Educational Film Comedy: Laughing and/about Learning

In my project Educational Film Comedy, I explore the mixing of comical and educational modes of filmmaking since the invention of cinema. On the one hand, I am interested in the many examples of educational films, videos and programs that have used comical effects and comedic genres (from slapstick to satire) for the purposes of pedagogy. On the other, I also investigate screen comedies that reference, and often make fun of, the formulas of educational film and video. (Think, for instance, of the many parodies of musty classroom films in episodes of The Simpsons, or shows mocking educational TV formats like the series Cunk on Earth, 2022, on Netflix.) In both these cases, comedy, education and film challenge and interpret each other in ways that can help us understand the roles that humor as an emotion has played in ideas and practices of education in the 20th and early 21st century: When was humor seen as something to be avoided, for which topics and audiences was it embraced? This will likely depend on cultural and historical contexts, but it also touches on issues discussed in theories of humor: Many of them argue that perceiving something as funny is a matter of having your mental concepts and routines of understanding scrambled. Looking at films and videos that combine educational and comedic modes of filmmaking is also a way of exploring how different ideas of what the moving image is and can do have been negotiated: Was it seen as a good thing for films use in education that the cinema was for much of the 20th century widely popular as mass entertainment, or was this seen as a hindrance? Research so far would suggest that there were widely different dominant assumptions about these questions between, for instance, main proponents of classroom filmmaking in the USA and in German-speaking countries during the 1920s to 1950s. My aim is to get a nuanced picture on these issues that have so far not been studied in much depth. The main result of my project will be an English-language monograph on the topic of Educational Film Comedy. I will mostly draw on archives from Austria, Germany, North America and Belgium for examples, but the list of 200 relevant films and videos I researched in preparation for this project also includes films and videos from Australia, Romania, Ukraine and Zimbabwe, among others. I aim to research another 200 examples and plan for the book to consist of two main parts: The first provides a theoretical framework and an overview analysis of my findings, the second will highlight certain important aspects via a selection of case studies. The research will be conducted at the University of Maryland, College Park (year 1), and University of California, Berkeley (year 2). The book will be finished afterwards during a one-year stay at Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History in Vienna.

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