Notes and Study Questions for Noel Carroll's “Notes on the Sight Gag”

The following notes and study questions are designed to help you understand key arguments in Carroll's article.  We do not expect you to submit formal written answers to the questions.  If you have difficulty answering the questions, raise those difficulties in class discussion.

Noel Carroll begins his essay by distinguishing among the variety of kinds of silent films that provoked laughter—trick films and magic films, slapstick and roughhouse—and finally, the sight gag.  Here he is working out a description of what constitutes a sight gag overall, and then he establishes subtypes of this category of visual comedy.  (Notice that sight gags also occur in films that aren’t comedies.)

So first of all, how does Carroll define the sight gag?  Once you’ve read the whole article through (because he defines it a few times, with slightly different emphases), put his definition into your own words.

List the six types of sight gag Carroll identifies.  From the screenings of the week, try to come up with clear movie examples of each type—other than the examples Carroll himself cites.  The idea here is not to memorize or even learn any of these sight-gag categories, but to get an idea of  the factors that Carroll is raising as he explores the possible permutations of sight gag.

Page 32: “…Chaplin is particularly invested in the theme of imagination, and it is an essential feature of his character that he can see things differently from others…” This is an interesting claim.  Could one argue, based on the inventory of “mimed metaphors” and other kind of sight gags of Chaplin’s and of Keaton’s seen in class, that Carroll’s claim is truer of Chaplin than of Keaton?  Does Belton’s summary of the comic personas of Chaplin and Keaton (pp. 146-149) confirm or contradict such an argument?

Why is the sight gag funny, in your opinion?  What do we laugh at the general situation Carroll defines as the sight gag?  Can you come up with examples of sight gags in recent movie comedies?  If so, show how one works according to Carroll’s definitions and analyses.

In an intriguing pair of final paragraphs, Carroll invokes the “anxiety of photography,” the belief held by many aestheticians at the turn of the 20th century that neither photography nor film could be “art” because, unlike painting, these media just mechanically reproduce reality.  How, for Carroll, is the sight gag part of a strategy to claim the rightful place of cinema as an art?