The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader 2019028962, 9780367175931, 9780367175948, 9780429057526

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The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader

The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader is a selection of the most outstanding critical analysis featured in the journal Comedy Studies in the decade since its inception in 2010. The Reader illustrates the multiple perspectives that are available when analysing comedy. Wilkie’s selections present an array of critical approaches from interdisciplinary scholars, all of whom evaluate comedy from different angles and adopt a range of writing styles to explore the phenomenon. Divided into eight unique parts, the Reader offers both breadth and depth with its wide range of interdisciplinary articles and international perspectives. Of interest to students, scholars, and lovers of comedy alike, The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader offers a contemporary sample of general analyses of comedy as a mode, form, and genre. Ian Wilkie is a Lecturer in Performance at the University of Salford, specialising in the Comedy Writing and Performance degree. His PhD is in Comedy and he is the author of Performing in Comedy: A Student’s Guide. Wilkie has been articles editor of Comedy Studies since 2013 (becoming main editor in 2015), and occasionally works as a comic actor.

The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader

Edited by Ian Wilkie

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Ian Wilkie; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Ian Wilkie to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised 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. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wilkie, Ian Angus, editor. Title: The Routledge comedy studies reader / edited by Ian Wilkie. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019028962 | ISBN 9780367175931 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367175948 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429057526 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Comedy--History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1922 .R68 2019 | DDC 809/.917--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028962 ISBN: 978-0-367-17593-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-17594-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-05752-6 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Dedicated to Tim Miles, a Comedy Scholar and Gentleman

Contents

Foreword by Ian Wilkie Acknowledgements

xii xxiv

PART I

Back to basics: What is comedy and where does it come from?

1

1

3

Against Comedy (1:2) CHRIS RITCHIE

2

Thoughts on the current state of humour theory (1:2)

11

PETER MARTEINSON

3

The origins of comic performance in adult–child interaction (1:1)

18

IAN WILKIE AND MATTHEW SAXTON

4

The science of baby laughter (4:2)

29

CASPAR ADDYMAN AND ISHBEL ADDYMAN

PART II

Old comedy: Taproots and tropes 5

The time-travelling miser: Translation and transformation in European comedy (2:1)

39

41

RACHEL KIRK

6

Conflict and slapstick in Commedia dell’Arte – The double act of Pantalone and Arlecchino (4:1)

49

LOUISE PEACOCK

7

Clowns do ethnography: an experiment in long-distance comic failure (5:1) BARNABY KING AND RICHARD TALBOT

59

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Contents

PART III

Class, gender, race: Reading comedy’s issues 8

‘To what base uses we may return, Horatio!’ – Hamlet, Comedy and Class Struggle (4:2)

75

77

ISAAC HUI

9

No other excuse: Race, class and gender in British Music Hall comedic performance 1914–1949 (3:1)

86

DAVID HUXLEY AND DAVID JAMES

10 ‘Women Like Us?’ (3:2)

95

GILLI BUSH-BAILEY

PART IV

Doing comedy: Giving, receiving, causes and effects

105

11 Pretty funny: Manifesting a normatively sexy female comic body (4:2)

107

HANNAH BALLOU

12 No greater foe? Rethinking emotion and humour, with particular attention to the relationship between audience members and stand-up comedians (5:1)

115

TIM MILES

13 The roots of alternative comedy? – The alternative story of 20th Century Coyote and Eighties Comedy (4:1)

124

LLOYD PETERS

14 Life memory archive translation performance memory archive life: textual self-documentation in stand-up comedy (7:1)

140

CHRISTOPHER MOLINEUX

PART V

New comedy? Interviews with practitioners

149

15 Not the definitive version: an interview with Ross Noble (1:1)

151

OLIVER DOUBLE

16 Scenes in the House of Comedy: Interview with Stewart Lee (2:1) TONY MOON

164

Contents

17 Up and down with Barry Cryer: From an interview conducted on 22 July 2011 (2:2)

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TONY MOON

18 Interview with Charlie Hanson (3:1)

176

GARY TURK

19 ‘Words are my weapons’: Tiffany Stevenson interview (3:2)

181

TONY MOON

20 Russell Kane: Comic chameleon (4:2)

185

SAM FRIEDMAN

21 Les Dennis: Man out of time (4:2)

188

SAM FRIEDMAN

22 ‘Not a funny place to live’: An interview with Chris Rock (5:2)

191

KARA HUNT

23 A series of ghastly mistakes that turned out right in the end (8:1)

199

TONY MOON INTERVIEW WITH JOHN LLOYD (COMEDY PRODUCER)

24 Interview with Kate Fox – stand-up poet (8:2)

207

IAN WILKIE

PART VI

Critical angles: Essays on a Joan Rivers routine

211

25 From toothpick legs to dropping vaginas: Gender and sexuality in Joan Rivers’ stand-up comedy performance (2:2)

213

SHARON LOCKYER

26 Joan Rivers – Reading the meaning (2:2)

224

LOUISE PEACOCK

27 ‘A pleasure working with you’: Humour theory and Joan Rivers (2:2) BRETT MILLS

236

x

Contents

PART VII

The world of comedy: Culture and satire

245

28 Obscenity, dirtiness and licence in Jewish comedy (5:2)

247

DEBRA AARONS AND MARC MIEROWSKY

29 Satire in a multi-cultural world: a Bakhtinian analysis (9:2)

261

GRANT JULIN

30 Silly meets serious: discursive integration and the Stewart/ Colbert era (9:2)

282

AMANDA MARTIN, BARBARA K. KAYE AND MARK D. HARMON

31 The comedian, the cat, and the activist: the politics of light seriousness and the (un)serious work of contemporary laughter (6:1)

300

IAN REILLY

32 Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen, and the seriousness of (mock) documentary (6:1)

314

CATE BLOUKE

PART VIII

New comedy? Emerging platforms and forms of expression

329

33 A book and a movie walk into a bar (6:2)

331

KYLE MEIKLE

34 Kidding around: children, comedy, and social media (5:1)

342

PETER KUNZE

35 A new economy of jokes?: #Socialmedia #Comedy (6:2)

352

REBECCA KREFTING AND REBECCA BARUC

36 Comedy meets media: how three new media features have influenced changes in the production of stand-up comedy (6:2)

365

JILLIAN M. BELANGER

37 The animated moving image as political cartoon (9:1) LUCIEN LEON

372

Contents

38 Is vlogging the new stand-up? A compare/contrast of traditional and online models of comedic content distribution (9:1)

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392

MATTHEW MCKEAGUE

Index

402

Foreword Ian Wilkie

Comedy studies It may come as something of a surprise that the study of comedy has only one journal dedicated to the topic – and, as of 2020, for the last ten years, that has been the one whose backcatalogue you are currently perusing. Nonetheless, the twenty-first century has seen a growing appetite for the study of comedy, with academic interest emerging across university departments worldwide. In the new millennium, in the UK alone, dedicated comedy conferences have sprung up at universities including Kent, Salford and De Montfort. Growing media interest in how comedy affects public consciousness about how the world works means that mainstream and online outlets increasingly seek scholarly commentary on comedy themes in relation to popular cultural, political and social trends as they emerge. With signs of an interest in the study of comedy as a self-contained entity arising, the establishment of an academic field seems, finally, to be under way and this Reader is a response to that growth. Back in 2010 Chris Ritchie, having already initiated the first BA degree in Comedy at Southampton Solent University, saw the need for a journal to be created in order to capture the increasing cross-disciplinary interest in the topics, substance and related interests of comedy, and thus the journal Comedy Studies was born.

Comedy principles But in terms of any studies at all, what, actually, is comedy? Received wisdom posits that comedy, as we understand it, emanated from the theatre, informally at first in ancient world representations of ‘ritual [and] revolt’ (Weitz, 2016: vii). This would suggest that comedy has always contained a strongly performative essence in which comedy is something that is ‘done’ to people and is received by them in a specialised form. The formalisation of comedy as a form of dramatic art in fifth century BC Athenian festivals and competitions opened up opportunities for a new genus of criticism by the philosophical thinkers of the day. Subsequent scholarly writings on the nature of comedy have reduced the activations that prompt laughter to three essential principles, those of Superiority, Incongruity and Release (Morreall, 1987; Provine, 2000; Raskin, 1985 etc.). These principles operate in terms of cause and effect or in the transmission and reception of comedy. The principles of Superiority and Incongruity can be seen as the drivers in creating the causes of laughter, while the effects can be measured in the Release response of the audience, spectator or reader. Release, most obviously measured through the laughter response in live performance is the principle most overtly located in the body, described in the work of Sigmund Freud

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as ‘an outlet for psychic or nervous energy’ (1905, 1964: 111). Indeed, the ‘Holy Grail’ for many comedians is the belly laugh of Relief/Release, which might look something like this description: The phenomena all comedy entertainers want to achieve. The audience were literally out of their seats and were on their hands and knees, rolling in the aisles!! Some banging the floor with their hands – rolling onto their backs, screaming with laughter – they were helpless. (Sales in Hudd, 1993: 151) Comedy’s relation to the physiologically cathartic effects of laughter has long rendered it as something that appeals, somehow, to a lesser, arguably primal, human response and, so, comedy was categorised in the lower order of creative arts from the beginning, as dictated by those (perhaps too) influential ancient philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. This, along with comedy’s early associations with the revelry, drink and debauchery that emerged from subversive rituals and rites meant that the komos has always been perceived, at heart, as a vulgar and undignified form of human activity. The early classifiers also fixed the Superiority principle as being central to comic expression, defining comedy as something predicated on an apperception of inferiority: Comedy is … an imitation of characters of a lower type, – not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the Ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. (Aristotle, 1997: 9) The Superiority theory of comedy held sway as the go-to critical lens to apply to comedy pretty much until the eighteenth century. Another way of viewing the way Superiority operates in comedy is in Thomas Hobbes’ notion of the way in which feelings of Superiority are triggered by the ‘getting’ of a joke or by seeing something happening within a comic activation of which the doer is unaware. The receiver of the comic moment is thus in the superior position of being aware of a ‘sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves’ (1840: 20). The novelist Henry Fielding wrote of the way in which Superiority and Incongruity coincided, in that ‘the only source of the true Ridiculous … is affectation … from the discovery of this affectation arises the Ridiculous, which always strikes the reader with surprise and pleasure’ (1742: 2). More recently, Incongruity has become the preferred and favoured principle for evaluating comedy. New theoretical angles that emerge tend to be variants on the ‘oddness’ theme. Comic Incongruity is essentially defined as ‘the familiar as if it were strange’ (Morreall, 1987: 2) in that something does not match up with what we expect things of that kind to be, or … it is out of place in the setting in which we find it. Something amuses us if it somehow violates our picture of the way things are supposed to be, and … we enjoy this violation. (216) Charles Darwin summarised how all three major hypotheses work in conjunction as a ‘cue’ for laughter in humans. Laughter, he claimed, was precipitated by

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[s]omething incongruous or unaccountable, exciting surprise and some sense of superiority in the laugher, who must be in a happy frame of mind, seems to be the commonest cause. (Enck, 1960: 31) Analysts of comedy have historically often been further drawn to the Russian scholar and critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of comedy’s locus in ‘carnival’, which is ‘an officially sanctioned holiday from the usual order of things’ (Weitz, 2009: 186). The subversive, rabble-rousing and debauched reputation of the carnival’s spirit of revelry has also added to comedy’s classification as something dangerous to orthodoxy as well as to it being a lower form deemed unworthy of serious scrutiny. As the playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt concluded more recently, ‘the comic is considered inferior, dubious, unseemly’ (in Corrigan and Rosenberg, 1964: 272). Finally, critics of comedy often reject but then return, strangely drawn, to the work of Henri Bergson and his ideas of the Release afforded through laughter as having a primarily ‘social function’ (1900, 1994: 117). In his ‘automaton’ or ‘mechanical inelasticity’ theory (ibid: 108 and 117), Bergson posited that whenever a man acts most like a machine that the laughter of Relief is provoked. He stated that ‘the attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine’ (1900, 1960: 49). This way of thinking about comedy provides scholars with a visual metaphor for the Incongruity principle, while also encompassing the idea of comedy’s role as pointing out human wrongness as it operates within an inflexibly prescribed social rulebook. Whatever means of analysis that is adopted, these different ways of looking at how comedy works firmly place comedy (perhaps as distinct from humour) within the realm of the ‘doing’ and the response to that activation. Comic theoreticians often base their analyses on these essential mechanisms for creating comedy and you will note that these influential theories will feature in many of the varied studies of motivating the ‘funny’ that follow in the Reader.

Comedy problems So, how do you solve a problem like comedy in the Academy? Comedy’s low status in society, and consequently within the institutions of serious study, can be attributed to a number of factors. Firstly, as seen, before formalisation in fifth-century Athenian drama, comedy too ‘grew gradually out of something more primitive’ (Potts, 1966: 12). However, while drama slowly gained respectability and became legitimised as a creative art, comedy remained stuck in its perceived dubious, carnival-esque, low, popular and trivial origins. Comedy has become viewed, at best, as a craft and it has seldom achieved high creative or artistic reputation or achieved proper status as a subject fit for critical scrutiny. Another problem that comedy has in getting taken seriously is that, as Eric Weitz notes, it is strongly linked to ‘play’ (2016: 6). Although the notion of ‘play’ is very helpful in thinking about the essentially ludic nature of all comedy, play brings with it a preconception of an essentially childish – and thus ignorable – form. As Susanne Langer suggests, ‘we often laugh at things in the theater that we might not find funny in actuality’ (1953: 85). Freud has, moreover, described the sensation of ‘feeling ashamed over what one has been able to laugh at in a play’ (1905, 1964: 219). This cognitive dissonance is perhaps partly

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triggered by comedy’s strong childhood associations. As we argued in the very first issue of Comedy Studies, comedy is located in the primal caregiver interactions of those who engage in play with their babies and infants (Wilkie and Saxton, 2010). The first stand-up comedians that we all encounter are, in fact, our early carers who create a blueprint for the doing of comedy. Child Directed Speech (CDS) employs a consciously entertaining and distracting mode of communication that uses many of the same mechanisms as comedians’ doing of comedy, and it follows very similar patterns in the ways in which responses to these interactions are encouraged. Containing some element of play at its core, the doing and reception of comedy assumes a super-communicative agreement between performer and audience in whatever form it might take. The comedy audience recognises and accepts highly manufactured, manipulative conventions, designed (often solely) with a specific view to making it laugh as being crucial to the rules of the engagement. Paradoxically perhaps, in the doing of it, comic play is not recognisable by the audience as being ‘real’ or ‘true’ but must simultaneously still ‘ring true’ in order to register as being properly funny. Comedy in performance requires both creator and recipient to be ‘in on the game’. As this game involves a negotiated mode of playfulness at its core, defining comedy becomes even more difficult to pin down. Play is a ludicrous and quicksilver form, notoriously resistant to fixed rules or inflexible rubrics. Play’s exceptional status along with the need to consider the audience’s vital role and engagement within the prescribed game makes rigorous analysis even more difficult to articulate. Operating firmly in the ludic mode, comedy, moreover, is often completely nonverbal. This bypasses the essentially literary and textual methods of analysis that are adopted in more traditionally sanctioned scholarly modes. Thus, comedy rarely gets taken seriously and is generally viewed as being immune to any serious critique. Whenever scholars do attempt to define comedy, the American writer E. B. White’s notorious (and normally truncated) quote bedevils their analysis – ‘humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind’ (in Enck et al, 1960: 102). While accurately describing the undoubted difficulties of critiquing humour (treated as the same as comedy), the dissected frog analogy suggests, oddly, perhaps, that analyses of the phenomenon should also themselves, perforce, be funny. Nonetheless, White’s remark does at least still allow that comedy is a subject worthy of serious scrutiny. Adopting a scientific study does accurately characterise humour studies’ sometimes attempts to explain the phenomenon of eliciting laughter. It is true however that taking an overly scientific approach within the discipline can indeed lead to what the humorist George Mikes described as the deployment of ‘terrifying graphs’ (1980, 2016: 24) that feature in academic conferences dedicated to the topic. In fact, humour studies are generally more interested in the individual’s response to the activation, whereas comedy studies seem to be geared more to considering the response of audiences or multiple spectators. While both interests are concerned with comedy/ humour’s causes and effects, their critical emphases also tend to concentrate on different key players within the engagement, i.e. comedy more generally seeks the perspective of the teller and what s/he is trying to do, while humour focuses more on what the receiver(s) make of the engagement. The other major difference between comedy and humour is, very roughly speaking, an emphasis on, respectively, performance texts and literary texts. Nonetheless, comedy, humour and laughter studies do tend to appear as defining terms that are lumped together and appear somewhat interchangeably, as you will note in the various usages of the vocabulary in the Reader.

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Moreover, in the Anglo-American Western tradition, current thinking about comedy tends to trigger thoughts of stand-up, a form described by Oliver Double as ‘a single performer standing in front of an audience, talking to them with the specific intention of making them laugh’ (1997: 4). As a form of modern comedy, the concept of the ‘standup’ did not appear until World War I at the earliest (Double, 2018). Stand-up is perhaps the purest form of comic performance. A doer, in the form of a joke-teller, transmits the comedy. Receivers, in the shape of an audience, process that interaction and actively respond to the creative act through their laughter reaction. As a format, stand-up encourages critical thinking about how comedy makes its meanings and how those messages are received. The form can be boiled down to the delivery and the ‘seeing’ of the joke – itself a unit of analysis that generally works through the obviousness of its structure, the constituents of its text and the manner of its performance. Basic jokes, with a formulaic beginning, middle and end, contain a build that culminates in some element of surprise. Jokes mainly operate through Incongruity – ‘most jokes arise through transference and the arousal of false expectations’ (Aristotle, 2007: 33). As Carr and Greeves further note, ‘the punch line works by resolving the suspense of the story in an unexpected way’ (2006: 22). Effective joking relies on fairly sophisticated performative conditions and techniques of delivery to succeed fully in prompting laughter. The catchphrase of the Northern Irish stand-up comic Frank Carson (1926–2012) expressed this mastery of delivery – ‘it’s the way I tell ’em’. The way the ‘story’ is told, using some or all of the comic principles, is an under-researched imperative in thinking about the way comedy relies on effective signalling for creating the conditions for effective reception of comic meaning. As mentioned, it is, crucially, the performative ‘doing’ of comedy that differentiates it from humour, which generally tends to approach analysis from a more socially intercommunicative, literary, linguistic, pictorial or textual angle. The joke as a unit of analysis, however, is naturally limited in its scope for explaining comedy as a whole. Attempts to apply the same joker/audience formula across modes (parody, satire, lampoon) let alone across myriad mediatised forms (radio, TV, film, animation, podcasts, vines, blogs, mash-ups); or even to other live forms (clowning, farce, puppetry) can often come a cropper. This is partly due to audiences’ increasingly sophisticated post-postmodernist appreciations and understandings of how comedy makes its multi-layered meanings. Furthermore, the possibilities of increasing counter-examples that a globalised, multi-platform, twenty-first-century comedy landscape can throw up, renders the joke form too narrow a tool for evaluation of comedy. The audience’s response and its role within the creation of any successful engagement of a stand-up event are also insufficiently taken into critical consideration in the main, and whatever the future of comedy study, still more attention to the audience is required. Giving equal emphasis to the effects of the ‘doing’ will mean that comedy studies (read from whatever disciplinary angle) will consider further the ‘effect’ part of the cause and effect equation. As Dürrenmatt also noted, ‘through comedy … the anonymous audience becomes possible as an audience, becomes a reality to be counted on, one to be taken into account’ (in Corrigan and Rosenberg, 1964: 286).

Comedy reflections Comedy’s possibly unique problem of being fatally subject to serious analysis is an attitude that is also mirrored by its practitioners. Those who do comedy themselves often see their practices as not fit for deeper appraisal. As the hugely popular British comedian Eric

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Morecambe once noted, ‘if you try to find out what makes us tick … the watch stops’ (in Griffin, 2005: 235). Despite the acceptance of a certain degree of reflexivity within live comedy (which requires an audience and the presence of the laughter response to measure its effects with any validity), those who actually do it are often reluctant to unpack the process. This reluctance to consider cause and effect can block any research in which performers are integral to understanding the mechanics of comedy. As Brockbank notes, ‘actors have traditionally been suspicious of theory or analysis, ascribing the creation of character in performance to decisions instinctively made, perceptions unconsciously arrived at, fine discriminations mysteriously achieved’ (1988: 3). However this reluctance towards deeper reflection is also, perhaps, due to the lack of available vocabulary to quantify comic practices properly or to find meaningful terms to give any real voice to what is, often, a tacit knowledge base. Critical vocabulary to study comedy as a concept in, and of, itself is diffuse. It is never a particularly easy matter to critically evaluate the production and reception of comedy, or to analyse comedy’s form and function within culture and society, or to scrutinise comedy in relation to emerging contemporary performance practices. Moreover, how it might emerge in the study of other domains – those, say, of text, sociology, education, politics, satire, history, culture, the social sciences, psychology, communication or science studies – raises still more problems of terminology. Umberto Eco notes that the ‘comic is … an umbrella term like “play”’ (1986: 275, italics mine). Eco’s ‘umbrella’ notion acknowledges that comedy can be taken seriously as something fit for study and that its practices inculcate and inform many other fields. Nevertheless, comedy’s overarching and multi-disciplinary nature means it cannot escape from the fact that it emanates from playful, often ephemerally performed, nebulous modes of human activity and that these elusive conceptions are often antithetical to the set definitions that prevail within the different scholastic subject domains with which comedy becomes associated. Despite these challenges, research into comedy provides an endlessly fascinating area for scholars to explore. The study of comedy also offers boundless possibilities for new and original research perspectives. The Reader that follows largely locates comedy within performed modes, but suggests much about the widespread range of disciplinary angles that can be taken. Indeed, it excitingly illustrates the sheer scope of analyses that comedy studies allows. We are, moreover, hugely grateful to those practitioners who have provided their reflections on the doing of comedy; and interviews with experts of comic practices such as Chris Rock, Ross Noble and John Lloyd are interspersed among the theoretical perspectives that are published here.

Comedy Academy Paradoxically, comedy studies in the Academy has never become fully legitimised, albeit that comedy as a concept has featured within the frameworks of a Western liberal arts education since ancient times, and has proved to be the sometimes almost obsessive object of analysis of leading philosophers and thinkers from Plato to Schopenhauer for over two thousand years. Comedy has been tackled by most of the Big Thinkers, despite Dr Johnson’s caveat that ‘comedy has been particularly unpropitious in definers’ (1751: 370). Comedy in the Academy operates like Lear’s Fool. Presenting low status socio-cultural capital, the Fool is a vital, sometimes tolerated, but unrecognised member of the King’s Court, forced to present his important critical insights, at times, under the radar. The shoots of comedy as a field of study in the UK started to emerge in the modernist

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scholarship of the twentieth century at the dawn of the mass media age. Popular culture studies emerged as a field, prompted in turn by the interests of literary scholars and class historians such as the Leavises, Richard Hoggart and Eric Hobsbawm. In the UK, the Centre for Contemporary Studies was established in 1964, signalling the start of a cultural and social sciences trend within the Academy, which in turn encouraged a growth in writing about new genres such as mass fiction, film, music, advertising, cinema, comics and the radio. By the 1970s, social scientists such as Stuart Hall legitimised the study of the media in the realm of higher education. Meanwhile comedy study per se was being promulgated in the latter half of the twentieth century due to the excellent work of expert amateurs such as John Fisher and Roger Wilmut. By the 1980s, the alternative comedy boom brought about a culture of more radical critical thinking about issues such as race, class, gender and sexuality as explored through stand-up comedy and this interest was translated into the strictures of the Academy. By the 1990s, official interest in comedy as a field of study had started to formalise. Events such as a comedy festival in Leicester cohosted by the university, alongside a number of dedicated comedy conferences at universities and international publications on comedy from academics marked the very beginnings of a field. Indeed, in the new millennium, comedy-badged degrees have been offered at a handful of universities. To illustrate the current place of comedy in the Academy through a snapshot portrait of the contemporary UK scene, a typical BA degree with the word ‘comedy’ in the title would resemble the University of Salford’s BA degree in Comedy Writing and Performance. For this three-year undergraduate award, student numbers typically average 15–20 per academic year. The emphasis is on students gaining skills in performing, writing and theorizing comedy. Students undertake a blend of core and optional modules across the degree. In practical areas these tend to include modules in topics such as standup, physical comedy or acting for the camera. In theoretical areas, a range of modules in film, theatre and textual studies, all with an emphasis on comedy, are forwarded. The overarching aim of the mixed practice and theory BA degree level courses is to enable undergraduates to build their creative skills for application across the comedy industry spectrum post-graduation. During their education students can participate in relevant inhouse opportunities, are encouraged to generate their own local platforms for the dissemination of their comedy writing and performance, and there are possibilities to take part in outside, industry-facing activities. In gradually establishing itself as a player within the growth of the study of comedy in HE over the last ten years, the University of Salford hosted an early comedy studies conference in 2007 which attracted a huge diversity of papers on different ideas of comedy. This period also saw the birth of the journal Comedy Studies which is currently housed within the university. The first Women in Comedy symposium was hosted by the university and research projects, including the University of Salford’s Sound of Laughter Project, have involved a number of colleagues and students alike. The Mike Craig archive is housed in the university. It contains 600 hours of digitised comedy tapes, including many items previously thought to be lost. Moreover, a partnership with the Comedy Writing and Performance degree at Humber College, Toronto has been instituted, allowing students to exchange ideas between the two countries. From providing the only complete comedy degree in the UK, as of 2018, this offer has expanded to four other institutions who now offer their own badged comedy degrees. At the time of writing, the named comedy degrees available at BA level are through York, Bath Spa and Goldsmiths universities. The National Film and Television School also

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offers a degree in Writing and Producing Comedy. Previous degree offers at Canterbury Kent in Comedy Performance and Production and at Southampton Solent in Stand-up Comedy have, however, been discontinued. Nor is Kent offering its (hitherto unique in the UK) MA route. That university, however, hosts an extensive digitised stand-up archive, while Brunel University has a comedy studies unit which acts as an incubator for research projects but currently offers no discrete degree in comedy. The growing suite of comedy degrees and the different departments’ interest in hosting international conferences in comedy and providing quality publications on comedy has happily broadened comedy’s presence within the Academy. The distinctive work going on marks a clear trajectory for the growth of comedy as a separate field in the UK. Writing on comedy at postgraduate level and beyond is illustrated by the selection of articles that are published in the Comedy Studies journal and in this Reader. Otherwise, HE providers in the UK (and in the US and Canada) overwhelmingly tend only to offer discrete comedy modules that are embedded within performance or theatre degrees. Most commonly these take the form of a stand-up comedy module and are taught by external practitioners, perhaps establishing the reductive wider mindset that ‘comedy’ means stand-up comedy. This can mean that myriad other forms that comedy enjoys become somewhat overlooked or sidelined in existential discussions about what comedy is. The vital collaborative group work and ensemble elements of comedy production, for example, are not particularly addressed within stand-up. Conversely, in terms of humour studies, there are no degree options whatsoever available in the UK, while laughter studies tend merely to be an ad hoc adjunct arising within the science departments at providers such as Birkbeck and UCL. Taking a degree in comedy as a separate discipline offers the potential for students to progress into the comedy industries. Comedy also affords the acquisition of wider skills: Such skills include problem solving, finding solutions, forming relationships, logical thinking, choosing appropriate tools, interpreting results, drawing conclusions, evaluating data, and analysing opinions and instructions. (Wilkie, 2015: 39) Graduates can also take up higher-level study into comedy-related matters. Continued study of comedy at postgraduate level offers rich opportunities within the Academy, as the subject of comedy provides an incomparable basis for developing the critical questioning and reasoning skills that are applicable to a wide range of disciplines.

Comedy Journal As comedy studies started to emerge from the shadows and was becoming an area that spawned interest from academics and practitioners alike, there arose the need for a dedicated journal for the study of comedy as an entity which could encompass ideas about classical comic performance traditions; review comic principles and theories of form and genre; raise questions about the production and consumption of comedy; examine the wider meanings contained in comic expression; and deliver a forum for original perspectives on previously unexamined objects of laughter. In 2010, Chris Ritchie and his team set up Comedy Studies, the first UK-based academic journal solely dedicated to comedy. It followed on from the very first BA in Comedy (at Solent University, Southampton) and

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was in response to demand from the comedy conferences that started at the universities of Kent, Salford and elsewhere. In the introductory editorial Ritchie wrote: With comedy studies, a forum is bring created for the discussion, analysis and critique of comedy … we welcome all attempts to theorize intelligently about why comedy is as it is. Yet there is also a strongly practical bent to our endeavours … we are keen to investigate comedy as a global phenomenon. (Comedy Studies, 2010 Editorial, 1:1) The rationale for the journal attempted to legitimise the study of comedy and intended to help place it as a discrete academic discipline. Through rigorous analysis, comedy would become less nebulous as an entity. Whilst it fully recognised and embraced the increasing cross-disciplinary and global interest in the phenomenon, the journal would aim to detach itself from the conventional way of thinking about comedy, i.e. only how it pervades other more established disciplines. Over the ten years of its operation the journal has covered an eclectic range of topics and themes featuring such considerations as comic form in performance and writing practices; histories of stage and screen comedy; literary and popular comedy; comedy and its traditions across cultures and societies; satire, taboo, controversy and offense; and comedy and new media. All of these areas have been analysed using the various principles and philosophies of comedy and established humour and laughter theory to ask such questions as ‘What is comedy?’ ‘What is humour?’ ‘What is laughter?’ What, moreover, does the element of ‘play’ – a defining feature of comic engagement – mean for the messages and meanings conveyed through all of these different areas of study? In attempting to answer these questions, the scope of the journal mirrors Alan Gowans’ characterisation of the main relationships between the data and socio-historical trends as used in art history criticism, i.e. similarly defining comedy ‘by an aesthetic line of progress, as cultural expression, and by social function’ (1981: 3–4). Special issues of the journal have included a celebration of Women in Contemporary Comedy, edited by Katy Shaw (3:2); Comic Improvisation, edited by Brainne Edge (4:1); Comedy and Seriousness, edited by Nick Holm and Carolyn Veldstra (6:1); and Laughter in the Digital Age, edited by Peter Kunze (6:2). Articles from each of these special issues appear in the Reader. Issue 2:2 was a key cross-disciplinary edition. Edited by Sharon Lockyer, Brett Mills and Louise Peacock, it took an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of one stand-up comedy performance – that of Joan Rivers’ routine on hosting Live at the Apollo (BBC 1, 2010, series 3, 10 December 2007, available on YouTube). Adopting different perspectives on performance study, Jewish cultural studies, socio-cultural, semiotic discourse analysis, humour theory and politeness the edition analysed the same piece of comic text from a fascinating series of cross-reference points. Three articles from that issue are reproduced in the Reader. The overarching purpose of the Reader is to present a representative back-catalogue of the journal’s content over the past ten years. The Reader is intended as a collection that illustrates the multi-perspective means that are available to analyse comedy. The Reader presents an array of critical approaches from interdisciplinary scholars, all of whom evaluate the comedy from various, and different, angles and who also adopt a range of writing styles to explore the phenomenon. The selected articles offer a contemporary sample of general analyses of comedy as a mode, form or genre, which will prove of interest and use to students, scholars and lovers of comedy alike.

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The content of the Reader is broken down into eight sub-sections, as follows: Part I is entitled Back to basics: what is comedy and where does it come from? It begins with some thoughts from Chris Ritchie on comedy’s essential nature, on its low status, subversive and performative quality. Peter Marteinson then applies some influential philosophical theories to the phenomenon of comedy. The articles by Wilkie and Saxton and the Addymans that follow locate comedy in the communicative mechanisms involved in earliest human interactions. Part II, Old comedy: taproots and tropes, discusses the histories and performance bases of comedy. The two articles by Rachel Kirk and Louise Peacock evaluate comedy’s earliest propensity towards ‘laughing at’ in its favouring of stereotypes and violence, while Barnaby King and Richard Talbot muse on the traditional form of clowning as a basis for Practice as Research. Part III, Class, gender, race: reading comedy’s issues, contains three articles which concentrate on comedy’s reflections in society and culture. Isaac Hui looks at class as a meaningful driver in comic text, while David Huxley and David James consider the appearance of comedy’s ‘issues’ within the Music Hall genre. Gilli Bush-Bailey introduces the question of gender issues as something often rendered problematically in comic representations. Part IV, Doing comedy: giving, receiving, causes and effects, tackles aspects of the doing and reception of comedy in performance. Hannah Ballou considers the nature of the feminine in the practice of comedy. Tim Miles looks at the audience’s position in the creation of live comedy, while Lloyd Peters considers the watershed moment of the alternative comedy boom and how it adopted a novel and critical viewpoint on the material of comedy. Christopher Molineux looks at how comedians document and self-reflect on their process. Part V, New comedy? Interviews with practitioners, comprises a selection of interviews with comic makers that have featured in the journal, including conversations with Ross Noble, Stewart Lee and Tiffany Stevenson. Part VI, Critical angles: essays on a Joan Rivers routine, groups the different perspectives on the same comedy set as provided by three eminent scholars in comedy – Sharon Lockyer, Louise Peacock and Brett Mills. Part VII, The world of comedy: culture and satire, provides some global overviews of issues of place, politics and seriousness in relation to comedy. Debra Aarons and Marc Mierowsky discuss ‘Obscenity, dirtiness and licence in Jewish comedy’. Grant Julin considers ‘Satire in a multicultural world: A Bakhtinian analysis’, while Amanda Martin, Barbara K. Kaye and Mark D. Harmon explore the interface of ‘Silly meets serious: discursive integration and the Stewart/Colbert era.’ Meanwhile, Ian Reilly in ‘The comedian, the cat, and the activist: the politics of light seriousness and the (un)serious work of contemporary laughter’ and Cate Blouke in ‘Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen and seriousness of (mock) documentary’, evaluate comedy as provocation and review the power behind the politics of laughter. Part VIII is called New comedy? Emerging platforms and forms of expression. This section looks at comic expression across new outlets and its adoption of these evolving modes – by adaptations (Kyle Meikle), using social media (Peter Kunze, Rebecca Krefting and Rebecca Baruc, and Jillian M. Belanger), by animations (Lucien Leon) and through vlogging (Matthew McKeague). This section brings twenty-first-century perspectives firmly to bear on the study of comedy and concludes the Reader’s intention to provide a

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collection of emerging contemporary readings on the study of comedy and its myriad theories, practices and concerns. For the many excellent critical evaluations of the work of individual makers of comedy (e.g. the Coen Brothers, Sarah Silverman or Bridget Christie) that have featured in the journal, we would refer you to the journal itself, available by subscription through Taylor & Francis. Whatever the model adopted by the scholars of comedy that are featured in this book, we suggest that the study of comedy and its workings demonstrates critical thinking of a high order. We are very grateful to all our contributors. They continue to show how comedy impacts across multiple social and cultural contexts and their work illustrates how the study of comedy is truly located in the examination and evaluation of both ancient and cutting-edge conceptualisations. The work of our contributors illuminates the many ways in which comedy works to question orthodoxies and how thinking critically about comedy’s trends, practices, developments and current concerns ‘gives license to violate the rule’ (Eco, 1986: 275). Like comedy in the Academy, our Comedy Studies journal has occupied and maintained a small but resolute niche. In 2020, however, with the publication of this retrospective Reader, there is a sense that comedy is starting to grow up. Ultimately the Reader aims to present a range of informative, current scholarship and research for the furthering of indepth knowledge and understanding of the field of comedy as it looks in the early twenty-first century. As the editors wrote in the very first issue of the journal: ‘such an endeavour can only enhance a sense of the longevity and significance of comedy as a part of life’ (Comedy Studies, 2010 Editorial, 1:1). Hopefully you will be able to judge from the selection that follows whether this aspiration has been realised.

References Aristotle (1997), Poetics, London: Dover Publications Ltd. Aristotle (2007), Rhetoric III, Accessed online at: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/a8rh/. Bergson, Henri (1900), ‘Laughter’. In Sypher, Wylie (1994), Comedy, London: John Hopkins University Press. Also in Enck, John J., Forter, Elizabeth T., and Whitley, Alvin (eds.) (1960), The Comic in Theory and Practice, New York: Appleton-Century Crofts. Brockbank, Philip (ed.) (1988), Players of Shakespeare 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carr, Jimmy and Greeves, Lucy (2006), The Naked Jape, London: Michael Joseph. Comedy Studies (2010–) Oxon: Taylor and Francis. Corrigan, Robert W. and Rosenberg, James L. (eds.) (1964), The Context and Craft of Drama, San Francisco: Chandler. Double, Oliver (1997), Stand-up: On Being A Comedian, London: Methuen. Double, Oliver (2018), ‘The origin of the term “stand-up comedy” – update’, Comedy Studies, 9:2, 235–237. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2040610X.2018.1428427 Durrenmatt, Friedrich (1958), ‘Problems of the theatre’, in Corrigan, Robert W. and Rosenberg, James L. (eds.) (1964), The Context and Craft of Drama, San Francisco: Chandler. Eco, Umberto (1986), Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality, London: Vintage. Enck, John J., Forter, Elizabeth T., and Whitley, Alvin (eds.) (1960), The Comic in Theory and Practice, New York: Appleton-Century Crofts. Fielding, Henry (1742), Author’s preface to 1948 edition of Joseph Andrews, New York: Rinehart & Co. Inc.

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Freud, Sigmund (1905, 1964), Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. London: Hogarth Press. Gowans, Alan (1981), Learning to See: Historical Perspective on Modern Popular/Commercial Arts, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press. Griffin, Stephen (2005), Ken Dodd, London: Michael O’Mara Books. Hobbes, Thomas (1840), ‘Human nature’ in Molesworth, Sir William (ed.) (1840), The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury Vol 4. London: Bohn. Hudd, Roy (1993), Roy Hudd’s Book of Music-Hall, Variety and Showbiz Anecdotes, London: Robson. Johnson, Samuel (1751), Rambler, No 125, in British Essayists, vol. XXI, May 28, 1751. London. Langer, Susanne (1953), Feeling and Form, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Mikes, George (1980, 2016), English Humour for Beginners, London: Penguin Random House. Morreall, John (ed.) (1987), The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, New York: Albany. Potts, L.J. (1966), Comedy, London: Hutchinson and Co. Provine, Robert R. (2000), Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, London: Faber and Faber. Raskin, Victor (1985), Semiotic Mechanisms of Humor, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Weitz, Eric (2009), The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weitz, Eric (2016), Theatre &Laughter, London: Palgrave MacMillan. White, E.B. (1954), ‘Some remarks on humor’. In The Second Tree from the Corner, New York: Harper & Brothers. Wilkie, Ian (2015), ‘“Too many actors and too few jobs”: a case for curriculum extension in UK vocational actor training’, London Review of Education, 13.1: 31–42. Wilkie, Ian and Saxton, Matthew (2010), ‘The origins of comic performance in adult–child interaction’. In Comedy Studies, 1.1.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all Taylor and Francis editors for Comedy Studies for their patience and their support of our journal over the years, and particular thanks to Ben Piggott for agreeing to the publication of this retrospective collection.

Part I

Back to basics What is comedy and where does it come from?

Chapter 1

Against Comedy (1:2) Chris Ritchie

Then will the comedians turn and twist, rendered nimbler than ever by the sting of fire that is not quenched. (Tertullian1)

1. Comedy, laughter and joking have long been a concern for philosophers, moralists and belligerent clerics. The philosophy of comedy starts with Plato and Aristotle laying out their respective positions: Plato saw laughter as a mix of pain and pleasure and jokes as containing a levelling quality that could reduce the status of the powerful; Aristotle described comedy as an educative force for social good. It is between these two polarities that the debates over the function of comedy have been strung: those who see a subversive negative quality in comedy and those who see a positive subversive quality.

2. Comedy and joking have been historically proscribed as social status, and hierarchies can be undermined by a simple joke passed along from mouth to mouth like a virus, mocking the great and the good. In The Republic Plato writes that ‘we must not allow any poet to represent men of repute as overcome by laughter, much less to represent gods in such a case’ (Plato 1958: 69). Plato saw how comedy and laughter could undermine the rulers of his Republic. Comedy is a mix ‘of pain and pleasure’ (Plato 1956: 57). It is undignified to show people who lack self-awareness, and the pleasure of comedy arises from the discomfort of others. Aristotle believed that although comedy is ‘an imitation of inferior people [. . .] The laughable is an error or disgrace that does not involve pain or destruction’ (Aristotle 1965: 9). Comic characters transgress etiquettes, and although somehow ‘less’ than us are still like us, which is why we relate to them, and comedy, like slapstick, is not real. Of course, some people do find the involuntary suffering of others amusing, and finding something funny is always a subjective experience. How do we justify what we laugh at – if at all?

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3. Epictetus the Stoic (d. 135AD) warned against loss of control and excess in all things: ‘Let not your laughter be much, nor on many occasions, nor excessive’ (Epictetus 1991 32), and at the theatre, ‘abstain entirely from shouts and laughter at any (thing or person)’ (Epictetus 1991 33). The role of social joker fares less well: ‘Take care also not to provoke laughter; for this is a slippery way towards vulgar habits and is also adapted to diminish the respect of your neighbours’ (Epictetus 1991 34). But perhaps laughter should be cultivated as a stoical coping mechanism for the continuous stress and absurdity of everyday life. In De Spectaculis, the early theologist Tertullian (155–230 AD) listed the reasons for not attending comic displays or theatres, and threatened eternal damnation for the comedian: the theatre was the site of idolatry and all manner of badness, as it involved male actors dressing up as women (due to the fact that, in various times, it was illegal for women to perform onstage). Tertullian cites Deuteronomy’s edict that a man shall not ‘put on a woman’s garment, for all who do so are an abomination to the LORD our God’ (Deuteronomy ch. 22, v.5). So much for the Christmas panto then.2 Men dressing as women is a transgression. In transvestite comedy the intentions vary: men dissembling convincingly as women (Dame Edna, Lily Savage) is not the same as men obviously dressed as women for comic ones (Les Dawson). For Tertullian, the theatre in general is wrong, and if they insist on this kind of behaviour then it is going to end in tears: If tragedies and comedies are the bloody and wanton, the impious and licentious inventors of crimes and lusts, it is not good even that there should be any calling to remembrance the atrocious or the vile. (Tertullian, De Spectaculis xxvii)3 It was only in fifteenth-century Britain that the church embraced theatre’s educative power: realizing that the populace would always be drawn to spectacle, the church used performance as a method of propaganda with morality and miracle plays. Occasionally, comedy could receive a good press: Evanthius (d.359AD) agreed with Aristotle’s idea of the beneficial nature of comedy: ‘Comedy is a story treating various habits and customs of public and private affairs, from which one may learn what is of use in life, on the one hand, and what must be avoided on the other’ (Palmer 1982: 30). Livius Andronicus also held that ‘Comedy is the mirror of everyday life’ (Palmer 1982: 30). Donatus (c.fourthcentury BC) admired the Roman playwright Terence, as his characters were true to life and observed decorum by avoiding offensive topics.

4. In his Penitential, Thomas de Chabham4 worried that the guise of the minstrel was useful for ne’er-do-wells, idlers and spies to adopt. Dating from the start of the thirteenth century, the Penitential categorized the different classes of performers and players: ‘the church unanimously condemned minstrels because of their association with the tricks learned from the Roman slave “histriones”’ (Rubel 1925: 231). The witnessing of ‘spectacula’ was especially forbidden to the clergy. Chabham defined three main categories: ‘(1) the acrobats, jugglers, and masked performers, (2) the slandering rogues who follow the retinues of great men, (3) those who frequent taverns and “loose assemblies” and there

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sing songs which move to wantonness’ (Rubel 1925: 233). They have no chance of salvation. The exceptions are those who sing about saints to comfort the sick and needy. Over time, many edicts were issued to restrict the movements and livelihood of wandering performers: the legal and moral position of comedians has always been a dubious one and theologians have been mainly dismissive, with the notable exception of Erasmus and his Praise of Folly. Pascal, the high priest of ennui, wrote ‘Great wit, bad character’ (Pascal 1966: 242), perhaps seeing that indulgence in joking and frivolity was a deviation from the study of God.

5. ‘so many ruffians, blasphemers, and swinge bucklers, so many drunkards, tosspots, whoremasters, dancers, fiddlers, and minstrels, dice players and maskers, fencers, thieves [&] interlude players’. (Northbrooke 1843: 76) Northbrooke’s A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays and Interludes with Other Idle Pastimes (written in 1577) is a scholarly if lengthy diatribe against ‘vain plays and interludes’ in which his apoplectic condemnation knows few limits. He has a strong turn of insult and there are few who are immune to his venom: ‘jolly yonkers and lusty brutes [. . .] adulterers, unchaste, and lewd persons, and idle rogues [. . .] dicers, carders, mummers and dancers’ (Northbrooke 1843: 11–12). One can almost see the flecks of bile spattering the manuscript. And this is only the introduction. The list of insults is a lost art in the era of the sound bite, and Cracker John weighs in on the ‘evil and unprofitable arts, as of interludes, stage plays, jugglings, and false sleights, witchcrafts, speculations, divinations, or fortune-tellings and other vain and naughty curious kinds of arts’ (Northbrooke 1843: 56). The punishment for those ‘idle, vagrant and masterless persons, that used to loiter and would not work [. . .] [is to] have a hole burned through the gristle of one of his ears’ (Northbrooke 1843: 76). If he is caught again, he will be hanged. However, Northbrooke did allow ‘honest jesting [. . .] [not] jesting that is full of scurrility and filthiness’ (Northbrooke 1843: 69). What little pleasure he derived appear to be from proscribing that of others: a life spent in denial needs some distractions after all. Like many bitten by the Jesus bug, he tends towards excessive condemnation for relatively minor infractions: the stage is one of Satan’s ways to obscure the word of God. We have to contextualize Northbrooke (and Prynne later) with the development of Protestant austerity: hard work brings us closer to God, Sunday is for worship not leisure, and holidays are a papal corruption. The Church and state’s desire to excise blasphemy or sedition intensified when they realized that the stage offered a space for public dissent and moved to curb it.

6. Our whole course of life is but matter of laughter. (Pliny in Burton 1932: 45) In his compendious Anatomy of Melancholy, written in 1621, Burton examines depression and, using the discredited theory of humours, makes a great many bizarre suggestions and wayward conclusions, tempered with humour and bombast. Burton (1932: 51) argues that if there be laughter it should be served with scorn: folly in the form of love provokes

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‘laughter to see an amorous fool torment himself for a wench; weep, howl for a misshapen slut’. Like the Stoics, Burton (1932: 76) sees that moderation in merriment is preferred lest one’s countrymen deem one mad: ‘do not laugh overmuch or be over-sad’. There is a medieval association of laughter and madness, as both imply a loss of control, and hence the court fool’s ambiguous status. Burton’s remedy for melancholy is puritan excessive moderation, and he seeks ‘to correct these spendthrifts and prodigal sons, enforce idle persons to work, [and] drive drunkards off the ale-house’ (Burton 1932: 97). The professional joker can expect a life of poverty, and contrary to Donatus ‘that comedian Terence [. . .] perceived himself to be forsaken and poor, he voluntarily banished himself to Stymphalus, a base town in Arcadia, and there miserably died’ (Burton 1932: 357). William Prynne, in his 1632 Histriomastix, condemned in somewhat protracted terms the indulgence of theatre: ‘The profession of play-poets, of stage-players; together with the penning, acting, and frequenting of stageplayes, are unlawfull, infamous and misbeseeming Christians’.5 Nor was he keen on ‘the unlawfulnes of acting, of beholding academicall enterludes and sundry other particulars concerning dancing, dicing, health-drinking’. It was not just the stage Prynne condemned but the audiences as well. With all the self-loathing of a Pascal, Prynne does not understand us ‘miserable and graceless wretches’ or why we ‘cleave to worldly pleasures’ and attend ‘diabolical and hellish interludes’. Needless to say, he was never invited to parties.

7. The business of plays is to recommend virtue, and does countenance vice. (Jeremy Collier in Nettleton 1939: 391) In the snappily titled A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), Jeremy Collier criticized the bawdy Restoration comedy for failing to ‘punish’ the ‘bad’ characters and for indulging ‘their smuttiness of expression; their swearing, profaneness [. . .] their abuse of the clergy; their making their top characters libertines, and giving them success in debauchery’ (Nettleton 1939: 391). He does not sully his text by including anything as devious as evidence for ‘he that is desirous to see these flowers let them do it in their own soil; ’tis my business to kill the root rather than transplant it’ (Nettleton 1939: 391). And he got his way: the 1737 Stage Licensing Act determined that all stage plays had to be first approved by the Lord Chamberlain, something not repealed until 1968. Samuel Johnson’s A Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage (1739) is an ironic protest against this censorship. He castigates the censors for moral hegemony and aspiring to an arrogant posterity. Johnson was angered by the refusal to allow the performance of Brookes’ Gustavus Vasa, whose corrupt politician resembled Walpole. Although not a comedy, the censorship of Brookes’ play held implications for satires on religious self-righteousness, political malfeasance or moral deviation. Johnson’s ‘impartial hand’ suggests that the unaccountable licenser need not provide any reasons for the denials or consider how successful and popular a play may be: for a writer to demand an answer suggests ‘a strange Degree of Perverseness’ (Johnson 2003: 501). Johnson warns that censorship breeds human curiosity: ‘all those pernicious Sentiments which we shall banish from the Stage, will be vented from the Press, and more studiously read because they are prohibited’ (Johnson 2003: 507). Censorship rarely achieves a totality, and critical literature will always find a way into the public domain.

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Humour at present seems to be departing from the stage, and soon it will happen that our comic players will have nothing left but a fine coat and a song. (Oliver Goldsmith in Nettleton 1939: 7636) In A Comparison Between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy (1772), Goldsmith warns that if we banish ‘humour from the stage, we should ourselves be deprived of the art of laughing’ (Nettleton 1939: 763). The stage in general and comedy in particular went through a series of changes throughout the eighteenth century as subject matter became more bourgeois and ‘safe’ in order to placate the increasingly middle-class audiences.7 This along with the success of David Garrick and Colly Cibber validated acting as a respectable career rather than the refuge of immoral wastrels. As the nineteenth century developed, music hall, vaudeville and cabaret became prominent forms of comic entertainment still prone to censorship, which helped perpetuate the double entendre and saucy innuendo. We must say what must not be said and so find ways to express it that do not necessarily contravene the law: Max Miller is prime exponent of this.

8. Why were the Germans laughing when society around them was crumbling? (Grange 1996: ix) As Grange points out, ‘comedy has frequently suffered a discredited reputation in the German language theatre because there is a German tendency to ‘underestimate comedy as a valid form of artistic expression’ (Grange 1996: 7).8 This despite the work of Hans Sachs and a clowning tradition represented by Hanswurst, an anarchic vulgar rustic who was briefly excised ‘by imperial decree’ in 1752 following an effort to elevate theatre from mass entertainment. The clown is antithetical to the bourgeois theatre, as he will never sober up or get a job. Nineteenth-century Germany comedy had been censored, but in 1920 the government nationalized the theatre and between 1919 and 1933 over 900 comedies were produced. The Weimar republic, like the Elizabethan and Restoration periods in England, was a vital and contentious time, rich in comedy and satire. Critical comedies emerged alongside the increasingly critical situation that infuriated the Nazis, who claimed that such comedies ‘subverted ‘real’ German values’ (Grange 1996: 21). Grange writes that despite box office success, many of these comedies were overlooked and ‘frequently dismissed by contemporary critics as intellectually insufficient’ (Grange 1996: ix). One of the most crucial aspects of comedy is that it documents current opinions, jokes and quotidian detail such as food, politics or fashion.9 In Weimar, loosely defined legislation meant that ‘pub cabaret’ and ‘private clubs’ did not fall under the same state supervision as ‘legitimate theatre’, and at the start of the century many smaller cabarets sprang up, often of dubious quality, but able to perform more risqué material. As the 1930s approached, there were increased fascist and anti-Semitic activities against venues, performers and audience members that ‘encouraged’ managers to censor political material, and cabaret began to lose its bite, aggression and irreverence. The Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933 saw a great many performers removed following political, social, sexual and racial legislation. Under the Nazis, Goebbels promised that ‘Political jokes will be stamped out. Wiped off the map’ (1996: 248).10

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9. Stalin, in true paranoid style, dealt savagely with anyone who dared joke about him, most regrettably the poet Osip Mandelstam, whose depiction of the dictator’s buzzer as ‘the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip’ (Mandelstam 1977: 98) made him disappear into the web of gulags. In the middle of Stalin’s worst excesses his widow wrote: ‘the odd thing was how we were still able to joke and laugh. In 1938 M[andlestam] even declared he had invented a device for the suppression of jokes as a dangerous thing: he would move his lips silently and point at his throat to indicate the position of the cut-off device. But the ‘device’ didn’t help and M couldn’t stop telling jokes’. (N. Mandelstam 1970: 42–3). In Communist Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera depicted the repercussions of a careless gag in his novel The Joke, which, echoing the book, created censorship problems for the writer. The Czech film of the novel was likewise banned. Kundera understood the very real consequences of joking in a totalitarian state, although he fared somewhat better than Mandelstam. In the Czech state nothing is ‘just a joke’ and the novel’s protagonist faces disastrous consequences. Kundera does well to invoke the depressing, tatty state that is likewise reproduced in the film The Lives of Others (2006). Set in 1984, the film deals with the excessive surveillance and blackmail used by the East German State. In the Stasi HQ canteen, over thin soup and insipid fruit juice, a young trainee tells a joke about leader Erich Honecker but is overheard by Grubitz, a senior officer, who commands him to complete the joke: ‘No harm in laughing at the party chairman is there? I probably know the joke anyway’. Grubitz then follows it with one of his own before demanding ‘Name? Rank? Department?’ He holds the tense moment before passing the incident off as a joke, although the audience knows it is a catastrophe for the impetuous trainee: the joke is feeble, the repercussions potentially severe. Again, a joke is never ‘just a joke’.

