Jerry Seinfeld’s film about the invention(?) of Pop Tarts, “Unfrosted,” is a comedy, but not really like most — or maybe even any — other comedies. It’s a comic version of a completely different sort of film — what you might call a product biography. One of the first things you want to know about a movie before deciding to see it is what genre it belongs in.
What sort of movie is it? A comedy? Science fiction? Horror? Musical? Western? Action-adventure? Film scholars write books on specific genres and even on the notion of genre itself. It’s a surprisingly elusive concept. After all, comedies can be defined as films that deliberately set out to make you laugh (as opposed to the sort you laugh at because they’re so bad); musicals have songs and frequently dance numbers; Westerns display cowboys, horses and guns.
But what genre really means is simply that you can talk about some group of films based on shared features, such as plot, form or iconography, though those categories might not be equally important or even appearing in every genre. And it gets more complicated. Larger genres can have their own sub-genres.
Romantic comedies, screwball comedies and parodies are only three of several comedy categories. Horror films can be grouped by their threats, such as slashers, ghosts, demonic possession and so on. And a film can belong to a couple of genres.
“Cowboys & Aliens” (2011) for example, obviously combined both Western and science fiction. For some year.
