Notes on visual comedy from Paul Wells’ “Understanding Animation” (1st edition)

• Animation has its roots in ‘trick film’ – “These kinds of images soon constituted visual conventions.  In manipulating the image in this way, film was able to demonstrate the transgression of the physical laws and disrupt the patterns of experience and behaviour determined by them” (p. 128) e.g. Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906)
• Early comedy heavily influenced by vaudeville clowns.  Two types of comic output
  • Gag – comedy spectacle (trick)
  • Personality – “an art that goes beyond merely moving designs around, and emotionally invites the audience by communicating a character’s individualism to them” (p. 129)
• For Disney – personality precedes the gag “the personality of the victim of a gag determines just how funny the whole incident will be” Personality is informed by status and identity (p. 130)
• Disney
  • ‘Caricature’ = human flaws – the kind of comedy caused by the character – external humour drawn from physical events
  • ‘Exaggeration’ = human foibles – kind of comedy within the character – humour drawn from an internal source evident in behaviour (p. 131)
• Otto Mesmer’s Felix the Cat – visual gags – using all the graphic possibilities

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipeZUbESWjE

Other variations on this theme

• Disney – “conventional notions of linear narrative, plausible motivation in the main characters, logical (if over-determined) resolutions to narrative ‘problems’ etc “- ‘folksy style of humour
• Warners – gags – “sharp, rapid, cynical, often cruel, reflecting a faster, quicker-witted world” – anarchy (p.137)
  • The gag represents, in a sense, a depersonalisation of emotional release, it depends on the very rapid recognition of emotional stereotypes

• Yankee Doodle Daffy
  • Visual gags – signs – ham, corn
  • Impersonations (don’t age well)
  • ironic ending
• Tex Avery – “clearly understood that children would be appeased by physical slapstick while adults required a more knowing, self-conscious approach, which would engage with more mature themes”
• Vaudeville + absurdist principles of the visual pun
• On character ‘I’ve always felt that what you did with a character was more important than the character itself. Bugs Bunny could have been a bird’
  (Adamson, 1975: 162).
• Gags – “self-reflexively interrogating the boundaries of cartoon animation”
• Extending the premise Visual Gag/Pun

• Alienation devices – “Avery asked the audience to always remember that they were watching a cartoon, a medium reliant on contemporary technologies.”

(modern equivalent …)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYJAYUf1BN4