Comedy is the most durable category of movie across the entire history of the medium. From before the beginning of the twentieth century -- once audiences got past the mere novelty of watching objects in motion on the screen, and the purpose of that motion became important -- comedy has pulled more people into theaters and generated more video releases than drama, music, or adventure.

Mostly, this is a reflection of the fact that people not only like to laugh, but need to laugh. Indeed, the tougher times are, the greater the need may be, as demonstrated by the large number of comedies produced during the Great Depression and World War II. And with the right stimulus, people can laugh at almost anything -- even themselves. During the 1930's and '40s (and even more so today), the director who could reliably elicit laughter from his audience was very seldom lacking in employment. Only the standards for comedy, and the forms of humor that are in vogue, have really changed.

The first screen comedies reflected the sensibilities of the early movie audiences, mostly lower- and working-class people seeking novelty and escape. Films at the turn-of-the-century normally ran under 10 minutes, and in that timespan it was far easier to string together sight gags around a loose "story" than to attempt anything like serious drama. Additionally, most film programs early in this century were presented as an extension of burlesque and vaudeville shows, and the screen comedies of the turn-of-the-century were largely built on the same slapstick ideas that drove these popular stage entertainments. The humor was usually crude and rough-house -- the vaudevillian pratfall was the order of the day, what modern viewers would consider violent and cruel (one can see lingering manifestations in work of the Three Stooges, but more on them later).

During the first decade of the twentieth century, as movie lengths increased to full reels and then to two reels, the level of humor became more complex, if not sophisticated. For purposes of modern viewers, screen comedy's first modern manifestations lay in the work of Mack Sennett (born Michael Sinnott in Canada, in 1880), a laborer and failed dramatic actor turned burlesque performer who joined the Biograph Studios production unit under D.W. Griffith as an actor. Sennett quickly learned the basic techniques of filmmaking, and by 1910 he was directing. He left Biograph and became a co-founder of Keystone Studio, where he quickly established himself as the reigning master of slapstick comedy, principally through the films featuring Mabel Normand, Charlie Chaplin, and -- arguably the first screen "ensemble" company of any lingering note -- The Keystone Kops. The sense of timing in Sennett's pictures, coupled with their outgoing good spirits and their frantic pacing, made them some of the most popular films of their era.

Ironically, it was D.W. Griffith -- through his past relationship with Sennett -- who helped spawn the full-length screen comedy. Griffith had announced to the world that he was working on a drama (The Birth of a Nation) about the Civil War that would run the unheard of length of over two hours, in a time when the standard running time of movies was 15-20 minutes. Hearing this, Sennett decided to make a comedy that would run a full hour. The resulting film, Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914), starring Marie Dressler and Charlie Chaplin, was a huge hit, and its success introduced the comedy feature, which became the dominant form within a few years.

Chaplin, who subsequently became the most familiar comedy star of his generation (and possibly of all time) in the guise of "the little tramp," quickly became a director of incomparable skill. In association with Keystone, Essenay Studios, and later as an independent producer, Chaplin became a dominant figure in American popular culture and a major influence on the shape of movie comedy -- from excruciatingly funny yet serious shorts such as The Immigrant, or the madly slapstick Easy Street, up thru his celebrated full-length features The Gold Rush (1924), City Lights (1931), and Modern Times (1936), Chaplin brought a perfection of timing and a characterization at once humane and humorous, that has endured in popularity and familiarity for most of this century. He also introduced social commentary to screen comedy, subtly at first and later more prominently. None of this happened easily or cheaply. In perfecting a film or a shot, Chaplin might work on a gag for days, shooting and reshooting dozens of times and rethinking the premise and timing until he had it right, and his films were among the most expensive - -and successful -- comedies of their day. Chaplin's success as a director was fostered by the popularity of his on-screen character and the fact that he became his own producer, and, thus, controlled the pursestrings of his pictures.

