Tiempos modernos: Vernacular Assimilations of Slapstick Comedies in Latin American Classical Cinema

Alejandro Kelly Hopfenblatt (Universidad de Buenos Aires/CONICET)

Slapstick films were one of the main components of Hollywood’s global expansion in the 1910s and 1920s. Picking up on popular humor traditions, these movies provided stories and images of confusion and disconnection that were easily relatable for audiences both domestic and international. Comedians such as Charlie Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy were also celebrated in societies were modernization processes were even more fragmentary and incomplete such as those in Latin America, originating local imitations and assimilations. With the onset of Latin American film industries in the 1930’s, slapstick became a framework for their critical reception and their commercialization. Regionally celebrated comics such as Cantinflas, Tin Tan, and Luis Sandrini were all deemed national versions of Chaplin, even when their movies were not imitations of Hollywood’s comic procedures. Picking up on their own local popular humor traditions and their personal backgrounds in entertainment, they starred in vernacular assimilations that related more to slapstick themes than to its methods. Modernity became thus not only a chaotic whirlwind but a problematic tension with national traditions that needed to be exposed and mocked. Whether talking about the growth of bureaucracy, the development of new sensibilities or cinema’s role in disseminating modern ideas, Latin American assimilated slapstick as a way to present its own modern times