Ealing comedy

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English

Etymology

From Ealing Studios, the studio which released most such films, named after the London town of Ealing.

Noun

Ealing comedy (countable and uncountable, plural Ealing comedies)

  1. (uncountable) A genre of English comedy film, typically populist and satirical about life in post-WWII British society.
    • 2004 June 3, James Chapman, Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present, Reaktion Books, →ISBN, page 281:
      Ealing comedy is suddenly being regarded as the intellectual's treat.
    • 2006 March 23, Gill Plain, John Mills and British Cinema: Masculinity, Identity and Nation, Edinburgh University Press, →ISBN, page 210:
      What Michael Balcon described as the 'mild anarchy' (1969: 159) permeating Ealing comedy was, over the course of the decade, usurped by the moderate anarchy of the St Trinians and Carry On films.
    • 2014 July 14, Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930-1960, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 377:
      The use of voice-over, characteristic of Ealing comedy, is also ironic.
    • 2023 July 27, David Stubbs, Different Times: A History of British Comedy, Faber & Faber, →ISBN, page 1886:
      Ealing comedy was a reaction against the sort of earnest fare the Ealing Studios themselves had produced in wartime.
  2. (countable) A film in this genre.
    • 1989 August 1, Julian Graffy, Geoffrey Hosking, Culture and the Media in the USSR Today, Springer, →ISBN, page 67:
      This new film follows the pattern of an Ealing comedy, with escalating chaos and fantasy as the entire fabric of life collapses for the inhabitants of a Leningrad apartment block
    • 2006, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, The Coen Brothers: Interviews, Univ. Press of Mississippi, →ISBN, page 200:
      OK, it's [The Ladykillers] an Ealing comedy so there's something very British and very genteel about it , which isn't particularly our thing.
    • 2014 October 16, Gilbert Adair, Surfing the Zeitgeist, Faber & Faber, →ISBN:
      Its finest moments are nevertheless as always the vignettes of tenderly observed British ordinariness: Wallace remarking 'Cracking piece of toast, Gromit' at the breakfast table, just like Stanley Holloway in an Ealing comedy