The study of laughter is called Gelotology, after the Greek word for JELLO, nature’s funniest food. Aristotle believed that only humans laugh, but scientists have discovered that other primates, rats, dogs and, of course, hyenas also emit sounds that might be called laughter. Although cats do not laugh out loud, many scientists believe that they are quietly snickering at us on the inside, though this has not been proven definitively. At one time physicians believed that laughter could be therapeutic. Reader’s Digest even had a column once called “Laughter Is the Best Medicine,” but most reputable scientists abandoned this theory after the movie Patch Adams actually made many people sicker. In fact, a number of people have reportedly died laughing, including Pecos Bill, King Nadabayin of Burma, Damnoen Saen-um, a Thai ice cream truck driver, and Alex Mitchell of King’s Lynn in Norfolk, England, whose last laugh was triggered by a Scotsman fighting a black pudding with his bagpipe. Comedy is a serious business and could be dangerous if not handled carefully.

In order to scientifically analyze just how comedy works I’m going to dissect one of Woody Allen’s funniest films, which is probably my purest comedy moment. Unlike many critics, I prefer Allen’s older, funnier movies and I don’t think he has ever topped his 1978 comedy Interiors. Interiors, which is about the madcap antics of three artistic daughters (Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt, Kristin Griffith) dealing with the disintegration the marriage of their parents (Geraldine Page, E.G. Marshall), was influenced by the films of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. Bergman and Antonioni were often considered to be the pranksters of European art cinema until their recent deaths within a day of each other, which may have been their final practical joke.

A lot of Interiors‘ humor comes from the cinematography, which can make or break a comedy. Interiors takes place for the most part in darkly lit interiors (a visual pun, get it?) and uses a lot of black and white, which are probably the funniest colors. That is why black-and-white comedies are usually funnier than color movies. The movie also uses a lot of red, which is the third funniest color. The least funny color, of course, is blue, which is why getting the blues means being really sad. Green is also a not very funny color (which explains the name of the completely humorless Green Party), while orange is usually good for a giggle or two. There is quite a bit of controversy about yellow, however. Is yellow funny? That is a question that has haunted jokesters for centuries. I think yellow can be funny if used sparingly. A dollop of mustard skillfully applied, for example, can be quite comical.

Another thing that makes Interiors such a rib tickler is that the characters hardly ever laugh. A joke is usually funnier if the person telling the joke keeps a straight face, which is why Harvey Korman and Tim Conway on The Carol Burnett Show were so excruciating to watch, as you can see for yourself in these very unfunny clips. The actors in Interiors play it straight all the way through, which just makes the comedy build and build. If you watched Interiors with a laugh track it would be a completely different film. Allen must have done multiple takes of some scenes so that the actors did not crack up in the middle of a scene and break character. I would love to see a blooper reel of Interiors to see if I’m right.

There is one scene where the characters laugh at a joke that has just been told, but we don’t hear the joke, which is yet another example of Allen’s genius. Although it may sound counterintuitive to a layman, many experienced comedians will tell you that actually telling a joke can sometimes ruin the joke. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen young comedians who didn’t understand this simple rule and insisted on telling a joke when they would have been much better off not telling the joke at all. Not telling the joke forces the audience to imagine what the joke might be, and nine times out of ten the joke they imagine is much funnier than any joke the comedian could have told.

Although Interiors is usually known for its slapstick and physical comedy, the wit of Allen’s dialogue should not be underestimated. Allen is an expert at comedic wordplay and there is no shortage of it in Interiors. One line that always slays me is when Mary Beth Hurt’s character says, “At the center of a sick psyche is a sick spirit.” What makes this line so funny? It’s obvious to anyone who knows anything about comedy. Give up? It’s the alliteration of the “S” sound. S is probably the funniest letter in English, followed by the K sound, which also appears in this line, compounding the hilarity. (In Cyrillic Zhe (Ж) is the funniest letter and in the Xhosa click language it’s the “ngq” sound, although some experts make a convincing argument that the glottal fricative “hh” is even funnier. It may just be a matter of taste.)

The number three appears a lot in Interiors and this is no accident. As any funnyman will tell you, three is the sacred number of comedy. There are always three people walking into a bar, not two and not four. The number 276 is also pretty funny but it’s hard to work into a joke so it is rarely used. A joke in which 276 people walk into a bar would certainly be funny, but it would take a very long time to tell. Some mathematicians claim that the imaginary number 3i is also very funny but no one has yet been able to work it into a joke, as far as I know, although some students at MIT reportedly have tried.

