as Jimmy, their alcoholic ex-pro coach. He is both an alazon (buffoon) and an eiron, as he sarcastically manipulates the girls to get what he wants: a championship season. By film's end, however, he proves to be a Good Soul who takes the women's best interests to heart.

  Highlights include a number of comic montages to suggest the passage of time and the growth of the women as players, and to cover their years on the road on buses and in boardinghouses.

  Scatological slapstick is given a strong nod, especially in Tom Hanks's entry and hilariously long urination introduction to the team in their locker room. Penny Marshall plays the humor broadly enough to hold a large audience, and yet she avoids dwelling too long on such humor, since the final overall feeling the film leaves you with is a warm but tearfully nostalgic one.

  The script manages the transition from humorous sports film to serious meditation on girls becoming women through sports with two particular touches. In the first, which we can place as the end of act 2, one of the women learns in a particularly moving scene that her husband has been killed on the front. And in the second, we realize that Tom Hanks has died several years before the "present" and thus is unable to be there to savor the success of his coaching. His absence makes his presence all the more powerful.

  A League of Their Own manages to have its comedy both ways: the first half is often hilarious and very light and bright, often pure farce, but in the second half and particularly t
he last act the film has few laughs and a surprising number of tears, all wrapped in the banner of nostalgia and renewed sisterhood. While we laugh, we get a glimpse of changing values in American culture, as women who had previously defined themselves only as wives or working women in traditional roles now become more self-assured in their new "professional" images.

  The screenwriters and Marshall deserve special credit for not overdoing the slapstick and for avoiding a simplistic romance between the Geena Davis and Tom Hanks characters. They come close, but the script resists such a cliche.

  Race, Politics and Humor: Spike Lee's Get on the Bus

  The humor of any dominant culture in any country runs the risk of unfairly stereotyping other ethnic, racial or political groups. Conversely, humor and comedy become important ways in which a minority group can discuss its situation, in relation both to dominant cultures and to its own people.

  African American comedians and actors have for years worked a wide spectrum of humor, ranging from the biting activist routines of Dick Gregory or Richard Pryor to the middle-class, image-conscious humor of Bill Cosby or the trendy youth laughter of Will Smith and Wesley Snipes.

  At the center of commercial African American filmmaking over the past decade and more, however, is Spike Lee. Combining laughter with racial and sociopolitical insight, his films, beginning with She's Gotta Have It (1986), School Daze (1988) and most significantly Do The Right Thing (1989), have given voice to many concerns of contemporary urban African Americans.

  Get on the Bus (1996), with a script by Reggie Rock Bythewood, is even more daring than Lee's previous work. Here, on a small budget of several million dollars raised entirely by fifteen African Americans, including Danny Glover, Will Smith and others, he successfully pulls off a very difficult assignment: making a fiction film about the Million Man March of 1995 without alienating either the Marchers or their detractors. I have watched the film a number of times now, and I must say I am deeply impressed with the concept, writing, and execution of this anarchistic ensemble comic drama. And Lee uses the element of improvisation (discussed in chapter 8) to make the very short shooting schedule a strength rather than a weakness.

  Audience: targets the African American male, but the film "works" for audi ences of all ages and races. Box-office receipts, however, and surveys did show that there was very little crossover to nonblack audiences.

  Structure: Get on the Bus is a picaresque political road movie. The topic is the Million Man March, but much of the brilliance of the film is that instead of the typical dramatic story of a central character or two attending the March, perhaps experiencing both difficulties and transforming joy and then going home to make changes in their lives, Lee and scriptwriter Bythewood have made the journey to the March 85 percent of the film!

  Given that the overall subject matter is a serious one, an even more important theme emerges through the film: the identity, role and significance of the African American male in American culture today. Bythewood and Lee have, furthermore, happily chosen to tackle this most serious topic with humor and pathos in such proportions that the humor keeps the pathos from ever turning into oversentimentality or easy melodrama.

  I refer you back to our discussion in chapter 7 of Boccaccio and the Italian tradition of shaping comic narratives around a group telling stories. For Bythewood and Lee have similarly employed a Decameron structure in filling a bus with a wide spectrum of different black males, each of whom "tells" his own story. And in a spirit similar to both Boccaccio and Dante, the overall sense of "comedy" comes from the celebration of the group as group and thus a microcommunity, ultimately tolerant of all its members. The ending is thus very much an embrace.

  Characters: This Noah's Ark of a bus has at least one of every kind of man we can imagine, including

  Evert, a truck driver and one-time deadbeat father who is now trying to come closer to Shmoo

  Shmoo, his hiphop teenage son, who has been picked up for shoplifting and allowed to come on the bus only chained to his father (the chains become a central ironic image for a "freedom" bus!)