10. Be warned – if you crack a joke, Burma’s military leaders usually don’t laugh. Instead they send you to prison. (Free Zarganar Campaign website11) Jokes are subversive. They are moments of freedom, and the best jokes have an element of truth in them. It is clear that the very act of laughter is a temporary loss of control, of the audience and of those who govern them: the release of tension following the revelation of a comedic truth renders us helpless and we forget those who would keep us tense. Ideas and dissent can be propagated through joking, and authoritarians feel threatened by it. Although comedy can be a divisive force, it can also unify. We may joke about others and thus denigrate them, but we also share jokes and are united in our laughter, coming together in brief moments of liberation from work, personal distress and political despair. It is not difficult to find contemporary examples of comedians ‘rendered nimbler than ever by the sting of fire that is not quenched’. In 2009 in Myanmar (Burma) the comedian and film-maker Zarganar was sentenced to 35 years for joking about the government. He has served several sentences for similar ‘offences’. The actors union Equity are running a campaign to release him and all comedians and comedy scholars should support this. That comedians are being jailed is anathema to everything the Comedy Studies journal and comedy in general represents. Please support the campaign. We cannot allow frenzied moralists, papal diktats and funless totalitarian naysayers to extinguish the comic spirit.

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http://www.freezarganar.org/home.asp Source: Chris Ritchie (2010) Against Comedy, Comedy Studies, 1:2, 159–168.

Notes 1 In Chambers (1903: 11). 2 The question of why so much British comedy involves men dressing up as woman is an eminently suitable one for discussion. 3 There are several different versions of De Spectaculis, this is from an Anti Nice Fathers website at http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-03/anf03-09. htm#P979_399986. 4 The actual text has been extremely difficult to get hold of and I have had to refer to what others have written. All quotes are from Rubel (1925). 5 All quotes are from Prynne’s Prologue found at http://history.wisc.edu/sommerville/367/ Prynne.html. 6 Goldsmith (1939). 7 See Ritchie (2007). 8 See also Ritchie and Harris (2007). 9 The fragments of ancient Greek comedies are full of gastro-detail. See Ritchie (2007). 10 When asked in 1939 ‘whether today in Germany we still have any humour?’ Goebbels replied that ‘there is no country in Europe where there is as much joy than in Germany’ (Jelavich 1993: 248). 11 http://www.freezarganar.org/About-the-Campaign.asp.

References Aristotle (1965), The Poetics, Harmondsworth, Penguin. Burton, Robert (1932), The Anatomy of Melancholy, London, Dent. Chambers, E. K. (1903), The Medieval Stage, Oxford, Clarendon. Epictetus (1991), Enchiridion, New York, Prometheus. Free Zarganar Campaign http://www.freezarganar.org/About-the-Campaign.asp. Accessed 31/8/10. Goldsmith, Oliver (1939), ‘A Comparison Between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy’, in George H. Nettleton (ed.), British Dramatists From Dryden To Sheridan, London: Harrap, pp. 761–3. Grange, William (1996), Comedy in the Weimar Republic, London, Greenwood. Jelavich, Peter (1993), Berlin Cabaret, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Johnson, Samuel (2003), Selected Essays, London, Penguin. Kundera, Milan (1992), The Joke, London, Faber. Mandelstam, Nadezhda (1970), Hope Against Hope, Harmondsworth, Penguin. Mandelstam, Osip (1977), Selected Poems, Harmondsworth, Penguin. Nettleton, George H. (1939), British Dramatists from, Dryden to Sheridan, London: Harrap. Northbrooke, John (1843), A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays and Interludes with Other Idle Pastimes, London, Kessinger. Palmer, D. J. (1982), Comedy Criticism, London, Palgrave. Pascal (1966), Pensees, Harmondsworth, Penguin. Plato (1956), Philebus, London: Thomas Nelson. Plato (1958), The Republic, London: Dent. Prynne, William (1632), ‘Histriomastix’,on http://history.wisc.edu/sommerville/367/Prynne.htm. Accessed on 31/8/10. Ritchie, C. and Harris, J. (2007), ‘No Laughing Matter: A Short History Of German Comedy’, Scenario, 2007: 2. http://publish.ucc.ie/scenario/2007/02/ritchieharris/06/en, Accessed on 31/8/10. Ritchie, C. (2007), The Idler & The Dandy in Stage Comedy, New York, Edwin Mellen. Rubel, Helen F. (1925), ‘Chabham’s Penitential and Its Influence in the Thirteenth Century’, PMLA, 40: 2, pp. 225–39.

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Tertullian, ‘De Spectaculis’ (200AD), http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-03/anf03-09. htm#P979_399986. Accessed 31/8/10. Von Donnesrmark, Florian Henckel (2007), The Lives Of Others. London, Lionsgate,

Contributor Chris Ritchie completed his Ph.D thesis on ‘Stand-up comedy and everyday life’ at Goldsmiths College, London. He is the Founding and Executive Editor of Comedy Studies, the author of The Idler and the Dandy in Stage Comedy and Performing Live Comedy, and started the first comedy degree at Southampton Solent University. He is now a chef.

Chapter 2

Thoughts on the current state of humour theory (1:2) Peter Marteinson

There is little doubt that significant progress has been made in this discipline over the years, almost in spite of Henri Bergson’s (1912) discouraging twentieth-century admonition that ‘all the greatest philosophers have attacked this little problem, which always slips away, sliding, escaping, and then pulling itself back together, an impertinent challenge thrown at the feet of philosophical speculation’.1 Among the more successful recent advances, Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo (1991)2 spring to mind as real examples of progress: their General Theory of Verbal Humo(u)r (GTVH) constitutes, as they describe it, a ‘full-fledged taxonomy’ of parameters that can be identified and enumerated in verbal jokes, such as shared knowledge, logical contradictions and opposing semantic scripts. Rather like the taxonomy Linnaeus developed to attempt to categorize all living things, the GTVH does indeed provide a descriptive framework of traits one can use to situate and classify instances of verbal humour. One must remember, however, that the advent of the science of genetics has brought many revisions and corrections to the biological taxonomy, and it would also be appropriate to recall that our first attempts at human anatomy preceded any understanding of physiology by many centuries (one thinks of the Egyptians’ opinion that the brain, which functioned to cool the blood, was a nearly useless organ that need not be preserved in any future lives). Still it seems worthwhile to revisit both Bergson’s caveat and the GTVH (as well as other examples of progress in humour theory), in light of Max Weber’s doctrine on the three scientific methods.3 For the question Bergson asked, just before writing the above expression of the weakness of philosophy in this area, was this: ‘Que signifie le rire?’ What does laughter signify? Indeed, he belonged to a time in our collective intellectual history during which the tradition of a widely recognized ontological sensitivity in scientific methodologies was very much alive, much more so than is the case in today’s neoPositivist climate.4 After Weber, it was broadly accepted for quite some time that the method for the scientific study of material things, as in physics, must differ profoundly from those methods suited to an understanding of human behaviour, in that the latter sciences must not only apprehend material fact, but also must address the normative, the ‘noological’ social realities that affect human psychology and our decisions in respect to our place in society. Immaterial sociocultural and mythical concepts were considered to be of real importance, despite their lack of relevance in the natural sciences – or as we might say today, their lack of existence in the paradigm that predominates philosophy in our time.5 According to the terminology of the day, we merely seek to explain material facts in the natural sciences, but seek also in the human sciences to understand the world of the

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mind, a much more complex and difficult undertaking, given that sociological, psychological and anthropological matters often prove far from consistent, and seldom logical at all. Therefore, in asking for the significance of laughter, Bergson was positioning his investigation in terms of an interpretative method, rather than a merely explicative one, just as Wilhelm Dilthey, seen in many ways as the father of the social sciences, would no doubt have done, given the same question.6 This means that Bergson was aiming to go beyond the descriptive, axiomatic and taxonomical explanations that are accepted as adequate in the natural sciences. He clearly hoped we would eventually relate the parts to the whole, and answer the question of how and why laughter occurs at all. Why indeed? Such questions are no longer fashionable at present. Perhaps we are more modest, or less ambitious, than scholars at the turn of the previous century. Or maybe people just don’t believe in why any more. Is it a childish sort of question? Or does it appear naively metaphysical in the medieval, religious sense only a few can accept today? It is in this context that we can understand how Raskin’s and Attardo’s GTVH has been generally received as a more or less complete body of theory; completion nowadays means internally consistent, not exhaustive. And of course it is complete, in many respects. Yet it is essentially descriptive, like the physical discipline of mechanics, rather than interpretative, as Bergson’s theory was intended, and as we all must hope the theory of laughter will one day become. I am therefore quite sure there is still hope for a more robust, exhaustive theory of laughter. In fact, we can take some inspiration from the way in which Raskin and Attardo combined elements of their originally separate theories, namely Raskin’s Semantic Script Theory of Humour, and Attardo’s joke representational model. Their final endeavour shows that two different but compatible bodies of theory may be usefully combined in a way that allows one to complement the other, perhaps by shoring up some lacunae or shortcomings in each. This is therefore a useful approach when there are sufficient elements of compatibility. In this sense I do see today a promising direction, an exciting line of investigation that lies just an iota beyond our current theoretical state of readiness. It too involves, in a sense, the combination of theoretical contributions from a number of sources. And there is no better occasion than the launch of a new learned journal in our area to outline some of these wishes, in the hope that members of the discipline may find them useful. Hypothetically, the new theoretical approach I feel shows some promise would go something like this. First, let us think about Socrates’ invaluably astute observation, brought down to us by Plato, that the ridiculous often seems to result from a ‘failure’ of ‘self-knowledge’.7 From this, we can abstract the useful insight that an epistemological sensibility is a necessary element of the study of laughter. In other words, does the object of our laughter appear not to know something that we hold as evidently true? Indeed, we have known since ancient Greek times (think of the eiron mocking the bigger, stronger alazon) that in practice, ironic humour involves the portrayal of someone who demonstrably lacks a particular bit of shared knowledge that is most relevant to the social situation in which they find themselves. So an adequate theory of humour must have an epistemological dimension: Who knows what? and on what basis? So let us keep Socrates in mind as we move further forward in time. Next let us consider Arthur Schopenhauer for a moment. An oddity, a bolt out of the blue, his very simple formulation on the comic stands alone in the literature, one of the most peculiar and elusive statements: laughter is nothing more than ‘the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects’ that have been ‘thought through it in some relation’.8 Yet this contains something essential, something that goes

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beyond the well-trodden topoi of superiority, suddenness or mere incongruity: Schopenhauer is pointing out that there is an ontological difference between the two things suddenly seen as no longer in accord with each other; one is material, the other immaterial. This, to me, is of capital importance, though the German philosopher did nothing to develop the idea. My own two cents’ contribution at this point is that normative cultural concepts, such as those seen in social identity, are precisely the sort of ‘concept’ that we often observe falling out of place with respect to a material situation. If we imagine an unusually dressed person to be a Priest, or a Bullfighter, or a Beefeater, and then realize they are merely on their way to a costume party, we are amused at the surprise separation, in our minds, of the social concept from the real person. (This is of course why disguise itself – false identity – is so successful and frequent in comedy.) Thus, an ontic sensibility is also pertinent, as we must be able to distinguish carefully between what kind or kinds of entities are manifested in the situation that stimulates our laughter; we must ask whether they are material or immaterial, physical or mental, factual or normative, natural or cultural, because all these have different criteria for truth and falsehood: material facts can only be physically real; axiomatic observations about them can be logically real; but social and anthropological realities can only be normatively and emotionally real: they are never real in a material sense, like an electric fence or iron bars. Yet they can also keep people away, or guide their decisions. So the two most crucial dimensions for an adequate theory of laughter, clearly, are an epistemological sensibility, on the one hand, and a ontological one, on the other. However, Schopenhauer failed to notice that natural science concepts, when disproved, are not funny. In Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques, in Letter 15, we read about how Newton’s ‘new’ attraction model of astronomical orbits (now called gravitation) is far superior to Descartes’ cyclonic hypothesis, and we see a scientific concept dissociated from the real objects it was meant to represent. It is a fascinating account, as one Frenchman is disparaging another in favour of a Briton, but it is by no means funny. So the German’s definition, while ingenious, was too broad. Further refinements are needed, and we can suggest only a few here in this limited space. Next, for instance, we can take Schopenhauer’s rather plain term, ‘concept’, and broaden it to encompass the full gamut of Jungian archetypes through which we model social being (or even their Confucian homologues, for readers who know their Eastern philosophy), to see a further improvement in this renewed type of hypothesis of the comic: Combining what we know from Socrates, Schopenhauer and Jung allows us to take the ‘self-ignorance’ formulation to include not only the failure to see oneself per se, but also the ignorance of any socially significant information pertaining to the situation in which the ridiculous subject has some part. Consequently, I would phrase the next corollary of this thought experiment as follows: The comic stimulus consists of nothing other than the perception of a human subject who noticeably fails to grasp the normative sociocultural significance of a situation in human experience. By normative cultural reality I mean of course to include the archetypes of the unconscious, the set of acculturated social topoi that we project, each a discreet Jungian imago, onto the persons present in every social transaction, whether projected onto the self, as in the miles gloriosus archetype (the macho self-worshiping warrior), or onto something or someone else, as Don Quixote typically does when he tilts at windmills. Thus, we can pragmatically localize the key sociocultural ‘ignorance’ or error either as being centred around the ridiculous subject’s self-identity (such as Don Quixote’s self-image as a heroic knight), or merely as being within his conception of some other related person’s

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social significance (such as the case in which Don Quixote takes a barber’s metal shaving basin to be a magical knight’s helmet, or better yet, a common village whore to be a Lady). The advantages of such a formulation are several. Indeed it seems to ‘fit’ a wider range of known cases than other approaches, and no less significantly, it integrates a number of well-known observations that have hitherto seemed rather unrelated. Among these is Henri Bergson’s famous notion of raideur or ‘rigidity’ in the ridiculous subject. For Bergson very astutely discerned something almost imperceptible – that the person we laugh at appears, during the ‘comical moment’, to be little more than an automaton,9 a physical figure devoid of what makes a person appear complete, a humanoid ‘mechanism’. Bergson explained it in this way: ‘something mechanical encrusted on something living’. Indeed that does seem quite true, but in light of everything we have learnt in the century since Bergson, and of the fact that Jungian archetypes are appropriate immaterial entities in the sense of Schopenhauer’s incongruous ‘concepts’, I think we may yet come to prefer an inverse conceptualization: rather than describing the ridiculous subject as having something rigidly mechanical forced onto the living self, what if we considered the nonridiculous subject as a biological organism upon which habitually we project something ‘living’, something sociocultural, like a Jungian archetype?10 According to this converse formulation, a modified Bergsonian hypothesis, it seems correct to say that when the ‘living’ social identity concept is mentally separated from the ‘mechanical’ body to which it is normally married in perception, we then find the subject ridiculous. The suits and trappings of social being no longer ‘fit’. Indeed, it seems that man disrobed of social being is precisely what we ordinarily laugh at, and it is this naked state of merely factual or material being that appears rigid, or lacking in ‘life’ as Bergson put it. Thus, the direction I am hoping to cut away through this theoretical jungle seems to integrate well with Bergson, along with important elements of Socrates, Schopenhauer and Jung. Incidentally, it seems also to explain the child-like laughter elicited by flatulence, scatological humour and the like: such bodily functions generate a disjunction in our perception of man as a social being, and force us to see him, however briefly, as a mere biological one. There is a sudden ‘collapse’ of conceptual, normative, social significance, almost as Hobbes and Bain saw it, though not necessarily because of any polemic or derisory will.11 This proposed line of reasoning seems to accord acceptably with other observations as well. If we sum up the ‘low’, bodily, realm of humour (actually one of my favourite kinds, since reading Rabelais) as the sudden perception of a disjunction between the ridiculous subject’s biological and social being, as we model it in our minds as observers, then what about the incongruity we often see in the comedy of manners, between two or more equally immaterial social concepts (like sentimentality versus stoicism, or business versus pleasure), and indeed everywhere in Oscar Wilde’s theatre, and even in twentieth-century cinema’s comedy? Or even in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, at the outset of which a clutch of aristocratic soldiers swear never to love a woman, for the sake of military stoicism, a theatrical opposition of the values of virility versus sentimentality in men? Indeed, comedy often brings into agonistic conflict a pair of ideals, without recourse to figures of base or bodily humour. So it seems that we must try to expand on Schopenhauer’s contribution to our hypothesis just as we broadened what we took from Socrates. If we are correct that the German philosopher’s ‘concept’ and the ‘real objects’ they separate from are of differing ontic nature, one being material and the other immaterial, and if I am right in understanding that the materially factual – such as flatulence – can dispel and ridicule a social reality – such as one’s aristocratic

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air – then is it not reasonable to posit that one form of social reality might compromise the epistemologically ‘real’ status of another equally immaterial concept? Indeed, if we can describe the Schopenhaueresque and Bergsonian process of a contradiction arising between the factual and the normative as the deculturation of a previously valued and recognized social concept,12 we could equally describe the sort of immaterial-versus-immaterial disjunction seen in Victorian ‘wit’ and elsewhere as the relativization of one such concept by another. When Algernon13 forbids his guest Jack from eating the cucumber sandwiches on the table, and then goes on to eat one himself, he is not only displaying his biological hunger as something that dispels Jack’s social status as a guest, but in addition, he gives a social reason for it (1897: 280): the cucumber sandwiches ‘are for Aunt Augusta’. Thus, we see that he is attempting to utilize his self-conception as an ideal Host (in favour of his aunt, who is to visit later on) in a way that negates and relativizes his current status as host to his poor guest Jack, a situation that recalls our ‘expanded’ self-ignorance concept. Even more clearly, Algernon states that ‘Divorces are made in heaven’, an utterance that leads the audience to imagine a legal process ending social unions in some association with paradise or God, which causes marriage itself to appear ridiculous – not Algernon himself, not directly, in any case. So it appears that the fatal flaw of Schopenhauer’s formulation was that he did not appreciate that the relevant concepts must not merely be connected to the pertinent objects in just ‘some relation’, but rather, in a very specific kind of relation: a sociocultural one, with normative criteria for truth and falsehood. In the same scene above, does Algernon not react to Jack’s statement that he is in London to propose to Gwendolen by saying, ‘I thought you had come up for pleasure? . . . I call that business’. Again, one social concept, business, is brought into a relation with that of marriage that defies the social norms of each, and creates a relativization of the one by the other, such that both lose, for the moment of laughter, their full social value, and are left degraded as we laugh at Algernon’s reaction. No character here seems truly self-ignorant, in the strictest sense; no concept is found incongruous to any real objects, as in Schopenhauer; yet these traditional theoretical formulae are quite close to the mark, in a way that is perhaps best explained by the formulation we have begun to develop here: social being, whose fragility arises from its immaterial nature, is epistemologically compromised either by its ungrammatical juxtaposition with another figment of itself (relativization) or with material reality (deculturation). We cannot see it as real at such moments, though we normally accept it, at other times. It is normatively real but ultimately, it is factually false. In other words, social being itself is at the heart of laughter, and in particular, its fragility in the face of material facts. An example: Vladimir Propp recounts an amusing Russian story in his own book on humour, in which a very esteemed professor, giving a lecture to a large audience of admirers, is harassed by a fly that keeps landing on his nose. His venerable image as a scholar is visually perturbed by the sight of him swatting at his own face. Nature trumps culture, as it is truer in a sense – that of material fact. The observant reader will notice that nothing in the theoretical direction I am attempting to describe contradicts in any important way the theory of Raskin and Attardo; rather, it may offer our modern understanding of laughter a modest additional layer of compatible interpretative methodology, which in fact I attempt in more detail in my recent book (2006) to develop as an ‘Ontic-Epistemic Theory of the Comic’. The semantic scripts they observe to be in contradiction with one another in verbal humour may in fact be special, limited cases of relativization, in the terminology of my book.

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I hope it is by now clear how the approach I would like to suggest involves an ontological speculation on the sorts of entities we encounter in comedy, and in life, and an awareness of the epistemological consequences of their differing natures, and of their differing interpretations by different subjects. Perhaps laughter ultimately protects social being from its weak epistemological foundations, thus permitting it to survive the comic event that compromises it. That, in any case, is one of the findings of my research, such as it is. Such an approach may help explain the reason for which so many comedies exploit the mechanisms of disguise and mistaken or compromised identity – both of which force the mise-en-scène of dramatic irony – as well as countless older (neo-classical) comedies based on laughable persons whose ego-related aspirations do not match what we see as plausibly real, whose behaviour belies the identity to which they pretend (one immediately thinks of the fictional Socrates of Aristophanes’ The Clouds, or Jourdain in Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Don Quixote in Cervantes’ eponymous novel, or even Peter Sellers’ Clouseau in the Pink Panther films of the late twentieth century). Even the subtler realm of the comedy of manners falls within the purview of such a theory, as in these it is society’s institutions that are themselves repeatedly put to the test, questioned, compromised, contradicted, contorted and dispelled (one thinks of the way in which sexuality and gallantry destroy marriage in Congreve’s The Way of the World, and the way in which family relations are turned to dust in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest). Indeed, it seems laughter is a restorative balm allowing us to forgive and forget transgressions against society’s conventions. In the guise of a conclusion, it is my hope that this short reflection on the theoretical aspects of our discipline, offered here in the second issue to honour the launch of Comedy Studies, might offer some interesting food for thought to new readers. I am sure this new journal will provide an excellent forum for the investigation of the various phenotypic manifestations of the comical, and the theoretical work through which we come not only to explain, but also to understand it. Source: Peter Marteinson (2010) ‘Thoughts on the current state of humour theory’, Comedy Studies, 1:2, 173–180.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Bergson (1912), opening page, author’s translation. See Raskin and Attardo (1991). Weber ([1906] 1992). This position is explained at length by Kalinowski (1985). Cf. Carnap (1934). Cf. Socrates as recorded by his disciple Plato in Philebus, sections 48c–48d. Schopenhauer (1966: 59). Cf. Le rire, pp. 7–8. ‘Archetypes [. . .] are the necessary a priori determinants to all psychic processes’. Jung (1917, s. 276). 11 Thomas Hobbes referred to laughter as ‘sudden glory’ resulting from another’s debasement (Hobbes, Leviathan); Bain (2003) similarly saw the ridiculous as a degradation. 12 It is perhaps worth noting how closely this phrase resembles Bain’s (2003: 100) definition of the comical, as the degradation of some person, institution or value. 13 Wilde (1897), Plays: ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, p. 280.

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References Aristophanes (2003), Lysistrata and Other Plays, London: Penguin Classics. Bain, Alexander (2003), Mental Science, London: Kessinger. Bergson, Henri (1912), Le rire, Paris: Felix Alcan. Carnap, R. (1934), The Unity of Science, London: Kagan Paul. Dilthey (1988), Edification du monde historique dans les sciences de l’esprit, (Edification of the historical world in the sciences of the mind) Paris: Cerf. Jung, Carl G. (1917), Collected Works, Princeton: Pantheon. Kalinowski, Georges (1985), Sémiotique et philosophie, (Semiotics and Philosophy) Paris: HadesBenjamins. Kolakowski, Leszek (1968), The Alienation of Reason, New York: Anchor Press. Marteinson, Peter (2006), On the Problem of the Comic, Ottawa: Legas Press. Molière (1993), Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, (the Bourgeois Gentleman) Paris: Classiques Hachette. Plato (1917), Philebus, in Oeuvres complètes, Complete works, Ed. E. Fabricius, Paris: Flor. Propp, Vladimir (1970), ‘On Laughter and the Comic’, Unpublished English edition, in Paul Perron and Patrick Debbèche (eds), accepted by University of Toronto Press. Raskin, Victor and Attardo, S. (1991), ‘Script Theory Revis(it)ed’, Humor, 4: 3–4, pp. 293–348. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1966), The World as Will and Representation, London: Dover. Shakespeare, William (1956), Love’s Labour’s Lost. Ed. Richard David. London, Methuen. —— (1981), ‘Hamlet’, in Harold Jenkins (ed.), London: Arden/Methuen. Voltaire (1943), Lettres Philosophiques, London: Blackwell. Weber ([1906] 1992) Essais sur la théorie de la science, – Essays On The Theory Of Science – Paris: Plon. Wilde, Oscar (1897), Plays, London: Collins.

Contributor Peter Marteinson was a Canadian researcher educated at the International School of Brussels (Belgium), the University of Toronto (Canada) and the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris). His doctorate in French on the aesthetics of comedy (1998) was the inspiration for his later English-language book-length study of laughter in general: On the Problem of the Comic (2006). He taught, wrote and co-edited the University of Toronto learned journal Sémiotique appliqué/Applied Semiotics with Professor Pascal Michelucci.

Chapter 3

The origins of comic performance in adult–child interaction (1:1) Ian Wilkie and Matthew Saxton

Overview This article considers the origins of comic performance. We argue that the appreciation of comedy and aspects of comic performance find their roots in the unique form of interaction witnessed between parents and their children. Adults modify their speech in myriad ways when addressing infants and toddlers. They adopt a special register, known as Child Directed Speech (CDS), typified by a wide range of adaptations and simplifications (Saxton 2009). Compared with normal discourse, sentences tend to be shorter and grammatically simpler, while the vocabulary chosen is concrete and confined to the child’s interests. The linguistic modifications on display in CDS serve to facilitate both communication and language development. They also provide the basis for the child to learn about humour and comic performance from the first weeks of life. In what follows, we describe the earliest signs of comic appreciation in infancy and consider how specific features of Child Directed Speech contribute to the development of comic performance from non-verbal through to verbal humour. We demonstrate that humour and laughter are intrinsic aspects of successful interaction between mother and child. We also show how the style of adult-infant interaction can be seen as the foundation of comic performance adopted by professional comedians.

The development of smiling and laughter Newborn infants can smile, in the sense that the corners of the mouth curl up, just days after birth, but mostly this occurs when they are either very drowsy or even asleep. In the following weeks, infants begin to smile when awake, but in an indiscriminate way, at both people and things. It is not until about six to ten weeks of age that genuinely social smiling emerges (Emde & Harmon 1972); the baby responds to another person’s smile with a smile of their own, and begins to initiate smiling also, in a process which only emerges through social interaction with other people. We know this from studies of blind infants, who often fail to progress spontaneously to social smiling (Fraiberg 1974). Once reciprocal smiling emerges, parents begin to feel notably more engaged, while the infant, in turn, begins to show signs of joy, a new emotion, when interacting with others. Soon afterwards, from twelve to nineteen weeks of age, laughter appears, generally in response to very active stimulation by the parent. For example, laughter can be induced by simple games of ‘I’m gonna get you!’ which might culminate in blowing a raspberry on the baby’s cheek. Laughter can also be induced by a vigorous pitch or unexpected tone of voice. As it happens, CDS, when directed at infants in the first year of life, sounds quite

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different from normal speech (Garnica 1977). A relatively high pitch is lent colour by exaggerated, swooping intonation contours, which are designed to grab the infant’s attention. At the same time they can prompt delight and laughter in the child. Thus, Rasmussen reports of his daughter that at ‘one hundred and sixty-two days old he could always make her laugh by asking: “Can you laugh a little at father?” pitching his voice on high notes’ (Rasmussen 1920). Van Leeuwen describes the process of CDS, revealing many of the key features of proto-comic performative interplay, in a transcript of a mother interacting with her 12-week old baby during a research project on ‘toys as communication’: Mother: ‘What’s that? . . . (excited high-pitched voice) What’s thaaat? . . .’ She holds up the rattle and shakes it. Mother: ‘Who are they? What are they? They are funny ones . . ..’ She moves the rattle close to her ear again, shaking one of the characters and listening to it. Mother: ‘This is a nice one . . . Oooh! This is a squeaky one!’ She squeaks him again. The baby shakes her arms and legs vigorously and looks on intently. Mother: ‘Oooh . . . (creating a voice for the alien) Ho-ho-ho. It’s like a dragon. (She continues, using the ‘aliens’ as puppets, creating sounds for them, making them wiggle, ‘walk’ across the baby’s tummy, caress the baby’s cheek, and so on). (van Leeuwen 2005: 84–86)

Surprise and familiarity From the very first, attempts to provoke smiling or laughter in an infant are characterized by an element of surprise. In this vein, Darwin relates his exchange with his 3½-monthold child who was ‘exceedingly amused by a pinafore being thrown over his face and then suddenly withdrawn, and so he was when I suddenly uncovered my own face and approached him’ (Darwin 1872: 289). Our response to being surprised in this way persists into adulthood, as we experience ‘the physiological squeal of transient delight, like an infant playing “peek-a-boo”’ (Critchley 2002: 10). We see that an element of surprise is critical in triggering a comic response in both infants and adults. Comic triggers tend to be more vigorous than other forms of adult–child interaction, with parents engaging in exaggerated vocal play and facial expressions. A playful attitude is signalled by the introduction of absurdity and incongruity. This kind of early interaction is not only widespread but finds official sanction in advice dispensed by the National Health Service: ‘Put out your tongue and make funny faces. Your baby may even try to copy you! . . . Your baby is learning all about expression, mood and communication’ (Welford 1999: 124). Surprise functions as a trigger for laughter, but not just any kind of surprise in any context. Arguably, an event is rendered both surprising and humorous by the occurrence of incongruity presented within a familiar setting. Sully observed the importance of surprise, rather than shock, more than a century ago: Provocatives [sic] of laughter . . . were sudden movements of one’s head, a rapid succession of sharp staccato sounds from one’s vocal organ (when these were not

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disconcerting by their violence) and, of course, sudden reappearance of one’s head after hiding in a game of bo-peep. (Sully 1896: 407) The infant as an audience for comic performance needs to feel secure with the performer, typically a parent or family member. Infant and parent are typically bonded by familiarity and feelings of positive affect, so the setting for early comic performance is generally ideal. In a similar way, the success of comic performance in adulthood is also predicated on familiarity with the performer. The audience must in some way recognize the comic actor or the character they play. Of course, many comic characters are created with the deliberate intention to caricature unattractive traits. In this vein, one might mention Basil Fawlty’s irascibility, David Brent’s insensitivity, Rigsby’s cravenness, or Edina’s rampant egomania. But personality flaws do not prevent one from liking either the character, or more subtly, the actor portraying the character. Thus, Thomson suggests that ‘it is not simply that we like the actor in spite of the character, rather that, in defiance of our own moral judgment, we like the character because of the actor’ (Thomson 2000: 131). Whether or not the audience likes the actor (or their character), a sense of familiarity with the performance is, arguably, essential. In the same way, the infant will only laugh when they are both familiar and comfortable with the performer. This is what Jean-Pierre Jeancolas refers to as the ‘reassuring’ element in comedy (Jeancolas 1992: 141). Accordingly, J.B. Priestley notes that: The people to whom we are bound by real affection are always, to some extent, comic characters, and we begin to feel this in childhood. (We are always glad to see Uncle Joe or Aunt May but they can’t help being rather funny). (Priestley 1976: 9) Morreall notes that ‘babies enjoy peekaboo only with familiar faces of people they feel attached to’ (Morreall 1987: 135). By six months, infants begin to demonstrate an ability to distinguish between well-known versus strange faces (Sandstrom 1966: 173). And it is the familiar faces that evoke laughter. If the reassuring context is absent, neither the young child nor the adult will be amused. For instance, the child’s first encounter with a jack-in-the box is just as likely to terrify as to amuse, unless it is introduced carefully, with some preparation by the caregiver that the new object will be a source of fun. In essence, the child must learn that the toy is not threatening and is, in contrast, comical: the surprise which then ensues is more likely to be pleasant. Circus clowns also exemplify this point, in as much as many children seem to be scared by clowns – giving rise to the dedicated phobia known as coulrophobia. Perhaps the outlandish make-up creates an image of the human face that is excessively unfamiliar to young children. Events differ in their degree of novelty and hence in the extent to which the element of surprise they embody is amusing, rather than frightening. And often, the transition from comedy to alarm is quite subtle, as Hazlitt observed in 1885: If we hold a mask before our face, and approach a child with this disguise on, it will at first, from the oddity and incongruity of the appearance, be inclined to laugh; if we go nearer it, steadily, and without saying a word, it will begin to be alarmed . . . it is usual to play with infants, and make them laugh by clapping your hands suddenly

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before them; but if you clap your hands too loud, or too near their sight, their countenances immediately change and they hide them in the nurse’s arms. (Hazlitt 1885: 5) It becomes apparent that the manner of the interaction is as important as the action itself. We see this point confirmed in verbal, as well as non-verbal humour. With puns or gags, the way in which the joke is told is essential in the realization of the comic potential. As the comedian Frank Carson would have it: ‘it’s the way I tell ‘em’.

Incongruity Incongruity is a fundamental feature of comic performance. And the element of surprise discussed above is an essential ingredient in the creation of incongruity. But so, too, is the familiar setting in which the surprise takes place. For an event to be incongruous, audience expectations must be confounded. It follows, therefore, that the ability to compare (however unconsciously) the expected with the unexpected is an essential ingredient in appreciating a joke or piece of slapstick (Morreall 1987: 130). For the infant, the ability to recognize the unexpected as the unexpected is therefore essential. In fact, research over the past 25 years has consistently shown that infants are attuned to unexpected events from the very first weeks of life (e.g., Cashon & Cohen 2000). By the use of deception, infants can be presented with ‘magical’ events which defy the laws of physics or logic. For example, a drawbridge can be raised in front of an attentive infant, and, via illusion, can apparently ‘pass through’ a solid object (Baillargeon, Spelke & Wasserman 1985). On such occasions, infant behaviour betokens their sensitivity to the incongruity of the situation. They look longer or suck more vigorously on a dummy, and their heart rates increase when observing impossible events. This basic finding has been replicated dozens of times and the research method is now known as the ‘violation of expectation’ paradigm. It would seem that we are equipped from the very start with a key ingredient in the appreciation of comic performance: a sense of the incongruous. Writing in the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer was well aware of the importance of incongruity in inducing laughter: The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which can be seen through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity. (Schopenhauer 1909: 52) Similarly, Kierkegaard noted that surprise is present in any ‘contradiction’ that, in turn, leads to a perception of incongruity (which must contain its own innate truth or ‘absurdity to itself’ (Kierkegaard 1941: 460)). This perception then leads to laughter. But why should laughter be the response, when faced with incongruity? The answer to this question is much more mysterious, but the sense of relief, or release, which people feel when they ‘get’ a joke may hold the key, even for the infant: Research has shown we instinctively recognise these ‘incompatible contexts’ in the first year of life . . . research shows that if a mother crawls towards the edge of the cot

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the baby will laugh because it interferes with the convention that babies crawl, mothers walk . . . Laughter is essential because it provides a cognitive respite. (Hale cited in Skatssoon 2006)

The here-and-now Adult–child interaction is rooted in the here-and-now. In fact, it might be argued that nothing else is possible (Saxton 2009). The typical one- or two-year-old is incapable of discussing ideas and concepts remote in time and space. Their interest is instead devoted to concrete actions and objects within their immediate orbit. In fact, five topics tend to dominate the conversation of very young children: clothes; parts of the body; family; food; animals (Ferguson 1977). An adult who attempted something more ambitious, say some treatise on stock market prices or global warming, would be met with a blank stare. The adult is forced to follow the child’s interests and concentrate on matters of interest in the child’s immediate environment. Comedians also often draw their audience into a world that is rooted in the moment, as noted by Bruce: ‘Comedians drew on a repertoire of techniques which broke any theatrical illusion and rooted the experience in the here and now – they engaged directly with their audiences, ad-libbed, used catch-phrases and so on’ (Bruce 1999: 83).

Language-based humour At the age of about 12 months, most children utter their first word and the subsequent shift into a world of language takes off with remarkable speed. By the time of the child’s third birthday they can string multi-word sentences together. By the age of five, the typical child possesses a vocabulary of about 6,000 words and possesses most of the basic grammatical machinery for understanding and producing complex sentences (Saxton, in press). In tandem with this exponential linguistic growth comes a rising appreciation in the child for language-based humour. The development of a sense of humour seems to parallel the child’s linguistic development (Morreall 1987: 217). In verbal language play the sort of language play that leads to puns is thought to serve an important function in the development of a child’s language and communication skills . . . the greater source of pleasure seems to be the interaction with the carer or researcher . . . in this case ‘telling’ the joke . . . seems to make the children feel exhilarated at their new power to amuse their adult carer. (Carr and Greeves 2006: 31) Children on the threshold of language take great delight in onomatopoeia, simple wordplay and puns (Moustaka 1992). We find here an echo in the use of catchphrases by many comedians: instantly recognizable triggers for a comic response. Dave Willis’ ‘way, way uppa kye’ is particularly childlike and was, in fact, taken verbatim from an utterance made by his own son, Denny, when a young child (House 1986: 67). Tommy Morgan’s catchphrase was similarly childlike, with onomatopoeic qualities: ‘clairty, clairty,’ meaning ‘dirty, dirty’ (Irving 1977: 29). Arthur Askey’s ‘hello playmates’ or Bernie Winter’s ‘hello choochy face’ are further appeals to the childlike state. In a similar way, playground chants and rhymes, with their reliance on rhythm and vernacular language, are often

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resonant of comedians’ catchphrases. In Scotland, for example, one finds so-called stottin rhymes, as in: ‘Ruglen’s wee roon rid lums reek briskly’ (this translates as ‘Rutherglen’s small, round, red chimneys smoke copiously’ (Mackie 1973: 102)). Freud states in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, it is also generally acknowledged that rhymes, alliterations, refrains and other forms of repeating similar verbal sounds which occur in verse, make use of the same source of pleasure – the rediscovery of something familiar. (Freud 1964: 122) The use of incongruity to provoke laughter shifts from purely physical events into the linguistic sphere during the pre-school years. For example, puns rely on incongruity in their manipulation of the phonological, morphological and semantic features of words. In consequence, ‘a pun is a sort of jack-in-the-box’ (Santayana 1896: 250). Jokes also depend on verbal incongruity: The punchline works by resolving the suspense of the story in an unexpected way. Your brain responds to this tiny paradigm shift by making a conceptual leap that mirrors the jump from perceived threat to no threat, with the same result – laughter. (Carr and Greeves 2006: 22) Undoubtedly, the level of sophistication witnessed in verbal humour develops gradually during the school years. It may be for this reason that Scottish educationalist and founder of Summerfield School, A.S. Neill suggested that: ‘Few bairns have a sense of humour; theirs is a sense of fun. Make a noise like a duck and they will scream, but tell them your best joke and they will be bored to tears’ (Neill 1916: 26–27). Perhaps Neill should not have told these children his ‘best joke’. Language-based humour is by no means beyond the grasp of even very young, preschool children. But it must be grounded in the experience and perspective of the child, not the adult.

Repetition One of the most characteristic features of CDS is the occurrence of repetition. Both adults and children repeat both themselves and each other with very high frequency, especially between the ages of one and three years (Saxton, in press). Information is constantly recycled and re-presented, often with minor modifications, indicating that both the parent and the young child are highly sensitive to each other’s contributions to the conversation. More broadly, verbal repetition is an example of imitation, which is a fundamental feature of social interaction. From the very moment of birth, neonates display the capacity to imitate facial gestures, including tongue protrusion and a wide O-shaped mouth gesture (Meltzoff & Moore 1983). It turns out that the human brain is equipped with so-called mirror neurons, directly associated with our ability to imitate (Rizzolatti & Arbib 1998). And of course, imitation and verbal repetition are staple components of comic performance. Making silly faces back and forth is not confined to interaction with young children. And Bergson argues that ‘in a comic repetition of words we generally find two terms; a repressed feeling which goes off like a spring, and an idea that delights in repressing the feeling anew (Bergson [1900] 1956: 54). In his consideration of comic performance

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within sitcom, Mills refers to the ‘comfort of repetition’ (Mills 2005: 140). Repetition also features in a very deliberate manner ‘in French plays of the absurd, like Beckett’s En Attendant Godot and Ionesco’s La Leçon [and] doubtless take their inspiration from the Commedia tradition’ (Styan 1975: 93). Repetition is embedded in many of the rhymes and lullabies which are used to amuse young children, for example, ‘eeny-meeny-miny-mo’, ‘one-two-three-a-lairy’, and ‘tinkertailor-soldier-sailor’ (Hoggart 1960: 49). And children take great pleasure in repeating enjoyable activities, like book reading, on occasion beyond the endurance of their parents. The use of repetition with children may well contribute to feelings of familiarity and security which, as noted above, may create a backdrop for the introduction of surprise. In a similar vein, comedians’ catchphrases imbue the audience with a sense of instant recognition and comfort. The radio comedy ITMA, during World War II, was famously littered with catchphrases: There was Ali Oop the peddler: ‘You buy nice dirty postcard, very slimey, oh blimey.’ There was Mrs Mopp the charlady: ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ There was Sam Scram the useless factotum: ‘Boss, boss, sump’n terrible’s happened.’ There was Colonel Chinstrap the tippler: ‘I don’t mind if I do.’ There was the salesman: ‘I’ll call again. Good morning. Nice day.’ There was the diver: ‘I’m going down now, sir.’ There were many more: it sometimes seemed that every week Ted Kavanagh, who in all exceeded 300 half-hour scripts, invented a new catchphrase every week, and a character to go with it. (Halliwell 1987: 218) Catchphrases continue to be very popular. The recent BBC comedies The Fast Show (1994–2000) and Little Britain (2003–2006) are popular with young audiences, in part because of their reliance on familiar catchphrases, identified with particular characters, repeated on every possible occasion. Meanwhile, young-child specific shows such as The Teletubbies (BBC 1997–2001) and The Tweenies (1999 to date) rely on repetitions and simple, nonsensical utterances to appeal to, and comfort, their target audience.

Nonsense The oft-repeated rhymes and chants of childhood are often deliberately nonsensical. Against a background of conventional meanings and sentence forms, incongruity is introduced: in a linguistic form that echoes the incongruity of purely visual, event-based humour. The devices for making meaning, from infancy throughout childhood, include glorification in the use of bizarre words, turns of phrase or sounds, along with an enjoyment of conceptualizations that can be understood merely as silly or ridiculous. Children’s nursery rhymes, chants, poems, songs and jokes all revel in such incongruities; an early example of nonsense is provided by Brown in his (possibly imagined, nonetheless illuminatingly detailed) description of Sir Walter Scott, playing with the seven-year-old Marjorie Fleming, in 1810: Having made the fire cheery, he set her down in his ample chair, and standing sheepishly before her, began to say his lesson, which happened to be – ‘Ziccoty,

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diccoty dock, the mouse ran up the clock, the clock struck wan, down the mouse ran, ziccoty, diccoty dock.’ This done repeatedly till she was pleased, she gave him his new lesson, gravely and slowly, timing it upon her small fingers, – he saying it after her, – ‘Wonery, twoery, tickery, seven: Alibi, crackaby, ten, and eleven; Pin, pan, musky, dan; Tweedle-um, twoddle-um, Twenty-wan; eerie, orie, ourie, You, are, out.’ He pretended to great difficulty, and she rebuked him with most comical gravity, treating him as a child. He used to say that when he came to Alibi Crackaby he broke down, and Pin-Pan, Musky-Dan, Tweedle-um and Twoddle-um made him roar with laughter. (Brown 1898: 205) Comic performance aimed at adults can also embody revelry in the incongruities that language can present; double entendres, slang, puns and rhyme all demonstrate enthusiasm for playing with language and finding humour in confounding our linguistic expectations.

Superiority One further standard ingredient often found in comic performance is a sense of superiority, which is enjoyed by the audience at the expense of the performer. As the great movie comedian Oliver Hardy noted, ‘one of the reasons why people like us, I guess, is because they feel so superior to us. Even an eight-year-old kid can feel superior to us and that makes him laugh’ (cited in McCabe 1966: 46). At the same time, there is an implicit collusion between performer and audience. The audience understands that displays of ineptitude and inadequacy are ‘put on’ for their benefit. Thus, W.H. Auden states in his ‘Notes on the Comic’ that: in appearance he is the clumsy man whom inanimate objects conspire against to torment; this in itself is funny to watch, but our profounder amusement is derived from our knowledge that this is only an appearance, that, in reality, the accuracy with which the objects trip him up or hit him on the head is caused by the clown’s own skill. (Auden 1963: 373) Charles Darwin also considered ‘some sense of superiority in the laugher’ to be an important ingredient in the humour we perceive (Darwin [1872] 1904). Once again, we find the foundations of adult comic performance in the structure of adult–child interaction. The acquisition of linguistic and social conventions by very young children depend on what Kuhl & Meltzoff (1996) call the ‘hindsight basis’ or ‘I knew it all along effect’. In this regard, one might point to the fact that the comic characters enjoyed by young children are often incompetent, clownish figures like Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean (ITV, 1990–1995). With his inability to perform even the simplest of tasks, the child enjoys a feeling of superiority over Mr. Bean. They ‘know all along’ how to succeed where even concerted efforts by Mr. Bean fail.

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Conclusion From the very first weeks of an infant’s life, interaction with parents often constitutes a comic performance. Parents can make infants laugh by confounding their expectations within a familiar setting, via vigorous vocal or physical events. But it would be wrong to conclude that the infant spends a long apprenticeship as the audience, in thrall to the parent’s ‘turn’ as performer. Long before the child’s first birthday, we see signs of the child initiating the making of laughter. Thus, Piaget (1952) observed his 10 month-old son continually throwing a favourite metal toy into a basin to delight in the noise it made. The laughter provoked in this way was shared with the parental audience. Many of the elements of adult humour are witnessed from the very start in adult–child interaction. These include the elements of incongruity and superiority evident in slapstick and physical comedy. But incongruity and superiority can also be seen from very early on in adult– child humour based on language: verbal repetition, wordplay, nonsense, rhymes, jokes and puns. Hal Roach, the great silent movie comedy director, believed that ‘one of the big secrets of successful comedy is relating it all to childhood’ (Kerr 1975: 111). We would further refine this observation, by focusing on a very specific aspect of childhood: the quality of interaction between parent and child. As we have seen, several key features of adult–child interaction persist beyond childhood and can be identified in successful adult comic performance, based on the quality of interaction between comedians and their audiences. Source: Ian Wilkie and Matthew Saxton (2010) ‘The origins of comic performance in adultchild interaction’, Comedy Studies, 1:1, 21–32.

References Auden, W. H. (1963), The Dyer’s Hand, London: Faber. Baillargeon, R., Spelke, E. and Wasserman, S. (1985), ‘Object permanence in five-month-old infants’, Cognition, 20/3, pp. 191–208. Bergson, H. ([1900] 1956), ‘On Laughter’ (trans. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell) in Comedy, New York: Doubleday & Co. Brown, J. (1898), Horae Subsecivae, London: Adam and Charles Black. Bruce, F. (1999), ‘Songs, Sketches and Modern Life: Scottish Comedians 1900–1940ʹ, Theatre Notebook: A Journal of the History and Technique of the British Theatre, LIII: 2. Carr, J and Greeves, L (2006), The Naked Jape, London: Michael Joseph. Cashon, C. H. and Cohen, L. B. (2000), ‘Eight-month-old infants’ perception of possible and impossible events’, Infancy, 1: 4, pp. 429–446. Critchley, S. (2002), On Humour, Abingdon: Routledge. Darwin, C. ([1872] 1904), The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, (ed. F. Darwin), London: John Murray. Darwin, C. (1877), A biographical sketch of an infant, Mind, 2/7, pp. 285–294. Emde, R. N. and Harman, R. J. (1972), ‘Endogenous and exogenous smiling systems in early infancy’, Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 11, pp. 77–100. Ferguson, C. A. (1977), ‘Baby talk as a simplified register’, in C. E. Snow and C. A. Ferguson (eds), Talking to children: Language input and acquisition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraiberg, S. H. (1974), ‘Blind infants and their mothers: An examination of the sign system’, in M. Lewis & S. Rosenblum (eds), The effect of the infant on its caregiver, New York: Wiley.

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Freud, S. (1964), Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (volume VIII), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, London: Hogarth Press. Garnica, O. K. (1977), ‘Some prosodic and paralinguistic features of speech to young children’, in C. E. Snow & C.A. Ferguson (eds), Talking to children, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 63–88. Halliwell, L. (1987), Double Take and Fade Away, London: Grafton Books. Hazlitt, W. (1885), Lectures on the English Comic Writers, London: George Bell. Hoggart, R. (1960), The Uses of Literacy, Harmondsworth: Pelican. House, J. (1986), Music Hall Memories, Glasgow: Richard Drew Publishing. Irving, G. (1977), The Good Auld Days: The Story of Scotland’s Entertainers From Music Hall to Television, London: Jupiter. Jeancolas, J. (1992), ‘The inexportable; the case of French cinema and radio in the 1950s’, in R. Dyer and G.Vinceneau (eds), Popular European Cinema, London: Routledge. Kerr, W. (1975), The Silent Clowns, New York: Da Capo. Kierkegaard, S. (1941), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (trans D. Swenson), Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kuhl, P. K. and Meltzoff, A. N. (1996). ‘Infant vocalizations in response to speech: Vocal imitation and developmental change’ Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 100/4, pp. 2425–2438. van Leeuwen, T. (2005), Introducing Social Semiotics, London: Routledge. Mackie, A. (1973), The Scotch Comedians: From the Music Hall to TV, Edinburgh: Ramsay Head. McCabe, J. (1966), Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy, New York: Signet. Meltzoff, A. N. and Moore, M. K. (1983), ‘Newborn infants imitate adult facial gestures’. Child Development, 54/3, 702–709. Mills, B. (2005), Television Sitcom, London: BFI Publishing. Morreall, J. (ed.) (1987), The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, New York: Albany. Moustaka, K. (1992), ‘Motherese: A description of the register caretakers use to address children and its relation to first and second language acquisition’, unpublished MA TESOL thesis, London: University of London. Neill, A. S. (1916), A Dominie’s Log, London: Herbert Jenkins Limited. Piaget, J. (1952), The child’s conception of number, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Priestley, J. B. (1976), English Humour, London: Heinemann. Rasmussen, V. (1920), Child Psychology. Part 1. Development in the first four years. London. Cited in Grieg, J. (1969) The Psychology of Laughter and Comedy, New York: Cooper Square Publishers Inc. Rizzolatti, G. and Arbib, M. A. (1998), ‘Language within our grasp’, Trends in Neurosciences, 21:5, pp. 188–194. Sandstrom, C. (1966), The Psychology of Childhood and Adolescence, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Santayana, G. (1896), The Sense of Beauty, New York: Scribners. Saxton, M. (in press), Child language: Acquisition and development, London: Sage. Saxton, M. (2009), ‘The inevitability of Child Directed Speech’, in S. Foster-Cohen (ed.), Advances in language acquisition, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 62–86. Schopenhauer, A. (1909), The World as Will and Idea (trans. R. Haldane and J. Kemp), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Skatssoon, J. (2006), News in Science: Why we laugh at slapstick, Tuesday 3 October 2006. Accessed at ABC Science online: http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/2006/1753373.htm Styan, J. L. (1975), Drama, Stage and Audience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sully, J. (1896), Studies of Childhood, London: London: Longman, Greens & Co. Thomson, P. (2000), On Actors and Acting, Exeter: University of Exeter. Welford, H. (1999), Ready, Steady, Baby: A Guide to Pregnancy, Birth and Early Parenthood, Edinburgh: Health Education Board for Scotland.

