Müpa Film Club

It Only Hurts When I Laugh

Excerpts from the history of Hungarian film comedies and satires

We should make it clear right from the start: comedy is not a genre in itself. It’s more of a box into which we loosely toss any film that makes us laugh. Of course, we can try to group comedies together based on the type of laughter they induce. Such a classification scheme would yield ‘smiling films’, ‘laughing films’, ‘laughing-out-loud films’, ‘giggling films’ and so on. This approach seems rather imprecise, though. What we laugh at, what we find funny, varies quite a lot. It depends on the era, the culture, the community – and even the viewer’s current mood. We find different things funny in a silent burlesque film than we do in a rom-com, and we laugh differently at a satire than we do at a parody. It would take a long time to list each category. This new series from the Müpa Film Club celebrates ninety years of Hungarian film comedies. It promises to be a journey of discovery through time, and a great adventure. Filmmakers and directors always need to understand their era and their audience well enough to make their jokes hit the mark. The film club, on the other hand, is an opportunity to explore how our views, prejudices and values have changed over the decades.

The first three films in the series – Pesti mese (Tales of Budapest, 1937), A csodacsatár (The Miracle Striker, 1956/1957) and Mici néní két élete (Auntie Who Was Respectable, 1963) – testify to the fact that even though the language of Hungarian film did not undergo any fundamental changes over the course of those 26 years, everything else did. Revealed behind the comedic characters, the situational humour, the amusing dialogues and the gags is our world at that time, along with its doubts and questions. And there will be things we can still laugh about today.