A Cultural History of Comedy in the Modern Age

Louise Peacock, Andrew McConnell Stott, Eric Weitz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350440838
• eBook ISBN: 9781350187856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia del XX secolo

Drawing together contributions by scholars from a variety of fields, including theater, film and television, sociology, and visual culture, this volume explores the range and diversity of comedic performance and comic forms in the modern age. It covers a range of forms and examples from 1920 to the present day, including plays, film, television comedy, live comedy, and comedy on social media. It argues that the period covered was marked by an explosion of comic forms and a flowering of comic creativity across a range of media. From the communal watching of silent films at the start of the period, to the use of Twitter and other online platforms to share and comment on comedy, technology has brought about significant changes in its form, consumption, and social effects. As comic forms have shifted and developed, so too have attitudes to what comedy can and cannot do. This study considers its role in entertainment and in provoking consideration of a range of social and political topics. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter, and ethics. These eight different approaches to comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

CHAPTER ONE

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Form

BRETT MILLS

INTRODUCTION

The history of the forms of comedy since the 1920s should be understood primarily as a consequence of developments in technologies of communication throughout the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first. That is, in earlier ages comedy was a form of culture whose communicative contexts were typically small-scale, as in the case of a comedy play being watched by a few hundred people at a theater. Even where forms of media—such as the book—enabled comic content to reach large numbers of people, these were typically consumed by individuals, reading a tome alone. The forms of technology that began to dominate in the twentieth century fundamentally altered these relationships, enabling comic forms to be disseminated to extremely large numbers of people, running into the millions, simultaneously. This means that understanding how comedy’s form developed during this time requires acknowledgement of the technological tools that fundamentally reshaped the relationships between producer and audience, given that, as seminal media theorist Marshall McLuhan notes, “it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” ([1964] 2001: 9).

This chapter focuses on the various types of mass media that have become central to the lives of the majority of the global population since the 1920s. It does so through discussion of film, radio, television, and the internet. This is not to downplay or disregard the continued importance of other cultural forms—such as theater and the novel—to the history of comedy during this time. But it is instead to argue that the changes that have occurred in the last century are overwhelmingly a consequence of the development of mass media. Indeed, that some of these media did not exist at the beginning of the twentieth century means that their relationships to comedy requires attention in order for the evolution of comedy during that time to be comprehended. In focusing on the mass media, it is precisely the “mass” aspect which is paramount. That these media reach extremely large numbers of people, often disregarding national boundaries, means that, as communications theorist Denis McQuail argues, they “are for most people the main channel of cultural representation and expression, and the primary source of images of social reality and materials for forming and maintaining social identity” (2010: 4).

That mass media can play such a significant contributory role in activities of self-expression has meant that they have often been regulated in order to manage the expectations of the large numbers of people that consume them. For comedy, whose social role is often that of saying the unsayable and trampling over taboos (Jenkins 1994; Bucaria and Barra 2016), the variety of viewpoints contained within mass audiences becomes a real problem. Whereas in stand-up a comedian is able to respond to the audience in front of them, in mass media a comic text’s production is typically complete prior to its reception by audiences, and so it must work from assumptions about how those audiences will respond to the humor on offer. The “mass” nature of mass media, then, has resulted in comic form having to respond to this decoupling of audience and performer, and this has resulted in a range of texts across film, radio, television, and the internet. It is clear to see that there is now more comedy than there has ever been, and more routes through which it can be disseminated; but this proliferation has also required comedy to acknowledge its social effects. It may be this latter aspect which represents the most fundamental change in comic form in the last hundred years.

FILM

That the nature of mass media comedy is significantly informed by the technologies and organizational structures that arise from those technologies, can be seen in the history of film comedy. This section predominantly focuses on Anglophone comedy cinema, because this has been the dominant form of global film-making and distribution for much of the medium’s history. In particular, Hollywood—as both an institution and as a series of film-making practices—has dominated how cinema has come to be understood the world over. And Hollywood has, throughout its history, made comedy.

