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COMEDY
What is comedy? Andrew Stott traces changing definitions of the term
from Aristotle to Chris Morris’s Brass Eye via Oscar Wilde and Some
Like It Hot. Providing readers with the ideal critical introduction to the
irrepressible genre of comedy, this wide-ranging and thorough overview:
• investigates comic forms, theories, and techniques
• considers comic identity, including that of clowns, stereotypes, and
the stand-up comic
• introduces comedy’s role in theories of deconstruction,
psychoanalysis, and gender
• features analytical case studies on a number of themes, from political
satire to slapstick
• considers comic representations of the body and sexuality
• reviews theories of the cultural and psychological purposes of
laughter
Introducing complex theoretical ideas in an accessible and lively way,
this is the essential guide for those studying comedy in its many forms.
Andrew Stott is Assistant Professor of English at the State University
of New York, Buffalo.
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THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM
SERIES EDITOR: JOHN DRAKAKIS, UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING
The New Critical Idiom is an invaluable series of introductory guides to
today’s critical terminology. Each book
• provides a handy, explanatory guide to the use (and abuse) of the
term
• offers an original and distinctive overview by a leading literary and
cultural critic
• relates the term to the larger field of cultural representation.
With a strong emphasis on clarity, lively debate, and the widest possible
breadth of examples, The New Critical Idiom is an indispensable
approach to key topics in literary studies.
Also available in this series:
Autobiography by Linda Anderson
Class by Gary Day
Colonialism/Postcolonialism by Ania Loomba
Comedy by Andrew Stott
Culture/Metaculture by Francis Mulhern
Difference by Mark Currie
Discourse by Sara Mills
Dramatic Monologue by Glennis Byron
Ecocriticism by Greg Garrard
Genders by David Glover and Cora Kaplan
Gothic by Fred Botting
Historicism by Paul Hamilton
Humanism by Tony Davies
Ideology by David Hawkes
Interdisciplinarity by Joe Moran
Intertextuality by Graham Allen
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iii
Irony by Claire Colebrook
Literature by Peter Widdowson
Magic(al) Realism by Maggie Ann Bowers
Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form by Philip Hobsbaum
Modernism by Peter Childs
Myth by Laurence Coupe
Narrative by Paul Cobley
Parody by Simon Dentith
Pastoral by Terry Gifford
The Postmodern by Simon Malpas
Realism by Pam Morris
Romance by Barbara Fuchs
Romanticism by Aidan Day
Science Fiction by Adam Roberts
Sexuality by Joseph Bristow
Stylistics by Richard Bradford
Subjectivity by Donald E.Hall
The Unconscious by Antony Easthope
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COMEDY
Andrew Stott
NEW YORK AND LONDON
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First published 2005
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 2005 Andrew Stott
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Stott, Andrew, 1969–
Comedy/Andrew Stott.
p. cm. —(The new critical idiom)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Comedy. I. Title. II. Series.
PN1922.S78 2005
809′.917–dc22 2004010093
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0-203-31212-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-29932-2 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-29933-0 (pbk)
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CONTENTS
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ix
Introduction
1
1 Comedy in the Academy
17
Plato and Aristotle
18
Genre Trouble
20
Fertility and the ‘Élan Vital’: Cornford, Bergson, Langer
24
Springtime and Festival: Frye and Barber
28
Carnival and the Marketplace: Bakhtin and the New
31
Historicism
2 Comic Identity
39
Stereotypes
40
Clowns, Fools, and Folly
45
Tricksters
49
Wit, Camp, and Bathos: Congreve, Wilde, Hancock
53
3 Gender and Sexuality
59
Cross-dressing: As You Like It and Some Like It Hot
60
Drag and Transvestism
66
Marriage
71
4 The Body
79
Beauty and Abjection
80
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vii
The Grotesque
83
Slapstick
87
The Female Body
92
5 Politics
97
Comedy and the State: Frogs and Brass Eye
99
Satire
103
‘Alternative’ Comedy: Comedians and Comedians
107
The End of Laughter? Three Holocaust Comedies
113
6 Laughter
121
Christian Laughter
121
Superiority and Incongruity Theories
125
Relief Theory: Freud and Spencer
131
Poststructuralist Laughters
133
Conclusion
139
GLOSSARY
143
FURTHER READING
149
BIBLIOGRAPHY
151
INDEX
161
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SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
The New Critical Idiom is a series of introductory books which seeks to
extend the lexicon of literary terms, in order to address the radical
changes which have taken place in the study of literature during the last
decades of the twentieth century. The aim is to provide clear, well-
illustrated accounts of the full range of terminology currently in use, and
to evolve histories of its changing usage.
The current state of the discipline of literary studies is one where
there is considerable debate concerning basic questions of terminology.
This involves, among other things, the boundaries which distinguish the
literary from the non-literary; the position of literature within the larger
sphere of culture; the relationship between literatures of different
cultures; and questions concerning the relation of literary to other
cultural forms within the context of interdisciplinary studies.
It is clear that the field of literary criticism and theory is a dynamic
and heterogeneous one. The present need is for individual volumes on
terms which combine clarity of exposition with an adventurousness of
perspective and a breadth of application. Each volume will contain as
part of its apparatus some indication of the direction in which the
definition of particular terms is likely to move, as well as expanding the
disciplinary boundaries within which some of these terms have been
traditionally contained. This will involve some re-situation of terms
within the larger field of cultural representation, and will introduce
examples from the area of film and the modern media in addition to
examples from a variety of literary texts.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In keeping with the communal spirit of comedy, this book is the product
of a number of good-natured interactions and has benefited greatly from
the assistance of the following people: Keith Hindle and Nigel Mapp
were kind enough to comment extensively on drafts, and without the
profit of their rigorous and generous readings, this work would be much
impaired. Monica Kendall also furnished excellent comments on my
final draft. Terry Hawkes graciously allowed me to borrow a bit on
Simon Forman I heard him deliver at a meeting of the London
Shakespeare Seminar in 2002. Liz Thompson at Routledge is to be
thanked for giving me the opportunity to write the book in the first
place, and for retaining always the virtue of patient and good-humoured
correspondence while I moved countries and generally didn’t get down
to it. John Drakakis has offered consistently supportive and
authoritative editorial advice from first to last, and I am delighted to
appear in his series. The final and most outstanding debt of gratitude is
owed to Josie Stott, the funniest person I know, whose love,
encouragement and support make everything worth doing. For this, and
everything else, I love you.
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INTRODUCTION
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall
down an open sewer and die.
Mel Brooks
Providing a simple formula to answer the question ‘what is comedy?’ is
not so easy. On the one hand, comedy is a reasonably graspable literary
form, most properly applied to drama, that uses stock character types in
a scenario where some kind of problem must be resolved. Comedies end
happily, often concluding with a communal celebration such as a feast or
a marriage. We might add that we would expect a comedy to be funny,
and that during the course of its action no one will be killed. But this
definition is fine just so long as we understand comedy in its strictest
and most restrictive sense within literary history. In his study of five
centuries of English stage comedy, Alexander Leggatt notes the relative
stability of this formula across generations of writers, describing it as
our most consistent literary genre, ‘surviving centuries of cultural
change with its basic conventions stubbornly intact’ (Leggatt, 1998:1).
Yet any consideration of what we think of as comedy in the modern day
exposes numerous anomalies and deviations from this pattern, and a
diversity of linguistic and performance practices. As a label, ‘comedy’
can be applied across a range of styles, including traditional categories
such as pastoral comedy, farce, burlesque, pantomime, satire, and the
comedy of manners; yet it also applies to more modern subdivisions:
cartoons, sitcom, sketch comedy, slapstick cinema, stand-up, some
game shows, impressionists, caricatures, and even silly walks. Applying
a single uniform definition or methodological approach to such a
mixture would be highly unsatisfactory. This terminological range is a
product of the fact that comedy is as much a tonal quality as a structural
one. While there is a long-standing literary tradition of comedy, ‘the
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2 INTRODUCTION
comic’ is an identifiable mode or tone of writing that manifests itself in
a multitude of media, genres, and forms that are not necessarily
synonymous with comedy. The mixture of comic with tragic and other
elements in writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Dickens, Ibsen, Samuel
Beckett, Carol Churchill, or Martin Amis, for example, is indicative of
what W.Moelwyn Merchant called the ‘permanently recurring affront to
the purity of comedy and tragedy as dramatic categories’ (Merchant,
1972:1). In postmodernism, parody, burlesque, and satire—notably
‘comic’ techniques—are used in the service of serious critiques of
Enlightenment philosophy. In practice, then, generic definitions show
themselves to be porous, and we often see comic business appearing in
contexts structurally inconsistent with that form. This might lead us to
suggest that what we call comedy is really humour, a specific tone
operating free from generic restraints, which, while not the exclusive
property of comedy is closely associated with it. Similarly, laughter, the
most immediate meter of comedy’s success or failure, does not belong
to it uniquely, and is equally induced by humour but also embarrassment,
fear, guilt, tickling, or laughing gas.
By retaining a broader understanding of the term comedy we can use
it as a means of organizing and understanding a series of persistent
themes that we encounter again and again across a variety of settings.
These themes include various forms of inversion, the ‘world-turned-
upside-down’ scenario where slave governs master or man bites dog.
Foolishness, intellectual myopia, or the rigid insistence on inflexible
systems of being or thinking are ridiculed by transformations of
different kinds, investigations of alternative identities, or a relaxation of
social codes and a suspension of laws governing the body. The matter-
of-fact comprehensibility of language is compromised by linguistic
contortions that produce parallel or nonsensical forms of meaning. In all
these, regardless of where they appear, a notion of ‘comedy’ is at work.
That our understanding of it is not contained by one definition or
narrative arc is one of the principles of this book. ‘Comedy’ is a term
that can refer equally to a genre, a tone, and a series of effects that
manifest themselves in diverse environments. This will require us to
think of comedy multilaterally, as at once a literary tradition with
identifiable structural qualities, and as a way of describing isolated events
or passages within other types of work.
As a dramatic form, the historical development of comedy appears to
confirm the idea of a relatively permeable form adapting to suit the
demands of the day. Cordatus, the moderator of Ben Jonson’s play
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INTRODUCTION 3
Every Man Out of His Humour (1600), offers us this synopsis of its
development from its origins in ancient ritual:
‘tis extant, that that which we call Comoedia, was at first nothing
but a simple and continued Satyre, sung by one only person, till
Susario invented a second, after him, Epicharmus a third;
Phormus and Chionides devised to have foure actors, with a
Prologue and Chorus; to which Cratinus (long after), added a
fifth and sixt; Eupolis, more, Aristophanes, more than they: every
man in the dignity of his spirit and judgment, supplied something:
and (though that in him this kind of Poeme appeared absolute, and
fully perfected) yet how is the face of it chang’d since, in
Menander, Philemon, Cecilius, Plautus, and the rest; who have
utterly excluded the Chorus, altered the property of the persons,
their names, and natures, and augmented it with all libertie,
according to the elegancie and disposition of those times wherein
they wrote?
(Jonson, 1920: Induction, 261–275)
In this version, comedy begins as a simple song for a lone voice
gradually accumulating protagonists and interlocutors as each authorial
generation presents additions to the form. In this, Jonson, whose own
comedies were innovative and markedly different from those that
preceded him, suggests that comedy is by definition open to continual
adaptation. It offers a welcome opportunity for greater freedom of
expression:
I see not then, but we should enjoy the same Licentia, or free
power to illustrate and heighten our invention, as they did; and
not be tied to those strict and regular forms which the niceness of
a fewe (who are nothing but Forme), would thrust upon us.
(Jonson, 1920: Induction, 275–279)
Our knowledge of the origins and development of comedy has not
advanced far beyond Jonson’s. A clue to its beginnings may be found in
the etymology of the word itself, which is generally agreed to be
derived from an amalgamation of the Greek words ‘kômos’ or ‘kômai’ ,
and ‘oda’, words that reflect comedy’s roots in the Greek peninsula.
‘Kômos’ translates as ‘revel’, while ‘kômaî comes from the word for
Village’. Aristotle (c. 384–322 BC) preferred this second definition,
remarking that the Dorians ‘call outlying villages kômai…the
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4 INTRODUCTION
assumption being that comedians were so-called not from the revel or
kômos, but because they toured the villages when expelled from the town
in disgrace’ (Aristotle, 1996:6). ‘Oda’ is uncontroversially translated as
‘song’, and so comedy is either a hymn of celebration or, as Dante
(1265–1321) styled it, ‘a rustic song’ (Dante, 1984:31). Most critics and
historians agree that comedy appears to be the product of a rural
environment rather than an urban one, and to have come into being in
association with seasonal agrarian fertility rites. At some stage, comedy
also began a long association with the god Dionysus, whose divine
characteristics and patronage are clearly impressed on the form.
Dionysus, the son of Zeus and Semele, was originally a god of the
fertility of nature, a vegetation-spirit who died and was reborn yearly. His
cult reached Greece from either Thrace or Phrygia at around 1000 BC,
and was particularly notable for its devotional use of wine and the
orgiastic revels of its votaries, especially women, who withdrew into the
wild to make contact with nature. Dionysus was often described as
having a minor god, Phales, as his companion, of whom little is known
except his obvious association with the word ‘phallus’, and by the
fourth century BC Dionysus had outgrown his association with organic
fertility to become a sponsor of human sexual behaviour. The
temperament and qualities of Dionysus and the nature of his worship
appear, then, to have exerted a significant degree of influence on the
principles of festivity, inversion, relative sexual freedom, and travesty
that we find in comedy. Also significant is the removal from the city he
encourages, placing him at the fringes of the civic environment and
drawing his followers away from urban jurisdiction and inducing
them into conduct that would be unacceptable in the city. Echoes of
these Dionysial themes can still be heard much later on, as in the
libidity, rusticity, and altered consciousness of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream (1595). Dionysus’ most important function in terms of the
literary history of comedy was as the patron of both the Lenaea and the
‘Great Dionysia’, annual Athenian theatrical festivals at which prizes
were awarded to the best dramatists. Initially, the Dionysia, the more
important of the two, were only for tragedians, with comedies
performed only at the winter Lenaea. From around 486 BC, a comedy
competition was initiated at the Dionysia, the point at which we may
say that comedy is institutionalized as a significant literary form. We
can say this because the Dionysia appear to have played an important role
as a civic gathering and statement of national identity aside the
presentation of theatrics, a platform where the achievements of the state
might be annually reiterated, honours granted to citizens of distinction,
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INTRODUCTION 5
and the lines of social division and hierarchy be graphically represented
in terms of seating and participation. A sense of collective involvement
in the issues of government might also be raised through the debates
aired in plays (Palmer, 1994:31–32).
This leads us to a further question asked of comedy: what purpose
does it serve, and what, if anything, is its social function or
philosophical value, apart from giving pleasure? While the comedy of
Aristophanes (c. 448–380 BC) sustained an overt political and satirical
commentary, comic drama was encouraged to move away from current
affairs at an early stage in its development. Aristotle tells us that it was
Crates (active 450 BC) who ‘first abandoned the form of a lampoon and
began to construct universalized stories and plots’; and by the time of
Menander (c. 342–c. 291 BC) nearly a century later, comedy had ceased
to intervene in the issues of government, at least explicitly (Aristotle,
1996:9). Instead, comedy was commended for its realistic representation
of the human condition, famously moving the early Alexandrine scholar
Aristophanes of Byzantium to ask, ‘O Menander and Life/Which of you
is imitating which?’ (Segal, 2001:153). By the fourth century AD, the
idea of comedy as an instructive literary form takes shape in the work of
Donatus, a grammarian who taught at Rome, and who wrote
enormously influential remarks on the comedies of Terence, works he
would have never seen performed and would have only known as texts.
Under these sterile conditions, Donatus declared comedy to be
essentially didactic, mirroring everyday life and schooling us in practical
ethics. He also emphasized the academic qualities of comedy, arguing
that good comedy should be built according to sound rhetorical
principles (Herrick, 1950:65). Donatus’ scholarly and moralistic method
fortified comedy with some of the technical respectability of tragedy,
and the principal arguments of comic theory from the Renaissance
onwards are based on his ideas. That its primary function is corrective is
argued in 1698, for example, by William Congreve in response to the
clergyman Jeremy Collier’s attack on him in particular and theatre in
general. ‘Men are to be laughed out of their vices in comedy’, he wrote.
The business of comedy is to delight as well as to instruct; and as
vicious people are made ashamed of their follies and faults by seeing
them exposed in a ridiculous manner, so are good people at once both
warned and diverted at their expense’ (Congreve, 1997a: 515). Two
centuries later, in his ‘Essay on Comedy’ (1877), the playwright George
Meredith made a similar point, although metaphysically enlarging it by
personifying comedy as a benign spirit monitoring human behaviour.
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6 INTRODUCTION
‘Whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious,
bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate’, he writes,
whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run
riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in
absurdities, planning short-sightedly, plotting dementedly;
whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate
the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration
one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice;
are false in humility or mined with conceit…the Spirit overhead
will look humanely malign, and cast an oblique light on them,
followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit.
(Meredith, 1980:48)
The extent to which we have been profitably instructed, or productively
chastised by this ‘humanely malign’ creature is deeply debatable,
especially in the present day.
In the twentieth century, critics have been less keen to subscribe to
comedy’s didacticism. Some, like Maurice Charney, see a central
methodological absence in contemporary discussions of the form that
leaves us with ‘no common assumptions and no set of conventions by
which we could agree on how to speak about comedy’ (Charney,
1978:vii–viii). More assertive critics, like Harry Levin, see comedy as a
conflict between the emotions of joviality and sobriety, a ‘perennial war
of the laughers against the non-laughers’, of playboys against killjoys,
‘locked in an eternal battle of world views’ (Levin, 1987:40). For Erich
Segal, the history of Western comedy plots a long line of descent from
the euphoric highs of ‘Aristophanic triumph’ to the resignation of the
‘theatre of inadequacy’, represented by the work of Samuel Beckett.
According to this thesis, vigorous expressions of life begin to fade and
become more complicated and contingent as history and experience
instruct us in cynicism, and boisterous, optimistic comic forms are
rendered increasingly untenable. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953)
epitomizes comedy’s fate:
The drama will have no happy ending. Indeed, it will have no
ending at all. There will be no revel, renewal, or rejuvenation. For
whatever Godot may represent, whether salvation or erotic rebirth,
one thing is clear. The traditional happy ending is no longer
possible—because comedy is dead.
(Segal, 2001:452)
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INTRODUCTION 7
Rather than proposing narratives of comic function that are intended
to hold true in all times and places, some critics, especially those with
an interest in poststructuralist theory, are drawn to its apparent
indefiniteness and resistance to definition. Andrew Horton claims that
‘like language, and like “texts” in general, the comic is plural,
unfinalized, disseminative, dependent on context and the intertextuality
of creator, text, and contemplator’ (Horton, 1991:9). Kirby Olson
adopts a similar approach, reading comic fiction through the work of
twentieth-century French philosophers Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles
Deleuze, and finding in comedy an affront to rationality and meta-
narratives that attempt to exhaustively explain or incorporate all aspects
of the world:
Comedy is an immanent form that does not make us look into the
heavens or to God for answers to questions…. Comic theory traces
a larger discourse over politics of the body and, within that
discourse, between orthodoxy and heresy. Like desire, laughter is
strangely fluid and cannot be contained by rational thought.
(Olson, 2001:5)
For Olson, the slippery problem of defining comedy and comic action
satisfactorily is evidence of its postmodern virtues: ‘Comedy is
precisely a certain freedom from definition’ (Olson, 2001:6, original
emphasis).
Perhaps the only formulation that remains appropriate is also one of
the vaguest. In 1900, the French metaphysician Henri Bergson, of whom
much more in Chapter 6, argued that ‘the comic does not exist outside
the pale of what is strictly human’, a statement that maintains that in all
instances, events must at some point intersect with human
consciousness to become comic (Bergson, 1980:62). The humanness of
comedy was noted by Aristotle who observed that we are the only
creatures who feel compelled to laugh. Comedy is certainly a social
activity first and foremost, conceived of always with some kind of
audience in mind, and everywhere produced from the matter of
dominant cultural assumptions and commonplaces. The question of how
or why things come to be funny is similarly determined by culture. Even
though comedy often seems to be suspending, inverting, or abandoning
dominant norms, these inversions are produced in relation to the
cultural orthodoxies from which they must always begin. It should
therefore be possible to trace comic events back to the significations
they have transformed. In this way, the comic can be thought of as a
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8 INTRODUCTION
means of opening up the possibility of multiple perspectives, as each
concept culturally established as orthodox simultaneously presents itself
for the possibility of comic subversion, like a silent but parallel
conversation that could audibly erupt at any moment. Take the
traditional story of the Greek poet Philomon, who, we are told, died
laughing after he saw a donkey eating figs. The lethal quality of this
scene was the perceived incongruity of a beast eating what was
categorized as human food. What killed Philomon, therefore, was an
event that violated certain prefabricated categories of decorum and
appropriateness applicable to figs and donkeys, coupled with his ability
to perceive that violation as ludicrous and culminating in dangerously
high levels of amusement. We can understand this as an experience of
division within the poet that allowed him to interpret multiple layers of
significance instantaneously and simultaneously. For Bergson, the
division between the perceived and the actual, and the possibility of
reading situations in a number of different ways, was a phenomenon he
isolated as one of the three principal triggers of laughter. What he
labelled ‘the reciprocal interference of series’ is a scenario that ‘belongs
simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is
capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the
same time’ (Bergson, 1980: 122). Examples would include Oliver
Goldsmith’s play She Stoops to Conquer (1773), where Marlow
mistakes the Hardcastle’s house for an inn, or the film Monty Python’s
Life of Brian (1979), where Brian’s life parallels that of Jesus Christ,
and he is mistaken for the son of God. What is amusing is the tension
caused by the coexistence and interplay between ‘the double fact of
coincidence and interference’ (Bergson, 1980:124), such as Brian’s
unwittingly amassing a devout following while his mother insists that
‘he’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy’. That both Brian’s
followers and his mother should be confirmed in their contrasting
beliefs is made plausible by the setting and the action of the film, and
thus Life of Brian demonstrates a continual awareness of the possibility
of reading a scenario in two different ways, of a division in
comprehension and the coexistence of parallel ideas.
The theme of comedy as a divided and doubled experience is even
embodied for us in the double act, a staple of comic performance since
the appearance of Dionysus and his servant Xanthias in Aristophanes’
Frogs (405 BC). Double acts present a perfect embodiment of the
uneasy doubling and bifocal perceptions of comedy. Similarly, we might
look to the disparity between place and self that is continually used in
comedy, stories in which people are geographically, linguistically, or, in
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INTRODUCTION 9
some profound existential way, misplaced, ‘fish out of water’ comedies
like Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), Buster Keaton’s The
General (1926), Eddie Murphy’s Trading Places (1983), or Steve
Martin’s Bringing Down the House (2003). Another stock situation
presents a discrepancy between the way a character presents him- or
herself and the substance of their actions, as is the case with
Shakespeare’s pompous Falstaff, or the hypocritical devout in Molière’s
Tartuffe (1664). A recurring technique of the comedy team Monty
Python (1969–74) was the discussion of quotidian topics in an elevated
register, exploiting discontinuity between form and content, as in this
sports report that blends philosophy with soccer:
Last night in…Jarrow, we witnessed the resuscitation of a great
footballing tradition, when Jarrow United came of age, in a
European sense, with an almost Proustian display of modern
existentialist football.
Virtually annihilating by midfield moral argument the now
surely obsolescent catennachio defensive philosophy of Signor
Alberto Fanfrino. Bologna indeed were a side intellectually out
argued by a Jarrow team thrusting and bursting with aggressive
Kantian positivism.
(Chapman et al ., 1998, vol. 1:139)
All these examples utilize some form of incongruity, and rely upon a
culturally defined sense of incompatible orders, such as the
displacement of people or discourses, to produce ambiguity and the
feeling that normality has been momentarily decentred for pleasurable
ends. This has been studied by Mary Douglas in her work on joking
relationships in traditional cultures. Douglas argues that a joke cannot
simply jump from nowhere, but derives from a sense of reality that pre-
exists it, and which it seeks to distort:
a joke is seen and allowed when it offers a symbolic pattern of a
social pattern occurring at the same time…all jokes are expressive
of the social situations in which they occur. The one social
condition necessary for a joke to be enjoyed is that the social
group in which it is received should develop the formal
characteristics of a ‘told’ joke: that is a dominant pattern of
relation is challenged by another. If there is no joke in the social
structure, no other joking can appear.
(Douglas, 1975:98)
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10 INTRODUCTION
Jokes therefore emerge from within the social framework and
necessarily express the nature of their environment, which means that
all jokes are necessarily produced in a relative relationship to the
dominant structures of understanding and the epistemological order.
Despite the violation of the social order implied by joking, the joker
enjoys a kind of immunity through the belief that his or her wit represents
insight into a different type of consciousness:
The joker’s own immunity can be derived philosophically from
his apparent access to other reality than that mediated by the
relevant structure. Such access is implied in the contrast of forms
in which he deals. His jokes expose the inadequacy of realist
structurings of experience and so release the pent-up power of the
imagination.
(Douglas, 1975:108)
Douglas’s conclusions suggest that joking is an imaginative exploration
of alternative social formulations, and a recognition of lack in the
‘realist structurings of experience’ that usually represent it. Through
joking, the joker appears to gain privileged insight beyond the social
construct where its meanings are neither exhaustive nor absolute, but
are simply choices. Joking reveals the practical limits of cultural
structures; for all systemic choices, other choices could have been
made.
Joking is quite different in Freudian psychoanalysis, but nevertheless
similarly revealing of an underside to socially constructed ‘reason’. For
Sigmund Freud, a joke is an example of ‘parapraxis’, an act like a
mistake or slip of the tongue that exposes something of the repressed
thoughts hidden in the unconscious. Like dreams, jokes contain
significant information about unconscious thoughts and the nature of
inhibitions, and the production of a joke is a means of negotiating the
psychological barrier between the conscious and unconscious mind.
Freud points out that jokes have a tendency to spring from nowhere,
suddenly appearing like little emissaries of the unconscious. ‘A joke’,
he writes,
has quite outstandingly the characteriztic of being a notion that
has occurred to us ‘involuntarily’. What happens is not that we
know a moment beforehand what joke we are going to make, and
that all it then needs is to be clothed in words. We have an
indefinable feeling, rather, which I can best compare with an
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INTRODUCTION 11
‘absence’, a sudden release of intellectual tension, and then all at
once the joke is there—as a rule ready clothed in words.
(Freud [1905], 2001:167, original emphasis)
Making jokes is an almost involuntary act; they come across the joker in
an instant, fully formed and with no explanation as to how they were
made. In Freud’s analysis, joking is symptomatic of the division in the
psyche that characterizes human beings. Once again, the comic acts as a
parallel conversation, tracking reason and occasionally interrupting it.
So what does this strange ability simultaneously to recognize the
social order and comically subvert it amount to? Existential philosopher
Helmuth Plessner cites the perception of the comic as evidence that
human beings are intrinsically ‘eccentric’, as they are the only animals
with the capacity to reflect on their thoughts and experiences. Plessner
argues that our experience of the world is a result of information
mediated through the purposeful management of our speech, thoughts,
and control of our limbs, all of which, organized around a coherent
sense of self, leads us to believe in our mastery of the immediate
environment. The world outside, however, is unconcerned with the
individual ego, and treats the human body as yet more matter. Thus we
are at once convinced of our control of the environment, but
simultaneously aware that we are subject to disinterested nature:
Just as the world and my own body are revealed to me, and can be
controlled by me, only insofar as they appear in relation to me as
a central ‘I’, so, on the other hand, they retain their ascendancy
over their subjection in this perspective as an order indifferent to
me and including me in a nexus of mutual neighbourhoods.
(Plessner, 1970:36)
The subject, then, comes to reflect upon itself as both ego and matter,
and is divided in this knowledge. As Simon Critchley puts it, ‘the
human being has a reflective attitude towards its experiences and
towards itself, living ‘beyond the limits set for them by nature by taking
up a distance from their immediate experience’ (Critchley, 2002:28).
The title of Plessner’s work is Laughing and Crying, because these
effects, both largely involuntary, involve moments when the bodily
intrudes into the sense of self and overruns it, disturbing the conscious
mind. Human eccentricity is the product, therefore, of discontinuity
between the world in our head and the world outside. ‘In this respect,’
says Plessner, ‘man is inferior to the animal since the animal does not
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12 INTRODUCTION
experience itself as shut off from its physical existence, as an inner self
or I, and in consequence does not have to overcome a break between
itself and itself, itself and its physical existence’ (Plessner, 1970:37).
We could attribute to this phenomenon of being ‘shut off’ the often
remarked-upon cruelty of comedy, which involves a certain degree of
desensitization. If it is generically appropriate for tragedy to ask us to be
sensible of human suffering, then comedy, as my Mel Brooks epigraph
shows, allows us to stand back and look upon human misfortune from
an emotional distance, sometimes even deriving great pleasure from it.
In a discussion of Charles Baudelaire’s (1821–67) concept of irony in
a 1969 essay entitled The Rhetoric of Temporality’, literary theorist Paul
de Man develops a further idea of the discontinuity between what we
might understand as material nature and human consciousness. In this
essay, de Man explains that Baudelaire’s notion of irony is not an
intersubjective concept, something produced between people, but an
internalized relationship, a ‘relationship, within consciousness, between
two selves’ (de Man, 1983:212). Where comic relationships often imply
positions of superiority and inferiority, there are no proper ‘selves’
within the internalized ironic relationship to occupy those spaces, and so
it is not possible to think of one as ‘superior’ or more knowledgeable
than another. Therefore, says de Man, irony ‘merely designates the
distance constitutive of all acts of reflection. Superiority and inferiority
…become merely spatial metaphors to indicate a discontinuity and a
plurality of levels within a subject that comes to know itself by an
increasing differentiation from what it is not’ (de Man, 1983:213). This
is especially pronounced when a human being differentiates him- or
herself from the non-human world. When a person falls over, for
example, the inauthentic nature of the relationship of identity to its
surroundings is exposed:
The Fall, in the literal as well as the theological sense, reminds
him of the purely instrumental, reified character of his
relationship to nature. Nature can at all times treat him as if he
were a thing and remind him of his factitiousness, whereas he is
quite powerless to convert even the smallest particle of nature into
something human.
(de Man, 1983:214)
Human beings, prone to treat the world around them as if it were a thing
that they could control (de Man uses the word ‘reified’, to suggest that
nature is incorrectly perceived as a malleable commodity), find
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INTRODUCTION 13
themselves made into a thing by nature. De Man continues by adding
that humans largely know the world as a ‘language-determined’
experience, in which everything is perceived through a linguistic
framework. Ironic language, the language of the Fall, is language that
expresses the ‘inauthentic’ nature of the subject’s relationship to the
world:
The ironic language splits the subject into an empirical self that
exists in a state of inauthenticity and a self that exists only in the
form of a language that asserts the knowledge of this
inauthenticity. This does not, however, make it into an authentic
language, for to know authenticity is not the same as to be
authentic.
(de Man, 1983:214)
Thus in irony, the subject is divided into an inauthentic self, and a
self that knows itself to be inauthentic. In various ways, all the ideas
discussed above suggest that in some experience of the comic there is a
division of consciousness that enables the subject to see the world with
bifurcated vision. Instances of joking, humour, or irony invoke a
separation between ‘authorized’, egocentric, or rational versions of the
world and their revealed alternatives, commenting on established
conventions as they go. This does not mean that joking opens up a path
to ‘truth’, or even that it has the ability to cut through untruths, as it
generally does not provide coherent counter-arguments and its efficacy
as a platform for change is questionable. Indeed, we would have to say
that the duality enabled in joking and comic scenarios opposes any
univocal interpretation of the world. Given this principle, this book will
not attempt to explain comedy in accordance with a single
methodological framework or narrative of literary development.
Instead, we shall approach comedy thematically, accepting what
appears to be its bifurcated nature by treating it as a multifaceted and
diverse series of events, rather than a generic totality, and evoking
particular theories or concepts only whenever they might usefully help
us to understand comic ideas.
Chapter 1 considers the reputation of comedy in academic and
scholarly circles, assessing the status of the genre in works of literary
criticism and the professionalized literary studies undertaken in
university departments. Here we will see that the reputation of comedy
suffers from both the lack of a foundational manifesto and an
association with popular culture that results in its denigration and
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14 INTRODUCTION
relegation in the hierarchy of literary forms. In the latter part of the
twentieth century, however, certain schools of thought have developed
that have re-examined the comic in the light of its socio-cultural context
and declared it a fertile site of resistance and liberation.
Having sought to establish the genealogy of comedy as an object
of intellectual scrutiny, the remainder of this study deals with broad
themes that appear and reappear across a variety of comic texts and
performances. Chapter 2 discusses the question of identity in comedy
and seeks to delineate a number of popular modes of characterization,
locating their origins and attempting to unpack the range of their cultural
and philosophical significances. Characters such as the Native
American trickster, or the medieval European figure of Folly, are shown
to express contradictions in the societies from which they spring, their
maddening, nonsensical, or outrageous behaviour the result of
competing cultural demands intersecting in this one figure.
Extending the discussion of the previous chapter, but also limiting its
focus to a specific issue, Chapter 3 deals with the treatment of gender
and sexuality in comedy. This chapter is primarily interested in the
representation of both orthodox and transgressive representations of
sex, gender, and the interaction of men and women. As sex is probably
the single most persistent theme in comedy—and we can also see that
comedy has traditionally allowed the most explicit and frequent
discussions of sex in the public arena—we shall consider how comic
narratives consistently engage in a debate about the concept of gender
and the nature of desire. Drag and transvestism are recurring themes
here, and we will consider how comedies such as Shakespeare’s As You
Like It, and Billy Wilder’s 1959 film Some Like It Hot, make much of
the potential for same-sex desire that cross-dressing occasions. By way
of contrast, it is also necessary that we consider the surly
companionship and perpetual battle of the sexes that is marriage as
represented by a range of postwar British situation comedies.
Sexuality leads us inevitably to a consideration of the body, and
Chapter 4 deals with the chaotic, disruptive, and ungainly body of
comedy, considering the extent to which comedy narrates a nightmare
fantasy of the body in revolt. In this chapter there is also a discussion of
the female body in comedy, the source of so much prurient humour,
sexist remark, and cultural anxiety, attempting to outline the extent to
which the female body is considered always, in a sense, inappropriate,
and imagined as a site of potential moral and social subversion. Comedy
has often worked according to the conventions of a literary tradition
that tries to tame and moderate the female body, but in performers, such
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INTRODUCTION 15
as Jennifer Saunders and Jo Brand, is now a platform from which to
launch attacks on such types of repressive and conservative thinking.
Is comedy therefore a political genre? The answer is yes, and
Chapter 5 discusses the extent to which comedy has been involved in
political debate since its first structured manifestations in the work of
Aristophanes. Politics, of course, can have many agendas and this
chapter discusses satire, the way in which comedy has been used to
serve reactionary ends, such as reinforcing negative racial or sexist
stereotypes, and also efforts to produce a political comedy in service of
the politics of the left wing. The final question of this chapter is whether
or not comedy can ever be a suitable forum for the discussion of
extremely sensitive and emotionally charged political issues.
Considering three film comedies that look in part at the horror of the
concentration camps, this chapter will evaluate the response of comic
form to difficult content, and question the suitability and desirability of
placing such issues alongside some degree of comic content.
The final chapter shifts the thematic focus of the book a little and
considers laughter, something that does not belong to comedy
exclusively but which is coupled to it to the degree that comedies
without laughter are nowadays considered failed comedies. Laughter
remains an inexplicable aspect of human behaviour, but there have been
many attempts to either incorporate it into a theory of human nature or
equate it with kinds of moral impropriety. To conclude, this chapter
looks at the trope of laughter as it has been invoked in contemporary
poststructuralist theory as a means of conceptualizing the limit and very
edge of everything that can be said and understood.
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COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY
And this book—considering comedy a wondrous medicine,
with its satire and mime, which would produce the
purification of the passions through the enactment of defect,
fault, weakness—would induce false scholars to try to
redeem the lofty with a diabolical reversal: through the
acceptance of the base…this is what we cannot and must
not have.
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco’s novel imagines a book on comedy, Aristotle’s lost
sequel to Poetics. The book is at the heart of a monastic conspiracy to
keep humour out of religion by suppressing the Aristotelian authority
that lends comedy intellectual legitimacy, preventing ‘the operation of
the belly’ becoming ‘an operation of the mind’ (Eco, 1983:474). Eco’s
conspirators fear that if comedy were to be rehabilitated within
respectable academic contexts, the conceptual order of things would be
radically altered, and with it the social fabric that draws on its
hierarchies, as ‘on the day when the Philosopher’s word would justify
the marginal jests of the debauched imagination, or when what has been
marginal would leap to the center, every trace of the center would be
lost’ (Eco, 1983:475). To preserve the status quo, the book is infused
with a poison that kills all who read it.
While Eco’s conspiracy is entirely fictional, it is the case that comedy
has been denigrated in the academy, especially in comparison with
tragedy, due in part to the absence of an important treatment of it in the
Classical tradition. Comedy is often perceived as ephemeral and lacking
intellectual weight, or, in the protests of those who claim that explaining
a joke kills it or that things are ‘just’ for laughs, is seen as an aspect of
communication that is emphatically closed to study and interrogation.
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18 COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY
While there are a number of reasons for the cultural second-place that
comedy occupies, the most forceful among them are a product of
concepts relating to the nature of literature, the proper objects for
intellectual enquiry, and rejection of supposedly ‘popular’ forms in
favour of elite ones. While earlier writers like Congreve and Meredith
had stood up for the corrective merits of comedy, it is only in the
twentieth century that we meet critics who are prepared to ‘redeem’ it as
a culturally rich and critically significant form within a rigorous
intellectual context. This chapter will consider some of the reasons for
the place of comedy in the academy, and the work of some of its most
important critics.
