Humour in Film as a Method of Expression

Abstract

Living in a social world, we experience feelings and react to others’ feelings as they appear to us. For instance, we have all smiled since we were babies. The first “genuine” social smile typically occurs sometime between weeks 6 and 8, as a response to recognizing someone very special: Mom or Dad (Kail, V., Robert & Cavanaugh, John C., 2019). We see, we are happy, we smile. We are born with the desire to be happy. Humankind has searched for different revelations of happiness, and this is how humour was born. From ancient times to the present day, humour has been an instrument of communication, a social behaviour that is an integral part of mass media and social interaction. Humour provides a reciprocal influence. It is a way to interpret information as well as a specific media that can be used to convey this information. What happens to the media once it is "infected" by humour? Does humour necessarily satisfy the need for entertainment? Can humour have a "serious face"? Is it true that "Humour is always a monopoly of the semi-literate" (McLuhan, 2016)? This essay will explore the above-mentioned topics from the perspective of the humour applied in motion pictures, during the interwar era. It will specifically discuss the genre of satire using as a case study the humour found in Latin America during that time as evidenced in the movie Tararira, the film of Benjamin Fondane produced by Falma Film in Buenos Aires in 1936.

Keywords

• film studies
• benjamin fondane
• interwar cinema
• tararira film
• humour in film
• lost movie
• comedy
• argentinian cinema
• french filmmaker