It was in the 1910s and 1920s that, according to film historian Douglas Gomery, Hollywood began to “dominate the world film industry” (2005: 7). It did so through the development of what has become known as the “Hollywood studio system.” This system was, according to film historian Thomas Schatz, one in which production and distribution was organized via studios, each of which “developed a repertoire of contract stars and story formulas that were refined and continually recirculated through the marketplace” ([1989] 1998: 7). Communications scholar Janet Staiger argues that therefore the system can be seen as “an instance of the economic system of capitalism” (1985: 88), given that it positioned film as a product more than an art form, and that what was produced responded to ticket sales and audience feedback. Via this system film was an economic product on a par with other forms of goods under capitalism, and it was for this reason that studios not only managed the production of cinema but also its distribution. Studios owned distribution systems, such as cinemas, ensuring their goods could be effectively circulated and demand and supply managed. The studio system’s high point is understood to be the 1930s–1950s, in which the five largest studios received three-quarters of the income generated from cinema ticket sales in the United States (Gomery 2005: 71). Indeed, it was the studios’ success that contributed to their downfall, for successful challenges from independent cinemas meant the US Supreme Court decreed in 1948 that the studios must sell their cinema chains (Schatz 2008: 16). Cinema was also encountering considerable competition from television, for audiences found they could receive entertainment directly into their own homes. That said, “the Hollywood studio system never died … [for it] is still made up of a small set of corporations that produce, distribute and present films for profit” (Gomery 2005: 198). While previous forms of comic culture inevitably circulated within financial regimes, the Hollywood studio system represents a reshaping of culture as nothing more than an economic good. And thus the kinds of comedy that have been produced for cinema should be understood within this context. While this is true of all genres and modes that cinema produces, this may represent a particular challenge for comedy, whose flouting of rules may be seen to sit uneasily within such pragmatic and goal-orientated production regimes.

The rise of the studio system coincided with the development of sound technology, which meant film moved from the silent era to talkies. The silent era is most closely associated with gag-based and slapstick comedy centered on the exploits of an individual at odds with the world around them. These were often short films, such as those of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd. Films such as these certainly drew on narrative, but their main pleasures were those of a succession of sight gags, with the narrative functioning primarily simply as a way of tying these jokes together. Importantly, this form of comedy relies heavily on the skills of the performer presenting them, and thus the pleasure they offer marries the content of the joke with appreciation of such skill. Steve Seidman refers to this as “comedian comedy,” which foregrounds the “self-ness of the comedian” (1981: 4), in which audiences are invited to bring extra-textual knowledge to their reading of the comedy. It matters because the Hollywood studio system—and much Western culture—relies on broadly unexamined notions of “realism” for their meaning, in which the world created by the fiction is intended to be complete, comprehensible, and distinct from that of the viewer. Comedy, on the other hand, “with its maintenance of the relationship between performer and audience …, is a genre which tends to promote an active spectator through these extrafictional features” (1981: 5). This strand of comedy situates this kind of performer as an “outsider” (1981: 6). The outsider aspect is persistently evident in the foregrounding of the performer’s skills, but it means that comic characters have also typically been outsiders. So Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” character is, according to Alan Dale, “antisocial” and whose “trickster anarchy” means he is constantly in conflict with representations of social order, such as policemen (2000: 39, 44). Similarly, Harold Lloyd’s comic persona is one in which he “affects a self-image which obscures a hidden true self” (Seidman 1981: 141), depicting a character at odds with social niceties and therefore required to behave in unnatural ways in order to fit in. The content of these comedies, and the pleasures they offered, therefore aligned with comedy’s uneasy position within the studio system, for that system’s reliance on narrative coherence and diegetic realism was not fundamental to how comedy had hitherto been structured. From the off, the relationship between comedy and the film industry was strained, and the subsequent history of the use of humor in cinema can be seen as an ongoing attempt to reconcile these tensions.