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE
The generic codification of drama in Ancient Greece laid the
foundations for the subsequent disparagement of comedy in relation to
tragedy. In Hellenic philosophy, comedy was thought to belong to the
lower human instincts, and, as such, was to be avoided by the man of
reason; comedy was a measure against which a rational identity could
be formulated. The contaminating qualities of comedy are first asserted
in Plato’s Republic (c. 370 BC):
If there are amusing things which you’d be ashamed to do
yourself, but which give you a great deal of pleasure when you
see them in a comic representation or hear about them in private
company—when you don’t find them loathsome or repulsive—
then isn’t this exactly the same kind of behaviour as we uncovered
when talking about feeling sad? There’s a part of you which
wants to make people laugh, but your reason restrains it, because
you’re afraid of being thought a vulgar clown. Nevertheless, you
let it have its way on those other occasions, and you don’t realize
that the almost inevitable result of giving it energy in this other
context is that you become a comedian in your own life.
(Plato, 1994:360)
Here Plato establishes an historically dogged distinction that opposes
the vulgarity of laughter and clowning to the sovereignty of reason. The
comic is believed to exist outside of the subject rather than be a quality
residing within him or her, leading to a conception of the human subject
as an essentially serious creature for whom the comic is a temporary
identity that may be encountered on occasion. Prolonged exposure to
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COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY 19
comic thoughts or performances can result in the debased
transformation of the subject into a comedian, as we ‘irrigate and tend
to those things when they should be left to wither, and…[make] them
our rulers when they should be our subjects’ (Plato, 1994:360). Plato’s
denigration of comedy in Republic exists within the context of a broader
project to categorize and index subjectivity for the purposes of
cultivating the ideal person in the ideal state. Unhealthy or
counterproductive thoughts, emotions, and behaviours are restrained by
an act of will and reason is promoted above all other things.
The generic distinctions that Aristotle lays out in his Poetics (c. 330
BC) represent the fundamental pattern through which the opposition
between comedy and tragedy has been understood in literary culture.
Poetics, the most influential work of literary theory in Western culture,
implicitly establishes the idea that comedy is a type of drama, with
specific rules, character types, and outcomes. Both comedy and tragedy,
Aristotle argues, seek to represent the world mimetically, but whereas
tragedy ‘is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and
possesses magnitude’ (Aristotle, 1996:10) set in the world of people of
substance, comedy deals with people who are ‘low’ by nature:
Comedy is (as we have said) an imitation of inferior people—not,
however, with respect to every kind of defect: the laughable is a
species of what is disgraceful. The laughable is an error or
disgrace that does not involve pain or destruction: for example, a
comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not involve pain.
(Aristotle, 1996:9)
Aristotle’s laws of narrative distinction contain unambiguous value
judgements that echo Plato’s. His comedy is a non-violent form
conceived primarily in terms of derogation: inferiority, ‘error’, and
‘disgrace’. Comedy is an imitation of the ridiculous or unworthy aspects
of human behaviour, where little of real significance passes on stage and
‘inferiority’ amounts to a failure to uphold moral virtues. Ideally,
tragedy depicts the decline in fortune of an individual which ‘is not due
to any moral defect or depravity, but to an error of some kind’ that
inevitably leads to a death or to the experience of ‘something terrible’
(Aristotle, 1996: 21). Comedy, on the other hand, ends happily and
conflicts are resolved: ‘In comedy even people who are the bitterest
enemies in the story…go off reconciled in the end, and no one gets
killed by anybody’ (Aristotle, 1996:22). The brief discussion of comedy
in Poetics is not intended as a dismissal, but as a counterpoint to tragedy
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in the contrast between genres, the one form representing ‘high’ ideals,
the other ‘low’, for the purposes of producing a symmetrical literary
system that reflects a conception of humanity as an amalgamation of
two competing facets of character. It is widely assumed that Aristotle
intended, or had already written, a companion volume that concentrated
on comedy, but this text, if it ever existed, is now lost. A brief
document entitled the Tractatus Coisilinianus, which outlines the
construction of jokes and catalogues types of comic characters, may
offer an insight into its content; but its own provenance is uncertain,
being ‘Variously hailed as the key to Aristotle’s views on comedy and
denounced as a sorry Byzantine fabrication’ (Janko, 1984:1). To what
extent the existence of a comic Poetics would have improved the
reputation of comedy in academic or scholarly circles it is impossible to
speculate, yet given the centrality of Aristotle to the history of ideas, his
implied validation through an extended treatise would have undoubtedly
improved its standing. But the most important factor in deciding the
status of comedy in the academy is the simple fact that as tragedy
occupies the privileged space in Poetics, it has been seen to occupy the
privileged space in literary culture. The influence of Aristotle’s brief
remarks on the shape of generic thinking are difficult to overstate: ‘On
this Aristotelian basis’, writes M.S.Silk, ‘…all subsequent Western
theory has been founded, most explicitly in the shape of a series of
syntheses, late Greek, Graeco-Roman or Renaissance, but explicitly or
implicitly in all ages’ (Silk, 2000:54).
GENRE TROUBLE
As comedy is a diffuse term, so its place within academic scholarship
has often been confused, even while its generic boundaries were at one
time extremely rigid. The Roman comedy of Plautus (c. 254–184 BC)
and Terence (c. 190 or 180–159 BC), known as ‘New Comedy’ and
composed of a body of only twenty-six plays that were adaptations of
Greek originals, was built almost exclusively on plots and characters so
similar that to modern readers the genre seems narrow and formulaic.
From another perspective, however, it tells us that the concept of
comedy was well defined, and that the form was specific, coherent, and
specialized at this time. The demarcations of comedy would never be so
clear again. During the medieval period, the identity of comedy became
confused and its boundaries blurred. Drama that conformed to
Aristotle’s formulae or directly emulated the writers of classical
antiquity disappeared from literary culture with the fall of the Roman
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Empire and the degradation of the theatres, not to re-emerge until the
fifteenth century. Generations of medieval grammarians did keep
Aristotle’s definitions alive alongside the texts of plays by Greek and
Roman authors, and the distinction between comedy and tragedy was
upheld in commentaries and treatises by writers such as Diomedes,
Evanthius, and Donatus. But while these authors continued to transmit
Hellenic ideas about comedy, they had little or no first-hand experience
of what they were writing about. As a result, the classical definition of
comedy maintained in scholarship had little bearing on comedic
practice.
In the medieval period, comedy, previously conceived solely as
drama, began to appear in both prose and verse as a distinguishable
mode or tone rather than a technically rigid genre. As Paul G.Ruggiers
writes, ‘the forms of tragedy and comedy inherited from classical
antiquity had no real impact upon the like modes of experience…in the
Middle Ages’, resulting in considerable diversity and discontinuity
amongst comic forms (Ruggiers 1977:7; Shanzer, 2002:25). Amongst
other things, there developed alternative prose types to which ‘were
attached the considerations of their serious and non-serious biases, and
of the subject matter and vocabulary once reserved for the dramatic
forms, but now applied inadvertently to the narrative fictions’ (Ruggiers
1977:7). This is the ultimate source of the problems of definition and
confusion that inevitably arise in discussions of comedy—when
‘comedy’ can describe at once a dramatic genre, a literary mode, or
instances of humour real or fictional. Both Boccaccio (1313–75) and
Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) were interested in the textures and possibilities
of comedy and tragedy, yet neither was a dramatist. The clearest
example of the broadening of the term in the medieval period is the title
of Dante’s Divine Comedy (begun c. 1314), a poem that contains little
that may be described as humorous. Structurally, however, Dante’s
poem, like Greek and Roman comedy before it, moves out of ignorance
to understanding and towards a happy conclusion, or in terms of its
theological framework, from despair to eternal life. In a letter to his
friend Can Grande, Dante further explains his choice of title by
indicating that it is written in what he calls ‘an unstudied and low style’
(Dante, 1984:31). Medieval mystery and morality plays similarly
incorporated comic elements in accordance with these principles,
‘comedy’ representing a condition of ignorance prior to eventual
salvation. The Vice figure of the drama was often intentionally
humorous, an inversion of the ideal qualities of humanity presented in
the didacticism of the principal narrative.
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With the rise of Humanism, the renaissance educational movement that
devoted itself to the study of classical authors and the pursuit of pure
literary style, Aristotelian standards of generic difference were
reintroduced to literature. Humanist scholars returned to their sources in
Greek and Roman texts, the reputation of these volumes having
flourished since the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the
reintroduction of otherwise overlooked authors it occasioned in Western
Europe, and sought to emulate their language, plots, and structures.
Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1552), for example, widely
recognized as the first comic drama in English, proudly proclaimed its
classical heritage:
The wyse poets long time heretofore,
Under merrie Comedies secretes did declare,
Wherein was contained very virtuous lore,
With mysteries and forewarnings very rare.
Such to write neither Plautus nor Terence dyd spare,
Which among the learned at this day beares the bell;
These with such other therein dyd excel.
(Udall, 1984: Prologue, II. 15–21)
Udall, headmaster at Eton, saw his play as an anglicized Latin comedy,
affording it both academic and moral integrity. When, in 1588, Maurice
Kyffin translated Terence’s Andria in a version principally to be used in
schools, he prefaced the text with praise of Terence’s style, clearly
revealing the influence of the comic theory of Donatus:
Among all the Romane writers, there is none (by the judgement of
the learned) so much available to be read and studied, for the true
knowledge and purity of the Latin tong, as Pub. Terentius: for,
sith the cheefest matter in speech, is to speak properly and aptly,
and that we have not a more conning Craft-master of apt and
proper speech than Terence, well worthy is he then, even will all
ease and diligence, to be both taught and learned before any other.
(Kyffin, 1588: sig. A1, recto)
As early modern scholarship favoured classical models for the purity of
their form and style, Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry
(1579–80), complained of the disregard theatre practitioners had for
generic boundaries, particularly taking them to task for their
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COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY 23
Gross absurdities, how all their plays be neither right tragedies,
nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns, not because the
matter so carrieth it, but thrust in the clown by head and shoulders
to play a part in majestical matters with neither decency nor
discretion, so as neither the admiration and commiseration, nor
the right sportfulness, is by their mongrel tragic-comedy obtained.
(Sidney, 1991:67)
Sidney’s exasperation with mixed modes stems from a desire to impose
conformity on the drama of the Elizabethan stage, and to lend it some
gravity. Yet, as Stephen Orgel tells us, comedy was not ‘simply the
opposite of tragedy, but…the largest condition of drama’ during this
period (Orgel, 1994:36). There is some anecdotal evidence that the
comic aspects of renaissance drama may have been amongst the most
prominent for contemporary audiences. London doctor and astrologer
Simon Forman, for example, records his presence at a performance of
The Winter’s Tale on 15 May 1611. His report differs considerably from
modern readings of the play as it concentrates almost exclusively on the
clown character of Autolycus, which leads him to conclude that the play
is about ‘feigned beggars or fawning fellows’ (Rowse, 1976:310).
Similarly, the Swiss tourist Thomas Platter, in the playhouse for a
performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at the Globe in 1599,
mentions little about the tragedy aside the dance that followed it, which
was performed ‘exceedingly gracefully, according to their custom, two
in each group dressed in men’s and two in women’s apparel’ (quoted in
Shakespeare, 1998:1).
Throughout the medieval and renaissance periods, therefore, it seems
that a scholarly definition of comedy, loyal to the Aristotelian blueprint,
existed separately from popular plays, poems, and other vehicles for
humour. The academy’s apparent distance from popular culture is
confirmed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is concomitant
with the rise of professional English literary studies. Inspired by the
Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822–88), and largely
concerned with what Chris Baldick calls ‘questions of literature’s social
function’ (Baldick, 1987: 18), the view of comedy in the universities at
this time is best summed up by a footnote in F.R.Leavis’s study of the
novel, The Great Tradition (1948), that calls the work of eighteenth-
century satirist Laurence Sterne ‘irresponsible’, ‘nasty’, and ‘trifling’
(Leavis, 1972:10). As Baldick says elsewhere, critical opinion held that
‘the author’s quality of mind [was] reflected in the quality of the literary
work: to speak of the maturity or integrity of one is to commend the
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24 COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY
other’ (Baldick, 1996:164). Comic themes were thought to be local and
vulgar, antithetical to a vision of art that believed in its ability to
communicate beyond the moment of its creation like tragedy. A passage
from A.C. Bradley’s prestigious British Academy lecture of 1912
expresses this idea. ‘Most of the great tragedies’, he writes,
leave a certain imaginative impression of the highest value….
What we witness is not the passion and doom of mere individuals.
The forces that meet in tragedy stretch far beyond the little group
of figures and the tiny tract of space and time in which they appear.
The darkness that covers the scene, and the light that strikes
across it, are more than our common night and day.
(Bradley, 1929:75)
The literary establishment view was that comedy did not belong in such
cultured and profound company, and that ‘Comedy and satire should be
kept in their proper place, like the moral standards and social classes
which they symbolize’ (Frye, 1990:22).
FERTILITY AND THE ‘ÉLAN VITAL’ :
CORNFORD, BERGSON, LANGER
‘The history of literary criticism is also the history of attempts to make
an honest creature, as it were, of comedy’, writes David Daniell
(Daniell 1997: 102). The first significant modern attempt to make
comedy a ‘serious’ object of study appeared in 1914, written by a
scholar of Ancient Greece. Francis Macdonald Cornford’s The Origin
of Attic Comedy is a combination of literary criticism and anthropology
that attempts to reconstruct the sources and forms of the original comic
entertainments. Cornford was part of a Cambridge-based movement of
anthropological classicists, and The Origin of Attic Comedy, like James
George Frazer’s enormous anthropological survey The Golden Bough
(1890–1915), is part of a broader school of Edwardian scholarship that
examined the ceremonies and beliefs of primitive communities in an
effort to see their influence on modern thinking and social organization.
Cornford’s text looks in detail at the structure of Greek Old Comedy,
especially that of Aristophanes, and demonstrates its ceremonial roots
and the relationship of its characters to significant elements of seasonal
rituals. Cornford argues for an aboriginal relationship between comedy
and the religiously sanctioned revel and fertility beliefs that stemmed
from Dionysial and Phallic ritual (Cornford, 1914:3). The study
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COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY 25
describes how agrarian rituals, beginning with simple work-chants and
songs, developed in form and complexity until they had become
invested with significance that led to prepared and stylized activities
growing up around them. A characteristic ritual of this type was the
phallic procession, a parade of phallic symbols that used profanity and
sexual and scatological imagery as a kind of benevolent magic to
protect the community. As he writes,
Besides the distribution of benign influence…these processions
have also the converse magical intent of defeating and driving
away bad influences of every kind. The phallus itself is no less a
negative charm against evil spirits than a positive agent of
fertilisation. But the simplest of all methods of expelling malign
influences of any kind is to abuse them with the most violent
language…. There can be no doubt that the element of invective
and personal satire which distinguishes the Old Comedy is
directly descended from the magical abuse of the phallic
procession, just as its obscenity is due to sexual magic.
(Cornford, 1914:49–50)
Through a process of historical accretion and growth, ceremonies of this
kind become formulaic, developing into a symbolic dialogue, or agon,
from which emerged drama. Comedy was now an identifiable form that
retained its characteristics from ancient folk practices long after the
beliefs that nurtured them had either become obsolete or been subsumed
into the secular aspects of the performance. While the exact nature of
this transformation is not entirely clear, Cornford argues that the reason
that the forms of the fertility songs and dances were preserved after
their religious significance had evaporated was because they were,
essentially, funny:
The…double intent of stimulating fertility and averting bad
influences lies at the root of many forms of festival dance, which,
when the serious purpose has died out of them, are kept under the
sanction of old customs, and partly for the sake of pleasurable
obscenity.
(Cornford, 1914:50)
Comedy now had well-defined structural components: the agon, in
which the hero-protagonist struggles with an adversary and wins; the
enjoyment of the victory, celebrated by feast and sacrifice, and a final
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26 COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY
victory procession, the komos, followed by marriage or some kind of
resurrection. The relationship of comedy to agrarian fertility rituals is
most clearly seen in Aristophanes’ play The Acharnians (425 BC), the
oldest comedy in existence. Having been drinking, the farmer
Dikaiopolis mounts a phallus on a pole and celebrates his ‘Country
Dionysia’ by making offerings of cake and asking the god to bless his
sexual adventures with the neighbour’s slave: ‘For now is the time to be
merry, with pleasure for one and/all’ (Aristophanes, 1973:61). Comedy,
then, is a secularized version of a ritual that was so entertaining that it
could not be allowed to die out.
The methodological impulse of Cornford’s text, a return to ritualistic
sources and an examination of the cultural significance of the comic,
was representative of a new departure in modern academic treatments
of comedy. Studies of this kind give comedy a credibility that it did not
possess in the qualitative analyses and exclusions of English Literature
departments. It also had the benefit of providing it with the best
classical ancestry. Cornford’s study was also a product of its time, as
for all its experimentalism, the literary culture of modernism was
simultaneously fascinated by the distant myths of pre-Christian Europe.
The fundamental identity of the people was a compelling issue in the
first half of the twentieth century, and the compilation and analysis of
myth fuelled a popular or ‘folk’ image of the past. Perhaps this was an
attempt at finding roots in an otherwise alienating modern world, but its
implications are wider. Its symptoms appear all over modernist
literature; for example, the high visibility of both The Golden Bough
and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance in the footnotes of
T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) indicates that the themes of modern
fragmentation in the poem hope to find anchors in the mythic past. In
Britain, there was concern that colonizing the world meant losing a
sense of self. Anxiety about the loss of indigenous culture was reflected
in, for example, the founding of institutions such as Cecil Sharp’s
English Folk Dance Society in 1911, which began its work collecting
songs and dances from a provincial and predominantly oral tradition.
Comedy, understood in these terms, is an authentic, continuous
expression of the communal identity as it encounters the life force.
The philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859–1941) has been influential in
conceiving of comedy as a manifestation of vitality. Central to
Bergson’s thought were the dynamic forces of intuition and impulse, the
‘élan vital ’, creative and demanding life forces that reveal themselves
to us continually and through which all social interaction is mediated.
Bergson’s famous essay ‘Laughter’ (1900), discussed in further detail in
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COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY 27
Chapter 6, claims that humour is born in moments when the life force is
momentarily usurped or eclipsed by an involuntary manifestation of
automatism or reduction of the body to a lifeless machine. The fullest
articulation of comedy as vitalism appears in Susanne Langer’s study of
aesthetics, Feeling and Form, which also calls Bergson ‘pre-eminently
the artists’ philosopher’ (Langer, 1953: 114). For Langer, art is an
intuitive and essentially creative process driven by the need to be alive.
Comedy is:
an art form that arises naturally wherever people are gathered to
celebrate life, in spring festivals, triumphs, birthdays, weddings, or
initiations. For it expresses the elementary strains and resolutions
of animate nature, the animal drives that persist even in human
nature, the delight man takes in his special mental gifts that make
him the lord of creation; it is an image of human vitality holding
its own in the world amid the surprises of unplanned coincidence.
(Langer, 1953:331)
This version of the comic exists in the routine obscenity surrounding
marriage celebrations, in the jubilant nicknaming of genitalia, or in
bouts of celebratory drinking that follow a triumph, however minor.
What is important, emphasizes Langer, is that the comic spirit
constitutes an essential element of being human and, more importantly,
being alive. This definition is complicated by the very full tradition of
black humour that exists in Western culture, and which is prevalent in
both literature and social interaction. Jokes about death or the fear of
death can be devastatingly funny, but do not seem to conform to
Langer’s model unless morbid reflection itself constitutes a triumphant
acknowledgement that one is still breathing. What is important about
the work of Bergson and Langer is that it positions comedy at the
ontological centre. In claiming for comedy a close relationship to
fertility ritual, rites of passage, and reproductive events, these writers
reintroduced comedy into the academic mainstream as a genre in which
the fundamental imprint of human existence is as evident as in its tragic
counterpart. However, in doing so they also reproduced the terms of the
argument that elevated tragedy and denigrated comedy: even though
comedy has been shown to be an object worthy of significant study, it is
simultaneously shown to be closer to nature than art, and closer,
therefore, to the body than the soul.
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28 COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY
SPRINGTIME AND FESTIVAL: FRYE AND
BARBER
It is no accident that literary studies devoted to the study of comedy
should appear first in areas that are unquestionably perceived as
belonging to ‘high culture’, as if their association with culturally central
concepts would protect them from accusations of low-mindedness. The
trope of comedy as life force is particularly evident in Shakespeare
studies, much of it indebted to the distinguished work of the Canadian
scholar Northrop Frye (1906–91), who saw in Shakespearean comedy a
spirit of regeneration in sympathy with the natural rhythm of the
seasons. Basing itself on a series of archetypal structures in harmony
with the four seasons of the year, Frye’s The Anatomy of Criticism
(1957) offers the idea that ‘the fundamental form of [mythical] process
is cyclical movement, the alternation of success and decline, effort and
relapse, life and death’ (Frye, 1990:158). Humanity, in other words,
creates an imaginatively inhabitable world of literary fiction carved from
the patterns of life and death that assimilates the idea of seasonal
rejuvenation into narrative. This is the case especially with narrative
produced prior to the advent of modernity and the demythologization of
culture that accompanied it. Narrative patterns, writes Frye,
are usually divided into four main phases, the four seasons of the
year being the type for four periods of the day (morning, noon,
evening, night), four aspects of the water-cycle (rain, fountains,
rivers, sea or snow), four periods of life (youth, maturity, age,
death) and the like.
(Frye, 1990:160)
From these archetypes are formed ‘narrative categories of literature
broader than, or logically prior to, the ordinary literary genres’, meta-
generic forms from which more specific genres are derived: ‘the
romantic, the tragic, the comic, and the ironic and the satiric’ (Frye,
1990:162). These pre-generic ‘moods’ of narrative have in turn strong
associative connections with the texture of the seasons: summer for
romance, autumn for tragedy, winter for irony and satire, and spring for
comedy.
Spring, the transitional season between hardship and repose, is placed
perfectly to enact the theme of rebirth and the battle of winter and
summer that is the dominant analytical metaphor in Frye’s theory
of comedy. Shakespeare’s comedy, he says, ‘is the drama of the
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COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY 29
green-world, its plot being assimilated to the ritual themes of the
triumph of life and love over the waste land’ (Frye, 1990:182). The
‘green world’ is a phrase widely taken up by Shakespeare criticism as it
offers a convincing template for the symbolism of the narrative
structure of his comedy. ‘Green worlds’ are wish fulfilment locations,
always rural, often enchanted, in which the normal business of the town
is suspended and the pleasurable pastimes of holiday prevail.
Shakespearean green worlds include the wood outside Athens in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, the coast of Illyria in Twelfth Night (1601–
02), Portia’s Belmont in The Merchant of Venice (1596–97), and the
Forest of Arden in As You Like It (1599). Associated with love, leisure,
levelled social hierarchy, and play, the green world serves as a space in
which solutions to urban problems can be worked through. As court or
city rules no longer apply, gender distinctions can be disregarded, the
mythical and the quotidian can intermingle, and drunks and braggarts
are able to live freely away from the tyranny of work or the regime of
the clock. In order to solve the problems of the town, represented by a
‘blocking agent’, usually a father figure or envoy of the older generation
whose blind insistence on his authority forbids the success of
relationships founded on love, society must be divested of its most
fundamental suppositions, such as the nature of law, or the relationship
between the sexes, in order that those suppositions may be reconstructed
in the form of a happy ending. Immersion in the green world is
immeasurably healing, but always temporary; holiday is defined only as
such because it must be distinguished from the everyday world. In the
narrative of As You Like It, says Frye, Rosalind is the representative of
spring, inspiring renewal in the dormant inhabitants of Arden and
ultimately triumphing over the cruel and unforgiving winter of Duke
Frederick. Through her intervention, made possible by her entry into the
forest, the unlawfully usurped Duke Senior is reinstated, reconciliations
are brought about, and, after a round of divinely sponsored weddings,
society is rejuvenated with the promise of a new ruling generation and
their heirs.
Frye’s account is both convincing and symmetrically satisfying, but
it brings with it two key objections. The first is the extent to which
comedic structure is privileged over content, the degree that his
discussion of varied and distinct plays can become a list of titles whose
similarity rests on their final reconciliations. This is a shortcoming of all
structuralist and narratological critical practices, and in mitigation it
should be noted that Frye’s project aims to study structural similarities
and not offer close readings of individual texts. However, through the
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30 COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY
reduction to narrative units, literary difference is lost through the
absorption into a homogenized structural model. A recurrent problem of
comedy criticism is its focus on structure and plot over character and
dialogue, a result of both the critical prejudice that tragic heroes are
individuals, and the practice of writing comic ones as types. The second
objection would be the extent to which a large part of The Anatomy of
Criticism depends on our acceptance of Frye’s overall thesis that literary
forms, at least in the originary phases of their development, mirror the
procession of the seasons in what amounts to a grossly extended
pathetic fallacy. Does all literature conform in tone to the overbearing
influence of four seasons? Are all writers informed by an unconscious
force that imposes itself on their work through an enigmatic process of
arboreal ventriloquism? Is it entirely inconceivable that a narrative
could be constructed and read outside those terms?
Another influential Shakespearean, C.L.Barber, believed that
structural readings of literature failed to grasp the truth of art. In his
Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959), he indirectly challenges Frye
with an accusation of insensitivity, writing that, ‘No figure in the carpet
is the carpet. There is in the pointing out of patterns something that is
opposed to life and art, an ungraciousness which artists in particular feel
and resent’ (Barber, 1963:4). For Barber, literature is full of moments of
‘design beyond design’ that possess a vitality that resonates much
further than the generic and narrative structures in which they are
placed. Barber’s intention, and the nature of his contribution to the
understanding of comedy, was to demonstrate the relevance of the
Elizabethan social practice of holiday festivities that inform comedy and
are reflected in it. This is a sixteenth-century remodelling of The Origin
of Attic Comedy, privileging an historicist methodology that holds an
understanding of original context above other means of reading a
literary text. The practices he invokes include festivals like ‘the
celebration of a marriage, the village wassail or wake… Candlemas,
Shrove Tuesday, Hocktide, May Day, Whitsuntide, Midsummer Eve,
Harvest-home, Halloween and the twelve days of Christmas season
ending with Twelfth Night’ (Barber, 1963: 5). Such holidays provide
the basis for the staged folly, disguise, and masquerade of any number of
Shakespeare’s plays. For Barber, comedy is essentially ‘saturnalian’, an
experience of pleasurable merrymaking and social inversion named
after the revels devoted to the Roman god Saturn. Saturnalian comedy is
neither satirical nor political, but devoted to a process Barber calls
‘release and clarification’. ‘Release’ refers to the loosening of social
controls during holidays, and leads Barber, like Freud, to ascribe comic
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COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY 31
pleasure to the redistribution of mental energy normally devoted to
social conformity, so that ‘the energy normally occupied in maintaining
inhibitions is freed for celebration’ (Barber, 1963:7). ‘Clarification’ is
comedy’s ability to reaffirm the positive relationship of humanity to its
environment, ‘a heightened relationship between man and “nature’”
(Barber, 1963:8). Comedy thereby has the dual function of celebrating
human relationships and merrymaking, while mocking what it considers
‘unnatural’, baiting killjoys and miserly characters who fail to observe
the feast or show some perverse aversion to happiness. From this
perspective, Barber reads a character like Shylock from The Merchant of
Venice as a representative of anti-festival, a usurer whose anxiety about
money stands in joyless contrast to the Venetian Christians who use
money ‘graciously to live together in a humanly knit group’ (Barber,
1963:167). As the defeat of outsiders and the chastisement of
scapegoats is a significant aspect of the comic celebration of communal
identity and its life experience, the vilification and forcible conversion
of Shylock reveal him as a representative of egregious heterogeneity that
must be made to conform to ‘healthy’ community values. However,
Barber’s insistence on holiday forms, while not absolute in his
discussion of The Merchant of Venice, has the effect of naturalizing folk
practices and eliding the politics of race that speak through them.
CARNIVAL AND THE MARKETPLACE:
BAKHTIN AND THE NEW HISTORICISM
With the re-emergence and dominance of forms of historicism in
literary studies in the 1980s and 1990s, the work of one commentator,
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), has been extremely influential. Bakhtin,
a Russian formalist who first began working on a theory of the novel
after the Russian Revolution, made a major contribution to comedy
studies with the monograph Rabelais and his World, written as a
doctoral dissertation sometime in the later 1930s and unpublished in
English until 1968.
Through an analysis of the early modern French comic novelist
François Rabelais (c. 1494–c. 1553), Bakhtin argues for the existence of
two synchronous but contradictory world views during the medieval
period. ‘Official’ culture, which he characterizes as ecclesiastical,
sombre, excluding profanity, and suppressing the body, driven by the
bureaucracy of the Church and the administration of Grace, is
contrasted with what he calls the culture of the marketplace, the popular
and boisterous voice of the people. The marketplace is a totemic
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32 COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY
location for Bakhtin, and one that has certain parallels with the rituals
discussed by Cornford and the spontaneous expressions of vitality
explored by Langer. ‘This territory’, writes Bakhtin,
was a peculiar second world within the official medieval world
order and was ruled by a special type of relationship. Officially
the palaces, churches, institutions, and private homes were
dominated by hierarchy and etiquette, but in the marketplace a
special kind of language was heard, almost a language of its own,
quite unlike the language of the Church, palace, courts, and
institutions.
(Bakhtin, 1984:154)
The language of the marketplace is the idiom of the plebeian classes, the
expression of ‘natural’ feeling, coarse, unlettered, and unmediated by
the expectations of formality. This is a vision of culture at ease with,
and making fun of, graphic descriptions of sexual activity and bodily
functions, ridiculing officials and officialdom, and violating officially
designated rules of etiquette and decorum. The world of the marketplace
operates according to what is essentially a comic logic, one that runs
parallel to official, serious, improving culture, laughing at it, and
sometimes violently humiliating it.
Bakhtin’s most important contribution to later analyses of comedy is
his theory of carnival. He argues that carnival is the vehicle of an
authentic proletarian voice answering the ascetic oppressions of the
ruling classes. Carnival, literally ‘a putting away of meat’, is the period
immediately before Lent, the Christian phase of abstinence that takes
place over forty days in February and March and concludes on Easter
Sunday. Carnival takes place on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent
begins. In Frenchspeaking countries, carnival is called ‘Mardi Gras’, or
fat Tuesday, helpfully signifying the sensual indulgence and misrule that
comes before the Lenten fast. As a fixture of the medieval calendar,
carnival was a special holiday that permitted the temporary suspension
of social rules and codes of conduct and deference. The Flemish artist
Peter Bruegel’s painting of a popular medieval and early modern theme,
The Battle of Carnival and Lent (1559), presents Carnival as a gorged,
corpulent, and self-indulgent figure, engaged in an endless contest with
gaunt Lenten piety. In Bakhtin’s work, this contest is more than an
embodiment of the eternal struggle between the flesh and the spirit but a
manifestation of popular opposition to the dominant order and the
enactment of alternative regimes:
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As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival
celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from
the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical
rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the true
feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was
hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.
(Bakhtin, 1984:10)
The inversions and suspensions permitted and legitimized by carnival
represent substantive challenges to authority, therefore offering the
possibility that comedy, invested with the spirit of festive and carnival
traditions, may also be an expression of popular discontent. Some critics
have seen in Bakhtin’s work an almost utopian view of medieval culture
that is more akin to wish fulfilment than historical research. Aaron
Gurevich, for example, questions whether or not Bakhtin had not
‘transposed some aspects of contemporary life in Stalinist Russia into
the epoch’ he was dealing with (Gurevich, 1997:58).
Recent historicist and some poststructuralist critics have found
Bakhtin’s theory of opposing cultures particularly productive. Such
criticism is drawn to comedy via its thematization of misrule and the
visibility of characters from the lower social ranks. Perhaps the most
influential critical position of this kind is new historicism, a
methodology that came to prominence in the 1980s, and whose practice
is best summed up by Steven Mullaney, who writes that, ‘literary
criticism is conceived not as an end in itself, but as a vehicle, a means
of gaining access to tensions and contradictions less clearly articulated
in other social forums but all the more powerful for their partial
occlusion’ (Mullaney, 1988: x). With this in mind, new historicism reads
comedy as a potential site of social disruption, using the comic as a
medium for the message of dissent. However, according to new
historicist formulations of the configuration of state power, it is a
medium that is simultaneously monitored and controlled by the
authorities that it seeks to subvert. As Stephen Greenblatt writes of
Shakespearean drama in his essay ‘Invisible Bullets’: during the process
of transgression and inversion, ‘authority is subjected to open, sustained
and radical questioning before it is reaffirmed, with ironic reservations,
at the close’ (Greenblatt, 1985:29). Power absorbs the potential for
change, permitting itself to be questioned for the tactical and pragmatic
purposes of seeming to appear open, before finally reasserting itself
once more: ‘Within this theatrical setting, there is a remarkable
insistence upon the paradoxes, ambiguities, and tensions of authority,
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34 COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY
but this apparent production of subversion is…the very condition of
power’ (Greenblatt, 1985: 44–45). Inversion and misrule, then, exist
within a matrix of ‘licensed transgression’, and are expedient outlets for
reckless behaviour that enable the continuance of the social order. As
Olivia remarks of Feste, the representative of festival in Twelfth Night,
‘There is no slander/in an allowed fool’ (Shakespeare, 1989:1.5.88–89).
Greenblatt assesses the potential of comedy to cause social upset in the
following terms:
It is precisely because of the English form of absolutist
theatricality that Shakespeare’s drama, written for a theatre subject
to state censorship, can be so relentlessly subversive: the form
itself, as a primary expression of Renaissance power, helps to
contain the radical doubts it continually evokes.
(Greenblatt, 1985:45)
An absolutist monarchical message is effectively reinforced and
validated through the dramatization of objections and subversions of it.
Passages which are seemingly transgressive or dissenting are permitted
on account of their ultimate defeat and containment within the form.
Any potential for offence must have been countered by the message of
monarchical status quo, otherwise, Greenblatt argues, the Master of the
Revels, the official dramatic censor, would have erased them and
punished their author. How convincing, however, is this concept of the
‘big brother’ state that permits objection only that it might enforce itself
at a much more insidious level? Certainly, comedy was subject to
censorship in the early modern period. We know that the Henry IV
plays had been modified by such an intervention, as the character of Sir
John Oldcastle, a Lollard martyr and member of the powerful Cobham
family, had to be renamed Sir John Falstaff to appease his offended
descendents. Ben Jonson, along with his collaborators, was imprisoned
in 1597 and the theatres made to submit to an enforced closure due to the
outrage caused by their satirical play The Isle of Dogs, now lost. But the
question is whether or not the form invariably renders any potentially
political content safe. As Janet Clare states in her study of censorship on
the early modern stage, the Master of the Revels could be both
inconsistent and arbitrary, which presumably allowed some satire
through unaltered (Clare, 1990:122). Greenblatt’s absolutist model,
however, suggests that power has comprehensive coverage, is co-
ordinated and efficient at every level, and immune to mistakes and
oversights.
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Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression (1986) offers an alternative view. This is a radical
materialist reading of Bakhtin that can be said to have rescued some of
his ideas from the romanticization of the marketplace and reformulated
them as a more credible political force in which the marginal is
understood to be genuinely creative and disruptive. Stallybrass and
White see carnival and comic forms addressing ‘the social classifications
of values, distinction and judgements which underpin practical reason’,
where carnival ‘systematically inverts the relations of subject and
object, agent and instrument, husband and wife, old and young, animal
and human, master and slave’ (Stallybrass and White, 1986:56). These
upheavals reformulate, for a temporary period at least, socially
sanctioned power relationships, bringing the margin to the centre,
making it visible and giving it voice. This is not to say that carnival is
suddenly a politically progressive force, however, as, ‘although it re-
orders the terms of the binary pair, it cannot alter the terms themselves’,
as inversion of the terms of normal social operation is not the same as
redefining them (Stallybrass and White, 1986:56). The carnivalesque is
not then equipped to topple the dominant order, but neither is the
dominant order able to silence the carnivalesque; Stallybrass and White
imagine both terms engaged in a mutually dependent but antagonistic
relationship, in which each contains an element of its other that it uses
to define itself. ‘A recurrent pattern emerges’, they write,
the ‘top’ attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons
of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some
way frequently dependent upon that low-Other…but also that the
top includes that low symbolically, as a primarily eroticised
constituent of its own fantasy life.
(Stallybrass and White, 1986:7)
Comic inversion not only makes visible those excluded from the
hierarchy, therefore, but also symbolically foregrounds the tensions and
desires that are elided parts of the identity of power itself, revealing
power not to be the coherent and all-pervasive monolith of new
historicism, but constituted of contradictions and unacknowledged
dependencies.
A further challenge to the critical tendency to reduce dissent to
collusion in support of the absolutist tactics of the state appears in
Michael Bristol’s Carnival and Theater (1985). Bristol takes issue with
the new historicism’s conception of power as ‘always singular, a unity
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36 COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY
and also a plenitude’, as it means it would be ‘necessary for festivals to
be completely unselfconscious occasions in which nothing was ever
learned, and for the participants to cooperate, year after year, in an
oppressive routine contrary to their interests’ (Bristol, 1985:15, 27).
Finding the containment model of power unsubtle and unrealistic, he
invokes the work of anthropologist Victor Turner to understand the
relationship between carnival and authority. Turner makes a distinction
between types of festive activity that are ‘liminal’ and those that are
‘liminoid’. ‘Liminal’ phenomena are those carnival or festive activities
that remain bound by their archaic form to the extent that they are
simply the residue of a previously significant ritual or the repetition of
an inversion that remains entirely unanalysed by its participants. An
example of this might be the erection of a maypole or performance of a
morris dance in a modern town. ‘Liminoid’ activities, however, are ‘not
merely reversive, they are often subversive, representing radical
critiques of the central structure and proposing alternative models’
(Bristol, 1985:38). Liminoid activities, then, contain the elements of
genuine social commentary and conflict, and can extend the definition of
festivity to include theatrical performances and riots. Rather than being
contained by an authority that tacitly permits festive outbursts,
Popular festive form reminds the ruling elite that they may
actually rule relatively incompletely and ineffectively. Much of the
conduct of everyday life, and many of the details of political and
economic practice, proceed quite independently of the wishes of
the power structure. Carnival is an heuristic instrument of
considerable scope and flexibility. Though it is a festive and
primarily symbolic activity, it has immediate pragmatic aims,
most immediately that of objectifying a collective determination
to conserve the authority of the community to set its own
standards of behavior and social discipline, and to enforce those
standards by appropriate means.
