Saturday, March 4 | 12 Films
On March 4, TCM presents a marathon of Oscar-winning and nominated comedies. The dozen films comprise an essential comedy primer.
The fact is, the way the Academy has often snubbed comedy is no laughing matter. Classic comedies that received no Oscars include Leo McCarey’s Duck Soup (1933) and Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940). Charlie Chaplin was nominated for several Oscars over the course of his career but only won one Academy Award: Best Score for Limelight.
Comedy deserves better. Even Woody Allen, who has won a few statuettes in his pre-scandal time, once compared making comedy to sitting at the children’s table. But in Stardust Memories (1980), aliens (the extra-terrestrial kind) advise his floundering film director, “You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes.” In Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941), a filmmaker who wanted to ditch his signature escapist comedies to “make something that would realize the potentialities of film as a sociological and artistic medium” has a change of heart after a series of misfortunes teaches him that there’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. “Did you know that’s all some people have?” he muses. “It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”
Perhaps Donald O’Connor sang it best in Singin’ in the Rain (1952): “Make ‘em laugh.”
Artists and filmmakers pay lip service to how difficult it is to create a comedy. My Favorite Year (1982), popularized British actor Edmund Gwenn’s deathbed observation, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” So why #Oscarsoserious? Ruben Östlund’s black comedy Triangle of Sadness (2022) did earn a Best Picture nomination and Rian Johnson’s comedy-adjacent mystery Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery earned a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. But neither film is just full-out funny like, say, Charles Crichton’s A Fish Called Wanda (1988).
Incidentally, Kevin Kline in that film was one of less than a handful of comic performances (along with Alan Arkin and Jack Palance) to be honored with an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in the last 40 years.
And speaking of Woody, his film Annie Hall (1977) was the last comedy to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. (Is The Artist from 2011 a comedy? Discuss). Oh well, la di da.
But TCM’s salute to comedy at the Oscars is a reminder that every so often, the Academy got it right. Half of the 12 films are enshrined in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry of “historically, culturally or aesthetically significant” American films. (For the record, they are The Front Page, Ninotchka, Adam’s Rib, Born Yesterday, Some Like It Hot and To Be or Not to Be).
The first comedy to win Best Picture was Frank Capra’s seminal screwball comedy It Happened One Night (1934). TCM’s 24-hour comedy binge features two other Capra classics, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), which earned him his second Academy Award for Best Director (the film was also a Best Picture nominee), and You Can’t Take It with You (1938), which won Best Picture and Best Director, Capra’s third Oscar in four years.
The lineup includes another Oscar-winner for Best Picture, Tony Richardson’s rollicking costume comedy Tom Jones (1963), starring Oscar nominee Albert Finney as the titular rascally foundling, “of whom the opinion of all was that he was born to be hanged.” The boundary-pushing comedy was that year’s most honored film with 10 nominations in all. It won four, including Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Score.
Academy Award voters have seen fit to duly recognize some iconic performances, including Judy Holliday’s Oscar-winning turn as the quintessential “dumb” blonde Billie Dawn in George Cukor’s Born Yesterday (1950). It’s not like it was a weak category that year. Holliday was up against Anne Baxter and Bettie Davis in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950) and Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950).
That same year, nominee James Stewart did not win Best Actor for one of his most beloved roles in Henry Koster’s Harvey, but Josephine Hull did win for Best Supporting Actress reprising her stage role as the flustered sister of Elwood P. Dowd, whose best friend is a six-foot invisible rabbit.
TCM’s comedy marathon includes two other Best Picture nominees, Lewis Milestone’s The Front Page (1931) and Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), which was also nominated for its sparkling screenplay.
Two other brilliant screenplays were nominated, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin’s Adam’s Rib (1949) and Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s Some Like It Hot (1959), which was also nominated for Best Director, Best Actor (Jack Lemmon), Best Cinematography and Art Direction. It did win an Academy Award for its costume design (Marilyn Monroe’s “I’m Through with Love” dress should have been given the Thalberg).
The wrong music can sink a comedy. Composer Charles Fox told NPR that so-called silly, or comedic music cannot save a scene that doesn’t play. Music’s role, Fox said, “Is to support the scene with ambience, with coloration. You can give it a mood, you can give it a tempo." Academy voters have recognized several memorable scores with Oscar nominations. John G. Blystone’s Laurel and Hardy comedy Block-heads (1938) was nominated solely for Best Music (Way Out West from 1937, one of the duo’s best features, likewise was nominated in the Best Music category).
Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be (1942) was not nominated for its impeccable direction, brilliant script or indelible performances by Jack Benny, Carole Lombard, Sig Ruman and Felix Bressart, but it, too, was nominated for Best Music, as was Stanley Kramer’s star-studded slapstickpalooza, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), which did win an Oscar for its sound effects. It was also nominated for Cinematography, Editing, Sound, Best Original Score and Best Original Song.
What to do about getting the Academy to take comedy seriously? Perhaps it can take a cue from the Golden Globes and create a separate category. “No,” surprisingly says none other than Mel Brooks, an Academy Award winner for his The Producers (1967) screenplay, and whose films have earned Oscar nominations for Gene Wilder (as co-screenwriter of Young Frankenstein from 1974) and Madeline Kahn (Blazing Saddles, 1974).
