ABSTRACT
“Cult films,” note the editors of Cineaste’s special issue on cult film, “make us feel less alone in the dark”. Scholars of comedy tend to locate a bridge between ancient comedy and the comedy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the commedia dell’arte of Renaissance Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Geoff King proposes that comedy in film might be best understood not as a genre, but as a mode. Janet Staiger proposes a useful way of exploring how an audience can make a film a cult film, with the example of her finding the comedy in an ostensibly un-funny film: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The manner in which Surrealists enjoyed the films, however, taking “low” comedy and giving it the scrutiny and embedding it with layers of meaning usually reserved for more “artistic” fare, brought their consumption into the territory of the cultist. The comic mode, applied by an audience to a banal film, made it a cult film.
