The history of Teen Comedies

Natasha Cremona

Teen comedy is a sub genre of Comedy.

The genre is targeted at teenagers and young adults in which the plot is based upon the interests of teenagers. However, older adults may enjoy them for nostalgic purposes.

Teen Comedies

These interests include coming of age, first love, rebellion, conflict with parents, teen angst or alienation.

Often these normally serious matters are presented in a stereotyped or trivialized way.

Teen comedies are often set in schools, or contain characters that are of school age.

Comedy dates back to the era of silent film in 1895 where it first began to be shown in television programmes.

Due to the absence of speech, silent film comedy relied heavily on slapstick and burlesque humour.

The history of Comedy

Burlesque is theatrical entertainment which includes comical sketches and parodies aimed at an adult audience due to the explicit scenes that were shown, these included stripteases.

Slapstick is quite different to burlesque as this includes very energetic comical conventions such as chases, collisions and very often practical jokes were played.

Influential comedians

One of the most famous slapstick directors is Charlie Chaplin. He revolutionised the slapstick era by self directing and creating comedy films – a career that lasted for over 75 years.

Charlie was famous for his slapstick acrobatics and he was unique in his styles when portraying this to the audience.

Instead of making something artificial happen, he would wait until something natural occurred.

His style of comedy is still used by other comedians today.

The history of Comedy

By the 1930’s silent film had grown out of fashion and due to the advance in technology verbal humour was able to be included. This took comedy to a whole new level.

Verbal humour consisted of onscreen puns, innuendos and parodies.

In the early 1960’s comedy became darker and very serious in films, in the form of black comedies. These were comedies based on finding humour from even the most hopeless situation.

The history of Comedy

In 1970 success was found with spin off films from comical British television series.

1980 was a time of popular comedies, many of which are still popular now. For example, Honey I shrunk the kids was produced in around the 1990’s and is still watched today.

In 2000 the emergence of Romantic Comedies, also known as Rom-Coms, began. It was also around this time when Teen Comedies became popular.

They were aimed at teenagers and included embarrassing and relatable situations that would capture the audience.

Classic examples of this are American Pie and The Inbetweeners.

The history of Teen Comedies

One of the first Teen Comedies was released in 1955. It was called Rebel Without A Cause and was quite successful.

Then out of nowhere, a film called Heathers was released in the 1980’s. It was about two outcasts who take revenge on the popular kids by killing them. The film was a huge hit, but studios knew after the school shootings at Columbine and Sandy Hook, there could be no more films with this type of narrative.

Many studios realized that making movies marketed to teens, who had a lot of free time to go and see films, could be a huge moneymaker. However, the number of films created for teens in the 1950’s exhausted audiences, and so for the next two decades, there were few movies targeted specifically at teens.

The history of Teen Comedies

With the constant quick advances in technology, teen slang and social society, it is difficult to create a Teen Comedy with lasting power.

However, as long as the demand is high, constantly releasing new Teen Comedies will allow different studios to make a lot of money.

So instead of such a shocking subject matter, a much tamer approach to teen life was taken through film.

This lead to a series of teen comedies, ranging from Clueless to Mean Girls. Just like Heathers, these films centered around the ‘popular’ girls but the characters weren’t truly evil.

The only problem was that these Teen Comedies tended to be extremely “current”, which meant they out-dated in ten years or so.

Teen Comedies

Teen comedies came of age in 1950 because it was not long before this that the concept of a teenager was born. The idea of an intermediate stage between childhood and adulthood, with its own particular characteristics.

Teen Comedies are also known as teen films or teen epics.

Just like the early teen comedies, any film in this genre made today will contain some stereotypical ‘high school’ characters.

A change that is currently taking place however, is the fact that other genres need to be included in films aimed a teenagers in order to maintain the audience.

Natasha Cremona