Of all the categories in the film festival, comedy could prove the most problematic.

After all, what is more subjective and personal than what we find funny?

And yet, more than any other genre, it's comedy that helped make cinema what it is today.

SILENT COMEDY - In the silent era, comedy, which relied on sight gags and slapstick, had much more immediate currency than any of the other dramatic genres. It's perhaps for this reason that the stars of the silent movie era we remember today tend to be the comic stars - think Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. But with the onset of talkies, most of the old silent stars vanished into obscurity. Yet the transition period yielded one of the great cinematic comedy double-acts of all time - Laurel and Hardy.

SCREWBALL COMEDY - As comedic cinema developed throughout the 30s and 40s, the screenwriters took greater and greater delight in the verbal dexterity that cinema could allow them.

Comedy became more dependent on character and story for its laughs and it seemed actors had to speak faster and faster in order to fit all the witty one-liners in. Think His Girl Friday or Mr Blandings Builds His Dream Home.

THE 'MADCAP' COMEDY - For want of a better title. This evolved in the whacky and anti-authoritarian 60s and narratively speaking they tended to be messy - with the format tending to be a prolonged form of chase of some kind. But when done properly, they are enormous fun. Good examples are What's New, Pussycat? and The Cannonball Run.

THE DRAMEDY - Or the drama-comedy. A bit more bitter-sweet this one - and will give you moments of poignancy as well as a few laughs. The master of this form is, of course, post-Annie Hall Woody Allen, although other examples include Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King and Bruce Robinson's Withnail and I.

THE SPOOF - Back into the realms of out-and-out mayhem again, with the spoof movie that parodies other movie genres. An early and brilliant example is Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein but it was taken to incredible heights by the Zucker brothers in the Airplane and Naked Gun series of movies.

THE POSTMODERN COMEDY - A relatively new sub-genre, this is closely related to the spoof movie, although it also shares something with the dramedy. Not content with mere parody, the postmodern comedy moves into surreal territory. Wes Anderson is a great example of this style with his brilliant The Royal Tenenbaums but the work of screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann should also be mentioned with great works like Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Send in your choices for the film festival, which will take place at the Oxford Phoenix Picturehouse on August 6 to 11. You can email your choices in the categories of SF, horror, comedy, romance, action and You Decide, to me at colin.mcbride@nqo.com or vote at www.oxfordmail.net/whatson/filmfestival/