(Bristol, 1985:52)
Festival is not contained by authority, therefore, but rather overrides it
in certain circumstances by asserting local plebeian codes of conduct over
the representatives of officialdom. Social practices like the charivari, a
cacophonous procession and serenade undertaken by the inhabitants of a
village or district for the purposes of deriding and humiliating an
unpopular marriage or person, are clearly used as a means of regulating
the life of the community outside of official legislation. The humiliation
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of Malvolio in Twelfth Night may serve as an illustration. The gulling of
Malvolio and the presentation of him as an extravagant lover
‘crossgartered’, is a festive castigation of the sour puritan steward
whose very name means ‘ill-will’. Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Feste, and
Maria ridicule Malvolio’s pretensions to marry the wealthy Olivia, and
then continue to torment him until he is perceived to be mad. Festivity
therefore pursues authority, which is ridiculous because it is inflexible,
and forces it to adapt to the demands of the community.
Comedy’s perceived association with a kind of folk politics has
therefore given it legitimacy in modern academic discourse. Following
Cornford’s literary anthropology and reading it through Bakhtin’s
concept of carnival, comedy becomes useful to academia as a literary
counterweight to strict regimes, an expression of a communal life force
that inverts the social order and offers short-term liberation from
authoritarian pressure. By associating it so clearly with plebeian culture,
however, modern critical interest is guilty of retaining the elitist generic
divisions that once denigrated comedy, keeping it as the working-class
cousin of aristocratic tragedy and other ‘serious’ forms.
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38 COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY
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2
COMIC IDENTITY
Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital.
They lay there and looked at each other. Their families
came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre
coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their
deathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at the
other and said, ‘So. What did you think?’
Steven Wright
In Woody Allen’s film Zelig (1983), the title character has a desire to
belong so acute that he physically transforms himself into the likeness
of whoever he is with. He soon comes to the attention of a baffled
medical establishment, and, through the help of a frenzied press that
dubs him ‘the human chameleon’, becomes the biggest celebrity in
America. Troops of people are brought to meet him and each time he
mimics their appearance, turning into a Rabbi, a 300-pound overeater,
an African-American musician, or a Frenchman. While Zelig plays with
key American issues, most obviously the immigrant experience and the
struggle of assimilation, it also focuses a recurrent theme of comedy:
the nature and limits of identity. Leonard Zelig is so shy and self-
effacing that he is pathologically driven to assume the identities of
others. This involves not only absurd physical transformations, but also
presents an image of failed interiority, of a man who is a reflective
surface. Many comic characters might be said to play on our fears of
being incomplete humans through their failures of self-awareness or
inability to reflect on the nature of experience. Comic characters are
traditionally one-dimensional in the sense that they are apparently
unable to learn and change. Bugs Bunny, for example, is madly funny,
anarchic, transgressive, and dangerous, and completely incapable of
reflecting on his actions. Bugs lives in a perpetual series of excitable
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40 COMIC IDENTITY
nows, changing voice, costume, or tactics within seconds. What makes
him funny is the weightlessness of his character, the fact that he is not
anchored within an orthodox system of selfhood or responsibility. In
Roman New Comedy, character types are so rigidly defined that their
behaviours are entirely predictable within given situations. The miser
will always be miserly, and the braggart will always boast. In this case,
comic identity is derived from a sense of atrophied consciousness. In both
examples, human identity is stripped of its subtlety or ambiguity,
leaving only monstrous activity. While individual comic characters are
infinitely various, it is possible to identify certain features of the
categories to which they belong. This chapter will consider the
reasoning behind types of comic character, beginning with the most
important, distinct personality types.
STEREOTYPES
As we know, traditional comedy is largely plot driven, moving towards
ritualistic resolutions such as feasts, marriages, or revelations. Comic
characterization is usually subordinate to the demands of plot, and
therefore more effectively realized with stereotypes and one-
dimensional characters than anything approaching the realistic portrayal
of human emotions. A play by Molière, for example, relies on
maintaining the tension of the plot rather than the needs of its
individuals. Accordingly, we see a seemingly endless parade of
characters who are utterly dominated by a single prevalent
characteristic, providing the premise for many popular ensemble
comedies in which each character reliably acts according to their
qualities, such as The Phil Silvers Show (1955–59), Dad’s Army
(1968–77), Are You Being Served? (1972–85), The Simpsons
(1989—present), or the Carry On series of films (1958–79). The
comedian Mike Myers has said that the principle of single-mindedness
is essential to successful comedy, suggesting that ‘Comedy characters
tend to be a—machine; i.e., Clouseau was a smug machine, Pepe Le
Pew was a love machine, Felix Unger was a clean machine, and Austin
Powers is a sex machine’ (quoted in Friend, 2002:82). Consciously or
otherwise, Myers is adapting the Bergsonian view that ‘what is
essentially laughable is what is done automatically’ (Bergson, 1980:
155). Automatism, or the channelling of diverse thoughts and feelings
through one overriding principle, has been the impetus behind comic
characterization since the New Comedy of the third century BC, and
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provides us with the set of comic stereotypes that have provided the
blueprint for comic characterization from the renaissance to the present.
New Comedy is derived from the work of the Greek dramatist
Menander, whose plays, up until the discovery of papyrus fragments in
1905, were known only through the adaptations and embellishments of
the Roman comic authors Plautus and Terence. Considering the
enormous impact Menander has had on comedy, very little is known
about him. He was an Athenian, who according to one account, wrote
108 plays, but had only modest success during his lifetime, and was
eclipsed by other authors of New Comedy, of whom even less is
known. His standing was completely revised in later antiquity,
however, and he was prized for the quality of his plots and the
excellence of his characters. Whereas Aristophanic Old Comedy dealt
with political institutions, public figures, and fantastical situations,
Menandrine New Comedy was concerned with the intimate themes of
domestic and private life. New Comedy dramatized the lives of citizens
rather than gods and politicians and was interested in romance, sexual
desire, the circulation of money, and the imposition of patriarchal order.
New Comedy was also the first to conclude with the promise of marriage.
Concomitantly, its repertoire of stock characters emerges from the
household and orbits around this central domestic space. Menander,
Plautus, and Terence populate their plays with variations on the same
basic character types: the profligate or impractical young man; the
senex, or parent; the matronly wife; the meretrix, or accomplished
courtesan; the clever slave; the nervous parasite; the vulnerable maiden;
and the miles gloriosus, or swaggering soldier. These characters reflect
Menander’s absorption of the philosophy of Theophrastus (c. 370–c.
288 BC), head of the Peripatetic School after Aristotle, and the author
of Characters, thirty sketches of human types embodying particular
faults and follies. Like stage comedy itself, these amount to possibly the
most resilient character types in all Western fiction, with several
remaining, in the words of Northrop Frye, ‘practically unchanged for
twenty-five centuries’ (Frye, 1953:271).
New Comedy is generally considered to be a more conservative form
than its Aristophanic predecessor, reflecting a change in the context of
Greek drama from the fourth to the third centuries BC. The shift in
emphasis from the public arena to life indoors was probably a response
to Athens’s decreasing political importance, and the fact that its
leadership was largely supported by foreign powers, resulting in a loss
of the political immediacy that motivated Aristophanes. Audiences may
have also changed: as the subsidies which allowed people from all
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walks of life to attend the theatre disappeared, a more resolutely
middle-class audience came to dominate. Their taste, suggests Geoffrey
Arnott, was escapist, interested less in the ‘recurring disasters of life’
and more in stories in which problems ‘always resolved in the inevitable
happy ending which celebrated and cemented family unity’ (quoted in
Konstan, 1995:167). Just as its characterization was formulaic, so were
plots, featuring variations on familiar themes. Roman comedy deals
repeatedly with the forbidden love of a young man for a prostitute,
slave, or otherwise ineligible woman, and the complications of their
romance in the face of fierce parental disapproval before finally,
through some contortion of the plot, a recognition scene reveals her true
identity as a citizen. ‘With this device, the conflicting claims of private
passion and social responsibility are neatly reconciled, for the
waywardness of desire proves to be illusory. The impulse that aspires to
the forbidden is domesticated, gratified without danger to public
convention, and thus the threat to the city-state ideal of a closed
conjugal group is averted’ (Konstan, 1983:24–25). Given that these
narratives tend towards the reinforcement of family ties and the
maintenance of dynastic status, supporting the privilege of a racially
homogenous group in an ethnically diverse empire, stereotypical
characterization might be seen as a reassuring ploy that confirms a
hegemonic view of the world, and appeals to the comprehensive
systems of taxonomy and categorization that existed in Roman
intellectual life. As Maurice Charney writes: ‘Comic convention
postulates a society that is rigidly hierarchical. By the laws of decorum,
carefully formulated by such Roman rhetoricians as Cicero and
Quintilian, different social classes have their prescribed styles, both of
manners and of speech’ (Charney, 1978:51). Representing a range of
clearly delineated social types supports a concept of order that asserts
its totality by claiming to predict, know, and catalogue the behaviour of
all kinds and types of people. Watching a parade of stereotypes,
therefore, affords the comfort of confirming an audience’s prejudices.
As previously discussed, the reputations of Terence and Plautus were
upheld during the medieval and renaissance periods by scholars who
valued them primarily as examples of good style. The basic structure of
New Comedy had been preserved in the Italian renaissance form known
as the commedia erudita, or ‘learned’ comedy, of which Niccolò dei
Machiavelli’s La Mandragola (c. 1520) is an example. Italian drama
has some influence on the structure of English playwriting throughout
the 1580s and 1590s, combined with a group of plays known as
‘prodigal son’ dramas, another fashionable continental model that
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dramatized the errant ways and eventual reformation of a wayward son.
Eventually, these influences came to form city, or ‘citizen’, comedy, a
branch of comic writing devoted to intrigue plots of love and money and
the struggle between the older and younger generation amongst the
merchant classes of contemporary London. A number of circumstances,
including rapid population growth and the emergence of a
predominantly capitalist economy over an agrarian one, had raised the
visibility of the urban middle classes in England. As a result, these
citizens are identified solely with their economic interests, and almost
every area of existence is subsumed into their financial dealings,
including their sex lives. In city comedy, the slave girl is displaced and
the energetic pursuit of the commodity becomes the new object of
desire. William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money (1598) is
generally held to be the first play to fit this description exactly, but it
was Ben Jonson (1572–1637), the dramatist who most aggressively
asserted his erudition, whose work most clearly exemplified the revived
and anglicized Roman form. Jonson believed that comedy was a
weapon aimed at the faults, follies, and hypocrisies of the world. The
prologue to The Alchemist (1610), establishes both his targets and the
authorial tone:
Our Scene is London, ‘cause we would make knowne.
No countries mirth is better then our owne,
No clime breeds better matter, for your whore,
Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more,
Whose manners, now call’d humours, feed the stage:
And which have still beene subject, for the rage
Or spleene of comick-writers.
(Jonson, 1979: Prologue, 5–11)
The prologue lists a number of malefactors, and promises the audience a
procession of types, ‘now call’d humours’. The word ‘humour’ has its
roots in medieval physiognomy, meaning ‘moisture’ or Vapour’.
Principally employed to describe animal or vegetal fluids, the word came
to its present meaning of ‘amusement’ via the application of medical
theory to fictional characterization. Medieval medicine, following Galen
(AD 129–99), held that health was regulated by four essential fluids—
blood, phlegm, black bile, and choler—existing equally within the
human body. When balanced, the humours were complementary and the
body enjoyed good health. When disproportionate, and one fluid came
to prominence above the others, the body experienced discomfort or
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44 COMIC IDENTITY
disease. From this, it followed that a person’s mental qualities,
character, and temperament could also be subject to overbearing
influences. A preponderance of blood produced sanguinity, or a brave,
hopeful, and amorous disposition; too much phlegm resulted in apathy;
black bile led to melancholia; and disproportionate choler caused
irascibility and hot-headedness. At the beginning of Every Man Out of
His Humour, Jonson tells us how humoral theory may be taken as a
principle of characterization:
It may, by Metaphore apply it selfe
Unto the generall disposition,
As when some one peculiar qualitie
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a Humor.
(Jonson, 1920: Induction, 112–118)
The concept of dominating ‘confluctions’ is extended even further in
Jonson’s Volpone (1605–06), where greed has caused the characters to
become so distorted and dehumanized they take on animal traits,
reflected in their names. The old magnifico Volpone is named after a
fox, his servant Mosca, a fly, and the legacy-chasing flatterers Voltore,
Corbaccio, and Corvino after carrion-eating vultures, ravens, and crows
respectively.
Several aspects of Volpone, such as its Venetian setting, reveal the
influence of not only the commedia erudita but also the commedia
dell’arte, an improvised, non-scripted form of ‘popular’ theatre first
recorded in 1545, that based its action around set scenarios that usually
involved love intrigues and bits of comic business called lazzi. The
commedia dell’arte employed a stable of reusable characters, most of
whom wore expressive stylized masks, each actor dedicating
themselves to the study of only one role. The origins of commedia
dell’arte are obscure, but various types of performance appear to have
contributed to its development: the stereotypes of New Comedy, of
course, as well as the Roman fabula (various types of comic interlude),
mime and buffoon shows, mountebanks, carnival processions, and
medieval stage devils. The main characters of commedia appear to have
emerged from four principal types, two infuriating vecchi, or old men,
usually parents or guardians, and two zanni, or clowns, principally
responsible for the comedy. These characters came to be fixed into the
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COMIC IDENTITY 45
identifiable roles of Pantalone, the old Venetian merchant; the Doctor, a
tiresome pedant; Harlequin, a quasi-independent servant, whose
familiar patchwork costume originally signified poverty; and Brighella,
a street bully and unrepentant liar who may have helped shape
Beaumarchais’s Figaro, adopted by Mozart and Rossini. Additional
characters developed, each with their own mask, who were to infiltrate
and influence Western comic literature in various guises for centuries.
These included Pedrolino who was remodelled in France as the sad and
lonely Pierrot, and Pulcinella, who eventually became the jovial seaside
wife-beater, Mr Punch. In the commedia, as well as all the comic forms
that utilize stereotypes, identity is destiny, and characters are doomed to
repeat their actions and live forever at the mercy of their undiagnosed
flaws.
CLOWNS, FOOLS, AND FOLLY
Alongside stereotypes, the predominant figure of comedy is the fool. An
historically complex and paradoxical character, claiming a variety of
overlapping roles including clown, buffoon, jester, scapegoat, and
clairvoyant, the fool recurs as a symbol of contradictions and
quandaries. Often the fool is simply a low commoner possessed of
shrewd practical sense, as in the popular late medieval tales of the
‘obscene and hairy’ hunchback Marcolf, who repeatedly proved himself
wiser than King Solomon in bouts of wit. Foolishness is not the same as
idiocy, but rather an expression of the ambiguous, doubled, and inverted
ideas of wisdom and folly that existed in the medieval period. Folly,
incorporated into several strong currents of theology, saw foolishness as
the overriding characteristic of humanity, revealing itself in all human
endeavour. Knowledge was a tainted and problematic concept, as the
intolerable desire to know had led to the expulsion from Eden and the
fall from grace. God therefore favoured the foolish and inviolable
innocents who could not be corrupted by their own ingenuity. Christ
had appeared as a manifestation of this humility, presenting himself ‘as
a mock-king, riding into Jerusalem on an ass, to be displayed in purple,
beaten and laughed at…Christ and the fool as one in simplicity’
(Jacobson, 1997:167). The ecclesiastical establishment of the Middle
Ages incorporated some of these beliefs into their liturgical activities.
Church festivals such as the festum stultorum (the ‘feast of fools’), the
fatuorum papam (the ‘fool’s pope’), and the festum asinorum, a French
feast celebrating Mary’s flight into Egypt, during which the priest and
congregation were required to bray like donkeys, emphasized the
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ineffable folly of status in ritual form. As the theologian Peter L.Berger
writes, folly enabled a magical transformation of the world, or ‘more
precisely’, was ‘an act of magic by which a counterworld [was] made to
appear’ (Berger, 1997:193). Yet foolishness for its own sake was
neither condoned nor encouraged. Medieval scholasticism made a
distinction between the natural and the artificial fool: the first category
referred to someone who was considered a ‘holy innocent’, a child or an
adult with a learning disability, whereas the second referred to those
‘who counterfeited this state in order to amuse others…in short, all
clowns’ (Palmer, 1994:43). While clowning was not considered to be a
sanctified form of folly, but was equated with vice and sinfulness, the
idea of folly as the purifying antidote to human pretension developed as
a strong theme in literature. As folly was a conventionalized means of
expressing human nature, it could also be adopted as an ironic and
paradoxical identity assumed for the purposes of social commentary and
satiric attack.
At the close of the Middle Ages, folly became a distinct literary
voice, mocking pretension and belittling pride. One of the most
significant texts of this kind is Flemish writer Sebastian Brant’s
Narrenschiff (1494), or Ship of Fools, a long and popular moral satire
that castigated people from all walks of life for their vanity and
hypocrisy. Brant’s conceit of doomed passengers haplessly sailing to
the Land of Fools allowed him to parade a catalogue of social types who
failed to meditate on their eternal fate. Brant’s text lacks humour,
although it was published with a series of lively comic illustrations, but
its device of social panorama was employed by a masterpiece of ironic
fool literature, Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly (1511 and 1515).
Desiderius Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist and reformer, took the
idea for his text from the name of his good friend Sir Thomas More,
which, he says, ‘is as near to the Greek word for folly, moria, as you are
from it’ (Erasmus, 1993:4). The Praise of Folly is in turns an ironic,
ambiguous, and viciously satirical lecture on the benefits of folly
delivered by Folly herself. Addressing a happy and receptive crowd
who applaud her arrival, Folly, the daughter of Money, nursed by
Drunkenness and Ignorance and attended by Self-Love, Flattery,
Forgetfulness, Idleness, Pleasure, Madness, and Sensuality, explains her
centrality to human affairs. All things are made possible through her
mediation, she claims. Peace is the product of flattery, she says,
vainglory has resulted in science, wisdom is the fruit of folly as the wise
man is modest, but the fool tries, just as Christ used ignorant apostles
and told them to think like children. Everywhere, folly is a condition of
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human nature and without it, social interaction would be unbearable.
Consider marriage, for example:
Goodness me, what divorces or worse than divorces there would
be everywhere if the domestic relations of man and wife were not
propped up and sustained by the flattery, joking, complaisance,
illusions and deceptions provided by my followers!…In short, no
association or alliance can be happy or stable without me. People
can’t tolerate a ruler, nor can a master his servant, a maid her
mistress…unless they sometimes have illusions about each other,
make use of flattery, and have the sense to turn a blind eye and
sweeten life for themselves with the honey of folly.
(Erasmus, 1993:35)
Folly, in this case wilful blindness or the willingness to believe
convenient fictions, is an essential component of a happy life; humanity
is utterly dependent on it. Erasmus intended The Praise of Folly as a
satire, a comic version of his On the Education of a Christian Prince
(1516). Through the technique of praising that which is to be
condemned, he produced a powerful ironic identity devoted to comic
defamiliarization as a means of revealing the truth. Folly, for example,
is the only person able to speak freely to monarchs,
It might be said that the ears of princes shun the truth, and that
they steer clear of wise men for the simple reason that they fear
there may be someone outspoken enough to risk saying what is
true rather than pleasant to hear. The fact is, kings do dislike the
truth, but the outcome of this is extraordinary for my fools. They
can speak truth and even open insults and be heard with positive
pleasure; indeed, the words which would cost a wise man his life
are surprisingly enjoyable when uttered by a clown. For truth has
a genuine power to please if it manages not to give offence, but
this is something the gods have granted only to fools.
(Erasmus, 1993:56–57)
The notion of truth emerging in the guise of folly is clearly visible in the
work of Shakespeare, where a fool’s licence serves a number of
dramatic ends. In theatrical practice, the concepts of folly and clowning
overlapped considerably. A ‘clown’ meant literally a person from the
country, a yokel whose rusticated ways were cause for mirth.
‘Clowning’, however, indicated a number of performing skills, such as
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dancing, juggling, and musicianship. The marriage of clowning skills
with folly’s penetration of vanity and hierarchy meant that the clowns
of the early modern stage became dramatically powerful characters,
both agile performers and important narrative units, childishly amusing
and insightful by turns.
Shakespeare’s use of the clown is established in what is one of his
first plays, The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1592), where Launce is
given a tenuous relationship to the plot that closely follows the action
while remaining separate from it. This allows a detached but parallel
commentary that unifies themes raised throughout the play’s
symmetrical pairings of high and low social groups. In the second half
of his career, as Shakespeare moved away from writing comedies to
concentrate on tragedies and romances, his use of the clown changes in
a manner that reflects this new generic context. Around this time (1600),
William Kemp, a bumpkin fool who had played most of the early clowns,
was replaced in Shakespeare’s company by Robert Armin, who seems
to have had a much drier and more restrained style. Concomitantly,
Shakespeare’s later clowns are darker figures, imbued with a sense of
mortality and melancholy. The porter of Macbeth (1606), for example,
imagines himself as the gatekeeper of Hades, while the grave-diggers in
Hamlet make weary jokes about ageing and physical decomposition,
and literally preside over the death of clowning as they dig up the skull
of Yorick, Hamlet’s favourite jester, now only the memory of laughter.
Both Othello (1604) and Antony and Cleopatra (1606–07) contain only
a single clown scene. In the first, the clown jests with Desdemona over
the whereabouts of Michael Cassio, a conversation that immediately
follows Othello’s decision to have Cassio killed. In the second, it is the
clown who delivers Cleopatra the venomous asp and wishes her ‘joy
o’the worm’ (Shakespeare, 1989:5.2.270). Both clowns prefigure
deaths, the contrast of the lowly with the elevated lending the memento
mori a particular piquancy. The most powerful example of this is the
fool in King Lear (1604–05), who is the only character after Cordelia’s
banishment able to speak the truth to the king. Lear’s fool is rarely
funny, but he is frequently barbed and morbidly apposite, openly
abusing the old king: ‘FOOL. If thou were’t my fool, nuncle, I’d have
thee beaten for being old before thy time. /LEAR. How’s that? /FOOL.
Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been/wise’
(Shakespeare, 1989: 1.5.36–39). As Lear’s rage becomes increasingly
impotent and futile, the fool’s nonsense is the only appropriate retort.
There is no use for him after the third act of the play, but he delivers a
prophecy before he goes. Typically paradoxical and impossible, the
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fool’s prophecy imagines the disarray England will fall into when vice
is no longer a part of everyday life:
When slanders do not live in tongues,
Nor cutpurses come not to throngs,
When usurers tell their gold i’th’field,
And bawds and whores do churches build,
Then shall the realm of Albion
Come to great confusion;
(Shakespeare, 1989:3.2.87–92)
The parting speech is indebted to Erasmus’s Folly in its belief that
selfdelusion and hypocrisy are integral to the health of the nation. This
central contradiction, the inversion of the good and the bad, the wise
and the foolish, and the mad with the sane, lies at the heart of the
‘eccentric’ vision of comedy, where thoughts and experiences can
coexist alongside ironic reflection on those same thoughts.
TRICKSTERS
Paradoxical folly has a close relative in a character known as the
‘trickster’ who appears in the folk tales and religious myths of many
cultures. Mythical tricksters include the Greek god Hermes, a liar, a
thief, and a master of disguise; St Peter, who appears in Italian folk tales
as a shiftless opportunist whose quasi-criminal activities have to be
continually remedied by patient and forgiving Jesus; the Norse god
Loki, the companion of the thunder god Thor and personification of
lightning; the Native American Coyote, a sacred progenitor, manic
omnivore, and externalized taboo; and the Yoruba Esu-Elegabara from
Nigeria, a figure who carries the desires of man to the gods, and who
limps ‘precisely because of his mediating function: his legs are of
different lengths because he keeps one anchored in the realm of the
gods while the other rests in this, our human world’ (Gates Jr, 1988:6).
The trickster is a practical joker, a witty and irreverent being who
violates the most sacred of prohibitions. The trickster is not confined by
boundaries, conceptual, social, or physical, and can cross lines that are
impermeable to normal individuals, between the living and the dead, for
example, or to travel between heavenly and human worlds
instantaneously. This is why, like Hermes, the trickster often doubles as
the messenger of the gods.
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The trickster has a religious significance in some cultures that takes a
didactic form. Here is an example of a tale featuring ‘Coyote’, a trickster
often found in the Native American cultures of the southwestern United
States:
Hearing a strange sound coming from an old elk skull, Coyote
looks inside and finds a village of Ants having a Sun Dance. He
makes himself small in order to get inside the skull and see better,
but presently his body returns to normal size and his head is stuck
inside the skull.
He wanders into a village and announces, ‘I am holy; I have
supernatural power; you must give me something!’ The awe-
stricken people pass him in a procession, marking him with pollen
as is customary in that region. But the last person in line is a
smart aleck boy who is carrying a stick behind his back. When he
reaches Coyote he brings the stick down with all of his might
across the old elk skull, and it cracks and falls off. ‘That’s what
you should have done long ago’, Coyote tells them, ‘but instead
you wanted too much supernatural power.’
(Hynes and Doty, 1993:3)
Only after Coyote has been confronted by an equally irreverent
adversary does his greed become an admonition of the villagers’
gullibility and a warning to treat supernatural events with caution. In
this resides Coyote’s moral ambiguity: he rightly berates the people, but
only after his attempt to cheat them has failed. William Hynes and
Thomas Steele see the trickster as a necessary by-product of social
order:
Systems normally busy generating firm adherence to their beliefs
also maintain within these belief systems, somewhat
contradictorily, a raft of tricksters who perpetually invert and
profane these same beliefs. In myth and ritual tricksters seem to
be officially sanctioned exception clauses by which belief systems
regularly satirize themselves.
(Hynes and Steele, 1993:160)
The trickster, then, provides an integral check on beliefs to prevent them
from becoming too secure in themselves.
Trickster figures are everywhere in comedy from disguised lovers to
legacy-hunting rakes. Obvious examples would include the cartoon
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anarchists Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, the bogus civil servant
Khlestakov in Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector (1836), or the
mute and infuriating Harpo Marx. In Roman New Comedy, trickster
figures inhabit the skin of the ingenious slave character. In Plautus’
Pseudolus (c. 191 BC), the slave Pseudolus, his name itself meaning
‘false one’, addresses the audience with a proclamation:
Now let all take notice—and let none say he has not received
notice—all adults here present, all citizens of this city, all friends
and acquaintances of mine, are hereby warned and advised, this
day…to be on their guard…gainst me…and not to trust a word I
say.
(Plautus, 1984:221)
Pseudolus’ low social status gives him the freedom to move across
social boundaries, which includes awareness of the fictive nature of his
existence, operating both within the frame of the fiction and without it,
addressing the audience and acknowledging the fact of the
performance, and at one stage even admitting to being an actor. Within
the play, his trickster mobility makes him an intermediary between the
lover, the patrician parent, the pimp and prostitute, between illicit and
legitimate love and respectable and shameful liaisons. In the end,
Pseudolus forges domestic harmony from sexual and financial scandal
and consolidates the system by flouting it.
Shakespeare’s Puck is similarly the counter-intuitive provider of
solutions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Puck, also known as Robin
Goodfellow, is a genius of minor mischief and domestic upsets, a
‘merry wanderer of the night’ devoted to practical jokes and turning
sentiment into laughter:
The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,
Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me;
Then I slip from her bum, down topples she,
And ‘tailor’ cries, and falls into a cough,
And then the whole quire hold their hips and loffe,
And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swear
A merrier hour was never wasted there.
(Shakespeare, 1989:2.1.50–57)
Puck is in fact a collation of a number of spirits, including hobgoblins,
changelings, and incubi. In the generations immediately prior to
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Shakespeare, fairies like Puck were styled as sinister demons who ‘stole
children, dispensed sudden illnesses, destroyed crops and flocks and
were believed to live in hell’ (Laroque, 1993:22). The transformation of
Puck from demonic spirit to playful trickster is partly due to the falling
away of superstitious belief, as well as the transposition of character types
from classical literature onto domestic writing. As Jonathan Gil Harris
writes, the supernatural characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are a
syncretic blend of powerful yet for the most part benevolent
spirits taken from the seemingly disparate domains of Greek
mythology, courtly romance and village folklore; even…Puck is a
composite of ‘high’ and ‘low’, owing as much to Neoplatonic
conceptions of Cupid as to the Robin Goodfellow of popular
tradition.
(Harris, 1998:353–354)
In the psychoanalytic system of Carl Jung, the trickster is a remnant of
an earlier state of consciousness before humanity had become fully
civilized. In Jung’s view ‘all mythical figures correspond to inner
psychic experiences and originally sprang from them’ (Jung, 1959, vol.
9:256). Jung sees the cycles of tales that feature the trickster as a means
of narrating how ‘a higher level of consciousness has covered up a lower
one’ (Jung, 1959, vol. 9:266). Trickster narratives usually conclude with
the meddlesome actions of the protagonist coming to serve some useful
or illustrative purpose, as in the case of Coyote. As such, argues Jung,
they mirror the development of human consciousness from a wilder and
more savage state to a state of relative sophistication. ‘The civilizing
process begins with the framework of the trickster cycle itself, he writes.
‘The marks of deepest unconsciousness fall away from him; instead of
acting in a brutal, savage, stupid, and senseless fashion, the trickster’s
behaviour towards the end of the cycle becomes quite useful and
sensible’ (Jung, 1959, vol. 9: 266). Such is the trajectory of Puck, who
initially serves as an agent of chaos, but is ultimately responsible for
inducing Demetrius to love Helena and arranging the young couples in
perfect symmetry, so that ‘Jack shall have Jill/Nought shall go ill; /The
man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well’ (Shakespeare,
1989:3.2.461–3).
While Jung thought of the trickster as the ‘shadow’ of a former
being, whose high visibility in narrative speaks of its refusal to be
completely dissolved into modern consciousness, structural
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw him as a symbolic agent who
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unified two otherwise contradictory concepts in the structure of
understanding. In ‘The Structural Study of Myth’ (1958), Lévi-Strauss
argues that in traditional cultures, two opposite and irreconcilable
terms, such as life and death, are replaced by equivalent terms, such as
agriculture and hunting, in order that a third term might be permitted as
an intermediary. This is why carrion-eating animals like the coyote and
the raven are given the role of tricksters in Native American myths.
These animals possess some of the elements of both terms: they are like
hunters because they eat meat, but also like farmers because they do not
kill what they eat. ‘The trickster’, he says, ‘is a mediator. Since his
mediating function occupies a position halfway between two polar
terms, he must retain something of that duality—namely an ambiguous
and equivocal character’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1963: 226). The comic mobility
of the trickster, therefore, is a means of bringing about reconciliation
through the interpenetration of apparently irreconcilable realms of
existence. By having a foot in both the sub- and super-lunary worlds
and embodying a moral ambiguity, he acts as a signifier in which
opposites can come together: through the mediation of the trickster, life
and death are reconciled.
WIT, CAMP, AND BATHOS: CONGREVE,
WILDE, HANCOCK
The versions of subjectivity we have seen so far have all been grounded
in some sense of the truth of identity: whether it be the sanctified
ambiguity of fool or trickster, or the supposed universality of types. In
this final section, we shall look at comic techniques that arose in the late
seventeenth century that demonstrate a different attitude towards
identity, which we might think of as characteristically ironic,
dramatically individualistic, and largely agnostic. These techniques
would be ‘wit’, celebrated in Restoration and eighteenth-century literary
culture; ‘camp’, the knowing elevation of style and debonair dismissal
of gravity; and ‘bathos’, the puncturing intrusion of reality that floors
lofty aspirations. All three techniques are generally associated with
urban and sophisticated comedies from the seventeenth century
onwards, comedies permeated with a non-committal individualism and
defiance towards seriousness and orthodoxy. In Restoration comedy, the
quality of wit, quick inventiveness in language, and taking pleasurable
liberties with meanings, is a fashionable way of asserting social
superiority and individuality above the ordinary dullness of society.
This idea is derived in part from earlier conduct books, such as Baldesar
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Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528) that declares witticisms
‘diverting and sophisticated’, and considers spontaneous displays of wit
perfect examples of the courtly ideal of sprezzatura, or effortless grace
and accomplishment (Castiglione, 1986:172). The plots of Restoration
comedy differ from their renaissance predecessors inasmuch as the
desires of the individual take priority over the needs of the community,
as, writes Edward Burns, “‘Wit”—the ability to use social and linguistic
artifice for personal ends—overrides “decorum”—the affirmation of an
intrinsically self-righting social order—and thus plays reach their
endings on kinds of contracts, not an order re-discovered, presumed to
have been somehow always “there” and hence presented as natural’
(Burns, 1987:17). This change reveals a new disillusionment with
ideologies of absolute order following the social upheavals of the
English Civil War. Authority had disgraced itself, it seemed, and
sincerity and conviction were currencies debased by ideology. For
Joseph Addison, writing in 1711, people were no longer marked by ‘a
noble Simplicity of Behaviour’, but had become expert ‘in Doggerel,
Humour, Burlesque, and all the trivial Arts of Ridicule’ (Addison and
Steele, 1979, vol. 2:238). With this post-lapsarian cynicism came the
enormous popularity of parody and irony as literary modes. This would
also account for the centrality of artifice and ‘playing’ as themes in the
comedy of this era, confirmed by its extravagant use of masks,
disguises, impersonations, and subterfuges that focus attention on the
theme of credibility. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Critic (1779)
represents the culmination of knowing meta-theatricality of this kind, as
the entire piece, set at a rehearsal, is an extended parody of literary and
dramatic conventions continually interrupted by inept discussions of
style and merit. William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700)
opens just after its hero Mirabell has lost a card game, and it continues
to dramatize the theme of playing for high stakes until it ends. In this
play, performance, the appearance of action, and the concealment of
intention, is unproblematically offered as the route to gratification and
reward. The Restoration comic hero is a male fantasy of libertinage,
where wit is a verbal manifestation of virility that presides over the fops
and the Witwouds, gaining wealth, respect, and women as returns.
The arch-sophistication of Algernon Moncrieff, the louche aristocrat
of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), presents a
further development of the witty, noncommittal, and ‘performed’ comic
persona. Algy, utterly self-absorbed, exists in a perpetually ironized
relationship to the society in which he lives, in which contradictions are
the foundation for knowledge: ‘More than half of modern culture
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depends on what one shouldn’t read’, he says (Wilde, 1980:1.131–132).
His friend Jack Worthing enjoys land, income, and position as a Justice
of the Peace, but lacks a family history and therefore ‘an assured basis
for a recognized position in good society’ (Wilde, 1980:1.579–580). At
the heart of the play is the plasticity of identity: Jack is ‘Ernest in town
and Jack in the country’ (Wilde, 1980:1.168), while Algy is an
enthusiastic ‘Bunburyist’, an author of fictional persons, who becomes
Ernest in the country. In the twice-invented Ernest we have the perfect
emblem of identity in Wilde’s world, all surface and no content.
Embodied twice in Jack and Algy, Ernest is simultaneously two people
and no one at all. The Importance of Being Earnest is therefore a play
about the multiplication of a central identity that is notable because of
its absence. At face value, its anxieties concern the expectations of high
society and the importance of conforming to them. From the manner in
which the criteria are filled, however, changing names, adopting false
identities, the fortunate coincidence of Miss Prism’s retrospectively
legitimizing narrative, reminiscent of the recognition scene of New
Comedy, it is clear that authenticity is secondary to the maintenance of
appearances and contorting oneself to fit the bill. While the title insists
on the importance of honesty, the play itself resounds with inconsistent
and contradictory pronouncements for the purposes of stylish effect.
Gwendolen and Cecily’s resolve to be scandalized, for example, is a
performance of being scandalized, rather than the thing itself:
GWENDOLEN. Let us preserve a dignified silence.
CECILY.
Certainly. It’s the only thing to do now.
Enter JACK followed by ALGERNON. They whistle
some dreadful popular air from a British Opera.
GWENDOLEN. This dignified silence seems to produce an unpleasant
effect.
CECILY.
A most distasteful one.
GWENDOLEN. But we will not be the first to speak.
CECILY.
Certainly not.
GWENDOLEN. Mr Worthing, I have something very particular to ask
you…
(Wilde, 1980:3.12–17)
The Importance of Being Earnest fits exactly the criteria for what the
influential American cultural critic Susan Sontag has described as
‘Camp’. ‘Camp’, she says, ‘is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one
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way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon…not in terms of
beauty but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization’ (Sontag,
1982:106). Published in 1964, ‘Notes on Camp’ anticipates some
postmodernist discussion of the triumph of style, but actually finds its
origins in much older forms such as Mannerism and eighteenth-century
literary excess. ‘Camp sees everything in quotation marks’, she writes,
it is to ‘understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role’ (Sontag, 1982:109). As
Gwendolyn says, ‘in matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is
the vital thing’ (Wilde, 1980:2.28–29). Wilde’s own aesthetic beliefs
held that art was essentially useless, but that its lack of utility was the
source of its beauty. That art existed only for its own sake made it
independent of the world and therefore liberated from it, a liberation that
left art free to concentrate on its beauty, and ‘the sheer absoluteness of
its detachment’ (Leggatt, 1998:34).
In the twentieth century, Wilde’s sophisticated style continued in the
work of Noël Coward. Coward, ‘a man who spent a life-time
merchandising his deluxe persona’ (Lahr, 1984:22) was a prolific writer
of prose, drama, and over three hundred published songs, all of which
were characterized by effortless wit and laissez-faire charm. Like Wilde’s
aristocrats, Coward’s characters enjoy their own fictionality. The
divorced and reunited couple of Private Lives (1930), for example,
share flippancy as a philosophy of life, and a defence against reality:
AMANDA.
Don’t laugh at me, I’m serious.
