🎥 NeMLA 2025 Panel

In March 2025, I chaired my panel "What a Joke: The Evolution of the Comedy Remake" at NeMLA in Pennsylvania. Below is the CFP:

     A common sentiment about humor/comedy is that “humor is subjective.” This phrase of course highlights the wide variance in any audience’s response to comedy: a joke told to a crowd might land with some and not others, which makes the success of a joke a primary concern to those studying humor, particularly in film. Another concern to film studies scholars as a whole is the role of the remake, and the response to remakes seems to be much more unanimous: the overwhelming narrative appears to be that remakes are lazy and to be avoided, as the original proves better in most cases. This panel merges these two concerns and invites conversation about how comedy remakes have evolved over the last few decades. Presentations will look to the moments where they fail, the moments where they surprisingly work or even outshine their source material, and discuss what is interesting about them—whether they succeed or not. As remakes, reboots, and adaptations are continually on the rise and the distrust of comedy films rises with them, now more than ever a discussion of how comedy remakes work and are impacted, or impact, various cultures is welcome.

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to: how a remake works under a new cultural context (either tracking movement from one country to another, or simply over time); how specific characters, scenes, plot elements or jokes are changed or “updated;” the way comedy itself has evolved in the time between versions; how certain aspects of a remake go unchanged but “should have” changed.

Here is a link to the CFP: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/07/10/panel-for-nemla-2025-what-a-joke-the-evolution-of-the-comedy-remake

And a link to submit: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21021

Myself, Derek Graf, Clayton Dillard, and Katie Monthie discussed remakes of Wilfred, Mean Girls, The Nutty Professor, and The Goodbye Girl.