In a recent episode PBS’s American Masters about Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, Schulz said that what makes people laugh is suffering. I think Woody Allen would agree and what he once said about life could also be said about his film Interiors, that it is “full of misery, loneliness, and suffering — and it’s all over much too soon.”

I have to admit that the first time I saw Interiors I did not get a lot of the jokes. I remember my initial reaction to the film was, “Is this supposed to be funny?” It was only after seeing the film a number of times that I began to realize just how funny it was. Often it is the case that if a comedy is not funny the first time you see it, it becomes funny after you watch it again and again and again. This film taught me everything I know about comedy and made me realize that if your first reaction to a joke is “Huh?” that often means that it is a very good joke indeed. In fact, the world’s oldest joke is a Jewish joke found in a clay jar and written on ancient papyrus not far from where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Scholars are still studying this joke and not one of them has laughed yet. It may turn out to be the best joke of all.

Crossposted at Jon Swift

Obituaries for film directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman hailed them as cinematic giants. Bergman was called “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera” who brought “metaphysics - religion, death, existentialism - to the screen.” Antonioni, we were told, “challenged moviegoers with an intense focus on intentionally vague characters and a disdain for conventions like plot, pacing and clarity.” Both of them “rose to prominence at a time, in midcentury, when filmgoing was an intellectual pursuit.” But times have changed and some critics have refused to toe the party line. After decades of being terrified into silence by liberal movie snobs who haunted cafés and cocktail parties ready to pounce on anyone who said that the latest art film was boring or incomprehensible, some brave souls have begun to speak out, unafraid of being labeled ignorant philistines.

“Only hours after Ingmar Bergman’s death was announced, his fellow existentialist filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni died,” wrote John Podhoretz on The Corner. “Kind of like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson dying on the same day, if you think bummer movie directors are analogous to the Founding Fathers.” Ding dong, the bummer movie directors are dead, Podhoretz proclaimed to the cheers of intellectual munchkins everywhere.

In a piece for the New York Post he savaged Bergman for making films that were just too hard to understand and no fun at all. “Not so long ago, Ingmar Bergman was one of the most celebrated and famous men in the world — the recipient of universal praise for having transformed the corrupt young medium of the movies into a vehicle for difficult, punishing, sobering, existentialist high art,” wrote Podhoretz. “Art, in this view, wasn’t supposed to be easy to take or pleasurable to take in. It was supposed to punish you, assault you, scrub you clean of impurities.”

It’s bad enough that so many of his films were in black and white and had subtitles, they were depressing, too. Taking a brave stand in favor of easy, pleasurable films Podhoretz declared, “You can only tell people to sit down and eat their spinach for so long,” no doubt hearkening back to that life-changing moment in his childhood when he threw his bowl of spinach on the floor and demanded that his mother, Midge Decter, give him some ice cream instead.

Jack Warner once said that he judged movies by whether his ass shifted in the seat while he was watching them and Podhoretz has been judging movies by his ass for years. Antonioni’s L’Avventura is “disastrous fare,” he says. West Side Story is “an unintentional laff riot.” (Only elitists spell words correctly.) Raging Bull is “the most unpleasant American movie” and “torture to sit through.” Vertigo is “silly.” The Searchers is “a turgid, wooden, boring and weird movie.” 2001: A Space Odyssey is “a crashing bore.” On the other hand Podhoretz is a big fan of Road House, Phantom Menace and Cinderella Man.
.
Podhoretz is not the only film critic inspired by Jack Warner’s critical method, which we might call Derrièrism, since most critical theories have French names for some reason. The deaths of Bergman and Antonioni have given Derrièrism a shot in the arm, or a shot somewhere anyway.

Derrièrists are tired of liberal elites telling us what is good for us. They are tired of movies that are depressing and pretentious and difficult. They don’t see the need for new narrative structures when the old ones work just fine. They believe that films should be as literal and clear as the Bible. They are tired of movies that always focus on the bad news the way the media always focuses on the bad news from Iraq. And they prefer clearly resolved, preferably happy, endings.

Nehring the Edge gives us a perfect example Derrièrism with his very succinct review of Antonioni’s Blow-Up: “This is candy for film geeks and crud for everyone else. The average viewer will probably find Michelangelo Antonioni’s groundbreaking film to be pompus, confusing and maybe a tad stupid. If you’re the kind of person who would find this film interesting, you’re probably the kind of person who would have already of tracked it down and watched it. If you’re a normal person, skip this one.” Normal people should not even subject themselves to a film like Blow-Up, lest they be confused by its enigmatic themes.

