Slapstick: An Interdisciplinary Companion

Ervin Malakaj, Alena E. Lyons, Ervin Malakaj, Alena E. Lyons

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110570977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

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.

Part I: History of Slapstick

Introduction

Alena E. Lyons

Ervin Malakaj

Slapstick’s sometimes crude material devised to reach broad audiences could be read as universally appealing. On the one hand, such universality suggests that slapstick’s gags, for instance, are legible as humorous and elicit laughter in any cultural setting across time; on the other, claims to universality assert that, for example, the humbling frailness of the slapstick protagonist purports to share the spectators’ profound anxieties about modern life. However, such totalizing assumptions overlook slapstick’s historicity. In so doing, they risk obstructing attempts to locate expressions of slapstick in concrete socio-cultural contexts, as the following example illustrates.

From July 2013 to February 2014, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg [Wolfsburg Art Museum] presented the exhibition Slapstick! Alÿs, Bock, Chaplin, Hein, Laurel & Hardy, Keaton, Matta-Clark u.a. [Slapstick! Alÿs, Bock, Chaplin, Hein, Laurel & Hardy, Keaton, Matta-Clark et al.], curated by Uta Ruhkamp. This exhibition aimed to bring iconic scenes from slapstick films from the silent film era in dialogue with contemporary art. In each exhibit, a scene from a slapstick film was juxtaposed with a work of art that in some way or other took up elements of the scene and transformed them. For example, Steve McQueen’s (*1969) video installation “Deadpan” (1997) was shown together with Buster Keaton’s (1895–1966) hurricane scene from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928, Dir. Charles F. Reisner), to which McQueen’s approximately four-minute video explicitly refers. Starting with a clear definition of slapstick as a primarily US-American comedic film genre from the 1910s and 1920s, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg made it possible for exhibition visitors to recontextualize classic slapstick films by seeing them in dialogue with individual works of contemporary art, which in turn encouraged audiences to take on new perspectives on the ‘original’ slapstick as well as its legacy today.

In a 2013 clip advertising the exhibition to the public, art historian and then director of the museum Markus Brüderlin (1958–2014) simultaneously gestures toward but also flattens what otherwise was a sophisticated, trans-historically situated exhibition. By means of an anecdote he invites the audience to reflect on the peculiarly unpredictable interrelationship between laughter and slapstick films:

[T]he filmmaker and theatre man, Robert Wilson, once did an experiment […]: he confronted young people from an African tribe […] with these slapstick films – and they cried. And then he confronted them with the mountains of corpses in concentration camps – and they laughed. Maybe it’s a very good example that allows us to think about laughter.

(form-art.tv 2013, TC 00:01:50–00:02:31, translated by Alena E. Lyons)

Regardless of which work of the US-American dramatist and video artist Robert Wilson (*1941) Brüderlin references, Brüderlin appears committed to differentiate among comedy, laughter, humor, and slapstick. His description suggests that slapstick is, in fact, not universal; its non-Western reception is radically different from what Western viewers would expect. But the framing of his claims is highly problematic. The example he uses overtly adopts a colonial-racist perspective: channeling Wilson, Brüderlin evokes an exotic image of faraway Africa at some indeterminate point in history, and of young Africans whose reactions to Western images are the opposite of what is seemingly intended. Furthermore, the example posits that American slapstick and the piles of dead bodies in German concentration camps are extreme poles of what human beings can produce and to which human beings can react as human beings. Presented as extremely different from Western reactions, the reactions of the young people in Wilson’s experiment bring these separate and incompatible poles together in a way that for Brüderlin helps to shape a new perspective on what slapstick can or cannot do in terms of laughter. But even if this example illustrates that slapstick is more complex than we thought (i.e., different audiences respond to it differently), it does so using extreme examples in a totalizing fashion without attending to the complex social and cultural histories behind them.

The last decade has seen a rise in the scholarship on slapstick that explores the historical and cultural conditions that shaped different slapstick traditions. Tom Paulus’s and Rob King’s anthology Slapstick Comedy (2010), for example, presents a sophisticated overview of the genre’s history with contributions studying a broad variety of elements relating to US slapstick cinema and link these to the cultural context of early-twentieth-century modernization. King’s monograph Hokum! (2017) likewise focuses on early twentieth-century slapstick, with a specific interest in the 1920s. King studies the technological and historical conditions that informed the emerging sound film against the backdrop of the Great Depression. Both studies are interested in, among other ideas, the growing technologization of modern life and slapstick’s investment in reflecting its constitutive elements. A few more recent publications are increasingly concerned with the role of neglected groups of people involved in slapstick, such as women (see e.g., Ellenbürger 2015; Massa 2017; Hennefeld 2018). In addition, scholars such as Louise Peacock (2014 & 2019), Bryony Dixon (2010) or Jeffrey Richards (2015), consider the prehistory of slapstick. Their research concerns the relation between slapstick and European theatrical or other performance traditions, in particular those of the nineteenth century, like British music halls, and those of the sixteenth century, like Punch-and-Judy shows or the commedia dell’arte.

