Sounding Funny - Sound and Comedy Cinema - Mark Evans

Sounding Funny - Sound and Comedy Cinema - Mark Evans

A Special Flavour: Comic Song Scenes in the Hindi Cinema

Sounding Funny - Sound and Comedy Cinema - Mark Evans

Greg Booth [+-]
University of Auckland
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Gregory D. Booth is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland and has been engaged in the study of Indian music and culture for more than thirty years. He is the author of two books, Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios (OUP 2008) and Brass Baja: Stories from the World of Indian Wedding Bands (OUP 2005), and numerous articles on music, film, industry and culture in South Asia. He recently edited More than Bollywood: Studies in Indian Popular Music (Booth & Shope, OUP 2013) and is currently studying aspects of India’s music and film culture-industries, focusing on a wide range of factors including intellectual property, technology, industrial structures, and the music-film relationship.

Description

This study examines music’s potential for highlighting or amplifying the behavioural or verbal exaggerations and departures from the norm that are essential to the production of humour. It engages with the semiotic ambiguities of musical sound and the relations between sound, text and image as these occur and are exploited in the song scenes of the Hindi cinema. Because song scenes occupy a distinctly non-linear position in the linear narratives of the cinema, these scenes are primary sites for the production of humour. The study focuses on three specific issues. First, I examine the sonic process of musical detail in the production of comedy. How does musical sound reinforce comic meanings produced by image and text? I argue that musical sound has inherent limitations in the Hindi cinema’s comic song scenes, but also that comedy’s extra-normal nature is enabled by the conventions surrounding those scenes. Second, and in addition to these inherently structural issues, the study considers the special relationship that comedy in Hindi song scenes has with representations of gender, social class and character type: Comic song scenes are narrative location in which a ranged of potentially “othered” social categories may be constructed as objects of laughter. Finally I suggest that comic song scenes shift between laughter as dramatic representation, experienced sympathetically by the audience, and as an audience response to an objective incongruity.

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Citation

Booth, Greg. A Special Flavour: Comic Song Scenes in the Hindi Cinema. Sounding Funny - Sound and Comedy Cinema. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 205-223 Jan 2016. ISBN 9781845536749. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=24497. Date accessed: 29 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.24497. Jan 2016

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