Abstract

This thesis highlights discrepancies in the reception of comedy screenplays for people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, focusing specifically on the United Kingdom and South Korea, and suggests criteria for screenwriters to consult when writing, specifically comedy, for a global market.

In creative practice, a screenplay is often tailored with encoded messages in mind and crafted to be received or decoded in a certain way. However, when writing for an audience consisting of both different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, these encoded ideals often fail to deliver as intended, especially in the realm of comedy writing. As a creative practitioner operating between two drastically different countries, the United Kingdom and South Korea, I believe this to be an issue in need of further exploration.

Despite the existence of studies pertaining to discrepancies across the reception of cinematic translation, few are exploring it within creative practice, and notably, from the perspective of the screenwriter; therefore, this research offers a new perspective and poses pre-existing questions regarding the translation of comedy from a new, unexplored angle: the perspective of the screenwriter.

Using case studies, questionnaires, and reflexive creative practice, this research project highlights key areas of importance for screenwriters to consider when writing comedy intended for international consumption. Additionally, key theoretical considerations from poetics, comedy theory and translation theory have been explored in order to outline and assess the route of the issues posed, and to set a solid foundation for the creative practice and exploration that follows.

Korean cultural context has also been utilised as a framework for the core case study referenced throughout this project, whereby, the reception of various British comedy films, such as Johnny English (2003), Hot Fuzz (2007), and The Trip to Spain (2017), is explored within a Korean cultural context and compared with the reception they received in the United Kingdom (through box office figures and online reviews) to determine where differences emerge, and further, in collaboration with the aforementioned key theoretical considerations explored, why this may be the case and how best to work with these factors in creative practice.

These findings inform the production of cross-cultural comedy screenwriting guidelines in the form of a website. The guidelines produced as part of this research project highlight elements screenwriters should be mindful of when writing comedy for international audiences and are easily accessible on a website for reference and application in real-world creative practice. Further to this, the aforementioned guidelines have been tested within this study in the form of a feature-length comedy screenplay that acts as a framework to highlight guideline utilisation and assess the ease of use and application in a real-world creative practice context.