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Contributors Ian Wilkie is a professional actor and a tutor in post-compulsory education at the Institute of Education, London. He is currently undertaking research into comic performance at the University of Aberystwyth. Matthew Saxton is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology and Human Development at the Institute of Education, London. His research interests are in the field of child language acquisition and include the role of input and interaction and their integration within theories of grammar development. He is the author of ‘The inevitability of Child Directed Speech’, in S. Foster-Cohen (ed.), (2009) Advances in language acquisition, London: Palgrave Macmillan, and Child language: Acquisition and development (2017).

Chapter 4

The science of baby laughter (4:2) Caspar Addyman and Ishbel Addyman

How many babies does it take to change a lightbulb? What’s laai-bub?

Babies laugh a lot but what are they finding so funny? ‘The Baby Laughter’ project (http://babylaughter.net) is an online research programme that aims to take laughing babies seriously. In short, we think that babies laugh when they ‘get the joke’ and so studying the things that make babies laugh can tell us about their cognitive and social development. This article describes the motivations behind the project, its aims and methods and some of the questions that we hope it will answer. Data collection is still underway but we present some preliminary results and offer some early conclusions.

What can we learn from laughing babies? There are two things we could potentially learn from the laughter of babies. We could learn about laughter and we could learn about babies. These are both serious fields of research but perhaps are not regarded as such by outsiders. This leaves the study of laughing babies at a double disadvantage and, indeed, this might explain why the topic has been neglected on all sides. As we shall see, infants have been largely ignored in the study of laughter and humour while laughter and humour have been largely ignored in the study of infants. This project comes from within the field of developmental psychology so we shall primarily be interested in what laughing babies can tell us about babies. But research with babies is not just about what it is like to be a baby, infancy is a window into adulthood. Studying the considerable efforts that babies must go to acquire skills like language, social interaction or even walking has changed psychology’s perspective on adult abilities that would otherwise be taken for granted. We hope that the scientific study of baby laughter will inform theories of adult laughter and humour. It is also important to emphasize that this is a scientific study. This brings its own challenges. Laughter and babies are both incredibly tricky to study in a scientific setting. Laughter is spontaneous, capricious and idiosyncratic, babies no less so. Getting babies to laugh is relatively easy but getting them to laugh on demand is just as hard as stand-up comedy. Furthermore, it is always very difficult to untangle the social and the cognitive aspects of laughter. Is this person or baby laughing at me or with me? Finally, a lot of scientists would think that laughter isn’t an appropriate topic for ‘serious’ investigation. We disagree strongly and hope to prove that when laughing babies really do get the joke.

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Infant laughter in the study of humour No one can fail to notice that babies laugh more than the rest of us but the academic study of humour and laughter does not often consider laughing babies to be very relevant. Sigmund Freud normally had a lot of time for the unseen influence of the infantile on the adult. But when it came to humour, he took a very Victorian approach that children should be seen and not heard. In Freud’s 1905 book Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, it was the intellect rather the infantile that was the source of amusement. In Freud’s view ‘children do not strike us in any way comic’ ([1905] 1976: 287) and ‘children are without a feeling for the comic’ ([1905] 1976: 288). He admits that children’s laughter can be an expression of playfulness or pure pleasure. But he makes a very adult interpretation of much of children’s laughter, imaging it a form of superiority or even Schadenfreude at the expense of the person seeming to do something wrong. Suggesting that children’s laughter is an expression of mastery then leads Freud into the somewhat circular and illogical position that adult humour might be found in ‘Those things are comic which are not proper for an adult’ ([1905] 1976: 292). In other words, children laugh when they feel grown up and grown-ups laugh when they feel childish. Of course, Freud is a soft target. He was working over 100 years ago at a time when psychology was in its own infancy and the birth of developmental psychology was 40 to 50 years away. Perhaps more surprisingly, Robert Provine’s landmark book Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (2000) barely mentions babies or children at all. The book is based in large part on Provine’s own research into laughter. His research has helped draw a clearer 145 distinction between laughter and humour. Eavesdropping on student conversations in college cafeterias, he showed that much laughter is social in origin (Provine 1993). It happens when friends interact and is usually not tied to any particular joke or punchline. Provine does suggest that the origins of laughter might be found in the interaction between mother and infant, albeit a chimpanzee mother and infant. Chimpanzee mothers generally ignore their babies but when prompted by their infants they engage in play and tickling with laughter and ‘play-face’ from their infants serving to regulate the interaction (Plooij 1979). Amazingly, Provine describes this research but does not speculate or look for any evidence that laughter is an important part of the relationship between human mothers and their babies. A more recent book Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (M. M. Hurley et al. 2011) fares no better. Despite the cognitive science credentials of its authors it follows the tradition of Freud, taking a highly intellectual approach to humour where children and especially babies are ignored. However, there are exceptions. In his 1979 book, Humor: Its Origin and Development developmental psychologist Paul McGhee made great use of the work done by developmental psychologists in that decade (see below). He saw the creation and appreciation of humour as a special form of play that tracks the cognitive development from the very earliest ages (McGhee 1979). Missing from that account was a clear role for the undoubtedly important social aspects of humour. But more recent work begins to address this. Vasudevi Reddy (2001) lists the many ways in which an infant interacting with an adult resembles a clown. Reddy (2001) presents evidence from parental reports of infants under a year intentionally acting in an exaggerated or ‘silly’ manner or violating norms in order to elicit laughter. While in their excellent article, in the first ever issue of Comedy Studies, I. Wilkie and M. Saxton speculate that interactions between adults and young child contain the ‘essence of comic performance’ (2010: 21). They track how different aspects of the comic (e.g. nonsense,

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incongruity, superiority, etc.) can be found in the very early interactions between parent and child, with both parties contributing to the performance. The laughter shared by a parent and child is not some incidental side-effect of their interaction. Rather this interactive, social element of humour is likely to be a key part of their learning and nurturing relationship. And, as such, it is also likely to be central to any truly comprehensive theory of why we laugh when we do. We hope that ‘The Baby Laughter’ project will provide some data to help support this view. But the project also has another purpose. To look down the other end of the scope and see if infant laughter really does play a role in their cognitive development. As babies are learning to laugh, are they laughing to learn?

Infant laughter in developmental psychology Early laughter is a strangely neglected topic in developmental psychology. Developmental psychology starts with Jean Piaget in the 1920s. But, with respect to infant laughter, honourable mention must go to Charles Darwin. Darwin’s 1872 book The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals was far ahead of its time in equating the fearful and happy expressions of animals with those of man. Chapter 8 was focused on joyful emotions including laughter and drew parallels between humans and other apes. Then in 1877, Darwin published a paper on his careful observations of his infant son Doddy. A game of peek-a-boo elicits an ‘incipient laugh’ at 110 days (1877: 289). Three or four weeks earlier than this he received a little pinch on his nose and cheeks as a good joke. I was at first surprised at humour being appreciated by an infant only a little above three months old, but we should remember how very early puppies and kittens begin to play. (Darwin 1877: 289) Starting in the 1920s Piaget took up this idea. Like Darwin, Piaget observed his own children and thought smiles and playfulness were signs of cognitive mastery. According to his theory (Piaget [1945] 1951), learning in early childhood is a continual cycle of accommodation and assimilation. Accommodation is the serious and effortful adaptation of the child’s mental model to new facts about world. Assimilation is the pleasurable experimentation and exploration that takes place in light of this new knowledge. A baby in a phase of assimilation will laugh and smile at his or her newfound skill. In the process they would be likely to discover something new and stimulating, prompting a further round of accommodation. By Piaget’s theory, laughter too should track cognitive development. But oddly enough, as T. R. Shultz (1976) observes, ‘Piaget didn’t appear to be at all interested in laughter or in humor’ (Shultz 1976: 23) despite noting that laughter accompanied all instances of symbolic play in his own children aged 18–24 months. Nevertheless, Piaget’s theory of accommodation and assimilation, together with his stage theory of development (Piaget [1936] 1952) was hugely influential and formed the basis for most infant psychology until well into the 1990s. Interestingly, Shultz was the only researcher to empirically test the idea that smiles accompany cognitive mastery in infancy. Shultz and E. Zigler (1970) presented either a stationary or moving clown stimulus to very young infants (between 8 and 18 weeks old). Infants were slower to smile in reaction with the moving (swinging) puppet than the

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stationary one, supporting the idea that smiles come after a period of accommodation. Combined with other similar results (McCall 1972; Zelazo 1971; 1972), this lead Shultz (1976) to conclude, contrary to the indifference of Piaget, that infant’s laughter was indeed a sign of pleasure at cognitive mastery. Around the same time, L. A. Sroufe and J. P. Wunsch (1972) quizzed 150 infants under a year old with a wide range of games and actions (peek-a-boo, silly voices, bouncing the baby, etc.). Nothing was universally popular, although ‘chasing the baby’ came close. But they found some clear developmental trends. Generally babies laughed more as they got older and the sophistication of their ‘humour’ increased too; simple visual and tactile stimuli worked best for the youngest babies (4–5 months) but more involved social games caused older babies to laugh. Sroufe and Wunsch imagined that laughter was a regulatory mechanism for the infant. Partly, this regulates the interaction with the caregiver but it also has a cognitive purpose. ‘Laughter signifies the occurrence of an important transaction between the infant and his environment’ (Sroufe and Wunsch 1972: 1341). They imagine laughter being a ‘tension-discharge’ (Sroufe and Wunsch 1972: 1341) mechanism in the face of mounting incongruity, recalling H. Spencer’s ([1863] 1892) physiological theory. M. K. Rothbart (1973, 1976) attempted to elaborate these internal processes in the infant as a box and arrow flowchart, so beloved of researchers of that era. The model itself does not add much in itself and is only half the story, as Rothbart acknowledges. Equally important is the feedback loop between infant and environment, especially the caregiver who ensures that ‘laughter games are . . . gauged to the child’s level of cognitive and emotional development’ (Rothbart 1973: 255). After that original research on infant laughter pretty much stopped for three decades. Laughter and smiling were no longer considered useful measures of infant cognition. Boredom or rather ‘visual habituation’ (Fantz 1964; Cohen 1969) became the dominant paradigm. Measuring infants’ changing looking times in response to repeated or changing stimuli was more suitable tool for studying infants in the laboratory. In the next few decades there were only a few studies that looked at infant laughter, and these were largely confined to recording the physiological features of infant laughs (Nwokah et al. 1994) and smiles (Kawakami et al. 2006) without any social or cognitive interpretation. Very recently this is changing. G. Mireault et al. (2012) were the first researchers to directly test the idea that humour might be a bonding mechanism. Challengingly, they found a negative correlation; lower humour at 6 months led to greater attachment at a year, suggesting that ‘less good-humored infants elicit greater parental engagement’ (Mireault et al. 2012: 797). Meanwhile, E. Hoicka and N. Akhtar (2012) built on the work of Reddy (2001). They showed that babies under a year will copy humorous productions of others but as they get older infants increasingly create more and more novel ‘jokes’ of their own. This renewed academic interest in infant laughter and humour is a good thing, more especially as it comes at the topic from a more social and emotional perspective. Baby laughter is a neglected empirical area and there is no clear theory that fits in with other modern developments in our understanding of infancy. But as the millions of viewers on YouTube can attest, baby laughter has never gone out of fashion in the non-academic world. With ‘The Baby Laughter’ project website http://babylaughter.net, we aim to use public interest and the Internet to kickstart research. We are running online surveys of large numbers of parents and also encouraging them to send us videos of their own laughing babies – all in the name of science.

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‘The Baby Laughter’ project The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka’ but ‘That’s funny . . .’. (Isaac Asimov) ‘The Baby Laughter’ project is a set of online surveys for parents of babies and toddlers to see if there are developmental changes in what makes babies laugh at different ages. The aims are two-fold. First, to see how laughter changes in the first two years of life and second, to see if those changes track other milestones in cognitive development. By conducting a large global survey of what makes babies laugh, we first hope to establish that babies do in fact laugh as they are learning and then use this as a new window onto what we already know about early cognitive development. Parental reports and funny YouTube videos are no substitute for controlled laboratory experiments. But they can give us more immediate and more convincing evidence that a baby understands a particular concept. We also expect to confirm the findings in the adult literature (Provine 2000) that most laughter is primarily social in nature, By finding out what situations, people and events babies find most amusing and entertaining at different ages, we hope to provide a new perspective on infants’ social and emotional development.

Participants The participants are parents of babies (2 years old and under). They will be recruited online via the project website itself (http://babylaughter.net). To date, over 500 parents from over 25 countries have taken part in our surveys.

Methods Parents can provide information in one of three ways: Full survey – the causes of infant laughter (nine sections, 60 questions, fifteen–30 minutes to complete) Includes questions about baby and family background, causes of laughter, funny situations, places, times of day, interactions with people. In addition to the questions prepared specifically for this survey, participants can optionally answer a set of standard questions about infant temperament (Very Short Infant Behaviour Questionnaire (Gartstein and Rothbart 2003). Short ‘field report’ (six questions, two to five minutes to complete) A very short survey asking the parent to describe a single incident of infant laughter. Questions ask for infant age, details of who was present, where and when the event took place and what happened. Submit a video – parents can submit a link to a video of their baby laughing together with information about what happened and who was present.

Analysis From the quantitative survey questions, we hope to discover what toys, games, sensations and interactions cause babies to laugh the most. How early does social laughter start?

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What are the primary causes of laughter in infancy? Do these change with cognitive development? Is laughter influenced by, family size, socio-economic status, temperament, etc. From the free-form responses we hope to accumulate evidence in support of the hypothesis that babies laugh most at events and activities for which they are just starting to understand the relevant features of the world. For instance, is knocking over blocks funniest for babies who are just establishing a naïve theory of gravity? Obviously, we must not overlook the fact that laughing is a highly social experience. We will be looking at where, when and with whom babies laugh the most (and the least), and seeing if there are differences between babies. Does a baby’s laughter relate to other aspects of their temperament? Are there cultural differences?

Preliminary results Data collection is ongoing and a full analysis will appear in due course in a developmental psychology journal. But here we present a representative selection of early findings arranged according to age or cognitive domain.

When does laughter start? The majority of babies smile in the first month (Figure 1a) and although most babies start laughing around their third month (Figure 1b) there is a surprisingly large age range for the first laugh. The pattern for first social smiles was somewhere in between and we believe this shows that its a myth that early smiles are just trapped wind.

What are the causes of laughter? We asked parents about the causes of infant laughter. They rated happiness, excitement, physical sensations, surprise, social causes highly, bonding and communication less highly and dismissed the idea that laughter is a release of tension or happens when fear is averted. But we have yet to break these results down by age of the infant. Meanwhile, parents’ free-form responses showed a wide range of motivations and causes. For example: • • • • •

‘When something out of the ordinary happens’ (Female – 4 months) ‘To express his emotions . . . That he’s feeling happy, in a good mood, social, interactive, bonding’ (Male – 6 months) ‘When she achieves something difficult’ (F – 10 months) ‘To express genuine comic silliness’ (M – 17 months) ‘Because she is being engaged with in a fun and exciting way’ (F – 19 months)

Physical sensations and naïve physics Young babies have a slowly dawning awareness of their bodies that precedes other awareness. From very young ages the babies in our survey loved being tickled and dangled upside down. Babies also seemed to laugh as they understood the physical world. Most remarkable in this area were two videos sent to us by parents. In the first an 11 month old delights in discovering that a light switch makes it goes dark.1 In the second some

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parents tried to replicate the popular finding on YouTube that babies love ripping paper. Their son was shocked at first then laughed.2 Remarkably their son was only 3 months at the time.

Peek-a-boo – from surprise to social graces Our survey confirms Darwin’s (1877) suspicion that peek-a-boo is the ultimate in baby entertainment. It is the most popular game with babies of all ages and all nationalities. It starts off as a very simple game but gradually gets more complex as layers of sophistication are added to the baby’s ability to interact with others. It is likely that very young babies (under 6 months) are genuinely surprised by a reappearing face. While older babies (under a year) start to understand the social elements of the game. By the time they are toddlers, they are so good at it that it is almost as if they are playing mainly for your benefit. We feel that this universal love of peek-aboo points to a deep universal truth; Humans are hugely social creatures.

Clowning around Our findings are corroborating the work Reddy (2001) and Hoicka and Akhtar (2012) and confirming the suspicions of Wilkie and Saxton (2010). Infants love being the centre of attention and will make a performance out of anything. Little children will play the clown and hardly need any encouragement to do so. Nor for that matter do parents. But laughter is the icing on the cake. • • • • • •

‘Laughter is a positive noise she can give. Crying is usually to get our attention if she feels she doesn’t have it, but laughter appears to come from sheer joy of having our undivided attention’ (F – 6 months) ‘She really seems to enjoy it and it gets her lots of attention. We make quite a lot of effort to be silly etc to make her laugh. There is a lot of laughter around her’ (F – 7 months) ‘The first time she laughed hysterically was when a friend pretended she had smelly feet. My little girl kept putting her feet to everyone’s noses, laughing so much, this went on for about 20mins’ (F – 10 months) ‘Playing peek-a boo at really close quarters with silly noises and silly facial expressions is sure to make her laugh’ (F – 12 months) ‘Daddy and mummy were imitating his favourite character from a TV show. He clapped his hands and burst out in laughter and he made us do it over and over again’ (M – 18 months) ‘Because to him I’m the most hilarious person in the world, and I think his laughs say “mum you’re great!” At l least that’s what I hope anyway!’ (M – 14 months)

Conclusion ‘The Baby Laughter’ project is only just getting started. We already we have a rich source of data on the role of laughter in development that we will be begin analysing in depth shortly and the project website will continue to collect further data indefinitely and provide feedback to parents who have taken part. At this stage, it is too early to make grand conclusions. But we can say with certainty that laughter is central component in early development and it is likely that our sense of humour starts to form far earlier than most

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theories of humour currently admit. Furthermore, there appears to be greater variety and subtlety in the sources and purposes of laughter than was previously thought. By taking laughter seriously, we believe that psychologists can gain many new insights into the first few years. We believe the same is also true for parents. Babies can laugh long before they can talk or communicate in other ways. Smiles and laughter are not only the welcome relief that help parents (and babies) cope with the tears and confusion. They are also a shared celebration of all the triumphs and achievements in an infants’ life. This also highlights the importance for parents and children of staying happy and positive throughout the wild ride that is parenting in the early years. Not only is shared laughter the quickest way to connect two people but perhaps the secret to happiness is retaining a childlike ability to laugh at the world. We think the shortest answer to the question why do babies laugh is ‘because they are happy’. Recently we went to the swimming pool and after we took a shower, he was standing under the shower, laughing with pure happiness. It was so sweet. (M – 14 months) Source: Caspar Addyman and Ishbel Addyman (2013) ‘The science of baby laughter’, Comedy Studies, 4:2, 143–153.

Notes 1 http://babylaughter.net/videos/2013/05/13/your-babies-014-light-goes-on-light-goes-off/. 2 http://babylaughter.net/videos/2013/04/05/your-babies-013-youngest-ever-fan-of-rippingpaper/.

References Cohen, L. B. (1969), ‘Observing responses, visual preferences, and habituation to visual stimuli in infants’, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 7: 3, pp. 419–33. Darwin, C. (1872), The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, London: John Murray. —— (1877), ‘A biographical sketch of an infant’, Mind, 2: 7, pp. 285–94. Fantz, R. L. (1964), ‘Visual experience in infants: Decreased attention to familiar patterns relative to novel ones’, Science, 146: 3644, pp. 668–70. Freud, S. ([1905] 1976), Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, vol. 6, London: The Pelican Freud Library and Penguin Books. Hoicka, E. and Akhtar, N. (2012), ‘Early humour production’, British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30: 4, pp. 586–603. Gartstein, M. and Rothbart, M. (2003), ‘Studying infant temperament via the revised infant behavior questionnaire’, Infant Behavior and Development, 26: 1, pp. 64–86. Hurley, M. M., Dennett, D. C. and Adams Jr, R. B., (2011), Inside Jokes: Using Humor to ReverseEngineer the Mind, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kawakami, Y., Esteban, C. R., Raya, M. et al. (2006) Wnt/b-catenin signaling regulates vertebrate limb regeneration, Genes & Development, 27: 14, July. McCall, R. B. (1972), ‘Smiling and vocalisation in infants as indices of percep-tual-cognitive processes’, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 18, pp. 341–47. McGhee, P. E. (1979), Humor: Its Origin and Development, San Francisco, CA: W.H.Freeman and Company.

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Mireault, G., Sparrow, J., Poutre, M., Perdue, B. and Macke, L. (2012), ‘Infant humor perception from 3- to 6-months and attachment at one year’, Infant Behavior and Development, 35: 4, pp. 797–802. Nwokah, E. E., Hsu, H. C., Dobrolowska, O. and Fogel, A. (1994), ‘The development of laughter in mother-infant communication: Timing, parameters and temporal sequences’, Infant Behavior & Development, 17: 1, pp. 23–35. Piaget, J. ([1936] 1952) La naissance de l’intelligence chez l’enfant/The Origins of Intelligence in Children, New York: International Universities Press. —— ([1945] 1951), La formation du symbole chez l’enfant; imitation, jeu et reve, image et representation/Play, Dreams, and Imitiation in Childhood, New York: Norton. Plooij, F. (1979), ‘How wild chimpanzee babies trigger the onset of mother-infant play – and what the mother makes of it’, in M. Bullowa (ed.), Before Speech: The Beginning of Interpersonal Communications, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 223–43. Provine, R. R. (1993), ‘Laughter punctuates speech: Linguistic, social and gender contexts for laughter’, Ethology, 95, pp. 291–98. —— (2000), Laughter: A scientific investigation, London: Faber and Faber. Reddy, V. (2001), ‘Infant clowns: The interpersonal creation of humour in infancy’, Enfance, 53: 3, p. 247–256. Rothbart, M. K. (1973), ‘Laughter in young children’, Psychological Bulletin, 80: 3, pp. 247–56. —— (1976), ‘Incongruity, problem-solving and laughter’, in A. J. Chapman and H. C. Foot (eds), Humor and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications, London: Wiley, pp. 37–54. Shultz, T. R. (1976), ‘A cognitive-developmental analysis of humor’, in A. J. Chapman and H. C. Foot (eds), Humor and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications, London: Wiley, pp. 11–36. Shultz, T. R. and Zigler, E. (1970), ‘Emotional concomitants of visual mastery in infants: The effects of stimulus movement on smiling and vocalizing’, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 10: 3, pp. 390–402. Spencer, H. ([1863] 1892), ‘The physiology of laughter’, in Essays vol. 2: Scientific, Political and Speculative, New York: Appleton. Sroufe, L. A. and Wunsch, J. P. (1972), ‘The development of laughter in the first year of life’, Child Development, 43: 4, pp. 1326–44. Wilkie, I. and Saxton, M. (2010), ‘The origins of comic performance in adult-child interaction’, Comedy Studies, 1: 1, pp. 21–32. Zelazo, P. (1971), ‘Smiling to social stimuli: Eliciting and conditioning effects’, Developmental Psychology, 4, 1, pp. 32–42. —— (1972), ‘Smiling and vocalisation: A cognitive emphasis’, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 18, pp. 349–65.

Contributors Caspar and Ishbel are brother and sister. They are currently working together on a book about laughing babies. Caspar Addyman is a developmental psychologist and director of the Infantlab at Goldsmiths, University of London. He studies cognitive development in infants with particular interest in concept learning, time perception and language acquisition. His first novel Help Yourself was published in 2013 and is about a failed stand-up comedian. Ishbel Addyman is a writer and mother of two young children. Her first book Cyrano: The life and legend of Cyrano de Bergerac was published in 2008.

Part II

Old comedy Taproots and tropes

Chapter 5

The time-travelling miser: Translation and transformation in European comedy (2:1) Rachel Kirk

Introduction Playwrights have always adapted and re-created themes and stories to expand the comic potential of preceding canonical works. Translation is one of the prime vehicles of this cultural continuum, as Walter Benjamin suggests when he notes that ‘Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract areas of identity and similarity’ (1996: 70); translation does not simply strip away the source text’s language and clothe it in another, but re-dresses it in a fresh costume for a new role. Literary translation studies has moved beyond literal approaches to translation, generally favouring what Eugene Nida has termed ‘functional equivalence’, placing less importance on language and instead seeking to ensure that the translated text fulfils the same functions and carries out, as far as possible, the same cultural work as the original. However, identifying this essence and its creator is problematic. Barthes argues that ‘Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away; the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing’ (1968: 142). According to Barthes, the introduction of any reader to a text assumes the death of any notion of an original writer or spirit as each recipient will interpret the same text differently. Translation offers one reading of a text and draws out some of the many potentialities words can create. When applied to theatre, this process is situated in a framework that is subject to its receiving society and culture in a specific time and place. While theoretical research on theatre translation, and indeed on comedy translation, is still somewhat in its infancy,1 the field has already become more concerned with a praxical approach to these concepts in an effort to reconnect theory and practice.2 As such, by attempting to engage with Benjamin’s notion of the continua of transformation, this article traces one such continuum through the transformation of the character of the miser in Plautus’ Aulularia/The Pot of Gold (c. 195 BC)3 to David Johnston’s (2010) translation of Molière’s L’Avare/The Miser (1668)4 in order to interrogate the question of authorship and to explore translation and comedy’s reciprocal relationship with the past.

The miser in action When considering a play for translation, the translator must first determine what function the play will have in the receiving society, and, subsequently, assess to what extent the source play can fulfil this objective. Studying how the translator adapts the new version allows the recipient to grasp a sense of how the target performance is relevant to its

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audience, and exemplifies the utility of the original material. This first section considers how Plautus and Molière develop the same stock character of the miser before later illustrating the translator’s primary task of adapting the play within his own framework. The misers’ greed is established through their actions and others’ perceptions as their money-saving attempts serve as a catalyst for ridicule. Plautus’ Euclio propagates his own reputation from the outset when his maid-servant states that all there is worth stealing in the house are cobwebs, declaring, ‘I want those cobwebs of mine looked after. I’m poor; […] I take what the gods give me’ (Plautus 1916: Act 1.1, Lines 87–88).5 Likewise in L’Avare, Harpagon warns his servants to ‘take care not to scrub the furniture too hard, in case it wears it out’ (Molière 1971: Act 3.1). This obsession not only damages the misers, but also their relationships with other characters, resulting in paranoia and mistrust of everyone around them, with Harpagon not even trusting himself not to steal his own money (Act 4.7). Although the families of both are directly affected, especially when the misers repeatedly refuse their daughters a dowry, the effect on others is more apparent in Molière’s play since the daughter, who does not appear onstage in Plautus’ play, and a son, an addition to the French version, give personal accounts, emphasizing the severity of that miser’s greed. With the breakdown of familial relationships, the misers turn to the thing closest to them, their money, and this relationship gives a sense of the true potential of their capacity to love. They speak directly to their treasure, in the third person: Euclio tells his pot of gold he will hide it from its enemies in a shrine (Plautus 1916: Act 3.6, Lines 580 ff.), and Harpagon refers to his cash box as his ‘dear friend’ (Molière 1971: Act 4.7). To both men their treasure is their true family and they protect it as they would a child, an act that is juxtaposed with how they treat their actual children. Following the theft of the gold and money, the young men wishing to marry the daughters approach the fathers to express their desires, leading to a misunderstanding where the misers believe they are talking about their money, not their children. Molière, however, develops this scene in his version as he advances the miser’s relationship with the cash box6; when the young man declares that the ‘treasure’ is wise, honest and has beautiful eyes, Harpagon finds this a strange declaration, but rather than realise he is not talking about the box, he states that, ‘he’s talking about it like he’s the lover of a mistress’ (Molière 1971: Act 5.3). For Harpagon, the outer aesthetic beauty of the box is the equivalent of a mistress, but the attraction to the inner beauty, the money inside, is true love. Molière has so far translated this comedic character quite literally. He does not translate Plautus’ script word for word, yet he follows a similar plot to create in his own language a character who, like Euclio, is perceived as greedy, obsessive and highly materialistic, a man whose social blindness incites laughter when the miser meets his downfall. However, since comedy is always transforming, its essence distilling over time, Molière expands on the humour derived from the Plautine miser, using language to dig deeper into the mindset of the character, thus subsequently giving the spectator of Aulularia a more acute opening into Euclio’s internal struggle.

The alternate ending The misers’ relationships to money are essentially the same, but it is how each character chooses his own fate that gives an insight into their abnormal psychological states, with Molière’s alternate ending reflecting the interests of his specific audiences, suggesting that

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he consciously sought to recreate the functional equivalent of the Roman play. Notably the end of Plautus’ play is problematic since a complete script no longer exists, but five remaining fragments allow extensive exploration of the Plautine miser. Plautus wrote his comedies for a society based on a class system, to be performed during Rome’s games and religious festivals surrounded by various other forms of entertainment. Despite social hierarchies, all societal factions, from senators to slaves, were permitted to attend many of these festivals, and, since Plautus’ aim was to entertain his spectators, he had to attract it away from other activities by creating plays that spoke directly to his audience. Aulularia is therefore not simply a comedy based on the rich versus the poor, but the materiality versus the personal. Although Euclio agrees to the marriage of his daughter to his elderly neighbour, Megadorus, who will accept her without a dowry, he later transcends his own character and offers the gold to his daughter and the young man. Euclio’s psychological shift appears sudden, but can be accounted for by the fact that the character did not build his wealth, but acquired it when he found his grandfather’s gold. Euclio is not naturally upper-class, but leaps up the hierarchy and still considers himself to be poor. His ignorance of wealth, and obsession with money, is contrasted to the rich Megadorus who, having agreed to pay the expense of his wedding to Euclio’s daughter, expects nothing from him and sends some of his cooks to Euclio to prepare a feast for him. When he offers Euclio wine before the wedding, the latter refuses as he assumes Megadorus is trying to inebriate him in order to steal his money (Plautus 1916: Act 3.6, Lines 573 ff.). Moritz Levi suggests that the comedy’s purpose ‘is not so much to depict the avarice of Euclio as it is to describe the fate of a pot of gold’ (1900: 22). Without Megadorus, the play would lose focus on how Euclio’s riches have obscured his judgment of others and shift to an exploration of upper-class wealth. Euclio’s obsession with the gold builds throughout the play, dominating his life and blocking relationships, while Megadorus’ generosity towards the young girl shows how money can be used to strengthen relationships. In his speculation of a likely ending, Minar (1947: 273) argues that Euclio had no choice but to give his daughter a dowry because his hidden wealth became public knowledge following the theft. On the other hand, he believes that the extant fragments suggest Euclio’s ultimate sense of satisfaction at being forced to break ties with the pot, evidenced in the line, ‘by day or by night I could never rest; now I can sleep’ (Plautus 1916: fragment v). Aulularia, whose comedy is dependent on the class system, traces the educational journey of a miser who ascends the rigid hierarchy into a context that lessens the quality of his life, and who involuntarily, in typical saturnalian fashion, plummets back into the lower stratum, leading to profound contentment with what he already had. Wealth’s hold over the old man is relaxed causing him to garner collective sympathy from spectators who each understand the effect of money despite how much or how little they possess. Aulularia allows the audience to explore their own relationship with material goods and experience the obsession through Euclio’s comic process of degeneration and renewal. The self-analysis that Plautus invites his audience to undergo is enhanced by the fact he chooses to locate his play in Athens. Theatre has the power to transport us to a particular time or place, and spectators’ relationship to the location alters perception of the action. By setting the play in Athens, Plautus allows his Roman audience to move beyond their own situation from which they can critically analyse themselves from an external and disconnected perspective, acquiring the necessary clarity to focus back using the insight they gained. Yet Molière does not transport his audience, instead locating the play in Paris,

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bringing it directly to the spectators, and so reinforcing the perception that the play is about them. They are invited to gain a more profound insight into their own mindset and actions through a play that is a part of their sociocultural context and themselves. Molière’s contemporary audience can perhaps account for this shift in location as, unlike Plautus, he was writing and performing for a society interested in a new institution, a society of orders, not class, which was founded on the central notion of the honnête homme (the perfect gentleman). Apostolidès and McLean state that ‘Molière’s theater stands out as a testing ground and a judgment place where new social behaviors are tried out and sanctioned by laughter’ (1988: 490). In L’Avare, Molière presents a miser, incongruous in terms of this society’s ideal sense of self, but nonetheless darkly real. Unlike Plautus’ character, his obsession is irreversible, and he does not learn from others or the results of his own actions. In the recognition scene it emerges that the other rich old man, Anselme, who was to marry the miser’s daughter, is in fact the father of the daughter’s and the son’s lovers, a development that emphasizes the distinction between the two rich men. This entire scene is not present in Plautus’ play,7 but Molière uses it to enhance the miser’s relationship to the inanimate object. In the final scene Anselme is reunited with his children after many years, and promises everything Harpagon demands so he can leave to see his long-lost wife. Anselme places much less value on money than family relationships, unlike Harpagon who, having lost his money when it was stolen, is happy to marry his children off to whoever Anselme requests so he can be reunited with his treasure. At the end of the play, one rich man leaves for his family and the other leaves for his cash box; money is Harpagon’s family, and he will remain loyal to it over and above the welfare of his children. Harpagons’ psychology works differently from that of Euclio who was temporarily misguided by his sudden wealth. Harpagon has always had his money, yet has never learned to control it or to balance his money and relationships. David J. Wells argues that Harpagon’s comedy is derived from his madness and deformity, and that the only reason he can be laughed at openly is that Molière introduces his insanity gradually (1972: 242). The audience is rarely left alone with Harpagon, often watching another character interact with him onstage, before his madness escalates to his climactic monologue following the theft of his cash box (1972: 243). In contradistinction to the honnête homme of seventeenth-century France, Molière’s miser, as a character without reason that has no concept of acceptable behaviour, disrupts contemporary social boundaries. Unlike Plautus, the French playwright’s focus is not on the effects of money or on any educational journey, but rather he provides the audience with a satirically charged illustration of the destructive consequences of transgressing social norms and values. While the actions of Plautus’ character can be translated, to a certain extent, into the new version, they cannot, as it stands, produce the same effect in Molière’s society. Instead of presenting his audience with a foreign character who enters a new social faction and returns to his normal state at the end of the performance, Molière shows his spectators what could happen specifically to them if they rebel against the universal ideal, leaving them with a sense that their actions will determine whether they meet Euclio’s ending or Harpagon’s.

Comedy, translation and its sources In this way, Molière places the character in a different framework and essentially translates him across languages, times and cultures, showing that one plot can inspire many

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readings. He adapts Plautus’ play in such a way as to achieve a similar effect through the comedy in allowing his audience, like the Roman one, to question their society. Yet his adaptation makes us further question Aulularia. Did Euclio really change in the end? What would have become of him had he kept the gold? In a translation of L’Avare, a play attributed to Molière, the concept of an original and definitive author becomes blurred – translating a play that is rooted in the past alters its source and transforms perceptions of its historicity. David Johnston’s translation of Molière’s play, a version twice removed from the Roman one, performed in Belfast in 2010, has clear connections with Plautus’, but again the character is altered to sit within a new framework. A significant change between the source and target8 emerges at the beginning where Johnston inserts a monologue by the miser, Harpingon in this version, making him the first character we encounter, unlike Molière who does not introduce him until later in the play after we hear second-hand accounts of his personality.9 However, rather than appearing insane, Harpingon speaks with a degree of rationality (especially when projected against the madness of the current economic recession) that serves to confound the expectations of those who come to the theatre already familiar with L’Avare. As with L’Avare, Johnston’s decision to locate the play in Belfast brings the foreign play towards the spectators, urging them to focus directly on themselves. Whereas Molière did this to examine his contemporary society of orders, Johnston focuses on his own audience’s social situation from the outset as Harpingon states in his opening monologue, These are different times […]. Things are changing, on the move. […] Money doesn’t make the world go round. Money holds everything in place, so nothing changes. Cash is different. Cash is like your secret weapon. Keep it, hold on to it, don’t let anyone touch your cash. (2010: 2) The miser in this version is not necessarily a character obsessively hiding his money due to greed, but one who is prudent and who saves to accommodate the changing times of which the spectators are a part. From this perspective the comedic function is significantly altered. In the two previous plays a sense of superiority was prominent, but in this case the humour is derived from a cathartic release of tension as the spectators view how they act in the economic climate. The play gives them the opportunity to connect with the miser and the rest of the audience creating a sense of unity when, from the perspective of another time or place, they too could be viewed as equally selfish. When the translator removes the original playwright’s language, what remains is a kernel of a story that is disconnected from any author or any context of performance. Translation does not take place in a vacuum, but it cultivates this kernel and creates a continuum of transformation in which the story continues, changing according to the receiving society’s contextual conditions. George Steiner in his discussion of the hermeneutic act of translation describes it in terms of the ‘hermeneutic motion’, which involves trust, aggression, incorporation and restitution. Where the first two are the act of entering into a text, trusting that the words hold meaning and bringing these meanings back to the new context, the latter two processes ensure that something is being given back to the original text to create a passage between the source and the target. Steiner argues that,

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The a-prioristic movement of trust puts us off balance. We ‘lean towards’ the comforting text […] We encircle and invade cognitively. We come home laden, thus again off-balance, having caused disequilibrium throughout the system by taking away from ‘the other’ and by adding, though possibly with ambiguous consequence, to our own. The system is now off-tilt. The hermeneutic act must compensate. If it is to be authentic, it must mediate into exchange and restore parity. (1975: 316) Johnston’s version continues the story of the miser, yet it compensates by transforming the past; it not only pushes the boundaries of our initial perception of Molière’s character, allowing us to consider how situation determines action, but further urges us to question initial assumptions about Euclio, a character created over 2000 years previous, as we return to Plautus’ play with renewed insight. European comedy is part of a living fluid tradition, and the function of a given type of comic device is dependent on the society in which it is produced. In this study we have three misers, each taking the same initial journey, but ultimately acting in different ways to create a new comedic function for the target audience. With each performance or translation new meanings are discovered that are inherent to the source text, and by translating the subsequent text’s historicity, we can look back to the source and allow it to influence its own tradition. However, it is evident from this study that comedy itself is constantly transformed and developed. Comedy is always an act of translation as it takes those universal and historical stock themes and situations and appropriates them so they equally belong to the new audience. While the playwright or comedian does not have to consciously translate from a source in the way that Molière and Johnston have done, their material is always passing through this continua of transformation, affecting perceptions of the past and altering its future development. Comedians make the same decisions as translators when they choose to adapt material, and a more solid connection between translation studies and comedy studies can perhaps open up further discussion on the theoretical basis of the practice of social comedy. Source: Rachel Kirk (2011) ‘The time-travelling miser: Translation and transformation in European comedy’, Comedy Studies, 2:1, 39–46.

Notes 1 Key texts include Patrice Pavis’ discussion of the semiotic approach (1992), and, for a range of articles on theatre translation, Johnston (1996) or Scolnicov and Holland (1989). Specific research on the translation of comedic plays in terms of contemporary theatre translation theory is particularly scarce. However, see, for example, Kenneth McLeish’s argument (1996) for translating the comedic function of the play, or, for general research on translating various genres of comedy, see Vandaele (2002). 2 For the issue of translating puns for performance in a specific time and place, for example, see Marinetti’s discussion (2005) of three translations of Goldoni’s Il servitore di due padrone/The Servant of Two Masters. 3 Aulularia centres on the attempts of rich Athenian protagonist, Euclio, to hide his pot of gold from others so they believe him to be poor, constantly paranoid that they have found it. At the same time, unknown to Euclio, his daughter, Phaedria, is pregnant by a young man, Lyconides. However, the latter’s rich uncle, Megadorus, is persuaded by his sister to ask Euclio for his daughter’s hand in marriage, an arrangement he agrees to. The household god, the Lars, tells us in the Prologue that he has arranged this attempted marriage so the young man might marry the

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girl more easily. During the wedding preparations, Lyconides informs his aunt about his relationship with Phaedria and his slave steals Euclio’s pot of gold. Lyconides confesses to Euclio what he has done and forces his slave to return the gold, resulting, in typical Plautine fashion, in a happy ending with the old man allowing him to marry his daughter and giving the gold as a dowry. L’Avare, based primarily on Aulularia, follows the seventeenthcentury French miser, Harpagon, as he frantically conceals his money from his household. Harpagon organizes a wedding between himself and a young woman, Mariane, who his son, Cléante, is in love with, and informs Elise, his daughter who intends to marry the young Valère who has been pretending to be a servant, that she will marry a rich old man, Anselme, and that Cléante will marry a widow. In order to wed Mariane, Cléante asks a money-lender for a loan, one which, unknown to the son, is provided by his father who wishes to increase his money through interest. When Harpagon discovers his son loves the girl he concedes to let him marry her, then refuses when they have an argument. Harpagon’s money is stolen by servant La Flèche, but he believes it was Valère as he is told as such by his other servant Maître Jacques. In the final act, Anselme appears for the first time, and, in a conversation with Valère, it is discovered that the latter is the brother of Mariane and that they are both the children of Anselme. Harpagon tells Anselme he owes him his money since his son stole it, and Cléante says he will get him the gold if he can marry Mariane. Finally, this wedding is agreed, and also the marriage between Elise and Valère, and while Harpagon returns to his money, the reunited family exit to be with Anselme’s wife. All translations of Aulularia and L’Avare in this article are my own. The equivalent scene in Aulularia takes place in Act 4.10. It should be noted, however, that the recognition scene is in fact a typical Plautine ending; Molière has, in effect, given back to Plautus’ play by adapting his play within its own tradition. The source, in this case, being L’Avare. Aside from this alteration, Johnston’s translation retains the same plot and characters as Molière’s version.

References Apostolidès, Jean-Marie and McLean, Alice Musick (1988), ‘Molière and the sociology of Exchange’, Critical Enquiry, 14: 3, pp. 477–92. Barthes, Roland (1968), ‘The Death of the Author’, in Stephen Heath (ed.), Image, Music, Text, London: Fontana, pp. 142–48. Benjamin, Walter (1996), ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, London: Belknap Press, pp. 62–74. Johnston, David (ed.) (1996), Stages of Translation, Bath: Absolute Press. —— (2010), The Miser, Belfast, unpublished script. Marinetti, Cristina (2005), ‘The Limits of the Play Text: Translating Comedy’, New Voices in Translation Studies, 1, pp. 31–42. McLeish, Kenneth (1996), ‘Translating Comedy’, in David Johnston (ed.), Stages of Translation, Bath: Absolute Press, pp. 153–59. Levi, Moritz (1900), ‘The Sources of L’Avare’, Modern Language Notes, 15: 1, pp. 10–14. Minar, Jr, Edwin L. (1947), ‘The Lost Ending of Plautus’ “Aulularia”’, The Classical Journal, 42: 5, pp. 271–75. Molière (1971), ‘L’Avare’/‘The Miser’, in Georges Couton (ed.), Œuvres complètes/Complete Works, vol. 2, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 505–83. Pavis, Patrice (1992), Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture (trans. Loren Kruger), London: Routledge. Plautus, Titus Maccius (1916), ‘The Pot of Gold’, in Paul Nixon (ed.), Plautus: With an English Translation, vol. 1, London: William Heinemann, pp. 231–323. Scolnicov, Hanna and Holland, Peter (eds) (1989), The Play out of Context: Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Steiner, George (1975), After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vandaele, Jeroen (ed.) (2002), Translating Humour, Special issue of The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication, 8.2. Wells, David J. (1972), ‘The Structure of Laughter in Molière’s “L’Avare”’, The South Central Bulletin, 32: 4, pp. 242–45.

Contributor At the time of writing, Rachel Kirk was a doctoral candidate in translation at Queen’s University of Belfast. Her practice as research thesis focused on documenting the process of translating Plautus’ Roman comedy Casina for performance in an effort to reconnect the theory and practice of theatre translation. Her research interests include theatre translation, translating comedy, classical performance reception and the carnivalesque.

Chapter 6

Conflict and slapstick in Commedia dell’Arte – The double act of Pantalone and Arlecchino (4:1) Louise Peacock

Definitions Before it is possible to consider the extent to which Pantalone and Arlecchino might be considered as a slapstick double act it will be helpful to establish a working definition of what is meant by the term Slapstick. This in itself is no mean feat. As Slapstick has rarely been considered in any detail by academia such definitions as exist must either be drawn from dictionaries or from more anecdotal or biographical texts that deal with slapstick. Traditionally Slapstick has been viewed as low-brow and without intellectual merit. The assumption seems to have been that such a lightweight form of comedy is barely worthy of serious consideration. However, this article contends that Slapstick is worthy of academic examination for a variety of reasons. The skill involved in creating and performing Slapstick sequences merits exploring and, perhaps more importantly, the question of how Slapstick triggers laughter, and to what purpose, is one that has not been adequately considered elsewhere. Such academic writing as exists does so across a range of performance media and this is problematic in that the definition thus far offered of slapstick on film is necessarily different to how slapstick might be defined on the stage. Critical texts in the area of theatre performance are, nevertheless, not very helpful in defining slapstick. K. Pickering’s Key Concepts in Drama and Performance (2010) does not include a definition of slapstick – presumably he did not consider it to be that key, despite the fact that it has existed for centuries. As J. Wright acknowledges ‘most of our rhythmic physical comedy and our knockabout slapstick routines . . . has its origins in Commedia dell’Arte’ (2006: 182). In his book Slapstick: The Illustrated Story of Knockabout Comedy (1987), T. Staveacre identifies the way in which violence is performed as key in identifying slapstick. ‘Violence – or the parody of violence. There’s a delicate distinction. The ‘injury laugh’ must always be carefully calculated: if a blow seems to cause real pain, there will, usually, be no laughter’ (1987: 41). Beyond this, the closest Staveacre comes to identifying what slapstick is presented through his chapter headings some of which read as a list of potential ingredients: tumbling, physical encounters, props, traps, tricks and flaps, sparring partners, inspired lunacy, visual vulgarity and victimization. This list could equally be used to describe the range of interactions that occur between Pantalone and Arlecchino. C. R. Gruner in Understanding Laughter (1978) says that slapstick is ‘the form of humour that depends for its effect on fast, boisterous and zany physical activity and horseplay’ (1978: 6). The link to commedia is clear here in Gruner’s use of the word zany, which is derived from the name ‘zanni’ (z-a-n-n-i-) of the generic servant character in Commedia dell’Arte. Stoloff suggests that slapstick comedies ‘escalated in tempo until they concluded with a

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crescendo of acrobatic chase and combat. These climactic battles usually included thrown projectiles (often but not necessarily pies) kicks in the rear, somersaults, belly flops and frequently concluded with all participants doused in some convenient body of water’ (Paulus and King 2010: 152). Water, for obvious reasons, is less in evidence in the performance of stage comedy but it makes regular appearances in the circus ring. This approach of identifying a set of ingredients that can be expected of slapstick is, at least constructive. So in order to be considered slapstick, a comedy should include all (or most) of the following: comic pain and comic violence; falling and tripping; throwing of objects (often, but not always, food, particularly pies); malicious props (the falling piano and the collapsing ladder); stunts and acrobatics. This definition clearly relates primarily to film slapstick. Indeed, film studies seems to have appropriated slapstick to such an extent that we tend to forget that its roots lie in live performance. Still some elements of this definition are useful to us, particularly the acrobatic chase and combat. Andrew Stott also associates slapstick primarily with the silent film era, suggesting it involves ‘falls, blows, mishaps accidents and demands considerable skill from the performer’ (Stott 2005: 153). This definition is more closely related to the way that slapstick operates within Commedia dell’Arte, particularly in its identification of the importance of skill, as we will see from the examples given later. Commedia scholar Mel Gordon also makes a connection between commedia and silent film ‘indeed it is hard to conjure images of the commedia without seeing Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Bert Lahr, the Marx brothers, Jack Benny or Laurel and Hardy’ (1983: 3). What more might dictionary definitions offer? The Oxford English dictionary online offers the following definition, ‘Knockabout comedy or humour, farce, horseplay’, which, while rather unhelpful in its brevity, does identify some key elements that might be expected in slapstick performance. The Encyclopaedia Britannica offers a type of physical comedy characterised by broad humour, absurd situations and vigorous, usually violent action. The slapstick comic, more than a mere funny man or buffoon, must often be an acrobat, a stunt performer, and something of a magician – a master of uninhibited action and perfect timing. Outrageous make-believe violence has always been a key attraction of slapstick comedy . . . (Britannica.com) This is potentially interesting in that, as well as categorizing some ingredients, this definition ventures towards identifying particular skills that are needed by the performer. It is important, therefore, not only to consider the content of the slapstick sketch as it is performed but also to consider the demands placed on the performer. Thus notions of physical mastery and timing should be considered when defining slapstick in addition to the list of ingredients above. The term slapstick is thought to derive from the English translation of ‘battacchio’; the Italian word used to describe the wooden stick carried by Arlecchino. It was ‘derived from the Bergamese peasant stick used for driving cattle. Two thin pieces of wood are kept apart at the handle and slap against each other when a blow is stopped on the moment of impact’ (Rudlin 1994: 77). In this way when Arlecchino struck a person with it, it made a satisfyingly loud sound without inflicting any real pain. Here then is a clue to the first element of slapstick performance: it offers the sound and appearance of pain without actually inflicting pain.

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‘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. (Stott 2005: 87) Whilst it is true that early American cinema did not appear to be able to conceive of comedy that was not slapstick (largely because it communicated so readily with the audience without sound), it is necessary to take issue with Stott’s dismissal of the tradition of slapstick that flourished between Aristophanes and, say, Chaplin, Keaton and Mack Sennett and without which slapstick may not have been a vital enough tradition to make the transition to celluloid. A lively slapstick tradition can be traced from Arlecchino’s battacchio, through Punch and Judy, through pantomime and through stage plays right to the present. A similar trajectory can be traced on-screen from Chaplin (a modern day Arlecchino if ever there was one) through Michael Crawford, through Rowan Atkinson and through Jim Carrey. This ubiquity is one of the elements that makes slapstick so deserving of fuller academic consideration.

Slapstick and Commedia dell’Arte The use of stunts and acrobatics as a central performance trope of slapstick demands particular skills from the performers; their bodies appear capable of physical feats beyond the ability of ordinary everyday people. Indeed in his book The Body in Hollywood Slapstick (2007) (which focuses as the title indicates on American film comedy from the early silent greats through to the late twentieth century but which does not, unfortunately, offer a neat definition of slapstick) A. Clayton identifies what he defines as the notion of ‘other bodies’ asking the question ‘how do I know that the body of another is not entirely unlike my own – say rubbery and numb rather than fleshy and sensitive?’ (2007: 173). Here then is another element of slapstick performance: the performance frame encourages the viewer to consider that the performer is perhaps not affected by pain in the usual ways. This point is particularly interesting in relation to Commedia dell’Arte where, as I shall illustrate, the use of masks changes the way in which the audience respond to pain. Commedia dell’Arte emerged in the mid-sixteenth century and has existed in some form or other ever since though its most vital period extended from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth century (when it was appearing in scripted form most significantly from the pens of Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi). In fact the term Commedia dell’Arte ‘was never used of the activities of actors or professional acting companies until the eighteenth century, when we find Carlo Goldoni employing it to distinguish the masked and improvised comedy from the scripted comedy that as a dramatist he himself favoured’(Richards and Richards 1989: 8–9). The original performers would have referred to what they did as commedia improvise, commedia alla maschere (highlighting the importance of the mask) or commedia dell’Arte all’improviso. A commedia troupe would usually consist of at least ten actors. Between them they would play the following masks (the term when applied to commedia signifies both a physical mask for the face and to the character as a whole) Pantalone and Dottore, two male lovers and two female lovers, Colombina, Capitano and a number of zanni (depending on the size of the troupe). Of these the lovers and Colombina did not wear face masks, relying instead of heavy and stylized make-up. Performers

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usually played a role for life, developing the physicality of the mask and learning routines and speeches that could be moulded to work in a variety of different scenarios. Scenario is the term used to describe what the troupe performed. A scenario may be viewed as a plot outline, indicating to the performers the key events, exits and entrances, which had to take place in order for the scenario’s story to be told. The capo-comico or actor manager would gather the troupe together and tell them what the scenario for the day’s performance was to be. He (the capo-comico’s were almost exclusively male) would remind them of the plot of the story, highlight the potential for lazzi and also remind them of which family their mask was in. Key features were repeated in the scenarios (which were not exclusively comic) such as status interaction between Pantalone and his servant (often Arlecchino), unrequited love or love triangles and disguise and mistaken identity. Such devices created the opportunity for the performers to introduce set pieces into the structure of scenario. Gordon’s book, Lazzi, provides a good cross-section of the forms of lazzi to be found in seventeenth and eighteenth century manuscripts in Venice, Rome, Padua, Paris, Naples and Perugia. According to Gordon a lazzo (the singular form of lazzi) is ‘Any discrete, or independent, comic and repeatable activity that guaranteed laughs for its participants’ (1983: 5). He identifies twelve categories of lazzi but here we are most concerned with those lazzi, which fall in the categories of ‘Comic Violence/Sadistic Behaviour’, ‘Social-class rebellion’ and ‘Stupidity/ Inappropriate Behaviour’. For the zanni, physical set pieces were common and these could provide the opportunity for the introduction of comic pain into the performance. Of central importance here was Arlecchino’s batocchio. It is possible to explore the ways in which slapstick violence and the resultant comic pain were incorporated in Commedia performances by analysing a number of lazzi and scenarios. Two key forms of performed pain are well evidenced in Commedia. These are intentional pain inflicted by others and accidental self-inflicted pain. The former most commonly involves the beating of a low class zanni by a higher class character such as a lover or Pantalone but it can also include elements of the subversion of class expectations when the zanni beats the higher class character (and even, sometimes, gets away with it). The second form usually occurs as a result of the zanni’s stupidity. As will be shown in the following examples the zanni (who is often, but not always, Arlecchino) is central to the performance of pain, either as the inflictor or the victim. Another important feature of the performance of pain in Commedia is that the performance style highlights the importance of the threat of pain and the role played by anticipation in the audience’s enjoyment of the performance of comic pain. There is also the opportunity for accidental pain inflicted on others to occur but one of the difficulties of assessing the primarily physical performance of commedia is the paucity of documentation on which we can draw. Travelling troupes of performers moved around Italy (which was not a unified country at this point in its history but a collection of independent states using different dialects) and further afield into Spain, France and even England. To cope with lack of communication via the spoken word, like silent film, commedia developed a range of techniques. Commedia troupes relied heavily on broad characters, a highly physical playing style, the use of masks and grummelot (a nonsense language equally comprehensible or incomprehensible to all) and the use of lazzi. These lazzi often, but not exclusively, revolved around the infliction of comic pain through beatings, trips and falls, either openly or through subterfuge. At the heart of the commedia performance and usually taking the lead in the dishing out and receiving of comic pain was the double act of Pantalone and Arlecchino.

