Clara's AICE media year: Comedy Films

Comedy Films

Hello bloggers! It’s been a while, but don’t worry, today, we’re starting something big… The final Portfolio Project. For this project, I need to do a 2 minute film opening of the genre I choose, and this specific blog is for that, to see if making my film opening a comedy would work, and what specific things should the film have.

First, comedy does not have a specific target audience, but it does have a lot of genre conventions. Some of them are “the fish out of water” which refers to placing a character on an environment where they clearly don’t belong, which is unfamiliar and its meant to create conflict. Also, they usually have an “idiot protagonist” which is from where most of the comedy comes from. The mise-and-scene is usually really colorful, with bright lightning, and uses a lot of medium-shots.

The institutional conventions of the narrative image are the visual simplicity, which the film’s bright colors, and high key lightning indicate that the environment of the film is happy and a “safe” one. The character branding is usually the main character looking directly at the camera with an exaggerated facial expression. The marketing techniques used are that usually the main actor is a known one, because the audiences already know them, also that this films usually have a really funny trailer, which includes a lot of jokes, and sometimes, the jokes on the trailer are all the jokes that the film includes. Another big convention is that comedies for the family are usually released during “tentpole” times, like summer, or Christmas, and adult comedies are usually released in February, March, September, or October, which are the months in which they have the less competition from other big films.

Dumb And Dumber

Two Film/TV productions that represent this genre are “Dumb and Dumber” (1994) (shown in picture below) This film cover nicely shows that the film is a comedy. This is because of the exaggerated facial expressions of both characters (Lloyd and Harry), and they are also shown doing something “stupid” which also indicates, with the tittle, that probably both of the characters are going to face “dumb” problems and they are going to solve them on a funny way.

The Naked Gun

“The Naked Gun” (2025) is another comedy film which character branding is also the main character looking directly at the camera with an exaggerated facial expression, looking straight at the camera, and he’s doing something unusual, which represents that the film is a comedy.