ELYOT [seriously]. You musn’t be serious, my dear one; it’s just what
they want.
AMANDA.
Who’s they?
ELYOT.
All the futile moralists who try to make life
unbearable. Laugh at them. Be flippant. Laugh at
everything, all their sacred shibboleths. Flippancy
brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and
light.
AMANDA.
If I laugh at everything, I must laugh at us too.
ELYOT.
Certainly you must. We’re figures of fun all right.
(Coward, 1999:226–227)
In Wilde and Coward, then, comic identity is conceived as a means of
refusing incorporation into a communal identity defined by the sobriety
of the establishment. In both cases there is a celebration of individualism
over the masses, an elitist appreciation of privilege over all that is dull
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and ordinary, and a belief that easy intelligence equals freedom from
conformity.
The underside of Wilde and Coward, and the immersion in
ordinariness is what characterizes the bathetic hero. Bathos, the
reduction of the elevated to the everyday to produce an incongruous
anticlimax, is a rhetorical term whose current usage is taken from
Alexander Pope’s Scriblerian tract Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in
Poetry (1727). Bathetic comedy, moments where romantic or
glamorous concepts are found to be untenable when pushed up against
reality, became particularly popular after World War II, and may
express the antipathy towards Cowardesque privilege felt by the newly
enfranchised working men and women of the nationalized industries.
The bathetic hero is perhaps the comic equivalent of the ‘angry young
man’ of the 1950s, continually reminded of the imperatives of
conformity, and the poverty of ambition amongst the working class. The
bathetic hero is poised to reflect on the distance between ideological
fictions and reality like the marginalized voice of folly in the consumer
age. Dark versions of comic bathos appear in the work of Joe Orton and
Harold Pinter, both of whom use laughter as a means of attacking
middle-class sensibility and hypocritical establishment values, but the
model for the bathetic hero in British comedy is Tony Hancock
(1924–68), whose popular radio show Hancock’s Half Hour transferred
to television in 1956 and ran for five years. Everything was slightly
disappointing in Hancock’s world, and cause for heightened incredulity.
Stephen Wagg calls his persona ‘the model of a dyspeptic, status-
anxious, petit-bourgeois suburbanite stomping grumpily about the lower
reaches of Middle England’ (Wagg, 1998:7). Hancock was an
unemployed actor with delusions of grandeur, living in rented
accommodation in Railway Cuttings in East Cheam, his address an
emblem of dishevelment, with his resolutely working-class housemate,
played by Sid James. An episode called The Big Night (1959) that sees
Hancock and Sid preparing for a blind date, might be thought of as a
lower middle-class revision of the aristocratic comedies of
sophistication. Mimicking Coward, Hancock imagines himself an
international playboy, yet as a subject of the working week his play is
confined to Saturday night only and his leisure strictly dictated by time.
This is the consistent theme of the Hancock series, the distance that
emerges between the concept of the self generated by the individual
desiring ego, especially one who ‘was not only forever seeking to better
himself but believed at the same time that he was already superior’, and
that produced by the reality of economic status (Neal and Krutnik,
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1990:248). Not only is Hancock economically confined, but we find
there are erotic limits imposed on him as well. Sid’s hyperbolized
physical description of Hancock’s blind date, built up by swelling
romantic music, abruptly ends when we learn that her name is Gladys.
Similarly, Hancock’s home, the place where he should be master,
revolts against him in the form of his elderly maid, Mrs Cravat. Mrs
Cravat refuses to conform to any of the conventions of polite domestic
service, just as Hancock fails to be an aristocrat: she is surly,
aggressive, rude, and dismissive of Hancock’s pretensions to social
nicety, even amplifying his own pomposity by bringing in the breakfast
and announcing it as ‘oeuf scambléd’, scrambled eggs, transformed
through bad French into a parody of an expensive restaurant. The
expanse between Hancock’s bathetic mediocrity and the glamour to
which he continually aspired was also the subject of a film-length
treatment, The Rebel (1960), in which he travels to Paris to become an
artist, enjoying immense success despite an acute lack of ability. By the
end of this film we are thoroughly convinced that high art is fraudulent
nonsense, and the best thing that Hancock can do is return to the
suburbs and remain an eccentric. In this sense, bathos is not only a
voicing of one’s imprisonment within class structures, but also a
statement of reconciliation that acknowledges suburban ‘normality’ as
the only identity that is truly honest and decent.
In summary, we might say that comic identity appears to be found in
a sense of division or incompleteness. This can manifest itself as a
conflict between alternative world views, between appearance and
reality or between self-image and public perception. It might also be the
case that a character is not fully attuned to the world nor entirely
possessed of a sense of themselves or their surroundings. Obliviousness
to the demands of everyday life might be invigorating, but it also
condemns characters to repeat the pattern of their mistakes. In an
historical context, to such dividedness there is attributed a philosophical
or mythic dimension, as in the case of folly and tricksterism, that asserts
the existence of a universe outside the individual and a higher power
that controls it. In the modern age, the dividedness of comic identity and
the fluidity of meanings that accompany it could be read as symbols of
increasingly individualistic egos and the estrangement of self and
society. Either way, comic humans are incomplete.
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GENDER AND SEXUALITY
I don’t like funny women. I come out of a generation where
the woman should be beautiful and sexy and a wonderful
flower attached to a man, even though my whole life has
been the antithesis of this. To this day, you don’t expect
women to be funny.
Joan Rivers
Comedy treats matters of sex more often and more openly than any
other form. Its festive structure and Dionysial associations afford sexual
themes greater freedom, while also providing a fictional arena in which
taboos may be openly discussed without fear of social contamination.
The unquestioned bed-sharing and co-dependency of partners like
Laurel and Hardy and Morecambe and Wise is evidence of a loosening
of the usual rules, just as the enormous popularity of a number of openly
gay comedians, such as Julian Clary or Graham Norton, both of whom
have made effeminacy and homosexual innuendo central to their act,
seems to be at odds with a society that remains largely homophobic. Of
course, comedy places sexual desire and erotic arousal within the
context of laughter, rendering discussions furtive, titular, and self-
conscious, and complicating its aims. Freud writes that ‘the spheres of
sexuality and obscenity offer the amplest occasions for obtaining comic
pleasure…for they can show human beings in their dependence on
bodily needs…or they can reveal the physical demands lying behind the
claim of mental love’ (Freud, 2001:222). In both cases, sexual themes
amuse because some masked or elided aspect of the animal subject
peeps through the civilized exterior and shows itself to be insatiable.
Studies of sexual content in humour, such as G.Legman’s two-volume
Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1975) or Christopher Wilson’s scientific
study of joke function, stress that sexual jokes ‘offer the furtive joy of
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60 GENDER AND SEXUALITY
ignoring taboos’ (Wilson, 1979: 131). Yet while sexual content in
comedy may be pleasurable because it outruns censorship, it is also
important to acknowledge the extent to which sexual themes play a part
in establishing or consolidating norms of sexual behaviour. Wilson
discusses the use and effect of incest jokes, for example, and concludes
that ‘Humour that dismisses incest and other socially disapproved
relationships as “laughable” may be seen to illustrate and reinforce sexual
convention’ (Wilson, 1979:177). Similarly, as US comedian Joan
Rivers testifies, we may view comedy’s representation of male and
female gender roles, especially in narratives that conclude in marriage,
as confirmations of culturally orthodox views of the nature of men and
women. Jimmy Durante’s crack, ‘my wife has a slight impediment in
her speech. Every now and then she stops to breathe’, or Groucho
Marx’s ‘women should be obscene and not heard’, are both mid-
twentieth-century verifications of the patriarchal view of women as
incessantly verbose in violation of their ideal role as sexually attractive
objects. Comedy therefore articulates sexual politics from a number of
contradictory positions, including liberation from censorship,
exploration of desire, and insistence on conservative categories of
gender.
CROSS-DRESSING: AS YOU LIKE IT AND SOME
LIKE IT HOT
A familiar motif in the comic exploration of sexuality is the cross-
dressing ‘progress narrative’. According to Majorie Garber, a
transvestite progress narrative is a plot that requires one or more of its
characters to disguise their gender ‘in order to get a job, escape
repression, or gain artistic or political “freedom’” (Garber, 1992:70).
There are many examples of this in comedy, including the plays
Charley’s Aunt (1892) and La Cage Aux Folles (1978), the movies Mrs
Doubtfire (1993), Tootsie, Victor/Victoria (both 1982), and Some Like
It Hot (1959), and the cross-dressing comedies of Shakespeare, As You
Like It, Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice.
In As You Like It, cross-dressing allows the play to develop a
heightened eroticism and an inclusive attitude towards sexuality, and
even the title suggests a relaxed attitude to sex—the ‘it’ presumably a
reference to all kinds of appetites, not only sexual. ‘It’ is a good word to
use in relation to the sexual tensions of this play, as they are at once
indeterminate, elliptical, and absolutely central to the plot. As You Like
It is the story of Rosalind and her companion Celia, forced by the
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usurper Duke Frederick to follow her father into exile in the Forest of
Arden. Aware of the danger facing lone women travellers as ‘Beauty
provoketh thieves sooner than gold’ (Shakespeare, 1989:1.3.109),
Rosalind decides to disguise herself as a man:
Because that I am more than common tall,
That I did suit me all points like a man,
A gallant curtal-axe upon my thigh,
A boar-spear in my hand, and in my heart,
Lie there what hidden woman’s fear there will.
(Shakespeare, 1989:1.3.114–118)
Taking up the props of masculinity, and burying ‘female’ traits such as
apprehension, Rosalind completes her transformation and takes the
name ‘Ganymede’. The Shakespearean stage used boy actors in female
roles exclusively, as women were forbidden from performing in public
and did not take parts in plays until the Restoration. That all of
Shakespeare’s female roles, even the most demanding tragic ones, were
played by boys without reducing drama to farce, tells us that this
convention makes Rosalind’s gender swap utterly convincing within the
context of the play. But As You Like It is complicated by an additional
layer of transformation. Rosalind’s male disguise reminds us of the
initial gender of the performer, highlighting the fact that his femaleness
is only theatrical, with the effect of blurring gender distinctions while
accentuating them thematically. This gender ambiguity appears to be at
the centre of sexual fascination in the play, and instead of protecting her
from unwanted attention, Rosalind’s disguise makes the apparent
youthful maleness of her character its central sexual object. The cross-
dressing of As You Like It therefore encourages the boy actor to assume
a heightened erotic presence by placing him in the playful and
indeterminate world of comic identities. The key to this is the choice of
the name ‘Ganymede’ with which Rosalind completes her disguise. In
Greek mythology, Ganymede was a beautiful Trojan youth, so admired
by Zeus he was taken as his lover. There is a deliberateness in Rosalind
naming herself after ‘Jove’s Own page’ (Shakespeare, 1989:1.3.124);
the choice introduces the idea of men as compelling sexual objects,
usurping women in the traditional role of the desired one (underlined
perhaps by the un-cross-dressed Celia’s choice of name, ‘Aliena’,
pushing women further to the margins). The naming of Ganymede
ensures that Rosalind will be at the heart of a series of crossed and
interacting desiring relationships that centre specifically on the strange
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and alluring identity she has created for herself. Chief amongst these are
two fascinations that would now be labelled as homosexual. First, the
desire of Phoebe for Rosalind, which displaces the shepherd Silvius, her
appropriate and conventional mate; and second, more important, the
apparent fascination that Orlando has for Ganymede irrespective of his
proclaimed love for Rosalind. Ganymede’s interactions with those he
fascinates are characterized by verbal sparring and witty comebacks.
Stephen Greenblatt sees this as a stage version of sexual excitement.
‘Dallying with words is the principal Shakespearian representation of
erotic heat’, he writes. ‘Hence his plots go out of their way to create not
only obstacles in the lovers’ path but occasions for friction between
them’ (Greenblatt, 1988:90). The contest of Beatrice and Benedict in
Much Ado About Nothing (1598) exemplifies this kind of verbal
foreplay, but in the green world of Arden, the friction caused between
man and boy appears to condone alternative desiring partnerships
outside the compulsory heterosexuality of the town. Given these
circumstances, Stephen Orgel sees a radical sexual agenda at work in
the play, calling Ganymede a ‘dangerous alternative’ to heterosexual
norms and reproductive sexuality, as ‘the idea of the boy displacing the
woman appears in its most potentially threatening form, the catamite for
whom Jove abandons his marriage bed’ (Orgel, 1997:57). Evidence for
this can be found in the ‘wooing scenes’ of acts 3 and 4, in which
Ganymede proposes to take Rosalind’s place and invites Orlando to
practise his seduction of Rosalind upon him: ‘woo me, woo me, for now
I am in a/holiday humour, and like enough to consent’, she/he says
(Shakespeare, 1989:4.1.64–65). Orlando, wholeheartedly embracing the
fantasy Ganymede has proposed, pleads with him:
ORL. Then love me, Rosalind.
ROS. Yes, faith, will I, Fridays and Saturdays and all.
ORL. And wilt thou have me?
ROS. Ay, and twenty such.
ORL. What says thou?
ROS. Are you not good?
ORL. I hope so.
ROS. Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing? (to Celia)
Come, sister, you shall be the priest and marry us—Give me your
hand Orlando.—What do you say sister?
ORL. (to Celia) Pray thee, marry us.
(Shakespeare, 1989:4.1.107–119)
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So happy is Orlando to accept Ganymede as Rosalind that he pleads
with Celia to marry them and allow the boy to displace the woman in
the marriage rite. That this was not entirely acceptable in its day is
evinced by the early modern opponents of the stage who condemned the
erotic lure of theatre practice and considered the presence of the boy
player to encourage homosexuality. John Rainolds, in Th’overthrow of
Stage-Playes (1599), warned that the kisses of boy actors could so turn
a man that he could be moved to infidelity: ‘If they do but touch men only
with their mouth, they put them to wonderful pain and make them mad,
so beautiful boys by kissing does sting and pour secretly in a kind of
poison’ (quoted in Orgel, 1997:28). Philip Stubbes’s Anatomy of Abuses
(1583) held that public performances, with their ‘wanton gestures’ and
‘bawdy speeches’, were a place for men to meet for the purpose of
finding a sexual partner. After the play was done, ‘everyone brings
another homeward of their very friendly, and in their secret conclaves,
covertly, they play the sodomites, or worse’ (quoted in Orgel, 1997:29).
For Orgel, these anti-theatrical attacks offer three very important
insights into the connection between sexuality and the early modern
stage. Although he emphasizes the ideological extremity of opponents
to theatre, he concludes that their arguments indicate, first, that ‘the
basic form of response to theatre is erotic; second, that erotically,
theatre is uncontrollably exciting; and third, that the basic, essential
form of erotic excitement in men is homosexual—that, indeed, women
are only a cover for men’ (Orgel, 1989:17).
Billy Wilder’s 1959 film, voted the best comedy of all time by the
American Film Institute, brings the cross-dressing theme into the
twentieth century. Some Like It Hot shares many similarities with As
You Like It, not least the indeterminate and enticing ‘it’ of the title. The
film restates the idea that men can adequately replace women, both as
women and as sexual partners for men, and that femininity does not
reside in biological gender or ontological identity, but in ‘feminine’,
material supplements to the body such as high heels, make-up, and
brassieres. The film tells the story of two Depression-era musicians, Joe
and Jerry, played by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, who witness a mob
killing and are forced to go into hiding. They dress as women, rename
themselves Josephine and Daphne, and join ‘Sweet Sue’s Society
Syncopators’, an allgirl jazz band travelling on an engagement to
Florida. Joe falls in love with the band’s singer, Sugar, played by
Marilyn Monroe, which necessitates the adoption of a further identity as
‘Shell Jr’, in a ploy conceived in answer to Sugar’s fantasy of a rich
man in glasses. Joe and Jerry, motivated by the threat of death, come to
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understand quickly that the authenticity of ‘femaleness’ resides only in
the quality of its performance. For example, when joining the band for
the first time, they struggle with their disguises until they find an example
to emulate in Marilyn Monroe:
JER. (rubbing his ankle) How can they walk on these things? How do
they keep their balance?
JOE. Must be the way their weight is distributed. Come on.
As they proceed along the platform, a gust of wind sends their
skirts billowing. Jerry stops again and pulls his skirt down.
JER. And it’s so drafty. They must be catching colds all the time.
JOE. (urging him on) Quit stalling. We’ll miss the train.
JER. I feel so naked. Like everybody’s looking at me.
JOE. With those legs? Are you crazy?
JER. (stopping in his tracks) It’s no use. We’ll never get away with it,
Joe.
JOE. The name is Josephine. And it was your idea in the first place.…a
member of the girls’ band comes hurrying past them, carrying a
valiseand ukulele case. Her name is SUGAR…
JER. Who are we kidding? Look at that—look how she moves—it’s
like jello on springs—they must have some sort of a built-in
motor. I tell you it’s a whole different sex.
(Wilder, 1959)
Simply wearing women’s clothes seems to accentuate the men’s sense of
essential sexual differences, as well as underline their view of women as
sex objects. But once given insight into the tricks of the performance,
‘jello on springs’ accompanied by a close-up of Monroe’s backside in
motion, they copy it and are successfully assimilated into the band with
absolutely no suspicions raised. The transvestism of the two leading
men is, of course, foisted upon them, and we are continually reminded
that their cross-dressing is a means to an end, not evidence of a latent
fetish. To remind us, Joe and Jerry’s clothing is continually depicted as
costume, complicated and unusual and always requiring adjustment and
therefore risible in its unnaturalness when contrasted with their
fundamental maleness. However, while a masculine authenticity is
alluded to beneath the clothes, women themselves remain conspicuously
facile. Monroe’s Sugar is portrayed as a stereotype of a certain kind of
woman. Singing ‘I Wanna Be Loved By You’, Monroe wears a tight
dress that accentuates her bosom by appearing to be translucent. Amidst
the ‘conscious heightening as well as dissolving of sexual stereotypes’
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that Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans see at work in this film,
Monroe represents ‘overflowing female excess’ (Babington and Evans,
1989:227–228), a figure of hyperbolic femininity that Molly Haskell
describes as being ‘as much in “drag’” as Joe and Jerry (quoted in
Sikov, 1994:142). During the song, which tells of passive availability
and urges the lover to approach, so much is made of Monroe’s bosom
that rather than guaranteeing hers as an authentic female body amongst
the fakes, she appears as an unrealistic construct and a product of
‘glamour’, Hollywood, and girlie magazines. As Ed Sikov writes, ‘If the
film has a central deficiency, it is Wilder’s inability to move Monroe’s
character beyond a sort of paralysed observation of her own image’
(Sikov, 1994:143). Even ‘real’ women seem to lack substance beyond
the trappings of their gender.
Structurally, Some Like It Hot and As You Like It are close. Both
feature the removal from the hostile and dangerous city: in
Shakespeare’s play it is the court under the tyrannical Duke Frederick,
in Wilder’s film a violent Chicago of gangsters, prohibition,
unemployment, and hunger. Both the Forest of Arden and Miami Beach
represent liberation from danger and the opportunity to explore
alternative identities and the fermentation of romantic relationships.
Both locations are associated with holidays and respite from economic
demands, as Rosalind says to Orlando, ‘There’s/no clock in the forest’
(Shakespeare, 1989:3.2.294–295). It seems both film and play insist
that the fluctuation of playful identities is only a temporary measure,
necessary to reconfirm heterosexual norms which Majorie Garber sees
as fundamentally unchanged by the period of cross-dressing:
The ideological patterns of this implication are clear: cross-
dressing can be ‘fun’ or ‘functional’ so long as it occupies a
liminal space and a temporary time period; after this
carnivalization, however…the crossdresser is expected to resume
life as he or she was, having, presumably, recognized the touch of
‘femininity’ or ‘masculinity’ in her or his otherwise ‘male’ or
‘female’ self.
(Garber, 1992:70)
When we look at the endings of both narratives, however, we can see
that they refuse to relinquish their hold on the carnival world
absolutely, and that more than a ‘touch’ of the freer desiring
relationships and gender identifications they have discovered remains
after the narrative ends. In the epilogue to As You Like It, the actor
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playing Rosalind comes out of character, addressing the audience with
conventional pleas for leniency before saying to the men:
If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had
beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and
breaths that I defied not. And I am sure as many as
have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths will
for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.
(Shakespeare, 1989: Epilogue, 16–21)
At the end of Some Like It Hot, Jerry, still disguised as Daphne, offers a
series of reasons why he cannot marry Osgood Fielding III, the
millionaire who has fervently pursued him, finally admitting ‘Damn it,
I’m a man’. Osgood’s reply is the pragmatic ‘Nobody’s perfect’. Such a
wonderfully reasonable response intimates that heterosexuality is not
necessary for a perfectly good marriage. Rosalind, revealed finally as a
boy actor offering to kiss the men, suggests that the sexuality of As You
Like It is not contained entirely by the parameters of the fiction, but is
‘diffuse, nonlocalized, and inclusive, extending to the audience an
invitation to “come play”’ (Traub, 1992:142). Both endings suggest the
possibility of the homoeroticism of the cross-dressed period continuing
in the world after the issues that forced characters into disguise have
been resolved. Indeed, Ed Sikov emphatically says of Jerry’s situation,
‘Osgood’s final declaration is openly gay, there’s no question about
that. The line is meaningless otherwise’ (Sikov, 1994:146). Sikov,
chiding critics who claim that “‘Nobody’s perfect” is not specifically
about gay sexuality’, points out their wish to ‘steal what precious little
mainstream cultural participation gay men and lesbians can claim for
ourselves. Somehow it doesn’t seem fair’ (Sikov, 1994:148).
DRAG AND TRANSVESTISM
The reluctantly cross-dressed protagonist of a progress narrative is a
substantially different prospect from the female impersonator, or drag
act, that has been a successful comic franchise since the mid-1800s.
Here, drag is not donned as a means to achieve an end in the
conventionally dressed world, but is the focus of the entire
performance. The female impersonator derived in part from nineteenth-
century circus acts that tricked their audiences into believing that daring
acrobats and gymnasts were in fact dainty girls to enhance their box-
office appeal, as well as the tradition of men playing women’s roles in
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minstrel shows. ‘Putting on the drag’ originally meant applying the
brakes of a carriage, but once the word had entered homosexual slang
through the ‘molly-houses’ or transvestite clubs of nineteenth-century
London, it stood to mean the ‘drag of a gown with a train’ (Senelick,
2000:302). Early drag acts conventionally concluded with the removal
of the wig to reveal the close-cropped hair that acted as a guarantor of
the performer’s masculinity, a gesture that places great signifying
emphasis on the coiffure, as in the finale of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene
(1609–10). In music hall, the term ‘female impersonator’ was
commonly used to describe drag acts, a label that makes the performer’s
gender self-evident. For comic drag, whose best-known mainstream
exponents are performers like Danny La Rue, Barry Humphries as
Dame Edna Everage, and Paul O’Grady as Lily Savage, the intention is
to parody types of femininity through a knowing masculine prism that
acknowledges the nature of the travesty at all times. The question of
what is being parodied is largely dependent on the performer, but
generally drag allows the male comedian to exploit his attire to offer a
deliberately provoking perspective on women. This amounts to a form
of ventriloquism that explores women’s attitudes to sex, women’s
conversation, and monologues intended to puncture idealized versions of
femininity. In the tradition of pantomime dames, comic drag paints a
picture of feminine grotesque, selfdelusion, hyperbolized glamour and
sexual outrageousness that would be inappropriate in ‘real’ women
(although this is also true of Caroline Aherne’s ‘Mrs Merton’
character). Danny La Rue, who was enormously successful in Britain in
the 1970s, with his own nightclub, television series, and appearance at
Royal Variety shows, assumed the persona of a raucous showgirl with
lower middle-class manners and a crass addiction to extraordinary
outfits, high wigs, and sparkling accessories. La Rue’s primetime
popularity and insistence on being a ‘family act’ meant that much of the
sexual tension in drag was removed from his show. La Rue was keen to
point out that what he parodied was artifice in women, especially a
certain kind of woman he found vulgar. Laurence Senelick sees this as a
contradiction, writing that La Rue creates an ‘anodyne illusion’ that
mocks overly sexualized women, while simultaneously placing them at
the centre of a family show (Senelick, 2000:247). Lily Savage, his
postmodern alternative, to whom glamour is distinctly foreign, is a 6′ 2″
peroxide blond from Birkenhead, first unveiled in the gay cabaret of
London’s Vauxhall Tavern in 1985. Wearily smoking onstage, she is
resigned to petty brutality and failure while acknowledging the free-
market nature of sexuality in the underground economy. In both the
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financial success that putting on drag has brought Paul O’Grady as well
as Lily’s own history of low-grade prostitution, the selling of women is
always thematically near.
How might we then think about the representation of gender through
drag acts and female impersonators? Certainly the politics of drag
have produced a number of theoretical perspectives on its representation
of gender, although it must be acknowledged that these are almost
exclusively concerned with the meaning of drag in gay and lesbian
culture, where comedy is not always the primary focus of the act. Esther
Newton, writing in 1979, argued that drag existed within a two-tier
‘sartorial system’ in which the gender identification of the performer
was best understood in relation to the first two layers of their clothing.
The top layer of clothing, visible on the outside, was a ‘costume’ and
presumed to be part of an act or symbolic presentation on behalf of the
wearer. The second layer of clothing, essentially underwear, hidden
from view, reveals the true nature of the wearer’s gender identification
that ‘anchors’ their gender during the performance. Thus, Newton
argues, drag, ‘poses an opposition between one sex-role sartorial system
and the “self”, whose identity has to be indicated in some way’, because,
‘when impersonators are performing, the oppositional play is between
“appearance” which is female, and “reality”, or “essence”, which is
male’ (Newton, 1979:101). Drag is then a parodic interplay between
‘appearance’ and ‘essence’, in which the performer retains their ‘real’
gender via the guarantee of the concealed body. Applying Newton’s
position to comic drag, we might conclude that its garish makeup,
euphemistic sexual content, and parody of female behaviour amounts to
mimicry and mockery of women by men who always confidently
remain men. Yet Newton’s sartorial distinction remains questionable:
how can one set of clothes be said to stand for gender authenticity,
while another represents quotation and parody? Mark Simpson, for
example, has argued that drag can go beyond a ‘mere carnival’ parody
of women and challenge the heart of suppositions about gender in
society. Drag, he writes, can,
take the form of an incitement to rebellion. It can express a desire
to revolt against the most tyrannical of laws, the ‘natural’ link
between sex and gender. This drag-as-rebellion, strange to relate,
can even represent a rejection of the denigration of women’s
bodies on the basis of lack.
(quoted in Bruzzi, 1997:165)
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If this is the case, and we can think of drag as an interrogation of
gender, one that breaks the link between biologically determined
categories and socially constructed conceptions of sex, then female
impersonation may constitute a rebuttal of prescriptive roles and an
exploration of alternative genders and sexualities. As we have seen,
there is a large body of work that puts momentum behind the argument
that comic inversion can be a political force, so why not extend it to
include drag? If we accept this argument, then we would also be able to
apply it, as some Shakespearean critics have done already, to the
‘progress narrative’. In this revised version, Shakespearean cross-
dressing is not simply explained by ‘holiday humours’, but is a
politicized investigation of gender hierarchies that questions the
inferiority of women at a time when the assumption of male superiority
was overwhelming. Drag is the vehicle of this investigation as it focuses
the attention on the sartorial symbols of gender and recontextualizes
them in a way that might lead us to question their cultural power.
The most radical and influential theorist of drag has been the
American critic Judith Butler, whose work touches on cross-dressing by
way of a larger argument about the fluidity of gender identities. Butler’s
position can be broadly characterized as ‘anti-essentialist’ in that she
argues for a concept of gender that is not built on a foundation of
biology or other predetermined generative categories, but one that is
continually ‘iterated’ through the ‘performances’ of gender required by
culture. Thus we make our gender by performing the expressions that
are culturally characteristic of it. ‘In this sense, gender is always a
doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the
deed’, she writes; ‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions of
gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very
“expressions” that are said to be its results’ (Butler, 1990:25). It should
be noted that ‘gender identity’ is not identical to biological sex, but
rather the gender with which the subject identifies him or herself,
irrespective of their anatomically prescribed or medically understood
gender. Traditional feminist responses to drag and cross-dressing,
claims Butler, have viewed it as either degrading to women, or as ‘an
uncritical appropriation of sex-role stereotyping from within the
practice of heterosexuality’ (Butler, 1990:137). Rather than arguing the
politics of drag from the point of view of drag relying on a discrepancy
between the biological sex of the performer and the gender that is being
performed, Butler insists that there are three categories at work:
‘anatomical gender, gender identity, and the gender that is being
performed’ (Butler, 1990:137). As she writes,
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If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct from the
gender of the performer, and both of those are distinct from gender
of the performance, then the performance suggests a dissonance
not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender and
gender and performance.
(Butler, 1990:137)
This concept of drag is one in which the various categories that are
confused, mixed, and invoked in cross-dressing demonstrate the
nonessential nature of gender:
In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure
of gender itself—as well as its contingency . Indeed, part of the
pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of
a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in
the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are
regularly assumed to be natural and necessary.
(Butler, 1990:137–138, original emphasis)
Drag may therefore be said to reveal that gendered social discourse has
no tenable foundation, even if the performer is unaware of the broader
implications of their act. However, as Butler concludes, there is no simple
test or rubric that determines whether acts of gender parody are
subversive, or simply images that have been ‘domesticated and
recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony’ (Butler, 1990:139).
While the politicization of drag has not entered the world of comedy
to the extent that it exists in the gay, lesbian, and transsexual
communities, the themes of ‘imitative’ gender and gender contingency
have been dealt with by performers like the US comedian Sandra
Bernhard and the British comedian Eddie Izzard. Clearly neither of
these performers wears drag in the conventional sense, but both use
their performances to draw attention to the politics of sartorial choice
and the gendered assumptions of dress. Both resist the application of
prefabricated definitions to label their sexuality, preferring to use their
comedy as a means of questioning the validity of labels. Bernhard, who
refuses to allow either her performances or sexual orientation to be
easily categorized, has been described by Camille Paglia as a ‘drag
queen…[who] can defend herself without running to grievance
committees. Whether lesbian or bisexual, she accepts and respects male
lust without trying to censor it’ (Paglia, 1994:140). Izzard describes
himself as a ‘male lesbian transvestite’, a convolution consistent with
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his routines that are not so much surreal, the usual epithet he attracts, as
a cut and paste of the found objects of the media age. Izzard often wears
women’s clothes on stage, but his representation of sexuality follows
much the same principle of choice and assemblage as his act, creating a
gender role that does not conform to pre-existing definitions. Izzard
says, ‘People say, “Why don’t you change your clothes at half-time?”
Why? Do footballers do this? I’m not a drag act. This is not about the
clothes, it’s about the comedy and I just do whatever I want’ (Izzard
et al., 1998:61).
MARRIAGE
While a notion of femininity is the principal allusion at the heart of
cross-dressing and drag, ‘real’ women are excluded from this important
comic motif. A commonly held objection, as formulated by Lucy
Fischer, is that transvestite comedy ‘privileges the male and claims his
dominance even when woman is apparently there’, noting also the
absence of central women in both comic cinema and in theoretical
discussions of the genre, which is ‘particularly bizarre given the origins
of the mode in female fertility rites’ (Fischer, 1991:62, 63).
Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (412 BC) is the earliest extant play to give
significant speaking roles to women, and possibly the first in Western
literature. Its plot involves a group of Athenian women who occupy the
Acropolis and go on a sex-strike in order to force their husbands into
peace negotiations with Sparta. Lysistrata and her group are politically
motivated and outspoken women who ransom the state into seeing
sense. However, this is not an argument for their emancipation. As
Lauren K.Taaffe tells us, the central conceit of Lysistrata, a role-reversal
that places women in masculine positions (and vice versa), only serves
to draw out the subordination of women:
The integrity of male identity is kept whole, while the absurdity
of women in public life is played up. The play confirms and
celebrates an ordered sense of gender identity in which male is
stable and female is unstable, in need of control through marriage.
Finally, the convention of male actors in female roles ensures that
masculinity is always present on stage, even when all the characters
are female.
(Taaffe, 1993:51)
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The representation of women in Lysistrata is largely symptomatic of the
representation of woman in Western comedy as a whole, where she is
relegated to a generic purpose, the butt of a joke, or a caricature to be
presented by men in drag. Susan Carlson writes that,
In the comic plays populated by women, two features proscribe
what comedy’s women can be: a basic inversion and a generally
happy ending. To understand these two aspects of comic structure
is to understand the limitations of comic women. Women are
allowed their brilliance, freedom, and power in comedy only
because the genre has built-in safeguards against such behavior.
(Carlson, 1991:17)
Women are therefore used for two reasons: to provide an hysterical
vision of the world-turned-upside down, and to enable male order to be
re-established through the subjugation of women in marriage. This
would certainly be the most satisfactory way to explain the absolute
transformation of Katherine in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew
(1593–94) from a ‘shrewd ill-favoured wife’ (Shakespeare, 1989:1.2.
59), to a compliant woman who argues that a husband should be ‘thy
lord, thy life, thy keeper/…thy sovereign’ (Shakespeare, 1989:5.2.
146–147). Kate’s volatile behaviour is permissible in the context of
comedy because it is both temporary and necessary if it is to be finally
overcome. The play’s characterological incoherence is explained
because comedy’s view of women is formulaic. It is entirely appropriate
that the first wife we meet in the play who conforms to Petruchio’s
ideal (‘My husband and my lord, my lord and my husband/I am your
wife in all obedience’ (Shakespeare, 1989: Induction, 2. 104–105)), is a
male, the page Bartholomew in disguise, underlining the extent to which
play-acting and male fantasy override anything like the realistic
portrayal of women (Leggatt, 1998: 121).
Marriage could be described as the main reason for the participation
of women in comedy, as well as one of the primary conditions under
which men and women are seen to interact. Marriage also serves as the
conclusion towards which traditional comic narrative inevitably moves,
a cultural symbol of the harmonious symmetry and the resolution of
troubles. In addition, female characters in comedy are outstandingly
susceptible to ideological versions of the male concept of women,
largely defined in terms of their suitability for marriage. Particularly
common is the representation of women as either virgins or whores,
with little room for ambiguity. In the early modern period the official
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discourse of marriage held that the domestic arena was a microcosm of
the state, with the husband the head of the household just as a monarch
rules over his people. While this trope of domestic government
epitomizes a harmonious ideal, numerous treatises on the proper conduct
of husbands and wives also suggest that marriage was a precarious
undertaking where ‘adultery and whoredom’ were ever-present dangers
to marital harmony (Newman, 1991:20). In comedy, women’s
reputations are forced to negotiate the opposing poles of subordination
and infamy. The courtesans of Roman comedy, for example,
traditionally belonged to the hetaerae, a class of foreigners who enjoyed
some freedoms but were denied citizenship and generally considered
aliens. As an outsider, the courtesan’s sexual services were acceptable,
although she remained culturally egregious. In order to become a
Roman, the plot demands her transformation, and the reform of her
sexual behaviour and ethnic identity. Terence’s Eunuch (161 BC)
features such a device, in which the discovery of the slave Pamphila’s
true identity clears the way for her marriage to the young Athenian
aristocrat Chaerea. However, before the news of the marriage, Chaerea,
thinking his beloved beyond his reach, switches places with a eunuch
servant, enters her house and rapes her. Chaerea’s pride in his fortune
and pleasure in his escapade is not censured by his family or peers,
aside the mildest chastisement for rascally behaviour. Rather, as the title
suggests, the play diverts attention from the issue of rape to consider the
comic improbabilities of a eunuch’s sexual performance. That Chaerea
and Pamphila are eventually married supposedly negates the crime
against her, and confirms for us the view that women are either married
or legitimate sexual targets.
A similar formulation is found in the comedy of the early modern
period, where a woman’s acceptance is determined by the sexual status
she has in the eyes of men. The sexual defamation of Hero in Much Ado
About Nothing, for example, results in her supposed death, which can
only be reversed by a symbolic resurrection brought about after her name
has been cleared. Similarly, the tragi-comic The Winter’s Tale sees the
accused Hermione reborn after her innocence is assured after a period
of sixteen years; while Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in
Cheapside (1613) features Moll Yellowhammer’s resuscitation while
laid in her coffin. In these cases, women are wrongly accused of improper
sexual conduct, an accusation that demands the highest penance that
strict social codes allow. To all intents and purposes, Hero, Hermione,
and Moll die, and remain dead until the slander against them has been
disproved. Only when the meanings that men attach to women have
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been redefined, may the women be reborn and returned to their places
as faithful wives and chaste servants of their husbands.
The citizen comedies of the Jacobean era are particularly well stocked
with prostitutes and they generally conform to the image of the fallen
woman as a diseased monster. They also serve a moral function, being
used to tempt and chastise the prodigal, or being married off to a usurer,
as is the case at the end of Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One
(c. 1605), or David Lord Barry’s Ram Alley (1608), both examples of
comic contrapasso where the villain is delivered a deliciously ironic
punishment befitting the nature of his crime. There are occasional
variations on this theme where the prostitute turns out to have a heart of
gold, but, as Alexander Leggatt writes, ‘None of the attempts to
complicate the conventional opposition of chaste maid and vicious
whore really amounts to much: they are all minor effects, frequently
uncertain and apologetic’ (Leggatt, 1973:109).