Along with Chaplin, the other two major comic geniuses of the silent era were Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Keaton, the great "stone face" who could elicit laughter by mixing his serious screen persona into slapstick, vaudeville-inspired situations, was, like Chaplin, a director as well as performer, and in his prime he controlled every aspect of his filmmaking. His most successful and popular film across the decades is The General (1927) -- based on the true story of the hijacking of a Confederate train by a group of Union soldiers during the War Between the States -- but he is also renowned for his 1921 surreal comedy The Playhouse, which made extensive use of trick photography and multiple exposures, the 1923 satire The Three Ages (a parody of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance), and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). It was coincidental with the coming of sound that Keaton made a major tactical error in his career, giving up his own production company and signing a contract with MGM in which he sacrificed creative control of his films. He never fully recovered from this mistake, and although the films he made at MGM were not bad -- and some were quite good -- he never achieved the heights that he'd found as an independent filmmaker. Various personal problems, including a bout with alcoholism, complicated Keaton's career during the 1930's, and by the end of the decade he was considered a has-been -- although his timing and creativity were not impaired, and by the mid-1950's, he had embarked on a second career in television. Although he never starred in another major film, Keaton became a familiar face on the small screen and a popular supporting player -- he played a key role in Chaplin's 1951 Limelight and by the end of the decade had been rediscovered by general audiences. During the 1960's Keaton worked in various comedy features including Richard Lester's A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum (1966), several of the Beach Party movies, and one superb installment of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone entitled "Once Upon a Time."

The other great comic genius of the silent era was Harold Lloyd, who had been briefly associated with Sennett but found his path to success in association with producer Hal Roach, who in 1917 suggested to Lloyd that, in place of comic make-up, he try building his screen persona as the average man, complete with glasses. Lloyd was an instant success in this role, a lively, optimistic, energetic Everyman who seemed to embody the country's image of itself during the period immediately after World War I. By the early 1920's, he was more popular than Keaton or Chaplin, and he was the highest paid actor in Hollywood. An athlete as well as a gifted comic, Lloyd relied on his physical prowess at performing various stunts, and the appeal of his on-screen persona, in place of slapstick gags. In Safety Last (1923), Girl Shy (1924), and The Freshman (1925), he created an indellible image of youth in its most comic incarnation. Lloyd slipped into sound more easily than either of his rivals, and his 1936 feature The Milky Way, directed by Leo McCarey, is one of the funniest movies of its decade, but he found public interest in his work waning as the '30s wore on. An attempt at a comeback in the mid-1940s, in Mad Wednesday (aka The Sin of Harold Diddlebock), was a failure, but Lloyd was not worried -- as outright owner of his most important and popular films, he'd made a fortune from their original runs and subsequent reissues and was still issuing them 30 and 40 years later in feature-length compilations.

The coming of sound created new demands for comedy, as it did in every other motion picture category. Some of the established performers from the silents, most notably Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang -- both stars of films made by Hal Roach -- made the transition well enough and indeed thrived in the new medium. Both Laurel and Hardy and the Our Gang players -- better known today under their television name The Little Rascals -- used sound to enhance their already established on screen characters and to punch home the humor of the pratfall and related slapstick devices at the core of their work.

Generally, when the smoke from the sound revolution cleared, however, a whole new wave of players had come to comedy: The Marx Brothers at Paramount and later at MGM, Eddie Cantor for Samuel Goldwyn, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey at RKO, and Ted Healey and His Stooges at MGM, and later the Stooges by themselves at Columbia, were some of the more notable. The Marx Brothers had come from Broadway after a string of stage successes; Cantor, also from the Broadway stage, managed to capture something of the same wide-eyed innocence of Lloyd's young heroes, coupled with some ethnic (i.e. Jewish) and topical humor mixed with a few songs and production numbers, and began a 25-year run of successes in movies and on television. Wheeler and Woolsey, who came out of vaudeville, were among the least sophisticated of the early sound comedy teams but managed to keep their success going for much of the decade at RKO, despite the increasing tiredness of their films. Healey and the Stooges, who were even less sophisticated than Wheeler and Woolsey, were reasonably succesful at MGM, but the Stooges -- Moe Howard, Jerry (aka Curley) Howard (replaced by Shemp Howard), and Larry Fine -- were even more popular on their own and signed to Columbia for a 25-year career built on pratfalls and pie fights.

