50 THE CLOWN-PRINTS OF COMEDY FRANK KRUTNIK CONSIDERS THE COMEDIAN COMEDY Christian Metz, 'Story/Discourse*, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, London, Macmillan, 1982, p 91. ' For example: Mary Ann Doane, The Diabgical Text, photocopied PhD thesis, University Microfilms International, 1979, p 2. For further consideration of these terms, see Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, 'A Note On History/Discourse', in John Caughie (ed), Theories Of Authorship, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul/British Film Institute, pp 232-241. THE QUESTIONS I will be addressing here concern the extent and nature of the much-noted 'disruptiveness' of comedy in relation to a tradition of film comedy which attempts to incorporate the performance skills of recognised comedians within the framework of the mainstream narrative film. From the outset I must stress that this work is tentative, hampered most significantly by the lack of as rigorous a study of particular films as I would like. However, as the most valuable work on comedy to date has been similarly generalised and tentative, I will fall back on the old disclaimer by stressing that my findings here represent 'work in progress'. Certain forms of comedy are felt to be potentially disruptive to the operations of the 'classical' fiction film, with the key features of the latter including the structuring of conflict through a coded realism of character and action, illusionism, and a rhetorical mode which produces the fiction as seemingly autonomous. Here, for example, is Christian Metz's influential view: the traditional film is presented as story [histoire], not as discourse [discours]. And yet it is discourse... but the basic characteristic of this kind of discourse, and the very principle of its effectiveness as discourse, is precisely that it obliterates all traces of the enunciation, and masquerades as story.' However, as several writers have noted 2 , this conception of the 'classical film' is only a partial account, slighting most obviously the musical and the type of comedy to be discussed here, both of which inscribe perform- ance conventions from other media and tend, if only in 'bracketed' moments, towards the exhibitionist, and hence discursive, rather than the voyeuristic and historical. 3 The concept of the 'classical film' adhered to by Metz and others seems only directly applicable to the dramatic or action genres. One can view comedy as representing an alternative fictional mode, its effectiveness often resulting from a play with the conventional fictional operations of the 'straight' genres. John Ellis and Steve Neale have pro- posed a useful dichotomy between two tendencies in comedy: (a) 'Crazy' or 'Formal' Comedy 'which is aware of language and works by deconstructing it and recombining it, the comedy of gags, of at University of Sussex on March 23, 2015 http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from