Page - 27 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/02

26 | Toufic El-Khoury www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 23–37 An interdisciplinary examination of the relationship between societal legiti- macy and organization of marital status, on one hand, and comic traditions, on the other, in a specific community, society, or country would surely be fruit- ful. The way a society conceives marriage conditions the way it laughs about it. When we look at classical cinema in the United States, Italy, and Egypt, we observe that certain comic traditions related to adultery, divorce or plotting the death of a spouse are more similar for American and Egyptian cinema than for the two western societies. For example, one convention absent from American and Egyptian comedies, though very popular in Italian comedies, is the killing of a spouse, especially the woman. Whereas Catholic Italian society forbids or highly stigmatizes divorce, such is less the case in Protestant and Muslim socie- ties. “Divorce Italian style” (an ironic metaphor for a husband plotting to kill his wife popularized by the title of a Pietro Germi comedy with Marcello Mastroi- anni9) could therefore flourish in Italy but be completely inconsistent with other audiences’ comic habits.10 Comedy conventions will vary depending on society’s laws and moral norms. While this particular question deserves its own expanded study, which would involve a comparative examination of comedy in relation to judicial, sociocultur- al, or theological topics, here we concentrate on a core study of the representa- tion of marriage in American classical comedy. We will focus on Stanley Cavell’s analysis of a specific comic corpus and on the way these comedies discussing marriage belong to a specifically American school of thought. We will then seek to identify traces of Kierkegaard’s philosophical legacy, by way of Wittgen- stein’s influence on Cavell, in this American thinker’s definition of marriage. STANLEY CAVELL, SKEPTICISM, AND REMARRIAGE: THE AWFUL TRUTH (1937) Of the seven movies discussed in Cavell’s famous essay on American comedy, Pursuits of Happiness: Hollywood and the Comedy of Remarriage, only two treat marriage directly, showing the internal functioning of a married couple with a minimum of external interferences: The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, US 1937) and Adam’s Rib (George Cukor, US 1948). And of those two movies only The Awful Truth has its narrative focused solely on the marriage question – Adam’s Rib centers on two lawyers, happily married, who find themselves on opposing sides in a trial of a philandering husband and a jealous and murderous wife, with 9 Some of the comedies centered on this particular comic plot: Il Vedovo (Dino Risi, IT 1959), Divorce Italian Style (Divorzio all’italiana, Pietro Germi, IT 1961). 10 In France, historically a Roman Catholic country but marked by definitive secular traditions since the beginning of the twentieth century, the “divorce by murder” comic convention appears occasionally in cinema, as with La Poison (Sasha Guitry, FR 1951), about an elderly rural couple trying to murder each other.