Shaun of the Dead dir. by Edgar Wright, and: Mon Oncle dir. by Jacques Tati, and: Steamboat Bill dir. by Charles Reisner with Buster Keaton, and: Some Like It Hot dir. by Billy Wilder, and: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum dir. by Richard Lester, and: Duck Soup dir. by Leo McCarey, and: The Lady Eve dir. by Preston Sturges, and: Annie Hall dir. by Woody Allen, and: Best in Show dir. by Christopher Guest (review)

In order to penetrate the thicket or cave, surmount opposition at the gate or river, heroes of quest narrative sometimes recite a powerful spell, such as Dante’s “our passage has been willed above, where One/can do what he has willed,” which is addressed to a recalcitrant Charon at the crossing of Acheron. In this spirit, when teaching, I sought to provide my students with spells useful for penetrating the subject of screen comedy, an intellectual thicket if there ever was one. I imagined the aspirants trying out different formulas—“Comedy is a man in trouble” (Alan Dale), “an anaesthesia of the heart” (Henri Bergson), “the world is a comedy to those that think” (Horace Walpole)—as they made their valorous approaches to understanding. The only formula original with me was “Comedy loves symmetry.” By “symmetry” I meant the patterned replications so often found in comic works, the twinned heroes (or twinned hero-and-servant pairs, as in The Comedy of Errors), the paralleled situations, the exactly repeated lines, the framings onscreen which literally align characters in formal symmetry about some axis.

There is an example of such a framing in that very funny film, Edgar Wright’s 2004 Shaun of the Dead, which stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as twenty-something Londoners redeemed (partially) from their fecklessness by having to cope with a zombie apocalypse; Wright and Pegg collaborated on the screenplay. Midway through the film, one team of survivors runs into a second team of survivors. With mirror-image precision, each team member passes and greets his counterpart in the other team, in an act of visual rhyming to match the audible rhyming of the team leaders’ names, “Shaun” and “Yvonne.” This is repetition or replication taken to a lovely comic extreme, but then repetition is the master device of the film, which features many doubled sequences, doubled props, and doubled framings (you should pay particular attention to shots of a couple passionately embracing outside the Winchester pub). In a sense, the whole of Shaun of the Dead is a doubling, a parody of George Romero’s 1968 horror classic Dawn of the Dead, though an equally important starting point for Wright and Pegg was the 1999–2001 English television series Spaced, also directed by Wright and itself a parody of sitcoms.

One episode of Spaced opens by deliberately conflating zombies with the avatars of video games, thus setting horror in the midst of an ordinariness which greatly resembles it, and this sort of conflation runs right through Shaun of the Dead. Take the line “You’ve got red on you,” spoken by a mother after kissing her son and leaving lipstick on his cheek. Nothing could be more ordinary, but the line might also mean, and in the course of time does mean, “You’ve got zombie-infected blood on you.” Ordinary people doing ordinary boring jobs move through their day in a zombielike catatonia, then turn into literal zombies. Even as the uninfected survivors hole...