(p.5)
It was perhaps in this passage of Umberto Eco’s essay on Frames of comic freedom in which I found most intrigue this week. Eco makes the case for the similarities between irony and comedy, in that they both break the presupposed frame in which they operate, both breaking rules which are supposed to be known beforehand by the audience in order to create dramatic/comic effect. Further on, Eco pressed the importance of irony/comedy’s reliance on contextual knowledge, and advises against the “spelling out the norm” of the irony for comedic effect, assuming that viewers must come to their own realisation in order to appreciate the full effect.(p.6) More specifically, however, Eco talks here about the breaking of film genre rules for comedic effect – in this specific case, it’s the Western’s norms (conventions, aesthetics, structure) which are parodied.
Another good example of film genre irony could most likely be found in HBO’s The Sopranos’ treatment of Italian-American subcultures – a show which overall degraded and deconstructed the mafia film genre’s rules and myths which had been typified by mob films such as The Godfather. In the scene below, from the fourth episode of the second season, the Italian-American gangsters are taking a trip to Italy – the unsaid, expected norm of the mafia genre would assume that the Americans are to be welcomed amongst the Italians as brothers, as Vito Corleone himself had been when he went back to Sicily in The Godfather. What the Italian-Americans find, however, is that the ‘old country’ as they call it, have long-forgotten them, and see them as classless strangers rather than reunited compatriots. This degradation of the Italian-American’s identity, the breaking of this genre rule, which has always held a central theme in the mafia film genre, comes out with comedic effect throughout the episode.
Other Scenes from the episode:
Great read! Personally, when I read Eco’s piece, I found many of the arguments to be outdated when considering modern screen comedies. However, I think that honing in on the passage on page 5 and the subversion of genre is a really interesting and effective way of interpreting the reading and making it more applicable to analysing more recent comedies.