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The importance of a central double act Comic double acts existed centuries before Commedia dell’Arte. For evidence of this one has only to look at the opening scene of Aristophanes’ The Frogs, first performed in 405 BC, in which the master servant combination of Dionysus and Xanthius prefigures that of Pantalone and Arlecchino. Equally comic double acts have continued to exist in film (Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello), on television (Morecambe and Wise, Basil Fawlty and Manuel) and in animation (Tom and Jerry). The popularity of the double act in comedy and in slapstick in particular derives from the opportunities it presents for conflict and for comic contrast. Often the two halves of a comic double act look very different (think Laurel and Hardy or Basil and Manuel), they sound different, they have a different status level. The pairings work through binary oppositions and out of the oppositions arises conflict and out of the conflict, one way or another, comes comic pain. Pantalone and Arlecchino, therefore, represent a seminal slapstick double act. Pantalone is old and doddery whilst Arlecchino is young and very fit. Pantalone is rich: Arlecchino is poor. Pantalone is intelligent: Arlecchino is stupid and there we have the three most richly comic contrasts: physical, status and intelligence. These differences, exemplified here through Pantalone and Arlecchino exist in many double acts. Take Laurel and Hardy as an example. They are physically very different. Whilst not richer, Hardy is clearly the boss with higher status than Laurel and Laurel’s stupidity and incompetence frequently gets the seemingly brighter Hardy into trouble. Similar contrasts can be seen between Basil and Manuel. Physically there is the height difference. The whole relationship revolves around the contrasting status of boss and servant (in a way that is very close to the status relationship between Pantalone and Arlecchino) and finally the issue of intelligence is addressed to comic effect through Manuel’s lack of English – here a lack of comprehension comes to represent (perhaps wrongly) a lack of intelligence. Whilst comic pain is inflicted and received by all three of these pairs, there is a striking lack of malice or malevolence. Comic pain occurs either through comic violence (beatings, slaps and punches), which are inflicted with almost weary inevitability by the higher status character on the lower or through the trickery or stupidity – often this is where the lower status/lower intellect character can take some revenge. With reference to Commedia, Gordon refers to lazzi involving this kind of behaviour as sadistic behaviour but this, it seems to me, rather misses the point. Importantly for our comic response we recognize that what is occurring is not individual sadism but an important social instrument used either to confirm or subvert the usual status quo. The comedy double act provides the opportunity for contrast in the three key areas of physicality, status and intelligence. This is exemplified in, and exploited to comic effect by, Pantalone and Arlecchino. The physical contrast between Pantalone and Arlecchino is huge. Their contrasting ages mean that Pantalone is presented as hunched, stooping and very slow moving. On the other hand, Arlecchino is upright, full of energy and never stops moving. Two lazzi highlight the differences between them whilst demonstrating the slapstick comedy of commedia. In the ‘lazzo of the beetle’, according to J. Rudlin, Pantalone ‘falls flat on his back on hearing bad news (usually financial). Like a beetle he cannot then right himself’ (1994: 94). The inclusion of trips and falls in slapstick was identified earlier by both Staveacre and Stott. In performance this can be quite dramatic and extremely comical as the fall is usually very sudden and much is made of Pantalone lying

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on the floor helplessly waving his arms and legs and screaming for help. If present onstage, Arlecchino watches laughing to encourage the audience response. If summoned to help, Arlecchino proves incompetent (and the level of his incompetence can be increased or decreased according to the level of audience response). Various moves may follow: Pantalone can be spun round on his back rather than being helped to his feet. Alternatively he may be nearly pulled standing repeatedly before being allowed to fall back by Arlecchino who becomes distracted. Once Pantalone is back on his feet, Arlecchino may well receive a beating but Pantalone is so weak that the beating he can offer is laughable. In contrast to this show of physical ineptitude one of Arlecchino’s lazzi, ‘the lazzi of getting inside’ is acrobatic in nature. Gordon describes the lazzo thus ‘Arlecchino, standing on the top of a ladder, falls through a window and returns right back through the door in one movement’ (1983: 12). This move requires a high level of physical skill and emphasizes the acrobatic nature of Arlecchino. This lazzo together with the lazzo of the spilling of the wine, in which Arlecchino executes a backward somersault whilst holding a glass of wine without spilling a drop provides a strong physical contrast with Pantalone’s infirmity and out of this physical contrast comes physical comedy. Arlecchino can, potentially, leap and run to avoid beatings. He can hide behind Pantalone ducking, twisting, even diving through his legs to avoid being caught, all while Pantalone moves very slowly and deliberately around the stage, always turning just a fraction too late. The only means by which Pantalone can exercise any control is by asserting his higher status. According to Rudlin Pantalone is ‘top of the pecking order. Pantalone is money: he controls all the finance available within the world of commedia dell’Arte and therefore his orders have, ultimately, to be obeyed’ (1994: 92). The commedia scenarios are littered with scenes in which Pantalone gives orders to Arlecchino – to deliver letters or presents, to bring or take money, to prepare parties. In most tasks Arlecchino fails miserably and his low status is emphasized by his lack of intelligence. He misdelivers letters because he cannot read; he is tricked out of the money; he forgets where he should be going or who he should be talking to. However, these failures provide the opportunity for slapstick comedy. In attempting to conceal his failures and to avoid the inevitable beating Arlecchino employs a variety of tactics. He hides, for example, behind Pantalone and then when Pantalone turns to see who or what is behind him, Arlecchino walks round too so that he is always out of sight. If Pantalone turns suddenly, Arlecchino ducks so that he is below Pantalone’s eye line. Often this lazzo ends with Arlecchino diving through Pantalone’s legs in a desperate attempt to avoid being caught. In doing so he put himself, of course, in full view and sometimes knocks Pantalone over in the process. Here then is an example of the trips and falls so common in slapstick comedy. It also serves as a reminder of the importance of the skill and timing of both performers. As Rudlin says Arlecchino is ‘quick physically and slow mentally’ (1994: 78). Pantalone, while old, is still mentally sharp and this we have the third of the central binary oppositions. As with age and status Arlecchino usually ends up being beaten. For example, in the lazzo of the counting Pantalone wants Arlecchino to be beaten but realizes he is too weak to do it effectively. He therefore orders Capitano to do it for him. What ensues is what Gordon identifies as the ‘lazzo of the counting’. The Capitano starts to beat Arlecchino but loses count. ‘1, 2, 3 . . .. what comes next?’ Ever hopeful Arlecchino shouts ‘ten’ to cut short the beating. Capitano starts again from one. The humour of this can be emphasized in performance through Arlecchino’s responses to the beating, through his optimism each time he shouts ‘ten’ and his weary disappointment each time the Capitano starts from one. This lazzo plays on two key elements of slapstick comedy. First, it

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engages the audience in a cycle of anticipation and fulfilment, the audience quickly realizes what is going on and may even have joined in to disrupt the counting. The second, and perhaps more important, element is comic violence. As has been demonstrated this far, comic violence (usually beatings) is a key ingredient for provoking laughter in commedia and it is a common feature in slapstick comedy in all its forms. Staveacre identifies ‘falls and blows [as] the elemental basics of knockabout comedy’. He also stresses the importance of ‘the parody of violence’ . . . ‘if a blow seems to cause real pain, there, will usually be no laughter’ (1987: 41). This is one reason why Arlecchino’s slapstick is such an important prop. The loud noise highlights and exaggerates the pain (as the percussive sound track does in Tom and Jerry) without the blow causing real pain. There is plenty for Arlecchino to react to but the audience are freed from any moral concern by the knowledge that however awful the blow sounds it does not, in fact, cause any harm. Comic violence can also be contextualized in such a way as to increase its comic value and to give it a purpose beyond mere entertainment. In an extended piece of business known as a burle, the following action occurs. Arlecchino tricks Pantalone into hiding in a sack by telling that a band of robbers is marauding around the town and that as Pantalone is clearly wealthy he is likely to be attacked. Once Pantalone is hidden, Arlecchino puts on different voices pretending the robbers have arrived. He cries as if he is being beaten, shouts as if he is trying to defend his master and then beats Pantalone as if the robbers were beating him. As with other lazzi this can be repeated, shortened or extended according to the audience response. It usually ends with Pantalone emerging from the sack whilst Arlecchino is pretending to be the robbers. Arlecchino is so involved that he fails to notice Pantalone watching him. The consequence? A beating for Arlecchino. Of course we may be laughing at a number of things in responding to this lazzo. We laugh at Arlecchino’s obvious enjoyment of pretending to be the robbers; at his exaggerated cries as he pretends he is being beaten but most of all we laugh in pleasure at seeing the underdog on top. For once Arlecchino is beating rather than beaten. This lazzo fits into the category that Gordon identifies as ‘social-class rebellion’ lazzi. Here the comic violence serves a more serious purpose. There may well be an element of wish fulfilment for all those in the audience who have been the underdog, all those servants or lowly employees who have been beaten or pushed around by their masters or employers.

The purpose of slapstick Identifying what slapstick should include and even how it may be performed provides only a partial definition. It is necessary also to consider the purpose of slapstick comedy. Director Leo McCarey raises an interesting notion ‘there must always be a purpose behind slapstick’ (Gehring 2004: 34). We know what elements make us laugh in slapstick performance but McCarey raises the more complex issue of why. When somebody slips on a banana skin and falls to the floor are we simply laughing, as Bergson, would have it because, in falling, the individual becomes less human and more like some kind of mechanism? What the quotation from McCarey suggests is that, as was the case with Commedia dell’Arte, status plays a key role in whether or not we find slapstick funny. If the person slipping on a banana skin is highclass gentleman in a top hat that should be funnier than watching an urchin child slip. Many examples of slapstick work because, as an audience, we find it funny to see the mighty fallen or to see dignity upset. Stan Laurel himself suggested that

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The antics of the funny men in the custard-pie comedies are an exaggeration of those which keep children in the heights of laughter. You may not see the similarity at first but on thinking it over the resemblance is very definitely there. The comedian who knocks down the policeman is the small child rebelling against authority. The custard-pie is the symbol of revolt. (Louvish 2001: 293/94) Here arises the suggestion that it is not only that we can all enjoy seeing dignity overthrown but that slapstick (and in particular the ubiquitous custard pie) is a safe form of rebellion. The pie thrower knocking the helmet off the policeman does so for all of us. We can feel the thrill vicariously but we are safe from any consequence. In this way slapstick can be seen as working on several levels. First, as Laurel identifies, slapstick makes children laugh. There is a directness to the broad action of slapstick, which even very young children can enjoy. As adults watching we may remember our own enjoyment of such scenes when we were children so that nostalgia is at work when we enjoy slapstick but as adults we are probably also more aware of the elements of rebellion and wish-fulfilment contained in slapstick scenes. Here are people doing things that we could not get away with in our everyday lives and there is a great deal of entertainment from watching others suffer both as victims and perpetrators. Film director Leo McCarey (who directed three of Laurel and Hardy’s film and wrote many more) recognized in an article in the New York Herald Tribune in 1937 that the potential social purpose of slapstick lay in its universality ‘And the reason it will always go is because little boys will always throw snowballs at high hats. Upset dignity is eternally funny’ (Gehring 2004: 34). When Pantalone emerges from the sack, in the example cited earlier, we see just such ‘upset dignity’. There is a sense of the world, however momentarily having been put right, of Arlecchino having got his own back. For a few brief moments we rejoice in Arlecchino’s revenge, in his retaliation. A similar instance of retaliation or retribution exacted is seen in the scenario ‘The Tooth-puller’ (a concept that has been used in many subsequent comedies). Where what occurs is a combination of comic violence and sadistic behaviour. The plot is more elaborate that the comic beatings mentioned above. In this scenario (translated by Richard Andrews) Pantalone attacks Pedrolino who is fighting with Pantalone’s son. Pantalone bites Pedrolino’s arm so Pedrolino decides he will get his own back. In various plot twists and turns Pedrolino persuades a variety of characters to join him in pretending that Pantalone has bad breath. He then pays Arlecchino to disguise himself as a tooth-puller. Everyone tells Pantalone his breath smells. Pantalone orders Pedrolino to find him a dentist and the disguised Arlecchino arrives. He carries with him a selection of blacksmith’s tools and sets to work on Pantalone’s teeth. Causing great pain he extracts four perfectly good teeth. In terms of slapstick comedy a number of features are at play here. Anticipation is built by the fact that the audience witness each stage of the plot. We know there is nothing wrong with Pantalone’s teeth and there is an increasing tension as to whether he will actually lose any teeth. Once Arlecchino gets to work the tension transfers to how many teeth he will lose. The tension is offset by the cartoon quality of the violence. Arlecchino uses what are obviously inappropriate tools. The plot is also highly unrealistic. It is unlikely that Pantalone

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would bite a servant. All these elements combine to create what Andrews calls a ‘mechanical comic fantasy’ (2008: 68). Andrews also suggests that the tooth-pulling ‘could be orchestrated by Arlecchino into a climax of comic violence. He would use his survey of the blacksmith’s tools “inventing silly names” for them as a technique of delay, with Pantalone expressing suitable fear’ (2008: 69). The potential for comedy in Pantalone writhing in the chair and having to be restrained, screaming in fear and/or agony is huge. This could be extended by Arlecchino’s obvious pleasure at Pantalone’s distress. Here is where a degree of sadism is present and it is possible that an audience might feel that Pedrolino and Arlecchino are going too far. Commedia troupes could certainly have added spurts of blood to enhance the violence (they used pigs’ bladders full of blood for such effects). In terms of morality the key is to establish Pantalone as enough of a villain for the audience to feel that the pain and punishment is deserved. If the victim is innocent we are less likely to laugh but if the victim has been unpleasant and our sympathies have been secured by the perpetrator of the violence we are more likely to laugh. In this way slapstick comedy has the potential to be used as a means of reversing the usual status relationship and of exacting revenge where necessary – even if such a revenge may short lived and Arlecchino’s slapstick is soon used on him again.

Conclusion So Slapstick can be defined as a form of broad physical comedy in which laughter is likely to be provoked by comic violence and the appearance of pain. It uses as its techniques tripping, falling, hitting and throwing; all of which occur in patterns of repetition and escalation. In provoking laughter in these ways slapstick gives us the pleasure of seeing dignity over-turned. Pleasure can also be obtained by recognizing the skill, timing and mastery of the performer. All of these elements are, I would contend, best demonstrated through a central double act that embodies a series of binary oppositions as outlined above. Arguably the most important of these is status. The centrality of status in slapstick performance opens up the possibility for such performances to comment satirically on contemporary society. The centrality of status in slapstick performance opens up the possibility for such performances to comment satirically on contemporary society. In this anarchic and at times, excessive mode of performance lies the potential for social subversion. Therefore, what on one level works as entertaining and impressive physical skill, also contains two possible socially cathartic effects. One is that the audience witness the mighty brought low by a wellplaced blow from an underling. They laugh at the blow, at the reaction to the pain inflicted and at the joy of seeing the under-dog temporarily triumph with the result that the temptation to something similar in real life may be diminished. The slapstick violence and laughter acts as a release valve. The other, more subtle effect is that, in seeing the traditional battle between high and low status played out in this comic way, those whose lowly status is exploited can feel that the situation has been recognized and, vicariously, righted. Source: Louise Peacock (2013) ‘Conflict and slapstick in Commedia dell’Arte — The double act of Pantalone and Arlecchino’, Comedy Studies, 4:1, 59–69.

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References Andrews, R. (2008), The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala: A Translation and Analysis of 30 Scenarios, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. Aristophanes (1993), Plays: Wasps, Clouds, Birds, Festival Time and Frogs (trans.McLeish), London: Methuen. Britannica.com, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/548077/slapstick.Accessed 4 March 2011. Clayton, A. (2007), The Body in Hollywood Slapstick, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Davies, J. H. and Spiers, R. (1975), Fawlty Towers: Series One, London: BBC. Gehring, W. D. (2004), Leo McCarey: From Marx to McCarthy, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. Gordon, M. (1983), Lazzi: The Comic Routines of Commedia dell’Arte, New York: PAJ. Gruner, C. R. (1978), Understanding Laughter: The Workings of Wit and Humour, Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Louvish, S. (2001), Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy, London: Faber. Paulus, T. and King, R. (2010), Slapstick Comedy, London: Routledge. Pickering, K. (2010), Key Concepts in Drama and Performance, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Richards, K. and Richards, L. (1989), The Commedia dell’Arte: A Documentary History, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Rudlin, J. (1994), Commedia Dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook, London: Routledge. Staveacre, T. (1987), Slapstick: The Illustrated Story of Knockabout Comedy, London: Angus and Robertson. Stott, A. (2005), Comedy, New York: Routledge. Wright, J. (2006), Why Is That So Funny?, London: Nick Hern Books.

Contributor Louise Peacock is an Associate Professor of Theatre, and head of critical studies and comedy at the University of Southern California. Her research interests are in the areas of clowning, Commedia dell’Arte, slapstick and stand-up comedy. She is the author of Serious Play: Modern Clown Performance (2009) and is currently writing a book entitled Slapstick and Comic Performance. She has also published a number of articles that examine stand-up comedy, commedia and comic performance.

Chapter 7

Clowns do ethnography: an experiment in long-distance comic failure (5:1) Barnaby King and Richard Talbot

1 Introduction: ineptitude and clown ethnography Ugly Scenes was a participatory performance presented between 27 June and 1 July 2012 at the Performance Studies international conference, hosted by the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds, UK (PSi#18, http://www.psi-web.org/ detail/posts/10900). It was presented in the context of a conference theme of ‘Value and Efficacy’, which sought to explore ‘the synergies and contradictions between economic and cultural value in the field of performance’ (Psi18 conference archive, http://www.psiweb. org/detail/posts/10900). But while our project did engage with these issues, in particular through its ostensible use of verbatim theatre to excavate the performative economies of the 2011 riots, such prima facie intentions were repeatedly compromised by the comical ineptitude of its two directors: scholars, ethnographers and clowns Kurt Zarniko and Teddy Love. Although we had never worked together before this project, we had both separately used the term ‘clown ethnography’ to describe the activities of our alternative clown personae in an academic context. Barnaby King, through the persona of Professor Teddy Love, a self-declared ‘ethnoclownographer’, had spent many months in the field communing with other clowns and framing subjects in the clownish paradigm. Meanwhile Richard Talbot, as Kurt Zarniko, had examined and satirised the methods of community theatre intervention through a playful up-ending of conventional rehearsal processes and theatre mechanics (Alf’s Button, Triangle Theatre, 2006). It seemed that it would be a natural extension of our hitherto independent investigations of the performance of failure to bring Kurt and Teddy together to indulge their poorly concealed theatrical ambitions by directing the Greek tragedy, Iphigenia in Aulis, chosen due to its apparent resonances with the current economic unrest at the time in Europe. The results would be presented at the conference in Leeds; but since there was no way to physically bring together a company before that time, we would invite delegates to collaborate in a long-distance devising and rehearsal process using open-source internet platforms such as Skype, Google Docs, Dropbox, Facebook, and Snagit. This was, we hoped, a sure recipe for disaster, as reflected in the language of our initial project proposal: Ugly Scenes is a playful and durational shift, which invites delegates to join research and rehearsals for an amateur verbatim play that goes comically wrong, leading to ugly scenes in obscure locations of Leeds.

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In order to illustrate the tone of buffoonish amateurism introduced into the project by Teddy and Kurt, this article will include some short transcriptions of their conversations, conducted over Skype. The following is an extract from their first meeting, on 10 December 2010: KURT: Hahahahahahow have you been, Teddy? Are you filming this? TEDDY: Yes, I’m using that Snagit thing they gave us. KURT: The Richass and its Barnstable have asked us to stage Iphigenia at Aulis?! I read it,

but didn’t understand what it has to do with riots. TEDDY: It’s more about the metaphor, Kurt. The wind has gone out of the sails of the Greek

navy. They are up in arms. KURT: Yes, wind is the economy. Got no cash. Am in the doldrums. TEDDY: But what sacrifice are we prepared to make to get it back? KURT: As Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter. This is an ugly scene. TEDDY: Yes. Let’s call our version Ugly Scenes.

If such an ambitious blending of digital technology, social commentary and classical drama seemed to offer ideal terrain for our clowns to expose their own foolishness, the ethnographic pretensions of the project – the misuse of verbatim techniques to capture and incorporate the voices of the people of Leeds – added a precarious ethical dimension. On the other hand, we were not the first to imagine clownishness as a helpful attribute for scholarly research processes in various disciplines. McCormack argues, for example, that Geertz, Levi-Strauss and Derrida often exhibited notably clown-like characteristics (1999, 126). Babcock meanwhile compares clowns with philosophers, as they share modes of ironic self-reflection, deconstruction and free recombination, which may ‘break up patterns of thought and rationality that hold us in bondage and in which the given and established order of things is deformed, reformed, and reformulated’ (1984, 103). We thus conceived Teddy and Kurt as experts, or anti-experts, whose particular brand of stupidity, ineptitude, and naivety could be assets. Our experiment was to see whether the staged failures of a production directed by two clowns could generate new insights or even offer a kind of critique of notions of ethnographic performance and verbatim theatre. However, we underestimated their tendency to veer wildly into territory that was as unethical as it was unscholarly. KURT: I want to make a play about the man in the street. TEDDY: Then we should get to know the natives who riot in the street.

Teddy unwittingly reinscribes the crass assumptions underlying certain strands of structuralist anthropology: ‘The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong’ (Geertz 1973, 452). Too often, what the clowns did seemed less like ethnography and more like self-indulgent, nonsensical navel-gazing. TEDDY: You mean, ‘naval gazing’? KURT: Hahahahahahahahahahaha. Uhu. Good joke Teddy. BARNABY: Hey you two. You’re not supposed to be part of this conversation. Richard and I

are writing this article. KURT: The Barbara-B has forgotten that he put us in charge.

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RICHARD: You are just the directors. We are still in charge. So please only speak when you

are invited to. TEDDY: I wish to object to being called a buffoonish amateur! BARNABY: Oh please. It was a fiasco from beginning to end. Now be quiet! KURT: Real failure is too close to your bone for you, Barley Bee? RICHARD: Okay, let’s all calm down. Maybe we made a mistake. ‘[A]n experiment is never a

failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results’1. That’s a quote from Robert M. Pirsig. The point is, we can learn from our failures. KURT: But you have not learned, since you do not let us speak – why can’t I speak! let me speak! I want to speak! TEDDY: And I suspect you are still using us to try to be clever and funny when really you are not. Richard [reaching the end of his patience]: Barnaby, can you reframe the article please? In this article we not only offer fragmentary documentation of the Ugly Scenes project, from auditions through to the final rehearsals and performance, but we also attempt to replicate the reductive and satirical effect that the carnivalesque voices of the clowns tended to have on our serious scholarly intentions. While we originally framed ourselves as the producers of the play (just as we now frame ourselves as the writers of this article), trying fervently to keep the process on track, Teddy and Kurt were given license to pursue their eccentric whims and in so doing often illuminated the limitations and self-importance of our academically framed project (just as now we let them intrude upon and intervene within our purportedly scholarly discourse, unsettling and destabilizing its selfassured certainties). The juxtaposing and intermingling of voices thus instantiates contradictory and paradoxical discourses that elucidate the dialectical relationship between serious research and comical bluster. Silence. Teddy and Kurt have gone for a drink.

2 Clowns as idiots: flouting the etiquette of online interaction While the clowns showed signs of coming off the rails with their orientalist notions of ethnography, we thought they could still be trusted to audition actors for the production of Ugly Scenes, based on Iphigenia in Aulis. The source folio of Iphigenia in Aulis is said to be an unfinished production copy, from which the supernatural ‘rescue’ of Iphigenia is possibly missing (Whaley Harsh 1944). As an unfinished work, it invites speculation and ‘collaborative’ authorship by subsequent directors. Don Taylor made a version for Theatre Night (BBC TV, 1990), with Fiona Shaw as Clytemnestra.2 Katie Mitchell’s version (Abbey Theatre, 2001) featured servants rearranging deckchairs on a doomed liner. The emerging catastrophe of the Greek economy and the Euro crisis suggested yet another reinterpretation. We read about the tragic story of Chelsea Ives, 17, the Waltham Forest Olympic Youth Ambassador (2008) whose mother ‘shopped’ her to the police for rioting, leading to her arrest, public humiliation and imprisonment. Since our production would assemble an international cast across multiple time zones, we saw an opportunity to bring such a contemporary crisis within the family to bear on questions of the economy and sacrifice. We asked auditionees to read some of Euripides’ text, to tell us what they were doing in summer 2011 during the riots, and what they had sacrificed since.

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[Skype bell rings on Kurt’s laptop. An image appears of a woman wearing a purple robe and a blue headscarf.] KURT: Aha. Let me just zoom in now. You have prepared something for your audition? [Emer O’Toole begins reciting the audition text with a calm demeanour and expression. As she speaks, a hand reaches into the frame and pulls her headscarf off. She continues speaking, faster and more urgently. The hand enters again and pulls off the robe. She continues, frenzied and speaking in high pitch. Now a man’s head appears in shot, leaning down as if to kiss her.] KURT: Yaha! Aha! Hey. What did you do last summer when all this was panic in London [sic]? EMER: Well it’s very interesting, because as the riots broke out I was at a conference in Japan and they were recovering from the Fukushima disaster. KURT: Oh yes! Yes, of course! EMER: . . .I live in Brixton in London, which is just in the very middle of where the riots happened. I called my flatmates and they were up on the roof of my house and they were drinking beer and they were looking down and there were people rioting in the street below. I found it incredibly affecting to be. . . KURT: Mmm, it did not occur to me this Fukushima seaside ooh scene. . . mmm, yah. . . EMER: . . .so far away and. . . KURT: And you yourself do you think you have made a sacrifice? EMER: The political situation in Britain at the moment is so conservative, and so I am joining protests through the streets of London. Teddy and Kurt thus received an uncannily pertinent verbatim contribution from Emer, while revealing their vague control of the process, unwittingly attuned to much participatory performance that seeks to close the distance between the initiating artist and participant in an apparently delegated process (Bishop 2012, 7). In this case, however, delegation was not so much a considered strategy as a consequence of clownish irresponsibility and hoarding. As they grabbed a jumble of offerings, the clowns were both embedded in the world of social networking and reflecting its feverish dynamics. Once again it was more by remarkable luck than good planning that Teddy found himself auditioning Stefania Mylonia, a Greek actress, for the part of Iphigenia. [Skype rings on Barnaby’s laptop.] Stefania Mylonia: [dancing and waving her hands in a lax manner] No magical power Except the power of tears Don’t drive me down Into the darkness of the grave3 TEDDY: Do you play a musical instrument, Stefania? STEFANIA: No, I’m – I’m horrible, and I can’t sing really. Shall I keep going? TEDDY: Hmm. Have you considered a role for the production? STEFANIA: Of course. [Pause] Iphigenia. TEDDY: Ah. Well, of course. Of course. Silly me. [Pause] What did you do last summer, and what have you sacrificed since? STEFANIA: I have not sacrificed anything. I am not willing to.

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TEDDY: Do you think if you did sacrifice something it might help? STEFANIA: No. I don’t agree with the idea of sacrifice. I make choices, not sacrifices.

Choice is different. TEDDY: Do you feel that Iphigenia had a choice? STEFANIA: Of course she had a choice. You always have a choice. If my father were to do

this to me, I would simply kill my father. TEDDY: Well, that would take things in a different direction, wouldn’t it?

Kurt and Teddy were delighted with the auditions. Perhaps they realized that the cast had more interesting ideas about the riots, notions of sacrifice and familial claustrophobia than they did. In addition to the creative and political challenges posed by Emer and Stefania, they had received highly unusual contributions from Yassi Jahanmir as a fatigued Old Man, Karan Savage as a bathing Clytemnestra, Kellen Hoxworth as a soldierly Achilles and Sukanya Chakrabarti as an ethereal Chorus. We had to admit that, despite their disorderly and heavy-handed approach, Kurt and Teddy’s online auditions were yielding interesting results.

3 Clowns as eccentrics: technology and internet irreverence Just from the evidence of the auditions, we were struck by the way our international cast of actors had embraced the limits and challenges posed by technology. KURT: The rich-lord does not appreciate how we were so very cleverly exploiting the inter-

web to encourage fun and games. TEDDY: Exactly, Kurt. To you producers, technology was a means to an end, but for us it

was an end in itself: a new world for us to explore. As Michael North says, ‘the comedian needs to become part of the machine in order to extract its comic possibilities’ (2009, 11). Not only Kurt and Teddy but the whole ensemble had found playful ways to exploit these new technologies. So next, we asked them to ‘perform a sacrifice’ to each other on Skype. The contributors decided how to frame their performances in the interactive environment of Skype, improvising together in order to explore the encounter of two contrasting proposals. Viewing these fragments, our attention was drawn to the often humorous juxtaposition of rehearsed mini-scenarios and fragments of text mediated through a bricolage of on-screen frames. Furthermore, each participant, isolated in front of their laptops, received and experienced a different perspective on the scenes. Snagit was then used to capture these online encounters, often from both ends, which then enabled potential spectators to watch either or both of the performers’ perspectives. This might be said to activate the distinction Performance scholar Philip Auslander makes between ‘documentary’ photographs (those which may be understood to record during a one-off event) and ‘theatrical’ photographs (those which are composed for viewers to interpret after the event), in which the crucial relation is not between the document and the event but between the audience and the document and the way in which the document itself ‘performs’ (2012, 57). [Skype conversation filmed and posted on the Ugly Scenes Facebook group page4] YASSI: So I figured that the Old Man is a servant to Agamemnon, right? He lives a life of self-sacrifice, so I thought that for five minutes I’d run up and down the stairs until

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I am physically exhausted before I recite the speech. So you can go and have a coffee break. That was my idea – physical exhaustion. How about yours? KELLEN HOXWORTH: Achilles is playing so many games, so I didn’t know what he is sacrificing; so I figure his role of hero is ultimately what gets slain here. YASSI: Cool. Do you want to go first? KELLEN: Or do you? YASSI: Ok. Well. Er – haha. KELLEN: So you go do some running, and I’ll get some water. YASSI: I’m setting my alarm, so when you hear the ‘ding’ I’ll be done. The sacrifices that Yassi and Kellen subsequently performed were video captured from Skype using Snagit, and posted on Facebook for the whole cast to see and for the wider potential audience to comment on. Teddy and Kurt then gave directorial notes. KURT: Old man is running from downsatairs to upsatairs [sic], like servant like Sisyphus. TEDDY: I like visually the small box inside the big white box – Kellen’s background wall

is bright white (good contrast with the red apple). KURT: I like the running in the small box. I like the big apple and close-up expression. . . TEDDY: . . .and coming and going and actor’s chit-chatting.

KURT: Can the red apple be eaten first by the Achilles, then we see it appear in Iphigen-

ia’s hand on Skype and then she eat it too? TEDDY: Or maybe we see it in reverse, and she vomits it up.

Inelegantly described by Teddy and Kurt, the scene was in fact comically grotesque in the Bakhtinian sense, due to the disproportionate juxtaposition of Yassi’s panting body and Kellen’s masticating mouth. Mechanical and mundane physical activities, along with their contrasting repetitive noises, were rendered dynamic and compelling, as well as bizarrely funny, through the odd effect of Skype’s overlaying of images, self within the other or vice versa, depending on which side of the lens the viewer is positioned. As Michael North suggest, ‘the machine age seems to have brought, along with all its other dislocations, a new motive for laughter and perhaps a new form of comedy’ (North 2009, 5). Other actors also did inspirational dramatic work using Skype not only as the medium but sometimes as the primary source of incongruous humour. For example, Karen Savage and Emer O’Toole improvised a scene between Clytemnestra (renamed Clyty by Karen) and the Scary Priestess, a comic gem, in which the former was apparently drunk. [A woman in her bath, covered in bubbles, plays with the water and drinks.] SCARY: Clytemnestra, are you drunk? I fear she has imbibed of the spirits! I try to give her prophecies. I try to sacrifice my knowledge for her. What does she give me? A bath! [Clytemnestra lies back in the bath. The water laps her breasts. She drinks.] CLYTY: It is good that a mother should drive her own child away? This is good? Hmm? SCARY: I think Clytemnestra is starting to soak not only her feet, but also her brain; for she drinks and eats chocolate but declares it good, and seems not to know that her husband will be to blame. CLYTY: But it is good that a mother give her child away. SCARY: To what are you giving your child, Clytemnestra? Not to Achilles! To someone else further away.

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CLYTY: No, ‘tis good. ‘Tis good that a mother give her child away. SCARY: Clytemnestra, I cannot convince you. You will not listen to the words of your

priestess or to your gods. I fear I must leave you to the words of your chocolate; to your wine; to your suds; and you won’t believe me. CLYTY: It is good. SCARY: Goodbye, Clyty. You will find out too late that it is not good. Clyty/Karen appeared to be drunk. Or perhaps she was drunk. Either way, her repeated and slow lines seemed to ‘foul up’ the Skype conversation. Added to this were the distorted strains of Sunset Boulevard, which made it harder to hear what she was saying. Both Clyty and the Skype interface seemed to have become contaminated with Kurt and Teddy’s propensity for laying obstacles and booby-traps. TEDDY: Hahahahaha. Booby-traps. That is a good attempt at humour, Richard. KURT: Yes, but. You are wrong about Clyty. She is a good clown, so naked but for bubbles

and red drunk nose. TEDDY: And maybe you should have listened to Scary’s dire warnings before you make us do

what you make us do next.

4 Clowns as rabble-rousers: carnivals and shopping centres After three months of generating material online, we were finally to have the cast physically present in one place (except for Stefania/Iphigenia, who could not make it due to funding cuts in Greece). We acquired a vacated shop unit in The Light, a smart shopping mall in the centre of Leeds, where the clowns could lead ‘open rehearsals’ of Ugly Scenes. KURT: Yeah, we’re going public. We invite shoppers to come and join [sic]. TEDDY: We can make strategic invasions into the concourse. KURT: Ask shopper about what sacrifices she is making. TEDDY: Iphigenia’s wedding procession can be like a topsy-turvy carnival parade.

Teddy was referring of course to the possibility of Bakhtinian carnivalesque power reversal in capitalism’s most sacred of temples: ‘the peculiar logic of the “inside-out”, of the “turnabout”, of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies, travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings’ (Bakhtin 1965, 11). How appropriate that Bakhtin also names clowns as the ‘constant, accredited representatives of carnival spirit in everyday life outside of carnival season’ (8). KURT: Yeah, we was the instigators of travesty in the back passages.

Unfortunately, it was the parodic aspect of carnival that became dominant in the early stages. As producers, we set up a gazebo, piano and curtain in the bright shop unit and then left the clowns to do their worst. The international cast gathered. There were three people inside the shop – the ‘audience’. Immediately, there was an argument about who should be Agamemnon.

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Barnaby King and Richard Talbot TEDDY: Where is Agamemnon? KURT: Uh, we did not cast him. I want the main part. TEDDY: Who is the real Agamemnon? Stand up now [stands]. KURT: [stands]: We are both Agamemnon? TEDDY: Woe is me. I will not slay my children. KURT: Then you cannot be Aggie. Greece cannot bail out until we sacrifice her. TEDDY: Into what cruel straits have we been thrown? KURT: Aulis. We’re stuck in Aulis. TEDDY: It’s useless. KURT: You little squirt. Remember the plan for the wedding. TEDDY: Screw it. Screw it all. Screw you. Screw the whole thing.

Kurt was behaving like a paranoid dictator. Teddy was insecure and desperate to make something happen. Parody quickly descended into farce. KURT: Well, you wasn’t even in there. We had to do something TEDDY: OK everyone, it’s time for Iphigenia’s wedding procession.

Reluctantly the cast moved towards the door, Clytemnestra being dragged in her tin bath, others with odd props in their hands. Some people were chanting, others singing, but there was little or no unity of purpose. KURT: Let’s go out there and make a noise!

Almost as soon as the motley band left the shop, two security guards told them they must stay inside. Obediently, everyone turned around and wandered back into the shop. The cast was getting listless, and the three audience members were confused. TEDDY: What are we going to do, Kurt? What’s happened to our carnival? KURT: Listen, Teddy. Dickie and his Blunder Boy have truly stuck us in it.

In London, people raided the shops; but in Leeds that day, nobody had the courage to become really riotous. That is, our attempted subversion didn’t have the genuine violence of riot; but neither was it a temporary authorised carnival that gave everybody a bit of light relief from shopping. We needed the security guards to be on board because we had acquired the shop for free, but more importantly because we were always already part of an economy that accommodates and even promotes art for commercial reasons. Thus our carnival seemed like an embarrassing if cheerful adjunct to the shopping centre experience. We might say that this updates Bakhtin, because of the way the shopping mall is already a step ahead of those who want to disrupt its attraction and power. TEDDY: Maybe you should have uploaded Bakhtin yourself before this all started.

Following Scott’s idea of the ‘hidden transcript’, perhaps genuine carnival would have to take root behind the shop fronts in the dark corridors we witnessed as we were loading the set in, where we caught glimpses of restaurant workers sweating in hot kitchens, couriers coming and going in the gloomy loading bays and the security guards chatting off duty. Scott

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acknowledges that the ‘hidden transcript’, by which he means that which happens ‘offstage, beyond direct observation of powerholders’, is not a complete ‘realm of freedom’ (1990, 5) Those corridors were probably subject to surveillance too. Nevertheless, ‘the hidden transcript is produced for a different audience and under different constraints of power than the public transcript’; and it is often in these other realms, Scott argues, that sparks of rebellion and change are often ignited, which later burst forth into the public arena. KURT: Then why did the Dick and the Brenda-by get us to flounce in the palissades when

there’s more sinister activities in the dark labyrinth? BARNABY: We thought that the shop could be a travel agency, a portal to another reality. We

imagined transports, fantasy and escape, but we kept getting stuck. RICHARD: The shop became a harbour; but it wasn’t a refuge, it was a grotty trap. You can

imagine how these places begin to stink when there is no wind to wash the waste out to sea. KURT: But then into the stinky harbour, floated Iphigenia – or more precisely, her bottom – our curvaceous Greek saviour. CHORUS: The bottom! The bottom is speaking now! IPHIGENIA [VOICE OVER THE BUTTOCKS]: Be mine, all mine today; turn not unto moody thoughts. KURT: Fantastic! I kiss your arse, Stefania! At this moment a group of teenagers began to crowd into the shop and threatened to interrupt the proceedings. KURT: [to the teenagers]: We are killing Iphigenia so the wind can blow, so the army can

get out of the port. Do you know the story of. . . er, Disney’s Hercules? . . .er. . . Troy? With, er. . . Brad Pitt in it. He’s over there [pointing to Achilles]. TEENAGER: Can we get a photo of people that are dressed up? KURT [UNCERTAIN]: Yes. . . The teenagers surrounded Iphigenia, now played by an understudy – a conference delegate who was sitting in the gazebo. The teenagers joined in the chanting with the Chorus and moved menacingly towards Iphigenia, as if to perform a spontaneous sacrifice of their own. TEDDY: We might get arrested; yesterday we nearly got arrested. The security guards

are watching us. These teenagers, in spite of their apparent complacency and passivity, had themselves activated a carnivalesque ‘turnabout’ on the clowns by invading their space, unwittingly bringing with them the danger and grotesquery we had been vainly searching for. Indeed, it seemed as though a full-scale riot was now a very real possibility. But with the security guards lurking just outside, Kurt could not hold his nerve. He broke up the scene in a panic and fell back into his obsessive interviewing. KURT: What have you sacrificed to be here sacrificing Iphigenia with us? TEENAGE BOY 1: Sleep. TEENAGE BOY 2: PS3.

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The energy dissipated, the teenagers seemed to lose interest and drifted out. But Kurt was re-energized, and decided that they should all abandon the rehearsal and go in search of authentic material from the people of Leeds. With the entire cast and audience in tow, Kurt left the shop. There was only ever a vaguely defined group of presumed potential rioters: disenfranchised young people, or an economic underclass in Leeds – and now they were stopping middle-class boys and random strangers in a shopping centre on a Saturday and asking them what they had sacrificed lately. After 10 minutes, Kurt and Teddy rounded everyone up and returned to the shop, where they all shared the sacrifices they had collected from random strangers. SHOPPER 1: I have sacrificed a good night’s sleep. I will have nightmares about this

performance. AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: I sacrificed a good hour of my life so far. SHOPPER 2: I sacrificed quality time with my boyfriend. AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: I sacrificed going to see my son play in a football tournament. SHOPPER 3: I sacrifice chicken and chips. I’m going to Nando’s now. I’m not going to

have Piri Piri Chicken. I’m going to swap it for a wrap. EMER/SCARY PRIESTESS: I’m an optimist, you know – I always see the best in things, and I

really always used to think that things would work out. And then I came here. I met you people; I realised that it’s all doomed, and I suppose I’ve sacrificed all my joy and my optimism. AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: I think you need to sacrifice the ‘business’, yeah? I think you need to slow it down a bit. I think you need to not take it for granted that the audience know the story. And I think you need to sacrifice a little bit of humour. Or: attempted humour. First it was the threat of the teenage boys, then mutiny in the ranks of the cast, and now the audience has turned critic: perhaps this was too much truth for the clowns to hear, and the rehearsal stumbled to a halt. If only the clowns had been able to take the hint and sacrifice their lofty ambitions, we could have been saved by what followed the next day. TEDDY: Wait a minute. You made us do that. We had no choice. BARNABY: Remember what Stefania said. You always have a choice. Anyway, you were intent

upon your dazzling multimedia finale. . . KURT: Stitching together interviews and video clips, TEDDY: Merging them seamlessly with

verbatim material, RICHARD: Which we had to stay up all night to edit, Barnaby: Back in the same theatre where we had both done our MA. RICHARD: The Banham. [All four, scholars and clowns, look at each other sheepishly.] KURT: Well – TEDDY: Maybe – BARNABY: We all – RICHARD: – Wanted it. But you left us to do all the hard work while you went drinking. TEDDY: We had been devising a play online across the world. KURT: – And pulling together a stage version of a Greek tragedy in two days. TEDDY: All you had to do was get us an audience. KURT: And did you manage that?

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BARNABY [IGNORING THEM]: The next day it was Richard and I who set up the gazebo, the

bathtubs, video projectors, the sails, and a makeshift curtain flown at low level for comic effect. KURT: There you are, trying to be funny again. Only the trouble: comedy needs an audience. BARNABY: At the start time, only the actors were present. Our first audience member, Jeff, appeared 10 minutes late. TEDDY: Go Scene 2 – ‘Apples and Stairs’! KURT: We’re missing an actor: Achilles. RICHARD: Jeff was given Kellen’s Achilles costume and asked to stand in. So once again, we had no audience. BARNABY: Then my daughter Zora, aged 1, arrived accompanied by her mother. She was in her own world, climbing up and down the auditorium steps, while her mother followed to prevent her falling. So they hardly count as audience. RICHARD: Achilles recited his monologue, whilst being force-fed apples by the Old Man. The baby began to cry. JEFF [through apple-filled mouth]: I have a baby judging me. TEDDY: This isn’t working. Next scene! RICHARD: Another audience member arrived and was given the job of raising and lowering the curtain. TEDDY: Go Scene 3 – ‘Bathtime’! BARNABY: There was the sound of a winch creaking as the curtain rose, stopped, fell, and rose fully. Clyty was revealed lounging in a tin bathtub, wearing a shower cap and waving a back scrubber. CLYTY: Ah, Achilles. Come and join me in the bath. [Achilles sits in another bathtub next to Clyty.] I am so pleased to have you as my new son-in-law. RICHARD: There was an ominous creaking noise, it is not clear where from, that sounded like the timbers of a ship that is listing over to one side. The curtain fell. BARNABY: An awkward silence followed, as everybody realised that the baby girl was now the only audience member not on stage. She was ‘performing’, twirling and stumbling about in the aisle. RICHARD: Everyone was mesmerized by her except the curtain operator, who was raising and lowering the curtain at will. TEDDY: Scene 6, everyone! – ‘Pants Down’. KURT [runs onto stage]: Context: Clytemnestra knows that her husband Agamemnon has been deceiving her. CLYTY: Aggie. I’ve caught you with your pants down. TEDDY/‘AGGIE’: I deny it. CLYTY: You are going to sacrifice our daughter, aren’t you? TEDDY/‘AGGIE’: It’s true, it’s true, I admit it. CLYTY: Why am I always the last to know? TEDDY/‘AGGIE’: I thought it would be a nice surprise for you. You go to a wedding and it turns out to be a sacrifice. It’s something different. TEDDY/‘AGGIE’: Next scene! BARNABY: Then Stefania’s video suddenly appeared on the video screen. I don’t know if Kurt had received it in that moment via his smartphone, or whether Skype had started working again.

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At least Agamemnon has sacrificed something: His daughter. I bet then he’s going to feel the loss he gonna feel the pain for the rest of his life. The loss of his lovely daughter. And who the fuck is this man, this Calchus who designed this whole tragedy? Where the fuck do his magic powers come from? And why is everybody listening to him? Anyway if it must be it – Should I be sacrificed for Greece? Should Greece be sacrificed for Europe? Here I am, sacrificing my own performance for the sake of political dramaturgies. Am I the designer? Don’t think so. So go ahead. Kill me if you can. BARNABY: Zora remained eerily silent and she watched the monologue on stage, while eating one of Achilles’ discarded apples she had found on the floor.

5 Clowns as tricksters: enchantments and disenchantments TEDDY: OK, enough torture. BARNABY: Sorry, Kurt and Teddy, but we just had to do it to make a point. KURT: You academics, always trying to score points. TEDDY: Why can’t we just leave the failure be what it is. . . a failure? RICHARD: Was that a joke? Look, something must be learned from the failure, otherwise

they will not publish this article. TEDDY: OK, well what did you learn?

[Barnaby and Richard start speaking at the same time.] BARNABY: Relating McManus’s work on clowning to Sutton-Smith on playfulness. . . RICHARD: Alan Read’s reference to play from Agamben could help. KURT: Ufff. Sorry to interrupt you, but we feel this might take a while, so we’re off down the pub. TEDDY: Have fun making sense of all this nonsense! BARNABY: Uh, OK. Donald McManus says that the ‘key feature uniting all clowns. . . is their ability, through skill or stupidity, to break the rules governing the fictional world’ (2003, 13). But just as clowns within the theatre may break the rules of dramatic convention, so outside the theatre they can also break the rules of social convention. Brian Sutton-Smith, one of the foremost contemporary theorists of play, makes the distinction between play and playfulness, in which the former designates a ‘stylized form of house play, truck play, contest, or carnival in which the expected routines or rules guide and frame the action’, while ‘playfulness’ is that which ‘plays with the normal expectations of play itself’ (1997, 147–148). Of course this invokes a popular distinction between types of carnivalesque inversion that remain safely within licensed limits and those that might break open those limits and generate new

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possibilities for material social relations. However, most commentators (e.g. Scott 1990; Stallybrass and White 1986) would not see this as an either/or situation, but a question of conditions and fluctuating degrees. Thus Turner’s pronouncement that ‘playfulness is a volatile, sometimes dangerously explosive essence, which cultural institutions seek to bottle or contain in the vials of games of competition, chance, and strength, in modes of simulation such as theatre’ (1987, 168), captures the ambivalent contingencies of clowning as a ‘critical practice’, which society needs to contain (Mitchell 1992, 18). Many rules and conventions were at work in our play, of course. We imposed rules on Teddy and Kurt, which they (being us) felt unable to break. When they tried to break away from the script of Iphigenia, we imposed another script on them. When the cast found ways to be playful with the rules and conventions of online media, we were impressed but we did not allow that playfulness to influence our plan for a theatrical finale. Instead we maintained the prescribed structure, asking them to convert their original Skype interactions into less powerful embodied scenes to be acted out in theatrical surroundings. Notably, the most powerful interventions during the finale performance came from Stefania/Iphigenia, who had absented herself from physical presence and remained true to the virtual playfulness of the process; and from my one-year-old daughter, who was not yet old enough to know the rules governing the theatre or the social world. If, at its most playful, clowning does constitute a ‘volatile, sometimes dangerously explosive essence’, in most cases this got sacrificed to the gods of the shopping centre and the gods of the theatre. However, Stefania reminds us that the very notion of sacrifice is a product of human decisions and foibles: ‘I don’t agree with the idea of sacrifice. I make choices, not sacrifices. Choice is different’. If we accept this, then we must take responsibility for our failure to activate the dangerous essence of clowning. On a positive note, it was a timely reminder for the two of us, who purport to utilise our clowning for the pursuit of scholarship, that our attempts at interdisciplinarity may lead to disciplinary failings: ‘I think you need to sacrifice a little bit of humour, or attempted humour’. This was painful to hear for two artist scholars who think, sometimes, they are doing innovative work; but it deserves to be remembered next time Kurt puts on his funny glasses and Teddy dons his red nose. Clowns who try and fail to be funny are not playful tricksters, or dangerous rebels; they are just lost. Playfulness and humour are not the same thing. While the latter may flow from the former, if humour becomes the primary intention then playfulness breaks down and all potential for subversion is lost. RICHARD: OK, well I doubt you’ll buy this, Kurt and Teddy, but here goes. . . I’ll start

with a reference to Alan Read, who refers to Giorgio Agamben, who points out that play in its broadest sense ‘frees and distracts humanity from the sphere of the sacred, without simply abolishing it’ (2013, xxxiii). Play, Read argues, can also be understood as a mediating mechanism between the two disciplines of Theatre and Performance. As they struggle to transfer the work from street-level interaction to the theatre, to both document and to represent, the clowns enact this hinge-like mediation around (interdisciplinary) thresholds. Importantly for Agamben, the site of the threshold across which the practice, or object (victim) must cross in order to return from the sacrosanct may only be discernible through the performances that occur there. In light of these observations, the clown’s carnivalesque playfulness can be understood not merely as a temporary intervention and inversion of hierarchies (economic, disciplinary or otherwise), but as an ongoing mode

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and ‘political vocation’ (to use Agamben’s term; 2007, 73–75). The extent to which the clowns were prepared to challenge the security staff, or to offend the etiquette of online interaction, or to disrupt the classical text on stage, might also be understood as a function of the mediation process between spontaneous performance and the expectations of scripted theatre/social practices. Finally, considering the finale in which Zora became the focus of heightened attention, it seemed that for a moment she offered us a spontaneous version of Euripides’ ‘lost scene’–‘Iphigenia’s supernatural rescue’. Babyhood is a state often sentimentally privileged for its ‘authentic’ playfulness, but here she seemed to be marking out a wobbly and clownish frame around which a chorus of participants might cohere and perform. Indeed, as a figure tottering between embodiments as vulnerable daughter, curious beholder, sensitive participant and ready consumer, she seemed to bring Ugly Scenes and its instigators back down to earth so that we could ask ourselves – seriously, for once – what, if anything, is sacred. Source: Barnaby King and Richard Talbot (2014) ‘Clowns do ethnography: an experiment in long-distance comic failure’, Comedy Studies, 5:1, 64–77.