Nobody -- at least in public -- respected the Three Stooges or Wheeler and Woolsey, and few people today will admit to liking the Stooges, even though their videos sell in the hundreds of thousands. But the Marx Brothers were the darlings of the New York literary establishment -- master satirists and Broadway veterans, with scripts that showed the hands of some of the top writing talent of the era, they received a lot of good press. But their fast-paced comedy didn't do much for audiences outside of the big cities; rural filmgoers, who constituted the majority in those days, didn't care for the relative sophistication of their humor, and Paramount was told by theater owners that their audiences preferred the more basic physical comedy of Joe E. Brown. Finally, after the box-office failure of Duck Soup, the Marxes were dropped by Paramount. They were quickly picked up by MGM, where production chief Irving Thalberg pinpointed the problem they faced with the public -- it was Thalberg who correctly advised the Marx Brothers that they should try to soften their hard-edged image, give themselves more sympathetic roles in their films, help a romantic couple untangle their lives and defeat villains that the public could easily dislike. The first result was A Night At The Opera, one of the funniest movies ever made, in which Groucho, Harpo, and Chico Marx battled pompous singers (Walter Wolf King) and opera officials (Sig Ruman) and helped get a pair of singers (Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones) together. It was an immediate hit and was followed by the nearly as popular A Day At the Races.

Meanwhile, at Paramount and later at Universal, a former stage juggler named W. C. Fields made a series of well-received comedies surrounding his persona as a wry-humored, harried husband. It's A Gift is probably his best picture, although The Bank Dick has a major following, and Never Give A Sucker An Even Break is the looniest comedy of its day that most of us will ever see.

Ironically, neither Fields nor the Marxes were overwhelmingly popular in their own time. But during the 1960's, a new generation of young viewers more attuned to satire and cynicism embraced both, and their movies proved among the most successful on the then burgeoning film-revival circuit and later on home video. By contrast, Eddie Cantor, who was one of the most popular screen personae of his generation and who worked well into the television era, is today looked upon as a period curiousity, an ethnic humor figure out of a bygone age -- but, strangely enough, his films are all still funny.

The major makers of comedy, however, were the directors -- some, such as Frank Capra, later became known for more serious work but in the late silents and early talkies were regarded as humor specialists. Director Ernst Lubitsch became celebrated for his sophisticated, European-flavored romantic comedies, such as Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and later his controversial anti-Nazi comedy To Be Or Not To Be -- like Chaplin's anti-Hitler satire The Great Dictator, Lubitsch's movie was poorly received as a supposed exercise in bad taste. Howard Hawks, celebrated for his dramas since the silent era, brought his frantic pacing to humor with two inimitable classics, His Girl Friday --a topical satire on politics and journalism--and Bringing Up Baby; the latter was poorly received on its original release, and, indeed, led to the end of Katharine Hepburn's contract at RKO, but today is considered classic screwball comedy at its best. Mitchell Leisen distinguished himself with Easy Living, a delightfully loony story of a working girl (Jean Arthur) who accidentally gets hooked up with a wealthy family's problems. And William Wellman, one of the greatest action film directors of all time, also put his oar into comedy most successfully with the delightfully cynical and nasty Nothing Sacred, starring Carole Lombard and Fredric March. Gregory La Cava made what was probably one of the best topical comedies of the 1930's, My Man Godfrey, a frantically funny satire on the very rich, starring Lombard and William Powell.

