Comedy

POPULIST COMEDY

While clown comedy is the most traditional of the comic genres, dating from the beginning of cinema, populism came to the forefront during the Depression in the 1930s. The exemplar of populism is director Frank Capra (1897–1991), especially in his pivotal pictures Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), and It's a Wonderful Life (1946). This underdog genre embraces the belief that the superior and majority will of the common man is forever threatened by the usurping sophisticated evil few. Consequently, populist films frequently feature politician characters, including James Stewart's title character, a senator, in Mr. Smith , Loretta Young's congressional candidate in The Farmer's Daughter (1947), Kevin Kline as the president (and the president's double) in Dave (1993), and Chris Rock's presidential candidate in Head of State (2003).

Politics notwithstanding, Capra's It's a Wonderful Life represents the broadest microcosm of populist basics, from its celebration of family and traditional values to its embrace of personal sacrifice for the common good. Capra added a fantasy wrinkle by giving George Bailey (James Stewart) a guardian angel when he turns suicidal. The fantasy element is important because it makes the film's populist ideology more palatable to the viewers who otherwise might find the films too sentimental. Indeed, even when fantastic events do not take place, most populist interactions are so positive that the genre has been described as a fantasy of goodwill. Many classic sports comedies are populist in nature, including The Natural (1984), Major League (1989), and The Rookie (2001). Central to these and all populist underdog victories is the notion of a second chance, whether it is George Bailey getting his life back (and knowing its worth) in It's a Wonderful Life , or a man reconnecting with his lost father in Field of Dreams (1989)—a movie conceived as a baseball version of the Bailey story. Baseball also allows the modern populist film to keep alive the genre's celebration of America's pastoral roots.

Though Capra and populism owe a great deal to an American cracker-barrel humor that stretches from Ben Franklin (1706–1790) to Will Rogers (1879–1935), there is much about the genre that is international in nature. At its most fundamental, populism embraces unlikely victories and revitalized families, and especially the ties between fathers and children. Also, populists ultimately do the right thing. Therefore, such recent British comedies as Billy Elliot (2000) and Bend It Like Beckham (2002) may be considered as populist comedies, and even the offbeat French film Amelie ( Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain , 2001), in which the title character (Audrey Tautou) so inventively assists others that her efforts ultimately lead to her own special rewards, is populist in spirit.