Notes 1 ([1974] 2004: 99). 2 A. Wrigley, Weblog, University of Westminster, ‘Screen Plays Theatre Plays On British Television’ and ‘Greek plays: Iphigenia at Aulis (BBC TV, 1990)’, 26 April 2012. http://screenplaystv.word press.com/2012/04/26/iphigenia-at-aulis-bbc-1990/. 3 Euripides – Iphigenia at Aulis. 4 ‘Ugly Scenes’, https://www.facebook.com/groups/uglyscenes/.

References Agamben, G. 2007. Profanations. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York: Zone Books. Auslander, P. 2012. ‘The Performativity of Performance Documentation.’ In Repeat, Record, Perform: Live Art in History, edited by A. Heathfield and A. Jones, 47–57. London: Intellect. Babcock, B.A. 1984. ‘Arrange Me into Disorder: Fragments and Reflections on Ritual Clowning.’ In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, edited by J.J. MacAloon, 102–128. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Bakhtin, M. 1965. Rabelais and His World. Translated by H. Iswolsky. Massachusetts: MIT Press. Bishop, C. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and The Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso. Daily Mail. Mother of Olympic ambassador accused of rioting weeps as she’s led to cells. 18 August 2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2027024/Mother-Olympic-ambassador-accused-riot ing-weeps-shes-led-cells.html. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. McCormack, B. 1999. ‘Three Clowns of Ethnography: Geertz, Levi-Strauss, and Derrida.’ Dialectical Anthropology 24: 125–139. McManus, D. 2003. No Kidding! Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth-Century Theater. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Mitchell, W.E., ed. 1992. Clowning as Critical Practice: Performance Humor in the South Pacific. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. North, M. 2009. Machine-Age Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Read, A. 2013. Theatre in the Expanded Field Seven Approaches to Performance. London: Bloomsbury.

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Scott, J.C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Stallybrass, P., and A. White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press Sutton-Smith, B. 1997. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turner, V. 1987. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications. Whaley Harsh, P. 1944. A Handbook of Classical Drama. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Contributors Barnaby King is a performer, teacher, and researcher specializing in humour, clowning, and festive performance as they relate to political economies and social realities. His PhD, completed in 2013 at Northwestern University, revolved around clowning in Colombia as a transformative social practice. For eight years he worked as a professional director and facilitator of theatre for young audiences in Leeds and is founder of the ‘Clown Encuentro,’ an annual international conference and festival of clowning held in Colombia. He is currently a senior lecturer in Performing Arts at Edge Hill University, UK. Richard Talbot is a performer and a programme leader on the BA (Hons) in ComedyWriting and Performance at the University of Salford. His PhD (Roehampton, 2008), ‘The clown who lost his memory: multiple faces of the clown in practice and theory’, investigated the figure of the clown in participatory performance and the archive, and is available online via Triangle Theatre (where he is co-artistic director). He frequently collaborates with Ridiculusmus, performing in their production The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland.

Part III

Class, gender, race Reading comedy’s issues

Chapter 8

‘To what base uses we may return, Horatio!’ – Hamlet, Comedy and Class Struggle (4:2) Isaac Hui

Introduction Criticism of spiritual things is to distinguish between the genuine and the nongenuine. This, however, is not the concern of language, or only deeply disguised: as humor. Only in humor can language be critical. The particular critical magic then appears, so that the counterfeit substance comes into contact with the light; it disintegrates. The genuine remains: it is ash. We laugh about it. The rays of anyone who beams excessively will also tackle those heavenly unmaskings we call criticism. (Benjamin 1994: 84)

Humour, for Walter Benjamin, is the language of criticism. The genuine is the ash: the material that associates with death, and the function of criticism and humour alike is to turn the spiritual into material. It seems that comedy often has a connection with the material. Before the climax of Hamlet, William Shakespeare introduces the tragic hero to the gravedigger whose business, as my discussion is going to show, is to remind the prince of his impotence. The clown, the rustic, represents the comic anti-hero whose responsibility is to dig the base, or, to use Benjamin’s term, to ‘brush history against the grain’ (1968: 257). Through a rereading of the gravedigger scene, I am going to examine two questions in this article: (1) what is the relationship between comedy and the material? And (2) how can such a relationship tell us about the mutuality between comedy and tragedy? Based on the discussion, this article argues that the two genres are interrelated and should be understood together, for what is a tragedy for the bourgeois may just be a comedy for the proletariat.

Comedy and Materialism In the first part of this article, I am going to argue for the close connection between comedy and materialism. In the beginning of the gravedigger scene, the first clown says, ‘Come, my spade. There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and gravemakers; they hold up Adam’s profession’ (V.i.28-29). His words come from the proverbial rhyme ‘When Adam delved and Eve span,/Who was then the gentleman?’, Harold Jenkins suggests that ‘the Clown’s speech wittily inverts this by implying that there were none but gentlemen’ (Shakespeare 1982: 378). Adam was the first man who bore ‘arms’, which can be read as the coat of arms. The rhyme was the text that John Ball preached during the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. However, if we allow ourselves to consider the text in a bigger

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context, the idea of the Diggers revolt against hierarchy also recalls the Levellers in 1649, when a group of poor men started to dig the waste land on St George’s Hill, which is ‘a symbolic assumption of ownership of the common lands’ and ‘a symbolic rejection of conventional pieties’ (1972: 88). Christopher Hill writes that ‘The constitutional Levellers . . . were not in fundamental disagreement with the type of society that was being set up by the English Revolution. They accepted the sanctity of private property, and their desire to extend democracy was within the limits of a capitalist society’ (1972: 123). Even though the Levellers and the True Levellers wanted to distant themselves from being called a ‘communist’, the image of the gravedigger was again seen 200 years later in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that says ‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable’ (Engels and Marx 2008: 16). Marx uses the allegory of the gravedigger to suggest that the bourgeois would eventually create its own failure. Linking the working class with the colonized, Terry Eagleton comments: For Marxism, history moves under the very sign of irony: there is something darkly comic about the fact that the bourgeoisie are their own grave-diggers, just as there is an incongruous humour about the fact that the wretched of the earth should come to power. (2009: 161) In fact, if we follow Jenkins’s comments, we can see a Marxist twist in the words of the gravedigger, for Slavoj Žižek wrote: For properly historical thought, as opposed to historicism, there is no contradiction between the claim that ‘all history hitherto is the history of class struggle’ and the claim that the ‘bourgeoisie is the first class in history.’ All civilized societies were class societies, but prior to capitalism, their class structure was distorted by a network of other hierarchical orders (castes, estates, and so forth) – only with capitalism, when individuals are formally free and equal, deprived of all traditional hierarchical links, does the class structure appear ‘as such.’ (2010: 196) ‘Bourgeoisie is the first class in history’ – does it not sound like an echo of the clown whose words imply that once upon a time ‘there were none but (original emphasis) gentlemen’? Summing up from the above, we can see that the gravedigger is an image that represents the destructive force from within, such an image demonstrates Marx’s insight in his reading of Shakespeare. In fact, the clown’s words have a close connection with class struggle, for he demonstrates the revolutionary power of jokes. Comparing with the coat of arms, a spade is more superior as it was there from the very beginning. The spade, which is ‘the insignium of “ancient gentlemen” like “Gardners, Ditchers, and Gravemakers”’ (Jenkins 1956: 564), recalls the late medieval morality play Mankind, in which it was used as the representation of honest labour, the symbol against the sin of sloth. W. A. Davenport writes that ‘Mankind’s role in the play is identified as that of honest labourer by his spade, and the self-appointed task of avoiding idleness by digging and sowing’ (1982: 43). In the play, the symbolism of spade and the allusion of earth and clay are deployed to ‘remind us of Adam and of man’s burden of original sin’

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(Lester 1981: xxiv). Davenport suggests that digging ‘stands for the whole idea of man’s potential labours on this earth, as well as the idea of occupying oneself with useful tasks to fend off the Devil, and to earn salvation through virtuous acts, as one wins fruits from the earth by toil’ (1982: 43). Apart from this traditional reading, the spade, which digs the material base of earth, can be read as a symbol of the ‘working class’, and it belongs to nature and is primary while the coat of arms belongs to the bourgeois and is cultural and secondary. The interlude relates to the use of the gallows, as the devil Titivillus tries to convince Mankind to hang himself by saying that Mercy has been hanged. The power of comedy, as seen in Titivillus, Mischief, Newguise, Nowadays and Nought, is on the side of death, only in Mankind is it opposite to the one who makes their living through the spade. If the moral lesson of Mankind is to warn us against the violent use of language, the sin of flesh and excess, the theme of Hamlet is more ambiguous as it is the gravedigger who holds the spade. The power of comedy and death in the latter belongs to the working class. While the clown’s words may seem to be idle chatter, comparing Mankind with Hamlet shows that the bourgeois use of language is the real abuse of language. The teaching comes from the side of death, which is the exact opposite of Mercy’s saying ‘your body is your enemy’. The body for the gravedigger is not an enemy, because the material is the only form of existence, and it is the source of comedy, living and dying. Moreover, the suggestion that Adam must dig with his ‘arms’ can be understood sexually, which means that the challenge of the working class is at the same time targeted against the patriarchal power. Discussing the play, Jacques Lacan suggests the prince as the subject who is deprived of the phallus. Comparing this Shakespeare tragic hero with Oedipus, he writes: The situation at the beginning of Hamlet is completely different, even though it can be represented by the same notation. The Other reveals himself from the beginning as the barred Other. He is barred not only from the world of the living but also from his just retribution. He has entered the kingdom of hell with this crime, this debt that he has not been able to pay, an inexpiable debt, he says. (Lacan 1982: 44) The play, which he described as ‘a tragedy of the underworld’ (Lacan 1982: 39), is about the absence of the phallus and the desire for the objet a. The joke that Adam digs with his arms links with castration and death, because while it implies his sexual potency, such a substitution means that he is impotent. Avi Erlich writes, ‘The playful humor with Adam allows Shakespeare to discuss openly, in a seemingly innocent way, the unconscious fear that everywhere lurks in the play’s depths: “Why he had none” – fathers may be suspected of having lost their “arms”, of having lost their phallicism’ (1977: 137). The line demonstrates the anxiety of the patriarchal power: the father has always been impotent, and the supposedly authority of the father is gone and he was reduced as a laughing stock. Comedy is related to the concept of castration. In The Odd One In: On Comedy, Alenka Zupančič discusses comedy in relation to the Lacanian perception of castration: Castration is what gives enjoyment its relative autonomy, what accounts for its possible objectification (enjoyment as object) and for its possible detachability. That is to say: it explains why, as ‘id,’ enjoyment can walk away in any direction, why it can find and realize itself in the most unusual or the most usual activities. This also means

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that it is this relative autonomy of enjoyment that makes possible and opens up the space for what is colloquially referred to as the ‘fear of castration,’ that is, the fear of entirely losing control over this relatively independent part of our being. In other words, the empirical ‘fear of castration’ is always-already a consequence of castration – only if something already appears as separable/detachable can we fear that it will be taken away from us. (2008: 192–93) Comedy deals with the material – the object. The subject has always been castrated, but the joy comes with it. Zupančič argues that comedy is the radicalization of this norm, and she added that ‘The human norm is a fundamental dislocation of enjoyment, its potential objectification, detachability, independence, mobility (as fixation in another place)’ (Zupančič 2008: 193–94). Recognizing this state of existence, we can see that we do not own anything and those who chase after property and wealth are in a denial of castration, fetishistic and to be laughed at. In the middle of the gravedigger scene, the prince enters as if he is the substitute of the second clown, and the scene continues with the encounter between the tragic bourgeois and the comic proletariat. The clown throws up a skull, a memento mori. It is important for us to think about the comic nature of the skull, which is another return of the material. And it is exactly because it is material that it is deeply associated with death. The material is the only thing that truly exists yet is lifeless. It is an affirmation of existence and its opposite. Through numerous examples including Vesalius’ Skeleton Contemplating a Skull (1543) and Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), Roland Mushat Frye argues: The visual memento mori we have examined in connection with the memento mori dramatization in Hamlet did not trap a person in the spiritual cul-de-sac of a sterile preoccupation with death. On the contrary, they were directed toward life, and toward the effective living of life which, however long and short, should be lived in confident reliance upon the providence of God. (1984: 252) The skull becomes a detachment of the body. The throwing of the skull causes an uncanny feeling within us: something that is supposed to be part of us and which we cannot see is suddenly face to face with us, raising the ambiguity between living and dying. While Hamlet is obsessed with his father’s spectre, the gravedigger deals with the skull. The tragic bourgeois claims that there is a significant meaning when he is face to face with nothingness, yet what the comic proletariat says is that the material is everything. When the prince says, ‘That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once. How the knave jowls it to th’ ground as if ’twere Cain’s jawbone, that did the first murder!’ (V.i.70-72), he does not understand the state of ‘as if I had never been such’ as if he is holding on to the Imaginary. A ‘thing’ becomes funny when it develops its own life and takes its own flight, and the tragic bourgeois may be the ‘hero’ who resists the heterogeneous motion of life. If tragedy is about the spiritual, and comedy is about the interruption of spiritual by the material, the comic and tragic coincide in the jawbone. Comedy is the material life from within, and it is also exemplified in the wordplay between the prince and the clown. Mixing damnation with salvation, and, therefore, shattering the distinction between life and death, the first clown asks if Ophelia should be

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‘buried in Christian burial’ (V.i.1-2). The second clown replies that since Ophelia’s burial is a Christian one, they should make her grave straight, playing on the meaning of ‘straightway’ and ‘strait’, therefore, making her grave a confinement (V.i.3-4). His words imply that to believe in absolute sense is to be an essentialist, which is a straitjacket, who hastens to the imaginary meaning of death. Such ‘essentialists’ are trapped inside their Imaginary, for they make living a confinement and fantasise the significance of death, denying the values of living. The clown’s word is opposite to gravedigger’s emphasis of ‘hanging’ (And the more pity that great folk should have countenance in this world to drown or hang themselves more than their even Christen (V.i.26-29)) that means both death and ‘delay’. The clown shows the importance of the material and its relationship to living and dying as he demonstrates that to live is to ‘hang around’ but is also in itself a postponement of death. Referring to Hamlet’s ‘action’, the gravedigger says that an act contains three elements, namely, to act, to do and to perform (V.i.11). We ‘lose the name of action’ since action becomes a performance. The clown says, ‘he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life’ (V.i.18-19). The line may mean that if a person does not shorten his own life, he is not guilty of his own death. However, through the comic stoppage and interruption, the statement can be read as ‘he that is not guilty of his own death, shortens not his own life’, which makes the statement a tautology. But, once again, his words are unreliable either, as he says ‘here lies the point’ (V.i.10). Using the ubi sunt motif, Hamlet and the gravedigger enter into an argument relating to wordplay. In face of the skull, the prince asks ‘Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?’ (V.i.91-92) The question that he fails to ask is whether there is a difference between the inherent nature or essence of things and a quibble, a witticism, a quip. If the nature and essence of things are quibbles, it means that the essence is itself unsettling. When the clown says that the grave is his, the prince agrees because he thinks that the clown lies in the grave. The gravedigger says ‘I do not lie in’t, and yet it is mine’ (V.i.114), which suggests that the power of lying and telling truth is simultaneously possessed by the comic figure who speaks from the side of death. Hamlet, who can only see one side of meaning, disagrees and thinks that the grave is for the dead, and not for the living, suggesting that the gravedigger is lying. In response, the clown argues that what the prince says is a ‘quick lie’ (V.i.117). Within the Symbolic, there is a material force that creates the deferral of language, and meaning is always floating and ambiguous. Aristotle writes that comedy ‘is a representation of inferior people, not indeed in the full sense of the word bad, but the laughable is a species of the base or ugly’; and tragedy is ‘a representation of an action that is heroic and complete and of a certain magnitude. . . it represents men in action and does not use narrative, and through pity and fear it effects relief to these and similar emotions’ (1932: 19–23). The clown’s materialism makes the notion of purification impossible and leads the play away from the Aristotelian model of tragedy, questioning the role of Hamlet as a tragic hero.

Dionysus, Harpo Marx and Yorick In the previous part, I have discussed the close tie between comedy and materialism; in this part, I am going to examine the ambiguity between comedy and tragedy by linking Yorick’s skull with other similar figures in the two genres, and, more importantly, arguing for the comedic revolution power of the proletariat.

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Not only does the material life illuminate our understanding of comedy, it blurs the distinction between comedy and tragedy. Hamlet and the gravedigger play with words such as ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘is’ and ‘was’ until, finally, the prince says ‘How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us’ (V.i.126–127). Acknowledging the power of the material makes heroism impossible, and comedy is amoral because morality is the creation of the bourgeois. Playing the game of words makes the prince aware of his impotence. He thinks that the gravedigger is ‘absolute’, therefore he must speak according to the rule. The powers of being absolute and to equivocate, which seem to be opposite to each other, belong to the same side, to the gravedigger. The prince fears that the wordplay will ‘undo’ them, and the word is used by Vindice in The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), who unmasks the skull and says, ‘Methinks this [the skull] mouth should make a swearer tremble,/A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo ’em / To suffer wet damnation to run through ’em’ (III.v.58–60); ‘Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours/For thee? for thee does she undo herself?’ (III.v.72-73). The fear of the shattering of subjectivity recalls the power of Dionysus, which, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, associates with carnival and tragedy. Defining tragedy as ‘an Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian insights and power’, Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, writes that while Apollo represents the principium individuationis, Dionysus, who has a smiling mask on his face, signifies the shattering of principium individuationis (1956: 56–57). On the mask of Dionysus, which is a reminder of the grinning skull, Jean-Pierre Vernant suggests that it ‘is a means of expressing absence in a presence’. He writes: The mask, with wide staring eyes that fix one like those of the Gorgon (Medusa), expresses and epitomizes all the different forms that the terrible divine presence may assume. It is a mask whose strange stare exerts a fascination, but it is hollow, empty, indicating the absence of a god who is somewhere else but who tears one out of oneself, makes one lose one’s bearings in one’s everyday, familiar life, and who takes possession of one just as if this empty mask was now pressed to one’s own face, covering and transforming it. (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988: 396) Underneath a seemingly unified form and structure is the Dionysiac power that runs contrary with them, which is not unlike the gravedigger who is a disruptive power from within. The gravedigger’s confusion of words and our inability to tell his intention show the clown, and the comic, as undecipherable. Another similar example can be found in a different ‘Marx’ – Harpo. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan writes: It is enough to evoke a face which is familiar to everyone of you, that of the terrible dumb brother of the four Marx Brothers, Harpo. Is there anything that poses a question which is more present, more pressing, more absorbing, more disruptive, more nauseating, more calculated to thrust everything that takes place before us into the abyss or void than the face of Harpo Marx, that face with its smile which leaves us unclear as to whether it signifies the most extreme perversity or complete simplicity? This dumb man alone is sufficient to sustain the atmosphere of doubt and of radical annihilation which is the stuff of the Marx brothers’ extraordinary farce and the uninterrupted play of ‘jokes’ that makes their activity so valuable. (1992: 66–67)

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The grin and the mute of Harpo throw the others into abyss and void. Elaborating on Lacan, Simon Critchley suggests that a fool, who is a figure of both comedy and tragedy, is ‘a thing – an uncanny mixture of perversity and simplicity, of wisdom and stupidity, of familiarity and strangeness – who speaks the truth, often by remaining mute’. He argues that ‘the fool is that thing that speaks the truth to power, that speaks in refusing speech, that subverts protocols of everyday, polite language’ (Critchley 1999: 231). Emphasizing Harpo’s significance, he writes: So Harpo is dumb, and yet in his muteness, in his point de réponse, a word is articulated that hits the bull’s eye – il fait mouche en faisant mot. And Lacan has a strong point here, namely that Harpo’s wide-eyed dumb grin is extremely ambiguous, particularly with regard to its sexual intent . . . Harpo’s face is a mute mot, a void that the subject cannot avoid, an abyss into which all attempts at comprehension or judgement are annihilated. Harpo stands over against the subject als Ding, his muteness blocks the subject’s attempts at judgement and comprehension. In the endlessly surrealistic play of the Marx Brothers, in the sheer calling into question of the subject who still laughs in a recognition that destroys recognition, an identification that annihilates identity, a relation to das Ding is opened. At the heart of the laughter’s complicity is hidden an ethical relation of Fremdheit that radically calls the subject into question. (Critchley 1999: 232–33) Harpo forces those in front of him to be face to face with a void and an abyss. Comic language refuses ordinary language, and comic faces reject recognition. While tragic death allows the subject to escape from matter and evil, comedy forces the subject to face the annihilation of subjectivity. Comedy connects with death and finitude, hence the significance of ‘comic death, of dying onstage, or corpsing out’ in comedy (Critchley 1999: 233). Critchley suggests that ‘the comedian traumatizes the subject’ and laughter ‘return[s] us to the place of the guilty family secret’ (1999: 234), evoking Claudius’s fratricide. As he argued, ‘it only hurts when you laugh’ (Critchley 1999: 236), pleasure and pain are inseparable, and so are the comic and tragic. If comedy and tragedy cannot and should not be easily separated from each other, how can we distinguish the two? In Hamlet, the clown curses in the face of the skull as if the jester were alive, suggesting its uncanniness. The skull represents death and mortality, yet its grinning shows an ambiguity, as if it is at the same time comic. It is a façade that rejects single interpretation and comprehension. Hamlet suggests that Yorick is ‘a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy’, which associates with the wordplay between him and the gravedigger, and how comedy links with the notion of hanging, and the deferral of language and meaning, which is the death drive. Mladen Dolar argues that the death drive is not a preoccupation with death, instead ‘It is a drive which itself cannot die. It is a pure thrust of persistence which cannot be annihilated, it can merely be destroyed from outside, a pure life in the loop of death, emerging on the verge of nothing’ (2005: 159). The word ‘fancy’, which signifies the power of imagination and deception, draws attention to the phantasmagoric quality of the skull, confronting the prince as if it is a mirror image that lures and captures him, reversing the subject and the object position (Lacan 2002: 75–81). The Dionysiac power overwhelms the prince, as Nietzsche, connecting the two together, wrote, ‘What, both in the case of Hamlet and of Dionysiac man, overbalances any

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motive leading to action, is not reflection but understanding, the apprehension of truth and its terror’ (1956: 51–52). At this point in the play, the prince is holding the skull in his hand, talking to it as if it is speaking to him. Therefore, his words are a challenge and a response to the mocking grin. In other words, he thinks that the grinning skull is talking to him, smiling to him. He sees himself in the skull and realizes that he will be the same as Yorick one day, which suggests the overwhelming power of death. The prince feels threatened because of the incomprehensibility of the skull, which is at the same time the abyss. In such a moment, he evolves from acting like the second clown to becoming Yorick, which explains why the gravedigger has started digging the grave ever since Hamlet was born: behind the grinning is the threat of death and impotence. After learning that even Alexander looks the same as the skull and smells like the corpse after death, the prince, abhors such comic/tragic moment, throws down the skull. ‘To what base uses we may return, Horatio!’ he says. Why does Hamlet’s imagination abhor Yorick’s skull? It is because of the ‘base’, or, more specifically, the materiality of life. The OED suggests that ‘baseness’ has the meaning of ‘Low birth or rank, membership of a lower social class; lowly or mean estate’. Therefore, what the prince fears is also the violation of class differences. We should notice that it is Hamlet’s ‘imagination’ that abhors the skull, as if Shakespeare is suggesting a confrontation between the Imaginary and the Real. The imagination only exists in his head now, and what is left, what remains as ash, and what the prince can get a glimpse of, is the material, which shatters any notion of subjectivity, heroism, or even any form of genre distinction. Comedy represents the revolutionary power of the material. Death is always present, and it/id flashes itself in this uncanny moment. The gravedigger’s jokes are a revolution: they turn the class domination upside down, for they signify the utmost fear of the bourgeois who believes in private property and personal subjectivity. As Eagleton writes: For revolutionaries, who live continually in the shadow of the gallows, this negative comedy is not to be underestimated. Joking with the rope around your neck is a feeble way of transcending your oppressors, but it is a sort of transcendence all the same, which someone else may always find a use for. (2009: 170) The proletarian is a comedian because he recognizes that he does not own anything ultimately. Behind the jokes and the laughter of a proletariat lurk the fear and anxiety of the bourgeois. Comedy, jokes and laughter can be the revolutionary tools of the working class as it confronts the bourgeois with death and castration, challenges and disintegrates the solemnity of those who are obsessed and possessed. The question remains is how to flash this de-capitalized and decapitating power of the material. Source: Isaac Hui (2013) ‘“To what base uses we may return, Horatio!” — Hamlet, Comedy and Class Struggle’, Comedy Studies, 4:2, 155–165.

References Aristotle (1932), The Poetics, London: Heinemann. Benjamin, Walter (1968), ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.) Illuminations (trans. Harry Zohn), New York: Schocken Books, pp. 253–64.

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—— (1994), in Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (eds), The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940 (trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Critchley, Simon (1999), ‘Comedy and finitude: Displacing the tragic-heroic paradigm in philosophy and psychoanalysis’, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought, London: Verso, pp. 217–38. Davenport, W. A. (1982), Fifteenth-century English Drama: The Early Moral Plays and their Literary Relations, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Dolar, Mladen (2005), ‘Nothing has changed’, Filozofski vestnik, XXVI:2, pp. 147–60. Eagleton, Terry (2009), Walter Benjamin, or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, London: Verso. Engels, Friedrich and Marx, Karl (2008), The Communist Manifesto, in David McLellan (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Erlich, Avi (1977), Hamlet’s Absent Father, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Frye, Roland Mushat (1984), The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hill, Christopher (1972), The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, London: Temple Smith. Jenkins, Harold (1956), ‘How many grave-diggers has “Hamlet”?’, The Modern Language Review, 51:4, pp. 562–65. Lacan, Jacques (1982), ‘Desire and the interpretation of desire in Hamlet’, in Shoshana Felman (ed.), Literature and Psychoanalysis: the Question of Reading: Otherwise, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 11–52. —— (1992), in Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII (trans. Dennis Porter), London: Routledge. —— (2002), ‘The mirror stage as formative of the I function as revealed in psychoanalytic experience’, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg), London: W. W. Norton & Company, pp. 75–81. Lester, G. A. (ed.) (1981), Three Late Medieval Morality Plays: Mankind, Everyman, Mundus et Infans, London: A & C Black. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1956), The Birth of Tragedy & The Genealogy of Morals (trans. Francis Golffing), New York: Anchor Books. Shakespeare, William (1982), Hamlet, Harold Jenkins (ed.), London: Methuen. Vernant, Jean-Pierre and Vidal-Naquet, Pierre (1988), Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (trans. Janet Lloyd), New York: Zone Books. Žižek, Slavoj (2010), Living in the End Times, London: Verso. Zupančič, Alenka (2008), The Odd One In: On Comedy, Cambridge: MIT Press.

Contributor Isaac Hui is an assistant professor in the Department of Translation in Hong Kong’s Lingnan University, teaching translation and literature. He earned his Ph.D. in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong, researching on Ben Jonson and comedy studies.

Chapter 9

No other excuse: Race, class and gender in British Music Hall comedic performance 1914–1949 (3:1) David Huxley and David James

Introduction The following article grew out of a personal interest in British Music Hall on the part of the authors. Research into primary resources, however, revealed some wider issues in relation to comedic performances concerning not only race, but also class and gender. Elements of racist comedy and class-based humour were perhaps to be expected during the period under consideration, but we also uncovered a great deal of material that strongly suggested that female comedians were much more widespread, and indeed popular than conventional wisdom might suggest. This is very much a work in progress, but it lays out the conclusions of the research so far, and is able to reveal details of music hall comedy performance that have been unknown until this date. Our research differs from others inasmuch as the Red Letter includes actual material from the acts, as well as the audience’s reaction to that material. The acts themselves are only sometimes stars at the point they are reviewed, though some (such as Robb Wilton and Will Hay) would go on to achieve stardom. Thus, these reviews provide a unique insight into what might be termed the common-or-garden entertainers of the period.

The elusive audience A magazine cutting dating from 1914, passed down through my family, is headed ‘Not a Bad Turn, Am I?’ and is a review of the music hall comedy act of my great great uncle, Alec Kendal. (Anon 1914: 148) The review, by an anonymous ‘Music Hall Commissioner’, recounts details of the act. Kendal enters the stage, waits silently for some time and then asks the audience whether they missed him coming on and announces he’ll go off and come on again. The review then continues to recount his jokes and the audience’s reaction to them. This kind of evidence is the closest we will ever have to a video recording of music hall acts in the period before the First World War. There are primitive sound recordings or even film of some of the comedic acts from the pre-First World War period, but these are almost inevitably dry recreations of their stage acts, sometimes done by performers well past their prime. The reviews are in the popular magazine Red Letter, and although it is obviously possible to quibble about their precise accuracy they provide a broad and unique snapshot of the

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most popular entertainment form of the day, just as it was being superseded by film. Theatre posters from this period advertise the ‘Biograph’, which by the turn of the century was already sharing the bill with the live acts. Red Letter itself, by 1918, has largely abandoned music hall reviews and is dominated by film, and in particular Charlie Chaplin. In 1914, though, the review of Kendal’s act ends with the note that: ‘Our Music Hall Commissioner says you must not miss his next week’s article “It’s a fair champion”. he adds’ (Anon 1914: 148) and it was this promise of further material in the magazine that led to our research into music hall reviews. There have been a number of attempts to describe and analyse music hall acts and the nature of their audience. M. Willson Disher in Winkles and Champagne ([1938] 1974) and G. J. Mellor’s The Northern Music Hall (Mellor 1970) are broad histories of the type of acts (as well as specific examples), that populated the music halls, along with the various circuits such as the Moss Empires and the Barrasford Halls. D. F. Cheshire’s Music Hall in Britain (Cheshire 1974) and British Music Hall by Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson ([1965] 1974) chart the rise and fall of the music hall as a popular entertainment. The former work has a chapter on ‘The audience and the atmosphere’, looking at the habits of the largely working-class audience of the nineteenth century through contemporary reports, while the latter offers a similar history of the halls, which makes extensive use of postcard images of performers along with a précis of their career. Kindly Leave the Stage: The Story of Variety 1919–1960 by Roger Wilmut (1985) uses transcripts of recordings to illustrate the acts it covers, which, while providing an interesting insight into some of the performers and performances, is necessarily limited. Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure (1986) edited by Peter Bailey offers a collection of essays on music hall. Dagmar Höher’s essay The Composition of Music Hall audiences 1850–1900 attempts to reconstruct music hall audiences in terms of class, gender, age and residence by examining data from music hall disasters in London and the provinces. This provides a fascinating insight into the composition of the audience, especially her argument that ‘respectable single unaccompanied women hardly ever figure in . . . the early music hall historiography – despite the fact that they formed, as I shall show, a considerable part of many a music hall audience’ (Höher 1986: 74–75). Naturally, however, there is nothing here about the reactions of those audiences to the acts they had paid to see.

Class The phrase, ‘It’s a fair champion’ in itself perhaps suggests that Red Letter was a Northern working-class magazine, though in fact the vast majority of the reviews, where a location is mentioned, are in London, despite its publishers being DC Thompson of Dundee. My own interest in Music Hall performers was kindled when I acquired the diary of Fred Hill, a vent act. The diary lists all the engagements, payments, digs, communications (and indeed his marriage) as he travelled the country in 1911. My further research into Hill has shown how difficult it is to research more minor entertainers from this period. (D. J.) We feel that as we publish further material in this area, hopefully reprinting full accounts of various acts, it will enable other researchers to investigate an incredibly rich vein of material about the most popular entertainment form of the day. In the articles we found, there are also a number of star artistes who share their ‘rags to riches’ stories with the readers, as distinct from the reviews of the acts mentioned above. There seem to be two basic variations on a theme; the struggles the artist had in early life before they got into show business, or the struggles they had in their early days in the

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business. In addition, there is also a series on reminiscences by Chirgwin the White Eyed Kaffir – a famous musical comedy act around the turn of the century – such as ‘how I got my white eye’, told over a number of weeks in 1916. However, rather than a series of articles written specially by Chirgwn for the Red Letter, they turn out to be a serialization of his autobiography Chirgwin’s Chirrup, which had originally been published four years earlier in 1912. It is difficult therefore to state with any certainty whether any of the other articles are unique to the Red Letter or whether they are recycled from other sources. However, the sheer number of these stories would suggest that at least some of them must have been specially commissioned for the magazine. Of the 116 articles we uncovered that could be related to the music hall, 44 of them – about 38 per cent – were rags to riches stories. Perhaps the best example of the archetypal hard childhood in the material we uncovered was that of George Formby snr. The article, entitled ‘My life when singing for Coppers: George Formby tells how he rose from street Arab to star comedian’ begins ‘Mine is not an isolated story of the stage. Which of the ‘bhoys’ I wonder, can say they never knew days of privation and distress? But of them all, which of them, I wonder, can tell a more pathetic story than I?’ (Formby 1911: 210). Indeed, it seems that so legendarily poor was Formby that the comic singer Whit Cunliffe in the same series (who like Formby was from Ashton-under-Lyne) remarks that Lancashire has sent many of her sons to the theatrical profession, but I think none has had a harder struggle to ‘get there’ than has George Formby. He has risen from street arab to star comedian, and although I cannot relate hardships such as his, I have had a stiff fight to get to the top flight. (Cunliffe 1911: 322) The fact that Cunliffe uses the exact words (street Arab) used in the title of the article on Formby suggests that either he was an avid reader of Red Letter, or, more likely, that the hand of a sub-editor was at work. It also demonstrates the unthinking racism of the period, an issue explored in greater detail below. Formby tells of his childhood as a newspaper boy and goes on to comment that ‘oftener than not, I was in a state of bankruptcy, but, hard up as I was at times and hungry as a growing lad can be, I feel glad today that I never descended to pilfering of even the pettiest description’. Here then is the ‘deserving poor’ trope that is often found in Victorian society. As Grey notes in his introduction to Henry Mayhew’s Those That Will Not Work, the fourth volume of London Labour and The London Poor (1862), The Victorians, both as a matter of law and social attitude, separated the poor into wo classes, the “deserving” and “undeserving.” The deserving poor include anyone thrown out of work or into financial straights by events beyond his or her control elimination of a job, illness or old age, etc. The undeserving poor were made up of that class of people who declined to work, and made a perceived effort to live off the county dole or by conning honest folk, or who were ill or disabled due to their own folly – such as by being a drunkard, or catching a social disease. Such people were not entitled to pity, or really much consideration at all. (Grey 1862)

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Clearly, the reader is meant to both sympathize with the young Formby’s poverty and applaud his subsequent rise to fame and fortune. Formby is at pains to point out that this is a subject I never say much about. It is not that I am ashamed of what I was, I believe I am the better of it all to-day, but because it looks so much like asking for a round of applause for it . . . However since you press me, I will tell you the story of my early life. (Formby 1911: 322) There is clearly an aspirational and inspirational element to Formby’s story: even with beginnings that were only one step away from the Poor House, success can be achieved with talent and hard work. Also, with an assumed working-class audience for this magazine, these stories clearly mark out the entertainers as one of ‘us’ rather than one of ‘them’. The idea that he is ‘the better of it all today’ suggests that Formby is proud of his roots, but moreover that his struggle from poverty has improved him in some way. There seems to be an implicit assumption or recognition that the struggle to ‘raise oneself up by the bootstraps’ is to be applauded just as much (if not more) than actually achieving stardom. Despite his protestations that he does not actually want to court sympathy from the readers, he ‘reluctantly’ agrees to relate his early struggles, thus giving the impression of confiding in the reader rather than simply appealing to sentiment. In fact, in a neat sleight of hand, he manages to do both. In the other strand of these stories, the ones that relate the early struggles in the careers of stars, we get titles such as ‘How I was kicked off the Stage’ by George Robey ‘How I sang for a shilling a week’ by Little Titch and ‘When I sang to an audience of One’ by Marie Lloyd. The message is clear: even the greatest stars of the music hall, entertainers that were earning fabulous amounts of money, started out as poor and struggling artists. By around 1910, top acts such as Wilkie Bard or the aforementioned Marie Lloyd or Chirgwin could command weekly salaries into three figures. By way of contrast, our research has shown that in 1911 Fred Hill earned £172 13/- gross (£138 10/6 after expenses), which equates to about £2 14/- a week or an average of about 14/- a show. While this was by no means a king’s ransom, it is at the low end of comfortable income – about the same as a Sergeant in the Metropolitan Police. Another way to consider these articles in terms of class is to look at the language and tone of the articles themselves. A review of the revue(!) ‘Hullo Tango’ begins with a supposed conversation between two audience members. ‘But what’s this Tango all abaht? . . . Dunno, never saw’er any. It’s a young pantomime only better’ (Anon 1914c: 52). Similarly, in a ‘conversation’ with a new office boy, our Music Hall Commissioner tells the boy he is sick of him whistling rag-time tunes. ‘Strike me guv’nor . . . that’s not rag-time. It’s a waltz . . . Me and my pal, Bill, had threepence worth of the gallery at the Empire. Bill’s cracked on the cove that whistles that waltz – Albert Whelan. He’s the goods!’ (Anon 1913c: 41). These exchanges are clearly an attempt to transcribe or approximate the demotic London accent and vocabulary, and there is an obvious presumption by the writer that the audience for both the ‘turns’ and the magazine itself are working class. Interestingly, the writer places himself above (or at least separate from) this working class audience by his own reported speech. In an article entitled ‘Walter gets a surprise’, we have this exchange with the (same?) office boy.

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‘They’ve retired sir’ he blurted out. ‘Oh?’ I said, quite interested, ‘Who and what?’ ‘The “Appy Dustmen”’ ‘What’s that got to do with me? We can get someone else’ ‘No, not the real dustmen, I mean the “Appy Dustmen” on the ‘alls. They’ve retired. That’s the name of the show now, “The retired Dustmen”’ ‘You refer to Egbert Bros.?’ ‘That’s it sir. You ought to see them. Me and my pals saw them last night. My pal nearly had a fit laughing’. (Anon 1911: 184) There are, it hardly needs pointing out, no dropped aitches by our Music Hall Commissioner, and although he (presumably the Commissioner is male) never adopts a patronizing or condescending tone (at least in terms of class) the ‘demeanour’ of his writing indicates an educated, middle-class observer – and enthusiast – of the music hall.

Gender Our consideration of gender, in particular the role of the female comedian, is at this stage tentative, and requires much more research. The gender issue in British Music Hall certainly seems to be more complex than the issue of class. Of 80 reviews of music hall acts we have identified between 1899 and 1920 in the magazine, only two feature solo female comedians, while a further seven feature named female/male double acts. Yet posters that survive from the Argyle Theatre in Birkenhead from this period regularly have at least two female comedians on the bill. Whether this discrepancy is due to a policy by the magazine is not clear. As a working-class magazine published by D. C. Thompson in Dundee, it may have had an official or even unthinking policy that led them to neglect female acts. The majority of the magazine is taken up with romantic stories, often featuring doughty mill girls, popular news items, accounts of crime and sporting columns, centred on football and cricket. Nevertheless, where there are accounts of acts such as Anna Dorothy, ‘The I Don’t Care Girl’, it is clear that she does not fit into obvious early twentieth-century constructions of the ‘feminine’. Her act consisted of dressing up in a baggy, oversize policewoman’s uniform, which gave her license to comment on not only the nature of male and female dress, but also the battle of the sexes in general. Cross-dressing, whereby female performers dress as male, either as singers or comediennes, is much more prevalent than male performers who dress as females. Indeed, in the period we covered there were only two examples of what would now be considered a ‘drag act’ – interestingly a German performer called Max Waldon, and Albert Letine who as part of his act impersonated Gaby Deslys, the dancer and chanteuse, then famous for her ‘Gaby Glide’. Other female comedians also played with notions of power. In the revue And Very Nice Too in 1914, Lillian Major appeared in a sketch set in 1925 where, as chief of police, she has to deal with a male agitator who is demanding strikes against the domination of men by women (Anon 1914a: 16). Her husband is then shown as begging her for new clothes as he follows her, pushing their pram. Of course the likelihood is that this was an anti-suffragette sketch, showing the ‘dangers’ inherent in giving women the vote. Indeed, a similar scenario was still being used in the Two Ronnies’ serial-within-a-show The Worm that Turned as a

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reaction to ‘womens’ lib’ in 1980. Yet ironically, in 1913, this look into the future was set close to the year when women received the vote on equal terms with men – 1928. The posters we have found seem to indicate that contrary to received wisdom female comics were widespread and popular before the First World War. For example, the Argyle Theatre poster for 12 August 1912 has George Formby Senior as top of the bill with two other male comedians, Alec Kendal himself and Frank Armstrong, but there are also two female comedic acts: Maidie Scott, ‘Just a Comedienne’ and Ida Barr, ‘Vocal Comedienne’. It is difficult to be sure of the nature of the other female act on the bill, although it raises the issue of racism, which will be dealt with in much more detail below: ‘Kail Stern; The Columbo Coon in a novel and refined scena; She’s a White Girl’. Evidence from the reviews we have found, however, does show that ‘The Three Prestons’ were a comedy act with two male and one female performer. The Music Hall Commissioner notes in passing (in an article about an act intriguingly titled ‘Fregolia, the Lady Hustler’) that ‘though the comedian and the comedienne are as popular as ever with music hall patrons, the day is long past when they were the only turns worth seeing or hearing’ (Anon 1913b: 322). The implication seems to be that comediennes were not uncommon. Clearly, further research is required both into posters and music hall accounts to establish the situation here. However, the conflicting evidence does hint at the tantalizing possibility that the truism that ‘women aren’t funny’ was an invention of a later age, and was simply not part of ‘received wisdom’ before the First World War.

Race If gender is a complex issue, race is, unfortunately, much more straightforward. The British Music Hall was endemically racist at this time. In discussing this area, it is also impossible to avoid using words to describe black people that are now, and have been for some time, totally unacceptable. Yet obviously these issues need to be addressed without censorship in order to properly analyse the nature of performance during the period under consideration. It in no way excuses the racism in Britain at this time, but it is also worth considering that in the early part of the twentieth century the vast majority of the population would have had little or no direct contact with black nationals, particularly those from America. Many white music hall acts, such as George Elliot, ‘The Chocolate Coloured Coon’, played in blackface. Elliot and other acts who mainly performed in blackface seem to claim that their offensive racist portrayals were based in some kind of specialized knowledge of actual black American culture. In one of the autobiographical articles in the magazine, Elliot explains, A lot of people are under the impression that I am a coloured man by nature, but I can assure them that is not the case, As a matter of fact, my parents are from Birmingham, and it was from that centre that I was taken over to America at quite an early age. (Elliot 1912: 126) After explaining his invention of his own blackface make-up, Elliot continues: There I lived for a number of years amongst the Coons. I mixed with them, played with them, and studied their manners and customs both in the cotton fields and at home. To the original coons I am indebted for my representations on stage. (Elliot 1912)

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The fact that the word ‘coon’ appeared in both this article and Elliot’s bill-matter itself demonstrates that the term was in widespread use, as was the even more pejorative appellation of ‘nigger’. It is difficult to tell whether the former word may have been seen as less offensive, but to a large extent the terms seem to have been interchangeable. It is certainly the case that either word was meant to alert the audience to the fact that the blackface character would be some kind of simpleton. This is made clear in the book Practical Venriloquism and Its Sister Arts: A Revelation in Vocal Phonetics by Robert Ganthony (1903). In a section describing various kinds of character dolls, Ganthony explains: . . . niggers have a variety of accomplishments, some dance, some can smoke (if this be an accomplishment!) some play the Banjo, but the principal use of the nigger is to utter an idiotic laugh whenever an interruption is wanted, an awkward pause takes place, or the proceeding generally wants some little enlivenment. (Ganthony 1903: 122) The level of racism in many texts of this period makes the debates about Johnny Speight’s mocking of Alf Garnett’s racist attitudes in Till Death Do Us Part in the 1970s seem a minor footnote in the role of racism in comedy. Black performers were also put in a position where they felt obliged to make fun of their own dark skin. Black American comedian Harry Brown, in the revue Full Inside, is asked, ‘What are you?’, and replies, ‘An unbleached American’ (Anon 1914b: 66). Brown goes on to play a waiter called ‘Cocoa’ and his act is littered with jokes about his skin colour. This racism is not confined to black performers. The ‘Music Hall Commissioner’ reveals his own racist views when describing a double act, Gilday and Fox. He comments: Of this couple it cannot be said, as it can of many Hebrew comedians, that they are “aggressive”. They possess talent, and talent does not require to be aggressively displayed. (Anon 1913a: 333) The review of their act is generally favourable, but it never fully loses a condescending tone. This kind of unthinking racism continued throughout the twentieth century, and although it may have increasingly waned many would argue that, to one extent or another, it still exists. Another of my relatives, my grandfather, Will Morris, was a semi-professional entertainer for most of the first half of the twentieth century. He had a magic act, wrote and performed monologues, and was a ventriloquist. (D. H.) A review in The Griffin, Journal of the North Wales Magic Circle (1949) describes his ventriloquist act: Mr Morris’ vent figure then entertained us while he stood by with a disinterested look (‘Look intelligent, I’m supposed to be the dummy, not you’ was one of the dummy’s remarks). When the ‘doll’ proposed to blacken his face to suit his singing of a coon song, we all had a great surprise as the transformation took place, by a

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most ingenious method, in no more than two seconds! The ‘black man’ then proceeded to sing his songs to an accompaniment ably provided by Arthur Williams, a visitor. Mr. Morris received loud applause at the conclusion of his original and humorous act. (Lawrence 1949: 4–5) The doll has two half-faces facing in opposite directions and the transformation is achieved by spinning the head whilst flicking a lever, which makes a beret pivot to cover one of the faces. However much one might disapprove of the nature of the doll, it is a simple yet elegant mechanical device. The endemic racism of the music hall ha clearly not disappeared by this period, and indeed widespread racism in figures like ‘Little Black Sambo’ in The Beano comic continued well into the 1950s and beyond. I saw my grandfather perform many times, with an elf figure, ‘Johnny Oak-Apple’, and a talking Toby Jug, whose big finish was having a teddy bear appear from his head whilst raising a straw boater hat. I don’t believe that he was a racist. Living in Chester until his death in 1964, I am fairly sure that he hardly ever actually met a black person in the flesh. His earlier use of the blackface doll was based on the ‘received wisdom’ he found in popular culture. But I never saw him use the black face doll, so at some point, probably in the 1950s, he must have decided that it was inappropriate. (D. H.) In this, he was some years ahead of the British Broadcasting Corporation, who, incredibly, did not cancel the black-face Black and White Minstrel Show until 1978.

Further research We are currently conducting further research into popular magazines and archives of the period. In doing this, we hope to be able to establish more about the nature and number of female comedians before the First World War, and discover whether there were any exceptions to the endemic racism of the period. It is certainly the case that by the 1930s there were examples in British popular culture that made an appeal for greater tolerance. In the 1934 Will Hay film Radio Parade of 1935, for example, the black American singer Alberta Hurst sang ‘Black Shadows’, a plea for racial tolerance. Whether this more enlightened attitude found any earlier expression in the music hall is something that we hope our further research will reveal. Similarly, it will be interesting to see how class is represented both in the acts themselves, and in the reporting of those acts across the various periodicals under investigation. Perhaps the most significant area to be examined, however, is the tantalizing evidence of a wide range of female comedians, the nature of their material and the esteem in which they were held. Marie Lloyd is the most famous (and possibly the only widely known) of these comediennes, but our research already indicates that she was just the most successful of a plethora of ebullient, often risqué female acts that prove the dictum, ‘Women aren’t funny’ was actually invented sometime in the period we are investigating. It is certainly not a widely held view in the Edwardian era, and we hope that our further research will cast light on a key period in the history of female comediennes. Source: David Huxley and David James (2012) ‘No other excuse: Race, class and gender in British Music Hall comedic performance 1914–1949’, Comedy Studies, 3:1, 17–28.

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References Anon (‘The Music Hall Commissioner’) (1911), ‘Walter gets a surprise’, Red Letter, 13: 20, p. 184. —— (1913a), ‘Comedian who fought a government’, Red Letter, 20 December, p. 333. —— (1913b), ‘Fregolia the Lady Hustler’, Red Letter, p. 322. —— (1913c), ‘From the goldfields to the stage’, Red Letter, 12 April, p. 41. —— (1914a), ‘And very nice too’, Red Letter, 13 January, p. 16. —— (1914b), ‘Every bit of love I had for you is gone’, Red Letter, 16: 29, p. 66. —— (1914c), ‘Hullo Tango’, Red Letter, 16: 14, p. 52. —— (1914d), ‘Not a bad turn, am I?’, Red Letter, p. 148. Cheshire, D. F. (1974), Music Hall in Britain, Newton Abbot: David and Charles. Cunliffe, W. (1911), ‘My climb to the top of the Bill’, Red Letter, 23 December, p. 322. Bailey, P. (ed.) (1986), Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, Open University Press. Disher, M. W. ([1938] 1974), Winkles and Champagne, Cedric Chivers Ltd. Portway, England. Elliot, G. (1912), ‘When I was driven out of New York’, Red Letter, 3 August, p. 126. Formby, G. (1911), ‘My life when singing for Coppers’, Red Letter, 25 November, p. 210. Ganthony, R. (1903), Practical Venriloquism and Its Sister Arts: A Revelation in Vocal Phonetics, London: L. Upcott Gill. Grey, Roger H. (1862), in Henry Mayhew (ed.), London Labour and The London Poor vol. 4, London, http://eudocs.lib.byu.edu/index.php/%22Beggars_%26_Cheats%22_-_A_Victorian_Guide_ to_Those_That_Will_Not_Work (accessed 19/01/12) Höher, D. (1986) ‘The composition of music hall audiences 1850–1900’, in P. Bailey (ed.), Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, Open University Press. New York. Lawrence, W. (1949), ‘The open meeting’, The Griffin: Journal of the North Wales Magic Circle, 5: 7, May, p. 4–5. Mander, R. & Mitchenson, J. ([1965] 1974), British Music Hall, London: Gentry Books. Mellor, G. J. (1970) The Northern Music Hall, Newcastle upon Tyne and Middlesborough: Hindson Reid Jordison. Wilmut, R. (1985), Kindly Leave the Stage: The Story of Variety 1919–1960, London: Methuen.

Contributors David Huxley is a retired specialist on the graphic novel, comic book and comic strip, censorship, Hollywood film and animation. His Ph.D. thesis was ‘The growth and development of British alternative graphic magazines 1966–1986’. His research interests include the graphic novel and the comic strip, animation and horror film and early twentieth-century British Music Hall performers. David James is a Senior Lecturer on the BA (Hons) Film and Media degree at the Manchester School of Art. His research interests centre around British comedy and light entertainment including sitcoms of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. His current research is on Music Hall and Variety performers and audiences with a particular emphasis on representations of class, race and gender. He is also interested in the portrayal of class in British wartime films and British war films of the 1950s.