In Middleton and Dekker’s city comedy The Roaring Girl (c. 1611),
we are presented with a radical exception to proscribed female roles in
the unusual character of Moll Cutpurse. Also known as Mary Frith,
Moll defies all the conventions of acceptable female behaviour yet
retains her unimpeachable chastity. Mary Frith was a real person who
began to dress as a man and inhabit the London underworld in the early
seventeenth century. Such a unique character occupies a singular
position in the play, which seems continually to struggle to know what
to do with her and can think of her only as a confusing thing. The first
discussion of her by Sir Alexander Wengrave makes this clear:
It is a thing
One knows not how to name: her birth began
Ere she was all made. ’Tis woman more than a man,
Man more than a woman, and—which to none can hap—
The sun gives her two shadows to one shape;
(Middleton and Dekker, 1994:1.2.128–132)
It is easier for the men having this conversation to believe that Moll is
the victim of a bizarre birth defect, than accept a woman wearing men’s
clothing. While over forty plays used the convention of women
crossdressed for the purposes of disguise between 1603 and 1619,
including The Roaring Girl in the character of Mary Fitzallard, it is
important to remember that Moll is resolutely not in disguise (Stuart,
1993:31). Her attire flaunts indeterminacy and taunts male opinion. This
liminal relationship to categories of definition is further underlined by
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her mobile relationship to the city, living in several homes at once, and
slipping, ‘from one company to another like a fat eel/between a
Dutchman’s fingers’ (Middleton and Dekker, 1994:2.2.206–207). That
Moll does not really belong in her own play, is accentuated by the fact
that instead of following comedic convention and donning female attire
to marry at the end of act 5, she vows to stay single and to remain
always dressed as a man. Moll’s exclusion from the resolution grants her
leave to comment on patriarchy’s orthodox views of women.
Challenging the female role in marriage, she declares that,
I have no humour to marry. I love to lie o’ both sides o’th’ bed
myself; and again, o’ th’other side, a wife, you know, ought to be
obedient, but I fear me I am too headstrong to obey, therefore I’ll
ne’er go about it… I have the head now of myself, and am man
enough for a woman; marriage is but a chopping and hanging,
where a maiden loses one head, and has a worse i’th’ place.
(Middleton and Dekker, 1994:2.2.36–45)
Moll sees marriage as a resignation of her liberty, losing her ‘head’, her
virginity, or at least, sexual integrity, to a man, who then becomes the
‘head’ of the household.
In Congreve’s The Way of the World, as in much Restoration comedy,
the heroine is apparently contradictory. It may be worth reminding
ourselves that the Restoration saw the first actresses perform in theatres,
which must have changed the dynamic of the representation of the sexes
considerably in contrast to the singularly male population of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Restoration heroines must at once
prove their virtue, but also run dangerously close to compromising it
through demonstrations of wit that are the foundation of her
desirability. This fear is best articulated by Pinchwife in William
Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) who declares, ‘he’s a fool that
marries, but he’s a greater that does not marry a fool. What is wit in a
wife good for, but to make a man a cuckold’ (Wycherley, 1996:1.1.
388–390). Near the end of Congreve’s play, Millamant, pursued
shrewdly and ardently by Mirabell, makes a series of demands, requests
that must be satisfied if she is to be his wife. These include,
liberty to pay and receive visits to and from whom I please; to
write and receive letters, without interrogatories or wry faces on
your part; to wear what I please; and choose conversation with
regard only to my own taste; to have no obligation upon me to
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converse with wits that I don’t like, because they are your
acquaintance; or to be intimate with fools, because they may be
your relations. Come to dinner when I please; dine in my dressing
room when I’m out of humour, without giving a reason. To have
my closet inviolate; to be sole empress of my tea table, which you
must never presume to approach without first asking leave. And
lastly, wherever I am, you shall always knock at the door before
you come in. These articles subscribed…I may by degrees
dwindle into a wife.
(Congreve, 1997b: 297)
At first sight, these privileges look like an attempt to retain
independence within marriage, remaining the mistress of her affairs and
the gatekeeper of her own private space. Yet they also suggest an
attempt to avoid the necessary familiarities of married life, and to retain
the formality of courtship. ‘What seem like provisions by Millamant for
freedom and power’, writes Pat Gill, ‘are endeavours not to extend her
prerogatives but to freeze time, to remain eternally the same’ (Gill,
1994:121). Thus Millamant tries to avoid the pitfalls of established
matrimony characterized by the surly companionship and open
infidelities of the older generation that surrounds them.
The complaint that marriage is a form of servitude is certainly what
hangs over the portrayal of husbands and wives in many of the popular
television comedies of recent decades. Many prominent British sitcoms,
including Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973–74), Bless
This House (1973–76), George and Mildred (1976–79), or Keeping Up
Appearances (1990–95), show marriage as the site of tension between
down-to-earth men and pretentious women. A wife’s role is to thwart
her husband’s attempts to act ‘naturally’, usually defined as drinking,
gambling, or going to football matches, whilst encouraging middle-class
aspirations and the restraint of childish impulses. The sitcom wife is
overly socialized and rigorously abstemious in answer to her husband’s
perpetual appetite for sensual pleasure. She is formed by consumerism,
is unreasonably materialistic, status-obsessed, and concerned with the
artificialities of etiquette, whereas her husband believes himself to be
unpretentious, relaxed in his identity, dismissive of any person or
situation that does not allow him to ‘be himself, such as vicars, family
gatherings, Conservative politicians, and his boss. Female characters
have repeatedly been given the role of joyless authority figures in these
shows, wives who are simultaneously mothers to their infantilized
husbands. ‘Women are forced by sitcom to be the establishment’, writes
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Frances Gray. ‘This is clear from innumerable sitcoms in which female
absence is the condition that permits male individuality by liberating
them from the confines of the family “norm’” (Gray, 1994:84). This
would be the case in shows such as Steptoe and Son (1962–74),
Porridge (1973–77), Dad’s Army (1968–77), Yes, Minister (1980–88),
or even a supposedly ‘alternative’ sitcom like The Young
Ones (1982–84), where the absence of women helps to emphasize the
eccentricity, individuality, uniqueness, and strong characteristics of
male characters, who are ‘all free to be what they so enjoyably were,
precisely because there were no women around to “spoil things” with
common sense’ (Gray, 1994:84). This threat is built into the marriage of
Bob and Thelma in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, which,
argues Maggie Andrews, continually makes an issue of ‘the boundary
between adulthood and lad that Bob is constantly crossing and re-
crossing’ in continual fear of provoking his wife’s ire (Andrews,
1998:57). Bob’s bourgeois lifestyle, nurtured by Thelma, is
continually troubled by contact with his friend Terry, whose stint in the
army, bachelor life, and unapologetically working-class values amount
to the freedom Bob has renounced for his steady job and holidays in
Spain. Marriage is therefore the embodiment of lost liberty and denuded
proletarian authenticity: ‘a comedy of entrapment within the rigid and
class-based social structure’ (Gray, 1994:83). The confines of wedlock
were treated differently in a generation of sitcoms that emerged from
the USA in the 1990s, whose attitude to marriage was one of
straightforward avoidance. Shows such as Seinfeld (1989–99), Friends
(1994–2003), and Frasier (1993–2004), have no apparent faith in the
ability of relationships to last, and all have protagonists who remain
resolutely single and inept at maintaining romantic partnerships. What
seems to keep them this way is their residency in cities like New York
and Seattle as opposed to the suburbs, and a fear of ending up like their
parents, such as Seinfeld’s unspeakable Frank and Estelle Costanza,
themselves a re-rendering of the married couples of 1970s sitcom.
It is perhaps not remarkable that marriage often equals imprisonment
in modern comedy, given that marriage is no longer a prerequisite for
sexual activity. But even in traditional comedies that conclude with a
marriage, the promise of heterosexual sex does not necessarily override
or foreclose the sexual mutability that may have gone before. Not all
aspects of sexuality are simply carnival deviations permissible prior to
their inevitable incorporation into monogamous heterosexual
‘normality’. Stephen Orgel and Valerie Traub argue that the sexual
identity of the boy players of the Shakespearean stage had erotic
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significance beyond the structure of the fiction in which they appeared,
an erotic significance that spoke to ‘homosexual’ desires within the
audience. Similarly, drag acts reference elements of sexual identity that
are neither neatly assimilated into the idea of comic inversion nor
disarmed by their self-definition as comic performances. However, it
should be noted that in the vast majority of cases, sexual adventurism
applies to men only. As we look back over comedy’s treatment of
gender and sexuality, we must conclude that versions of female
sexuality that explore the configuration of women’s identity and desire
beyond a handful of stereotypes are still severely lacking.
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4
THE BODY
Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the
body has more fun.
Woody Allen
‘The comic hero, by his very nature,’ writes Maurice Charney, ‘needs to
declare himself the patron of everything real, physical, material,
enjoyable, and the enemy of all abstractions, moral principles,
seriousness and joylessness. This is a matter of basic allegiance to the
life force’ (Charney, 1978:160–161). If the comic hero is a sensualist,
then his or her main ally in hedonism is the body. The body in comedy
is the medium through which humanity’s fascination with its instincts
and animal nature is explored. The comic body is exaggeratedly
physical, a distorted, disproportionate, profane, ill-disciplined, insatiate,
and perverse organism. Any Tom and Jerry cartoon exemplifies this
extenuated corporeality in its parade of bodies that mutate, disassemble,
reconfigure, and suffer endless punishment while refusing to die. Comic
heroes are often disproportionate caricatures themselves, excessively fat
or ludicrously thin like Laurel and Hardy, myopic and fragile like Mr
Magoo, or elastic like Rowan Atkinson and Jim Carrey. We might also
say that the comic body privileges the facts of physicality over the ideal
of the physique, and its functions over poise, however those ideas might
be structured at any particular historical moment. Jerry Seinfeld once
said that conventionally attractive people do not make good stand-up
comedians, as the audience distrusts beauty in comedy and wants their
clowns to be imperfect. An ideal of physicality must exist against which
the comedian can be found lacking, thereby reassuring an audience that
comic substance will be found in departure from those ideals.
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BEAUTY AND ABJECTION
In Western culture, the human body is subject to discourses and
regulatory regimes that form and instruct it according to an
ideologically driven idea of how it should appear and how it may be
properly used. A key theme is its divided nature, capable at once of
stunning beauty and grace, and also disease and foul excretions, like a
temple built over a sewer. The idealization of beauty in the West has
one root in the Platonic system that understood the contemplation of
physical perfection as a necessary step on the course to absolute
knowledge. In The Symposium (c. 371 BC), Socrates encourages his
friends to use beauty as a ladder to the truth, urging them,
to begin with examples of beauty in this world, and using them as
steps to ascend continually with the absolute beauty as one’s aim,
from one instance of physical beauty to two and from two to all,
then from physical beauty to moral beauty, and from moral beauty
to the beauty of knowledge, until from knowledge of various
kinds one arrives at the supreme knowledge whose sole object is
that absolute beauty, and knows at last what absolute beauty is.
(Plato, 1951:94)
Beauty in human beings is therefore a partial reflection of an absolute
beauty that is good, virtuous, and metaphysically inseparable from
truth. For Aristotle, the kernel of beauty lay in perfect orderliness,
writing that ‘the chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and
definiteness’ (quoted in Synott, 1993:80). A parallel idea can be found
in the Old Testament’s book of Isaiah: ‘The carpenter stretcheth out his
rule; he marketh it out with a line; he fitteth it with planes, and he
marketh it out with the compass, and maketh it after the figure of a
man, according to the beauty of a man’ (44:13). Classical architecture
used perfect bodily proportion as a divinely gifted template for the
organization of buildings, especially temples, a principle developed by
the Roman architect and military engineer Vitruvius (fl. first century
AD). In Book III of his De Architectura, he writes, ‘No temple can have
any compositional system without symmetry and proportion, unless, as
it were, it has an exact system of correspondence to the likeness of a
well-formed human being’ (Vitruvius, 1999:47). A beautiful human
form is therefore the perfect compositional template, its symmetry and
proportion constituting an embodiment of the divine plan.
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Concomitant with the idealization of beauty is a cultural insistence on
mastering the body, and making it conform to ideas of deportment and
appropriate behaviour, regulating its functions and odours according to
what is considered acceptable, and what must be suppressed as crude or
bestial. Norbert Elias, whose ground-breaking work The Civilizing
Process (1939) demonstrated how a concept of the body, and the
appropriate way of managing it, lay at the heart of ideas like refinement
and civilization, argues that one of the principal means of governing
bodily manners has been through the introduction of shame. Feeling
ashamed, or developing a heightened sense of delicacy about
nakedness, table manners, flatulence, and other ‘unpleasant’ biological
facts, requires disciplining bodily functions to fit the codes of etiquette
and avoid being shunned. As the rules of bodily discipline become
increasingly refined, a parallel sense of the primitive and brutish is
created in its wake:
The greater or lesser discomfort we feel toward people who
discuss or mention their bodily functions more openly, who
conceal and restrain these functions less than we do, is one of the
dominant feelings expressed in the judgement ‘barbaric’ or
‘uncivilized’. Such, then, is the nature of ‘barbarism and its
discontents’, or, in more precise and less evaluative terms, the
discontent with the different structure of affects, the different
standard of repugnance which preceded our own and is its
precondition.
(Elias, 1978:58–59)
By demonstrating our disapproval of standards lower than our own we
construct a category of barbarism against which we guarantee our
elevated level of civility.
It is against these ideals of beauty and manners that physical comedy
is produced. Put simply, comedy strategically bypasses civility to return
us to our body, emphasizing our proximity to the animals, reminding us
of our corporeality and momentarily shattering the apparently global
imperatives of manners and beauty. Obscene, sexual, or taboo humour
is predicated on an understanding of the socially tolerable body that it
perverts in order to provoke laughter. Yet this does not amount to an
authentic moment in which we are granted a genuine and unmediated
experience of our material selves, but rather a discovery of the body
through the contravention of civility. Out of the concept of bodily order,
then, emerges the comic body.
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One idea that may help us understand the place of the body in
comedy is the notion of ‘abjection’. This concept, developed in its most
familiar form in the psychoanalytic criticism of Julia Kristeva,
contemplates those things which repulse or nauseate the subject but
which do not utterly belong outside him or her. In his study of abjection
in stand-up comedy, John Limon describes it as ‘a psychic worrying of
those aspects of oneself that one cannot be rid of, that seem, but are not
quite, alienable—for example, blood, urine, feces, nails, and the corpse’
(Limon, 2000:4). The abject is an ever-present site of horror and
fascination that pollutes the self, because the self partly consists of it.
This is most clearly characterized by the actual body, which will
eventually die. As Kristeva writes:
The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost
of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something
rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not
protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real
threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.
(Kristeva, 1982:4)
We see here that the abject is a physical reality that cannot be
defeated through the simple application of additional layers of cultural
refinement. In Limon’s terms, the abject ‘worries’ at us, refusing to be
sublimated, never entirely forgotten and implicated in one’s very
existence. Abjection may explain why ‘sick’, morbid, or scatological
humour, or comedy that involves violence and pain, is so popular. Such
examples go straight to the worry, addressing the inescapable bodily facts
of existence that are elided by manners. We know that medieval
Biblical drama often incorporated elements of farce and burlesque,
styles that use violence, physical predicaments, and scatology in their
comedy, as if indicating a desire to raise the troubling issues of finitude
in the presence of God. By foregrounding the functions of what Bakhtin
calls the ‘lower bodily stratum’, the genitals, the anus, urine, excrement,
and excrescences, and invoking the abject body as a risible concept to
be laughed at rather than feared, its power of horror may be lifted and
our fear of decay and degeneration alleviated. But the comedy of
abjection is also a confirmation of the frail foundation of civility,
locating subjectivity within material existence, acknowledging the
weakness of the body and the omnipotence of filth, and raising themes
that are impermissible elsewhere.
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THE GROTESQUE
The grotesque could be described as an embodiment of the abject. A
form of humorous monstrosity devised for satiric purposes, the
grotesque marries the repulsive and the comic, as in the paintings of
Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) or George Grosz (1893–1959), or
even in the spirit of pantomime dames. Retrospectively applied to the
decorative arts of Ancient Rome, the term originally referred to an
imaginative combination of the real and the fantastic, and especially an
unnatural or stylized distortion of organic nature in stark contrast to the
regularity of classical order (Vitruvius himself complained about it
bitterly). ‘Grotesque’ was a term initially reserved for the visual arts,
but later extended to include anything across the arts that contained
elements of the ridiculous, the horrifying, and the bizarre. The grotesque
is a form of exaggerated and ambivalent social commentary produced
by the violent clash of opposites, especially those that are comic and
terrifying, existing in a state of unresolved tension. The site of the
grotesque clash is the human body, resulting in deeply ambiguous and
divided reactions to the horror of corporeality and oneself as an
organism. Mr Creosote, the diner from the 1983 film Monty Python’s
The Meaning of Life, might serve as an example. Here is a man so
gluttonous that his eating causes him to vomit torrentially—until he
ultimately explodes after eating an after-dinner mint. Mr Creosote
survives but finds himself ripped apart and looking down at his exposed
ribcage and enlarged heart. As viewers, we are amused by the absurdity
of the spectacle, and appreciate its poetic justice. But the image is also
unnerving and disgusting, a visceral rendition of a body destroyed by its
own appetite and made to witness what it has done. It is the unresolved
nature of this scenario that gives the grotesque its particular force. The
grotesque, then, is a humorous mode that aims to produce an ambiguous
feeling pitched somewhere between pleasure and disgust.
By far the most notable author of grotesque comic fiction is François
Rabelais (c. 1494–1553). Rabelais’s stories of the giants Gargantua and
Pantagruel follow them through a series of absurd adventures and
grotesque scenarios that celebrate physicality by means of an
unremitting obsession with it. Rabelais’s giants and their companions
engage in a continual round of eating, drinking, defecating, urinating,
sweating, copulating, and passing wind. They are insatiately anal, oral,
and phallic monstrosities whose sexual and scatological openness hopes
to release the world from pathological inhibitions and the stress of
maintaining manners. What they champion is unruly, desiring, animal
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existence in the face of censorious and ascetic intellectualism. The
proximity of humanity to the body is continually stressed from the
moment Gargantua’s mother goes into labour in Book I. His birth is
prefaced by a characteristic case of mistaken identity:
A while later she began to groan and wail and shout. Then suddenly
swarms of midwives came up from every side, and feeling her
underneath found some rather ill-smelling excrescences, which
they thought were the child; but it was her fundament slipping out,
because of the softening of the right intestine—which you call the
bum-gut—owing to her having eaten too much tripe…
(Rabelais, 1955:52)
The confusion of the baby and bodily waste is symptomatic of the text’s
substitution of subjectivity with materiality, and its paralleling of
cognitive categories with bodily functions. However, Gargantua and
Pantagruel are not only representatives of an infantile or hedonistic id,
but rather the medium through which Rabelais launches satirical attacks
on a range of subjects including education, medicine, the ecclesiastical
establishment, monastic life, and the nature of justice. Rabelais
deployed his satire in the Erasmian fashion, ridiculing pretension and
ignorance by saturating it in exaggeration. For Mikhail Bakhtin, of
course, Rabelaisian grotesque was the purest possible manifestation of
the popular-festive folk identity. Arguing that Rabelais’s novels reject
any kind of boundaries between the mannered and disciplined body and
the procreative, alimentary, corpulent, or offensively abject body,
Bakhtin claims that Rabelais’s ‘grotesque realism’ demonstrates ‘the
body in the act of becoming’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 317). ‘We find at the basis
of grotesque imagery’, he writes, ‘a special concept of the body as a
whole and of the limits of the whole. The confines between the body
and the world and between separate bodies are drawn in the grotesque
genre quite differently than in the classic and naturalistic images’
(Bakhtin, 1984:315). The grotesque body is not a closed system defined
by clear limits, but a body that reaches out beyond its boundaries and
interacts with the world on a sensual level:
The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the
outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the
body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes
out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the
apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and
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offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the
phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a
principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in
copulation, pregnancy, child-birth, the throes of death, eating,
drinking or defecation.
(Bahktin, 1984:26)
The grotesque is therefore a vivid celebration of inter-connectedness,
growth beyond death and the continuity of existence, where the body is
triply significant as a representation of ideal community, the
embodiment of festivity, and interpenetration and connection of the
human body with the universe. Once expressed in these terms, it is clear
why some critics have accused Bakhtin of a ‘romanticization and
heroization of the body’ (Critchley, 2002:51).
A modified example of Rabelaisian grotesque would be
Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff, a figure for whom the celebration of
corporeality always takes place within the context of a direct challenge
from the disciplines of order and self-control. Falstaff is often thought
of as a representative of carnival, his Eastcheap antics standing in
contrast to the statesmen and soldiers of the rest of the play; 1 Henry IV,
by thus giving its reprehensible characters a dramatic status equal to its
aristocratic ones, can be viewed as ‘the first play in English to find
major imaginative stimulus in the disreputable’ (Rhodes, 1980:99).
Falstaff, a liar, a glutton, a coward, and the consort of prostitutes and
thieves, is a symbol of degeneracy and perpetual leisure. In a passage
where Prince Hal mimics his father’s displeasure, we can see how
Falstaff is imagined as a parade of meats:
There is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man; a tun
of man is thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that trunk
of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel
of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of
guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly…
(Shakespeare, 1989:2.5.407–413)
Falstaff s body is a distempered creation stitched together from organs,
fluids, and edibles: ‘In each image,’ writes Neil Rhodes, ‘Falstaff is…a
barrel of diseases or a horn of plenty which can be exchanged and
replenished at any moment’ (Rhodes, 1980:109). For Anne Barton this
constantly changing grotesque makes Falstaff a hero, the descendant of
a long line of characters who ‘detest war and the ideals of military glory’:
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They are healthily sceptical of the pretensions and promises of
politicians, and their own unabashed physicality makes them insist
on recognizing and celebrating man’s links with nonhuman
creation. Monstrous egoists and opportunists, they are enemies of
society, but also its raffish saviors.
(Barton, 1985:133)
In the final battle at Shrewsbury, Falstaff carries a bottle of wine where
his pistol should be, falsely boasts of killing Percy, feigns death to avoid
injury, and ultimately lives, enacting the image of a carnival
resurrection, and a life-affirming, if dishonourable, alternative to
politics and warfare. As C.L.Barber writes: ‘Whereas, in the tragedy,
the reduction is to the body which can only die, here reduction is to a
body which typifies our power to eat and drink our way through a
shambles of intellectual and moral contradictions’ (Barber, 1963:213).
Just as the end of 2 Henry IV sees Falstaff banished from Hal’s
presence on pain of death, and kings and carnival strictly kept apart,
after the renaissance the grotesque appears to have been relegated to the
margins of comedy. Neo-classical comedies of manners privileged wit
over physical humour, and revised concepts of authorship meant that the
onus fell increasingly on performers to respect the integrity of the text to
the detriment of clownish improvisation. At this stage, we can see
comedy draw away from the body and privilege plot, evinced by the
plays of Molière, Marivaux, Etherege, Wycherley, and others, whose
plays accelerate action verbally while simultaneously decreasing the
space it occupies.
Although the grotesque withdrew from comic literature, it enjoyed a
coincidental rise in the graphic arts, especially as caricature. Caricature,
taken from the Italian, caricare, meaning ‘to overdetermine’ or ‘to
overload’, isolates particular features in its subjects, the nose, say, and
enlarges, alters, or otherwise manipulates them in order to emphasize
particular qualities of appearance. Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), who
wrote a series of articles on caricature, considered it an example of the
‘comique absolu’, or absolute comic, because its grotesque distortions
had the power to shock the viewer into an awareness of the ironic
duality of life, ‘at once embodying and exposing the division and
fragmentation of the modern subject, representing and revealing the
terrifying and exhilarating otherness of modern experience’ (Hanoosh,
1992:4). Caricature operates according to the principle that we are all
potentially monstrous, as the prominently exaggerated or altered
features communicate the identity of the subject depicted, and so
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caricature makes us identifiable by deforming us. Caricature is most
readily associated with satire, with physical distortion commensurate to
the vices of its targets. William Hogarth (1697–1764), the painter and
engraver best known for his series of ‘modern moral subjects’ The
Harlot’s Progess (1732), The Rake’s Progress (1733–35), and
Marriage à la Mode (1743–45), used caricature in a distinctly literary
fashion, adopting an Horatian tone that belittles greed and hypocrisy.
Caricature’s place in national political debate was also established in the
eighteenth century, where cartoonists used it as a means of
transforming targets into the personification of their vice. For Freud, the
pleasure in caricature is derived from its ridiculing of political figures,
even when the image itself is unsuccessful, ‘simply because we count
rebellion against authority as a merit’ (Freud, 2001:105). Martha Banta,
who has studied nineteenth- and twentieth-century caricature in both the
USA and Britain, sees it as a subtle but powerful forum for establishing
the nature of normality. The questions that were being asked in these
cartoons, she writes, dealt with ‘essential (essentialist) concerns’, which
‘broke through as a series of pictorial enquiries: “What is ‘English’?”
“What is ‘American’?” “What is ‘civilized’?” “What is ‘barbaric’?” and
the most basic anxiety of all, “Where can we feel safe?”’ (Banta,
2003:23). Caricature helped to mediate these questions by pictorially
imagining the ‘other’ and making it monstrous or ludicrous in order to
service the anxieties of the white, urban middle-class readership of
magazines like Punch and Life. Pictorial caricature is therefore a
shorthand that uses elements of the human figure as a means of
conveying a complete set of ideologically correlated ideas.
SLAPSTICK
‘Slapstick’ is generally understood as physical humour of a robust and
hyperbolized nature where stunts, acrobatics, pain, and violence are
standard features. Broad comedy of this type has been around since
Aristophanes, but the form known as slapstick came into being as
practically the sole condition of comedy in early American cinema,
along with the keen artistry of performers like Charlie Chaplin, Buster
Keaton, and Harold Lloyd, and the enterprise of legendary producers
like Mack Sennett. Slapstick is a perfect example of the way in which
genres are shaped by the media that present them, as moving pictures
remained soundless until 1926, forcing humour to be silent and visual.
For Stanley Cavell, the technological considerations of early film were
absolutely central to the comedy it produced for two reasons:
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First, movie performers cannot project, but are projected. Second,
photographs are of the world, in which human beings are not
ontologically favoured over the rest of nature, in which objects
are not props but natural allies (or enemies) of human character.
The first necessity—projected visibility—permits the sublime
comprehensibility of Chaplin’s natural choreography; the second—
ontological equality—permits his Proustian and Jamesian
relationships with Murphy beds and flights of stairs and with
vases on runners on tables on rollers.
(Cavell, 1979:36–37)
Thus we are presented with the projected body that draws attention to
its surface and movements, placed among a world of things over which
it cannot claim superiority. Ironically for silent film, the term ‘slapstick’
is onomatopoeically derived from the sound made by the wooden
paddles clowns used to beat one another with in the burlesque touring
theatres. These were in turn versions of the inflated sheep bladders filled
with dried peas that accompanied clowns on the early modern stage,
themselves an echo of the tools used to beat the ritual scapegoat in
ancient ritual. The scapegoat, a person onto whom the accumulated
evils of the community were transferred prior to his or her expulsion,
might be a useful way of understanding the hero of slapstick comedy.
Slapstick comedians generally played the role of outsider, such as
Chaplin’s Tramp character, awkward, if physically gifted, loners who
found themselves swimming against the tide of modern living. Thrust as
innocents into a world they had never apparently encountered before,
their hapless bodies suffered the misfortunes that might befall us in our
daily lives so that we did not have to. Yet however often the body was
assaulted it was largely indestructible, rendering concern or sympathy
for a character’s pain irrelevant. In this sense, slapstick may be said to
represent a socially acceptable expression of masochism, as the viewer
takes no sadistic pleasure in the pain induced, or, perhaps, a liberation
from the compulsion to empathize.
The slapstick protagonist is continually prone to attack through either
a bodily revolt or loss of self-control, or from an external source that
aims to dismantle his dignity. In both slapstick movies and the cartoons
they inspired, the body is utterly malleable and infinitely resourceful. At
the heart of slapstick is the conceit that the laws of physics are locally
mutable, that the world can rebel against you, or that a person can be
suddenly stripped of their ability to control their environment or
anticipate how it will behave. The body in slapstick is often at odds with
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the mind that inhabits it, suggesting a dysfunction of the mind/body
dualism that emphasizes the dividedness of human experience. Slapstick
historian Alan Dale reads the beleaguered hero as a reconfiguration of
the relationship between the mind and the body that has been a feature
of conceptions of humanity since classical antiquity. ‘One of the central
elements of…theology,’ he writes,
the debasing effect of the body on the soul—enables Christians to
overcome this discord only by denying and finally getting rid of
the body, whereas slapstick achieves accord here on earth by a
comic concession to the body at its most traitorous. Both of these
stand in contrast to the pagan approach of the Olympic Games, in
which athletes attempt to achieve a perfect union of body and will.
These three ritualistic approaches form a gamut: Christianity
seeks eternal triumph over physicality after life; Olympians seek
by means of the body a temporal triumph that will be remembered
long after the athlete’s prowess has faded; slapstick seeks a
temporal acceptance of physicality by a cathartic exaggeration of
its very limitations.
(Dale, 2000:14)
As well as being a vicarious outlet for cruelty, then, the humour in
slapstick may also help to reconcile us to a body that obstructs the will
and insubordinately thwarts desire.
As slapstick is where the body meets the world of things, it is suitably
fascinated with objects. By examining the identity and utility of things
and playing with the space they occupy, their dimensions, properties,
and cultural significance, the body’s relationship to the external world is
made strange. Typical gags might involve disproportionate sizes, the
animation of the inanimate, the slowing down or speeding up of events,
the personification of objects, and the reversal or rejection of linear
cause and effect that allows things to be re-contextualized or entirely
reused. This belongs to a rich tradition of clowning. The most popular
routines of the famous Regency comedian Joseph Grimaldi
(1778–1837) were the ones where he turned cheeses into a coach, and
produced a hussar’s uniform out of a coal scuttle, a cloak, and a muff.
The Swiss-born clown Charles Wettach, better known as Grock
(1880–1959), speaks tellingly of his relationship to objects in his
autobiography: ‘Ever since I can remember,’ he wrote, ‘all kinds of
inanimate objects have had a way of looking at me reproachfully and
whispering to me in unguarded moments: “We have been waiting for
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you…at last you’ve come…take us now, and turn us into something
different’” (quoted in Welsford, 1935:309). Laleen Jayamanne sees the
clown’s ingenuity as ‘an unsevered link between perception and
action’, that amounts to the ability to think with the body rather than the
more familiar coordinates of subject—object relations, resulting in ‘the
capacity to make correspondences, the perception of nonsensuous
similarities across incommensurables’, such as eating an old shoe as if it
were a gourmet meal, as in Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925)
(Jayamanne, 2001:189). The idea that the slapstick gag represents an
interruption of conventional knowledge is put forward by Donald
Crafton, who argues that the utility-turned-unpredictability of slapstick
gags amounts to a rupture in the linear process of understanding. ‘One
way to look at narrative’, he says,
is to see it as a system for providing the spectator with sufficient
knowledge to make causal links between represented events.
According to this view, the gag’s status as an irreconcilable
difference becomes clear. Rather than provide knowledge,
slapstick misdirects the viewer’s attention, and obfuscates the
linearity of cause-effect relations. Gags provide the opposite of
epistemological comprehension by the spectator. They are
atemporal bursts of violence and/or hedonism that are as
ephemeral and as gratifying as the sight of someone’s pie-smitten
face.
(quoted in Jayamanne, 2001:185)
Rather than taking events and shaping them into coherent order,
slapstick events treat the world as if it were capricious, unpredictable,
and suddenly explosive. To think of a gag as an ‘irreconcilable
difference’ is to emphasize its incompatibility with our understanding of
how the world normally works. Slapstick, then, opens up the possibility
of the world becoming inhospitable and strange to us.
A useful way to consider slapstick is through the work of Henri
Bergson. Bergson, as discussed in Chapter 1, believed that human beings
exist in a state of continual ambient awareness of the animated Vital
spirit’ of themselves and others, and that when a situation causes vitality
to be obscured and the ‘humanness’ of humans is lost or denuded,
comedy is born from the sudden eclipse of life. ‘The comic’, he says, ‘is
that side of a person which most reveals his likeness to a thing, that
aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys
the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without
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life’ (Bergson, 1980:117). This especially includes moments where
judgement is overridden by the actions of the body, such as any
situation ‘that calls our attention to the physical in a person, where it is
the moral side that is concerned’ (Bergson, 1980:93). One of Chaplin’s
greatest films, Modern Times (1936), is extremely Bergsonian in this
sense. Set against a backdrop of mass labour and industrialization, the
unique and individuated body is contrasted with the faceless and
automated machines of production-line capitalism. Essentially, the film
asks whether it is possible for individuals to retain their sympathetic
emotional qualities when their lives are controlled by the working week
and subservience to heartless institutions. The film opens in a steel mill
with Chaplin performing repetitive tasks at a conveyor belt, an action
that penetrates him so deeply he adopts its automated twitch. While,
from one perspective, this is a dark comment on the reification of
labour, from a Bergsonian view it represents comedy in its purest form,
insofar as ‘The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body
are laughable in exact proportion as the body reminds us of a mere
machine’ (Bergson, 1980:79). The mechanized body is one of the key
symbols of the film, with two set pieces built around the uncomfortable
meeting of body and technology. The first features an automatic feeding
device to which the worker is strapped and fed by robot arms, with the
result that the meal is smeared all over Chaplin’s face and clothes, as if
he were an infant in a high chair. The second involves Chaplin’s co-
worker becoming stuck in the enormous cogs of a machine while
Chaplin tries to feed him his packed lunch. In both predicaments,
something particularly human—mealtimes, with their array of cultural
meanings, rituals, and strong associations of need and sensual enjoy-
ment—is marred through the intervention of something senseless,
inorganic, and utterly unsympathetic. In fact, missed or frustrated meals
recur throughout the film, underlining the extent to which the Tramp is
always at some distance from bodily satisfaction and that the
availability of sustenance is tied to economic success. The alternative to
faceless frustration is the ‘gamin’, Paulette Goddard, Chaplin’s wife at
the time, who plays a feral female representative of authentic vitality.
After her father is killed in a labour riot, the gamin comes under the
protection of Chaplin who instantly assumes the overlapping roles of
protector and uncertain mate. An absence of obvious sexual interest was
typical of Chaplin’s character, and his thin cane and voluminous
trousers have been taken as symbols of waning male sexuality (Segal,
2001:432). For the new couple, respite from privation takes priority
over sex. In a scene in which Chaplin takes the job of night watchman
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in a department store, the new couple enact a fantasy of leisure and plenty,
characterized by their unfettered access to the luxury goods on the
shelves. A similar bourgeois ‘green world’ idyll is conjured up as the
couple sit on the lawn of a suburban bungalow and imagine life as
middle-class pastoral, where the trees are heavy with fruit and the cows
deliver fresh milk. Ultimately, Chaplin’s slapstick in Modern Times is
the dumbshow of bodily cravings against social denial.
THE FEMALE BODY
The golden age of Hollywood slapstick was not a golden age for female
comedians. Women rarely performed the kind of stunts their male
costars were famous for, and were used instead as figures of erotic
interest, sentiment, or ridicule. The prolific producer of silent-era
slapstick, Mack Sennett, imposed rules for the use of women in his
films according to a descending scale of hilarity that held that old maids
were the funniest targets, mother-in-laws were second, but that it was
absolutely forbidden to make a mother the butt of jokes for fear of
alienating the audience (Dale, 2000:92). Women who occupy the roles
traditionally considered sacrosanct by men, the romantic partner or the
mother, could not be represented as either physical or humorous in
slapstick cinema, whereas the old or the unattractive could. This is
because ‘Comedy positions the woman not simply as the object of the
male gaze but of the male laugh—not just to-be-looked-at but to-be-
laughed at—doubly removed from creativity’ (Gray, 1994:9). The
objectification of the female body in comedy is clearly evident: as the
reward that awaits the hero, or in jokes as the primary locus of taboo, an
imaginative source for the proliferation of obscene and visceral humour
that focuses on sexual attributes.
As we have seen in Chapter 3, a woman’s place in comedy has been
defined by either her sexual identity or her availability for marriage. As
a result, comedy engages in the repetition of negative stereotypes.
Women are handed the role as the ‘handmaid of laughter, not its
creator’, in television programmes such as The Benny Hill Show
(1969–89), where women actors wore ‘revealing frocks…an expression
of perpetual surprise (men are so clever/naughty) and a special way of
moving that jiggles as many separate parts of the body as possible while
covering the minimum ground’ (Gray, 1994:21–22). ‘What unites the
narrow spectrum of female types in the traditional modes of popular
British comedy’, writes Lorraine Porter, ‘is their a priori definition by
physicality and sexuality: the tart or dumb blonde by her
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over-determined sexuality, or her excess of sexual difference, and the
tyrant or spinster by her absolute asexuality, or her lack of sexual
difference’ (Porter, 1998:70). While we might consider that the
‘spinster’ or other unattached women often represent a more sinister
threat of sexual otherness, rather than the negation of sexual difference,
Porter correctly identifies the female body as the genesis of woman’s
place in comedy. A sanitized version of this phenomenon results in the
virtual elision of the female body in the pleasant but asexual Anglo-
Saxon wives and mothers of early TV sitcom. In 1952, for example, the
American show I Love Lucy was unable to refer to pregnancy, even
though its star Lucille Ball was heavily pregnant and the show featured
an episode in which Lucy was delivered of a son (Horowitz, 1997:30).
In this, the treatment of women speaks not so much of a risible and
caricatured sexuality, but a fear of female corporeality and the
reproductive consequences of male fantasy. There is a long tradition of
conduct literature and etiquette books instructing women to control
themselves and to be deferential and remain largely silent. Wit in
women, while common, was to be discouraged and seldom displayed in
public. John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774),
warns that,
Wit is the most dangerous talent you can possess. It must be
guarded with great discretion and good nature, otherwise it will
create you many enemies. Wit is perfectly consistent with
softness and delicacy; yet they are seldom found united. Wit is so
flattering to vanity, that they who possess it become intoxicated,
and lose all self-command.
(quoted in Burney, 1998:341–342)
One is reminded of Jane Austen’s Emma, sharply reprimanded by Mr
Knightley for making a joke at the expense of the meek Miss Bates
(Austen, 1987:368). Gregory’s equation of wit and vanity repeats a
misogynist commonplace that women are prone to narcissism, and will
succumb to it as easily as Eve did to temptation. The connection
between humour and moral suspicion has existed since the earliest
writings of Christianity. Joseph Addison mentions that he once heard a
sermon on the belief that ‘laughter was an effect of original Sin, and
that Adam could not laugh before the Fall’ (Addison and Steele, 1979,
vol. 2:237), while Baudelaire held that ‘Laughter is Satanic; it is
therefore profoundly human’ (Baudelaire, 1992:148).
