Ealing comedy

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
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