ABSTRACT
This chapter follows a comparative exploration of the role of humor within two distinct media-technological constellations, roughly a century apart. It compares the earliest comic motion pictures with contemporary internet humor. The value of comparing early film with online videos, it generates a purview that opens onto possibilities both before and after the conscription of screen humor to a mass cultural paradigm. The term comedy designates an established cultural mode for which laughter is the intended goal; it stands, for a discursive practice or tradition. Early cinema, one can imagine proposing, was at the start a vehicle for comedy was shaped by preexisting comedic media, vaudeville, comic strips, etc., whose practices were simply extended into the new medium. The historiography of early screen humor has been approached by many scholars in terms of a struggle between class-based models of "low" slapstick comedy vs. "sophisticated" situation comedy.
