Comedy, love, irony: On Mauritz Stiller’s Thomas Graal’s Best Film

Abstract

Mauritz Stiller’s Thomas Graals bästa film/Thomas Graal’s Best Film (1917) is a self-reflexive romantic comedy and has been called ‘one of the cleverest films about film-making made in the silent era’ (Bordwell and Thompson 2003: 66). This article investigates the film’s correlations between love and metafiction and discusses some of the most striking differences between the Swedish and the American versions of the film. As in many silent comedies, the sight gag plays a dominant role. The article argues that in this film the sight gag is elaborated in an extended fashion more akin to romantic irony or what Friedrich Schlegel would call a ‘permanent parabasis’.