Comedy has been suppressed as a genre in the area of Korean film studies even though it has been one of the main genres. Unconsciously accepting the biased valuation such as "comedy-vulgarity", academic film discourse somehow stops serious considerati...
Comedy has been suppressed as a genre in the area of Korean film studies even though it has been one of the main genres. Unconsciously accepting the biased valuation such as "comedy-vulgarity", academic film discourse somehow stops serious consideration of Korean comedy's function and deep signification.
But if we focus on the cinematic fact, especially from the point of spectatorship and the socio-filmic intertextuality, comedy is very important and is a key area to make a whole map of Korean cinema. That is why I introduce the 60's Korean comedy which was the most flourished.
This article is composed of three parts. The first part proves how comedy was influential as genre during the 60's. But at the same time how academic discourse degraded comedy. The second part profiles the 60's comedy's characteristic points and types. Analyzing some comedy texts, the third part interprets comic plots and the main codes.
This dissertation's assumptions and aims are as follows:
1. Comedy deserves to be considered a main genre with melodrama and action in Korean cinema genre mapping.
2. This study will cross the genre study in the realm of traditional film studies and socio-filmatic studies' recent point of view to show the nature and the social function of Korean comedy of the 60's,
3. As we all know, there is not enough filmic evidence before the 60's. There are two reasons for focusing on the 60's comedy: first, we can find some comedy films around the 60's; second, we can call the 60's the comedy period since almost every director and producer had experience making comic genre.
4. Since comedy does not have a standard narrative convention like other genres, the comic plot and comic code are very important to achieve the comic which is the aim and the attractive point of comedy in relation to the spectator. Analyzing the comedy text, we can find the comic plot as well as comic codes. Particularly this period's comedy share some main codes such as the capitalist code, gender code, masquerade code. These codes are surely the ideological attitude of the 60's in relation to the rapid changes of Korean society.
5. In addition to clarifying Korean comedy's nature and the narrative stratagem, this study's aim is to restore comedy in Korean cinema's mapping overcoming the bias based on the bias without cinematic fact.