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Women have been systematically denied the power to be funny for a
number of cultural reasons. First, there is the often-repeated opinion
that women are not as naturally funny as men due to the belief that
comedy is boisterous and aggressive and therefore temperamentally
unsuited to women. A product of this is the perceived ghettoization of
women’s comedy and the belief that female comedians only discuss
‘women’s’ themes—relationships, shopping, and menstruation, for
example—whereas male topics are thought to be unbounded and
therefore to have universal appeal. Second, if women are seen to be
funny, then this is thought to be a function of the genre rather than the
qualities of the performer; as Leslie Ferris says, ‘the more
symbolic…“woman” becomes, the less she herself is and can be
culturally creative’ (Ferris, 1990:29). In addition, female roles in
comedy are limited and limiting and are often misinterpreted as
evidence of the limitations of female humour. Most pervasively,
comedy is culturally associated with a degree of sexual openness
deemed inappropriate for women. Regina Barreca, who writes
extensively on women and comedy, remarks that,
In communities throughout the world…women who tell jokes are
regarded as sexually promiscuous. The connection between
humor and sexual invitation is made up of many links, among
them the thought that it takes a certain ‘fallen’ knowledge to make
a joke. Women in some Greek and Italian villages, for example,
are considered less than virtuous if they so much as laugh aloud in
mixed company. Only old women—or women who are somehow
outside the sexual marketplace—are permitted to make lewd
remarks.
(Barreca, 1991:50)
The laws of deportment, etiquette, and sexual propriety, therefore,
traditionally discourage woman’s humour as it gives cause to suspect
their virtue. Not only is the intimation of forbidden knowledge
worrying, the effect of laughter upon the body is a contributing factor to
the equation of women’s humour with sexual threat as it dissolves good
posture, contorts the face, causes physical abandon, and produces a loud
noise. Laughter shatters the illusion of women as quiet and poised and
reveals them as fearfully bodily and biological creatures. The horror of
the exposed female body threatens to debase the ideals of beauty and
romance transposed onto women by men, as in Jonathan Swift’s poem,
‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ (1730), where the voyeur Strephon cannot
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believe ‘Such order from confusion sprung/Such gaudy tulips raised
from dung’ (Swift, 1967: ll. 141–142).
The comic abjection of the female body and its foundation in cultural
gender bias can be seen in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.
This city comedy features a scene in which three puritan ‘gossips’
attend a christening, get drunk, and wet themselves. Gail Kern Paster has
shown how this scene, and the play’s overall attention to urinary tropes,
draws together a number of patriarchal assumptions about female vocal,
sexual, and physical ‘incontinence’ that locate cultural views of
femininity in medical discourse. Early modern theories of sexual
difference believed that men were essentially ‘hotter’ than women,
accounting for their supposedly active dispositions and external genitals.
By contrast, women’s relative coolness and supposedly idle lives made
them considerably more ‘watery’. This medical fact produced a series
of associations connecting women with water, especially the sense of a
woman as a vessel whose impermeability or otherwise was an allegory
for her chastity and moral value. The puritan gossips are therefore
‘leaky’ women: their unrestrained talking shows their lack of discipline,
reinforced by their weak bladders. ‘The female characters of A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside’, writes Paster, ‘reproduce a virtual symptomatology
of woman which insists on the female body’s moisture, secretions, and
productions as shameful tokens of uncontrol’ (Paster, 1993:52). That
much of the play’s action takes place during Lent draws out the
iniquities of character by emphasizing their total lack of abstinence and
physical denial.
There are, of course, generations of female comedians who, while
often uncelebrated, have been extremely able physical comedians, as
Morwenna Banks and Amanda Swift’s history of women in music hall
shows (Banks and Swift, 1987). Of the better-known examples of
physical comedy written and performed by women, Jennifer Saunders’s
Absolutely Fabulous (1992–96) has been the most prominent of recent
years. In the double act of Patsy and Edina, Saunders personifies the
pretensions of the publicity and fashion industries and the hedonism and
egomania that accompany them. The grotesque physicality of this pair,
who are so penetrated by the contradictory and dictatorial demands of
fashion that they have become utterly misshapen, ridicules the beauty
worship to which they are slavishly subject, which in its purest form
demands that women subjugate their bodies entirely to become demure
and non-corporeal. The satire of the industry and its vacuous beliefs is
literally performed on the bodies of the women, in the garish and poorly
judged clothes they wear, in Patsy’s promiscuity, Edina’s immaturity,
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and the pair’s drunkenness. All of these are clearly forms of
incontinence, castigating women for cherishing inappropriate ideas
about themselves and inverting the generation gap. Women are not
being universally chastised, however, but rather these individuals are
singled out for the vacuity of their values and their elevation of ideals
that ask women to conform to unattainable standards of perfection.
Absolutely Fabulous’s frank discussion of sex and the body is part of a
broader movement of women writers who ‘are creating characters who
realize a much fuller and more troublesome range of bodily possibilities’
(Carlson, 1991:250). Certainly in the 1990s, a number of female
comedians came to prominence whose material dealt with their identity
as women, and the social, physical, and sexual expectations placed upon
them. Jo Brand, for example, has built a career on challenging male
views of appropriate female behaviour, and media that perpetuate a
male ideal of femininity:
if a Martian come down to earth and just had to watch telly and
read magazines to find out what women were like he’d think that
they were all blonde and 25 with big tits…. Also he would think
they were never rude and always looked nice, they always
deferred to men, a lot of the time. Obviously there are exceptions
to that on television, but I’m saying that’s the general essence of
it. So I like not to be like that.
(Brand, in Wagg, 1998:122)
A number of performers and television shows testify to the fact that
comedy written and performed by women successfully occupies
a mainstream position in twenty-first-century popular culture. However,
this cannot be simply accredited to tastes changing over time, but is
rather the fruit of the concerted political efforts of feminism since the
1960s. Clearly, comedy is not immune to ideology but is saturated in it.
As we have seen, the use of the body in comedy is derived from
normative cultural concepts of bodily deportment and physical beauty.
As such it reflects dominant ideological codes, but, as Jo Brand and
others demonstrate, it can also be the vehicle that challenges them
through parody, satire, and ridicule. In order to better understand the
ideological battles that have been fought through humour, we should
therefore consider further the relationship of comedy to politics.
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POLITICS
Humour is an aspect of freedom, without which it cannot
exist at all.
Malcolm Muggeridge
One of the less traumatic but nevertheless noticeable effects of the
events of 9/11 was the voluntary moratorium on humour that immediately
followed it in the American media. As a reaction to the horror of that
day, intolerance for joking and an extreme sensitivity to the
inappropriateness of laughter became a further way of emphasizing the
extent of the tragedy. Some commentators were even moved to see 9/11
as occasioning the demise of certain types of humour: Newsday
columnist James Pinkerton, for example, wrote of it as a ‘crushing
defeat for irony, cynicism and hipness’ in America. Certainly, there
were none of the poor taste jokes that followed hard on the heels of the
Challenger disaster (1986), the King’s Cross fire (1987), or the
explosion on the Piper Alpha oil platform (1988). In the weeks after the
attacks, the nightly talk shows of David Letterman and Jay Leno stayed
off the air, and when they returned they returned without their opening
monologues. The suspension of humour was temporary, of course, and
within two weeks the 26 September issue of the satirical newspaper The
Onion carried the headline ‘God Angrily Clarifies “Don’t Kill” Rule’.
Shortly thereafter an explicit command to laugh again came from
Rudolph Giuliani, the Mayor of New York, who during a charity
opening in October told the crowd ‘I’m here to give you permission to
laugh. If you don’t I’ll have you arrested’. In time, the ability to laugh
became symbolic of the resilience of Americans in general and New
Yorkers in particular, with the freedom to laugh being held up as a
defining feature of American democracy. Laughter—the pleasure,
dissent, and first amendment freedom to express oneself freely that it
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seems to assume—came to stand in opposition to the fundamentalist
dogmas and joyless religious strictures that were believed to
characterize those responsible for the attacks. The US comedian Lewis
Black, whose routine takes the form of exasperated commentaries on
current affairs, puts this idea most succinctly when he argues that ‘the
terrorist is a person without humour at all’ (Black, 2003). Can we
therefore imply a direct connection between the freedom to laugh and
the right to live freely? What is the nature of the relationship between
humour and freedom, and how does politics colour the world of
comedy?
The philosopher of humour, John Morreall, believes that a resilient
sense of humour is an intrinsic defence against tyranny. ‘The person
with a sense of humour can never be fully dominated, even by a
government which imprisons him,’ he writes, ‘for his ability to laugh at
what is incongruous in the political situation will put him above it to
some extent, and will preserve a measure of his freedom—if not of
movement, at least of thought’ (Morreall, 1983:101). A similar idea is
found in Lord Shaftesbury’s Sensus Communis (1709), where humour
offers a release from the frustrations of social justice, and a nation’s
appetite for comedy is formed in direct proportion to the degree of
political oppression at work there. Discussing the ‘spiritual Tyranny’ of
Italy, he writes that,
the greatest of Buffoons are the ITALIANS: and in their Writings,
in their freer sort of Conversations, on their Theatres, and in their
Streets, Buffoonery and Burlesque are in the highest vogue. ’Tis
the only manner in which the poor cramp’d Wretches can
discharge a free Thought…. The greater the Weight is, the bitterer
will be the Satir. The higher the Slavery, the more exquisite the
Buffoonery.
(Shaftesbury, 1988:141)
Arguably the notion of humour as an inherent expression of freedom
is over-romanticized, as it is possible to imagine circumstances or
hardships where laughter offers no comfort. Nevertheless, humour has
been demonstrably policed or punished by many governments who see
it as a form of subversion. In 1737, the fear of ridicule prompted Sir
Robert Walpole to introduce the Licensing Act censoring the theatre and
its satirical attacks on his government. Hitler ‘was so wary of the danger
of humour to the Third Reich that he had special “joke courts” set up
for, among other things, punishing people who named their dogs and
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horses “Adolph’” (Morreall, 1983:102). In 1935, the Berlin cabaret
comedian Werner Finck was imprisoned in a concentration camp for a
sketch that parodied limitations on the freedom of speech under Nazism
(London, 2000:34). In Soviet Russia it was strictly forbidden to publish
satire that criticized the party or its officers—a crime punishable by
imprisonment in labour camps. In the United States during the 1950s,
the investigations of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Committee on
Un-American Activities, established to root out communist
sympathizers and treasonous plots at home, drove humorists
underground for fear of blacklisting or incarceration. In 1952, Charlie
Chaplin’s uncontroversial film Limelight was singled out for
McCarthyite suppression. Limelight was apolitical, but the millionaire
Chaplin, who had always retained his British citizenship, was thought to
hold too much sympathy for the workers. Chaplin was refused re-entry
to the United States until he had appeared in front of the Immigration
Board of Inquiry to answer questions of a ‘political nature and of moral
turpitude’. He resettled in Switzerland and returned to the USA only
once to receive an Oscar in 1972 (Boskin, 1997:75–76). Comedy might
side with freedom of speech in these examples, the laughers against
paranoid and totalitarian regimes, but it is equally the case that comedy
can be used in the service of repression, what Christopher Wilson calls
the ‘cryptic conservative’ (Wilson, 1979:226). The denigration of
difference found in racist and sexist comedy, for example, reinforces
and validates a discourse of power that relies on the systematic
humiliation of targeted groups to secure its own sense of identity. In
Albert Cook’s view ‘comedy is approval, not disapproval, of present
society; it is conservative, not liberal’ (quoted in Carlson, 1991:15).
Clearly Cook overstates the case, but the question of what we laugh at,
and how it is censored or condoned by authority, is a highly politicized
area, and comedy can be the site of manifest ideological struggle.
COMEDY AND THE STATE: FROGS AND
BRASS EYE
In its earliest form, comedy engages with politics and the state.
Aristophanic comedy, for example, frequently defames identifiable
Athenian public figures and derides their policies. Each of Aristophanes’
eleven surviving plays is broadly based on a political theme pertinent to
Athenian institutions and democracy, or individuals within the polis.
Abuse that we would now consider libellous was a fundamental part of
the comedy, with named officials, military officers, and prominent
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citizens all insulted in considerable detail. Given the level of communal
participation with Greek drama and huge attendance at the annual
Dionysia, Aristophanic dissent would have been widely broadcast. This
responsibility or function appears to have constituted part of the identity
of the playwright, and textual evidence makes it clear that Aristophanes
imagined himself as the conscience of the people, exposing corruption
and political mismanagement and ridiculing the offenders. As the
Chorus of The Acharnians says,
He’ll carry on impeaching
Every abuse he sees, and give much valuable teaching,
Making you wiser, happier men. There won’t be any diddling
Or flattery or bribes, or any other kind of fiddling,
Nor will you drown in fulsome praises, such as all the rest
Bestow on you: he thinks his job’s to teach you what is best.
(Aristophanes, 1973:78)
In all likelihood, this passage was written in response to events of the
previous year, when The Babylonians, a play now lost, resulted in
Aristophanes’ probable conviction for slandering the city in the
presence of foreigners. This is probably the first time that comedy claims
for itself the privilege of licence, or of operating somewhere beyond the
law.
The nature of political commentary in Aristophanes tells us that his
work was conceived as a deliberate intervention in affairs of state. At
the beginning of his career, Athens was a powerful and democratic city
under the leadership of the popular and charismatic Pericles (c. 495–429
BC). Athens’s success threatened its neighbour Sparta, and in 431 BC,
the two cities entered into wars that would last intermittently for twenty-
six years and result in the eventual surrender and subjugation of Athens
in 405 BC. Throughout this period, Aristophanes maintains consistently
pacifist sentiments and opposes the hardships and loss of freedoms
brought about by lengthy conflict. Towards the end of his career,
condemnations and caricatures of politicians are coupled with a new
nostalgia for pre-war Athens and a lament for the depletion of the ideals
of democracy. In Frogs, written only a few months before the final
surrender of the Athenians, the god Dionysus is found mourning the
recent deaths of the tragic poets Euripides and Sophocles, and lamenting
the absence of good writers in Athens. With his servant Xanthias, he
disguises himself as Heracles and travels into Hades to recover
Euripides and return him to the upper world. In the underworld he
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presides over a poetical contest between Euripides and the older poet
Aeschylus, and on balance, the high-minded, old-fashioned verse of
Aeschylus is preferred over the newer style of his opponent, and so
Aeschylus is reinstated to life. Frogs therefore insists upon the
importance of literature to the spiritual life of the nation and affirms
conservative poetical values. We can see this as an assertion of the
centrality of drama to political and cultural discourse, with comedy as
the only literary form able to enlist fantasy and disregard boundaries as
a means of retrieving lost ideals.
Even though Aristophanic comedy is immersed in political themes, it
is not necessarily a vehicle for dissent and political change. Criticism is
divided between those who read his comedy as a profound engagement
with the issues of public life and those who see him as a professional
comedian getting laughs from the humiliation of authority figures. To
support this latter argument, critics point to the context of comic drama
within the two annual dramatic festivals, the Lenaea and the Dionysia.
Adopting an approach familiar from new historicism, the argument cites
the loosening of manners and mores during festival time, and the
ritualistic centrality of raillery and abuse in the kômos as the principal
motivation for apparently political humour. The insults of Aristophanes
are therefore part of the same formula as phallic worship and farce, and
their political relevance is a secondary effect. In Stephen Halliwell’s
words, this ‘is not an evasion of standards, but rather an institutionalized
and culturally sanctioned exemption from them’ (Halliwell, 1984:19).
According to this view, comedy is by its very nature as politically
impotent as it is apparently permissive.
The question of whether or not comic form automatically reduces the
political potential of comic content was raised by the scandal involving
the broadcast of a Brass Eye special about the media treatment of
paedophiles. The programme, shown on Channel 4 on 26 July 2001, co-
written by and starring Chris Morris, was a parody of a current affairs
programme. Each episode in the series satirized media sensationalism,
poor journalism, and the Irresponsibility of tabloid practices in a jaded
media market. To expose the culture of sound bites and ubiquitous
celebrity comment, politicians and media figures were asked to
condemn fictional issues or make on-camera appeals in support of
invented campaigns. In this episode, the singer Phil Collins was filmed
wearing a ‘Nonce Sense’ campaign T-shirt, while the radio DJ Dr Fox
was seated in front of a dead shellfish, saying, ‘Genetically, paedophiles
have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you or me…
it is scientific fact’. Reactions to the programme were fierce. Culture
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Secretary Tessa Jowell spoke directly to the head of Channel 4 to voice
her concern and try to elicit a guarantee that the programme would never
be repeated. The Home Office minister Beverley Hughes branded the
show ‘unspeakably sick’, and the Home Secretary David Blunkett called
it ‘not remotely funny’, although both later admitted that they had not
seen it. The Daily Mail columnist Simon Heffer described it as ‘the most
grievous breach of taste I have ever witnessed on TV, and a programme
that only a small proportion of the psychologically sick could have
found enjoyable’ (Daily Mail, 28 July 2001). While upholding the
channel’s right to free speech, the Independent Television Commission
forced Channel 4 to broadcast an apology two months later, after it
became clear that Brass Eye was the most complained about television
programme in British broadcasting history. Clearly, it was the opinion of
many that comedy had no business with such a topic.
This particular episode of Brass Eye was conceived in response to the
reductive and incendiary treatment of the issue of paedophilia in the
British media. The summer of 2000 saw a series of riots involving
antipaedophile protestors distressed at the presence of men they
believed to be abusers living freely in their neighbourhoods. Such
actions were in part inspired by the News of the World that had been
running a series of articles naming alleged offenders and including
some details of their whereabouts. As its target was the media, the
issues of paedophilia themselves were not considered, which
undoubtedly proved to be the most provocative characteristic of the
programme, as it appeared to lack any sentimentality for children, or
reiterate any familiar expressions of the sanctity of childhood as a state
of being. Neither did it temper its attack on publicity-hungry celebrities
and politicians with an unambiguous statement in support of the victims
of abuse. Many read these omissions as signs of fatal ambiguity, but one
suspects that demands for overt statements of authorial intent, or the
refusal to permit one aspect of the issue to be separated from the others,
would have been unnecessary had the programme treated a different
subject. As co-writer David Quantick said, ‘I think a lot of people
complained because it had the word paedophilia in the title and that a
lot of complaints seemed to be related to a show that didn’t go out’
(Guardian, 30 July 2001). Much of the opposition to the show now
seems to have been sparked by its enunciation of a culturally volatile
term that provokes instantaneous suspicion every time it is uttered
outside of the condemnatory discourse designed by the media. Yet for
the representatives of the government to comment on the content of a
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comedy show demonstrates that not all issues are covered by a blanket
licence granted to comedy to speak out of turn.
SATIRE
Brass Eye’s defence was built entirely upon its self-identification as
satire. While claiming that something is satirical does not exempt it from
criticism, it does imply a parodic tone that should not be confused with
a straightforward correspondence with the author’s views. Satire exists
all over the media, and is by no means an exclusive effect of comedy,
but it is the most directly political of comic forms and the one that has
caused the majority of censorious government interventions. Satire aims
to denounce folly and vice and urge ethical and political reform through
the subjection of ideas to humorous analysis. In the best instances, it takes
its subject matter from the heart of political life or cultural anxiety, re-
framing issues at an ironic distance that enables us to revisit
fundamental questions that have been obscured by rhetoric, personal
interests, or realpolitik. Michael Moore’s satirical documentary on US
gun laws, Bowling for Columbine (2002), had an enormous impact on
audiences and provoked fierce criticism from conservative groups, and
Moore was both cheered and booed when the film received an Oscar.
As for fictional works, Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 film, Dr Strangelove; or,
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is an excellent
example of how satire can ask a question that has been dismissed by the
establishment as naive, but remains absolutely crucial to the future of
humanity. Kubrick’s film is the story of an insanely paranoid American
general who initiates a nuclear strike on Russia to prevent them from
stealing his bodily fluids. Russia launches a counter-strike, and both
governments try to recall their planes, but one gets through and drops a
hydrogen bomb on the Russian base at Laputa, named for one of Swift’s
lands in Gulliver’s Travels. Dr Strangelove therefore asks a perfectly
reasonable but basic question: are our military leaders and their fail-safe
systems competent enough to prevent a devastating nuclear accident? In
the character of the psychotic ex-Nazi Strangelove, it asks if we can
really trust the individuals who lurk behind the anonymity of
government departments. In the wake of President John F.Kennedy’s
assassination, Columbia Pictures delayed releasing the film to avoid
accusations of anti-Americanism. When the film did appear, the
following disclaimer appeared over the title sequence:
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It is the stated position of the United States Air Force that their
safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events as are
depicted in this film. Furthermore, it should be noted that none of
the characters portrayed in this film are meant to represent any
real persons living or dead.
(Kubrick, 1964)
The second half of this statement is not entirely true: President Merkin
Muffley was based on Presidential candidate Adlai Stephenson, and the
monstrous Strangelove is a concoction of various German scientists
whom the USA had adopted in a Faustian bargain, among them the V2
rocket designer Werner von Braun. But the film’s insistence on its
fictionality reveals its acute sensitivity to the potential volatility of its
satire.
Satire is derived from the Latin satura, which means ‘medley’, or
‘hotchpotch’, and also described a type of dish, alluding to its origins in
country festivals and at feasts. Satire is usually categorized according to
the influence of two ancient Roman writers, Horace (65–8 BC) and
Juvenal (AD c. 60–c. 136), often thought of as stylistically opposite.
Horace is gentler, concerned with maintaining moral standards and
wishing to improve the ethics of his contemporaries by suggesting a
point of equilibrium between extremes. His tone is amused but not
scornful, appearing as a spokesperson for common sense, judicious
balance, and ‘telling the truth with a smile’ (Horace, 1959:34). Central
to Horatian satire is a series of contrasts between the country and the
city, ideal and practical ethics, and the demands of public and private
life. In all these, Horace is a poet of moderation, reserving his censure
for those who desire more than they need. Satire VI is typical of
Horace’s modesty and rejection of the ambition that ‘pulls everyone
forward, chained to the wheels/Of her gleaming chariot’. Addressing an
imagined politician, whose own status is derived from his father’s
elevated position, Horace, the son of a freed slave, says,
…if nature arranged for us all
After a specified time to begin life all over,
Choosing parents who suited our fancy, I’d stick with mine
And not go for persons distinguished in public life.
The mob would think me insane, but you, perhaps, wouldn’t,
For being unwilling to shoulder a load I’m not used to.
If I took on this role, I’d straightaway need some more money,
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Need to receive more callers and endure more visits,
Take this friend along or the other, and never go out
By myself or get out to the country…
…In this, and in thousands of other respects,
I am much better off than you, my dear Public Figure.
(Horace, 1959:66–67)
This sense of balance reflects the poet’s own relative investment in the
status quo. He was a part of the literary circle gathered around the
emperor Augustus’ finance minister Maecenas that included Virgil, the
poet of the Aeneid, a privileged group devoted to the Latinization of
Greek poetic forms and the enhancement of Roman poetry. We can also
detect the influence of Stoicism, an Athenian philosophical system
widely adopted in Rome. Stoicism’s chief ethical concern was that
humanity live according to the tenets of nature and reason. As all
animals have needs befitting their nature, such as the need for food,
shelter, and a mate, humanity must live according to these needs, and
the actions that nature has prescribed as ‘appropriate’. But, as humans
are possessed of reason, they can determine the quality of appropriate
actions with greater accuracy and consistency than animals, allowing
them to move beyond simply answering their needs, and enabling them
to act in concert with nature’s prescriptions. To act and understand in
this way is to act virtuously. Thus, while we can see that Horace is not
an explicitly philosophical poet, his satire is concerned with the
spiritual well-being of the individual, achieved through individual
choices and the reconciliation of self with its place in society.
A century later, the satire of Juvenal suggests that Roman life had
changed. Unlike Horace, Juvenal’s work was not popular or widely read
in his own lifetime, in fact, he was not really ‘discovered’ until two and
a half centuries after his death. Juvenalian satire is the satire of saeva
indignatio, or savage indignation, the bitter condemnation of venal and
stupid humanity. Whereas Horace scolds deviance from an essentially
benign human nature, Juvenal starts from the position that vice is at its
highest point and virtue has been virtually extinguished. ‘When was
there ever a time more rich in abundance of vices?’, he asks in his First
Satire, ‘Wealth, in our hearts, is set in the veriest Holy of Holies’
(Juvenal, 1958: 21). Juvenal’s two most influential satires, Satires III
and X, focus on city living and its corruptions. Satire III, ‘Against the
City of Rome’, makes it clear that hypocrisy is necessary for those who
wish to prosper:
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What should I do in Rome? I am no good at lying.
If a book’s bad, I can’t praise it, or go around ordering copies.
I don’t know the stars; I can’t hire out as assassin
When some young man wants his father knocked off for a price;
…
I am no lookout for thieves, so I cannot expect a commission
On some governor’s staff. I’m a useless corpse, or a cripple.
Who has a pull these days, except your yes men and stooges
With blackmail in their hearts, yet smart enough to keep silent?
(Juvenal, 1958:35)
Juvenal enjoyed a particular vogue in the eighteenth century when
English authors rediscovered satirical models as a powerful form of
social commentary. The most influential of these was undoubtedly the
complex Irish writer and divine Jonathan Swift (1667–1745). Swift’s
satire, although difficult to define absolutely, adopts the Juvenalian tone
of bitter indignation, appalled by man’s inhumanity and the greed and
hypocrisy of political and religious factionalism. Swift’s misanthropy is
voiced through the techniques of irony and parody, deploying an urbane
and calming narrative tone to investigate the darkest and most unsettling
topics, and using pre-existing literary modes to convey them. This is
clearly the technique of A Modest Proposal (1729), a short text that
outlines a plan to address ‘the present deplorable state’ of Ireland by
selling babies to be eaten as food (Swift, 1993:2181). A Modest
Proposal is a parody of the political treatises and pamphlets published
in abundance at this time, ventriloquizing the reasonable tone of the
concerned philanthropist. ‘I shall now humbly propose my own
thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection’, writes
the urbane narrator, before telling us that,
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my
acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is
at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food,
whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt
that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
(Swift, 1993:2182)
The ethics of cannibalism and degradations of the Irish under colonial
English rule are entirely flattened amidst the logical computations and
analyses of the humanitarian benefits outlined by the pamphleteer. Such
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appalling obliviousness to the variance between the ‘modest’ proposal
and the consequences of selling one hundred thousand children a year
for meat is typical of the cognitive distance Swift exploits in order to
expose his targets to maximum contempt. Like Juvenal, and indeed like
Brass Eye, Swift offers no counter-argument that can either be
concretely identified with the authorial position or be considered
socially constructive. This has made his satire appeal to widely
disparate groups: both English and Irish nationalists have claimed him as
theirs; the Protestant and Catholic churches see him as a defender of
their faiths; Marxists read in his satire a withering critique of bourgeois
capitalism; and ‘despite his association with misogyny’, Swift has been
celebrated as one of the ‘Fathers of Feminism’ during Women’s History
Month in 1996 (Kelly, 2002:133). ‘Satire’, he wrote in the preface to
The Battle of the Books (1704), ‘is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do
generally discover everybody’s face but their own’ (Swift, 1984:104).
‘ALTERNATIVE’ COMEDY: COMEDIANS AND
COMEDIANS
In 1971, Granada Television first broadcast The Comedians, a simple
and enormously popular show that ran for more than fifty episodes and
countless repeats. The show is notable because its stars, many of whom
had never appeared on television before, came to epitomize a style of
standup comedy that was vilified in an unprecedented politicization and
re-evaluation of comedy that took place in Britain throughout the 1970s
and 1980s, known as ‘alternative comedy’. The Comedians featured a
high turnover of routines, edited into a fast-paced package that broadcast
each comedian telling only one or two jokes. Most of its performers
were seasoned professionals drawn from the privately owned nightclubs
and working men’s clubs run by the Club and Institute Union (CIU). The
comedians of the CIU circuit had an enormous repertoire of formulaic
jokes, material that was often sold in bulk rather than written to order,
and over which individual comedians had no proprietary rights. Much
of this material had an aggressive subtext, expressing in particular
racist, sexist, and homophobic sentiments, such as Bernard Manning’s:
‘There was a plane crashed in Madrid about six month ago, two hundred
Japanese on that plane, broke my fucking heart. Six empty seats there
was’ (Manning, 1993). To a certain degree, the material reflected the
context of the performance, as the style suited a rapid non-narrative
delivery—practical means when coping with large and sometimes
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difficult crowds for whom the comedian was simply one more act on a
variety bill.
In response to comedy of this kind came a new sensitivity to the
practice of joking and its implicit politics. ‘Alternative’ comedians
rejected the easy racism and fast delivery of the gag comic, replacing it
with revised form and content. One of the first and probably the most
articulate formulation of these issues is found in Trevor Griffiths’s play
Comedians (1976). Griffiths, a playwright whose work tackles
questions of class consciousness and left-wing politics, examines the
power of comedy to support prejudices and instruct people in bigotry
through a group of men attending a night class for aspiring comedians
about to perform their debut show. Griffiths alludes to the construction
of jokes in his choice of characters, a proportion of whom belong to the
groups stereotyped by the CIU-style comedians: two Irish labourers, a
Jewish club-owner called Sammy Samuels, Gethin Price, a British Rail
van driver, and a walk-on part by a lost Pakistani called Patel. Their
tutor is Eddie Waters, the retired ‘Lancashire Lad’, a principled Shavian
socialist who believes strongly in the transformative power of comedy.
After warming his students up with a tongue-twister, ‘the traitor
distrusts truth’, Waters matter-of-factly starts to abuse the Irish,
‘flapping hands, stinking of soil and Guinness. The niggers of Europe’,
before doing the same with Jews, ‘Say Jew, say gold’ (Griffiths, 1979:
18–19). While his class laugh embarrassedly and shuffle their feet,
Waters carries on:
Negroes. Cripples. Defectives. The mad. Women…Workers.
Dirty. Unschooled. Shifty. Grabbing all they can get. Putting coal
in the bath. Chips with everything. Chips and beer. Trade Unions
dedicated to maximizing wages and minimizing work. Strikes for
the idle. Their greed. And their bottomless stupidity. Like
children, unfit to look after themselves. Breeding like rabbits, sex-
mad. And their mean vicious womenfolk, driving them on.
Animals, to be fed slops and fastened up at night. (Long pause.) The
traitor destroys the truth.
(Griffiths, 1979:19)
This shopping list of prejudice is intended to shock, a deliberate ploy by
Waters to warn his students away from the easy targets and lazy jibes of
the club comedian. In essence it invokes the spirit of club comedy
without the punchlines, exposing it for a lightly sugared bigoted tirade.
For Waters, the repetition of prejudice in comedy consolidates
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ignorance in the minds of the audience by reinforcing it through
intolerant laughter. Turning laughter on bigotry is, however, the most
positive thing that comedy can do; it should tell the truth, reveal things
for what they are, delivering people from the constraints of prejudicial
ideologies, to become ‘a radical mode of social communication’
(Garner Jr, 1999:133). In this credo, entertainment is secondary to the
redemptive and revelatory function of the ‘true’ joke. ‘We work through
laughter, not for it’, he says,
It’s not the jokes. It’s not the jokes. It’s what lies behind ‘em. It’s
the attitude. A real comedian—that’s a daring man. He dares to
see what his listeners shy away from, fear to express. And what he
sees is a sort of truth, about people, about their situation, about
what hurts or terrifies them, about what’s hard, above all, about
what they want. A joke releases the tension, says the unsayable,
any joke pretty well. But a true joke, a comedian’s joke, has to do
more than release tension, it has to liberate the will and the
desire, it has to change the situation.
(Griffiths, 1979:20, original emphasis)
Comedy retrieves a suppressed truth, but not in purely Freudian terms
as a means of keeping larger repressions in their proper place, but as a
revolutionary force that liberates people from their fear, interrogates
repression, and converts it into positive political energy. ‘Most comics
feed prejudice and fear and blinkered vision’, he says, ‘but the best ones,
the best ones…illuminate them, make them clearer to see, easier to deal
with’ (Griffiths, 1979:23).
Waters’s philosophy contrasts strongly with that of Bert Challoner, a
talent spotter for the clubs and the man who represents the way on to the
circuit. His advice advocates conformity to the style: ‘Don’t try to be
deep. Keep it simple. I’m not looking for philosophers, I’m looking for
comics’ (Griffiths, 1979:33). The abdication of responsibility implied
by Challoner’s view that ‘we’re not missionaries, we’re suppliers of
laughter’, or the logic of the argument that jokes are ‘only’ jokes, is the
consumerist fallacy that Griffiths wishes to condemn in this play
(Griffiths, 1979:33). Waters sees a direct relationship between racist
humour and the logic of fascism. Recalling a visit to a German
concentration camp while in the army entertainment corps ENSA,
Waters finds a horrific correspondence between jokes and the brutality
of anti-Semitism. ‘In this hell-place’, he says, he saw ‘a special block,
“Der Straf-bloc”, “Punishment Block”. It took a minute to register, I
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almost laughed, it seemed so ludicrous. Then I saw it. It was a world
like any other. It was the logic of our world…extended…. And I
discovered…there were no jokes left. Every joke was a little pellet, a
final solution’ (Griffiths, 1979:64). In this obscene absurdity, that those
incarcerated in a concentration camp should have a special place
reserved for further punishment, as if such a thing were possible, he
sees the cruelty of the joke and the perversity of the camp are cut
from the same cloth, different in degree, but not in kind (Garner Jr,
1999:141).
Having established the insidiousness of club comedy, one is
presented with the problem of what a responsible, inclusive, and
liberating comedy might look like. Act 2 of Comedians tries to think
this through via the performances of the students. Here the theatre
audience takes the place of the audience in the club, a device that
relocates the theatre patrons and places them in, one imagines, largely
unfamiliar surroundings and dares them to laugh at the acts they are
about to see. The first student, Mick Connor, appears to follow Waters’s
advice. His routine is drawn from his background, with material on the
Catholic confession, the prurience of priests, and the inconsistencies of
sex and faith. Connor seems at least to be confronting his fears, even
including a rather standard joke about the IRA, which in his mouth
comes across as an anxious gag about stereotypes and the violence that
plagues his country. Sammy Samuels, who has already signalled his
ambition to play the ‘tops’, begins his routine in similar fashion with
comment on his Jewish upbringing. Seeing Challoner entirely unmoved
breaks his nerve and sends him into a routine that targets the Irish, West
Indians, feminists, homosexuals, and sexual assault. The Ulsterman
George McBrain follows the same path, although his is marked by a
deep misogyny that appears in the refrain ‘my wife, God, she’s a slut’.
Samuels and McBrain, predictably, are the only students signed up by
Challoner to play the clubs. The centrepiece of act 2, and the entire
play, is Gethin Price’s routine, a bizarre and aggressive act that owes
more to Grock and Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty than to Frank
Randle, the northern comic he purports to idolize. Price is clearly the
most artistically gifted and ideologically motivated of the comedians,
yet he produces work that is dramatically out of place in the club setting
and stretches the definition of comedy until it is entirely
unrecognizable. He enters whiteface in denim jacket and boots, ‘half
clown, half this year’s version of bovver boy’ (Griffiths, 1979:48). The
act begins with a piece of mime, setting fire to a violin bow, and
crushing the violin underfoot. His first words sum up the violence and
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frustration that characterize him and his routine: ‘Wish I had a train. I
feel like smashing a train up. On me own. I feel really strong. I wish I
had a train’ (Griffiths, 1979:49). After a complicated series of kung fu
exercises, a couple of mannequins are brought on, a male and a female,
dressed for a night at the theatre. We imagine them waiting for a taxi as
Price enthusiastically greets them, before it becomes apparent that the
couple have nothing to say to him: ‘Been to the match, have we? Were
you at t’top end wi’lads? Good, wannit? D’you see Macari? Eh? Eh?
(Silence.) P’raps I’m not here. Don’t you like me? You hardly know
me. Let’s go and have a pint, get to know each other’ (Griffiths, 1979:
49). Through the disjointed and coarse dialogue, Price conveys the
inarticulacy and anger he perceives in the working-class male,
marginalized by middle-class society and reduced to expressing himself
through violence and sexual aggression; becoming, in fact, a stereotype
of the prejudices that define his class. His routine does include two
standard jokes, one sexual, one racial, but both are delivered maniacally
and to the dummies rather than the audience. In this context, they seem
like desperate and pathological symptoms of rage, rather than
pleasurable social exchanges. Towards the end of the routine, Price
offers the lady a flower:
Here. (He takes a flower out of his pocket, offers it to them.) For
the lady. No, no, I have a pin. (Pause. He pins the flower—a
marigold—with the greatest delicacy between the girl’s breasts.
Steps back to look at his work.) No need for thanks. My pleasure
entirely. Believe me. (Silence. Nothing. Then a dark red stain,
gradually widening, begins to form behind the flower.) Aargh,
aagh, aagh, aagh…(The spot shrinks slowly on the dummies,
centring finally on the red stain. PRICE’s ‘aaghs’ become short
barks of laughter. Innocence.) I wonder what happened. P’raps it
pierced a vein.
(Griffiths, 1979:51)
This disturbing image, followed by a simple rendition of the socialist
anthem the ‘Red Flag’, is an explicit expression of the militant subtext
of Price’s act, where revolutionary politics are confusingly mixed with
aggression and sexual threat. While Challoner can only describe it as
‘repulsive’, Eddie Waters calls it ‘brilliant’, but the final discussion
between Price and Waters reveals considerable tensions between the
two men. Price is full of revolutionary anger, while Waters retains faith
in political truth and social redemption. Yet something has been
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satisfied by Price’s iconoclastic performance. Politics, commitment, and
the articulation of experience have all been drawn upon to produce a
genuine and truthful event. No conventional description would call it
comedy, however. There is not one single laugh in the fictional club,
and one doubts there are many in the theatre either. Is it possible, then,
to have entertaining comedy on these terms?
In 1979, amateur promoter Peter Rosengard set up the Comedy Store
in a strip club in London’s Soho district. This club proved to be
important in the development of modern British comedy as it served as
a laboratory for the experiment presciently outlined in Griffiths’s play.
In Oliver Double’s terms, it brought ‘a handful of comic revolutionaries
together, [and] gave them a stage on which they could learn to be
funny’ (Double, 1997:165–166). Alternative comedy was overtly
political from the start, informed by a punk ethos that dominated British
counter-culture in the mid to late 1970s, it defined itself against the
expectations of mainstream performance, and encouraged people to
write their own material, set up their own gigs, and perform without the
need for agents or the approval of the concert secretaries of the CIU.
Looking back across fifteen years of alternative comedy, Guardian
comedy critic William Cook described its ideals in terms reminiscent of
the ethics of Eddie Waters, as a form that celebrated ‘similarity, rather
than condemning difference. The best of it hits hard and it hurts, but it’s
philanthropic not misanthropic, a bridge and not a wall. Above all
Alternative Comedy reveals, via laughter, something of the real life of
the comedian’ (Cook, 1994:16). One of the first casualties of the new
comedy was the joke-form itself, which had become guilty by
association. Alternative comedy deliberately parodied and derided the
idea of ‘jokes’ as reactionary and dull, as in Peter Richardson and Nigel
Planer’s anti-joke ‘what’s yellow and goes into the toilet? Piss’ (Sayle,
1988). While many routines now seem hopelessly naive, the movement
had the momentum and the talent to bring an entire generation of
performers to the attention of the public. Most important was the work
it did raising awareness of the prejudice that lurked in much mainstream
comedy, and in making audiences increasingly intolerant of it.
However, alternative comedy is no longer the iconoclastic force it once
was, and has managed to retain only the vaguest of liberal consciences
since it became big business and was incorporated into radio and
television. The market dominance of the watered down alternative
comedy has also had the peculiar effect of allowing comics like Bernard
Manning to portray himself as the victim of censorship and martyr to
political correctness. Manning’s publicity now presents him as the man
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they could not gag, a modern appropriation of clown who dares to say
the unsayable. This is presented as an authentically working-class
position, dispossessed by the uptight nanny state: ‘Can’t stop us
laughing can they?’, he says in an aside, ‘It’s the only thing we’ve got
left’ (Manning, 1993).
THE END OF LAUGHTER? THREE HOLOCAUST
COMEDIES
The self-evidently inappropriate proximity of the word ‘comedy’ to
‘Holocaust’ raises a question: are there times when comedy and politics
must not mix? While our instincts tell us that comedy has no place in
such appalling events, several attempts have been made to treat
Holocaust themes within a context that is either structurally or tonally
comedic. The results are of course varied, but the interaction of two
categories that common sense tells us are diametrically opposed can be
extremely interesting, both in terms of what possible benefits, if any,
comic elements bring to an understanding of history, and also where the
practicable boundaries of comedy’s much-vaunted freedom to flaunt
taboos might lie. Allusions to the Holocaust have been used by a
number of Jewish comedians as an emblem of the limits of bad taste or
wrong-headedness many times, suggesting that even thinking about it is
fraught with guilt and difficulty. The comically abysmal musical
‘Springtime for Hitler’ at the heart of Mel Brooks’s film The Producers
(1968), devised to defraud the insurance company with a failed
Broadway show, suffers a reversal when it turns out that the theatre-
going public love Nazi-themed musicals. The fraudsters, the critics, and
the Broadway audience are all shown to be appalling philistines. An
episode of Seinfeld saw Jerry censured by his parents and his
girlfriend’s father after they were spotted kissing in the cinema during
Schindler’s List (1993). In Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen’s character
Alvy refuses to see any movies other than the four-hour documentary on
Nazi-occupied Paris, The Sorrow and the Pity, because ‘everything else
is such garbage’ (Allen, 1977). With this comment he demeans its force
by putting Marcel Ophüls’s film in the same category as the average
Hollywood blockbuster, appreciable according to standard popular
criticisms by, for example, the credibility of its plot, the thrillingness of
effects, and so on. In all three of these examples, the Holocaust is used
as the absolute signifier of seriousness contrasted against light-
headed concern for entertainment, daily life, and diminutive but nagging
desires. The Holocaust acts as a grave reminder against which the
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self-centredness of the over-privileged modern bourgeois is made
utterly risible.
Other attempts at considering Holocaust themes in comedy have been
horribly ill-conceived. The American comedian Jerry Lewis directed
and starred in a 1972 film entitled The Day the Clown Cried, a story
about a German circus clown, Helmut Doork, who is arrested for a
drunken impersonation of Hitler and sent to Auschwitz. During his
incarceration he befriends the children of the camp and performs for
them with the hope of bringing some laughter into their lives. At the end
of the film he tries to shield them from their fear by leading them to the
gas chambers, while, the screenplay says, playing the harmonica like the
‘pied piper’. That the film lacked judgement is borne out by the fact that
it remains unreleased. Lewis’s unfortunate project underlines the extreme
difficulty of attempting to treat the subject of the Holocaust without
reducing it to banal sentimentality or simply using it as the backdrop for
clowning. The problems of the meeting of comedy with content of this
kind are obvious. Not only is comedy generically and tonally unsuited
to a treatment of the Holocaust, but there is a structural misfit too.
Comedy concludes with a standardized happy ending, ‘a conscious
superimposition of a formal pattern on material that may until the very
last moment whirl with turbulence’, in Zvi Jagendorf’s phrase, but here
there no question of such a thing (Jagendorf, 1984:43).
Let us consider three films that have attempted to do so with varying
degrees of success and controversy: Charlie Chaplin’s The Great
Dictator (1940), Frank Beyer’s Jakob the Liar (1974), based on the
novel by East German writer Jurek Becker, and remade in America as a
vehicle for Robin Williams in 1999, and Roberto Benigni’s triple Oscar-
winning Life Is Beautiful (1998). While each of these films has a
different strategy for dealing with this jarring incompatibility, none of
them can resist the implied trajectory of comic narrative as a means of
injecting their stories with some optimism and the possibility of future
happiness, even if it exists way beyond the final scene. We see this in the
equation of laughter with hope, and the implication that comedy is the
representative of a caring and inclusive human spirit that cannot be
extinguished by fascism. In The Great Dictator, set in fictional
Tomainia, Hitler look-alike Adenoid Hynkel has risen to power on anti-
Semitic policies and by fermenting international unrest. The film
contrasts Hynkel’s rampant megalomania, revealed in a scene where he
performs a delicate ballet with an inflatable world globe, with the
parallel story of a humble Jewish barber who returns to the ghetto after
several years in hospital suffering from amnesia. Chaplin played both
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Hynkel and the Barber, and the stories move together in order to bring
about a concluding scene in which the Barber, imprisoned for his
religion, escapes from a concentration camp and is mistaken for Hynkel
just as it is time for him to give a speech. Knowing that his life depends
on maintaining the charade, the Barber launches into an impassioned
six-minute plea that closes the movie. From his opening words, the
speech is resolutely anti-dictatorial: ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an
Emperor,’ he says, ‘that’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or
conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible, Jew, gentile,
black man, white. We all want to help one another, human beings are
like that’ (Chaplin, 1940). In response to Nazi militarism, which he
associates with the profiteering of industrialized society, Chaplin asserts
the redemptive qualities of nature and instinct, together with an
idealization of the power of human empathy:
Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with
hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have
developed speed but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that
gives us abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made
us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much
and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More
than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these
qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
(Chaplin, 1940)
As Alan Dale writes, ‘the Barber embodies a concept of insignificance
Chaplin associates with all kinds of worthiness—honesty, hard work,
courtesy, gallantry, the whole load’ (Dale, 2000:47). In the concept of a
society that can be saved by simplicity and considerateness, the Jewish
Barber’s speech demonstrates a clear continuity between Chaplin’s
critique of dehumanizing labour in Modern Times, and what he
perceived as the automatism of Hitler’s fascism, ‘unnatural men,
machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts’ (Chaplin,
1940). Chaplin has abandoned the structure of comedy and the business
of slapstick by this point of the film, as historical circumstances do not
allow for a traditional resolution. However, the implicit optimism of
comedy strongly influences the finale, as the Jewish Barber’s speech is
superimposed over images of dignified Jewish families in pastoral
exile. As sheaves of corn blow in the wind with the promise of a new
tomorrow, Chaplin’s political naivety seems terribly exposed. These
images were utterly hollow for Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
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who, in their 1944 essay ‘The Culture Industry’, felt they gave ‘the lie
to the anti-fascist plea for freedom’ and served ‘to confirm the
immutability of circumstances’ rather than proposing a radically new
direction (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2001:148–149). This would not be
the last time anyone accused Chaplin of inchoate sentimentalism.
Becker’s Jakob the Liar was the first important fictional narrative of
the Jewish wartime experience to come from East Germany (the
German Democratic Republic). The film tells the story of the middle-
aged Jakob, living in the ghetto and forced to work in the freight yard.
One night he is sent to the police station where he accidentally
overhears a radio report of the Russian army’s advance. Given hope by
this news, he tells his friend Kowalski who pressures him to know how
he could possibly have heard a radio in the ghetto. Jakob tells him the
truth, but Kowalski refuses to believe he would have left the police
station alive. Instead, Jakob tells them he has a radio hidden in his
house. Soon, the entire ghetto is coming to him for news, and the more
he prevaricates, the more convinced they become that he has access to
forbidden information (a perfect example of Bergson’s ‘reciprocal
interference of series’). Faced with the choice of either giving his
neighbours hope or telling them the truth, Jakob chooses the former. In
this, and Jakob’s simulation of radio broadcasts to tell his niece fairy
tales, we are asked to condone his fiction as a gift that momentarily
relieves suffering by extending the promise of a happy ending. There is
no happy ending, of course, and the final scene contrasts the journey to
the concentration camp with a fairy tale projected onto the clouds,
unhappily indicating the optimism and intangibility of fiction. For
Sander L.Gilman, Jakob the Liar is one of the few successful humorous
treatments of Holocaust material, because its comic aspects are
expressions of the accidental rather than the precursors of absorption
into a comic resolution. ‘Accident’, he writes,
is the wellspring of comedy and laughter, not because it is the
opposite of tragedy but because it is the instantiation of the
random in life, over which one can only laugh or weep. Becker
provides the ability to do both in Jokob the Liar and made it
possible to use the elicitation of laughter as a means of presenting
the unpresentable, not only in the Shoah, but the randomness of
life.
(Gilman, 2000:304)
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Gilman’s view of Benigni’s film is quite different. Life is Beautiful
ends with the liberation of the camps by the US army, and Joshua, the
little boy who has been saved from brutality by his father’s protective
fiction, is hauled up onto a tank by a friendly soldier, just as his father
predicted. In the concluding deus ex machina that also enables Joshua to
be reunited with his mother, Gilman accuses Benigni of reducing the
topic to fit the demands of form, as ‘Benigni’s promise is that there are
no accidents, that at the end of the comedy the gods in the machine will
arrive to resolve the action and rescue those in danger’ (Gilman, 2000:
304). In the ultimate imposition of comic form, the imperative to fascist
inhumanity is overridden: ‘Benigni’s laughter is proof that whatever
else will happen the promise of the film, the rescue of the child, must
take place. Our expectations are fulfilled, and we feel good about our
laughter’ (Gilman, 2000:304).
The three Oscars and huge box office success of Life is Beautiful
made it the biggest Italian film in history, and it has probably been seen
by tens of millions of people since its release in 1998 (Ezrahi, 2001:
292). For its supporters, Benigni has produced an important recognition
of Italy’s participation in the deportation of Jews, and told a fable of
selfless love and the ability of the spirit to resist the most appalling
oppression. The worst accusations levelled at it insist that it is sanitized,
fabricated, dishonest, and ‘a whitewash of European guilt’ (Ezrahi,
2001:295). In his review of the film published in the November 1998
issue of Time magazine, Richard Shickel argued that the comic
framework of the film amounted to an insult to the actual witnesses of
the Holocaust, writing that ‘its living victims…inevitably grow fewer
each year. The voices that would deny it ever took place remain
strident. In this climate, turning even a small corner of this century’s
central horror into feel-good entertainment is abhorrent. Sentimentality
is a kind of fascism too’ (quoted in Flanzbaum, 2001:281). A similar
degree of outrage was expressed by David Denby in The New Yorker,
who accused Benigni of wanting ‘the authority of the Holocaust without
the actuality’ and of ‘feeling relieved and happy that Life is Beautiful is
a benign form of Holocaust denial’ (quoted in Flanzbaum, 2001:282). It
is easy to see comic structure as a primary cause of this distaste, coupled
with the fact that it was devised and performed by a non-Jewish
comedian, making the film open to accusations of careless optimism
and inauthenticity. Rather than seeking to define some truth of the
Holocaust and Italy’s part in it, the film provides only easy comic
solutions and belief in a Christianized conception of absolution, ‘the
comic as artificial human construct of the universe as it should be’
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(Ezrahi, 2001:307). Ruth Ben-Ghiat argues that Benigni’s film also tries
to deflect some of the attention away from the Holocaust as a
specifically Jewish tragedy through ‘the inclusion of a self-sacrificing
Christian wife [who] affirms that Jews have no monopoly in Italy on the
state of victimhood, even as they remain the most acceptable public
symbols of fascism’s inhumanity’ (Ben-Ghiat, 2001:263). In response
to these criticisms, however, several writers have argued that the way in
which Holocaust history has come to be policed results in any treatment
of it being instantly condemned as facile, with the effect that a number
of valid narratives are dismissed out of hand. Hilene Flanzbaum, for
example, points to a contradiction amongst those who reject Benigni’s
film, because they occupy ‘a paradoxical and infinite regress in which
critics feel obliged to repeat that the Holocaust cannot ever be truly
represented, while at the same time, these very same critics vigorously
complain each time an individual representation insufficiently portrays
the event’ (Flanzbaum, 2001:284). For her, Life Is Beautiful
‘acknowledges at the start that it is a myth, and in so doing, it clearly—
and I believe, more honestly than films that claim historical veracity—
accepts its limitations as a work of art’ (Flanzbaum, 2001:283). As long
as we understand that the film is a fictional construct, Benigni’s
treatment is justified exactly because it does not claim to be an authentic
history, but does other work by placing the issues in an entirely new and
unusual context that has the virtue of reaching an enormous audience.
While not satisfied that the film is entirely innocent of all the
accusations levelled at it, Flanzbaum concludes that, ‘Benigni
accomplishes a great deal when he defamiliarizes the Holocaust enough
to make such viewers feel it all over again’ (Flanzbaum, 2001:283).
Perhaps the question of comedy and politics might be reduced to
questions of this kind, questions of efficacy. When laughter is directed
aggressively, it can be an extremely powerful tool, victimizing its
targets in purely negative terms and reinforcing prejudice. Comedy that
seeks to do the same to tyrannical or prejudicial ideologies, however,
often has to relinquish a reasonable base for its arguments before it
enters the arena. Parody and satire are good for demolishing dogma but
not for constructively offering alternatives to it. Alternative comedy
found itself censoring guilty form to the extent that it struggled to find
material and had to replace blacks and women with red-haired people
and Margaret Thatcher. Holocaust comedies exist within such a
complicated terrain of history, representation, politics, and prejudice that
they become instantly suspect, with the result that both comedy and
politics lose their immediacy and productions become debatable at best
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and ineffective and insulting at worst. Perhaps it is true that comedy has
nothing to offer politics when the project requires something more than
simple derision. Maybe the limited usefulness of comedy in politics is a
function of laughter’s association with ridicule. Let us then turn our
attention to the question of laughter, what it is, and how it is used.
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6
LAUGHTER
Perhaps even if nothing else today has any future, our
laughter may yet have a future.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Satisfactory explanations of laughter have always been notoriously
elusive. As Bergson put it, ‘this little problem…has a knack of baffling
every effort, of slipping away only to bob up again, a pert challenge
flung at philosophical speculation’ (Bergson, 1980:61). Across the
centuries, laughter has been variously understood as vice or cowardice,
as delight caused by surprise, the product of defamiliarization, a means
of averting antisocial conflict, or an extra-linguistic bark signalling the
limits of understanding. Aristotle, noting that laughter is exclusive to
human beings, believed that an infant could not be considered truly
human until it had laughed its first laugh at forty days old. By
acknowledging laughter as essentially human, every discussion of it also
tends to contain an idea of what being human means. A further
phenomenon unifies all theories of laughter: they all take it to be the
manifestation of a perfectly serious urge, process, or function, just like
Dutch historian Johann Huizinga’s theory of the serious importance of
play. Laughter is never just fun, as in all accounts of it the human being
is using their laughter to serve a social, psychological, or physiological
need. This chapter will survey a number of the most prominent theories
of laughter in order to show how this idea, so closely associated with
comedy, has been used as a means of understanding human identity.
CHRISTIAN LAUGHTER
Early Christianity was hostile to laughter. Nowhere does the New
Testament mention Christ laughing, although he twice wept, and
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evidence for his sense of humour is scant. The early church equated
levity and mirth with foolishness and ignorance. Ecclesiastes states that,
The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of
fools is in the house of mirth. It is better to hear the rebuke of the
wise, than for a man to hear the song of fools. For as the crackling
of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool: this also is vanity.
(Ecclesiastes 7:4–6)
Early Christian converts in Rome founded their principles of conduct in
opposition to the luxurious and debauched lives of their pagan masters.
Christian theology actively rewarded simplicity and poverty, and found
virtue in privation and self-control. The abrogation of the body and the
rigid imposition of pious abstinence made physical pleasure suspicious.
In Philippa Pullar’s words, ‘the body had to be broken; it had to be
abused and maltreated, its reactions, sensations and natural functions
became to the Christians a real and terrible neurosis’ (Pullar, 2001:37).
The contrast between Roman and Christian attitudes to laughter is
apparent in the story of St Genesius, a pagan Roman actor and now the
patron saint of comedians. During a performance for the Emperor
Diocletian that parodied the Christian baptism, Genesius received an
angelic visitation that delivered an admonition. His laughter quickly
turned to mortification and servility as he asked forgiveness of his
newly discovered God. Diocletian, who was expecting a laugh, had him
stretched, beheaded, and burnt (Jacobson, 1997:163–164). Laughter,
then, was a vulgar eruption of the body that contained the indecent
excess of paganism and was impudent, raucous, and ill-disciplined:
‘Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance
the heart is made better’ (Ecclesiastes 7:3).
As we saw in Chapter 4, governing the body requires the regulation
and the repression of certain corporeal traits. In early Christianity, it
was conventional to understand the human subject as fundamentally
torn between the animalistic urges of the flesh and the sanctity of a
pious soul. The earliest ascetic condemnation of laughter, authored in the
second century by Clement of Alexandria, conceded that laughter was
human, but urged Christians to restrain it as they might similar bestial
instincts:
For, in a word, whatever things are natural to men we must not
eradicate from them, but rather impose on them limits and
suitable times. For man is not to laugh on all occasions because he
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is a laughing animal, any more than the horse neighs on all
occasions because he is a neighing animal. But as rational beings,
we are to regulate ourselves suitably, harmoniously relaxing the
austerity and over-tension of our serious pursuits, not
inharmoniously breaking them up altogether.
(Clement of Alexandria, 1983:250)
In the process of determining pious deportment, laughter became subject
to the rules of appropriate behaviour and the rational ordinances of self-
control that kept base instincts in check. Clement was particularly wary
of the susceptibility of women to laughter, equating their mirth with
sexual immorality: ‘the discordant relaxation of countenance in the case
of women is called a giggle, and is meretricious laughter’ (Clement of
Alexandria, 1983:250). Ascetic control of the body was clearly troubled
by occasions that might convulse, distort, and overthrow it, and in
women the repercussions might be damnable. Similarly, early monastic
life held laughing to be one of its greatest crimes. As Jerry Palmer
writes:
In the earliest monastic regulations (in the fifth century) laughter
is condemned as the grossest breach of the rule of silence, and
later it is considered a breach of the rule of humility; it is also
considered the greatest dirtying of the mouth, which should be a
filter for good and evil to enter and leave the body; therefore it
must be prevented.
(Palmer, 1994:44)
Both examples, of female reserve and monastic silence, are indicative
of the belief that ‘the more the body was closed against the world, the
more the soul was opened up to God’ (Gilhus, 1997:67).
While the early church made significant attempts to banish and
condemn laughter, the medieval period saw ecclesiastical authorities
drawing it into the liturgical calendar and distinguishing between good
laughter and bad. The enigmatic question of whether or not Jesus had
laughed in his early life enjoyed a vogue in ecclesiastical society, so
much that in the thirteenth century, the University of Paris organized an
annual conference on the subject (Le Goff, 1997:43). In Chapter 2, we
saw how medieval culture made the figure of folly into a universal
symbol of human ignorance. Similarly in medieval morality plays the role
of Vice was given to a clown to better underline the need for folly to be
overcome before Mankind can proceed to Grace. ‘If there were no
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devils to expel, there would be no comedy to enjoy’, writes Howard
Jacobson, adding that, during the medieval period ‘hell remained a
locus for hilarity’ (Jacobson, 1997:151). Stage Hell mouths would
repeatedly provide the entrance for the most amusing comic
entertainers. A remnant of this practice can be seen in the devils chasing
clowns in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1594). Jacobson also
lists a number of Ioculatores Domini, jokers and jesters of God,
canonized holy men, including St Francis of Assisi, who used humour
in their proselytizing (Jacobson, 1997:166). Religious festivals, such as
the Feast of Fools, are further examples of the reconciliation of laughter
with religion. While Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) issued a decree
condemning the Feast of Fools, in pragmatic terms the incorporation of
laughter into worship was a necessity if the church were to extend its
authority over areas of folk belief and folk practices, including the still-
thriving Roman Saturnalia that it had so far failed to assimilate. The
moral equation of laughter with vice remained, but it was now utilized
in ritual as an instructive counterpoint to official discourse that
emphasized human failings and therefore the necessity of spiritual
intervention. In rituals of this kind, laughter serves joyfully to instruct
humility and the distance between the human and the divine. Laughter
in the Middle Ages therefore expressed human folly and postlapsarian
weakness, a liturgically important rite of exorcism. Enid Welsford
argues that the Feast of the Fools should not be thought of as a decline
into idiocy, so much as a demonstration of a subtle intelligence that
understood the antagonisms between riot and ritual as fundamental
aspects of human existence (Welsford, 1935:202). Medieval laughter
was part of creation, it had an exegetical purpose that could find the
truth of the gospel in the pious and the grotesque, rather than through a
rigid, contrasting system of truth and its opposite.
In addition to the metaphysical implications of laughter, there was a
tradition in early modern medicine that stressed its healthful benefits.
Influenced by Hippocrates (c. 460–357 BC), the most celebrated
physician of antiquity, and Democritus (b. c. 460 BC), the ‘laughing
philosopher’, both of whom had encouraged the cultivation of a sense
of humour as a defence against illness and depression, medical men
such as Laurent Joubert (1529–82) and, of course, Rabelais, saw
laughter as a means of maintaining the body’s humoral balance.
Joubert, whose Treatise on Laughter (1560) presents itself as a
scientific investigation, writes that ‘being joyful and ready to laugh
indicates a good nature and purity of blood, [and] thus contributes to the
health of the body and the mind’ (Joubert, 1980:126). After recounting
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three detailed stories about the laughter-provoking actions of monkeys
at the bedside of the dangerously ill, he concludes that ‘the dignity and
excellence of laughter is…very great inasmuch as it reinforces the spirit
so much that it can suddenly change the state of the patient, and from
his deathbed render him curable’ (Joubert, 1980:128).
Bakhtin, apparently inspired by the restorative function attributed to
laughter by early modern science, extends its implications into the
political arena by crediting it with the ability to triumph over oppression:
‘festive folk laughter presents an element of victory not only over
supernatural awe, of the sacred over death; it also means the defeat of
power, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that
oppresses and restricts’ (Bakhtin, 1984:92). Largely silenced by an
official culture that consolidates its power through seriousness,
Bakhtin’s laughter is the popular voice of the people, not only
alleviating the tensions of official ideology, but cutting right through
them and denying their influence. As we shall see shortly, this
conception of laughter as an extra-linguistic challenge to systems of
order is a notion that enjoys some popularity in twentieth-century
criticism.
SUPERIORITY AND INCONGRUITY THEORIES
The superiority theory of laughter states that human beings are moved
to laugh when presented with a person or situation they feel
themselves to be intellectually, morally, or physically above. Bakhtin’s
argument claims that by the sixteenth century a reorganization of
intellectual categories under the auspices of humanism continued to
separate laughter from official culture. This led to a starker demarcation
of the serious and the comic where ‘that which is important and essential
cannot be comical’, and ‘the essential truth about the world and man
cannot be told in the language of laughter’ (Bakhtin, 1984:67). Laughter
was removed from its position in philosophy and turned into scorn,
becoming ‘a light amusement or a form of salutary social punishment of
corrupt and low persons’ (Bakhtin, 1984:67). We can certainly see that
the concept of laughter changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, in a way that imbues it with an ethical significance. Sir Philip
Sidney, for example, remarked that laughter ‘hath only a scornful
tickling’ (Sidney, 1991:68). This attitude is developed further in studies
of rhetoric in the period. Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetoricke
(1567) provides a perfect example of the humanist conception of
laughter. ‘The occasion of laughter’, he writes,
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126 LAUGHTER
and the meane that maketh us merrie…is the fondnes, the
filthiness, the deformitie, and al suche evil behaviour, as we se to
bee in each other. For we laugh always at those thinges, which
either onely, or chiefly touche handsomely, and wittely, some
speciall fault, or fond behavior in some one body or some one
thing.
(Wilson, 1567: f.69, verso)
Laughter is used in rhetoric as a means of besting one’s opponent.
This idea is borrowed directly from Cicero (103–43 BC), the father and
codifier of oratorical arts and hero of the humanists, who writes:
It clearly becomes an orator to raise laughter…merriment
naturally wins goodwill for its author; and everyone admires
acuteness, which is often concentrated in a single word, uttered
generally in repelling, though sometimes in delivering, an attack;
and it shatters or obstructs or makes light of an opponent, or alarms
or repulses him; and it shows the orator himself to be a man of
finish, accomplishment and taste.
(Cicero, 1984:28)
Fritz Gaf writes that Roman laughter was mainly intended to ‘to correct
deviance—in a socially acceptable way’ (Gaf, 1997:31). The
importance of rhetoric in humanism may therefore have had the effect
of replacing medieval conceptions of redemptive, inclusive laughter
with the idea of it as a weapon used in verbal conflict and directed
specifically against failure or weaknesses. Thinking of laughter as a
weapon would therefore allow us to think of it as an ethically
determined tool, one that can be applied to both good and bad ends.
Certainly mockery and ridicule in Tudor and Stuart England were
prevalent means of extending social norms. Michael Bristol tells us that
ridicule is a recognized element in law enforcement, in the
punishment of insubordination and in the everyday feeling of
superiority enjoyed by nobles in respect to their servants.
Laughter is also an important element in the strategies of social
appeasement used by servants in respect of their masters. Self-
abjection and self-ridicule are significant elements in an elaborate
system of deferential gesture and compliment.
(Bristol, 1985:126)
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From this idea, it is not far to ‘superiority theory’, one of the three most
durable explanations of laughter in Western culture. By far the most
famous representative of superiority theory is the seventeenth-century
English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. In truth, Hobbes had little to say
about laughter, but what he did say is quoted in almost every discussion
of the subject, even though his ambiguity towards the topic is clear
when he calls laughter the signal of a ‘passion that hath no name’
(Hobbes, 1840: 45). ‘Laughter’, he wrote in his Human Nature (1650),
‘is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from some sudden conception
of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of
others, or with our own formerly’ (Hobbes, 1840:46). For Hobbes,
laughter is always antagonistic and conflictual, establishing a hierarchy
at the moment of pleasure. In Leviathan (1660), he makes his ethical
objection to this clear when he states that ‘much laughter at the defects
of others is a sign of Pusillanimity’ (Hobbes, 1991:43). Even laughter
that is not immediately directed at an ‘inferior’ person actually present
is structured according to this principle: ‘Laughter without offense,
must be at absurdities and infirmities abstracted from persons, and when
all the company may laugh together’ (Hobbes, 1840:46–47). Clearly,
there are types of humour that depend on a feeling of superiority for
their operation. Racist and sexist jokes, for example, presume an ethnic,
gendered, and intellectual advantage on the part of the teller and his
audience. Yet it is also possible to see that much laughter does not arise
from a feeling of pre-eminence, even one that is suppressed or inverted.
Like the early Christian commentators, Hobbes’s definition belongs to
the tradition that understands laughter operating within a moral
framework that sees laughers as selfregarding and uncharitable.
Superiority theory even became an edict of manners in eighteenth-
century ‘men of quality’ who refused to laugh on grounds of breeding.
In one of his comprehensive letters, Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773)
warns his son that he should be,
never heard to laugh while you live. Frequent and loud laughter is
the characteristic of folly and ill manners…. In my mind nothing
so illiberal, and so ill-bred as audible laughter…how low and
unbecoming a thing laughter is. Not to mention the disagreeable
noise it makes, and the shocking distortion of the face it
occasions.
(Stanhope, 1929:49)
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Here we find the Christian disapprobation of laughter and its fear of
bodily disorder, yet both are overridden by a class consciousness that
sees laughter as the enemy of social distinctions. According to Samuel
Johnson, neither Swift nor Pope could be induced to laugh, and Lord
Froth in Congreve’s The Double Dealer (1694) states, ‘There is nothing
more unbecoming a Man of Quality than to laugh; Jesu, ’tis such a
vulgar expression of the passion! Everybody can laugh’ (Congreve,
1973:7). The class-based rejection of laughter penetrated further than
the fear of appearing vulgar. Addison claimed that laughter ‘slackens
and unbraces the Mind, weakens the Faculties, and causes a Kind of
Remissness, and Dissolution in all the powers of the soul’ (Addison and
Steele, 1979, vol. 2:237–238). That every important household used to
keep a jester is conclusive proof that ‘everyone diverts himself with
some person or other that is below him in Point of Understanding, and
triumphs in the Superiority of his Genius, whilst he has such objects of
derision in his eyes’ (Addison and Steele, 1979, vol. 1:142–143).
Superiority theory was therefore confirmed by the superior members of
society refraining from laughing.
The continuity of superiority theory, and a general disdain for
laughter in elite circles, was eventually challenged in the eighteenth
century by analyses of humour that indicated the importance of pleasure
in laughter over mockery and derision. Superiority theory operates in
the absence of a joke and focuses on physical defects, personal
misfortunes, and social inequality; as such its view of humour is
dictated by grotesque and burlesque forms. The new accent of
eighteenth-century laughter studies highlighted the linguistic formulae
of humour, the operation of verbal triggers, and the juxtaposition of
elements in the production of comic effects. Francis Hutcheson
(1694–1746), professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow,
was an early and effective challenger to the Hobbesian position. Writing
in The Dublin Journal in 1726, Hutcheson attacked the malevolent
theory of laughter remarking that when we laugh there is a ‘great fund of
pleasantry’ (Hutcheson, 1750:7). Hutcheson was keen to prove that
laughter and a sense of the ridiculous ‘is plainly of considerable
moment in human society’ and ‘is exceeding useful to abate our
concerns or resentment’ in matters of small affront or inappropriate
conduct (Hutcheson, 1750:32). Indeed, he found ‘that nature has given
us a sense of the ridiculous as an avenue to pleasure and a remedy for
sorrow’ (Trave, 1960:69). A new generation of writers began to praise
the corrective, admonitory aspects of comedy over its corrosive
qualities. Shaftesbury’s Sensus Communis finds humour a ‘lenitive
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Remedy against Vice, and a kind of Specifick against Superstition and
Melancholy Delusion’ (Shaftesbury, 1988:188). In addition, Hutcheson
makes the elegant point that if laughter were only prompted by a feeling
of preeminence, then it would surely be easier to elicit. ‘Strange!’, he
writes, ‘that none of the Hobbists banish canary birds and squirrels, and
lap-dogs and pugs, and cats out of their houses, and substitute in their
places asses, and owls, and snails, and oysters to be merry upon’
(Hutcheson, 1750:12). In other words, if a person can be moved to
laughter by confirmation of his or her superiority, then any time they
felt like laughing they need only look upon the animals.
The idea that most clearly represents a rejection of superiority theory
is Hutcheson’s belief that the risible emanated from a juxtaposition of
incompatible contrasts. By the means of a discussion of great men on
the toilet he explains that the ludicrous is generated by the combination
of high and low in a single scene: ‘the jest is increased by the dignity,
gravity, or modesty of the person,’ he writes, ‘which shows that it is this
contrast, or opposition of ideas and dignity and meanness, which is the
occasion of laughter’ (Hutcheson, 1750:21). In the image of the great
man otherwise occupied, greatness and gravity collide with lowering
bodily urgency. Henry Fielding makes a similar point in his preface to
the novel Joseph Andrews (1742). The unfortunate, deformed, or
disproportionate are not humorous in themselves, he writes, but may
become so if they adopt an affectation:
Surely he hath a very ill-framed Mind, who can look on Ugliness,
Infirmity, or Poverty, as ridiculous in themselves: nor do I believe
any Man living who meets a dirty Fellow riding through the
Streets in a Cart, is struck with an Idea of the Ridiculous from it;
but if he should see the same Figure descend from his Coach and
Six, or bolt from his Chair with his Hat under his Arm, he would
then begin to laugh, and with justice.
(Fielding, 1980:7)
Pursuing the clash of incompatible ideas, James Beattie (1735–1803),
professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic at the University of Aberdeen,
writes in his essay ‘On Laughter and Ludicrous Composition’:
Laughter arises from the view of two or more inconsistent,
unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as
united in one complex object or assemblage, or as acquiring a sort
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of mutual relation from the peculiar manner in which the mind
takes notice of them.
(Beattie, 1776:347)
While Beattie was not the first to use the words ‘incongruous’ or
‘incongruity’ in relation to humour (that honour belongs to Mark
Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination (1744)), his definition of
laughter’s trigger is entirely representative of the shift in dominance
from superiority to incongruity theories in the eighteenth century, and is
the key to humour upheld by philosophers such as Kant and
Schopenhauer. The new focus on incongruity appears to be historically
appropriate to the eighteenth century where aleatory wit and linguistic
invention were culturally privileged skills. Addison, who while
disapproving of laughter celebrated wit, gives an account of the latter as
follows,
That every resemblance of Ideas is not that which we call Wit,
unless it be such an one that gives Delight and Surprize to the
Reader: These two Properties seem essential to Wit, more
particularly the last of them. In order therefore that the
Resemblance in the Ideas be Wit, it is necessary that the Ideas
should not lie too near one another in the Nature of things; for
where the Likeness is obvious, it gives no Surprize.
(Addison and Steele, 1979, vol. 1:189)
What is apparent in this description is the similarity between Addison’s
definition and Hutcheson’s and Beattie’s discussions of laughter’s
triggers. Wit, according to Addison, resides in the inventive drawing
together of apparently distant ideas for the amusement and intellectual
thrill of the listener. Again, we see the importance of crossing ideational
boundaries and the bringing of one thing into a taxonomy to which it is
not considered to belong. As incongruity plays with taxonomies and
hierarchies it suggests that these hierarchies are permeable and fluid
rather than rigid and permanent. The collision or juxtaposition of the
great with the low, or the humble adopting the airs of the elite, take
their humour from a displacement of order that simultaneously
acknowledges order and reveals its absurdity. Pleasure in wit also does
this, as it recognizes the role of chance in the production of meaning,
and the ability of language to make meanings outside the realm of
practical sense. However, critics of incongruity theory point out that it
over-privileges structural aspects in the production of laughter as if the
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formula of juxtaposition alone were the trigger. As John Lippitt writes,
‘even if, in any given example of humour, it is possible to identify an
element of incongruity, it is not necessarily this incongruity itself which
is the predominant reason for amusement. To put all the emphasis on a
factor such as incongruity is to stress form or structure at the expense of
content’ (Lippitt, 1992:200). Presumably, then, there has to be a reason
why some things are funny and others are not, which leads us on to
explanations rooted in culture and the unconscious.
RELIEF THEORY: FREUD AND SPENCER
The successor to incongruity theory was in some respects a continued
and internalized version of it. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
considerations of laughter, particularly those of Herbert Spencer and
Sigmund Freud, saw the triggers of laughter not so much as a
recognition of incongruity within scenarios or linguistic formulae, but
as a symptom of division and struggle within the self, recognition, as it
were, of incongruous selfhood. This is known as ‘release’ or ‘relief’
theory. The impact of Freud’s ‘discovery’ of the unconscious is clearly
of great relevance to an understanding of the process that recognizes
conflicted impulses within subjectivity as a cause of laughter. From this
principle, Freud theorized that humour works because it appeals to
unconscious thoughts that remain largely hidden in the majority of our
social interactions. This would explain the concept of a relative and
individuated ‘sense of humour’ not shared by all, as individual psyches
are wont to find different topics or ideas humorously appealing based on
the different experiences that have helped to shape them.
The mechanics of Freud’s theory of laughter are not entirely his, but
rather based in part on the work of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), the
father of evolutionary philosophy. Spencer attributed laughter to a
physiological cause, proposing the flow of ‘nerve force’, internal energy
that is generated by cerebral activity and which circulates in the body
until it is discharged by muscular action, such as conversation, or
respiration. On occasion, nervous energy will be displaced from its
proper outlet and redirect itself in short bursts of activity such as heavy
breathing, jumping up and down, or rubbing one’s hands with glee.