Chapter 10

‘Women Like Us?’ (3:2) Gilli Bush-Bailey

The shock of the (not so) new On Monday, 20 February 2012, the BBC broadcast the first of a new six-part series by female comedy duo Watson and Oliver. Lorna Watson and Ingrid Oliver have been regulars on the Edinburgh fringe and comedy circuits but were newcomers to BBC television, and early reviews are generally sceptical about press claims that they are poised to take up the baton from British television favourites French and Saunders or from the more recent and current small-screen favourite Miranda Hart. The Guardian review on 29 February, 2012, ‘Watson & Oliver: let’s give them a chance’, shrugs off the French and Saunders comparison, acknowledging instead the new comic duos’ debt to the enduring popularity of male comic duo, Morecombe and Wise, but there are also traces in this latest sketch work of Victoria Wood, a comic ‘national treasure’ who has already been erased from lists of recent comic comparisons by some television reviewers. By the time this article goes to press, Watson and Oliver’s first televised series will be over. Perhaps they will already have sunk without trace, or will their ‘really nice’ school girls be as familiar to us as Catherine Tate’s ‘Lauren’, or their hapless museum volunteer ‘Susan’ garner as many YouTube hits as Julie Walter’s ‘Mrs Overall’ or Tate’s ‘Nan’? In The Independent, Tom Sutcliffe complains that while watching Watson and Oliver, ‘I just find myself thinking how old-fashioned the format is’ (6 March, 2012) but it is precisely because they have unashamedly mined such a deep seam of comic sketch work that Lorna Watson and Ingrid Oliver might well gain a place alongside the many remembered (and forgotten) women whose comic work has established women as creators and critics of female representations in British culture. It is by asserting first that there is a real and valuable repertoire of women’s comic work, in creation, performance and reception that I then want to move to a specific exploration of the depiction of three metropolitan female characters that were performed at quite different historical moments and yet share characteristics that we recognize today. This is not merely to prove the deep historical roots of women in comedy, although the inequality of representation in the histories of comedy and in the current stand-up scene still needs to be recognized. Most important is to look at how women’s comedy work has contributed to the construction, disruption and containment of women in and through the laughter of other women; women like us. This article deliberately invokes the contentious and somewhat slippery notion of ‘us’ to draw attention to a binary opposite, the implied ‘them’. Women as subjects of comedy, makers of comedy and comedy audiences are agents in contemporary female representations that inform constructs of ‘our’ female identity, whether to reinforce or disturb the

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hegemonic ‘we’, even if and when we work to oppose it. As Andy Medhurst argues when discussing his own subject position in A National Joke: Popular comedy and English Cultural Identities: far too much writing about comedy sets itself the stern, intrusive, pseudo-objective task of studying what Other People laugh at and why Other People laugh. This has the damaging consequence of letting the critic’s own sense of humour off the hook, and that lack of self-reflexivity both prevents a full exploration of comedy’s political complexities and contradictions and risks turning the analysis of funny things into a sermon about what it is correct and incorrect to find funny. (2007: 8) This article seeks to avoid the distantiating ‘them’ implied in a critical approach to other people’s work in the past or present. Instead, it stands close to work made by and about ‘us’. As a female academic and theatre historian, my own comic taste is revealed through the criticism of sketches I have selected for consideration. As a female member of an audience, I have experienced the affective phenomenon that is the shared laughter of recognition, generated on at least two occasions within a wholly female audience, and, as a performer (although not of stand-up), I have also experienced the visceral pleasure and sheer energy created by generating that laughter. So what is it that we see of ourselves, for ourselves and about each other in the characters, and what might we make of the contradictions and complexities of the politics we find at work there?

The shock of the old There is such a premium on claiming originality, innovation and marked changes that theatre historians are ill-disposed to acknowledge derivation, consistency, or comparability. Exactly those qualities are often negatively inflected. Consequently, originality is privileged over borrowing, and uniqueness over likeness. (Davis, 2012: 13) Tracy Davis’ introduction to an anthology of nineteenth-century plays usefully opens up the seams of women’s comic work. Rather than claim originality for the comic sketches considered here, I want to establish and argue for their recognition in the cultural economy of comedy through their comparability. Davis’ argument for the importance of understanding the repertoire, that is, ‘the day-to-day competencies of performers and audiences to make and understand theatre, drawing upon their familiarity with aesthetic conventions, contemporary politics, and cultural preoccupations’ (Davis, 2012: 13), can be extended and applied to the making and understanding of comic sketches. It will be interesting to see if the satirical bite of Watson and Oliver’s playboy bunnies ‘Candy and April’ can be sustained beyond the girls ‘gagging’ as they bicker about whose turn it is to service the ancient Hugh Hefner, depicted through an off stage voice and a portrait of a repellently ‘gurning’ old man. But it will be more interesting still to see how they further develop the other kinds of working women they represent in their 30-minute sketch shows. Alongside the office receptionists with absurdly long designer nails and the competitive secretaries fighting it out over paperclips, Watson and Oliver also mine the comedy to be found in the past. Set in the carefree days of the post-war seaside resort, a

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vintage film clip of 1950’s buses, and families playing on the beach, dissolves to reveal the embittered and morally suspicious landlady of the sea-front boarding house. With hair rollers visible beneath her tight headscarf and her floral housecoat covered by a cable-knit cardigan, the landlady is first discovered in the ubiquitous green-painted kitchen belonging to her friend, Ruby, who is similarly dressed and sits at her kitchen table surrounded by tea towels draped over a 1950’s airing rack. While the landlady spills her tale of a deserting husband, in between puffs on a cigarette, Ruby reacts by drawing ever more absurd responses on her forehead with the eyebrow pencil. The very physical, almost slapstick comedy gives way to a more conventional monologue in the second episode. Cigarette still in hand, the landlady delivers a tirade of moral rectitude to an unseen honeymooning couple, insisting on documentary evidence of their marriage – and a letter of confirmation from their MP – asserting that there will no ‘unlawful conjugals’ in her house. These sketches owe much to the comic patterns of dialogue established by Victoria Wood, but shift their focus to women in the south of England rather than Wood’s more usual geographical territory of the Midlands and the North. The 1950s setting also follows in the wake of the current trend for romanticized recreations of post-war England in televised drama. Miranda Hart, for example, is called upon to deploy the comic persona she created in her BBC situation comedy Miranda (BBC, 2009) as part of Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012). Set in the East End of London, Call the Midwife sees Miranda Hart providing a post-war predecessor to the physically awkward woman in search of love she established in Miranda. ‘Chummy’, or Camilla Cholomondely-Browne, is a lovelorn ‘posh’ debutante who pursues an agonizingly awkward romance that eventually leads to happiness in the final episode when she marries the local bobby. Connections between Miranda Hart and Joyce Grenfell, not least in the many characters Grenfell created in British films of the 1950s, draw attention to the metatheatrical and intertheatrical references of the current repertoire, which is also part of a much longer repertoire of comic representation of working women. Grenfell’s on-screen trials as the gawky police-woman or hapless school mistress in the series of St Trinians films can be easily read across to the contemporary agonies experienced by Miranda Hart as she too negotiates a series of romantic and social challenges in Miranda. It is worth noting here that Grenfell wrote and performed her own solo performance material and that both Victoria Wood and Miranda Hart acknowledge her influence, placing Grenfell at the top of their list of comedy heroes.

A question of class This article has avoided the direct use of ‘class’ in thinking about the comic representations of working women, but in the three sketches I will now discuss - Catherine Tate’s ‘Nan’ (2004), Mabel Constanduros’ ‘Emily’ (1927) and Fanny Kelly’s ‘Sally Simkin’ (1832) – it is hard to avoid discussing the intended depiction of working-class women, even though one might choose to discard the vexed label of ‘cockney’ for the three characters created and performed some 180 years apart. Readers of Patrick Joyce et. al. in will have heeded the warnings about modern understandings of class being ‘mistakenly [. . .] imaged back upon the past, so distorting it’, but Joyce also acknowledges the ‘enormous influences’ of the views and discourses of class, arguing that ‘[o]nce they are themselves revealed to be in fact part of a long history of class discourse, and not an objective report on the past, it may at last be possible to move beyond them to new understandings’

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(1995:15-16). Andy Medhurst’s exploration of comedy and comic traditions in also deals with questions of class, usefully extending them to include discourses of gender and sexuality. In his chapter on the hugely successful television series The Royle Family (BBC, 1998-2000), Medhurst notes that ‘[c]lass is a recurring social and cultural theme throughout the history of English (and British) situation comedy’ (2007:145), but he also speaks of The Royle Family as ‘getting behind sociological generalities [. . ..] confidently work[ing] with such levels of detail because it is committed to depth, not breadth’ (2007: 146-47). With twenty episodes across which to explore this depth, The Royle Family, and many other situation comedies, can enjoy the luxury of specificity and nuance but where does this leave the sketch, or even the series of sketches? Can the ‘tight social focus, what might be called a demographic of deep narrowness’ (2007: 147), also be seen at work in the sketches of Nan, Emily and Sally Simkin?

Nan, Emily and Sally Simkin In moving on to examine these sketches, I will resist the notion of a linear, teleological development in women’s comic work, ascending from Sally Simkin, through Emily to Nan, or descending in a reverse historical order, doing history backwards, but will rather present my discussion of the three sketches via the notion of a palimpsest. That is, to consider these sketches as overlaying each other with their historical difference and dissonance revealed through equally permeable layers of consistency and comparability. I hope in this way to mark their differences but also to acknowledge their relatedness, not least in the central use of the female character voicing a perspective that is focussed on female experience and is, at times, surprising in its candour. Nan’s use of language and her damning condemnation of those around her might be seen as being inappropriate, in much the same way as Emily’s candid prognosis for the inevitable demise of the ailing young mother she seeks to cheer up by a visit to the sickbed. Such expected ‘unexpectedness’ in women’s comedy work seeps through a palimpsestic model in ways that are richer in their testimony to consistency than a conventionally linear progression suggests. The accusation of repetition or fixedness that has often been attached to women’s work might then be replaced by a consideration through incremental strategies, ‘a different composition’ (Bennett, 2003: 73). Kelly’s ‘Sally Simkin’, has much to say about her experience of the absent male, and in all three sketches, comic mileage is created by men being seen as a disappointment, even when they are physically present. The more striking effect of palimpsestic layers is the haunting dimension of longing for ‘something better’ that underpins all three sketches, a ‘likeness’ that defies historical specificity in its ghosting presence. Emily makes her appearance in a monologue sketch written and performed by Mabel Constanduros in 1927. Written in ‘cockney’ dialect and entitled ‘Cheering up Maria’,1 she is identified as being ‘a hearty, red-faced, cheerful creature’ (Gale and Bush-Bailey 2012: 638) who on entering the room of her unseen and unheard interlocutor, is unable to restrain her horror at the state of the bedbound invalid: ‘Oh, Maria, you do look bad, and no mistake! What ’ave you been doin’ ter get yerself down ser low? [. . ..] I only seen one person ’oo looked as bad as you, and that was me brother’s wife’s aunt be marriage, and she was gorn in twenty-four howers!’ (638). The almost gleeful recounting of conversations within the tight social and family network, established through a series of observations about weddings being followed by funerals, quickly turns to further dismay as she

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turns her attention to Maria’s baby. Admiration for Maria’s ‘beautiful boy’ irresistibly gives way to tales of dying babies, and her incredulity at the rapid decline of her brother’s child at the same age who ‘simply pined away. Nothink did it no good’ (638), not even the pork chop, or ‘noosepaper packet o’ s’rimps’, although ‘a drop o’ beer out o’ my brother’s glass dinner time’ did cheer the baby up, but to no avail: ‘wisted right away to a shadder, it did’ (639). It is with genuine surprise that she conveys the news that the doctor suggested the baby was starved: ‘it wasn’t even as if they’d give it nothink but milk, like some people’ (639). Momentarily distracted by the tale of her sister’s fatal ‘hinward canker’, she then returns to Maria’s baby who she is now sure has ‘’oopin’-corf‘and announces ‘eight monce is a very critercal age, so I’m told’ (639), before switching to a discussion of Maria’s husband who is serving overseas in China: ’E’ll be alright. Why should the Chinese bash ’im about? ’E never done them no ’arm, I lay. Never ’ad the sperit to lay a finger on you, did ’e, let alone a Chinese? Though when you come to think about it ’e’s just the sort that comes to ’arm. Them good steady ones always gits taken, don’t they? (639–40) Finishing up with a tale about her ‘’Enry’ who only joined the army for the rum ration ‘I was frightened to death ’e wouldn’t enlist’ (640) - and evidently less than pleased that he had returned home – ‘as I knoo ’e would, with a wound in ‘is ’and, so’s ’e can’t do no more work, and a appetite like a ’ostridge’ (640), – she leaves with the cheery sense that she is always one to ’ave a good laugh, and see the funny side’ (640). Constanduros’ sketch reveals the fear of cancer and infant mortality beneath a thin veneer of comedy in the everyday realities of feeding a family, work-shy husbands and even domestic violence. At a time when women faced uncertain economic futures in the aftermath of the first world war, with ongoing foreign conflicts and lack of employment adding to the turmoil of the inter-war years, the sense that ‘it’s always the good ones that goes’ (640), echoes the wave of female disappointment that is evident in the sketch focussing on Kelly’s character ‘Sally Simkin’, created and performed nearly a 100 years earlier. Sally is a maid-of-all-work, a typical occupation for many women whose economic survival depended upon a place as a domestic worker in service to a family or household. Fanny Kelly was herself among the less usual working women of her times as she was unmarried and, for many years, enjoyed economic independence through her work as a popular actress on the London stage.2 She used ‘Sally’ as a recurring character in her onewoman show, Dramatic Recollections, a series of stand-up monologues and comic sketches. Sally is presented as always hungry, always melancholy and always painfully conscious of the absence of her sailor beau, John Jones about whom, as Kelly confides, ‘there was some sad mystery of a shark’ (Bush-Bailey 2011:142). In the first sketch, Kelly introduces Sally by way of a short duologue, in which she plays both herself as the helpless auditor and Sally. The scene is set on the eve of departure from London to a ‘Country Engagement’ (143). Sally is comforting herself with a large piece of plum pudding, ‘about the size of a band box’ (143). Her complaint is not about the pain of parting from loved ones, but the pain of having no one to part from: Lawk Miss! – I can’t help hardly half crying – at going away some where – and bidding good bye to nobody – Ah! When I kept company, the quitting was something

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like – but Jones is at Sea where the sharks are and with a roving heart – Heigho – I a’n’t happy. (143–44) She goes on to complain that the unmarried Kelly cannot possibly understand as ‘you don’t keep company – You’ve no Jones away [. . ..] Nobody but they as kept company knows what it is to part’ (144). As Kelly remonstrates with her, Sally continues to be bemoan her lot still further, having only a lock of hair kept in her precious nutmeg grater to remind her of her love: He sent it me when he thought he was dying of a Fever and as he knows I like Dark hair, he cut it with his own hand off the Boatswain’s head – whose hair was darker than his own – Lawk Miss! Its enough to perish one on this lonesome night to be going away from Nobody. (144) Kelly refers to Sally Simkin as ‘my plague’ and the comedy of this sketch depends as much upon her reactions to her impossible maid as Sally’s outpourings about the restrictions of her single state. Catherine Tate’s ‘Nan’ also relies on a long-suffering auditor to take the full brunt of her invective.3 Tate’s ‘Nan’ is an overt disruption to the notion of the sweet old ‘cockney’ granny. She provides comic delight in her shockingly unrestrained swearing and politically incorrect criticism, usually involving an offensive assessment of everyone and everything around her. Tate increases the comic effect by providing a foil, a ‘stooge’ for Nan, in the form of her well-meaning grandson, Jamie, whose regular visits prompt the now familiar outbursts. It all starts well with Nan’s catchphrases including a sense of surprised welcome at the arrival of her grandson: ‘’ere ’e is! You come up and see me? Come up and see me ain’t ya? I noticed that!’ or, ‘is that you darlin’? Oh you’re a good boy’. Each sketch then follows one of several routes that all end in the now expected explosion of invective as Nan moves with effortless duplicity to accept, question and, ultimately, condemn whatever Jamie has attempted to bring for her ‘a load of old shit!’ The inevitable failure of attempts to convey in textual terms alone how and why a sketch is funny works to demonstrate the essential and vital act of performance for which such work is intended. However, there is sufficient in the extracts above to see something of the content and the value in pursuing the notion of ‘consistency’ and ‘comparability’ in the working of these women and their comic creations. The physical appearance of each character fits comfortably familiar, or typical models. Nan’s wayward, thinning hair frames her fixed expressions and overworked jaw; her slippers and wrinkled stockings speak of the lone older woman confined to the limits of the room in which we see her. Emily’s ‘hearty red-face’ also conveys something of the ‘jolly’ London type, contradicted and yet reinforced by her forecasts of doom. Kelly introduces Sally Simkin as ‘ugly to a merit – yet she hung gaudy ribbands and cluster’d cheap lace contentedly around those perverse inane plain features with as much daily care as if she was ornamenting Beauty itself’ (Bush-Bailey 2011: 142). We laugh at ‘them’ because we are ‘us’, not them. This is most clear in the case of the contemporary Nan. Complaints to the BBC from a small section of viewers about Nan’s excessive swearing suggest a younger demographic as the target audience for The Catherine Tate show (BBC, 2004–2009). Andy Medhurst rightly

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interrogates assumptions about audiences in the previously mentioned chapter on The Royle Family when he quotes London listing magazine Time Out commenting on the ‘Beeb’s gamble’ in screening the show on BBC1: ‘will the wider viewing public get the joke? (2007: 157). As Medhurst translates, the real question is ‘will the thickies get it?’ Medhurst resists the conclusion that the success of the The Royle Family ‘is nothing more than a freak show of underclass inadequacies’ (157) providing a self-satisfied audience with a glimpse of the ‘uneventful lives’ represented on-screen, and wonders whether ‘they’ can really fail to see the ‘tenderness, affection and raw emotion’ that runs through and across the relationships between the characters. The hegemonic work of recognising the apparent futility of Jim Royle’s life, lived almost entirely in his chair in front of the television, leads to laughter of relief that ‘we’ are not living such a life. In Bakhtinian terms, comic creations like Jim Royle might be seen as our contemporary fools for the day but, as we know, such carnivalesque overturning is posited on the sure return to the status quo. We are not expected to admire or emulate the unemployed Jim Royle, spending his day watching the telly – quite the reverse. The work of comedy to expose and overturn can also be seen to establish and reinforce dominant cultural values and expectations. This is the less than comfortable position to which the palimpsestic understanding of women’s comic work inevitably brings me. As much as we can celebrate and make visible the ‘likeness’ and comparability of characters like Nan, Emily and Sally, we also have to admit to their being worked up on the basis of female types that we recognise, and are encouraged to reject. They do offer models of female behaviour ‘we’ would seek to emulate. By creating women who say the ‘unsayable’, these female comics release the steam, the tension of what women see and do, and what they ‘can’ say, and yet they also reinforce the constructs that have contained, and continue to contain us. We relish the disruption of expected behaviour and response; but does our laughter also support and even buy into the not-so-subtle controls of gender construction? Does Sally Simkin still speak to the social isolation for the female singleton – however ‘out there’ she may be? Emily exposes the reality of the many women working as sole breadwinners to support their families, reminding us too of the fear of fatal illness for the single parent. Nan also carries something of our horror of a lonely, limiting and bitter old age. At the other end of the age-scale, Watson and Oliver’s parody of playboy bunnies works to expose the degradation of women in the fantasy world of Hefner’s Playboy Mansion but does so to simultaneously valorise contemporary images of female sexuality, reinforcing an age-old subservience to body image.

The history of comedy, the comedy of forgotten histories The history of women’s comic repertoire is not without its problems, but the problems are not about originality or uniqueness. The characters examined and their creators are not identified above because of the extraordinary triumph of their work, although they have had commercial success. Their place in this article’s representation of the repertoire is, as noted in Davis’ words above, the result of the ‘day-to-day competencies of performers’ (Davis, 2012:13), to some extent the ordinary and everyday success of women’s comic work. The likeness and comparability could just as well be applied to a host of remembered and forgotten female comic performers from Music Hall performer Jenny Hill to Beryl Reid. The task then is not only demanding attention for and recognition of the forgotten performer, but thinking more widely about the cultural act of forgetting that revisionist histories have sought to overturn. As Susan Bennett argues, revisionist

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history has less than convincing long-term benefits. If it is to be anything more than ‘the act of correction, improvement and updating’, it must work instead toward a new model of historical composition that accounts for and includes the ‘extensive’ creative work of women (Bennett, 2003: 73). The appreciation of the repertoire does not depend upon an in-depth and detailed understanding of, in this case, the comic work of every generation of women who have contributed to it, but rather upon an acknowledgement that such a repertoire exists. We must recognize that there is a very real body of work to which the newest, or latest, most outlandish or even the most conventional connects, the pleasure in likeness adding to the laughter of recognition. Forgetting of likeness and comparability in the work of women in comedy extends beyond the writers and performers to the body of work written about them. It is with pleasure that I find significant sections on Joyce Grenfell and Victoria Wood in Frances Gray’s Women and Laughter (1994), both of whom are also referenced along with Mabel Constanduros and Beryl Reid in Morwena Banks and Amanda Swift’s The Jokes on Us (1987). But it is with some dismay that we find no new work of academic enquiry by women on women in comedy published since the turn of the twenty-first century. Medhurst cites these earlier books in his bibliography but, as he makes clear, his identity as a white male academic is central to his response to the comic material he explores. When the late Christopher Hitchens’ largely derided article ‘Why women aren’t funny’ was published in Vanity Fair in 2007, it generated a number of heated responses – not least from me, a white, middle-class former actress turned academic, teaching a course on women and comedy in the context of an undergraduate university degree. Web-based resources proved more accessible to my students, as they found out-of-print publications almost impossible to track down. The Internet now leads one to a wide range of performances and writing workshops for women and comedy. The London-based Funny Women has recently announced its preparations for the tenth anniversary of the ‘Funny Women Awards’ (we are women – we are funny www.funnywomen.com). Will the notion of connectedness of comparability and likeness be acknowledged or commended in the seemingly relentless drive for originality, the search for uniqueness in the selection of the winner? Will the next ‘new’ act rise as if entirely new made? Will Watson and Oliver’s recently commissioned second series be expected to change direction in the relentless pursuit of the new, or will they turn to their critics to chorus with Nan: ‘What a fuckin’ liberty’. Source: Gilli Bush-Bailey (2012) ‘Women Like Us?’, Comedy Studies, 3:2, 151–159.

Notes 1 The full text of Constanduros’ ‘Cheering up Maria’ can be found in Maggie B. Gale and Gilli Bush-Bailey (2012) (eds.), Plays and Performance Texts by Women 1880-1930, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 638–40. 2 For more on Kelly’s life and work see Gilli Bush-Bailey (2011) Performing Herself: Autobiography & Fanny Kelly’s Dramatic Recollections, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Page references to Kelly’s ‘Sally Simkins’ refer to this publication which includes a fully annotated edition of Kelly’s 1832 one woman show, Dramatic Recollections. 3 There are numerous online sources for material on Catherine Tate with over fifty clips on YouTube dedicated to ‘Nan’. First appearing in The Catherine Tate Show (BBC, 2004-09) she is one of Tate’s most popular characters, appearing in Comic Relief (2007) and the Christmas special Nan’s Christmas Carol (BBC, 2009) among many other television ‘guest’ appearances.

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References Banks, Morwenna and Amanda Swift (1987), The Joke’s on Us, London: Pandora. Bennett, Susan (2003), ‘Decomposing History’, in W. B. Worthern with Peter Holland (eds), Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 71–87. Bush-Bailey, Gilli (2011), Performing Herself: AutoBiography and Fanny Kelly’s Dramatic Recollections, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Davis, Tracy C. (2012), The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance, Ontario: Broadview Press. Gale, Maggie B. and Gilli Bush-Bailey (2012), (eds) Plays and Performance Texts by Women 1880– 1930, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gray, Frances (1994), Women and Laughter, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Joyce, Patrick (1995), (ed.), Class, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Medhurst, Andy (2007), A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities, Oxon: Routledge.

Contributor Gilli Bush-Bailey is Professor Emerita in Women’s Performance History at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She has published extensively on the work of women as actresses, managers and writers. Her book, Performing Herself (2011), focuses on actress/manager Fanny Kelly, the creator of one of the first comic one-woman shows, performed in London in 1832. Her interest in women, comedy and solo performance is further explored in the selection of monologues introduced in Plays and Performance Texts by Women 1880–1930, edited with Maggie B. Gale (2012).

Part IV

Doing comedy Giving, receiving, causes and effects

Chapter 11

Pretty funny: Manifesting a normatively sexy female comic body (4:2) Hannah Ballou

Queerlesque performance artist Ursula Martinez smiles and turns her nude, statuesque body to exit. There is a tiny scrap of toilet paper peeking out from between her buttocks. The audience laughs long and hard. (Martinez 2010)

What is a comic body? What is a female comic body? What does it look like? What does it do? What if it is ‘sexy?’ Andrew Stott defines the comic body in relation to an ‘ideal of physicality [. . .] against which the comedian can be found lacking, thereby reassuring an audience that comic substance will be found in departure from those ideals’ (2005: 84). For this conception of the comic body ‘funny’ means ‘funny-looking’. Notoriously self-deprecating comedian Joan Rivers seems to concur; ‘[t]here was never a funny woman who was a beautiful little girl’ (Barreca 1991: 28). However, what if a normatively sexy female comic body (if it exists) subverts this notion by paradoxically being the ideal against which it may be found to be lacking? What if the ‘temple built over the sewer’ (Stott 2005: 84) happens to be Venus’ and she opens the sewer grates? I propose that the normatively sexy female comic body can derive or enhance its comic proposal via the incongruity of its designated unfunniness. This designated unfunniness is imposed from two angles; its sexiness and its femaleness. Throw into the mix the exquisite gem that is the nude female comic performance, and one has a heightened opportunity to examine and undermine potentially patriarchal and heteronormative constructions of the comic body. In the critical response to Margaret Cho’s 2007 burlesque revue, The Sensuous Woman (which included both stand up and striptease from Cho) no one questioned the decision of this lauded comedian to keep her mouth shut while she stripteased. In fact, one critic seemed to feel it was only natural, [. . .Y]es, she takes off all of her clothes in this show. She also tells jokes, but not at the same time, because that might be awkward. As a rule, it’s bad manners to laugh when someone disrobes in front of you [. . .]. (McKinley 2007) Presumably, that critic would not apply the same rule to the comedically ecdysiastic antics of The Greatest Show on Legs1 (Lee and Jackson 2011).

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The unfunniness of women The ubiquity of popular and academic discourses surrounding the stereotypical notion that women are either not funny or not as funny as men will surely be familiar to readers of this journal. It is both outside the scope of this article and unnecessary to oppose the essentialist ramblings of people (ranging from the esteemed late Christopher Hitchens to the average misogynist on the street) who hold this view (2007). It is unnecessary because female comic practitioners, their audiences and funny women everywhere have and will continue to disprove the notion in both word and deed. The futility of engaging with those who designate women as unfunny is best expressed by Mark Twain Prize for American Humour winner Tina Fey; My hat goes off to them. It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist. (2011: 144, original emphasis) However, the cultural constructions that produce such attitudes are complex and lingering. The salient points required to elucidate this argument for the potentiality of the normatively sexy female comic body can be summarized by Danielle Russell. [T]he presence of a female comic elicits a much different audience reaction than that of her male counterpart. ‘Deviant behavior and expression’ are somehow more palatable from a man. He is granted his due – assumed to be funny until he proves to be otherwise – while she starts from a different position – she must prove that she can be funny. (2002) In other words, due in part to patriarchal ideologies surrounding the performance of gender and humour, female comics have more work to do to earn the ‘faith’ of the spectator, using Oliver Double’s sense of that word; the belief that ‘[she is] really a comedian and that it’s OK to laugh’ (1997: 91).

The unfunniness of sexiness In addition to Stott’s exclusion of normatively sexy people from his definition of the comic body, several humour theorists argue against the compatibility of sex, sexiness, passion and desire with laughter, funniness and humour. Consider John Morreall’s contention (following from Henri Bergson’s characterization of humour as incompatible with emotion ([1911] 1924: 4a)) that ‘[i]n sexual intercourse [. . .] if one partner laughs about something, that shows a lack of passion; if they both crack up in laughter, the sex has been sidetracked’ (Morreall 2009: 33). This normative generalization is further developed by Tim Miles when he argues that ‘[h]umour and the erotic are intimately connected, each one promoting the other, but there seems to be a point at which all humour needs to be abandoned, for the erotic feelings to still develop further. There is a boundary’ (Miles 2011: 66, original emphasis). So, in this line of thinking, not only are sexy bodies excluded from Stott’s conception of the comic body, but sex and the erotic (beyond

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some undefined point) are also incompatible with the experience of humour. Indeed, Mark Weeks considers the possibility of laughter as ‘anti-erotic’ in that it may serve to interrupt the mounting tension of a seduction, be it sexual or textual (2002: 389). Regina Barreca controversially posits that it is specifically men who ‘can’t really laugh and maintain an erection at the same time . . . all that energy loses its focus and starts to move around again, playfully’ (Barreca 1991: 19, original emphasis). However, I contend that although these assertions may sometimes hold true, they are sweeping, normative generalizations that merely articulate one possible (hegemonically masculine) experience of the juxtaposition of humour and the erotic. My own lived body, for example, suggests otherwise. I have on multiple occasions laughed hysterically at the intensity and absurd performance of the build up to and experience of my own orgasm. There was no ‘lack of passion’ but that passion itself was hilarious to me. I doubt I am the only person in the world to enjoy this obliteration of Miles’ boundary and Morreall’s argument. Morreall tacks his proclamation on to the end of an argument for the necessity of disengagement from the object of humour, and the incompatability of amusement with emotions, particularly negative ones (2009: 29–33). However, this fashionable theoretical notion (though it frequently holds true) can be problematized by comic practice. Consider the example of Tig Notaro’s stand up performance at Largo in Los Angeles in 2012, shortly after she was diagnosed with breast cancer following the sudden death of her mother and the demise of her romantic relationship shortly thereafter. Comedian Louis C. K. witnessed the performance; I stood in the wings behind a leg of curtain, about 8 feet from her, and watched her tell a stunned audience ‘hi. I have cancer. Just found out today. I’m going to die soon’. What followed was one of the greatest standup performances I ever saw. I can’t really describe it but I was crying and laughing and listening like never in my life. [. . .] Tig took us to a scary place and made us laugh there. (2012) Notaro met with disbelieving, possibly uncomfortable laughter as well as concern when the audience realized she really did have cancer. Who’s taking this really bad? (she identifies a person who is vocally expressing concern for her) Ohhh. It’s ok. (laugh and smattering of applause) It’s ok. It’s gonna be ok. It might not be ok . . . (huge laugh) but I’m just saying . . . it’s ok. You’re gonna be ok. (Notaro corpses) I don’t know what’s going on with me. (laugh) (2012) Throughout the 31-minute set Notaro masterfully binds together the audience’s pity and concern (i.e. their engagement) with her comic proposals. She turns that very engagement into the object of the humour. There is no dichotomized oscillation between the amusement and the feelings as Morreall would insist upon, rather one provokes the other in a kind of copresent dissonance. They are laughing through the tears, not leaving them behind the instant Notaro pulls on the other string. They did not leave the ‘scary place’ that Louis C. K. identified, but they laughed both in it and at it. As Notaro’s performance challenges these positions on humour vis-à-vis negative emotion, so do the performances of the nude female comic body discussed below intervene in the derived discourses surrounding humour and desire.

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Stott calls on Freud in his account of sexuality-themed humour; ‘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 in Stott 2005: 62–63). However, Freud is not arguing for the possibility of the convergence of sexual and comic pleasure, rather he is supporting his relief theory of humour wherein it serves as a socially acceptable release for unsociable impulses including sexual desires. This account of the relation of the erotic to the comic is also a forerunner to Simon Critchley’s articulation of a highly relevant type of humorous proposal.

Mind the gap Critchley claims humour functions by ‘exploiting the gap between being a body and having a body’ (2002: 43). Stott’s notion of the comic body fits neatly into Critchley’s model for its production of humour. ‘The comic body privileges the facts of physicality over the ideal of the physique, and its function over poise’ (Stott 2005: 83–84). He explains further, ‘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’ (Stott 2005: 86). This line of thinking is validated by every fart, askew toupee and pants-wetting incident found to be funny. Following from Critchley, I believe a certain strand of feminist humour might be defined as that which exploits the gap between being a body and having a gendered body. I would also suggest every body may not have the same gap to navigate. The path to this brand of comic proposal for normatively sexy female comedians like Ursula Martinez differs from the path navigated by comedians within the bounds of Kathleen Rowe’s archetype, the unruly woman; a ubiquitous female comic figure whose body is marked by excess. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

The unruly woman creates disorder by dominating [. . .] men. She is unable or unwilling to confine herself to her proper place. Her body is excessive or fat, suggesting her unwillingness or inability to control her appetite. Her speech is excessive in quantity, speech, or tone. She makes jokes, or laughs herself. She may be androgynous or hermaphroditic, drawing attention to the social construction of gender. She may be old or a masculinized crone, for old women who refuse to become invisible in our culture are often considered grotesque. Her behavior is associated with looseness and occasionally whoreishness [. . .] She is associated with dirt, liminality [. . .], and taboo, rendering her above all a figure of ambivalence. (Rowe 1995: 31)

Contemporary examples relevant to the area of the comic landscape discussed here include the stand up persona of Jo Brand, recent comic film performances by actress Melissa McCarthy, and various sketch characters by Catherine Tate. The unruly woman fits neatly into Stott’s definition of the comic body. In terms of Critchley’s formula, the unruly

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woman’s more abject comic body (with her age, fatness or other excessive qualities) positions her nearer the state of being a body. Conversely her normatively attractive ‘ruly’ counterpart may have a more unexpected and therefore potentially stronger incongruity to propose. Her ‘gap’ is wider.

Pretty funny Sketch comedians Olivia Côte and Olivia Lee illustrate this idea very clearly in their respective practices. They both look like models. Their inclusion well within the tall, thin, leggy, ample-bosomed, white, western, normative beauty ideal inevitably informs their comic proposals. Just like Martinez with her toilet paper lazzi described above, both of these performers have a distinctly gendered access to scatological2 humour via the particularly incongruous instrument of their poised and privileged bodies. For example, in a sketch entitled Vestiaire,3 Côte appears alone in a locker room, disrobing after a workout. Both voyeuristic and anticipatory comic tension builds as she shakes out her hair and removes her bra, revealing her breasts. Then she hears men’s voices approaching which alert her (and the audience) to the fact that she is mistakenly in the men’s locker room. She goes into startle mode for a few seconds, desperate for an escape or a plan. She then disappears from the frame and the male athletes enter, see her, and freeze. The camera pans left and Côte is revealed (now fully nude; her underpants have mysteriously and amusingly vanished in the few seconds she is out of frame.) to be pretending to urinate in a urinal, then shaking off her mimed penis. She adopts a swaggering caricature of heteronormative masculinity. She crudely blows phlegm out of her nose. She says (roughly translated) ‘Pfff. Oh, hi. Ah, my balls hurt. Sorry dude. Ah, a quick shower to wash all that down . . .’ She grabs a towel and exits. The men remain in shocked silence (Côte and Siboni 2007). Several aspects of this scene are relevant to the discussion at hand. First, the beginning of the sketch (particularly when viewed on its own, out of the context of the television sketch show) could easily be the beginning of a standard heteronormative pornography video. Côte’s normative sexiness, the spectators’ opportunity to gaze at her demure, ‘private’ strip and the entrance of a group of muscled jocks combine to form the first half of one of the incongruities at work. The expectation is then disrupted when she is not enthusiastically ‘gang banged’ by the group of men, but rather evades the embarrassment of the social gaffe not by covering herself and apologizing (as many might do finding themselves in this situation), but rather by denying anything is amiss via a ridiculous charade of gender.4 The subtle invocation of a pornography trope confronts the spectator with the context they associate with viewing a normatively sexy nude female body. It also directs the expectation farther away from Côte’s eventual action. Also of note is the silence of the men. They are struck dumb both by Côte’s nudity and her comic failure to be in the correct locker room. It would be a very different scene if they burst out laughing, or conversely if they silently stared at an old, fat or otherwise excessive body. Côte’s closed-kneed, almost dainty comportment, pointed toes, sensuous stretching and hair-tossing that we beheld during the set up of the proposal form an incongruity with her crude, confident caricature of masculinity. It is the cultural baggage weighing on the experience of watching that normatively sexy female body strip (whether that be an experience of pleasure, titillation, discomfort, anger, irritation, etc.) that lends a particular

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charge to the ‘punchline’. That is not to say that an excessive body could not carry off the same sketch, but it would be a distinctly different proposal. Though experiences and readings of the nude display of the white western heteronormatively approved female body and its privilege are various and context dependent, it is undeniably a potent signifier and a provocative figure in the context of comic performance. There is a certain pleasure (comic or otherwise) when a person subverts a system that in some ways privileges her. Ultimately, Côte’s seemingly naturalistic and commendable performance of femininity contrasted with her unexpected comic exaggeration of masculinity illuminates the performativity of gender. The body she is can play fluidly with the gendered body she has, to comic effect. British comedian Lee’s sexiness is so mainstream she was in contention for a ‘Bond girl’ role in the film Casino Royale (Campbell, 2006) (Das 2010). She contends that her normative attractiveness helps enable her hidden-camera prank style of comic performance. ‘When I’m all dressed up, I don’t look like I’m going to cause any trouble. It’s afforded me the luxury of getting into events or certain situations’ (Das 2010). Several of Lee’s sketches for her aptly named television show, Dirty Sexy Funny, trace the path across the gap between having a normatively sexy female body and being an abject human body. In one, looking well groomed and fashionable, Lee politely asks a stranger on the street if she may borrow a pen. She proceeds to clean the wax out of her ear with it (Lee 2010b). In another sketch, the same character waylays another stranger, and, convincing her she has an important job interview, borrows her deodorant which she then applies to her vagina. ‘Thank you, I just want to feel fresh. Nice smell! Better than fish, isn’t it?’(Lee 2010a). In these cases it is the high status afforded by her appearance and manner as well as her performance of gender that confounds the victims of her crude misbehaviour and forms the incongruity by which the scatological humour is enhanced. On the one hand, these comic proposals could be seen as supporting the assertion that normative sexiness and funniness are incompatible since the performers deviate from the prescribed norms in various ways (Cote’s masculine caricature, Martinez’ ironic choreography and scatology, and Lee’s vulgarity) to manifest their comic bodies. However, Jill Dolan’s argument that ‘the female body is not reducible to a sign free of connotation’, and ‘women always bear the mark and meaning of their sex, which inscribes them within a cultural hierarchy’ may expose this line of thinking as naive (Dolan 1988: 63) To put it another way; an ironic tit is still a tit. Though these performances offer up their sexiness as the front end of an incongruous comic proposal, they are no less tall, thin, beautiful, white, cisgendered and professionally lit after the cognitive shift that repositions that sexiness in an unexpected context. Côte, Martinez, Lee and artists like them are harnessing the comic potential of subverting the cultural constructions that privilege their own bodies by both foregrounding and then undermining their normative sexiness and ‘correctly’ performed femininity. They reveal the potency of ‘sexy scatological humour’. Their work illuminates a path towards a feminist reimagining of the theoretical comic body wherein conventionally attractive women’s bodies, though still the ideological location of heterosexual desire, are not excluded. Source: Hannah Ballou (2013) ‘Pretty funny: manifesting a normatively sexy female comic body’, Comedy Studies, 4:2, 179–186.

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Notes 1 Another performance of this work can be seen online here: Naked white middle-aged men dance covering themselves with balloon to great comic effect. 2 The term scatological is used in a broader sense than usual here to include all abject bodily based humour in addition to the toilet variety, i.e. earwax, phlegm, menstruation, vomit, etc. 3 This sketch can be watched online on the website Dailymotion.com here:http://www.dailymo tion.com/video/x8h5wj_olivia-Côte-vous-les-femmes-2_sexy#UZO-pLWUTJY. 4 This use of the ‘everything is just fine even though I am naked in the wrong place’ comic trope reminds me of the time I mistook the hot spring bathing facilities in Bath for a clothing optional area (in congruity with my experience of other hot springs in the western United States). I did not realize for quite a while that all conversation had ground to a halt when I entered the pool. Eventually a scan of the tops of the shoulders of all the other women in the water revealed to me my error. At the time, I judged the best course of action to be ignoring the situation entirely. I carried on swimming until I was very politely asked by a staff member to put on a bathing suit. I was so confident in my world-view that natural hotsprings were nude affairs that I didn’t even have a suit with me. I had to reenter the pool with dignity in my t-shirt and underpants. Although the cognitive shift here was similar to that in Côte’s sketch, admittedly this example of the nude female comic body might be more relevant to a discussion of Bergson’s automaton.

References Barreca, R. (1991), They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . But I Drifted: Womens Strategic Use of Humor, New York: Viking. Bergson, H. ([1911] 1924), Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Temple of Earth Publishing, http://www.templeofearth.com/books/laughter.pdf. Accessed 29 May 2012. C. K., Louis (2012), ‘About Tig Notaro’, https://buy.louisck.net/news/about-tig-notaro. Accessed 2 June 2013. Campbell, Martin (2006), Casino Royale, Culver City: Columbia Pictures. Côte, O. and Siboni, J. (2007), Vous Les Femmes, Boulogne-Billancourt: CALT, http://www.dailymotion. com/video/x8h5wj_olivia-cote-vous-les-femmes-2_sexy#.UZ91i0CUTJY. Accessed 25 March 2013. Critchley, S. (2002), On Humour, New York: Routledge. Das, L. (2010), “‘Men don’t women to be funny”:The world according to Olivia Lee’, The Daily Mail, 15 May, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1277561/Olivia-Lee-Mendont-want-women-funny-Certainly-funnier-them.html. Accessed 1 May 2013. Dolan, J. ([1988]2012), The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Double, O. (1997), Stand Up! On Being a Comedian, London: Methuen. Fey, T. (2011), Bossypants, New York: Little, Brown and Co. Hitchens, C. (2007), ‘Why women aren’t funny’, Vanity Fair, January, http://www.vanityfair.com/ culture/features/2007/01/hitchens200701. Accessed 20 February 2012. Lee, O. (2010a) Dirty, Sexy, Funny, Season 1, Episode 2, London: Tiger Aspect. —— (2010b), Dirty, Sexy, Funny, Season 1, Episode 4, London: Tiger Aspect. Lee, S. and Jackson, P. (2011), At Last, The 1981 Show, Southbank Centre, London, 29 May. Martinez, U. (2010), My Stories Your Emails, Barbican Pit Theatre, London, 2 February. McKinley, W. (2007), ‘Margaret Cho unzips at the zipper factory, Sensuous Woman is not for the uptight’, Chelsea Now, 11 October, http://www.margaretcho.com/content/2007/10/11/chel sea-nowmargaret-cho-unzips-at-the-zipper-factory-%E2%80%98the-sensuous-woman%E2%80%99is-not-for-the-uptight/. Accessed 14 June 2010. Miles, T. (2011), ‘Sex, pies and Jilly Cooper: An online, cooperative analysis of humour and the erotic’,Comedy Studies, 2: 1, pp. 63–71. Morreall, J. (2009), Comic Relief: a Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Notaro, T. (2012), Tig Notaro: Live, Bloomington: Secretly Canadian.

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Rowe, K. (1995), The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, Austin: University of Texas Press. Russell, D. (2002), ‘Self-deprecatory humour and the female comic: Self-destruction or comedic construction?’, Thirdspace, 2:1, http://www.thirdspace.ca/journal/article/viewArticle/d_russell/ 68#8back. Accessed 28 Feb 2011. Stott, A. (2005), Comedy, New York and London: Routledge. Weeks, M. (2002), ‘Laughter, desire, and time’, International Journal of Humor Research, 15: 4, pp. 383–400.

Contributor Hannah Ballou is a London-based cabaret, comedy and live art practitioner. She

trained at the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre in California. She has performed her work internationally in such venues as New York’s Slipper Room, the London Burlesque Festival, Battersea Arts Centre, Sideshow, Leicester Square Theatre, Volupte Lounge, and the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. She produced and starred in The Lambchop Magoo Show at Proud Cabaret. Her performance research series include hoo:ha, Illuminating and exploiting a dissonance between funniness and sexiness with the female comic body in performance, and goo:ga, A comedy special by a very pregnant woman.

Chapter 12

No greater foe? Rethinking emotion and humour, with particular attention to the relationship between audience members and stand-up comedians (5:1) Tim Miles Introduction In Trevor Griffiths’ play Comedians (1976), a teacher of stand-up comedy, Eddie Waters, explains to his students that ‘it’s not the jokes’ that is the key, but the relationship with the audience. Indeed, much of the current literature on stand-up comedy comments on stand-up comedy’s interactive and co-constructed nature. Ritchie (2012, 164), for example, pointed out that ‘the [stand-up comedy] performer–audience relationship is symbiotic: the one cannot exists without the other’ (164); and Double (2005, 19) claimed that ‘It [stand-up comedy] involves direct communication between performer and audience. It’s an intense relationship with energy flowing back and forth between stage and auditorium’. Provine (2000) argued that relationships are core to laughter. Despite all this, attempts to seriously analyse the stand-up comedian–audience relationship barely exist, at least in emotional terms. It is intersubjectivity, how ‘I experience you as experiencing’ in the words of R.D. Laing, and phenomenology, that offers a means of analysis. To quote R.D. Laing again: The other person’s behaviour is an experience of mine. My behaviour is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to relate my experience of the other’s behaviour to the other’s experience of my behaviour. Its study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is interexperience. (1967, 17) This is useful for the study of emotion, as emotional states are experiential states whereas cognitive states are less so. So, in examining audience–performer relationships, I am focusing specifically on the emotional dynamic and less on the craft of establishing rapport, for example, in highlighting common points of reference. In so doing, I hope to develop the developing literature on stand-up comedy, and perhaps also shed some light on the knotty problem of humour’s relationship with emotion. Humour and emotion have much in common, and there is a long tradition – since Plato – that relates humour to emotion. More recently, Robert Sharpe has identified seven similarities between experiencing humour and emotions such as love and fear. Morreall (2008, 235) summarises:

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[Both have] ‘intentional objects’ – they are about something. Both admit of degrees. Both have behavioural manifestations which we may suppress. Both allow for selfdeception. Both are pleasurable or painful. With both we can distinguish between the intentional object and the mental state and the cause of the mental state. And with both we can cultivate taste. Indeed, Dunbar et al. (2011) shows how laughter produces endorphins in the brain via the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which controls emotion. However, Bergson’s On Laughter (1900) is premised on a number of central ideas, including that laughter requires a detachment from feeling (1900, 34): ‘Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion’. Other models have ambivalence regarding humour and emotion. What is often referred to as ‘superiority theory’, for example, proposes that humour is the result of pleasure gained at the expense of others. In the words of Thomas Hobbes (1651, 93): ‘the passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others’. If one is to accept this model, then to experience humour an emotional state (of pleasure), and one of lacking emotion (of indifference to the suffering of others), need to co-exist. Clearly, there is some relationship between humour and emotion, as the states we associate with laughter are usually emotional ones (joy, pleasure, nervousness, a desire to ingratiate); but the exact nature of this relationship seems difficult to establish, and extant models appear to be in contradiction. Literature that focuses on humour and the emotions generated through personal relationships is considerable. For example, Coser (1959, 172) states that ‘To laugh, or to occasion laughter through humor and wit, is to invite those present to come closer’. Kuipers (2008, 336) proposes that ‘Laughter and humor are indeed like an invitation, be it an invitation for dinner, or an invitation to start a conversation: it aims at decreasing social distance’. As Cohen (1976, 6–10) points out, jokes are like metaphors in that they serve to create intimacy through mutual comprehension. These invitations need to be performed. Palmer (1994, 12) comments that a joke not only needs to be recognised as being so for it to be funny, but that permission needs to be offered, by both joke-teller and audience, for the humour to function. Examining emotion through the lens of standup comedy is useful as stand-up comedy exists in some liminal space between theatre and social performance, seemingly paying little attention to such theatrical signifiers as costume, character, set and dramatic narrative, but instead allowing heckling and audience participation. In so doing, the interpersonal performed interactions that often facilitate emotion are foregrounded.

A phenomenological methodology Phenomenology focuses on human experience. Bert O. States (2007, 46) claimed that ‘Phenomenological analysis is an analysis of essences and an investigation of the general state of affairs which are built up in immediate intuition’. More simply, the aim is ‘seeing things through the eyes of others’ (Denscombe 1998, 78). For this reason, the subjective, personal narrative, which includes reflection and its subsequent analysis, is core to phenomenological research. Accordingly, this investigation focuses on looking at interview and questionnaire data, of both stand-up comedy audiences and stand-up comedians. Nine sources of data have been used:

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(1)

(2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9)

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Audience questionnaires, conducted by Lockyer and Myers, and published in ‘It’s About Expecting the Unexpected’: Live Stand-up Comedy from the Audiences’ Perspective’ (2011; 196 questionnaire participants) Audience interviews, conducted by Lockyer and Myers, and published in the same article (11 interviews) Audience questionnaires conducted by myself (71 questionnaire participants) Audience interviews, conducted by myself (6 interviews) Interviews with stand-up comedians, conducted by myself (17 interviews) Interviews with stand-up comedians, conducted by William Cook, and published in Ha Bloody Ha (1994; 28 interviews) Interviews with stand-up comedians, conducted by Dawn French, for the BBC4 television series Dawn French’s Girls Who Do Comedy (December 2006; 35 interviews) Interviews with stand-up comedians, conducted by Dawn French, for the BBC4 television series Dawn French’s Boys Who Do Comedy (December 2007; 35 interviews) Interviews with stand-up comedians, conducted by Alan Yentob, for the two-part BBC1 documentary The Art of Stand-up Comedy (December 2011; 11 interviews). This research attempted to get to an ‘essence’ of the experience of stand-up comedians and their audiences – one that focuses not on the specific experiences of the individuals, but on common experiences. Accordingly, I have adopted an unusual referencing system whereby only participants’ initials are identified in the text, with full details given in an appendix.

This relatively large sample was intended to, in Husserl’s words ‘expel anything that is local or contingent’ (1964, 37). The disadvantages of the phenomenological method include: a possible lack of rigour (participants were allowed, and even encouraged, to discuss what mattered to them); a focus on description, not analysis; and a method that attempts to extrapolate general principles from specifics. It may appear to pay attention to the mundane and subjective, and personal narratives are considered out of context (other audience members may have seen the same event in a very different way). Perhaps the most obvious weakness is the reliance on reported experience – relying not only on the honesty, and self-awareness, of participants, but also on their memory, and, in the case of interviews, command of the spoken work to convey experience. Reason (2004), for example, argued that ‘experiences, personal responses and ideas rooted in social interactions – such as prejudices, jealousies or personal identities – are not things that can be discovered, but are created by the language that is used to describe them’. Similarly, Hyncer points to problems over the ‘accuracy of description’ and ‘the retrospective viewpoint, and the difficulty of verbalizing essentially non-verbal experiences’ (1985, 295). Nevertheless, despite these limitations, using interview and questionnaire data remains a recognised phenomenological method (see for example Hyncer 1985; Pollio, Henley and Thompson 1999; King and Horrocks 2010).