Although Ann Althouse cried for, like, minutes when Bergman died, she had a very Derrièrist reaction to Antonioni. Blow-Up, affected her because it was the first movie she had ever seen that featured actors “naked and having sex,” but she never quite made it to the end of the DVD of L’Avventura and she only liked a scene that Pauline Kael exulted over in The Passenger “because it meant that the movie would soon be over.” Michael Medved, perhaps our greatest living Derrièrist critic, listed Zabriskie Point as one of the 50 Worst Films of All Time. His protégé Jason Apuzzo, whose website Libertas is dedicated to exposing the liberal Hollywood agenda, was not a big fan of Antonioni but did think he made Monica Vitti look sexy (perhaps that critical judgment belongs to a school that deserves the name of another body part translated into French.)

To Terry Teachout Bergman films were once a good way to impress a date but have long outlived their usefulness. “Ingmar Bergman has fallen from fashion, but I well remember when he was the very model of a Foreign Filmmaker, the man whose movies embodied everything that wasn’t Hollywood,” he wrote in 2003. “Those, of course, were the days when Hollywood wasn’t cool: if you wanted to impress your date, you took her to a Bergman. (A little later on, it was O.K. to take her to one of Woody Allen’s ersatz-Bergman movies.) Now he belongs to the ages, and I know more than a few self-styled film buffs who’ve never seen any of his work.” Now that he is older, and his ass has grown more sensitive, Teachout knows better. “Wild Strawberries is a beautiful movie — one that knows how beautiful it is, and wants you to know, too. The older I get, the less readily I warm to that kind of art, be it film, painting, music, the novel, or what have you.”

Coincidentally, the week Antonioni and Bergman died, online film critics released a list of their 100 top films, which included only 11 subtitled films (only one of which made it into the Top 20) and two films each in the Top Ten by Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott. Missing from the list were The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander, The Virgin Spring, Winter Light and Persona. Nor did the list include L’Avventura, Blow-Up, L’Eclisse, La Notte or Red Desert. In fact, not a single Bergman or Antonioni film were anywhere to be found. And anyone looking for the films of such tedious, long-winded foreign directors as Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Luc Godard, Luis Buñuel, F.W. Murnau, Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu, Satyajit Ray or Kenji Mizoguchi would have to look to the snooty Sight and Sound poll for satisfaction. It is a list that is steeped in Derrièrism.

There are still some hold-outs who resist the onslaught of Derrièrism like Japanese soldiers hiding on islands who don’t realize the war is over. Dan Callahan laments the “pop mindset that rules today” and inadvertently reveals the liberal agenda behind the adulation heaped on Antonioni and Bergman by some critics. “More than one commentator has termed their mid-twentieth century, fearing-the-atom-bomb, discuss-our-alienation-over-black-coffee-later modernism as “‘quaint,’” he writes. “We live in a period where some of those in power have termed the central tenets of the Geneva Conventions ‘quaint.’ Can the term ‘elitist’ be far behind?” Robert Stein says that Bergman’s films were full of “ideas,” as if this were a good thing. “You might feel drained after the movie, you might never want to watch another Bergman for ten years, if ever, but you don’t feel you’ve been talked down to,” writes Dan Leo at New Critics. “You haven’t been lied to.”

The Rightwing Film Geek, Victor Morton, who calls Podhoretz a “twit,” also resists the triumph of Derrièrism. “I don’t think sneering ‘over-rated’ is very productive,” he says. Although he confesses that Antonioni is not a “personal favorite” of his, he nevertheless has subjected himself to watching his films anyway. “Rather than sneer,” he suggests oddly. “Why not consider that this is a blind spot of yours and a personal shortcoming.” At the end of his post he reveals that after seeing Antonioni’s The Passenger recently, something “clicked,” but regrettably, it wasn’t his revolver upon hearing the word “culture.” “I made a mental note to give his other films a fresh look in light of The Passenger,” he writes. “In fact, now we all have more reason than ever to do so.” Morton may already be too far gone, but imagine if more young film critics got off their asses and actually saw Bergman’s and Antonioni’s films and made some effort to appreciate them. Fortunately, that isn’t likely to happen.

Update: Mr Podhoretz responds via email: “Let me say, after close consideration of your deep critical faculties, that you’re a dope.”

Crossposted at Jon Swift