Parody

PARODY IN CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD FILM

Literature, song, and the stage all boasted a well-developed tradition of parody long before cinema was invented, so it is no surprise that as soon as recognizable film traditions had been developed, they were subject to caricature. Cecil B. DeMille's feature Carmen was released in October 1915, and by December of that same year, Charles Chaplin's Burlesque on Carmen was in theaters. Through the 1910s and 1920s, parody emerged as a staple format for comic shorts. Ben Turpin used his peculiar cross-eyed appearance as the source of humor in his short The Shriek of Araby (1923), a parody of heartthrob Rudolf Valentino's popular romantic drama, The Sheik (1921). Stan Laurel used parody very effectively in his solo efforts such as Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pride (1925) and the western spoof West of Hot Dog (1924), which anticipated the Laurel and Hardy western parodies of the 1930s such as Them Thar Hills (1934) and Way Out West (1937).

Among the most accomplished of silent parodists was Buster Keaton (1895–1966), whose films tended to use the source text as a general structure, while the comedy itself was drawn from Keaton's inventive physical humor, often in tension with the narrative frame. Keaton's western spoof Go West (1925) describes a city slicker's assimilation into ranch life and his affection for a young cow, "Brown Eyes," which he saves from the slaughterhouse. In the film there is a scene in which the cowboys enact the western cliché of the bunkhouse poker game, and one of them points a gun at Keaton and snarls a famous line from The Virginian (1923), "When you call me that, SMILE." Because Keaton ("the great stoneface") is famous precisely for not smiling, or indeed expressing any emotion at all, he responds by slowly lifting the corners of his mouth with two fingers, a gesture that mimics Lillian Gish's character trying to force a smile for her abusive father in D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919). The multiple layers of parody and self-referentiality in this moment point to Keaton's use of cinematic history and conventions to add richness to his comedy through parodic reinterpretation.

The sound era provided new conventions for parody, and again the short film tended to lead the way with Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, and especially Abbott and Costello spoofing popular films in their short comedies. Abbott and Costello went on to develop a series of feature-length parodies in which they meet Frankenstein in 1948, the Invisible Man in 1951, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1953, and the Mummy in 1955. Animated films also made generous use of parody, as when Dave Fleischer's Betty Boop took on Mae West in She Wronged Him Right (1934) and Tex Avery took on the gangster picture with Thugs with Dirty Mugs (1939). Chuck Jones (1912–2002) had a particular flair for animated parody, directing Rabbit Hood (1949), The Scarlet Pumpernickel (1950), and Transylvania 6–5000 (1963), among many others.

The conventional approach to parody in the studio era was to drop an outsider or innocent into a film in which the other characters are playing their parts more or less straight, making the source text simply a context for the comic's gags. Bob Hope's (1903–2003) parody films, including the noir spoof My Favorite Brunette (1947) and the western spoofs The Paleface (1948) and Son of Paleface (1952), cast the comic as a hapless coward caught up in genre-based plots. In The Paleface , for instance, Hope plays a dentist named Painless Peter Potter who against his better judgment is drawn into gun battles with outlaws and Indians. The film's comedy emerges from the contrast between the conventional western hero—brave, strong, resourceful—and the nervous, wisecracking Potter, who says of his guns, "I hope they're loaded. I wish I was, too." In this way, genre conventions remain essentially intact, while the character who cannot comply with those conventions is the principal source of comedy.