No Pain No Gain: The Provocation of Laughter in Slapstick Comedy (original) (raw)

Introduction: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Slapstick

Slapstick: An Interdisciplinary Companion, 2021

Despite its unabated popularity with audiences, slapstick has received rather little scholarly attention, mostly by scholars concentrating on the US theater and cinema traditions. Nonetheless, as a form of physical humor slapstick has a long history across various areas of cultural production. This volume approaches slapstick both as a genre of situational physical comedy and as a mode of communicating an affective situation captured in various cultural products. Contributors to the volume examine cinematic, literary, dramatic, musical, and photographic texts and performances. From medieval chivalric romance and nineteenth-century theater to contemporary photography, the contributors study treatments of slapstick across media, periods and geographic locations. The aim of a study of such wide scope is to demonstrate how slapstick emerged from a variety of complex interactions among different traditions and by extension, to illustrate that slapstick can be highly productive for interdisciplinary research.

Laughing at the Body: Approaches to a Performative Theory of Humor

Journal of Literary Theory, 2009

In theories of the comic, whether literary, philosophical-aesthetic, linguistic or psychological in origin, the humor of the human body plays a secondary role. To date, it has been treated as a humor of action, a situational or movement humor, as a »lower« (crude-obscene), a farcical humor, or as a form of expression of a vitalist, carnival-like worldview (Bakhtin 1965). This paper aims to outline a performative theory of humor concentrated on the human body as a cause for laughter.

Review of Louise S. Peacock: Slapstick and Comic Performance: Comedy and Pain

HUMOR, 2018

Surprisingly little scholarly attention has been devoted over the years to the important subject of laughing at pain, perhaps because this type of humor is considered too juvenile and simplistic to warrant serious examination. Louise Peacock (who taught performance studies at the University of Hull in the UK but is now associate professor of theatre practice at the University of Southern California and affiliated with the Centre for Comedy Studies Research, Brunel University, London) proves such ideas wrong. Her book examines the types of pain that can be greeted with uproarious mirth by perfectly sane and kindly audiences, both children and adults. Its definitive analysis shows the matter to be far from simple. In the context of slapstick, important distinctions emerge between accidental, random, intentional and real pain inflicted for amusement and these are carefully defined (27). From them, Peacock derives a taxonomy of performed comic pain which will undoubtedly inform many future academic studies (78-9). She also provides a masterly outline of the structures typically found in slapstick, whether performed by an individual artist or in a double or larger act (40-61). Her book begins by discussing received theories of humor and the extent to which they do or do not apply to slapstick. She rightly focusses on the inadequacies of incongruity theory given its innate element of surprise: as she points out, this aspect is contradicted, for example by the positive expectations set up by any extended slapstick routine that disaster not only will occur but will repeatedly recur, and which result in increasing hilarity (66-7). Chapters 4 through 7 concern how audiences evaluate performed pain (is it real? convincing? is the damage permanent? and so on), stressing that important variables lie not only in the source and nature of the pain but also in the moral justifications provided. A performance scholar herself, the author makes a welcome acknowledgement of the concepts of comic character, plot and motivation as vital elements of the comic mix. However, she specifically excludes humiliation from her review of types of pain (80): this is a pity as it is a fruitful

Taking humour and laughter seriously: The multi-disciplinary field of humour studies

2021

From the time of Aristotle and Plato, philosophers have speculated about humour and laughter, proposing that ridere est humanum. But research has shown that chimpanzees and rats also laugh. Sociologist Norbert Elias believed that laughter evolved as an antidote to aggression, but humour can also be damaging. While studies in neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, literature, performance, history, sociology, religion, health and the emotions all now contribute to our understanding of the functions and consequences of humour, the question of whether humour unites or divides the human race is still open to debate. While humour can assist social cohesion in many ways, depending on cultural context (as some examples of peculiarly Australian uses of humour illustrate), and while its creators and practitioners command attention in daily life, it remains resistant to easy definition. Introducing humour studies H ow does someone come to be studying humour and laughter? Is it really a research field? Or is the idea that humour deserves serious attention merely a joke? These questions confront anyone embarking on this field, as they did the present author when, in 1965, | embarked on my doctoral thesis at University of NSW. My supervisor C. R. B. Quentin, the founder of the National Institute of Dramatic Art who also held the Chair of Drama, told me, "Oh Jessica, don't study tragedy [my intended subject], study comedy; you'll never be bored." He was very right and I am still fascinated by it. Back then, I chose to focus on the commonly despised variety of low comedy or farce-the kind that depends on physical and visual humour rather than on witty dialogue as found in high comedy 182 and the comedy of manners. There were very few academic historians of the theatre who thought this was important and the typical reaction was that it must be very easy to comprehend such a basic form of drama. However, from a practical and theatrical point of view, it is anything but simple. Quentin himself, a former director with the Old Vic Theatre Company, preferred directing comedy and considered it far more demanding than tragedy: it was difficult to make it succeed, challenging for the actors and even more resistant to analysis on the cold page. Beginning with a study of the history and theory of European farce across nine different cultures (working mostly in translation), I progressed to teaching comedy at

Slipping on banana skins and falling through bars: ‘True’ comedy and the comic character

Galactica Media: Journal of Media Studies, 2021

From Basil Fawlty, The Little Tramp and Frank Spencer; to Jim Carey, Andy Kaufman and Rowan Atkinson... comedy characters and comic actors have proved useful lenses for exploring—and exposing—humor’s cultural and political significance. Both performing as well as chastising cultural values, ideas and beliefs, the comic character gives a unique insight into latent forms of social exclusion that, in many instances, can only ever be approached through the comic form. It is in examining this comic form that this paper will consider how the ‘comedy character’ presents a unique, subversive significance. Drawing from Lacanian conceptions of the subject and television ‘sitcom’ examples, the emancipatory potential of the comedy character will be used to criticize the predominance of irony and satire in comic displays. Indeed, while funny, it will be argued that such comic examples underscore a deprivative cynicism within comedy and humor. Countering this, it will be argued that a Lacanian conception of the subject can profer a comic efficacy that not only reveals how our social orders are inherently inconsistent and open to subversive redefinition, but that these very inconsistencies are also echoed in the subject, and, in particular, the ‘true comedy character’.

LAUGHTER: AN ESSAY ON THE MEANING OF THE COMIC

Bergson's thinking typifies a peculiarly Gallic tendency to rationalize the apparently ephemeral and subjective (in this case, humor), discussing it in exquisitely rarefied language in order to assert that which defies common sense (a funny hat is not funny, laughter expresses no emotion, no one laughs alone) but partakes nonetheless of a logical inevitability. Laughter, first published in 1911, clearly draws upon the early years of European modernism, yet also prefigures the movement in some ways. In recognizing the comic as it embodies itself in a "rigid," absentminded person, locked into repetitious, socially awkward behavior, Bergson--even as he looks backward, primarily to Molière--seems to be spawning the sophisticated visual and physical comedy of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd.