Mix-up comedy
A mix-up comedy , also called Comedy of errors after Shakespeare , describes humorous film comedies or plays , the particular attraction of which is that characters are confused with other people due to their external appearance or their behavior and this leads to entanglements. A classic film example is Buster Keaton's film Buster and the Police (1922), in which the protagonist is mistaken for a bomb-throwing anarchist and is ultimately followed by a crowd of police officers.
Recurring reasons for confusion relate to gender identity, e.g. B. in Some like it hot (1959), the class relations, z. B. in Drei Men im Schnee (1955) or status symbols, e.g. B. in Clothes Make the Man (1940). Often strangers are mistaken for twins, doppelgangers, identical names, mixed up identities or simply misunderstandings for someone they are not.
The origin of the mixed-up comedies lies in Shakespeare's play Die Komödie der Irrungen (Comedy of Errors ) , with the beginnings of content already in the Latin comedy Menaechmi by the Roman Plautus and in the Greek Middle Comedy , at the latest in the New Comedy .
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Ludger Kaczmarek: Comedy of errors . In: Lexikon der Filmbegriffe, edited by Hans. J. Wulff and Theo Bender.
- ^ Philipp Brunner, James zu Hüningen: Confusion Comedy . In: Lexikon der Filmbegriffe, edited by Hans. J. Wulff and Theo Bender.