How Comedy And Karate Movies Have Blended So Perfectly

How Comedy And Karate Movies Have Blended So Perfectly

by Vernon Alvarez

For many people karate movies are all about the action. When you mention them, it is the fight scenes, with people flying across the screen, and super fast kicks and punches that come to mind. But there is another element that has blended so well in these films in the past and that is comedy.

Comedy and action have really worked well together ever since those first silent movies. Many of the stars at that time were very physical and that physical comedy lent itself well to action sequences. These influences can be seen in many movies, no more so than those that star Jackie Chan, a self-confessed fan of many stars of the silent era.

Born in 1954 in Hong Kong, Jackie Chan began his training at the tender age of 6, when he was enrolled by parents at the China Opera School. His family actually moved to Australia, but Jackie stay behind and trained intensely until he managed to break into the movie industry in the early Seventies. He had many bit roles including two opposite the legendary Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury and Lee's last movie, Enter the Dragon. Hong Kong cinema were desperate to find a new hero after Bruce Lee died, and many tried to emulate him. Jackie did not, instead focusing on developing his own, and after his role in Drunken Master in 1978, he began to make inroads.

Jackie loved the comedy of those silent greats like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd and he started to combine martial arts with this comedic-style. When he directed The Young Master in 1980, it started a trend in Hong Kong as the two genres blended seamlessly.

Despite being a major star in the East, Jackie took some time to get noticed in Hollywood. Early in his career a few American producers tried to bring him to Hollywood, but their first attempt, The Big Brawl, did not pay off, and neither did his cameo in Cannonball Run as a Japanese driver, where he hardly got to show his martial arts skills.

Jackie was not alone in his crusade to combine comedy and karate movies, and his main partner-in-crime was actor and director Sammo Hung, who he had known since they had studied together at the China Opera School. Sammo was very often the director or fight choreographer on Jackie's movies, and is a recognizable face in many of the films too. He had a brief stint in Hollywood too, starring in the TV show, Martial Law.

Rumble in the Bronx in 1995 finally fared well with American audiences and soon Jackie Chan was starring in a number of big Hollywood comedy action movies like the Rush Hour series, Shanghai Noon and its sequel Shanghai Knights, The Tuxedo and Around the World in 80 Days.

Another Hong Kong actor and director who uses comedy brilliant in karate movies is Stephen Chow, who counts Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung as two of his biggest influences. After breaking into TV and films as an actor in the Eighties, he started to direct more and soon his films began to get popular. When he made Shaolin Soccer, the rest of the world started to take notice, leading to his next film getting a huge budget. That film was Kung Fu Hustle, which would go on to become Hong Kong's most successful movie at the box office ever. Chow even got his hero Sammo Hung to help direct a few scenes in it. Kung Fu Hustle was also released in more cinemas in America than other foreign-language film in history.

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