Abstract
Focusing on the four musical comedies made in the 1930s by the Soviet director Grigorij Aleksandrov (1903–1983), this chapter examines how he and his composer Isaak Dunaevskij (1900–1955) enlisted music to help create laughs. While the humour in these films has been discussed by previous scholars, they have typically focused on verbal, narrative, visual, and physical gags. I narrow in on the role that the music itself—through performance, references, style, instrumentation—plays in generating humour. Given that comedy is contextual, I also frame the way that Aleksandrov and Dunaevskij deployed musical comedy within debates about Soviet humour.
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Notes
- 1.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
- 2.
The film is available for viewing, with English subtitles, at https://youtu.be/chDRXQ77IgA accessed 3 August 2021. Timings for specific scenes listed inline above refer to this version.
- 3.
The film is available for viewing, with English subtitles, at https://youtu.be/ia4DyErYhAs accessed 3 August 2021. Timings for specific scenes listed inline above refer to this version.
- 4.
The film is available for viewing, with English subtitles, at https://youtu.be/wUnZqtcrOlI accessed 3 August 2021. Timings for specific scenes listed inline above refer to this version.
- 5.
The film is available for viewing, with English subtitles, at https://youtu.be/t1wM1FSTIm0 accessed 6 August 2021. Timings for specific scenes listed inline above refer to this version.
- 6.
By the same token, because diegetic/non-diegetic blurring is a defining feature of the film musical and is theoretically not to be noticed (Altman 1987, pp. 59–80), I do not discuss examples of this kind.
- 7.
The lyrics for the first three films were written by the satirist Vasílij Lebedev-Kumač (1898–1949). Lyrics for The Radiant Path were written by Mihaíl Vol′pin (1902–1988) and Anatolij D’Aktil′ (pseudonym of Anatolij Frenkel′, 1890–1942). On the nature of their texts, see Salys (2009, pp. 11–12, 98, 101, 145–47, 241, 304).
- 8.
This is a musical gag in and of itself considering that they begin by playing Chopin’s famous ‘Funeral March’ – the third movement of his Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35 (1839) – then break into lively jazz, only to be admonished by a policeman and return to the funeral march.
- 9.
Stakhanovites were overachieving laborers who became models of productivity and citizenship during the Soviet 1930s (Siegelbaum 1988).
- 10.
There are other examples in these films of ‘unusual’ and potentially humorous instruments. In the opening scene of Jolly Fellows, for instance, Kostâ ‘plays’ the bars of a metal fence, some clay pots, and a wooden bridge like percussion instruments. In Volga-Volga, members of Strelka’s ensemble play a saw and water-filled bottles. But these are, I maintain, not to be understood as funny, but rather as examples of how these characters and their worlds are inherently and ‘naturally’ musical (Kupfer 2013, 2016).
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Kupfer, P. (2023). We Can Sing and Laugh like Children: Music as Comedy in the Film Musicals of Grigorij Aleksandrov and Isaak Dunaevskij. In: Audissino, E., Wennekes, E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33422-1_21
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