Comedy is a genre of film where the main emphasis is on humour. This genre films are designed for entertainment purposes using amusement, often achieved by exaggerating elements of everyday life to form a humerous hyperbolic version of life. Comedy is one of the oldest genre in film, some of the first silent movies were comedies known as slapstick comedies. During the 30's, silent movies were replaced by dialogue.
Types of Comedy:
- Slapstick- This type of comedy uses a lot of movement, it was introduced in the earlier silent movies to help enhance the audience’s understanding and reaction as slapstick comedy doesn't need any sound with it to still allow it to be funny. Slapstick comedy became quite popular with non - English speaking people.
- Anecdotal- This is where comedy is produced from a small short true story.
- Dark or Morbid – Where humor is created from a grim situation or misfortunes however there is a pessimistic outlook on it. This can also deal with scenes like death, drugs, terrorism, rape and war.
- Stand Up - A type of comedy that entertains and audience with a selection of jokes and humorous stories. A comedian may use a few different types of humour throughout their performance.
Codes and conventions:
Settings where a comedy genre would normally take place:
Bright places like towns or cities that are well populated, the lighting would pretty much always be bright as this emphasizes the reality of the programme and allows the audience to be interested by the characters, surroundings and the realistic environment. Furthermore bright colours have the conventions of being happy.
If it is a teen comedy then it would most likely be set in a school, small town or if the comedy was part of a program taking the mic our of teens then then the settings could be where a teenager is ‘known for’ hanging out at an alley way
Social comedies are generally set in a home or a bar as being in a bar allows people to be more confident as they are drinking.
Throughout a comedy there are usually a lot of jokes which often has a response of the characters laughing or some TV shows have a non-diegetic sound of laughing which is used as a voiceover, two examples of shows that use a laughing voiceover are ‘Friends’ and ‘The Big Bang Theory’.
In a comedy the opening credits, trailer or closing credits will have an upbeat soundtrack. This advocates the light heartedness of the show; this allows the audience to immediately pick up on what genre and what to expect from the following show.
The characters are what make up the humour in the comedy and generally the audience can depict whether the program will be a comedy just by looking at the cast, either from a poster on the side of a bus of an advertisement online. Moreover the characters often show distinct character differences to allow them to stand out. The typical character in a comedy would be an incompetent character, this character is the one who makes lots of mistakes, isn’t very smart and is always getting into trouble. To this character there will be a complete opposite character that knows everything, is hard working and will get annoyed by the incompetent character really easily because of their stupidity or the way they don’t stop talking. The difference between having the idiotic characters contrasting with the “normal” or clever group of people also emphasises their personalities and highlights the stupidity of the other character even more. 
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