Laughter in the Comfort of Home. An Analysis of the Adult Comedies Made for the Video Home Market in the late 1980’s and the early 1990’s in Argentina

Abstract

In a series of brief comments, Jesús Martín-Barbero (1987), posits comedy, along with melodrama, as matrix of Latin American popular culture. This cultural matrix was reworked by different disciplines, among which cinema stands out. When the movie industry incorporates it, reformulating it, it gives birth to different variants among which a type of comedy, focused on sex, managed to become one of the most popular subgenres in all Latin America. In Argentina, this type of comedy was one of the most successful film productions since its beginning. Said kind of comedy, which emerged in the 1960s, continued to be produced until the late 1980s and early 1990s when it abandonded the national movie theaters. However, far from disappearing, it found shelter in the home video market. Based on these considerations, the intention of this work is to address the landing of picaresque comedy into the home video market in order to analyze the continuities and the ruptures that occurred in the passage to a new media, the reformulations of elements from other productions with similar characteristics (television comic programs, the «Teatro de la Calle Corrientes») that was carried out, and the links established with other genres of the local video industry such as the video concert.