The research The data showed a strong emphasis on emotional experience for both stand-up comedians and audience members. Comments from stand-up comedians included: ‘When you try a gag out for the first time and you hear the laughter and you think “oh, great” . . . there’s no feeling like it’ (DFB-KD); ‘My experience of performance stand-up comedy has been

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both horrible and enjoyable – at its best, it’s joyous; at its worst, abysmal’ (TMISUSMC); ‘Magical when good, excruciating when bad’ (TMISU-AH); and ‘It is actually like being able to fly’ (AYI-JC). Audience members commented along similar lines: ‘It is my favourite pastime. If there was one night left in the world I would go to a comedy club’ (TMQ); ‘When it’s good it’s thrilling, and when it’s bad it’s excruciating’ (TMIA); and ‘Good stand-up is transcendent; very bad stand-up is at least an experience’ (TMQ). Specifically, many commented on well-being: ‘Not all comedians are depressed, but I think a very large number of them are. . . they find making people laugh makes them feel better in the short term’ (DFB-JC). The corollary of this being a sense of unhappiness or frustration when not performing. Comments included: ‘It’s like an insatiable itch, I get restless if I go too long without a gig. . . I feel stumped, cut off, listless, uninspired’ (TMISU-MO’S). Indeed, many stand-up comedians saw themselves as offering a therapeutic service, or some sort of drug. Comments included: INTERVIEWER: Why do we love people who make us laugh so much? STAND-UP COMEDIAN: Because it’s like a drug. I am sure of it. When you laugh you get a

good feeling, and we want that feeling. (DFB-RB) References to medicine, therapy, and feeling better were also common responses among audience members. Questionnaire answer to the question ‘how would you describe your experience of attending live stand-up comedy?’ included: ‘An essential and rewarding experience. Laughter isn’t available on the NHS, so live comedy is the way to go’ (TMQ), and ‘Light-heartedness leaves you feeling good and relaxed, like you get your stress out from laughing’ (TMQ). Similarly, questionnaire responses to the question ‘What do you enjoy most about live stand-up comedy?’ included: ‘I find it therapeutic to go to a standup show, not knowing what to expect, and just laugh together with a room of strangers for a couple of hours. It’s a wonderful break from the stresses of life’ (TMQ); ‘There’s the uplifting feeling that laughter gives me. Laughter is like medicine!’ (TMQ); and ‘Helping someone help me to appreciate and laugh about the otherwise stressful and upsetting things I experience. I once watched a “trans” comic joke about some of the oppressive people and situations I had encountered. I found this healing and de-stressing’ (TMQ). Interviews with audience members elicited further references to health and wellbeing, including: At the time I went to see Russell Howard I was having a particularly difficult time, emotionally and mentally, with how I felt, around about the time when I was at the crossroads and I felt: What do I do? Do I go into education, or carry on with jobs that are making me miserable? What do I do? I came out of that gig, after laughing so hard, and everything felt right with the world – even things such as the economic downturn, the problems with politics, the wars; they felt so irrelevant. I was in my own little bubble. It was like a Nirvana of well-being. It was such a nice feeling, and even if it only lasts for a few hours, it’s just so nice to find that point where you feel balanced, and it’s difficult to explain. I mean, Christians always say that when they first pray for forgiveness to God they have a feeling of euphoria come over them, and for me it was kind of like that. It was that kind of euphoria where it actually felt like I have a purpose. No medication you can be given will ever give you that feeling. (TMIA)

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The data suggest that there is a complex symbiotic relationship between the stand-up comedian and their audience in relation to the body, and well-being – with a relationship that is perhaps, in some ways, similar to a doctor and patient. Stand-up comedians frequently pointed to their emotional need for recognition and attention. Comments from stand-up comedians included: ‘It’s all about validation via the audience. We are trying to fill a hole’ (DFB-GN). Other comments included: When I was in a band, I used to think ‘Are they really paying attention?’. People would carry on talking, and you think: ‘Do they really care? Were they actually listening? Did it make any difference to them?’ You get a much clearer sense of the answer to all that in stand-up. (TMISU-DP) Audience questionnaire responses also frequently commented on the desire for an emotional relationship. One response, for example, to the question ‘What do you like best about live stand-up comedy?’ was: ‘When it caters to the specific audience and location, as it makes it feel more personal. When it feels like we are friends’. In response to the question ‘What do you like best about stand-up comedy?’: ‘The way it makes me feel. Good stand-up will make me cry with laughter, which is a fantastic feeling, evokes memories of good times and stays with me’ (TMQ). Some stand-up comedians commented on the dangers of their emotional need: I think it’s quite scary. You have to be careful, that you don’t start replacing real relationships with sort of the love you get from an audience; but, you know, it’s not really a real relationship – but it’s kind of brilliant, lots of strangers telling you you are brilliant, then you don’t really need people close to you to say that to you any more. (DFB-NF) A number of stand-up comedians commented that they found it emotionally difficult after a gig, when there is an awareness that the relationship with the audience is over. For example: I really used to find it hard. You think what do you do once you’ve come off, particularly with live stand-up you can have thousands of people laughing at you, loving you, and then you just go home. On, no, I’m on my own, what am I going to do? You need something, you need some punctuation. You cannot just go to bed. (DFB-RB) The bond that exists between stand-up comedian and audience member operates in terms of admiration, empathy and what I shall refer to as the paradox of identification. Many participants commented on the identification the audience member feels with the standup comedian in strongly emotional, experiential and empathetic terms. One audience member commented in interview that: ‘If it is bad I want to die. There is also an incredible level of annoyance. It is different in cinema. There is something about live comedy performance’ (TMIA). She also commented that ‘I feel they are being themselves and I am judging them as a person. There is a feeling that I know these people’. Typical

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responses to the questionnaire question were: ‘If the joke is not funny, I’ll feel bad for the comedian’ (TMQ). Stand-up comedians often commented on their awareness of the audience’s need for empathy. Comments included: ‘You are selling your ideas and your thoughts – they want a human connection with you’ (AYI-SK). Another commented on his more practical approach: ‘I would go to the back and say to the audience “those are the shitty seats”, and the people in the shitty seats would go “yeah, you’re with us”’ (DFB-RW). One audience member commented on ‘the mercy laugh’: ‘If someone is not very good, it is one of the most awkward things and I feel I have to mercy laugh, which is more likely to happen when seeing unknown comedians as they may not be your cup of tea. When someone is “dying” on stage it makes me cringe and I feel like crying for them, so it makes a miserable evening out’ (TMIA). Many audience members spoke about this sense of seeing themselves as the comedian, but as an impossibly braver incarnation. Comments included: ‘That’s my voice, that’s what I enjoy – the comedian is saying what I’ve always wanted to say but have never been able to find the words to say’ (TMIA); and ‘That’s the relationship between the comic and their audience – people can imagine them saying such things, and especially with the outrageous comedian, they think “I wish I had the courage to say that”’. Stand-up comedy may appear to require no obvious technical skill – unlike, say, ballet dancing. Seemingly anyone can do it; all that is apparently required is the ability to talk into a microphone. While matters of ‘timing’, and others skills associated with the craft of stand-up comedy, may elicit audience admiration, there is no apparent need for the physical dexterity of an acrobat, or the technical skill of a concert pianist where the training is foregrounded in the performance. The audience identifying with the accessibility of stand-up comedy paradoxically operates in conflict with the sense that they cannot identify with the performer, due to the perception that performing stand-up comedy requires a heightened level of bravery, though this admiration may include a degree of respect for the craft. Nevertheless, the emotional relationship between stand-up comedian and audience member exists in a constant state of tension and peril.

Conclusion To suggest – as Bergson did – that emotion is the enemy of humour, based on this empirical data, is clearly wrong, at least in the context of stand-up comedian–audience relationships. What we see instead is a paradigm shift, with a focus on identification, interaction, empathy, mutual therapy and well-being; as well as a need for recognition. Put simply, the focus is on performance, if one accepts Goffman’s definition of performance as ‘all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way the other participants’ (1959, 15–16). Participants in these laughter acts have entered a performance and play mode, a semi-fiction where emotion, and its consequences, no longer operate in the same way as before. When one enters a comedy club, there is an expectation of laughter; and in a UCLTV mini-lecture on ‘The Neuroscience of Laughter’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7lE2cl2zFo), neurologist Sophie Scott argues that the brain prepares to enter a laughter mode whenever there is an expectation of laughter. In short, it performs. What is needed now is a performance-based model of humour – one that places emotion in the experience of human interactions, and draws from a wider range of disciplines, including neuroscience. From here, an understanding of humour’s

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relationship with emotion may finally begin to resolve some of the problems and contradictions that exist in current models. Source: Tim Miles (2014) ‘No greater foe? Rethinking emotion and humour, with particular attention to the relationship between audience members and stand-up comedians’, Comedy Studies, 5:1, 12–19.

References Bergson, Henri. 2008. On Laughter. Translated by Cloudesley and Fred Rothwell. Rockville, MD: Arc Manor. Cohen, Ted. 1976. ‘Notes on Metaphor.’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36: 249–259. Cook, William. 1994. Ha Bloody Ha: Comedians Talking. London: Fourth Estate. Coser, Rose. 1959. ‘Some Social Functions of Laughter: A Study of Humor in a Hospital Setting.’ Human Relations 12 (2): 171–182. Denscombe, Martyn. 1998. The Good Research Guide: For Small-Scale Research Projects. Maidenhead: Open University. Double, Oliver. 2005. Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-up Comedy. London: Methuen. Dunbar, R.M. et al. 2011. ‘Social Laughter is Correlated with an Elevated Pain Threshold.’ Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences. http://www.professormarkvanvugt.com/files/Sociallaughter-is-correlated-with-an-elevated-pain-threshold.pdf. Accessed May 13, 2012. Fortier, Mark. 2002. Theory/Theatre. London: Routledge. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin. Griffiths, Trevor. 1976. Comedians. London: Faber & Faber. Hobbes, Thomas. 1651. Leviathan. Project Guttenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3207. Accessed April 20, 2010. Husserl, Edmund. 1964. The Idea of Phenomenology. Translated by William P. Alston and George Nakhnikian. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Hyncer, R.H. 1985. ‘Some Guidelines for the Phenomenological Analysis of Interview Data.’ Human Studies 8 (3): 279–303. King, Nigek, and Horrocks, Christine. 2010. Interviews in Qualitative Research. London: SAGE. Kuipers, Giselinde. 2008. ‘The Sociology of Humor.’ In The Primer of Humor Research, edited by Victor Raskin, 361–398. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Laing, R.D. 1967. The Politics of Experience. Pantheon Books: New York. Lockyer, Sharon and Lynne Myers. 2011. ‘“It’s About Expecting the Unexpected”: Live Stand-up Comedy from the Audiences’ Perspective.’ Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 8 (2): 188–196. Morreall, John. 2008. ‘Philosophy and Religion.’ In The Primer of Humor Research, edited by Victor Raskin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Palmer, Jerry. 1994. Taking Humour Seriously. London and New York: Routledge. Pollio, H.R., T. Henley, and C.B. Thompson. 1997. The Phenomenology of Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Provine, Robert. 2000. Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. London: Faber & Faber. Reason, Matthew. 2004. ‘Theatre Audiences and Perceptions of “Liveness” in Performance.’ Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 1 (2). http://www.participations.org/volume% 201/issue%202/1_02_reason_article.htm. Accessed December 25, 2012. Ritchie, Chris. 2012. Performing Live Comedy. London: Methuen. States, O. Bert. 2007. ‘The Phenomenological Attitude.’ In Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, 26–36. Michigan: University of Michigan.

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Contributor Tim Miles In addition to his publications for Intellect, Tim published two book chapters on the Belfast playwright Gary Mitchell. His main area of research, however, was humour and comedy, and his PhD looked at stand-up comedy, drawing from performance theory, humour theory and phenomenology. He was Book Reviews Editor for Comedy Studies and sat on its Editorial Board. Tim was also a highly experienced teacher, having lectured at five UK universities.

Appendix 1 The comedians •

•

•

•

• •

• •

Russell Brand (RB) spent some time appearing on the comedy circuit before having much success, the length of his apprenticeship perhaps due to drug and alcohol addiction. In 2000 he reached the final of the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year. He then developed a style that commented on his addiction issues, and was provocative in its sexual content. His 2004 solo show, Better Now, was about heroin addiction, and his 2005 show was called Eroticised Humour. Jimmy Carr (JC) is perhaps the UK’s most popular live stand-up comedian at present, continuously touring throughout the year. In 2003, he sold out an entire month’s run at the Edinburgh festival. He has released six DVDs of his live shows, and has performed around the world. He also makes many appearances on television, being a regular on shows such as QI and Would I Lie to You. Ken Dodd (KD) has a career as a stand-up comedian spanning almost 60 years. He has been very popular for most of this time, despite the changes in comedy fashions, and was still touring at the age of 84 in 2012. His rapid-fire style of delivery, one-liners and catch phrases (‘What a lovely day for. . .’) have remained similar for decades. His shows are known for being long, and containing thousands of individual jokes. Shappi Khorsandi (SK) began performing stand-up comedy at Joe Wilson’s Comedy Madhouse in 1997. The daughter of an Iranian refugee, her heritage forms a strong theme in her material. The last 10 years have seen her appear numerous times on television and radio, while continuing to gig and tour as a stand-up comedian. Her solo show, Dirt Looks and Hopscotch, toured in the spring of 2012. Shaun McHugh (SMC) began performing stand-up comedy about a year ago, during which time he has performed at 32 gigs, the majority being unpaid ‘open’ spots. Marina O’Shea (MO’S) is one half of the comedy double-act ‘O’Shea and Ogilvie’, formed in 2011. They have performed at a variety of venues and events, including theatres, comedy clubs and music festivals. They have also appeared on all-female comedy events for ‘What the Frock’ and ‘Funny Women’. Dave Pitt (DP) is a relatively inexperienced stand-up comedian, performing mainly in the West Midlands (some 35 gigs since June 2011). The majority of his gigs have been unpaid ‘open’ spots. Robin Williams (RW) has been performing stand-up comedy since the 1970s, often breaking box office records for stand-up comedy. After an absence of six years, during which time he established himself as a Hollywood film star, Williams returned to performing live stand-up comedy in 2009.

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Appendix 2 Referencing • • • • • •

‘TMQ’ denotes an audience quotation from the anonymous online questionnaire conducted by myself. ‘TMIA’ denotes a quotation from an anonymous audience member from an interview conducted by myself. ‘TMISU-XX’ denotes a quotation from a named stand-up comedian from an interview conducted by myself, with XX being the participant’s initials. ‘AYI-XX’ denotes a quotation from a named stand-up comedian from an interview conducted by Alan Yentob for the BBC1 documentary The Art of Stand-up Comedy, with XX being the participant’s initials. ‘DFG-XX’ denotes a quotation from a named stand-up comedian from an interview conducted by Dawn French for the BBC4 documentary Girls Who Do Comedy (2007), with XX being the participant’s initials. ‘DFB-XX’ denotes a quotation from a named stand-up comedian from an interview conducted by Dawn French for the BBC1 documentary Boys Who Do Comedy (2007), with XX being the participant’s initials.

Chapter 13

The roots of alternative comedy? – The alternative story of 20th Century Coyote and Eighties Comedy (4:1) Lloyd Peters

Context It is welcome and unsurprising that with the passage of time a more objective analysis of the 1980’s comedy scene can now commence. The term alternative comedy had been claimed at its most basic – allegedly defined by comic stand-ups Malcolm Hardee and Tony Allen – as an alternative to the mainstream live comedy. But there is no denying that it is a broad, over-used (and often mis-used) term that covered a multiplicity of performers and performance styles that flowered in the early 1980s. Against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s administrations (1979–1983 and 1983– 1987) and the discordant soundtrack of rebellious punk music, comedy performers as diverse as Keith Allen, Alexei Sayle, Rik Mayall, John Hegley and French and Saunders enjoyed burgeoning success. Most would eventually be appropriated, assimilated (and inevitably re-packaged) into the mainstream of television with shows such as The Young Ones (BBC 1982–1984), French and Saunders (BBC 1987–2005) and Saturday Live (Channel 4 1985–1987). This ‘new wave’ brand – it was too varied to be called a movement – coincided with the birth of a new alternative television broadcaster, namely Channel 4 who was established to commission ‘minority’ interest programming (commenced 2 November 1982). This was a perfect springboard to harness the talents of Peter Richardson who ran The Comic Strip (1980–1981) (at the Boulevard Theatre in the Raymond Revue bar, London) together with other defecting comedians (from the more aggressive Comedy Store) in The Comic Strip Presents series (1982–present) and whose Five Go Mad in Dorset was screened on the new Channel’s launch day. What is often conveniently over-looked is that the majority of the performers on the alternative comedy scene at this time – and it tended at first to be principally a Londoncentric circuit – delivered quite evidently non-political content. There were notable exceptions such as Alexei Sayle (the first and regular Master of Ceremonies of The Comedy Store), Tony Allen, Jim Barclay and Pauline Melville who, probably due to their radical fringe theatre roots, could be described as confronting political issues directly. Attacks on Thatcher were a staple component of their stand-up sets. Sayle, with his Stalinist parental influence, also often turned his ire on The Labour Party’s inability to effectively confront the Thatcherite agenda. However, it must be said that most performers of this time were quite conservative (small ‘c’) in content and form. Stylistically the majority of the stand-up comedians adopted the traditional cabaret/music hall and heightened persona modus operandi. However the traditional set-up, development and punch-line structure was often devoid

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of the ‘killer’ pay-off – outrage, passion and rage rather than neat funny ‘closure’ was more the order of the day. An audience wasn’t there to please – but to confront. This was the ‘new’ world of challenge and attitude in which, notably Keith Allen would hurl back the Comedy Store ashtrays at an unappreciative audience from whence they came. However, the most outraged and radical of these performers still appeared to confirm the notion that despite the left-wing stance, comedy remains a ‘conservative’ art-form in that material must register with what is already accepted in an audience member in order to trigger a response. As Simon Critchley identifies in On Humour (Thinking in Action) (2002), a joke-teller and audience agree a: . . . tacit social contract . . . namely some agreement about the world in which we find ourselves as the implicit background to the joke. There has to be some tacit consensus or implicit shared understanding as to what constitutes joking ‘for us’ as to which linguistic or visual routines are recognized as joking. . .. Joking is a game that players only play successfully when they both understand and follow the rules. (2002: 4) Others might characterize this phenomenon as simply preaching, (or rather joshing), to the converted. There was a second sub-section of alternative performers of the time, such as Randolph the Remarkable (one big belly and one small plastic bowl of water), John Hegley (offbeat poet with Glasses) and Julian Clary (promoted as the Joan Collins Fan Club – a duologue between Julian and Fanny the dog) that subverted the stand-up form. These were in the main curiosity, unusual acts that were deemed alternative by the nature they were not the ordinary or mainstream fare one would expect to see on a comedy line-up. The third distinctive sub-section that I would identify at this time, and which I would argue, were the most visibly influential of the alternative performers (in that they were appropriated more readily by television), were the character comedians. This was not stand-up or novelty performance – these were often improvised (or based on improv), character-led short sketches exemplified by the likes of The Oblivion Boys (Steve Frost and Mark Arden), French and Saunders and the surreal Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer.1 One of the most successful duos of the comedy clubs of this time, The Dangerous Brothers (Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson) developed these characters and skills from their time with 20th Century Coyote at Manchester University only four years earlier. It is due to the major impact of this character-led form on alternative comedy and its continuing influence today (on what I like to call post-alternative comedy), that the roots of this comedy are the principal focus of attention in this article.

Birth of Coyote It is undeniable that the cultural and political context of the time are essential to understanding the roots of 1980s UK character-based comedy. However, only when an analysis of the personnel involved placed in a specific geographic location can the full picture emerge. The continual comedic interchange of the five members that made up 20th Century Coyote: Lloyd Peters, Rik Mayall, Mike Redfern, Mark Dewison and Ade Edmondson – played a major part in developing comedy character routines, which were to feature later in their shows. Indeed, the

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relationships and ‘lazzi’ (comedy business) they established were akin to a continual long-form improvisation – highly amusing to those involved and quite tiresome to those who were not, including their lecturers. However, it is self-evident that most of the comedy groups through the ages owe their success to an intimate understanding of each performer’s strengths and weaknesses. It is where a group’s timing is honed and developed to a stage where the unknowing spectator would describe the comedy as ‘intuitive’ and ‘instinctive – the performer knows that spontaneous improvisation takes a lot of rehearsal. It is important to recognize and credit the roots of Coyote’s character-based sketch comedy. Leaving the influence of The Marx Brothers to one side for another article (concerning film to television to theatre influence), radio and television antecedents such as The Goons (BBC 1951–1960), Spike Milligan’s Q series (BBC 1969–1982), Michael Bentine’s It’s a Square World (BBC, 1960–1964), Do Not Adjust Your Set (ITV 1967–1969) and most importantly for the baby-boom generation, Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC 1969–1974) were all pre-cursors that created the fractured, nonnarrative, off-beat sketch shows of 20th Century Coyote. What directly impacted upon the students in 1975 were the plays and playwrights introduced as part of their drama course. Major influences were the Commedia dell’Arte stock character types, the surrealist/dadist classics such as Ubu Roi (Jarry), the Absurdists such as Ionesco (Rhinocerous) and most importantly the Restoration Comedy of Manner playwrights, especially Moliere – Tartuffe, The Misanthrope and Ben Jonson’s Comedy of Humours (Volpone). Also Grotowski and Artaud had a bearing especially concerning concepts of physical performance connected with the Theatre of Cruelty. Significantly, it is no coincidence that the first major show in which Peters, Mayall and Edmonson appeared was the 1976 first year production of Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. Some of the performances were open-air, which provided invaluable voice-projection training in readiness for the noisy pub environments they were to experience at Band on the Wall. The larger than life characters, needing projection and exaggerated delivery to communicate (especially outside), was the performance template employed for all 20th Century Coyote shows. More than that, what the students stole from Comedy of Humours/Manners’ texts was the opportunity to present bawdy characters enmeshed in scurrilous plots. What was undeniably attractive about Restoration plays was that they presented flamboyantly rude and crude characters often declaiming sexual innuendo and offensive dialogue. All of human life was here to be mercilessly plundered – pompous twits, feral low-life, the devious, the sex-starved, the deceivers, the pretenders. Mistaken identity and deception, disguise and reveal, shock and horror were the staple plot devices. The plays presented a delicious opportunity to ridicule the pretentious and the pompous whether they were from upper or working class. These characters and narratives formed the basis of every 20th Century Coyote play to follow and beyond – all performed from the privileged status of a comfortable middle class drama student. The intentions of social correction through satire that the Restoration playwrights espoused were, in truth, lofty aims not prioritized by the Coyote troupe, although desires to introduce more satirical wit were discussed (and dismissed) at subsequent company meetings. These extra-curricula shows served as a release from the more formal academic rigours of university life, such as they were, and served as an opportunity for showing off increasingly skilful comedy techniques, which was their passion. However, the Restoration themes that presented social unease and injustice appeared attractively contemporary given the political climate of the Thatcher administration. To the politically leftish-leaning

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students, there were a large number of scandals to expose and a multitude of rich people to satirize in the mid-1970s and it appeared entirely appropriate to resurrect a sixteenth-/ seventeenth-century genre in all its grotesque excessiveness. As an undergraduate studying Drama (B.A. Hons) at Manchester University (from 1975 to 1978), the group’s founder Peters met his first recruit fellow drama student Rik Mayall when both housed in the Manchester University Hall’s of Residence at Owen’s Park, Fallowfield. What united the pair was their love of the absurd, the surreal, the irreverent and the cheap burgers from the so-called Arm-pit – the nearby Canadian Charcoal Pit takeaway. Also they both had a penchant for silly voices and like many of their generation, quoted large sections of Monty Python sketches, which were seen as de rigeur ‘coolness’ in the mid-1970s. The Manchester Drama course also encouraged students like Peters and Mayall to experiment off-curricula, as impromptu performances were staged every week – especially Monday evenings – at the famous Stephen Joseph Studio – the ramshackle converted church that stood at the heart of the more formal, polished Manchester University (Owens) campus. Many of the unsung troupes of this time engaging in bizarre and risqué absurdism at the Stephen Joseph Studio certainly had an influence on the new intake. It has to be said that the artistic atmosphere of the University Drama Department at this time (1975–1978) was indeed rich with innovative talent and certainly contributed to a general atmosphere of invincibility and experiment – a ‘we can do anything’ attitude. This was not the usual empty student arrogance – many of these particular graduating students subsequently did make a name for themselves in the performance and media industries.2 In its own way, the scruffy studio (and the drama students that inhabited it) stood as a metaphorical two-fingers to the straight-laced academics that surrounded it. The quite unmerited superiority complex that the Drama students felt was exemplified by the fact that they were allowed to call their lecturers by their first names – not a privilege open to many others studying at Owens. Perhaps it was also the chip-on-the-shoulder envy that they were not at Oxford or Cambridge. Those interested in comedy saw their rough, crude experiments at the Studio as an antidote to the Cambridge Footlights (1883–present) and Establishment Club (1961–1964) ‘cleverness’, relying more on vague parodies or grotesque caricature rather than well-constructed sharp political or social satire. However, it was not until their second year when Mayall and Peters moved from Owens Park Halls (with two mutual friends from the English course) into Lime Cottage, Wilmslow Road in increasingly fashionable East Didsbury, that the seeds of Coyote were sown. Myth had it that Lime Cottage once housed the servants who attended the larger, grander house next door. The Cottage entered student mythology as HQ for anarchic meetings and wild parties. Two of Rik Mayall’s former school pals from the King’s School, Worcester – Mike Redfern and Mark Dewison – who had just enrolled on the first year also to study Drama at Manchester University were frequent visitors to the Cottage. As they were of like comedic mind, they were also enlisted to join the embryonic comedy band that was to become 20th Century Coyote – a suitably appropriate bad pun named by Hollywood film fan Peters – mainly because he possessed the 20th Century Fox theme music on vinyl. The music became the signature tune that opened and closed all Coyote shows. Needless to say, copyright was not cleared. The final member of the troupe, fellow second year Drama student Ade Edmondson, was recruited rather late in the day (October1976) mainly due to a suspicion that his humour was a little too refined for the group’s anarchy – especially as his favourite

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comedy inspiration at that time was alleged to be Tom Stoppard. However, as Rik Mayall put it in an interview with Martyn Palmer (1994), Ade had to be included because, ‘he had a red corduroy jacket, with strategic rips in it, with little John Lennon glasses and really ripped trousers. He was totally cool as far as I was concerned – and he had a motorbike’. A section of an episode of the documentary series Comedy Map (BBC 2007) hosted by Peters and Redfern traced The Cottage as the inspiration for The Young Ones (BBC 1982–1984). Anarchic parties, un-washed dishes and motorcycles being driven up staircases all figured in the lives of the residents of The Cottage and future television storylines. As Mike Redfern put it: It really was living in filth, living in squalor, living a party life and fitting studying around it. (BBC 2007) As Peters concurred: We didn’t know how to look after ourselves. It was the first time we were away. (BBC 2007) Crucially, the BBC programme omitted the central information that 20th Century Coyote was created there.3 Peters registered the name on 1 January 1977 (as a theatrical agency in error) at The Cottage address some three months after the group first performed at Band on the Wall. Presumably it still is registered there even though The Cottage and adjacent mansion were demolished in the 1990s to make way for a nursing care home.

Coyote uncaged The respected, if slightly dilapidated, jazz venue Band on the Wall, Swan Street was home to Manchester University’s semi-professional undergraduate theatre troupes (such as Snoh Fun and Jester) since March 1976. The new owners, local jazz musician Steve Morris and his business partner Frank Cusick had bought the old George and Dragon pub in 1975. They had the fore-sight to offer the space to all musical genres not just jazz and rode the new and post-punk wave with great effect – The Buzzcocks and The Fall played there. They also had the foresight to encourage the growing student population through the doors in any way possible, including lunchtime drama. It should be stressed that the idea of visiting a pub or club to watch theatre, not to mention comedy, was a rather rare, radical and imaginative alternativeuse concept in the mid-seventies. The marketing of comedy as the ‘new rock and roll’ was an unthinkably distant notion. However, the novelty of theatre activity in a pub was now worthy of press attention. As journalist Alan Sanders put it under the subheading ‘Fringe Benefits’ in the Manchester arts paper New Manchester Review (a fanzine and listings magazine which was the precursor for the now defunct City Life): Three cheerful Mancunians told me that they had thought their scene was ‘playing 501 at darts, playing cards’. They had never seen anything like this before, but would

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now ‘go out of their way to see it’. As one put it, ‘I count myself as working-class, and theatre always seemed something middle-class and not for me. I didn’t know what to expect, but it was good; I enjoyed it’. (Sanders 1976) This reinforces an argument not always clearly delineated with respect to northern-based comedy in the 1970s – that the performers, offering non-elitist, unstructured free entertainment, had stumbled unwittingly upon the Zeitgeist of the time – an alternative type of ‘punk’ entertainment. It was surely no coincidence that on 4 June 1976, The Sex Pistols played Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in what came to be regarded as one of the most influential rock shows ever. Something new was in the air and those in the ‘arts’ vicinity could not help being infected by the fallout. A full-time union official said ‘I think this is giving us the indication to go to the theatre. I would never have gone, you know, but the kind of plays which are put on here (Band on the Wall) are giving people the indication that there is something better in life than television, and things of that nature . . . what we have seen here has generated an interest’. (Sanders 1976) Described on the hand-drawn posters adorning the Band on the Wall club walls and windows as Lunchtime Theatre, the Coyote shows certainly had their roots in cabaret and vaudeville. The Coyote press release announced that: Band on the Wall, Swan Street, already established as one of the leading jazz centres in the North, has for some time now been experimenting with lunchtime pub drama. . .. the actors work from unscripted scenarios especially formulated for pub audiences. (Press release 20th Century Coyote, 5 November 1976) The shows were specially formulated, as detailed below. However, with no sense of destiny, the Band on the Wall was also seen by the Coyote troupe as a possible route to apply for a much-valued Equity card (The Actors Union). This valuable commodity recognized the performer as a professional and allowed the holder to work on stage and television. Equity was a ‘closed-shop’ union at the time and membership required four professional contracted engagements. It was common knowledge that being described as a Variety artist was an easier route to gain an Equity card as it had less onerous membership restrictions. This could explain why many shows at this time, including those at Band on the Wall, were described as ‘Cabaret’ or ‘Variety’ performances. However this quest for ‘The Card’ was to prove fruitless for the Manchester University drama pub performers – the Thursday, Friday and Saturday lunchtime shows were not officially contracted. Unsurprisingly, handing round a bucket at the end of the performance was not recognized by Equity as paid professional work. As resident company at Band on the Wall since October 1976, a new Coyote show was initially devised every fortnight and staged Thursday, Friday and Saturday lunchtimes. This was a punishing schedule for those expected to write essays and attend the odd lecture and the time-scale was eventually amended so as to produce a new show every three

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weeks. This was reason enough to ‘employ’ a stage manager and props gatherer – Joanne Bolt (daughter of screenwriter Robert Bolt of Man for All Seasons (1966) fame) – although ‘employ’ meant no remuneration, just the kudos of involvement in the grand comedy experiment. What was unusual at the time about 20th Century Coyote is that it combined all the elements described above – the surreal, the absurd, bawdy Restoration farce, fractured TV sit-com with long-form theatre improvisation – a rather inflated academic term simply meaning – ‘making it up as you go along’.4 The Coyote shows were amalgams of all these forms – often improvised round embryonic plots and recognized character personas, but usually, with an absurd twist. The ‘genre’ was closest to farce and slapstick5 – unsurprising when Peters and Mayall were both enthusiastic advocates of Laurel and Hardy. Its appealing energy was due to the likelihood that anything could happen during the 40minute shows – and frequently did. If things went wrong, this was seen as strength not weakness. Crucial to the success of the group was that the members of Coyote possessed complimentary and at the same time antagonistic performance styles that helped develop and cement stock comedy personas and which in turn suggested narrative. Mayall often played the immature spoilt child – sex-crazed and frustrated – constantly sparring with Peters – loud, surreal and crazy – an homage to the Marx Brothers; Redfern often played the sardonic voice of ill-reason; Dewison the dark, brooding and sinister interloper; Edmondson – weirdly white collar and off-beat – the bank manager with a grass skirt. It was a glorious character mix that helped create imaginative, original comedy conflicts. For example, in their second show The Church Bizarre – a Fete worse than Death (1976) the farcical plot of multiple tragedies at a church fete saw the arrival of a non-naturalistic, expressionist Death figure, costumed in full black cloak with accompanying scythe. Whilst displaying a rather pathetic Danse Macabre, Mayall as Death sarcastically complains that he has more important things to attend to than a bunch of country yokels who had drunk too much cider – there were plane crashes to organize. This juxtaposition of heightened farce with stylized personification more at home in a mediaeval mummers play was an imaginative juxtaposition of styles. The visitation of Death was ‘borrowed’ from the Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal (1957), which was performed as a playtext by the Drama students in their first year. The Death character was resurrected years later, Mayall playing the role in Maurice Dobbs Makes a Movie (Peters 1988) and Wishbone (1989) films written and directed by Peters. It was also used as a character and plot device in episodes of The Young Ones and Bottom (BBC 1991–1995) television series.

Dead Funny The first official Coyote show Dead Funny was performed Thursday, Friday and Saturday lunchtime 14–16 October 1976 to approximately 35–40 people per show – each performance lasting approximately 40 minutes. Rehearsals, including full dress rehearsals, were usually arranged in the evenings following lectures and all Coyote members attended to shape and develop the scene-by-scene skeleton template originally drafted by Peters and Mayall at The Cottage. There was no external director guidance - this was collaborative, collective play making. Characters were allocated and extra scenes added (from thirteen scenes in Draft One to 26 scenes in Draft Two) all by mutual agreement. When the troupe rehearsed briefly in

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the space, extra business was added, for example: using the supporting columns at Band on the Wall to help the many surprise reveals. At that time (before refurbishment) the sightlines to view the stage were rather poor but the columns were used by Coyote to mask characters and help delineate an entrance/exit point – a type of Brechtian wing area. The original, hand-scrawled scene-by-scene templates for Dead Funny still exist and provide a useful insight into how the seemingly improvised comedy was carefully structured. In brief, the narrative presents a farcical tale about a murderous doctor on the run, mistaken identity, curious workmen and a policeman investigating a dead body at a party that isn’t dead at all. Below I summarize the lined A4 scene-by-scene template sheet (Draft Two), headed on the first page by the character note that: ‘everyone stupid’. I have attempted to reproduce the original pagination, margin notes, quotation marks, (incorrect) scene numbering, underscoring and higher case lettering – an indication of key dialogue and the importance of the main action – what academics might describe as Inciting Incident and major Turning Points. 1 20th century Fox (twice.) Mark 2 Rick + Mark enter – Discuss Party – Don’t see Body Describe Dr Jeckyll-Hyde Knackers in detail from paper. EXIT BOTH. 3 APPEAR – SPEECH – Perfect woman – FIT ON certain words – TITS – have a fit on. TWITCH –innate insanity – “I’M SANE as the next man.” 5 ABOUT TO CARVE when they enter – pushed away from body. *TITS + rhyming words Who are you talking to? 6 Pretend to be postman. – EXIT + leave. 7 Mark + Rick – talking about party – Broom business//Drugs –//What did at party Girls. 8 Discover body by Rick sitting on it. Panicky. More excited. – get a drink from the bar – Gin and tonic. 9 Silly things to do – “Hula Kula” More panic. 10 Knock – think its Police – “Drugs squad” Draped. Vice squad”. tablecloth. 11 Im “Table Mender” – “Have you a Table” just a mention. “man eating bicycle pump” with a meat cleaver I’m the Dr. 12 “Excuse us a moment – I (Lloyd) approach the body * about to cut her bits off What’s wrong with her – pull back the cover 13 Get rid of me * She’s sleeping Fit – lips 14 What to do? – coffee table – Ring – The number – Removals 22222 “They can’t come” 15 Knock Removals Man – Garden Shears. “Doesn’t he look like Doctor” to audience Mike

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Pantomime – ‘Oh no he doesn’t” like Table Mender”. Oh No – “I’m French” – “J’habite” he’s French. 16 In a huddle Mark + Rick – just about to cut tits – Table falls. – what are you doing? – I rush out. EXIT. 17 Stand up as statue by the chimney – put her in the chimney and burn her. You look like postman. I’m not – more authorative] Enter Knock I burst Weapon sabre. in – What are you doing? – Dancing Instructor with limp. Dancing Instructor. I’ll give her a dance – she’s too tired Looks ill – I’ll look at her I’m a doctor – prove it – Marlene Dietrich – He’s German we can trust him – “maybe she is ill?” Go get some hot water and towels: What’s the matter it worked. I reenter early send them off again. 18 I’m alone – another bit of raid – 19 knife raised renter Mark + Rick – shriek 20 I pop Tit – shriek 19 Turn round see Mark, Rick – we all shriek. We’re all shrieking; Mike sits up 20 We turn round I shriek – Then Mark + Rick shriek. 21 When we find out not a woman – shriek together 22 When policeman we shriek 23 Mike’s speech – ball + chain. 24 Final speech 1 Who you were – who many years on trail What you doing how you find out “Hot tip” * Arrests me 25 Then – pleased applause congratulating police – list of charges Turn to Mark + Rick > 1 not reporting a dead body – not alone a policeman/woman – not dead at all. list of charges lot of them. Impersonating “Let alone a table mender” 26 Moral of this story. 20th century Fox Music interrupts The moral of this story A stiff in time saves Crime Interruption 20th century Fox “Then play it” again cmon then. Even on a cursory reading, it is evident that this earliest of alternative comedy shows could not be described as ‘non-sexist, non-racist’. The pantomimic scenario is deliberately crude and rude and owes more to a Ray Cooney sex farce or Carry On film than ground-breaking comedy. The reception to the show was mixed – and continued to

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divide the audience. Indeed, at the time there were vocal critics – some of them Manchester University students – who found the humour crass and infantile compared to their more lofty, well-made dramas that had preceded Coyote’s residency at Band on the Wall. One current student at the time described the material as ‘garbage’ although admitted to still having enjoyed it. A pejorative criticism, that became the common currency of back-handed insult for this form of character comedy years later, was that the humour was ‘wacky and zany’ – the latter word interestingly derived from late sixteenth-century Italian word zani which was the stock name of servants acting as clowns in Commedia dell’Arte. Probably it was a more appropriate observation than the critics intended. However, the Coyote troupe knew in their bones this was the start of something big, as Rik Mayall said after the Saturday performance on 16 October 1976. It’s great ’cos we can at last show our potential, show what we’ve got. What was difficult to see at the time was the prevailing cultural context of mid-1970s Manchester. First, Dead Funny was a product of its age – more deliberately ‘punk’ rebellion and rudely anti-establishment than politically correct polemic. Also, and notwithstanding 1960s’ trail-blazers in this area 6 it was amongst the first of its breed to present non-elitist (antielitist), free, comedy entertainment in a pub – certainly in the north-west. It celebrated being intellectually lightweight and easy to digest with a pint. Also the humour was more self-deprecating in reality than comes across on the page – all the characters were male, infantile losers, incapable of establishing serious relationships. This is a predictable consequence considering the absence of any female acting members of Coyote. The template of the male loser inadequate was to become a staple stock character type in virtually every sit-com then and now. Without making too many profound connections, it perhaps mirrors the well-documented sociological and psychological phenomena surrounding the increased insecurity of men’s status in British society. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that this form of character-led TV comedy continued to attract criticism specifically its tendency to be male dominated and overtly sexist. Indeed Alexei Sayle – a regular character in The Young Ones – was a vocal critic of the banality of this type of ‘brainless bimbo’ comedy. (Allegedly Sayle used the term to describe Bottom.) This was an example of an increasing antagonism in the 1980s between the politically driven stand-ups at The Comedy Store and London club circuit, and those delivering physical character-based comedy. This is probably due the fact that the latter didn’t comfortably fit the ‘non-sexist, non-racist’ template. It could also be argued that because of the multitude of celebrated male performers at the time (French and Saunders excepted) that it fuelled, however tendentiously, the divisive ‘women aren’t funny’ controversy. Indeed the criticisms increased as the comedy transferred to the small screen, for example, the banning of The Dangerous Brothers sketch Kinky Sex on Saturday Live and the plethora of disparagement aimed at the short-lived Filthy Rich and Catflap series (BBC 1987). Relatively contemporary performers of this form of comedy such as The League of Gentleman (BBC 1999-2002) continue to face similar scrutiny. As Gamze Toylan identifies in her article on The League of Gentlemen in which she quotes Linda Badley (1995): . . . ‘postmodern’ texts depict the ‘postmodern sexual terror’, which ‘has become part of a much larger anxiety about gender, identity, morality, power, and loss of control, [. . .]’ (Toylan 2012: 47)

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I would argue that those anxieties are not solely confined to the postmodern era, but were also evident in the pre/early postmodern era of the mid-1970s. Indeed the consequence of these anxieties was that the tension between the ‘non-sexist, non-racist’ purists (or those imposters hiding behind that title) and the character-led non-purists certainly increased when television found it easier to assimilate the latter rather than the former.

Coyote rampant Following the success of Dead Funny – over £10 collected in the bucket was a success not to be sniffed at by impoverished students – 20th Century Coyote produced six more alternative Cabaret shows at The Band on the Wall over a seven-month period. These were: The Church Bizarre – a Fete worse than Death Who Is Dick Treacle? Phantom of the Cabaret The Tpying Error The Anniversary Show Ron and the King’s nubile daughter Day of the Deckchair – (written and performed by Peters and Ade Edmondson) was a spin-off show presented at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 1978). All the shows presented a similar formula of grotesque and instantly recognizable character types, farcical plots and improvised dialogue guided by pre-constructed scene-by-scene structures. Certainly a cult following was created and the troupe were offered extra bookings (a gig in Guide Bridge, Ashton Under-Lyne). Accounts compiled by Peters reveal that after expenses (props, costumes publicity posters, photographs and even ‘acting wages’ (£5.00) the ‘Balance of Expenses Sheet No. 4’ revealed that on 19 March 1977, The 20th Century Coyote company had net assets of £20.37. In the final analysis, Coyote created its own curious comedy sub-genre – a complex and original mix of extended sketches, improvisatory routines, direct audience address, monologues – a grotesque, slapstick sit-com for the stage. The shows were intentionally ‘naughty’ and risqué, embarrassing even – a deliberate antidote to the academic rigors of the well-made plays the students were obliged to study. Perhaps it is more than coincidence that Gamze Toylan describes The League of Gentlemen’s ‘genre hybridity’ as: . . . complex, with its roots in the English comedy tradition that blends the grotesque and absurd. . .. music hall and variety theatre, as well as specific creators like Monty Python. The comedy style, distinct and dark in its own right, interweaves the pleasure of breaking taboos, the formation of oppositions such as exclusion and inclusion, and the usage of comedy of social embarrassment and bodily wit, which in turn combines the feelings of pleasure and discomfort. (Toylan 2012: 47) I would argue that precisely the same amalgam of styles and influences characterized all the Coyote shows – a direct antecedent of the Gentlemen. The shows as a whole certainly

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served as a template for many characters developed on subsequent stage and sit-coms in the 1980s, including Rik (the ‘c’ now dropped) in The Young Ones (BBC2 1982–1984). As the BBC comedy website (2012) puts it: It was the style and the characterization of The Young Ones, rather than its stories, which was entirely new. Never before had violence of such degree, squalor, physical foulness, blood, sex and death, all been used as such a regular part of a flagship comedy programme. (Anon 2012) But of course it had all been seen on-stage at The Band on the Wall in every one of the Coyote shows some five years before the first Young Ones episode (in 1982).

Coyote migrates south 20th Century Coyote never formally disbanded – in fact the name was used as by Mayall and Edmondson at the Comic Strip as late as 1981. But as Mayall and Peters entered their final year at university in September 1977 the commitment to performing together as the original five-some waned. Their decision to leave Lime Cottage – that incubator of anarchic ideas – and look for alternative accommodation in Manchester effectively meant that the central energy source of the troupe had dissipated. The Cottage – the catalyst location for constructing all the skeleton plots – had been passed to the next generation of Drama students. Concurrently, the location that spawned the atmosphere of rebellion – The Band on the Wall – was also looking to move on and concentrate more on lunchtime music than ‘cabaret’ theatre. However, Coyote members continued to work together in a range of productions either as part of their drama course curricula – for example, The Government Inspector and A Winters Tale (Peters and Mayall were the clowns) – or as part of extra-curricula shows such as Edward Bond’s The Sea.7 Following graduation in 1978, Peters, Mayall and Edmondson moved to London to seek work as actors. Their search happily coincided with the opening of The Comedy Store (in 1979) and Comic Strip (in 1980–1981) comedy clubs. Rik created anarchist poet Wick who professed his love for Theatre and Vanessa Redgrave, which featured on Boom Boom . . . Out Go the Lights (1980–1981). He also created Brummie investigator and philosopher Kevin Turvey, which was picked up by the sketch show A Kick Up the Eighties (BBC 1981–1984). He partnered Edmondson to form the loser perverts, The Dangerous Brothers – a stage act that appeared in the TV latenight sketch show Saturday Live (Channel 4). The characters and titles of some of their sketches provide the evidence of the Coyote legacy, for example, Torture and How to Get Off with A Lady. One of the final sketches entitled Kinky Sex was a pure Coyote derivative banned by Channel 4 for being ‘too sexy and too violent’. Adolescent, slapstick and anarchic were some of the kinder comments the material courted – exactly the same criticisms that 20th Century Coyote had attracted some four years previously. In between television drama work (including a Mike Leigh film Home Sweet Home (Leigh 1982) and the iconic Boys from the Blackstuff (BBC 1982), Peters teamed up with another ex-Manchester graduate and school friend Gary Brown to form comedy duo Foot and Mouth. They were regulars at The Comedy Store playing, amongst other characters, pompous aristos Anton and Giles – two twits who would have been well at home in any

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Coyote show. Brown and Peters also ran a comedy club in Covent Garden’s Lamb and Flag pub (in Rose Street) for a short season. They hosted the best of the new comedians at the time including early bookings for Clive Anderson, Paul Merton and Rik Mayall’s anarchist poet Wick. Mark Dewison and Mike Redfern also moved to London to pursue acting careers and both received work as theatre performers. However, in more recent times they subsequently both re-trained, Dewison as a counselor and Redfern as a management training consultant. Mayall and Edmondson collaborated together on a 16mm film directed and produced by Peters – a non-naturalistic adaptation of The Velvet Underground’s off-beat verse song ‘The Gift’ (1980) featuring Edmondson as shmuck Waldo and Mayall as groping boyfriend Bill. It was scheduled to be screened on BBC2 in the 1980s but was pulled due to it being considered too ‘punk’ by the BBC executive producer. Rik Mayall also appeared in a film entitled Le Chat in the Loo (1980) written and directed by Peters, a parody of Bunuel/Dali’s surreal masterpiece Un Chien Andalou (1929). Peters and Mayall last worked together for the recording of the Radio 4 play A Higher Education (2000) written by Peters in which Mayall appeared as the corrupt Professor Don Cruikshank. This off-beat satire, that also features Helen Lederer and Philip Glenister, owes much to the Coyote style combining heightened character types with a farcical, pantomimic performance style. Also like Coyote shows of the past, and unusually for radio drama, some scenes were improvised ‘live’ when recorded. The play was nominated for a Richard Imison First play award and has been repeated many times most recently on Radio 4 Extra on 5 December 2012. Plans for Peters and Mayall to collaborate and write a contemporary stage version of the play have been discussed as recently as February 2013. It hardly needs emphasizing, if more proof were needed, of the longevity of the Coyote legacy.

Coyote – the final howl Given the plethora of talent from an unusually gifted intake of Manchester drama students in the mid-1970s, it was perhaps inevitable that 20th Century Coyote was to be somewhat overlooked. And indeed, there will be critics who argue that Coyote was a rather inconsequential footnote in the great comedy naissance of the 1980s and 1990s. This article attempts to evidence the contrary view and to argue that the tremors of influence from this shortlived company troupe were quite profound and continue to vibrate even today. For instance, a direct line can be traced from the character-led innovations of 20th Century Coyote, through The Dangerous Brothers, and then to The Young Ones, which instilled an anti-mainstream slapstick into the mainstream. Their male-dominated excesses paved the way for the ‘new-laddism’ comedy of the late 1980s and 1990s (exemplified by David Baddiel and Frank Skinner), through TV series such as Men Behaving Badly (BBC 1992– 1995) and beyond to the Little Britain (BBC 2003–2006) series of character-led grotesques. One personality trait that appears to unite many of the characterizations in these shows is the frustrated, male loser – rude, crude and unsuccessful at any personal relationship. This certainly can be traced back to the scenarios of Dead Funny – and Restoration comedy and Commedia dell’ Arte before that. Significantly, the Coyote experience also adds weight to the contested theory that live theatre is indeed the primary engine that fuels innovation – a factory of ideas – that

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television eventually appropriates. The fact of the matter is that the majority of the comedy sketch shows and sit-coms of the 1980s and 1990s had their roots in theatrical experimentation. The invention of the characters and the development of slick timed routines could only come about from months on the club and pub circuit – television has no facility for lengthy rehearsal. This was as true for The League of Gentlemen as it was for 20th Century Coyote and beyond. And it was not the stand-ups alone who were leading the charge of the alternative comedy brand in the 1980s – the character-led comedians, as exemplified by the 20th Century Coyote boys, were certainly in the avant-garde. Source: Lloyd Peters (2013) ‘The roots of alternative comedy? — The alternative story of 20th Century Coyote and Eighties Comedy’, Comedy Studies, 4:1, 5–21.

Notes 1 Vic and Bob were mostly resident at The Tunnel Palladium, The Mitre, Deptford, London (1984–1989). 2 Alumni from the Manchester University 1974–1979 intake include: Tom Watt (sports broadcaster), Gary Brown (BBC Radio producer), Ben Elton (writer and performer), Paul Bradley (actor), Maggie Philbin (TV presenter), Shelagh Stevenson (playwright), Tony Clark (theatre director), Mathew Evans (TV director). 3 What the edit of the BBC programme also intentionally overlooked was that Mike Redfern did not live in The Cottage until he ‘inherited’ the property in 1978 after Mayall and Peters moved out. 4 Often long-form improvisation is traditionally initiated by a word, phrase or character or as the Harold form is defined: punctuated by games. (see Chin 2009: 4) 5 In a recent face-to-face interview with the author (11 February 2013), Rik Mayall insisted that Coyote shows and all subsequent derivatives (Dangerous Brothers, Young Ones, Bottom) had little to do with ‘slapstick’, which suggested staged buffoonery. Mayall prefers the physicalization to be viewed as ‘real violence’ because that was a more accurate description. Looking at scrawled notes Peters made following a company meeting (30 November 1976), there were suggestions from some members to ‘cut down on the slapstick’ in favour of more wit and satire. There is no evidence that subsequent shows reflected this proposal. A suggestion to bring in women and an (outside) director was also rejected as ‘superfluous’ (Peters’ notes 1976). 6 Such as CAST (Cartoon Archetypal Slogan Theatre) a left-wing, variety-based agit-prop theatre company toured art centres, pubs and small theatres in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 7 Directed by Maggie Philbin soon presenter of Multi-Coloured Swapshop (BBC 1976–1982) fame, helmed by Noel Edmonds.

References Anon (2012), ‘BBC – Comedy – The Young Ones’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theyoungones/. Accessed 3 December 2012. Badley, Linda (1995), Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic, London: Greenwood Press, p.14. BBC (1951–1960), The Goons, London: BBC. —— (1960–1964), It’s a Square World, London: BBC. —— (1969–1974), Monty Python’s Flying Circus, London: BBC. —— (1969–1982), Q, London: BBC. —— (1976–1982), Multi-Coloured Swapshop, London: BBC. —— (1980–1981), Boom Boom. . .Out Go the Lights, London: BBC. —— (1981–1984), A Kick Up the Eighties, Scotland: BBC. —— (1982), Boys from the Blackstuff, Ep: ‘Yosser’s Story’, Birmingham: BBC.

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—— (1982–1984), The Young Ones, London: BBC. —— (1987), Filthy Rich and Catflap, London: BBC. —— (1987–2005), French and Saunders, London: BBC. —— (1991–1995), Bottom, London: BBC —— (1992–1995), Men Behaving Badly, London: BBC —— (2003–2006), Little Britain, London: BBC. —— (2007), Comedy Map, Series 1, Manchester: BBC. Bendelack, Steve (dir.) (1999–2002), The League of Gentlemen, writers: Jeremy Dyson, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton, and Reece Shearsmith, London: BBC Television. Bergman, Ingmar (dir.) (1957), The Seventh Seal, performers: Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand and Bengt Ekerot. Sweden: Palisades Tartan. Bunuel, Luis and Dali, Salvador (1929), Un Chien Andalou, France: Ursulines Film Studio. Channel 4 (1982), Five Go Mad in Dorset, London: Comic Strip Presents. —— (1985–1987), Saturday Live, London: C4. Chin, Jason (2009), Long-Form Improvisation & The Art Of Zen: A Manual For Advanced Performers, Bloomington, US: iUniverse, p. 4. Critchley, Simon (2002), On Humour (Thinking in Action), London: Routledge, p. 4. ITV (1967–1969), Do Not Adjust Your Set, Birmingham: ITV. Leigh, Mike (1982), Home Sweet Home, London: BBC. Palmer, Martyn (1994), ‘How We Met: Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmonson’, The Independent, 20 February, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/how-we-met-rik-mayall-and-adrianedmonson-1395270.html. Accessed 3 December 2012. Peters, Lloyd (1980), The Gift, London: Lloyd Peters Productions. —— (1980), Le Chat in the Loo, London: Lloyd Peters Productions. —— (1988), Maurice Dobbs Makes a Movie, Leeds: Red-Roar Films. —— (1989), Wishbone, Leeds: Red-Roar Films. Sanders, Alan (1976), ‘Fringe Benefits’, New Manchester Review, 20, p. 12. Thomas, Polly (dir.) (2000), A Higher Education, writer: Lloyd Peters, performers:Rik Mayall, Helen Lederer and Philip Glenister, Manchester: BBC Radio 4. Toylan, G. (2012), ‘The league of gentlemen and 1900s England: Conflicts and complexities in sexuality and gender at the turn of the century’, Comedy Studies, 3: 1, pp. 41–51. 20th Century Coyote (1976), Dead Funny, Band on the Wall, Manchester. —— (1976), The Church Bizarre – a Fete worse than Death, Band on the Wall, Manchester. —— (1976), Who Is Dick Treacle?, Band on the Wall, Manchester. —— (1976), Phantom of the Cabaret, Band on the Wall, Manchester. —— (1976), The Tpying Error, Band on the Wall, Manchester. —— (1977), The Anniversary Show, Band on the Wall, Manchester. —— (1977), Ron and the King’s Nubile Daughter, Band on the Wall, Manchester. Zinnemann, Fred (dir.) (1966), A Man for All Seasons, writer: Robert Bolt, performers: Paul Scofield, Wendy Hiller, and Robert Shaw, Columbia Pictures.