The major comedic directorial figure--from the vantage point of the end of this century--to emerge from the 1930's, however, was Frank Capra. A one-time gagman and comedy specialist, who cut his teeth in the late silent era, Capra during the early- and middle-1930's began injecting an increasing measure of social realism into his work. As early as American Madness (1932), a serious drama about the near-failure of a New York bank, caused by an unfounded rumor, one can see it in his work, and this realism was strongly evident in his 1933 classic Lady For A Day. In 1934, Capra directed a relatively low-budget comedy called It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, where the comedic and serious sides found their perfect balance, and the result was a brace of Oscar nominations (and wins) and one of the most popular films in Columbia Pictures' history. All of Capra's subsequent 1930's comedies sought to recreate this balance of humor and seriouness, and all are worth watching, and one--Mr. Smith Goes To Washington --still holds up with some lessons for modern viewers.

During the early 1940's, as the world scene darkened with the coming of a new war, Capra's vision darkened as well--Meet John Doe (1940) is a brilliant picture, knowing and sophisticated, but it has an anti-fascist message that pretty much overwhelms any laughter in the script. Capra's Arsenic And Old Lace showed that he could still do straight (albeit macabre) humor and pace his work breathlessly.

The coming of World War II brought problems and opportunities to filmmakers. Doing comedies while the world was ripping itself to pieces seemed selfish to some producers and audience members--but the most important comedy director of the early 1940's, Preston Sturges, made his most celebrated film, Sullivan's Travels, just to make the point that laughter was more important during a war than at any time. Sturges had a knack for making society laugh at itself--greed, pomposity, pretense, and dishonesty were Sturges's targets, and he somehow managed to put such social criticism in a perspective that made people (in small towns as well as big cities) laugh.

Sturges's career didn't outlast the war, partly because of some bad choices of material. But he managed to make one ofthe few genuinely daring comedies of the era, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek --a story about an out-of-wedlock pregnancy -- and got it past the censors. His last major film, Mad Wednesday, aka The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, starring Harold Lloyd, failed both critically and commercially. During this same period, also at Paramount, expatriate Austro-Hungarian director Billy Wilder began making a name for himself in comedy and drama, beginning with the lively sex comedy The Major and the Minor (1941)--Wilder's later films would have an even sharper edge, culminating with Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Fortune Cookie (1965), but even his serious dramas, such as Ace In The Hole (1953), display a certain comic bite.

The early 1940's also saw the last wave of vaudeville performers make the transition to motion pictures--Abbott and Costello were the most successful of them, and their early pictures, from 1941 thru 1947, are among the most successful and watchable comedies of the decade (Buck Privates and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein are probably their best movies). More typical was the team of Olsen and Johnson, who were at Universal at the same time as Abbott and Costello; with the exception of their classic Hellzapoppin, none of their movies really hold up, but their lunatic pacing and frantic personae make them a good example of the underside of movie humor of the era. Eddie Cantor, long a fixture on the big screen, would also do a final homage to his stage roots with the 1944 feature Show Business, which displayed him reprising several of his classic stage bits and songs--the picture is well worth seeing, not only for Cantor but for the comic antics of Joan Davis, one of the great screen comediennes of her era, who can also be seen to great advantage in the Abbott and Costello film Hold That Ghost (1942).

The 1950's saw the arrival on the scene of performing teams such Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, the definitive straight man and stooge of the decade, who were extremely popular until their split late in the '50s, after which Martin embarked on a successful career as a singer and serious actor (The Young Lions, Some Came Running, Career, Rio Bravo, Airport etc.), and host of a variety show, while Lewis found spectacular success as a movie comic (The Nutty Professor etc.) and sporadic popularity on television. Abbott and Costello continued making movies, but their television performances, first on the Colgate Comedy Hour and later on their own series, The Abbott and Costello Show, expended most of their best classic routines, and their '50s films suffered from tired scripts and the obvious exhaustion of the two comics. Both attempted to continue their work independently on television, in both comedy and drama (Costello's goal had been to portray New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia), with mixed success.

