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The City of the Angels Fest teases out film's theological possibilities during post-screening panelists' conversations. Seasoned Hollywood writer Ron Austin, discussing Buster Keaton's The General (1927), noted how American film comedy arose from the void created by World War I. While the war severed Europeans' comedic traditions (resulting in Dada art), Americans refined their comedic instincts from slapstick to screwball comedy.

Austin lamented the loss of physical comedy, a training forged onstage, before live theatre audiences. "Physical comedy," says Austin, "begins with the recognition that we're not in control of the world. It acknowledges the perpetual embarrassment of the body, but affirms the physicalness of the Incarnation—the goodness of our being in the face of an absurd world where animals bite, buildings fall, and cars wreck."

He went on to trace the roots of comedy back to Plato: "We laugh because of the gap between the real and the ideal, between ourselves and God, especially when we take ourselves too seriously."

Perhaps the most overt biblical allusions arose in Preston Sturges' screwball comedy, The Lady Eve (1941). The film begins in the Garden, with an animated sequence featuring a serpent and an apple. Henry Fonda plays a rich beer magnate—named "Hopsie," no less!—who literally falls for a con artist played with comic aplomb by Barbara Stanwyck. The film skewers the pretensions of the upper class, but it places blame on both sides of the perpetual battle of the sexes.

In the post-screening discussion, Pepperdine University Provost Daryl Tippens noted the theme of falling and its connection to the medieval notion of felix culpa—the fortunate, or in the film's case, "happy" fall. Monica Ganas of Azusa Pacific University added, "Everyone has reasons to repent; the flattening of social class demonstrates we're all in the same boat before God. Comic relief comes because we know we're in trouble. Once we realize we (and the characters) are off the hook, that is grace."

Mark Twain said, "Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever."

Humor doesn't always travel or age well, and American films that dominated the festival slate, revealing comedy's cultural constraints, underscored that fact. While the Marx Brothers' commentary on the madness of war still applies, the sexism and racism found in Duck Soup invoked winces amidst the guffaws. Blazing Saddles' riff on racism in the Old West played as outrageous in 1974, but seemed passé; thirty years later.

Satire's sting can be bound by its era. It can cross into cruelty or obscurity, depending upon the subject critiqued. Ron Austin suggested, "The great comedians make us laugh with compassion, not ridicule. They laugh at their own pretensions—the gap between who we pretend to be and who we are."

Comedy is a weapon that must be wielded with precision and care. It works better as a mirror than a spotlight. As festival director Scott Young put it, "Funny flicks open up space for spirited laughter to do its radical makeovers on unsuspecting human species."

The largest festival crowds gathered for the two most recent films—1998's The Big Lebowski and Rushmore—whose absurdist ethos captures the chaotic spirit of our age. Fans who discovered these films on DVD were eager to laugh with an audience. The communal nature of the moviegoing experience enhances comedies.

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