| Allison Vincent |
Shaun of the Dead plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, June 7th, through Tuesday, June 9th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. Happy Pride!
I love comedy. If theater or filmmaking is cooking then comedy, to me, is the baking. It’s all about precision and, most importantly, timing. I cut my comedic teeth on Looney Tunes, The Three Stooges, Mr. Bean, and Mel Brooks movies. My grandmother would take me to used book stores when I would visit her in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and would let me buy old joke books. I vividly remember thumbing through the worn pages and reading a lot of groaners and dad-joke filler to find the fix or six actually funny gems each book contained. As I got older, the golden age of 90s stand up, SNL, Jim Carrey’s rubber body and face, and bizarre 90s cartoons like Rocco’s Modern Life and Ren and Stimpy began filling out my education and sharpening my attention to comedic detail and composition.
Without being able to articulate how beats worked, I began to understand that there was a way in which jokes worked. The word I was searching for was rhythm. I have written, and monologued at you if we’ve ever shared space when the topic came up (sorrynotsorry), about how horror and comedy have the same beats. Because they do! Comedy is just generally faster although, if you’re confident and patient, you can garner giant results with slow comedy as well, see Jacques Tati’s films for examples.
Generally, in America, we have a lot of talk heavy comedies. Of course there are wonderful examples to the contrary like the Farrelly Brothers, Jackass, National Lampoon movies (particularly the Vacation series), and goofball slapsticks like Airplane!. So, please don’t get me wrong, we have them and they are treasures. What I mean is that usually our comedies, which are very funny, are rooted in verbal humor with a few physical gags whereas directors like Edgar Wright build not only scenes but the whole plot and aesthetic of the movie around the physical comedy. In these movies, the world, not just the people or situations, are funny. The camera is in on the joke and everything (what up, mise en scène) is involved in achieving a laugh. Of Edgar Wright’s movies, Shawn of the Dead is both my favorite and the film of his I think exemplifies some bread and butter tools of comedy best.
1. Rhythm: Edgar Wright is a master of subverting expectations with rhythm. This is why, I believe, he is the perfect horror comedy director. Remember what I said about comedy and horror having the same beats? Yes, dear reader this is the hill I will die on. I am INSUFFERABLE.
Anyway, Wright uses jarring cuts and repetition throughout his films, particularly in montages to help us track changes in characters, time, and scenes as well as lightning fast visual storytelling that forces the viewer to focus rather than holding their hand through a more standard sequence of events. What’s super fun, and funny, about the first sequence of quick cuts in Shawn of the Dead is that they are dramatically counter to the mundanity of the tasks they depict Shawn doing as he gets ready for work.
Like Stephen Spielberg, the camera is often in on the joke, or helping the audience see the set up for the joke. Like all good horror directors, Wright uses what’s in frame just as much as what’s not in frame to both comedic and horrific effect. He is the king of things entering and leaving frame in surprising, often hilarious, ways.
2. Call backs: A call back is simply a reference to something an audience has already heard or seen. Improvisers and stand-ups know that a well timed callback can be the biggest laugh of a set if you nail the timing and make sure the audience is going to remember the reference.
The best, most elaborate callback in Shawn of the Dead is a beautiful tracking shot of Shawn walking to the convenience store encountering folks from his neighborhood along the way. The shot is repeated after the zombie apocalypse highlighting Shawn’s comic obliviousness and also how drastically and quickly things have changed. This sequence also showcases Wright’s hysterical use of sound effects when Shawn slips on blood in the convenience store making an exaggerated sneaker squeak that had me on the floor laughing the first time I saw the movie.
There are SO MANY brilliant callbacks in this movie. I can tell that the cast and crew were on the hunt for them, but it takes a clear, disciplined vision like Wright’s to know when they work and when we need to move forward without the joke. The film as a whole is incredibly well balanced and that is why Shawn of the Dead is such a fantastic movie, regardless of genre.
3. Reversals: A reversal is an actor/improviser/comedian’s bread and butter. Once you start thinking in reversals, it’s hard not to hear opportunities for them. My wife HATES when I get on a reversal kick. A very, very old clichéd version of this verbal joke is “I just flew in from Montana and boy are my arms tired!” Not very funny, but a clear example. A literary example is O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief” where kidnappers take a wealthy man’s child, but return him without the money because the kid is such a brat.
Essentially, a reversal breeds from verbal or comic misleading of expectations. To nail a reversal, you must wait for a circumstance, usually verbally, where the audience expects one response and then subvert their expectations with another response that still works, but is counter to what the situation calls for. In Shawn of the Dead, the best example of verbal reversals is Ed saying “I’m sorry” in a conversation where it absolutely makes sense for him to apologize because he is being chastised for doing something wrong, says “I’m sorry,” and then reveals that he’s not apologizing, but rather, has just farted.
4. Visual gags (straight up silly stuff): This, in my opinion, is some of the most underutilized comedy in American cinema. Borne from the days of lazzis in commedia dell’arte, sight gags and physical play are based in physical comedy and visual “gags.” A high brow example is the hat lazzi from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. A low brow example is Mr. Bean trying not to fall asleep in church and failing miserably.
Some of the greats that have inspired me are the slapstick masters like Mel Brooks, Monty Python, and Minnesota’s own Pat Proft. The best example of this is when Shawn’s crew bumps into Yvonne’s doppelganger crew as they go their separate ways wishing each other “good luck.” This is just so silly and satisfying and is really only there to serve as a visual gag to the delight of the audience. We are also beginning to head into the more dire and emotional section of the movie, so, rhythmically, it is a nice reprieve before we forge ahead into the deeper, darker stuff.
The Wayans brothers have recently taken the crown for unabashedly silly gags with the Scary Movie series, but I personally think we are greatly lacking sight gags in modern movies.
5. Heart: My old clown teacher used to say, “You have to make them laugh before you can ask them to cry.” The most successful comedies are anchored with heart. It doesn’t matter how silly or off the wall, there must be some emotional foundation for us to really care about the big dummies on screen. The way Shawn of the Dead is structured is incredibly rewarding because Shawn is a screw up, but not a zany one. He’s actually quite normal–the “everyman” we all know, or maybe are ourselves. Ed is the goofball sidekick who can be zany and devil-may-care. Shawn is just stuck and it takes a zombie apocalypse for him to snap out of it and act like a grown up.
Shawn’s relationships are all on the brink of destruction before the outbreak and his actions throughout the crisis bring him closer to the ones he loves and give him a deeper sense of his responsibilities to people as an adult because he is forced to confront losing what he loves most. The scenes between him and his stepfather, his mother Liz, and Ed all transition from comedic slacker to deep emotional cores by the end of the movie.
Shawn and Ed playing video games in the shed at the end? I’m not crying, you’re crying.
All in all, Shawn of the Dead is a bullet proof movie for me on several fronts. It is, hands down, my favorite horror comedy of all time, and one of my very favorite movies right up there with Young Frankenstein. For further thoughts the excellent YouTube account, Every Frame a Painting has a wonderful video laying out why Edgar Wright is just so much better at screen comedy than most directors out there today. Check it out and then watch his other brilliant films after you see my personal favorite, Shawn of the Dead at the Trylon.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon