The so-called comedia madrileña or nueva comedia madrileña ('Madrid comedy' or 'New Madrid comedy') was a film trend or film label for urban comedies in Spain that emerged during the Transition. It was led by filmmakers such as Fernando Colomo and Fernando Trueba.
Emphasizing the urban setting of Madrid and urban concerns, it consists of light, carefree comedies.[1][2] Characters display an unmistakable progressive worldview,[3] with the stories tending to bring to light the inner contradictions of the generation who had grown in opposition to the Francoist regime, even if the explicitly political elements generally feature as a backdrop.[4] The sketch of the typical protagonist of the early comedia madrileña is that of a forty-year-old urban male with an [implicit] university education, trapped in an existential crisis.[5] Despite some commonalities, mainstream comedia madrileña titles usually bear a tangential relation to the so-called Movida madrileña, insofar the latter was conventionally regarded as more "underground".[6] However Pedro Almodóvar took over Colomo's template and moved it to a "much more transgressive" environment, indeed diving into the Movida madrileña in Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980).[7]
^Huerta Floriano, Miguel Ángel; Pérez Morán, Ernesto (2015). "De la comedia popular tardofranquista a la comedia urbana de la Transición: Tradición y modernidad". Historia Actual Online. 37 (2): 209. ISSN1696-2060.