To some extent, British cinema had always been driven best by comedy, and Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes is not only one of the great thrillers of all time, but one of the great comedies as well. Such British screen comedy figures as Will Hay and the Crazy Gang (the distant antecedents to Monty Python's Flying Circus) were largely missed by Americans before the war, but after World War II, British comedies began finding a significant audience in the United States. Alec Guinness, as star of a series of comedies produced at Ealing Studios, was the first acknowledged international comedy star from England, in pictures like Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which he played seven different roles. He was followed by the even more versatile Peter Sellers, who seemingly, could do no wrong in pictures like I'm All Right, Jack and The Wrong Arm of the Law.

During this same era, the French director/actor Jacques Tati--a Chaplin-esque figure--found a following in the United States with Mr. Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle; despite the fact that both films were made in French, Tati's technique of pushing dialogue (which was held to a minimum in any case) into the background and relying on visual humor made them fully accessible to Americans and extremely popular in the United States.

The big change between the 1940's and the 1950's, however, was the arrival of television as a major spawning ground for careers. Although this era -- often referred to, a little too wistfully, as the "Golden Age" of television--today celebrated for its live drama, the real driving force behind early television was comedy. Curiously enough, apart from Red Skelton, who had been a major star on radio and in movies during the previous decade (and, according to those who have worked with him, was completely irrepressible--constantly testing out new ideas off camera), and had a 20 year career on television, the biggest comedy stars of this era--Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, Lucille Ball and her husband Desi Arnaz--had all tried and failed to sustain significant careers in movies. Indeed, all of them achieved such popularity on television, that their subsequent movies were regarded as nothing but footnotes to their tv careers.

Even more important than Berle, Gleason, Ball, and Arnaz's careers, however, was television's role as a spawning ground for the careers of various major screen comedy figures. These included the Philadelphia-born director Richard Lester, who started out in local television; and the writers Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Woody Allen, all of whom later emerged as major directors.

The breakdown of the studio system at the end of the 1950's led to a less coherent, formal body of work in movies, and comedies began following the trend that had already begun in drama, embracing more adult and controversial subjects, and delving into subjects that the studio chiefs of earlier years would scarcely have understood. The Beatles, in the hands of Richard Lester (who had previouly made something out of nothing in his first picture, It's Trad, Dad aka Ring-A-Ding Rhythm ) and producer Walter Shenson, took their lead from the Marx Brothers and came up with A Hard Day's Night, the first great rock 'n roll movie, and one whose pacing and techniques were largely rooted in television. Similarly, Mel Brooks--who had started out as a writer/performer associated with Sid Caesar on television--emerged as a major comedy talent with The Producers (1967), starring Zero Mostel (a one-time blacklisted actor) and Gene Wilder, which stretched the bounds of good taste with its story of a financial fraud surrounding the production of Broadway show called "Springtime For Hitler." And Mike Nichols, previously one half of the comedy team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, created the first counter-culture blockbuster in The Graduate, a movie that was both as romantic as any of Harold Lloyd's films (and also borrowed its ending from one of Lloyd's films) and as cynical and knowing as any of Preston Sturges's films. In the bargain, both Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffmann were transformed into major stars.

By the 1960's, audiences had also developed a sense of film history, and the work of the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Preston Sturges, and even Abbott & Costello became the subjects of admiration for hundreds of thousands of college students, and not just film students. Many of their movies--especially those of the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields--became the object of frequent revival theater showings and campus festivals, and the median age of the people attending these showings suddenly dropped from the fifties and sixties into the teens and twenties.

One emerging comic personality who drew some of his inspiration from these predecessors was Woody Allen, who at the end of the decade emerged as a director in his own right with Take The Money And Run, a movie that is as much as movies as it is about anything else. Another film that drew on this same awareness of the past within the zeitgeist of the times was Harry Hurwitz's The Projectionist, starring Chuck McCann as a daydreaming projectionist at a theater that shows old movies. These movies--really "films about films," which quoted from and acknowledged their debt to earlier movies in ways that anyone with more than a cursory knowledge of cinema would recognize--were the beginning of a trend in filmmaking that culminated, strangely enough, with George Lucas's Star Wars. The latter movie quoted freely from John Ford's The Searchers and a half dozen other earlier films.