One of the key ways this was achieved was through the movement to narrative comedy, which affected the kinds of films that were produced. For much of the silent era, comedies were shorts, lasting ten minutes or so; but the studio system was one that prioritized feature-length productions. These necessarily foregrounded narrative as a guiding principle, in which the pleasures offered audiences were those of a coherent story whose ending functioned as a resolution. And it was the need to tell stories efficiently and intelligibly that led to the development of what film historians Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell note has been dubbed “classical Hollywood cinema,” in which techniques of framing and editing helped audiences piece together a succession of images into an intelligible story (2010: 32, italics in original). Whereas “comedian comedy” was centered on the comic moment, narrative comedy instead prioritized the humorous story, which—while often peppered with discrete comic moments—also functioned as a coherent whole. This led to the development of many different kinds of comic film, whose early precursors continue to inform contemporary film-making. For example, according to Duane Byrge and Robert Milton Miller, screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s are “at heart a love story,” in which “improbable events, [and] mistaken identities” serve as initial barriers to a heterosexual couple, but whose resolution typically involves eventual marriage that gives “some whit of order … to the previous narrative chaos” (1991: 2–3). Here comedy arises out of disorder, and it is via the rejection of such disorder that narrative resolution can be achieved.

Screwball comedy’s characteristics can be seen to underpin the representation of humorous narratives concerning love and romance ever since. But such storytelling also attests to the ongoing negotiation required within film-making with regard to the relationships between narrative and comedy. For example, Wes Gehring argues the screwball comedy can be understood as foregrounding its comic aspects, whereas the romantic comedy prioritizes the romantic component but tells its story via comedic means (2002: 1). That such subgenres can be delineated evidences how comedy and narrative remain troubled bedfellows, and that the narrative disruption that comic moments often produce continue to be something that film-makers must pay attention to. This uneasy alliance of comedy and narrative means that analyses of humorous stories often have difficulty in delineating their ideologies or politics. For example, screwball comedy can, in its comic moments, be seen to offer up progressive representations of women that are significantly different to those in other genres. This is because the comedy often arises from female characters’ refusal to conform to the social expectations placed upon them. Here the comedy can be seen to celebrate female power, and to reject the notion that women should behave in ways that are comprehensible or desirable to men. However, the fact that so many screwball comedies’ narratives end with a heterosexual coupling means that such disruptive femininity is presented as “resolved,” offering a “traditional” representation of male–female interactions within which the woman’s comic vigor is eradicated at the end of the story. This problem is seen to afflict romantic comedies too, which film studies scholar Claire Mortimer often criticizes as “reactionary,” depicting women as “needy and superficial, being obsessed with finding ‘the one’ and marriage” (2010: 133). Delineating the cultural politics of narrativized comedy remains problematic, then, for the pleasures offered by a film’s narrative might be quite at odds with those of the comic moments that constitute the majority of the text’s running time. While it may be the case that such contradictions exist in a wide range of genres, comedy’s focus on particular moments as loci of pleasure means that the tension is more acute.

Furthermore, comedy’s forms remain more mutable and wide-ranging than may be the case for other genres because it might be more fruitful to not think of it as a genre at all. Genre studies scholars Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik argue it should instead be thought of as a “mode” (1990: 19, italics in original), which can be applied to a range of other genres. This suggests we can distinguish between “comedy” as a form of expression, and “a comedy” which is a narrative text whose primary function is the generation of humor. For example, a parodic film “has its own techniques and methods, but no particular form or structure” (1990: 19), meaning that it adopts a comic mode, rather than being a comedy. In parody, humor is used precisely to mock the conventions of other genres, or particular ways in which stories are told, and thus comedy here serves as a tool of expression that can be grafted onto the conventions of the genre being parodied. Parody is, according to Dan Harries, “the process of recontextualizing a target or source text through the transformation of its textual (and contextual) elements, thus creating a new text” (2000: 6, italics in original). That parody mocks other genres or texts means that it has often been seen as not a genre in itself, and its reliance on other texts means it doesn’t conform to normalized notions of authorial creativity that imbue the ways in which cultural hierarchies come into being. Given that all forms of comedy struggle for social and cultural approval, parody represents a maligned form of cultural communication, despite its particular communicative techniques and social purpose of critiquing the ways in which stories are told.