Slapstick is highly complex in its make-up. How one traces its historical trajectory depends on which of its many – e.g., thematic, linguistic, visual, sound etc. – elements one considers essential for its definition. Because of this, the historiography of slapstick is far from being exhaustive. Indeed, the future of slapstick historiography will likely bring studies that break down slapstick’s diverse elements and trace the historical tradition(s). In this sense, slapstick does not look back on one history, but on numerous histories. And this applies not only to its prehistory and early beginnings, but also to its more recent iterations. William Solomon’s Slapstick Modernism (2016) is a good example of a historically nuanced approach to slapstick and goes beyond the boundaries of film to explore the intertwining of slapstick as a stylistic or expressive mode with modernism – i.e., slapstick’s themes, its demands, its techniques, and its representatives.

With this section we want to make such questioning about and also with slapstick possible. On the one hand, the contributions trace the historical beginnings and developments of slapstick. On the other hand, since this is also a project invested in a holistic approach to slapstick research, the contributors provide examples of what an interdisciplinary historiography of slapstick across media can look like. Paul Michael Babiak’s chapter studies the emergence of the term ‘slapstick’ and its use by drawing on the discourse on the term proliferated in print culture. According to this research, slapstick is first and foremost a clearly identifiable stylistic feature of US-American cinema of the early twentieth century. In this respect, this form of comedy is deeply embedded in a specific social context. The expectations about the technical execution of slapstick performances as well as of the comic and entertainment factors of slapstick films emerge from this context, and eventually became a defining element of slapstick. Whereas Babiak offers a contextual history of slapstick, the next two chapters in the section offer approaches to the history of transmedial and intertextual history of slapstick.

Peter Edward’s contribution demonstrates how productive an interdisciplinary and transmedial approach to slapstick research can be. With the exception of William Solomon, few studies on the history of slapstick have focused on slapstick beyond film and theatre studies. In fact, the notion that slapstick may also be present in literature, music or other art forms, and that these appearances may have even contributed to its development in the course of its broad history, has not been sufficiently researched. In this light, Edwards investigates the question of whether elements of slapstick can also be found in classical music and how they are formed. In music theatre and opera, where classical music has a special relationship to the performative, Edwards traces a history of musical slapstick. In this way, slapstick is activated as a rich object of study for further research in, for instance, the field of sound studies.

In her contribution on early modern prose literature, Carolin Struwe-Rohr demonstrates an approach to a literary study of slapstick. Using selected examples, some from the narrative genre of the Arthurian saga, she shows how slapstick can be applied as an innovative means of reading early modern literature. By identifying elements in narrative patterns that are constitutive for slapstick (e.g., the comical framing of pain and humiliation), Struwe-Rohr establishes slapstick as an analytical category for literary analysis. In so doing, she shows that slapstick as an analytical category can be applied to texts that at first glance might appear to be outside of the purview of approaches to slapstick as a genre. By differentiating her approach to slapstick studies in such a way, Struwe-Rohr acknowledges that slapstick is not universal across time. In fact, in the chapter slapstick serves as a key to examine literary prose on the threshold from the late middle ages to the early modern period, which cultural specificities are not distorted in the process. As a side effect of this approach, Struwe-Rohr shows that the emergence of slapstick is much more complex, i.e., it does not only have its origin in the realm of performance and theater, but also necessarily has to be sought beyond these fields.

Works cited

Dixon, Bryony. “The Good Thieves: On the Origins of Situation Comedy in the British Music Hall.” Slapstick Comedy. Eds. Tom Paulus and Rob King. New York: Routledge, 2010. 21–36. →

Ellenbürger, Judith. “Frauen in der Filmkomödie, oder: Wie Slapstick mit Samthandschuhen funktioniert.” Die Körper des Kinos. Für eine fröhliche Filmwissenschaft. Eds. Christian Hüls, Natalie Lettenewitsch, and Anke Zechner. Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2015. 215–226. →

Hennefeld, Maggie. Specters of Slapstick & Silent Film Comediennes. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. →

King, Rob. Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017.

Massa, S...