Mad World

City Lights and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World both accentuate the change in farce and movements that were going on at the time of their release through the characters. Farce is a genre that has existed since the early days of Shakespeare as a relief for people from their daily lives. “Someone once said that farce is real people in unreal situations and comedy is unreal people in real situations (Foss 9). It acted as a “departure from the norm” (King 7) and put unlike people and places together. Hilarity can result from the awareness of things being out of order and strange. With City Lights, it is the tramp being thrown into situations he would not ever normally be in and making him fight his way out of it. The humor comes from his struggle and failure to get out of the situation. The tramp is donned as a lowly working class man through his iconic outfit, which includes a hat too small to fit on his head, baggy pants, and ridiculously oversized shoes. Despite this, the tramp is a loved and respected figure in the eyes of the audience, for he arose during the classical period, in which the lower class is romanticized. The journey is pleasurable and easy to view. The tramp’s life seems much happier and fulfilling than the wealthy man’s life with the film ending on a high note of the man getting the girl, demonstrating both falsehood and amorality in the lifestyle of the upper class. However, in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, there is no particular good or bad person who stands out and everyone gets an equally happy and grim ending. With truths becoming exposed in the modernist period, films became reflexive and reflected on the issues in life. The characters come varied as rich and poor, intelligent and dumb, conservative and li...

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...m the transition to classical to the modernism period, the fine line between the good and evil became blurred as ethics became more complicated and dependent on the situation. In City Lights, the good was the lower class whilst to evil was the upper class. Through Chaplin’s tramp, the lower class was exemplified to have a higher morale than the upper class, which was revealed to be depressed and depraved of richness in life. In It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the good and the bad are diversified between all types and class of people and left to the audience to decide. Husband and wife, American and British, the upper class and the lower class, and police and law betray one another disillusioned by money and a better life. The universal truth and law that existed during the classical period became numbered and varied during the modernist period and led to conflict.