As a mode, comedy is able to be grafted onto a wide range of other forms, precisely in order to make explicit and destabilize the norms of those forms. For example, the “Carry On …” sequence of British comedy films produced primarily in the 1950s to 1970s often take place in historical settings, such as the ancient Rome of Carry on Cleo (dir. Gerald Thomas 1964) and the British naval history of Carry on Jack (dir. Gerald Thomas 1963). According to Marcia Landy, in doing so they “undermine official narratives of the past,” resulting in a “counter-history” that makes explicit the contribution non-comic forms of film-making make to those histories (2011: 177). Furthermore, as works that often critique authority figures and institutions they represent an attack on the sociopolitical orders that produce and authorize the narratives being parodied. By this account, comedy functions less as a mode for critiquing how film works, and more as a tool for destabilizing the very systems that enable cultural hierarchies to come into being. Comedy’s mutability as a mode enables it to marry other cinematic genres too, such as horror. This is because both comedy and horror have, according to film scholar William Paul, an “aesthetic aim [which] is raising rabble,” primarily “because of their willingness to confront things we normally feel compelled to look away from” (1994: 21, 20, italics in original). These genres represent an attack upon the norms of civilized society, foregrounding pleasure over detached reflection, and refusing to distinguish between what should and should not be seen.

That said, it is important not to overstate the revolutionary or disruptive nature of film comedy, not least because its status as a commercial product validated by the production and distribution systems that enable it to come into being inevitably reduces its radical force. After all, comedy can be used to reinforce or normalize regressive or repressive ideologies as much as it can do otherwise. While comedy represents narratives and characters that fail to conform to social norms, it does so in a manner that necessarily renders them laughable. By this process, alternative behavior or viewpoints themselves become mocked, offered up for cinema audiences to find laughable, reassured that others adopt the same view through the shared sound of laughter in the cinema. This means comic film can be critiqued for its conservative representations as much as the humorous mode might function as a sociopolitical critique.

Perhaps one of the most obvious ways in which this takes place is in terms of comedy’s relation to the nation, where the view that the most sensible way to organize the world is via the nation-state is rarely held up for scrutiny. To be sure, comedy can critique ideas of particular nations, and, as Nigel Mather argues, the “comic mode, when effectively mixed with dramatic and compelling explorations of ethnicity in ‘everyday’ … society, is … particularly well suited to depictions of ‘hybrid’ groups and communities” (2006: 112). That is, the contradictory relationships that minority ethnic groups are often forced to have with their nations aligns neatly with the distanced, reflective attitude comedy employs. But this approach rarely questions the idea of the nation itself, and it is the case that one of the ways in which nations function as what political scientist Benedict Anderson (1983) calls “imagined communities” is via the forms of culture they produce, including comedy and film. This means that the comedy produced by Hollywood becomes understood as “American,” despite it failing to depict the lives and viewpoints of large swathes of that country’s population. Similarly, “British comedy” is a powerful marketing tool for particular kinds of comedy such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (dir. Mike Newell 1994) and Johnny English (dir. Peter Howitt 2003), despite the difficulties in delineating what that term means, either in terms of finance and production, or because of the complexities of the multi-nation status of the UK. This suggests film comedy serves as a tool to unite a nation, despite legitimate tensions that might exist within it, and it may do so in a manner that allows some voices to be heard while others are excluded. What this shows is the power that film comedy has, and its status as a tool for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Form
• 2 Theory
• 3 Praxis: ‘If You Laugh at Something, Then I’ll Potentially Keep It’: The Praxis of Live Comedy
• 4 Identity: Laughs Last—Gender, Power, and Comic Identity
• 5 The Body
• 6 Politics and Power
• 7 Laughter
• 8 Ethics
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright