COMMENTARY : Oscars for Comedies? You’re Joking

Satire, so the saying goes, is what closes Saturday night. According to Budd Friedman and Mark Lonow, founders of the Improv Comedy Club, comedy is what dies on Oscar night.

Calling comedy “the stepchild of the motion picture academy” and citing its traditionally low representation in the awards, Friedman and Lonow are collecting signatures in their 14 comedy clubs nationwide for a petition establishing three new Oscar categories: best comedy and best male and female comic acting. (Why not supporting performances? Comedy script? Direction?) Friedman and Lonow anticipate close to 10,000 signatures by mid-May, when the petition will be sent to the academy.

But do we really need a comedy Oscar? Doesn’t Price Waterhouse have enough stuff to tabulate already?

My first thought in hearing about this petition was that adding a comedy category will only give the academy an opportunity to honor the wrong funny-makers in much the same way that it now honors the wrong serious-makers. Adding a new category simply increases the chances for the academy to shaft a greater percentage of the truly deserving.

Still, I’m sympathetic to the problem--if not the solution. Comedy is more than the stepchild of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It’s the stepchild of Western Civilization As We Know It. Aristophanes may have gone toe to toe with Sophocles but, in more recent times, comedy is overwhelmingly regarded by awards-givers as undeserving of heavy kudos. And not just awards-givers: Many critics are all too eager to promote the idea that if it makes you laugh, it isn’t art. Art is what makes you a better person; it furrows your high brow.

By creating a comedy Oscar category, however, you could end up reinforcing the very problem you sought to eliminate. Friedman and Lonow believe that dramatic stars should not be up against comedic stars. “You don’t put ballet stars in competition with tap dancers,” Lonow says. The implication here is that drama and comedy are different activities, like snorkeling and spelunking. But if the problem now is that comedy is being accorded second-class citizenship, doesn’t separating out comedy from drama ghettoize it even further?

Awards aside, it’s denigrating, I think, to claim that comedy is a breed apart from drama. Comedy advocates are fond of stating that comedic acting is more difficult than dramatic acting, and they may be right. Certainly it’s no less difficult. But ultimately, comedy and drama are part of the same theatrical continuum. The dividing line between the two--unless you happen to be stalking the aisles of your local video store--is by no means clear-cut.

One of the great joys of performance, as any actor will tell you, is confounding the audience’s expectations about what is serious and what isn’t. Perhaps the greatest “serious” performance of recent years--Daniel Day-Lewis’ Christy Brown in “My Left Foot”--is also one of the most richly comic. To argue for a separate category for comedy is to argue that the emotions of life come in compartmentalized form. It’s an assumption that has never made for great drama or great comedy.

The comedy Oscar advocates like to point out that the Emmys, Tonys and Golden Globes already have their own categories for comedy. Yes, they do. All the more reason for the Oscars to hold fast.

As their all-time example of monumental comedy injustice, the advocates point out that Chaplin and Keaton never received any Oscars, except honorary ones.

But consider for a moment if Chaplin and Keaton were alive and making movies today. (Would that it were so. Comedic films, like dramatic films, have rarely been worse--but that’s another story.) Wouldn’t it be far too limiting to award, say, “City Lights” or “The Gold Rush” or “The Navigator” an Oscar for best comedy? A great work, whether it be comedy or drama, is essentially category-less.

I can anticipate the argument to this: How many Chaplins and Keatons have there ever been? Is it fair to scotch the comedy Oscar idea just because our current funnymen and women lack genius? Might not the addition of the category contribute to a recognition of comedy that would encourage genius?

Well, Chaplin and Keaton did OK without the encouragement of an Oscar. And there are comic actors today--Steve Martin, for example, and, at her best, Lily Tomlin--who are also touched by genius (if not by Oscar).

Yes, it’s infuriating that Martin’s work in, for example, “All of Me” or “Roxanne” was not recognized at the highest level by the academy. But that’s the academy’s problem, not Martin’s. Great film comics will thrive or not thrive based on the vagaries of life and the movie business, but giving awards to comics is not the best way to bring their talents out of the woodwork. Aside from giving their egos (and their bank accounts) a boost, awards will probably only make them pretentious--unfunny.

Awards confer respectability, and I would prefer to see comedy cleansed of it. Respectability is a sure comedy-killer. To argue for a special comedy Oscar is to reinforce comedy’s stepchild status; it sends a message that the only way a comedy can win an award is to win one in its very own specially-designed category.

Injustices abound in the Oscars. Just because comedy has received more than its fair share of shafts doesn’t mean you need to amend the Constitution. After all, I could fill a book with the names of dramatic films and performances that have gone unawarded. I’ll name just one.

In 1965, Laurence Olivier’s Oscar-nominated performance as Othello--regarded by many critics and actors as the greatest performance of the 20th Century--was passed over in favor of . . . Lee Marvin in “Cat Ballou.” Please note that Olivier lost out to a comic performance. It remains the academy’s most comic hour.