Humor and Sherlock Jr.

After watching Buster Keaton's 1924 film, Sherlock Jr., I noticed how different (yet still effective) the humor was back in the silent film era compared to how it is now.  After researching more about movies in this time period, I found out that this type of comedy is called "Slapstick Humor," or comedy based on deliberately clumsy actions and humorously embarrassing events (https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=define:slapstick).  The most accurate word in this description being "deliberate."  While watching this film, I could just not get over how perfectly choreographed every small movement was, and how absolutely hilarious that made it!  At the part where Keaton is shadowing the antagonist throughout the town, I was just about crying at how hilariously perfect the actors' timing was.

In movies today, I honestly don't think that directors could get away with something as casually perfect as this kind of gag.  Although we still do all love to see people falling and breaking things, that hasn't changed over the course of time, this kind of humor is now displayed much more sloppily.  In more modern movies, when people fall it is followed with a trail of obscenities or at the very least just seems much more like a real person falling.  Another more modern use of humor is something being ridiculously overdone to the point where it's almost painful to watch.  Example: In the movie Hot Rod with Andy Samberg, Rod falls down the hill for about two minutes.





Although it's the same exact same thing for the entirety of the scene, I laugh the WHOLE TIME.  Obviously what people find humorous in general hasn't changed all that much, but I think what has changed is our perception of film.  Back in the twenties when slapstick was the primary humor medium in film, movies were still a huge breakthrough that were simply amazing to witness.  When your audience is completely awestruck that they can even see you when you aren't there, you use much more finesse in your approach.  Now that movies are something that we all take for granted and a screen is something that you see wherever you look, when it comes to humor we aren't really looking to be wowed anymore.  People seem to find a lot more humor in something relatable which means we find awkwardness funny.  When a clumsy person falls, we don't casually slip into a back flip and land straight on our asses; We try and catch ourselves we fail at doing so and we look like a big bumbling idiot, so a big bumbling idiot is who we want to see fall.