City Lights and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World both emphasize the shift in farce and moves that were taking place at the time of their release through the characters. Farce is a genre that has existed since the beginnings of Shakespeare to relieve people from their daily lives. “Someone once said that farce is real people in unreal situations and comedy is unreal people in real situations (Foss 9). This acted as a “deviation from the norm” (King 7) and brought together different people and places Hilarity can arise from the awareness that things are messy and strange. With City Lights, it is the tramp who is thrown into situations in which he would not find himself. normally not and which requires him to fight his way out. The humor comes from his struggle and inability to extricate himself from the situation. The tramp is presented as a modest working class man throughout. his iconic outfit, which includes a hat too small to fit on his head, baggy pants, and ridiculously oversized shoes. Despite this, the Tramp is a beloved and respected figure in the public eye, as he was born in the classical era. , in which the lower class is romanticized. The journey is pleasant and easy to visualize. The tramp's life seems much happier and more fulfilling than that of the rich man, with the film ending on a high note of the man getting the girl, demonstrating both the falsehood and amorality of the woman's lifestyle. upper class. However, in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, there is no particularly good or bad person who stands out and everyone has an equally happy and dark ending. With the revelation of truths during the modernist period, films became reflective and thoughtful about life's issues. The characters are varied: rich and poor, smart and stupid, conservative and light...... middle of paper ...... In the transition from the classic to the modernist period, the fine line between good and evil became blurred as ethics became more complicated and situation-dependent. In City Lights, good was the lower class while evil was the upper class. Through Chaplin's The Wanderer, the lower class was shown to have higher morals than the upper class, who were shown to be depressed and depraved in wealth in life. In It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, good and evil are diversified across all types and classes of people and left for the audience to decide. Husband and wife, Americans and British, upper classes and lower classes, policemen and policemen betray each other, disillusioned with money and a better life. The universal truth and law that existed during the classical period multiplied and varied during the modernist period and led to conflicts..