  Xavier, a UCLA film student, a younger Spike Lee figure, out to capture the ride and the March on video as a class project

  Gary, a mulatto police officer with a white mother and a black policeman father who was murdered in the line of duty by a black man

  Jeremiah (Ossie Davis), a failed businessman, husband, father and man of the cloth with heart trouble, out to redeem himself

  An actor who claims he was "almost" cast in Boyz N The Hood

  A gay black couple who are trying to break up but remain friends (one, Mandell, is smooth, while the other is a rasta)

  A Black Muslim who used to deal drugs and has murdered a few brothers in the past

  There are others as well, but the second most important member (after Ossie Davis, who functions as a wise grandfather figure for the group, leading them in prayer and in African drumming) is George, the bus driver (Charles S. Dutton).

  The loose structure, wide variety of characters and finely tuned dialogue mean that there are nonstop opportunities for laughter, wise smiles and even tears, as Jeremiah dies in a Washington hospital as the March is beginning. Thus the film suggests that for many of the men onboard the triumph was not the actual March but the journey to the March and the humanity they have shown in being with Jeremiah.

  The bus-ride structure and ample uses of confrontational humor among such a group also allow Bythewood and Lee to cover a multitude of important issues for black males (and ultimately for all Americans), as they discuss, argue, fight over and sometimes come together on topics such as black women, black Islamic vs. Christian movements, Southern vs. Northern or Western blacks, Jews and the African American community, drug violence in the black community, skin color among blacks, fatherhood and race, and relationships with women, including fidelity and infidelity.

  By film's end, the sense of triumph required of comedy is apparent in each character, even Jeremiah, who dies knowing he has made a difference in the lives of those around him. No sudden miracles have taken place. But father and son do throw off the lock and chain and express their love for each other, and throughout the bus each takes back something of the spirit of the group.

  George, the bus driver, gets to make a key speech near the end, much in the spirit of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, as he tells the whole group, "God asks what you gonna do now. The real march ain't even started yet. We got work to do." Inside the Lincoln Memorial, they read a prayer written by Jeremiah.

  Highlights would definitely include the "Roll Call" song that kicks off the ride in California as the group is immediately united through music, and a sequence in which a rich African American car dealer with an attitude gets thrown off the bus by the whole group before they reach Virginia.

  Get on the Bus takes a lot of chances with humor in terms of character, story and theme, and I can't think of one of them that doesn't pay off handsomely in this small film that will find a larger audience over the years.

  Children and Comedy: The White Balloon, a Young Girl's Comic Odyssey

  Iran seems an unlikely place to look for an enjoyable and wise comedy about childhood. But The White Balloon (1995) is just one of many fine films "for children" that this Islamic nation with very strict limits on what can be shown or discussed has produced. Writers, pay attention: in a country that basically bans stories on politics, sex or religion, for starters, what do you write? Children's tales, of course! What we can learn from a film such as The White Balloon is both an engaging simplicity of story and style and a lesson or two about "Aesopian" storytelling. This is a term used for artists, writers and filmmakers in the former Communist regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where they learned the art of saying what they really wanted to say indirectly or metaphorically. An important part of the success of The White Balloon, therefore, is that this film, written by the famed director-screenwriter Abbas Kiarostami and directed by Jafar Panahi, is aimed not only at a ch
ildren's market but at an attentive adult audience as well. Thus an important lesson for us all: how to craft a comedy that reaches both children and adults who have not forgotten the child within!

  The plot is a picaresque journey story as a seven-year-old girl, Razieh (Aida Mohammadkhani), sets off from her home in a crowded Teheran neighborhood to buy a "dancing" goldfish as a New Year's gift. The plot twist involves the loss of the five-hundred-toman note her mother gave her and her tough-minded and clever determination to get it back.

  Yes, this is anarchistic comedy, but like many we have discussed, it is anarchistic with a muted rather than Aristophanic ending. Razieh's idea to hunt out the goldfish is a crazy one, according to her older brother, who points to the goldfish she already has in their courtyard pond. Her answer is the classic one of childhood wishes and "pre-Oedipal" behavior: "Yes, that's true, but they are not the right ones!"

  We adults laugh out loud (and definitely harder than the children in the audience) at this line, for we realize that Panahi and Kiarostami have hit upon a universal subject for comedy: all of us want that other goldfish, for we are not satisfied with the ones at hand!

  This is the stuff of fairy tales, and yet from the opening shot we are in the streets of Teheran, teeming with life, sounds and probably odors. In fact, the comic climate is carnivalesque, since all happens during the festive period of an Islamic New Year celebration. The white balloon of the title is being sold in the street as part of the celebration, and it cleverly distracts us from the comic center of the film: Razieh's journey of initiation to beginning to come of age, travelling away from the safe and known confines of her home into the "real" world.

  Definitely character-centered, this picaresque fish-out-of-water tale (she is definitely outside the environment she knows best, her home) opens up Razieh's multifaceted personality as both an innocent and an ironic instigator of trouble (comedy!), or, as Richard Corliss put it, "Razieh is a maven of curb-level politics, a born haggler. She'd be a demon at any yard sale" (46).