Laughter, like released steam pressure, is a manifestation of the internal
redirection of nervous energy. This was not an entirely new idea. The
anonymous author of An Essay on Laughter (1769) describes the
physiological effect as a #8216;laughter-struggle’ (Anon., 1769:75), an
internal battle between the mind and the muscles. Spencer holds that
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‘laughter naturally results when consciousness is unawares transferred
from great things to small’, when an anticipated sequence of thoughts is
bathetically interrupted with the result that the accumulated nervous
energy of one emotion now needs to be to be re-channelled and
provided with an alternative outlet (Spencer, 1860: 400). Spencer
imagines internal channels along which nervous energy flows. The
grander or more serious the emotion, the more the channels dilate. If a
sequence of ideas were to then take a ludicrous turn, the channels
become restricted and the surplus of energy expends itself: ‘the excess
must therefore discharge itself in some other direction; and…there
results an efflux through the motor nerves to various classes of the
muscles, producing the half convulsive actions we call laughter’
(Spencer, 1860: 400). Laughter, then, is always the product of a
lowering of anticipated ideas, although these can have healthful effects:
‘The heart and stomach must come in for a fair share of discharge’, he
adds, ‘And thus there seems to be a good physiological basis for
the popular notion that laughter facilitates the digestion’ (Spencer, 1860:
401).
While Spencer’s hydraulic explanation of laughter may not have aged
well, it is worth considering for its influence on Freud’s analysis of the
question in his 1905 study, Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious. Freud’s theory is in general agreement with Spencer’s
model of laughter as redirected internal energy, although he modifies it
beyond a biological explanation and explains the need for energetic
redirection as the circumvention of internal prohibitions put in place by
the superego. Jokes in Freud can be used as a means of making public
statements about taboo topics: ‘a purpose being satisfied whose
satisfaction would otherwise not have taken place’ (Freud, 2001:117).
Freud’s discussion of laughter occurs within the context of laughter as a
response to jokes only, and two types of joke in particular that he
identifies as ‘innocent’ and ‘tendentious’. The innocent joke is
essentially a pun or word game and appeals because of its technique and
formal qualities, its play on words or transposition of concepts, as in
Freud’s example: ‘Not only did he not believe in ghosts; he wasn’t even
frightened of them’ (Freud, 2001:92). As for the tendentious joke, says
Freud, ‘there are only two purposes that it may serve, and these two can
themselves be subsumed under a single heading. It is either a hostile
joke (serving the purpose of aggressiveness, satire, or defence), or an
obscene joke (serving the purpose of exposure)’ (Freud, 2001:97). The
need for these jokes is a response to social expectations, as the norms of
etiquette usually prevent us from directly insulting others or broaching
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taboo subjects. By touching on these difficult topics, the joke does
important work, as it alleviates the inhibition of the joker and addresses
the taboo while also keeping it in place. Laughing is the audible signal
that the energy required for ‘cathexis’, the accumulation of energy
around an idea, has been lifted and can now be dispersed in a
pleasurable fashion. The joker, says Freud,
has saved his psychological expenditure…. We should say that
his pleasure corresponds to this economy. Our insight into the
mechanism of laughter leads us rather to the introduction of the
proscribed idea by means of an auditory perception, the cathectic
energy used for the inhibition has now suddenly become
superfluous and has been lifted, and is therefore now ready to be
discharged by laughter.
(Freud, 2001:148–149)
Laughter, then, is the bang of anti-social thoughts colliding with a
censorious brick wall: ‘in laughter’, writes Freud, ‘the conditions are
present under which a sum of psychical energy which has hitherto been
used for cathexis is allowed discharge’ (Freud, 2001:148). Like
Spencer, Freud’s concept of laughter fits into an internal economy, a
functional system that retains the equilibrium of the subject by
disposing of waste in a socially acceptable way, and so maintaining
mental health.
POSTSTRUCTURALIST LAUGHTERS
Milan Kundera’s novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980),
contains a scene in which two students, wearing cardboard horns, and
their teacher begin to giggle uncontrollably during a class discussion of
Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros :
The three women danced and laughed, the cardboard noses
juggled, and the class looked at them in mute horror. But by now
the three dancing women were unaware of the others, they were
concentrating entirely on themselves and on their sensual pleasure.
Suddenly Madame Raphael stamped her foot harder and rose a
few centimetres above the floor and then, with the next step, was
no longer touching the ground. She pulled her two companions
after her, and in a moment all three were revolving above the
floor and rising slowly in a spiral. When their hair touched the
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ceiling, it started little by little to open. They rose higher and
higher through that opening, their cardboard noses were no longer
visible, and now there were only three pairs of shoes passing
through the gaping hole, but these too finally vanished, while from
on high, the dumbfounded students heard the fading, radiant
laughter of the three archangels.
(Kundera, 1996:104)
Kundera’s novel, set predominantly in communist Czechoslovakia,
deals with personal relationships and asks if anything can remain
private in an intrusive system. Weighed down by alienation and
misunderstandings, laughter is the sound that accompanies freedom, a
fantasy of weightlessness and unobstructed movement. This is laughter
as an expression of the sublime: joyful, angelic, desperate, exhausted,
overwhelmed, substituting for speech when nothing can possibly be
said. This small scene in some ways represents the manner in which
laughter has been conceived in the variety of arguments grouped
together under the term poststructuralism in the twentieth century. This
is not to say that postructuralism has adopted Kundera’s depiction of a
radiant laughter that transports one to a paradise far from the reach of
oppressive law, but it has configured laughter as a trope that expresses a
sense of the beyond, of something outside language and cognition as it
is organized in the quotidian. Following a theme established in the work
of Friedrich Nietzsche, what Simon Critchley has called ‘the golden
laughter of tragic affirmation’ (Critchley, 2002:105), poststructuralist
laughter acts like a sonar, reaching out and signalling the limit of
everything that can be said and understood. This laughter is not an
expression of pleasure, superiority, or release; nor is it nonsense, the
worthless opposite of intelligibility. Rather, laughter acts as a powerful
recognition of the end of understanding in language and the comic
recognition of the subject’s failure to grasp it. Georges Bataille has
written of laughter as ‘that place where nothing counts anymore—
neither the “object”, nor the “subject’” (quoted in Borch-Jacobsen, 1987:
741). Following Bataille closely, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen speaks of
laughter as the end of identity and absolute finitude: ‘it is the
presentation, necessarily pathetic and miniscule, of NOTHING…
NOTHING is the impossible, the impossible to present, and thus its
presentation can be nothing other than a comedy, risible and ridiculous’
(Borch-Jacobsen, 1987:756). While not entirely unlike Bakhtin’s
soaring laughter of liberation, this formulation of laughter neither
rejuvenates nor serves as a palliative against oppressive seriousness.
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This is not laughter as a release from oppression, but laughter that
encounters the limits of all conceptual formulae and returns to
acknowledge the finitude of its own existence. Critchley offers this
useful explanation,
Laughter is an acknowledgement of finitude, precisely not a
manic affirmation of finitude in the solitary, neurotic laughter of
the mountain tops (all too present in imitators of Nietzsche,
although administered with liberal doses of irony by Nietzsche
himself), but as an affirmation that finitude cannot be affirmed
because it cannot be grasped…. Laughter returns us to that limited
condition of our finitude, the shabby and degenerating state of our
upper and lower bodily strata, and it is here that the comic allows
the windows to fly open onto our tragic condition.
(Critchley, 1997:159)
What appears to be the intangible, impermanent, extra-linguistic
nature of laughter has appealed to some writers on deconstruction. The
self-reflexive structure of deconstructive readings, their interest in
‘play’, effective repetitions, aporia (the expression of doubt), and
linguistic and etymological puns have been understood as an innovative
and necessary incorporation of a type of laughter in work that engages
with the foundational discourses of philosophy, discourses from which
laughter has previously been excluded. Jean-Luc Nancy sees the utility
of a concept of laughter to deconstruction: ‘Laughter is neither a
presence nor an absence, it is the giving of a presence in its own
disappearance. Not given, but giving, and thus suspended on the edge of
its own presentation…laughter is the giving of an infinite variety of
possible faces and meanings. It is, in a word, the repetition of this offer’
(Nancy, 1987:729). Understood this way, laughter is a form of the
Derridean concept of différance, a way of thinking of language as a
structure of infinite referral and deferral, in which there are no fully
meaningful terms, only traces of terms. In a piece that specifically
focuses on the work of French philosopher of language Jacques Derrida
(1930–), Nancy continues the thematization of laughter as a trope that
can be used to interrogate the problem of the absent or deferred
presence of full meaning that is a key theme in deconstructive work.
Deconstruction argues that the centre or core of meaning, the plentiful
‘originary’ truth that validates all thought and understanding, whether it
be envisaged as a theological or philosophical concept, can never be
revealed through language but only ever be alluded to and infinitely
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deferred. For Nancy, this absent centre can be reconceived as a laugh.
‘The origin is laughing’, he writes, ‘There is a transcendental laugh’:
What is a transcendental laugh? It is not the obverse of the sign or
value accorded to serious matters, which thinking, necessarily,
reclaims. It is knowledge of a condition of possibility which gives
nothing to know. There is nothing comic about it: it is neither
nonsense nor irony. This laugh does not laugh at anything. It
laughs at nothing, for nothing. It signifies nothing, without ever
being absurd. It laughs at being the peal of its laughter, we might
say. Which is not to say that it is unserious or that it is painless. It
is beyond all opposition of serious and non-serious, of pain and
pleasure. Or rather, it is at the juncture of these oppositions, at the
limit of which they share and which itself is only the limit of each
one of these terms, the limit of their signification.
(Nancy, 1992:41)
Laughter comes to symbolize the absent origin that has no full
significance of its own, but which is constitutive of conceptual attempts
to positively structure systems of meaning. What is noteworthy in this
formulation is the extraction of the comic from its understanding of
laughter. Instead of thinking of laughter as the opposite of gravity and
intellectual seriousness, Nancy asks it to represent a fundamental
contradiction that affronts modes of understanding grounded in reason.
As such, laughter is a kind of metaphysical contradiction encountered at
the boundary of reason.
The French feminist critic Hélène Cixous offers us a similar image of
laughter as sound of signification at the limits of signification. Her
famous essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, a title that evokes an idea of
mythical female monstrosity and ‘outsidedness’, deals with the acts of
definition that constitute the formulation of gender distinctions in
language. Cixous calls for a redefinition of gender distinctions through a
revolution in signification, a redeployment of language capable of
countering the domination of language by patriarchy, a language that
can ‘break up the “truth” with laughter’ (Cixous, 1976:888). The laugh
of the Medusa is the revolutionary call of the woman outside patriarchal
definitions; this laughter rejects phallocentric identification, and is
forging a new language:
Too bad for them if they fall apart upon discovering that women
aren’t men, or that the mother doesn’t have one. But isn’t this fear
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convenient for them? Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in
truth, that women aren’t castrated, that they only have to stop
listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to
change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight
on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful, and she’s
laughing.
(Cixous, 1976:855)
As Frances Gray has written, ‘for Cixous, the laughter of the Medusa
destroys all hierarchies by rendering nonsensical the aggression between
father and son that is their basis; in destroying hierarchy it will remove
all difference between margin and centre. Women will not be outsiders,
because the concept of the “outside” or “inside” will become
meaningless’ (Gray, 1994:37). This is laughter as a radical commentary
that refuses to work inside the significatory system established by the
oppressor, busy about the work of dismantling patriarchal structures of
knowledge.
The Marxist critics Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, writing in
1944, held a radically different view of the uses of laughter. For them,
‘Fun is a medicinal bath’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2001:140). While
poststructuralism treats laughter as a trope with some allegorical
significance, Adorno and Horkheimer see it only as an empty reminder
of a previously satisfying experience. The ‘culture industry’, they
argue, referring to mainstream art and media under capitalism,
manipulates laughter and uses it as a placebo which it feeds to the
population of the ‘false society’ through television and film in order to
divert them from reflecting on their inauthentic existence. The culture
industry’s massmarket debasement of art, they argue, reduces content to
prudish titillation, and, having dispensed with aesthetic challenges,
mass-market culture resorts to humour as a means of obscuring the
vacuity it peddles at the expense of critical thought. The laughter of the
culture industry is therefore a kind of infantilized false consciousness,
attached to images in films that allude to the gratification of desires,
such as kissing or the possibility of sexual intercourse. By framing these
scenes as risible, vicarious thrills, the culture industry substitutes
genuine pleasure and experience for a humorous alternative so that
‘jovial denial takes the place of the pain found in ecstasy and in
asceticism’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2001:141).
Laughter is offered instead of satisfaction; it is a means of rendering all
desires and ambition beyond those provided by capitalism as a ludicrous
and stupid propositions, as ‘The supreme law is that they shall not
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138 LAUGHTER
satisfy their desires at any price; they must laugh and be content with
laughter’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2001:141). In conclusion we may
say that poststructuralist and theoretical treatments of laughter have
been attracted to its intangibility and association with a level of somatic
existence beyond that mediated by language, an existence that therefore
lends laughter the air of an extra-linguistic recognition of inauthenticity.
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CONCLUSION
There is a story about a man suffering from depression who goes to see
his doctor. After a cursory examination, the physician turns and says,
‘There is only one cure for you. You must go and see Grimaldi the clown.’
‘Sir,’ replied his patient, ‘I am Grimaldi the clown’ (Dickens, 1968:13).
This story, retold by Charles Dickens in his Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi
(1838), seems credible enough because of our cultural familiarity with
the concept of the weeping clown, the comedian who uses laughter to
conceal their misery. One can come across the same story told, with the
same degree of ironic pith, about both Grock and Chaplin, which speaks
of a modern mythology at work that wants to believe that all prominent
comedians are motivated by profound anguish. How have we arrived at
this idea that laughter is the close cousin of pain, and that our comedy is
as expressive of upset as it is of joy? These conventional thoughts are at
work behind the most disquieting double act of twentieth-century
drama, the bleak couple of Vladimir and Estragon, the tragic clowns of
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Nonsense and quips are the only
forms of language that allow them to communicate truly the full and
fixed banality of their lives. A traditional belief of the Hopi Indians of
northeast Arizona sees clowning as fundamental to identity, as they hold
that they are all descended from an original clown youth and clown
maiden. For them ‘Clowning symbolizes the sacredness of humanity in
the strict sense—that there is something sacred in being a finite and
mortal being separated from god’ (Loftin, 1991:112). By embracing the
identity of their first parents, the Hopi acknowledge the distance
between their daily lives and their idea of spiritual perfection, finding
religious value in the knowledge that they are flawed; a similar idea
motivates Dante’s definition of his Commedia as a comedy. These
anecdotes confirm the great suspicion that incidences of comedy and
humour always harbour a deeper, serious impulse, whether they be
manifestations of psychological darkness, or a spiritual recognition of
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140 CONCLUSION
human imperfection. When we consider the ways in which comedy is
used for hostile and aggressive purposes, or as a means of deriding
others and labelling their behaviour unacceptable, perhaps these
impulses are not so hidden. From Donatus to George Meredith, comedy
is employed as a form of castigation, a means of imposing normative
values on those who deviate from agreed standards of citizenship within
communities whose membership is well defined. Traditional finales like
the marriage are indicative of the conservative and conformist roots of
much comedy, reinforcing the homogeneity of the community after a
period of uncertainty. Instances of comedy that openly deride ethnic,
gender, or physical attributes are acts of aggression that indicate a fear
of difference and a desire to present oneself as more roundly human
than those in the target group. While Hobbes’s superiority theory of
laughter has been largely discarded, his view that it amounts to
‘pusillanimity’, or cowardice, represents the first ethics of humour to
couple the urge to laugh with a responsibility to think through
laughter’s moral implications. In this we can see that comedy is a
troubled form, attending to social anxieties and imposing a fictional
logic on ill-fitting or contested world views. How else might we explain
the constant worrying or fetishizing of questions of identity and place,
and aspects of existence like the fragility of the body, the obsession with
reproduction and scatology, and continual tests of the properties of the
outside world?
We must also emphasize the fact that comedy is contradictory and it
frequently works in a way that is apparently antithetical to the
maintenance of the status quo. Through joking and scenarios, or states of
being such as folly or tricksterism, comedy opens up the possibillty of
an additional dimension of understanding, one in which language or
perception are not rational meaning-oriented systems but have
unpredictable applications. Take the joke, “‘Doctor, doctor, I feel like a
bridge.” “What’s come over you?” “Two trucks and a motorbike.’” In
this, admittedly lame, example, the punchline explores the possibility of
retrospectively reading the set-up against the grain of conventional
sense, most obviously in the question ‘what’s come over you?’, which
is both a proverbial enquiry about one’s health, and, we discover, a
literal request to ascertain the volume of traffic that has passed over the
patient. While the humorous effect of this joke is negligible, it reveals
for us the fact that jokes are often a formally structured means of
revealing the susceptibility of language to alternative interpretations, the
importance of contextual referents in meaning, and the coexistence of
viable interpretations. Medieval concepts of folly understood this and
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CONCLUSION 141
fashioned from it a theological truth, that humanity was perpetually
looking at the world with doubled vision and a refined understanding of
its own simplicity. From this perspective, traditional endings like
marriages are a practical way of restoring reason and closing off
nonsense, acting as a barrier between the field of potentially radical
interpretive alternatives that comedy opens up, and the rest of the world
that needs to make sense if it is to carry on working.
Finally, we return to the difficult question of genre. Comedy’s
denigration in academic study is a product of its populism, its
association with the lower bodily stratum, and its problematic resistance
to generic definition. While the generic label continues to represent a
meaningful and practicable brand, priming us for certain kinds of action
and alerting us to a different type of dlscourse, the deracinated nature of
comic effect and the permeability of generic boundaries means that we
can no longer be satisfied by the Aristotelian concepts of form that
persist in most understandings of what comedy is. Traditional generic
definitions belonged to the theatre and, as its popularity has declined
over the course of the twentieth century, different types of comedy have
emerged in new contexts and media that often mingle with other modes
and tones of narrative. Perhaps then we need to stop trying to define
comedy on a generic level, and think of it instead as a series of more or
less connected effects, traditions, and modified themes treated with the
aim of opening up understanding for the purposes of laughter.
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GLOSSARY
Bathos a descent from the elevated to the ludicrous, a sense of deflation.
Burlesque in the British theatrical tradition, a satirical play that parodies
contemporary or well-known dramas, beginning in the Restoration
period with the Duke of Buckingham’s play The Rehearsal (1671),
lampooning the heroic drama of Dryden. Burlesque comedies were at
the height of their popularity in the Victorian period, and some
burlesque revues ran into the twentieth century. In American theatrical
parlance, a burlesque is a sexthemed comedy and variety revue with
its origins in the second half of the nineteenth century, often featuring
striptease.
Camp Susan Sontag defines camp as a ‘way of seeing the world as an
aesthetic phenomenon…not in terms of beauty but in terms of the
degree of artifice, of stylization’ (Sontag, 1982:106). Camp refers to
a certain kitsch or trashy aesthetic, an elevation of elements of pop
culture to a status beyond that deserved by its content according to
traditional categories of taste.
Carnival the period of feasting immediately prior to Lent, but for
Mikhail Bakhtin and others, a conceptual category that describes the
potential of popular literary and festive forms to disrupt the dominant
order, express dissent, and provide a framework for the celebration of
unsanctioned or ‘unofficial’ modes of being. ‘Carnivalesque’ refers to
texts, events, or practices that epitomize the spirit of carnival, often
associated with the gratification of bodily desires, but possessing the
potential to be read as an expression of the voice of the plebeian class.
City comedy a popular form of drama in the Jacobean and Caroline
theatre and associated with the playwrights Ben Jonson, Thomas
Middleton, John Marston, and Philip Massinger. City comedy is based
on the principles of Roman New Comedy, but brings its satiric eye to
bear on the financial dealings and sexual immoralities of a newly
emergent mercantile class, active in the burgeoning city of London in
the first half of the seventeenth century.
Commedia dell’arte a form of improvised comedy first recorded in Italy
in 1545, and flourishing from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth
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144 GLOSSARY
centuries. Commedia dell’arte is notable for its use of masks, each one
representing the distended features of a familiar stock character. These
stock characters are then found in stock scenarios and respond
accordingly, the actors improvising the specific action and dialogue at
the moment of performance.
Commedia erudita the ‘erudite’, or learned, counterpart to commedia
dell’arte, and written for the humanist courts of Italian Renaissance
princes. Most plays were closely based on the Roman New Comedy
of Plautus and Terence and intended for educated audiences.
Deconstruction a school of thought associated with the French
philosopher Jacques Derrida. Deconstruction’s principal interest lies
in unravelling the ‘metaphysics of presence’ that are said to authorize
key philosophical ideas and dominant discourses. Deconstructive
analysis engages in a detailed reading of the ways in which concepts
are structured through language, an unstable and volatile medium,
examining the extent to which the transcendental claims of such ideas
are undermined by their existence within the medium.
Drag generally a form of female impersonation, although drag can work
from female to male, in which the fact that a man has dressed as a
women is a significant element of the entertainment and largely
responsible for its humour. Drag differs from the transvestism of the
Shakespearean stage in this respect, as the drag act is not involved in
a narrative that requires crossdressing, and, even though no direct
reference is made to the actual gender of the performer, the audience
derives amusement from their knowledge that the woman is, in fact, a
man.
Farce a form of comedy that relies principally on physical humour,
horseplay, and awkward social situations to generate laughter. The
origins of farce can be traced back as far as the ancient Roman
fabula, the generic name for a variety of comic entertainments, and
the form was particularly popular in France in the Middle Ages. In the
nineteenth century, one-act farces often accompanied the performance
of five-act tragedies. In modern usage, the term is generally applied to
comedies that feature a series of contorted and overlapping intrigues,
such as a series of adulterous couples in close quarters and in imminent
danger of being found out.
Historicism a critical practice that claims that one only understands the
nature of a literary or other creative work fully when it is returned to
the original context of its production. Historicist readings of comedy,
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GLOSSARY 145
therefore, seek to relate comic forms to the social, cultural, and
political movements of their day in an effort to show the investment
and interrelatedness of one beside the other.
Humours the humours—blood, phlegm, black bile, and choler—were
four fluids believed to be essential to human health, the preponderance
of one fluid over the others possessing the ability to effect personality.
The humoral system was developed by Galen in the first century AD,
and remained influential in medicine through the Midde Ages and
early modern periods. The comedy of the humours, associated largely
with the work of Ben Jonson, used the humoral system as a basis for
characterization.
Materialism a belief that ideas and societies develop as a result of their
material conditions and environments, in opposition to idealism,
which holds that ideas or concepts come first and are acted upon to
develop material conditions. Materialism is especially interested in
class and economic relationships as a determining factor in human
interaction. This term is associated with Marxist and other forms of
socialist thinking.
Meta-narrative any narrative that claims to be able to explain all aspects
of existence within its own terms, Christianity for example.
Modernism a literary and artistic movement of the first half of the
twentieth century that experimented with various modes of aesthetic
representation, rejecting the figural or realist genres of the nineteenth
century.
New Comedy the term applied to the comedy of the Greek dramatist
Menander (c. 342–c. 291 BC), and used to differentiate his work from
that of his predecessor Aristophanes (see ‘Old Comedy’). New
Comedy uses stock characters and situations and is usually set around
the affairs and intrigues of a middle-class household. Plots revolve
around intrigues of sex and money and conclude with the restoration
of harmonious relationships. The Roman dramatists Plautus (c.
254–184 BC) and Terence (c. 190 or 180–159 BC) used Greek
prototypes in the composition of their own New Comedy, and New
Comedy forms inspired the English city comedies of the seventeenth
century.
New historicism like ‘historicism’, a critical school that believes in the
reconstruction of context as an essential aspect of understanding
literary text. The ‘new’ in ‘new historicism’ comes from its attempts
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146 GLOSSARY
to problematize the idea of history, pointing out that textual accounts
of the historical past are themselves texts and therefore susceptible to
the same principles of inclusion and exclusion, elision and omission,
as any other form of text and not necessarily imbued with any inherent
authority. New historicism came into being largely through the work
of American literary critics in the 1980s.
Old Comedy represented solely by the works of Greek playwright
Aristophanes (c. 448–380 BC), Old Comedy represents the first
recognizably comic narrative in Western literature. Characterized by
loose plotting, fantastic situations, and scatological and slanderous
humour, Old Comedy is thought to be derived in part from forms of
ancient worship, especially in honour of the god Dionysus.
Pantomime used in the seventeenth century to describe a story told in
dance, the British pantomime developed as an offshoot of Harlequin
plays, themselves a variant of commedia dell’arte performances.
Pantomime was developed in the nineteenth century, using classic
fairy tale plots as a loose framework for a broader range of elements
including songs, music hall routines, trick scenery, audience
participation, acrobatics, slapstick, costume changes, and romance. A
further convention of pantomime is its use of young women in the lead
male role (the ‘principal boy’) and older men playing the parts of
mature women, such as Cinderella’s ugly sisters (known as
‘pantomime dames’). Pantomime was associated with Christmas very
early on in its existence, and is still a popular part of the British
Christmas season.
Postmodernism a controversial and much-debated term, now largely
understood to refer to creative or critical practices that reject totalizing
meta-narratives and celebrate complexity, self-reflexivity,
fragmentation, doubt, ambiguity, relativism, and pastiche. The term
received its earliest use in relation to architecture, particularly
architectural styles that eschewed the monumentalist and technocratic
aesthetics of Modernism, appearing instead to favour process over
product and the witty quotation and incorporation of numerous
architectural features rather than subordination to one monolithic
concept of the new. Postmodernist effects in literature and art generally
draw attention to the concepts of form and artifice, rather than hiding
them, and reject notions of transparency or intentionality in
interpretation. Postmodernism has been viewed as many things,
including a reaction against the idea of history as ‘progress’, an idea
it credits in part with the development of ideologies that have led to
fascism and Stalinism.
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GLOSSARY 147
Poststructuralism a broad umbrella term that encompasses the work of
a variety of thinkers and theorists, many of whom rose to prominence
as a result of the student unrest of Paris in 1968. Poststructuralism is
most readily associated with the work of Roland Barthes, Michel
Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and others
of that era, and represents a furthering of the debates begun by
structuralist thinkers (hence the ‘post’), who had posited the idea that
communication operates according to systems of signs (known as
‘semiology’ or ‘semiotics’). The poststructuralist generation retained
this interest in the centrality of language to psychological and social
organization, but dispensed with the systematic approach of
structuralism, pursuing its investigations in a number of different
areas, including literature, politics, and psychoanalysis.
Satire a literary form that aims to criticize or censure people and ideas
through the use of humour. Satire can take many forms, but is generally
understood according to its degree of viciousness.
Slapstick physical humour associated with the early twentieth-century
silent film era and performers such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton,
and Harold Lloyd, but still employed in much contemporary comedy.
Slapstick involves falls, blows, mishaps, and accidents and demands
considerable skill from its performers.
Travesty while a ‘travesty’ can refer to something that has been made
ludicrous, it also means to alter the dress or appearance of a person,
and can refer to cross-dressing. The travesty of dress is a common
theme in comedy.
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FURTHER READING
The following is a selection of secondary and introductory volumes that
consider many of the issues dealt with in this book.
Carlson, Susan (1991), Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical
Tradition, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Excellent discussion
of the role of the comic representations of women in British theatre,
including feminist and political theatre of the late twentieth century.
Charney, Maurice (1978), Comedy High and Low: An Introduction to the
Experience of Comedy, New York: Oxford University Press. A loosely
organized collection of observations about comedy that provides valuable
insight into many aspects of comic effect and technique.
Critchley, Simon (2002), On Humour, London: Routledge. An essential
introduction to the philosophy of humour that considers the place of the
body in comedy, and the ideas of Nietzsche, Bakhtin, and Freud.
Double, Oliver (1997), Stand-Up: On Being a Comedian, London: Methuen.
Combines an autobiographical account of the author’s experience as a
stand-up comedian with useful historical analysis of the rise and
development of stand-up from the Victorian music hall to the present day.
Gray, Frances (1994), Women and Laughter, Basingstoke: Macmillan. The
leading book on its topic, an invaluable analysis of women in British and
American film, television, and stand-up comedy that includes theoretical
discussion of the gendered politics of laughter.
Jacobson, Howard (1997), Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the
Sublime, Harmondsworth: Viking. An historically and geographically
farreaching analysis of comedy and humour’s social function.
Leggatt, Alexander (1998), English Stage Comedy, 1490–1990, New York and
London: Routledge. A very useful and comprehensive study of comic
theatre organized around an analysis of recurring themes.
Levin, Harry (1987), Playboys and Killjoys: An Essay on the Theory and
Practice of Comedy, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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150 FURTHER READING
An extremely accessible and suggestive text that considers comedy as a
perpetual conflict between the forces of pleasurable chaos and despotic
order.
Morreall, John (1983), Taking Laughter Seriously, Albany: SUNY Press. A
detailed analysis of concepts and trends in the philosophical discussion of
humour.
Palmer, Jerry (1994), Taking Humour Seriously, London: Routledge. A superb
text that considers comedy and humour from a cultural and sociological
perspective and treats literary examples of humour alongside analyses of
joking relationships.
Wagg, Stephen (ed.) (1998), Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics
and Social Difference, London and New York: Routledge. A diverse
collection of essays and interviews on twentieth-century British film and
television comedy.
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INDEX
9/11 96–4
abjection 81–7
Addison, Joseph 54, 93, 127, 130
Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer,
Max 115, 136–5
Allen, Woody 37–1,113
‘Alternative’ comedy 112–113
An Essay on Laughter (Anon.) 131
Aristophanes 8, 25, 70–6, 99–7
Aristophanes of Byzantium 4
Aristotle 3, 4, 7, 119;
influence of Poetics 18–19
Armin, Robert 48
Arnold, Matthew 23
Arnott, Geoffrey 41
Babington, Bruce 64
Bakhtin, Mikhail 30–4, 84;
and laughter 124, 125;
‘lower bodily stratum’ 82
Baldick, Chris 23
Ball, Lucille 92
Banks, Morwenna and Swift, Amanda
94
Banta, Martha 87
Barber, C.L 29–2, 85–1;
‘release and clarification’ 30
Barreca, Regina 93
Barton, Anne 85
Bataille, Georges 134
bathos 56–57
Baudelaire, Charles 12, 86, 93
Beattie, James 129
beauty 79–5
Becker, Jurek 115–4
Beckett, Samuel 6, 138
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth 117
Benigni, Roberto 116–6
Berger, Peter L. 45
Bergson, Henri 7–8, 26–8, 40, 90–6,
119
Bernhard, Sandra 69–5
Black, Lewis 97
Blunkett, David 101
Boccaccio, Giovanni 21
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel 134
boy actors 60–5
Bradley, A.C. 23
Brand, Jo 95–2
Brant, Sebastian 46
Brass Eye 101–9
Bristol, Michael 35, 126
Brooks, Mel 113
Bruegel, Peter 32
Bugs Bunny 39
Burns, Edward 54
Butler, Judith 69–4
camp 55
caricature 86–2
Carlson, Susan 71
carnival 31–4, 34–8;
see also festival
Castiglione, Baldesar 53–6
161
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162 INDEX
Cavell, Stanley 87–3
Chaplin, Charlie 88, 90, 90–7, 98,
113–3
charivari 36
Charney, Maurice 5, 41–4, 78
Chaucer, Geoffrey 21
Christ 45
Cicero 125
city comedy 42–6
Cixous, Hélène 135–4
Clare, Janet 34
Clement of Alexandria 122
clowns and clowning 45, 47–49
Collier, Jeremy 5
Comedians, The (Granada Television)
136
comedy:
in academia 15–37;
ancient Greek root of 24–6;
and censorship 34, 98;
definition in literary history ix;
as division of consciousness
12–13;
as dramatic form 2;
as ‘élan vital’ 26;
etymology of 3;
as incongruity 8–10;
as inversion 33, 35;
as licensed transgression 33;
medieval definition of 20–2;
and ritual 24–6, 88, 123;
sexual politics of 59–8;
spring as metaphor for 27–28;
as tonal quality 1–2
Comedy Store, the 112
commedia dell’arte 44
commedia erudita 42, 44
Congreve, William 5, 54, 75–1, 127
Cook, Albert 98
Cook, William 112
Cooper, Anthony Ashley, (Lord
Shaftsbury) 97, 128
Cornford, Francis Macdonald 24–7
Coward, Noël, 55–9
Coyote 49–2
Crafton, Donald 90
Crates 4
Critchley, Simon 11, 134, 135
cross-dressing 59–7;
see also drag;
transvestism
Dale 88–4, 114
Daniell, David 24
Dante Alighieri 3, 21
deconstruction 135–3
Dekker, Thomas 73–9
de Man, Paul 12–13
Denby, David 117
Derrida, Jacques 135
Dickens, Charles 138
Dionysia, the 4, 99
Dionysus 3–4
Donatus 4, 5, 20, 22
double acts 8
Double, Oliver 112
Douglas, Mary 9–10
drag 66–5;
see also cross-dressing,
transvestism
Ecclesiastes 121
Eco, Umberto 15
Elias, Norbert 75–6
Eliot, T.S. 26
Erasmus, Desiderius 46–9
Evans, Peter William 64
fabula 44
Falstaff 34, 84–86
feast of fools 45, 123
female body, the 91–96
Ferris, Leslie 93
festival 35–8;
see also carnival
Fielding, Henry 129
Flanzbaum, Hilene 117
fools and folly 44–49, 140
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Forman, Simon 22–4
Frazer, James George 24
Freud, Sigmund 10, 58–3 87, 131,
132–40
Frye, Northrop 24, 27–29
Gaf, Fritz 126
Galen 43
Garber, Majorie 59, 65
Gilman, Sander L 115–4
Giuliani, Rudolph 97
Goddard, Paulette 90
Goldsmith, Oliver 8
Gray, Francis 76–2, 136
Greenblatt, Stephen 33–6, 61
‘green world’ 28
Gregory, John 92
Griffiths, Trevor 107–19
Grimaldi, Joseph 89, 138
grotesque 82–87
Halliwell, Stephen 100
Hancock, Tony 56–57
Harris, Jonathan Gil 52
Haskell, Molly 64
Haughton, William 42
Heffer, Simon 101
Hobbes, Thomas 126–4
Hogarth, William 86
holocaust 113–6
Hopi Indians 138–7
Horace 103–12
Horton, Andrew 6
House Committee on Un-American
Activities 98
Huizinga, Johann 119
humanism 21
humours, the 43–6
Hutcheson, Francis 128–6
Hynes, William and Steele, Thomas
50
Izzard, Eddie 69–5
INDEX 163
Jacobson, Howard 123
Jagendorf, Zvi 113
Jayamanne, Laleen 90
jokes 139–8;
‘innocent’ and ‘tendentious’
(Freud) 132;
racist 136;
sexist 91, 59, 107;
and taboo 58–3
Jonson, Ben 2–3, 34, 42–6
Joubert, Laurent 124
Jowell, Tessa 101
Jung, Carl 52
Juvenal 103, 105
Kemp, William 48
Kristeva, Julia 81–7
Kubrick, Stanley 103
Kundera, Milan 133–1
Kyffin, Maurice
Langer, Susanne 26–8
La Rue, Danny 67
laughter 1;
after 9/11 97;
in Bakhtin 124, 125;
in Christianity 121–31;
and feminine deportment 93–94;
incongruity theory of 128–7;
and intolerance 108;
in poststructuralist theory 133–5;
relief theory of 131–40;
superiority theory of 124–5
Leavis, F.R. 23
Legaman, G. 59
Leggatt, Alexander ix, 73
Levin, Harry 6
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 52–5
Lewis, Jerry 113
Limon, John 81
Lippitt, John 130
Manning, Bernard 107, 112–20
Marlowe, Christopher 123
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164 INDEX
marriage 70–77;
in British sitcom 76–2;
in US sitcom 77
Menander 4, 40
Merchant, W.Moelwyn 1
Meredith, George 5
Middleton, Thomas 73–9, 94
mockery 126
modernism 26
Molière 8
Monroe, Marilyn 64
Monty Python 8–9, 82–8
Moore, Michael 102–103
Morreall, John 97, 98
Morris, Chris 101–9
Mullaney, Steven 32–5
Myers, Mike 39–2
Nancy, Jean-Luc 135–3
New Comedy 20, 39, 40–4
Newton, Esther 68
Nietzsche, Friedrich 134
Old Comedy 24
Olson, Kirby 6–7
Onion, The 97
Orgel, Stephen 22, 61, 62–7, 77
Palmer, Jerry 122
Paster, Gail Kern 94
Philomon 7
Pinkerton, James 96
Plato 17–18, 79
Platter, Thomas 23
Plautus 20, 40, 50–3
Plessner, Helmuth 10–11
Porter, Lorraine 92
Quantick, David 102
Rabelais, François 31, 83–9
Rainolds, John 62
rhetoric 125–3
Rhodes, Neil 85
Rosengard, Peter 112
St Genesius 121
satire 102–107
Saunders, Jennifer 95
Savage, Lily 67
Segal, Erich 6
Seinfeld 113
Seinfeld, Jerry 79
Sennett, Mack 91
Shakespeare, William:
As You Like It 60–7, 65–66;
Antony and Cleopatra 48;
Hamlet 48;
1 Henry IV 85–1;
2 Henry IV 86;
King Lear 48;
Macbeth 48;
The Merchant of Venice 30;
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 4,
51–4;
Much Ado About Nothing 73;
Othello 48;
The Taming of the Shrew 71;
Twelfth Night 33, 36;
Two Gentlemen of Verona 47;
The Winter’s Tale 22, 73
shame 80
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 54
Shickel, Richard 116–5
Sidney, Sir Philip 22, 125
Sikov, Ed 64, 66
Silk, M.S. 19
Simpson, Mark 68
slapstick 87–7
Spencer, Herbert 131–9
sprezzatura 54
Sontag, Susan 55
Stallybrass, Peter, and White, Allon
34–7
Stanhope, W. (Lord Chesterfield) 127
stereotypes 39–6
Stubbes, Philip 62
Swift, Jonathan 94, 105–14
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Taaffe, Lauren K. 70–6
Terence 4, 20, 22, 40, 72
Theophrastus 40–3
Tractatus Coisilinianus 19
transvestism 64, 66–5;
see also cross-dressing, drag
Traub, Valerie 66, 77
tricksters 49–5
Turner, Victor 35
Udall, Nicholas 21–3
vice figure 21
Vitruvius 80
Welsford, Enid 123
Weston, Jessie 26
Wettach, Charles (Grock) 89–5
Wilde, Oscar 54–8
Wilder, Billy 63
Wilson, Christopher 59, 98
Wilson, Thomas 125
wit 53–6, 130;
in women 92–9
Wycherly, William 75
INDEX 165