Another figure to emerge from relative obscurity during this period was Blake Edwards, a writer-turned-producer/director. Edwards had done thrillers and serious dramas, including Experiment in Terror and The Days of Wine and Roses, but in 1963 he struck a deep vein of box office gold with a comedy thriller called The Pink Panther, all about the hunt for a notorious jewel thief (David Niven) by an inept Parisian police detective portrayed by Peter Sellers. His portrayal of Inspector Clouseau turned Sellers into a major international star and Edwards into a major director/producer, and spawned nearly two decades' worth of sequels, the longest running series of big-budget comedies in screen history.

Mel Brooks remained a major comedy director throughout the 1970's with the satires Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, and Silent Movie, while Woody Allen made the two most celebrated and popular movies of his career, Annie Hall and Manhattan, both of which played effectively off his own neuroses. The big surprise, however, was the $100 million success of National Lampoon's Animal House, a campus comedy whose cast consisted entirely of television performers and little known character actors. Its success not only opened the way for a revival of campus-based comedy not seen since the 1930's, but fostered the careers of a half-dozen performers, most notably John Belushi, one of the leading members of a television ensemble called The Not Ready For Prime-Time Players from Lorne Michaels' series Saturday Night Live.

Comedy in the 1980's and beyond took on a much greater youth orientation, in the wake of Animal House and the arrival of succesive new generations of performers: Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd et al, all of whom got their first major exposure on television on the series Saturday Night Live, all became major big screen personae, and their films--even the bad ones, and there were plenty of those--inevitably made money. Saturday Night Live and its producer, Lorne Michaels, became the major spawning ground--both directly and indirectly--for screen comedy of the 1980's and 1990's. The chances are that hit films such as Porky's and its sequels, as well as teen comedies such as Ferris Buehler's Day Off, Zapped! and Career Opportunity, would never have been made without Animal House as a precedent, and certainly the "National Lampoon" imprint would never have had the impact it did, through subsequent movies such as National Lampoon's Vacation starring Chevy Chase, without Animal House's success. Additionally, the entire late 1980's/early 1990's emergence of stand-up comedians and screen personalities was fostered by the breakthrough of Belushi and company can be traced to Michaels' series. Another television series that proved a similar spawning ground for important comedy careers was SCTV, a Canadian-based series set in the mythical town of Melonville and featuring a cast of strange, sometimes grotesque characters parodying well known media types (talk-show host Sammy Maudlin etc.), portrayed by Martin Short, Joe Flaherty etc. John Candy was the biggest star to emerge from the series, and went on to a major film career until his death in 1994, while shooting Wagons East. The British satiric troupe Monty Python's Flying Circus also made big-screen contiributions during this period, most notably the King Arthur parody Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the controversial (but very funny) religious film send-up The Life of Brian.

The other major new players in comedy during this era have been the satirists David and Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams, who began working together on the big screen in the 1970's with the film Kentucky Fried Movie. One of the funniest movies of the decade, this "sleeper"--which mostly ran as a second feature in smaller theaters--established a brand of multi-layered, fast-paced screen parody (aimed at various movie and television icons and genres) that came to fruition with Airplane! A parody of the disaster movies that had driven movie box offices during the 1970's, Airplane! and its sequels and offshoots--including the short-lived cop show parody Police Squad --were among the most popular and influential body of comedies of the early 1980's, and their influence continues in the 1990's with film such as The Naked Gun and its sequels, most starring one-time serious dramatic actor Leslie Nielsen.

The emergence in the 1990's of figures such as Dana Carvey, and the huge success of movies like Wayne's World, itself based on a Saturday Night Live sketch, continued this pattern originally set by Belushi and company, and the success of Rosie O'Donnell and other former stand-up comedy stars of the current era only carries the trend forward.