Laugh Track Not Included: Comedy Experiments

Experimental films are not generally associated with possessing a sense of humor, but that couldn't be further from the truth: some of the most widely seen experimental films of all time include the crowd-pleasing dark comedies of Luis Buñuel and David Lynch. William Verrone's 2014 essay "Humor and the Avant-Garde" suggests that experimental films "please because they tease; or, to put it less obliquely, they aim to be funny through subversion." The subversive humor found in this program of seven decades of comedy experiments tends to focus on deconstructing the omnipresent imagery of the daily news, Hollywood movies, and TV commercials. Some films, like Kubelka and Halpern's, leave the material relatively unaltered to expose its silly side. Others use collage animation (VanDerBeek), performance art (Smith), and editing manipulations (Child & Arnold) to provoke surprised laughs. Yet perhaps only one filmmaker wrote satires of experimental films themselves in Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow). His 1979 film On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed? might just be the rare case where explaining the jokes will make them funnier.

Program:

1. Science Friction, Stan VanDerBeek, 16mm, color, sound, 9 minutes
2. I Was a Male Yvonne de Carlo, Jack Smith, 16mm, black-and-white, sound, 28 minutes
3. On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed?, Owen Land, 16mm, color, sound, 17.5 minutes
4. Mutiny, Abigail Child, 16mm, color, sound, 9.5 minutes
5. Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, Martin Arnold, 16mm, black-and-white, sound, 15 minutes
6. Poetry and Truth Peter Kubelka, 35mm, color, silent, 13 minutes
7. By Halves, Amy Halpern, 16mm, color, silent, 7 minutes

Total Run Time: 99 minutes.