Contributor Lloyd Peters has lectured at the University of Salford since 1992. In that time he became a Senior Lecturer, Head of Performance, Programme Leader of Fiction Film Production (MA) and TV Documentary (MA) and an internationally published researcher in political performance. He returned to full-time acting and writing commissions in 2018 and was also awarded an Honorary Senior Lectureship by the University of Salford. Peters has been a professional actor, director and writer for 35 years and has received many

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television and radio broadcast commissions. He has worked with a number of the United Kingdom’s leading practitioners, including film director Mike Leigh, Ken Russell, Alan Bleasedale and Michael Wearing. He founded the ‘alternative comedy’ company 20th Century Coyote (with Rik Mayall) whilst studying Drama at Manchester University (1975–1978).

Chapter 14

Life memory archive translation performance memory archive life: textual self-documentation in standup comedy (7:1) Christopher Molineux

Eugenio Barba emphasised the ephemeral nature of theatre by referring to it as ‘the art of the present’ (Barba 1992), but while plays and other forms of theatrical performance have an ephemeral element to them, this element is more consistently and deliberately present in stand-up comedy than almost any other and the title of ‘the art of the present’ would certainly be aptly bestowed upon it. A theatre company’s performances of any given play remain largely consistent in terms of its script, cast, costumes, set, programme and, to a greater or lesser degree, the situations in which the performances are presented. In contrast, the majority of stand-up comedy is consistently, and often deliberately, variable in all these areas. During the course of my time as a professional comedian, I have witnessed that this variability is reflected in the comedian’s textual self-documentation, which is not intended to be definitive and is often meaningless to anyone other than the comedian themselves. This cryptic aspect has ramifications in an archival context because despite Jacques Derrida’s overstatement that ‘nothing is less clear today than the word “archive”’ (Derrida 1995), there is still a tendency to look upon the archive as the emblem of accuracy and ‘the backdrop to all scholarly research’ (Velody 1998). As a result, the self-documentation of the stand-up comedian, being cryptic and devoid of the qualities often sought in archival material, is likely to be perceived as having little value which puts it at some risk of being disregarded or destroyed. In order to determine what value might lie in these documents and to discover more about their creation and functions, I have embarked on a study that involves interviews with comedians, practice as research (PaR) and practice as research in performance (PaRiP). At the time of writing, this study has involved 31 interviews and the subjects were comedians of both genders from the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and India. They ranged in age from 20 to 60 and in experience level from amateur to veterans with over 40 years of professional experience. Through my research I have attempted to gain a comprehensive knowledge of: (a) how, when and where comedians first document their comic ideas; (b) how comedians use their self-documentation to continue the development of these ideas; (c) the media and methods are used for documentation and/or archiving; (d) how documents and archives influence creative processes and performance; and (e) what thoughts and emotions comedians attach to a–d. Interviews were done by telephone and in person and incorporated a series of questions arranged temporally regarding the creative process and included the initial documenting

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of a comic idea or line, further documentation where applicable over the span of time that the idea or its evolved forms are used in performance, short- and long-term archiving, and the posthumous fate of self-documentation.

Findings Initial documentation The media used in initial documentation varied somewhat depending on the situations in which the initial documentation took place. These situations can be divided up into three main categories: (1) new material sessions; (2) stage writing and (3) unscheduled writing. New material sessions refer to time set aside specifically to create and document new material. Thirteen per cent of the comedians surveyed regularly used this type of session and in all cases it was an individual rather than a group activity. This percentage stands in contrast with the writing sessions for reworking existing material, which were used by all the comedians questioned, and by majority on a regular basis. ‘Stage writing’ refers to material that was initially improvised by the performer during the course of a performance and ‘unscheduled’ refers to situations where comedy ideas having the potential to be used in performance appeared during the course of the comedian’s daily life. Unscheduled writing included times where specific situations or activities often lead to unstructured writing but there was no planning for such to occur. Unstructured writing was reported to take place at almost any time and in almost any situation. Some comedians found themselves comedically inspired while they were engaged in social situations and others would have their ideas and observations independently while present in social or solitary situations. In some cases comedians would have comedic ideas during physical activities such as running or sex. 12 subjects reported coming up with ideas while sleeping or dozing, which corresponds with the existing literature regarding creativity in hypnogogic states (Koestler 1964; Runco and Pritzker 1999). Initial documentation of text during writing sessions was made by one of the subjects with pen and paper, two used a laptop or tablet and one used a series of white boards, which were subsequently photographed. In the case of stage writing, 77% of the subjects made audio or video recordings of their shows, which were later reviewed and any new material deemed to be valuable was then transcribed or committed to memory. If the performances were not being recorded, the comedian would typically document the new material immediately upon leaving the stage or later on that evening. In some cases the comedians relied on their memory for longer periods of time, either deliberately or otherwise. A few of those surveyed also said that if they improvised something they liked on stage they would sometimes call from the stage and ask a fellow comedian in the crowd or even a crowd member to write it down or remember it. The media used to document stage writing was varied: writing in notebooks or on scraps of paper, napkins, coasters or arms and hands; typing on phones, tablets and laptops; and voice recording on phones were all mentioned. Twenty-one of the subjects usually wrote the material by hand, eight typed it onto phones, tablets, etc. and two used voice recordings. Some of this material would be documented into its permanent archive (e.g. a notebook or computer program) but much of it would be transferred at a later date. Four of the subjects reported that they used their phone to send a text or email to themselves and this was used as their permanent archive. One subject used SIRI to translate voice to text had an email account

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specifically dedicated for comedy material. The media used for unscheduled writing showed the greatest degree of variation due to the availability of documenting tools in the broad range of situations where comedic ideas appeared. Some comedians took this into account in advance and ensured that they had a pen and/or notebook with them at ‘all’ times, and for others their mobile phone served the same function. In these cases some of the material would be originally documented in its permanent archive. If none of these prearranged forms were available, comedians would use whatever means we are at their disposal. As a result, it was reported that comedy material had been written on a wide variety of materials including work orders, furniture, coasters and Kleenex boxes with a wide variety of writing tools such as pens, pencils, crayons, lipstick and eyeliner. American comedian Mimi Benfield had a particularly notable method for documenting ideas while driving: she would use dry-erase markers to write on her windscreen and then photograph them for archival purposes. In some cases when the comedian had a new comedy idea they would rely on their memory until they had the opportunity to document it and in a small number of cases they would not do any documentation until they had first tried the bit onstage.

Further documentation Further documentation refers to the transferral of initial documentation into its permanent archive and any subsequent editing or annotation that takes place. If the initial documentation did not take place in the permanent archive, the material was transferred there and then most initial documentation is typically destroyed. Material committed to the permanent archive varied greatly in its presentation and but in all cases was not intended to act as an unalterable script for what was to perform on stage. The degree of detail recorded and correlation between documentation and performance were varied. In many cases, only a single word was written down which served as a trigger for the detailed contents, which existed only in their memory. Most typically, the material was documented in a simplified form with emphasis being placed on key elements of the bit. Two comedians claimed that they wrote down their material ‘word for word’ but upon further questioning expressed that they considered the material to be flexible in performance and that they liked to ‘drop things or add things’. 89% of handwritten material employed the use of numerous simple markings intended to give direction in performance. The most common of these markings were underlining, circles, dots and spaces. This occurred to a lesser extent with typed material but there were still some instances of bolding, underlining and using colours, as well as the practice of hitting return to create an empty line, which would designate wherever they felt a laugh should be expected in performance. Handwritten words and phrases were also emphasised by employing larger lettering or change in style. 36% reported using changes in writing style which was sometimes intended to give cues regarding performance and 58% did doodling or artwork to accompany their handwritten material. Five of the subjects stated that the reason they doodled was to keep both their pen and their mind in motion while they were thinking or ‘stuck’. The artwork was at times incidental but more often done, it was to accompany the idea and in some cases was executed with great skill and individuality. 84% of subjects added notes to their comedy bits after their initial documentation and these annotations took many forms. Often the margin was used for additional ideas related to the bit or for positive or negative comments. Rejected ideas were sometimes

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scribbled over or even ripped out, but more often they were left intact because, as one comedian put it, ‘you never know, you might see something there later’. There was some evidence of organisational systems being used, such as the use of arrows and boxes and the numbering of pages or bits for indexing. Comedian John Wing stated that ‘a bit is never finished’ which clearly summed up every subject’s view of comedy material (excluding one-liners). Their self-documented archives were used as an ongoing source of reference in their continuing creative process. Unlike an actor in a play, the stand-up comedian habitually chops and changes their work at will in the preparation stage and in performance. Additions can be made or they can revert to material and approaches that they may have previously rejected.

Archiving As was just mentioned, the comedian’s self-documentation is part of a continuous creative flow to which the referencing of archives brings circularity. In addition, most of the comedians surveyed felt that their archive was personal in nature and in some cases private: it was a representation of self. This was only in evidence with comedians who wrote their material out by hand. The small number of comedians who primarily used digital documentation expressed more concerns with organisation while those with notebooks almost always displayed a marked emotional attachment. One comedian said, ‘When I look at old books it brings back what I was going through and who I was back then’ and another referred to them as ‘time capsules’. Several described the fear of losing their notebook or moments of extreme panic when they thought they had lost their notebook. In a G.Q. article, Mitch Hedberg’s widow Lyn Shawcroft described a time when Mitch lost his notebook saying ‘It was one of the only times I saw him really visibly upset about something’ (Mooney 2013). Mini Holmes described that when she discovered that a bag of her material on scraps of paper had been thrown out by her boyfriend three weeks after the fact ‘It was worse than any death I’ve ever experienced’ and added ‘I’d be willing to get shot for my book.’ The sharing of a book of comedy material was also often referred to as a personal experience. Several comedians said they would not let anybody ever look at their book, and one comedian said, ‘if my girlfriend ever looked at my book, that would be the end of our relationship’. Standing in contrast to the negative views of having a notebook read by someone else is my own experience. In 2009, a person I had just met that evening spotted my notebook and asked if they could take a look at it. I let them go through the book and gave explanations of the phrases, drawings and scribbles within. That person is now my wife and she always reflects back on that occasion as being the time she first felt a connection with me. Only two of the subjects said that they had ever deliberately discarded or destroyed any of the permanent archives they had created. In some cases, self-documentation of ideas and material was augmented with audio and video recordings of performances and the volume of material that was retained was often quite remarkable. Glen Foster kept dozens of books and notepads, had a dedicated email inbox with thousands of emails and several thousand video recordings on VHS, Hi 8, compact disc and hard-drive data dating back over 30 years. Subject reported that if their self-documentation archives were digital in nature, they were usually kept with back up, and in every case but one handwritten material was stored with some degree of ceremony and organisation. Some notebooks were kept in chronological order on a specific and accessible shelf, some were numbered, some were colour coded, some were ‘around somewhere in boxes’, one comedian reported that ‘they are all just sitting in a big crazy pile on top

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of the fridge’ while another kept all her notebooks and scraps in a large rice sack. The question ‘what do you think will happen to your archive when you die?’ evoked a range of responses. Three comedians said that they did not have much concern on the subject, most had some expectation that their books and other materials would be kept by family or loved ones, one intended to appoint a literary executor, and one said that that she wanted it all to be burned, adding that the idea her archives falling into anybody’s hands ‘is one of my greatest fears’.

Ritual Ritual is typically defined as public and social in nature (Evans 1996), but I would argue that the behaviour that comedians exhibit in their self-documentation should be considered to be a form of private ritual and furthermore that the social functions of social ritual are replaced in parallel by mnemonic functions. In contrast with Durkheim’s notion of ‘collective effervescence’ (Durkheim 2008) in stand-up comedian’s self-documentation, we see a reality of ‘personal effervescence’ catalysed by the expression of personal ritual, and this enables the construction and maintenance of ideological solidarity. In relation to Derrida’s claim that ‘archivization produces as much as it records the event’,1 it could also be argued that their documentation is inextricably linked to the eventual performance, which makes the entire process social in nature. The observed self-documentation rituals have psychological elements that I do not have space to discuss in this paper, as well as mnemonic elements that I shall cover shortly. The reported self-documentation methods were remarkable in their specificity and consistency in terms of the related materials and practices, and when speaking about their methods the subjects would often use the word ‘always’. Ritualised behaviour was more pronounced with those who wrote their material by hand. It varied in detail from person to person but was consistently observed in different forms. The types of notebooks that were used included Moleskin notebooks, Menji notebooks, hard-cover notebooks, softcover notebooks, notebooks with lines, notebooks without lines, notebooks with yellow paper, very small notebooks, very large notebooks and a specific blue notebook that can only be purchased at the University of Windsor bookshop that resembles a specific publishers poetry books from the 1960s. In almost every case, the subjects would only ever use their personally preferred type of book. The ritual use of the one type of notebook usually lasted for a phase of several years after which point a new ritual notebook would be adopted. Steven Pearl said that he preferred to write his bits on strips of paper and after switching to digital archiving would print out bits on pages and then rip them into strips. There was some evidence of this type of behaviour with the selection of pens as well. Dylan Rhymer said that he could only ever write his material with a blue Bic pen, and Mini Holmes described the specific type of pen she liked to use and added that if she lent her pen to anyone she would stare at them until they gave it back ‘like it was a joint’. These types of ritualisation are not unique to stand-up comedy but are worthy of further study in terms of their role in the psychological and mnemonic aspects of the creative process and its associated performance.

Memory and mnemonics At a simple level, a comedian’s self-documentation is memorial in nature: the comedian self-documents in order to facilitate memory in performance. The observations made in

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this study of their methods, rituals and opinions also reveal aspects of memory beyond the basic recall of textual data. Performance required a recollection of a variety of phenomenological aspects, and self-documentation was relied upon to aid in the maintenance of the required memories. It is my experience that a comedian’s power of memory is often considered by audience members to be one of their most remarkable talents. After performing a set of 60 or 90 minutes, I am often posed with the question, ‘how do you remember all that?’ The comedians interviewed placed great importance on the role of memory in stand-up. When asked, ‘How important is memory in stand-up?’, subjects gave answers such as ‘memory is everything’ and ‘it (memory) is the most important thing’. Five comedians said they had given up smoking marijuana because they felt that it adversely affected their memory. Conversely, no comedians surveyed felt that memory was not important in stand-up. I believe there is a corollary between the functional structures involved in mnemonics and humour, which would help to explain why humour is such a prevalent tool in advertising and why comic tools such as rhyming, alliteration have profound pedagogical functions. This proposed corollary also raises some interesting evolutionary questions. For example, repetition is one of the most basic of comic tools, has obvious uses in social learning, and is fundamental in the creation of ritual. Using Gould’s notion that ontology parallels phylogeny (Gould 1977), it can be inferred that the origin of humour predated that of social learning and ritual humour because it appears earlier in childhood development. As a result, humour may have played a role in the evolution of these more complex social and cognitive behaviours. Returning to the corollary between humour and mnemonics, several parallels between humour and memory can be observed. To begin with, the majority of comedy material can be classified into categories that are the same as those used in the classification of memory: the autobiographical and the semantic. Autobiographical comedy involves the recollection of episodes and characters that the comedian has experienced and semantic comedy involves the manipulation of ideas.2 Autobiographical comedy utilises semantic elements but is rooted in a different form of memory, recollection and performance. Autobiographical comedy material and autobiographical memory also share an emphasised phenomenological element, which tends to lead to more movement, expression and phenomenological descriptions in performance. In this study, it was witnessed that comedians who preferred autobiographical comedy tended to handwrite their material while comedians with a preference for semantic comedy were more likely to use typed digital formats. I surmise that this is because the act of documenting an initial idea or experience by hand offers more expressive and personalised variety to the documentation than typing is able to convey at this point in technological history. This was witnessed with doodling, artwork, size and shape of letters, etc., which in turn created a secondary autobiographical memory related to the comedy bit: the experience of its documentation. As a result, handwriting produced a document that conveyed more detailed and personalised semiotic information, which facilitated richer phenomenological memory of the original event/idea as well as the episode of the document’s creation. This process is enhanced by ritualisation, which, according to psychology professor Matt Rosano, ‘activates areas of the brain associated with working memory’ (Rosano 2009). The second parallel between humour and memory, as was pointed out in the example of repetition, is that they utilise the same tools. While a comprehensive examination of mnemonics is beyond the scope of this paper, it can be observed that comedic tools such as rhyming, alliteration, repetition and homonyms have been used as mnemonic tools for

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millennia. In addition to this, there were also mnemonic practices observed in the comedian’s self-documentation methods such as the use of different coloured pens and/ or paper and the use of boxes and distinctive shapes to contain the written material. These parallels seem to indicate that comedy has a relationship with mnemonics that could possibly prove beneficial if humour were to be incorporated into cognitive therapies and/or education. There is some evidence of this in current educational theory and practice (Egan 1997).

Hermeneutics The observed methods of stand-up comedians’ self-documentation practices recognised the limitations of the textual and attempted to capture the phenomenological and psychological essence of the ideas and events that made up the totality of the comedy bit. The documented text served as a semiotic reference point containing stores of additional memories which exhibits aspects that are hermeneutic as well as mnemonic. Plato recalls the limitations of text in the Egyptian myth where Theuth invents writing and presents his invention to God Thamus with the expectation of praise, but Thamus instead opines: . . .this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters, which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding. (Plato 1925) The majority of the comedians surveyed, consciously or unconsciously, shared the same view which necessitated a hermeneutic approach to their self-documentation in order that their comedy bits not be limited to rigid scripting but remained fluid in order to maintain the un-documentable ‘essence’ of the bit and to allow for its potential evolution. The consistent feeling among the comedians surveyed was that documenting material word for word was to be avoided; that it was a damaging and restricting practice. As was mentioned earlier, some comedians liked to work out the ‘exact’ wording, but on further questioning always stated that this did not mean that the bit had reached an unalterable form and that should always be viewed as ‘unfinished’. The majority would write down simple sentences, phrases or single words to act as triggers for their bit and had no long-form versions of them documented in text. Steven Pearl described this process as being ‘like jazz, you know, you just take it up there, work it, and see what comes out’. In hermeneutic terms, the trigger functioned as a series of symbols that gave access to the memories of initial creation and related subsequent ideas, which they then had to reinterpret (i.e. translate) into each specific performance depending on the various internal and external factors related to that performance. The observed practices recall Gadamer’s assertion that ‘a hermeneutically schooled consciousness must be sensitive to the otherness of the text from the beginning’ (Gadamer 1976). I refer to this method of documentation and interpretation as endoskeletal: the trigger word serves as a frame or skeleton that allows the comedian access to the memorialised bit, which they can then, works around and add to. In contrast, most plays would be viewed as exoskeletal because the existing script has to be adhered to: it is to be performed

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word for word. Every comedian who had this analogy introduced to them felt that this was an accurate and descriptive one. Also, related to hermeneutics were various examples of coding observed in self-documentation practices. The phrase and singleword triggers not only avoided the perceived perils of literalism, they were also virtually unintelligible to anyone other than the author themselves. In one case, a comedian reported that they deliberately wrote the material in their book almost illegibly and in very small print, so only they would be able to read it and several subjects reported that if someone were to try to read their notebook or digital notes they would not be able to ‘decipher’ it. Four of the comedians surveyed said that if someone read their notebook they would think they were ‘crazy’. It is important to note that the same hermeneutic approach is also a fundamental part of the process of finding new comedic ideas. The creation of comedy very often involves the traditional meanings of situations, behaviours, words, phrases and full texts being re-interpreted into a comic paradigm, which can assume the form of commentary and critique or simply be absurd in nature.

Conclusions Stand-up comedians’ self-documentation practices employ both handwriting (primarily in notebooks) and typing in a variety of different digital media. The majority surveyed displayed a preference for handwriting but digital media were frequently cited as having organisational advantages. Reported practices were often individually distinctive in terms of both their tools and methods, which created personal rituals that had psychological and mnemonic elements. Mnemonic and hermeneutic elements were in evidence in the structure of the methodology of self-documentation and the interpretation of documentation into performance. The archives that were produced were deeply personalised items steeped in personal ritual that were typically given great significance by their authors. The value of this self-documentation lies only in what it reveals about its author, but also what it reveals about the creative process, the relationship that exists between archives and performance and the nature of humour itself. More quantitative and qualitative data are needed, which should be examined bearing in mind mnemonic and hermeneutic aspects. In addition, a study of non-textual forms of self-documentation such as audio and video recordings would yield valuable related information.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Source: Christopher Molineux (2016) ‘Life memory archive translation performance memory archive life: textual self-documentation in stand-up comedy’, Comedy Studies, 7:1, 2–12.

Notes 1 The exception to this was some ‘one-liners’, which relied on specific wording and were examples of purely semantic writing rather than autobiographical. 2 There is also lesser category in comedy of fantasy and absurdity, which is a function of counterfactual thought.

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References Barba, Eugenio. 1992. “Efermaele: ‘That Which Will Be Said Afterwards’.” The Drama Review XXXVI (2): 77–80. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Vol. 90. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Durkheim, Emile. 2008. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translated by Carol Cosman and edited by Mark S. Cladis. Oxford: Oxford World Classics. Egan, Kieran. 1997. The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Evans, Elizabeth S. 1996. “Ritual.” In The Encyclopaedia of Cultural Anthropology, edited by David Levinson and Melvin Ember, 1120–1124. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc. Gadamer, Hans Georg. 1976. Philosophical Hermeneutics, translated and edited by David Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Koestler, A. 1964. The Act of Creation. New York: Macmillan. Mooney, Michael J. 2013. “Mitch Hedberg: The Best Pre-Twitter Twitter Comedian.” GQ Magazine, June 4. http://www.gq.com/entertainment/humor/201306/mitch-hedberg-comedynotebooks#slide=1 Gould, Stephen Jay. 1977. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Plato. 1925. Phaedrus from Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9, translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0059.tlg012. per seus-eng1:274 Rosano, Matt J. 2009. “Ritual Behaviour and the Origins of Human Cognition.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19 (2): 243–256. Runco, Mark A., and Stephen R. Pritzker. 1999. Encyclopedia of Creativity: Vol. 2, a–h, 63–64. San Diego: Academic Press. Velody, Irving. 1998. “The Archive and the Human Sciences: Notes Towards a Theory of the Archive.” History of the Human Sciences 11 (4): 1–16.

Contributor Christopher Molineux has worked as a professional comedian since 1986 and has taught stand-up since 2000. He has also written for Electronic Arts, worked as a stilt-walking street performer, done voice-over work for LEGO, Madeline, and Inspector Gadget.

Part V

New comedy? Interviews with practitioners

Chapter 15

Not the definitive version: an interview with Ross Noble (1:1) Oliver Double

1 Opening notes Ross Noble is one of the most successful and gifted stand-up comedians of his generation. He has acquired a huge and enthusiastic following, in spite of having relatively little exposure on television. Instead, he has built his audience largely on the strength of his live performance, relentlessly touring with shows like Sonic Waffle (2002–03), Unrealtime (2003–04), Noodlemeister (2004–05), Randomist (2005–06), Fizzy Logic (2006–07), Nobleism (2007), and Things (2009). As well as touring thousand-seat theatres, as of 2004 he has released a series of best-selling stand-up DVDs. His comedy is characterized by surreal flights of imagination, and his extraordinary ability to improvise. One of the built-in ambiguities in stand-up comedy is the extent of an act’s spontaneity. The interactive nature of the form, and the fact that it is performed in the first person, means that prepared material (performed for years or even decades) can come across as if it has just been invented before the audience’s very eyes. Most comedians strike a balance between improvisation and prepared material, but where one begins and the other ends is always left unclear. As Tony Allen, who was one of the first alternative comedians, argues: In reality, of course, very little is spontaneous and it is only the potential for spontaneity that exists. An honest stand-up comedian will admit that the moments of pure improvisation account for less than five per cent of their act. (Allen 2004: 93) Noble turns this potential for spontaneity into reality, improvising far more than 5 per cent of his act, and building much of the show from conversations with audience members or occurrences that happen in the performance space, on the stage, or the auditorium. As a Times reviewer puts it: Ross Noble can amble on stage, spot a piece of fluff on the floorboards, a latecomer trying to slip into a seat, an odd-looking chandelier, and suddenly he’s got his first half-hour of material, building a pyramid of observations from any starting point . . . More than any other comic playing the big stages, this straggle-haired Geordie seems to risk calamity every night. (Maxwell 2005)

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Something else that marks Noble out is his age. Still only 33 years old, he has been performing stand-up for seventeen years, and has been well known for ten, having been nominated for the Perrier Award in 1999. It is unusual enough that he started working as a stand-up at the remarkably tender age of 15, but the particular set of venues in which he cut his teeth was also far from ordinary. Having grown up in Cramlington, Northumberland, he first began performing in and around Newcastle upon Tyne, in one of the emerging comedy scenes that had started growing in provincial towns by the late 1980s.1 This meant that his first experiences of live performance happened in a freewheeling atmosphere where comedians and promoters were discovering how stand-up worked as they went along. Anvil Springstien, one of the leading lights of the Newcastle comedy scene at the time, pointed out that audiences were similarly uninitiated: Because audiences up here have never really had a history of being able to go out to comedy clubs . . . people don’t know how to behave in a comedy night, so the standard of heckling has been very strange and different, and no two gigs have ever been the same. (Double 1994: 257–58) Springstien also pointed out that, lacking the tighter expectations of the more established London circuit, the Newcastle comedy scene of the early 1990s encouraged more inventive approaches to stand-up: ‘There’s an awful lot of just standard, straight stand-up [in London], gag, gag, gag, gag. People want to be TV-friendly, so they write their sets towards that, you know, but up here it’s a different kettle of fish’ (Double 1994: 257–58). Starting off in such an atmosphere has coloured Noble’s whole approach to stand-up. It allowed him to gain an unusual amount of stage experience very quickly, and freed him from the restriction of audience expectation. As a result, he prefers the spontaneous to the highly prepared, the rough edges to slick perfection. More importantly, he is comfortable taking the artistic risks which improvisation entails on a regular basis. Meeting up again with Noble on 25 August 2009 in Leicester Square to interview him, I was struck by how closely his conversational style resembles his onstage delivery. His sentences are far from linear. He will stop halfway through a clause to rephrase or refine an idea, or go off at a tangent. On stage, he brilliantly exploits this tendency, commenting on his own sentence structure, and conjuring up whole routines based on little more than a slightly odd choice of word or a strange inflection. In conversation, he largely avoids this temptation, but his mercurial thought processes and his propensity to repeat and foreshorten makes transcription rather tricky. If I were to attempt to make whole sentences out of his exact words, his meaning would be in danger of disappearing under a riotous heap of ellipses and parentheses. Instead, I have simplified things in the interests of clarity, whilst trying to represent what he actually said as accurately as possible to give an accurate presentation of his words.

2 The interview Who were your early influences? Up until I started, I used to listen to Connolly and Carrott and Max Boyce,2 and who else did I have on CD? Just like the sort of people that you’d see on the telly all the time,

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you know. You know, obviously TVs and albums were the only way of sort of seeing people. And obviously all of those shows where comics were on, like the Just for Laughs thing, and there was that show Paramount City – things like that, you know. Yeah, so it wasn’t until I started watching stuff like that - I then actually started reading about comedy. So with people like Carrott and Connolly, what was it about them that you got into? The obvious thing was the nature of what they did. The creativity of it, you know, I think that was the thing – the fact that they were being funny in a specific way to them. Rather that in that interchangeable way. And that came across, you know. Because when I was a kid, I used to really like Lenny Henry, you know. Because it was the sort of thing where he was on telly a lot, and you think, ‘Oh, he’s funny’. Then what I started to like more and more about those guys, certainly Connolly, was the fact that even though they were mainstream, they seemed like they had a kind of an attitude to them. They sort of felt authentic, even Carrott, kind of. Back in the day there was a sort of an edge to him, you know, you got the feeling that he wasn’t like a shinysuited bloke. And stuff like Sweet and Sour Labrador (Carrott 1986) and Little Zit on the Side (Carrott 1979), those books of his routines – you know, like, there were some of those which obviously weren’t on TV, about him and Bev Bevan3 and all that. You sort of read those and there was something kind of a bit rock and roll about him, you know. On TV he came across as sort of like a dad from Birmingham, but then you listened to ‘The Magic Roundabout’.4 And I think that was the thing that appealed to me about it, it was establishment, but at the same time it wasn’t like middle of the road shit, you know. Which even the Comic Strip, you know those sort of Comic Strip lot, it was almost like they were these kind of edgy wild characters – they were edgy and wild compared to blokes in dicky bow ties doing chicken-in-a-basket clubs. Whereas actually, and I’ve got to be careful what I say, but a lot of them, or certainly the ones that made it, were kind of a bit middle of the road, you know. Whereas the real ones like Keith Allen and the guys from, like, the Wow Show5 and all that sort of stuff, they had that sort of edge to them. You were also influenced by the American improvisational comedian Jonathan Winters. How did you come across his work? From looking more towards America, you know. I mean basically like from reading about the American scene, and the amount of people who said he was influential on them, you know. And then, specifically Robin Williams going on about him, Robin Williams and Bill Cosby. I saw interviews with them where they were going, ‘This guy’s the man’, you know. And that made me go, ‘I should probably have a look at him!’ [laughs] What was the north-east comedy scene like when you first started performing? Well there were sort of two camps up there. There was Chirpy Chappies Comedy Café, which even saying it now sounds like something that somebody would make up for a bad film about stand-up, you know. Chirpy Chappies was run by Dave Johns, who at the time, because there was already a Dave Johns in Equity, was calling himself Ben E Cauthen, which is the weirdest stage name. But anyway, so it was Dave Johns and he ran the Comedy Café and there were a few acts who were sort of good enough in his eyes to play, to be support acts there. And they were Mike Milligan, John Fothergill, Anvil Springstien, and Paul Sneddon (who was

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billed as Vladimir McTavish). They were sort of the main support acts, and he used to bring the acts up from London. He had headliners like Jo Brand, and Mark Lamarr, Mark Steel and people like that. And then on the other side of that was a ‘comedy collective’ (which is very of the time) a comedy collective called Near the Knuckle – who ran a club called the Crack Club. Anvil Springstien was in that, but then there was also Tony Mendoza, there was Steffen Peddie, the Big Fun Club (who were like a double act), and who else did you have in that? Oh, you had a double act called Scarboro and Thick, and for years I never got that that was a play on Morecambe and Wise. It’s like ‘Scarboro’ instead of ‘Morecambe’, ‘Thick’ instead of ‘Wise’. But what was funny about that was they would introduce themselves as Scarboro and Thick, he was Eric Scarboro, and he was Little Ernie Thick [laughs]. The younger guy must’ve been like in his early twenties, probably about 21, 22, but the two of them had met when they both worked in a factory, or an engineering place. The older one had sort of given up his job as an engineer, gone into teaching, and so you basically had an older guy, and then Little Ernie Thick, who worked in this factory, but he had a kind of punk sensibility. He was into punk and would play the guitar – so he was obviously like a punk with a day job. And they’d do the sort of double act stuff, and it can be revealed now, Little Ernie Thick then went solo and used his real name, and that’s Gavin Webster.6 And all the Near the Knuckle gigs were basically rooms in pubs, because at that point, the only purpose-built comedy was the Comedy Store in London – but then outside of London, that was around that time the Glee Club opened.7 Yeah I think it might have been end of 1993 possibly when the Glee Club opened, and that was the first proper comedy club outside of London where it was like, ‘OK, we’ve got a dance floor afterwards, and proper seats’ rather than such-and-such a club at this venue. So anywhere that had a decent function room we’d start a comedy club there. Some of them lasted and then some of them you’d do a couple of weeks and they’d just go, you know. But all of those acts were unlike, say, London, where already by the early 1990s there’d been ten years of stuff. There wasn’t the idea of people going to comedy clubs, and we used to frequently get people, you know, older people, you’d be doing your stuff and they’d go, ‘Tell us a joke. You haven’t got any jokes mate.’ And all the time you’d sort of get asked – it was always the same thing – it’s like, ‘Do you tell jokes, or are you alternative?’ But it meant that we were doing a lot of different gigs, you know, like one night we did a working men’s club, and the next night was a function room, and then it might be a bit of a festival, you know, Stockton Festival, and there’d be like a marquee. It was very new and it was in effect what had happened in London ten years earlier.8 Do you think that because you came out of this nascent scene, and that you started at such a young age, that it affected your comedy style as it developed? Yeah, definitely. Because there was so few acts up there, it was one of those things where, I think I got a compèring gig, it might’ve been like my third gig or something. And like in London to get a job compèring you’d certainly have to be an absolute bulletproof sort of act, possibly even a headline act, in order for them to go, ‘Oh we’ll trust him.’ But when there are only a handful of people, you know, we used to start clubs up, and I’d compère. And I also used to compère at the university, I’d do Newcastle University one week and Sunderland University the next, for when the acts would come up from London, and I got myself a gig as the regular host. I also used to compère down at the Comedy Shack in York.

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But because of that, the idea of doing five minutes and honing it to get another gig, and honing it to try and get another gig in London, that was completely alien to me. My whole thing was, I’ve got to compère a show next week, there was the same audience the week before, so it was just the idea of new material, and sometimes doing quite a long time onstage. That meant that by the time I’d got to London, I got loads of work doing TV warm-ups, just because of that conversational thing of just having that high turnover of material. And then it went from sort of trying to have a high turnover in terms of writing jokes to just going on and going, ‘I’ve just got to be funny and entertain these people.’ So what was it like when you first moved down to London? It was bizarre from the point of view that I went from earning money, you know, doing the gig and then getting paid, and feeling like it was my job – well, it was my job – to all of a sudden (and rightly so with hindsight), you know, basically being forced to become an open spot. Sort of almost starting again and having to do five-minute, ten-minute slots. Some of the open spot nights were like a competition, you know. There was a competition down at one of the clubs, and it was like they had heats, and you came back for the final; I won the heat and then I was beaten in the final by this guy. At the time I would quite like to have won, you know, because it would’ve speeded things along. And the guy who won, I’m sure now he’s not doing it any more, and I’m sure he sits there and goes, ‘You know, I once beat Noble in a comedy competition,’ and I think brilliant, I love the idea that his mates go, ‘Yeah, course you did!’ you know what I mean? When was it that you actually moved down to London? It was sort of early ’95. But it was an odd thing that happened, because I was doing like these open-mike nights and all the rest of it, and from doing those, started getting people going, ‘Oh, he’s quite good, this bloke.’ But then my first agent, he was sort of scouting around looking for acts. He ran a comedy club down at Southend, and his mate, who he used to be in a band with, won So You Think You’re Funny9 and so he went, ‘I’ll manage you.’ So he set himself up as a manager, then he went out scouting for acts. So he saw me at one of these things and basically went, ‘Can I get you some gigs?’ And then that’s what opened the floodgates for the equivalent of what I’d been doing in Newcastle but down here. He was based in Essex, so a lot of these gigs were working in nightclubs in Essex, you know. I got a gig once where they launched Fosters Ice and the gig was I had to turn up to pubs, with these promotions people, and I had to host the night – and what it was, they had a big block of ice with bottle tops inside. And they would give punters hammers, and they had thirty seconds to hammer at the ice as hard as they could with these hammers, and then if they got the bottle top out they won a free Fosters Ice or a T-shirt – it said what the prize was on the bottom of the bottle top. I was in these pubs in Essex with these real sort of like chavs hammering blocks of ice. Yeah, so it was that sort of stuff, you know. One of the first warm-ups that I did was one for a thing called Gail’s Campus Capers, and it was like a game show around universities with a page three girl. And a thing called Who’s Sorry Now? which was for Living TV and it was about couples, people who’d had grievances, and then at the end the audience would decide their punishment – they’d spin a wheel and they would come up with what they had to do. Which

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actually worked out quite well because I ended up in the show, I went on there as a fake contestant. Like the day before, the people pulled out and they said, ‘Well we’ve got no one for tomorrow’s show, can you go into the audience and see if you can find somebody that’s had a grievance?’ Anyway, so no one wanted to do it and I went, ‘Well I’ll just do it, and pretend,’ and I went, ‘Does anyone else want to?’ and this girl put her hand up, she went, ‘I’m a drama student, I’ll pretend to be your girlfriend if you want.’ So we went on there and we filmed this show. I’m sitting there dressed in green and I’m going, ‘I’m obsessed with the colour green,’ and the audience members were going, ‘Why are you?’ It was the height of Jerry Springer, you know, so it’s like people were just going, ‘What is it about the colour green that you love?’ and I went, ‘Because green is Jesus’s colour.’ And this woman goes, ‘How is it Jesus’s colour?’ and I went, ‘Well, because you know he used to hang around with the fishermen, and the sea’s green.’ And this women went like, ‘The sea’s blue’ and I went, ‘Not at night’ [laughs]. And it went out on telly! So it was all of that, you know. And then I got a gig doing the warm-up for GMTV, as their warm-up man in Spain for six weeks, as part of Fun in the Sun. So every morning, I’d go down to the beach, and have three hours entertaining holiday makers, and then for about ten minutes of that three hours, Mr Motivator would make them dance, and then off we’d go, you know. I can see how that experience of playing horrible gigs would give you a lot of good stage experience, but it could also really coarsen you artistically. It could just make you slam out anything that works, but it didn’t. You were actually a much more surreal and creative comedian. How did you sustain your creativity during this time? Well, because I was trying all the time to balance the two, you know. Because at that time I was firmly under the impression that if people didn’t go with what I was trying to do, it was because I wasn’t being funny enough! It wasn’t, it was because I was being a dickhead! That’s not fair, when you’re on a beach in Spain at six o’clock in the morning and people have just come out of their local nightclub, you know. I knew what I wanted to be doing, and that was me on the way there. So all the time there was that balancing act, because I never wanted to just be self-indulgent. My thing was I thought I wanna be able to go on and entertain any crowd. There comes a point where you sort of actually sort of go, ‘I don’t wanna entertain these people.’ But if they came to the gig they’ll be entertained, you know, it’s that. It is them coming to you rather than you coming to them. You see a crowd and you say, ‘Well you’re this sort of crowd so I’ll do this sort of set to you.’ In a way that’s the wrong decision. You’ve got to try and make them come into your comic world. Exactly. I got a gig once doing the warm-up for the Radio 1 Roadshow. I was probably 19 at the time, you know, and I was onstage in front of 8000 people in a park, and it was that thing of like, ‘All right. How’s this gonna work?’ you know. But I knew at the time – and I sort of sound like a lifestyle coach here – the way I lived my life at the time was as if I was in a montage in a film, you know. It was that thing of like, ‘Oh I’m on a beach. Now I’m in a club.’ And I looked at it from that point of view. And it didn’t matter how shitty it got. I had this one warm-up gig: I used to hate doing it. Every Wednesday I used to just go, ‘Fucking hell, here we go again.’ A horrible time, and everyone on the staff was

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horrible to me. And you probably won’t be surprised, it was a Sky 1 chat show fronted by Richard Littlejohn. Yeah. Richard Littlejohn Live and Unleashed. And I would turn up there. I’ll give you an idea of the guests, one week it was Barbara Windsor and Mad Frankie Fraser! [laughs] And I was standing there going, ‘Why am I doing this?’ And six dwarves dressed as security guards walked past me. In the end I couldn’t give a shit what the show was, I’d just turn up and like as soon as I was needed I just walked on. And I was like, ‘Why are these dwarves dressed as security guards?’ Richard Littlejohn goes, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, tonight on the show, the Half Monty.’ And it was just after The Full Monty, and they basically were these dwarf strippers, they went out and did ‘You Can Leave your Hat on’. And then, I was stood there backstage as they walked off. So there wasn’t even seven of them, these six naked dwarves just walked past me, ‘All right’, ‘All right, that were a good one’, ‘N’night, son.’ Past they went, you know, these naked dwarves. And I think if I ever write my autobiography, the warm-up years, what this woman said to me will be the chapter heading. I was in the green room and there was like a platter of sandwiches, and of course I was the first one into the green room ’cos everyone else was getting their make-up off and everything. There was like a selection of sandwiches and I picked out the prawn sandwiches, four prawn sandwiches. I put them on this plate. The secretary, right, not even one of the producers, the secretary came across, took them off my plate, slotted them back into the platter and said, ‘Don’t eat the prawn ones, you’re only the warm-up.’ [laughs] So how did it get from that to the point where it was actually starting to work and you were able to do things much more on your own terms? Obviously the Perrier nomination in ’99 would have been a big thing. It was funny because that was definitely a tipping point but it was a weird one, that. I think I was a little bit resentful of that at the time because the momentum had already started. The ball was rolling, and it was happening anyway – and the Perrier thing, it was almost like they rubber-stamped it just as it was going out the door, you know. I went up to Edinburgh in ’96. ’96 was the year where I didn’t take any time off, I went a bit mental in ’96 ’cos I was pretty much onstage more than I was off, like. I took seven days off in ’96, so it was just like non-stop gigs. It got to the point where I would finish a gig and I’d pretty much stay up all night and then go to bed in the daytime. I just lived this life of, you know, just gig to gig, sleeping on people’s floors and all the rest of it. I went up to Edinburgh and did like a package show with a few others. In ’97, I didn’t go to Edinburgh but decided to leave it a year and then come back in ’98 and do my first solo show. But then around that sort of time, around sort of ’98, ’99, I started to notice that when I was playing clubs, and especially when I was compèring places, I noticed I’d start to get a bit of a following from people coming back to the clubs, you know. So ’99, I went up and did Edinburgh, Perrier, and then that’s when all of a sudden it was like the papers started writing about it and, you know, that’s when it sort of publicity-wise spread a little bit. So I went to comedy clubs on nights when there wasn’t a club on, so like say they did a Wednesday night, I’d be there on a Thursday or a Sunday and play the same venues but go, ‘This is just me on,’ you know. And ’99 also, that’s when I first went over to Oz, as well. So I quickly realized that if I did festivals, and then instead of just doing circuits gigs I would do gigs that were in circuit venues but I’d take them over, and in effect do a

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tour, you know. Link them up and advertise it as a tour, you know. So I did that, and then the next year, you know, the venues that had been a handful of people, now they were full, you know. And then went back to Edinburgh and moved up into sort of small theatres and arts centres. And then what started to happen, through word of mouth, because I wasn’t just an act on the bill, people were going, ‘Oh, you should see this bloke.’ Rather than trying to jump straight from the clubs into the 1000-seaters, which is what a lot of people were trying to do, they just thought, ‘I’ll get on telly and then fwhhoomf! I’m straight in there.’ I just started building like that, and the 100 became 200 and then 200 became 400. Then I would do two nights in a 400 or 500-seater, and then when it got to that point, that’s when I went, ‘Right, now it’s time to do 1000.’ Then before I knew where I was, it was the sort of thing where I’d managed to get into the touring theatre circuit without having to be a TV name, you know. You must’ve been the first person to do that since Eddie Izzard. Probably, yeah. Yeah, I would say so. And also the West End as well, like in 2003, you know, I booked a West End theatre, the Vaudeville, I’d done the Soho Theatre in London, and then moved into the Vaudeville and did two weeks there. Then the next year came back and did two weeks, then I did three weeks at the Garrick, and then I went and did four weeks at the Apollo. And then on top of that, I started to release the DVDs, which then had the thing of people who’d seen me on DVD but hadn’t seen me live, you know. I find the success of the stand-up comedy DVD really interesting, because on the face of it, stand-up is such a live medium that the idea of recording of it seems paradoxical in a way. Why do you think it works as a medium? Well I think the bottom line is something’s better than nothing. There’s an interesting statistic that 40 per cent of all DVDs are sold at the very end of the year – from the middle of November to December. So they’ve replaced socks as the thing you get your dad, you know. There you go: DVDs are the new socks. And so that’s half of it. And then the other half thing is that you probably get more laughs-per-minute on a stand-up DVD than you would in a comedy film, you know. It’s a different thing, the laughs are much more blatant – the laughs in a comedy film are probably more subtle. Another part of it is the souvenir aspect of people going and seeing a tour, they have a great night, same as people buying an album from bands and so on. But for me, the thing that I always found weird for my act personally was the idea of DVD – or any recording – being the definitive version. So mine are sort of like live albums, rather than some comics release a DVD and it’s like a studio album. They do the absolute definitive version. They record two nights and cut them together. You know, they hone the thing down on tour so that it’s incredibly tight. Whereas the benefit of DVD over VHS is the fact that you can have a couple of discs in there and you can pack so much stuff on there with all the extras and everything. I think the wrong way for me to do it would be to go, ‘I’ll try and do a definitive version of the show, and then that’s what people see.’ We film them and we don’t cut anything out, I leave it in warts and all, you know. Randomist is more of a box set than just a single DVD, you know, it’s a compilation rather than just a one–off. And I think that I’m probably the first person to really try and make the DVD a thing in itself. Basically what you normally get is a show and the chapter

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points on it if you’re lucky, you know. Whereas hopefully I think what’ll happen is, as a new generation of comics come through, they’ll look at the DVD and go, ‘Actually this is like an album, you know, it should be packed full of stuff.’ It’s bizarre because probably one of the most unlikely people to do a similar thing is Jimmy Carr, you know. Somebody who is so tight – what he does is probably the tightest show you’ll see – has heaps of extras and does really unusual things with his extras, you know. When my DVD comes out, it’s the sort of thing where people know that they can watch the main show, there’ll be a documentary on there, there’ll be a bit of bonus stuff. It’s gonna keep them busy for ages, you know. They don’t just have to watch the same show over again, there’s different ones. In order to produce your DVDs, with all the extras, you must have to document your work carefully. Yeah, yeah, we film pretty much every show. You used to minidisc-record your shows as well, because you also put out two CDs early on. That’s right, those Official Bootlegs, yeah.10 Do you think the desire to document is just to do with the possibility of commercial release, or because your stuff is unique every time? The latter. I did find it quite hard for a while, I was finding it quite hard to sort of deal with the fact that I’d come off after a great show that had some great stuff in it and just go, ‘That’s gone.’ And still there’s not enough room on a DVD to put everything on. So you’ve got an extraordinary archive somewhere with all of your recordings. Yeah, just every show basically. If you’ve got so much stuff, presumably cataloguing is going to become an issue. How do you know what you’ve got? When we were doing the TV series that I’ve just made, where we knew we were going to have to use something from lots of the shows, my tour manager sits there every night and writes down what I’m doing. So I can cross reference that and then find the tape. And then if we’re doing an extra and we go, ‘Oh we need that bit,’ usually I can sort of go, ‘Well I think I did, in that gig.’ We just sort of spool it through and try and find it. It’s all very haphazard. Even with a TV show, there’s two or three things that I went, ‘Oh, and we need to put that in,’ we just can’t find it. We know it happened at some point on the tour but we just don’t know where it is on the tape! When you’re putting together a DVD, and certainly the TV show, we filmed all the offstage stuff, and filmed all the onstage stuff, and then it was about mixing between the two, you know, taking all those different elements and weaving them into a thing. And again, that’s not the way that people make TV programmes. They decide what they’re gonna make. They plan it out. They then do the bits that they’ve planned. And then they edit it the way they thought about it beforehand. They don’t go, ‘Right, we’re gonna make a TV series. It’s gonna have elements of this and elements of that. Let’s just turn the camera on and see what comes out of my mouth. And then take all those things and try and build something at the end.’ Because if you’ve got a good editor, like Pete Callow who I work with, you know, we sort of created this TV series in the way that you

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might create like a documentary film. But without necessarily knowing what the documentary’s about, you know. When I put the DVDs together, it’s much the same. An extra on the new one is a short interview where I talk about stuff that people put on the stage and then we show little clips of that. The commentary is basically me sitting in a room with the thing playing in the background, just talking. Just a stream of consciousness, like the same as if I was onstage but with no feedback. So it’s probably a chance to see what the show would be if there was no sounding board from the audience. Just me talking. Literally just sitting there just talking to myself, you know. And there’s bits of it which are laugh-out-loud funny, you know, because I keep one eye on the engineer, and there are bits where he’s holding his sides laughing. And then there are other bits that are just really, really boring, you know. I would say out of the two hours of commentary there’s probably a good half an hour in there that – if you actually edited out the shitty bits – that’s actually really funny laugh-out-loud stuff, you know. So that in itself kind of creates a new thing, you know. It creates a new show if you like. It’s a different type of show. When you put a DVD out there, sometimes routines capture the audience’s imagination and they take on a life beyond you with people quoting them to each other. Your ‘Muffins’ routine is a good example.11 Have you been aware of this? Yeah, like people, kids actually, sort of shout stuff at me. That’s weird. Sometimes just a daft thing that you’ve said. The most obvious one, I actually talked about it on the last tour, was when I broke my wrist and the ambulance men turned up, one of them said, ‘Do your Stephen Hawking impersonation.’ And my wrist was broken, I was in agony, I had to have an operation and pins in my arm and everything, and the first thing they said was like, ‘Great, can you do your Stephen Hawking impersonation?’ I was like, ‘I just need painkillers,’ you know. But I was at a Starbucks and I was looking at the muffins, just ’cos I wanted a muffin, and I looked up and the guy just went, ‘Are you Ross Noble?’ and I went, ‘Yeah,’ and he just walked off into the kitchen. The thing that I love the most, and the reason I love this so much is that I was like this with things myself, is when people say to me, ‘Me and my mates, when we’re hanging around, always say . . .’ and it could be something like the thing about the owl, tucking in the owl, you know, like ‘Can you tuck me in?’12 You know, like when you like get teenagers and stuff, going, ‘We always go, “Can you tuck me in?”’ Moving on to your live work, different comics work in different ways in terms of preparing for a show, but given that so much of what you do is in the moment, how do you prepare for it? Well, there was one show where there was no preparation at all. There was one show where literally the tour was booked, started on the first night and I had no jokes. [laughs] Just went, ‘All right, here we go! Yeah! Um . . .’ I used to just do it where I’d tour Australia, come back and start again, you know.13 And then the past couple of years, I’d go up to Scotland, and I’d go up to the Highlands and Islands. It’s less about sort of coming up with a show, and more about just getting up to match fitness, you know. Just mentally – well, physically as well as mentally – just being in that headspace. ’Cos even with, like, improv, it’s not necessarily about the speed of the invention, it’s about the application of it. And pace as well. When you get on tour, there’s a thing of feeling the energy of an audience – not so much if it’s going badly but if it’s going well – there’s a skill in it. If you haven’t done a gig in a while, like at the start of a tour, there’s a danger that you’re just hammering

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through it, and you do a bit too long maybe in the first half, rather than realizing that you’ve got to pace yourself over the show. And it’s about that, you know, you can sort of tire an audience out. The pace, if you like, that’s just as important a skill – a muscle – to exercise as anything else. And of late, what I’ve been doing is, I’ll take time off over the sort of December, January time; but there’s a little music venue that used to be an old abattoir. Fairly small room, there’s like a bar out the front; then there’s a room out the back. Because it was an abattoir it’s got a sloping floor. It’s got all tatty old sofas and dining chairs and stuff. You’ll have probably about 100 people in and I’ll do that every Sunday, while I’m off, even though I’m on holiday. I host the show and just get a few comics in. It’s just out of Melbourne, and it’s the sort of thing where we don’t advertise it. People who know where it is can come along, but you have to get there really early to get in. You know, it’s one of those things where then I could start a tour and it’s like the one tour’s just continued. You mentioned getting into the headspace, and it seems to me that having watched you live and also on DVD, it’s not just about invention, but it’s also about being aware of which things to go for, if you know what I mean – which particular word, which combination of ideas to really develop and really exploit and run with and build. To me, that does seem to be an attitude of mind as much as anything else. It’s almost as if you have the ability to have that frame of mind that everybody has every now and again, that one little golden moment, where you’re suddenly being really funny and inventive, but it just lasts a second and then it’s gone. But with you, it is two hours every night. So that must be an interesting thing to experience on a regular basis. You know, I’m not into drugs, but I can come offstage having had a great gig where everyone has thought it’s great, and sort of go, ‘Yeah. Not so much.’ Like, an audience could be in hysterical laughter for the whole show and give me a standing ovation at the end, but that’s only part of it. But yeah, even when it’s only all right, you know, it’s still as much fun probably if not more fun for me than it is for the audience, you know. And it’s a weird one because it’s not, say, like a drug where anyone can take it and feel that feeling, you know. It’s really quite a sort of intoxicating thing, you know. I totally agree with you that the best comedy isn’t just about making people laugh, it’s about something else – but what is that for you? It’s lots of different things, you know. It’s about – if I was getting really sort of analytical about it – physical precision. From doing it onstage, I can fall over on a hard floor and not hurt myself. It happened while I was in Toronto, I fell, but it’s one of those things where as I fell, you do the sort of parachute roll thing, you can land on your back, but as you go down you can land on those bits there [indicates back of upper arms] and you absorb it, but it looks like you’ve fallen flat. I fell on the floor but it was too realistic. There was a moment like where they all went, ‘Fuck, he’s genuinely fallen over.’ I was waiting for the audience, as I was falling I went, ‘As soon as my body hits the floor . . .’ It’s like a bang is the cue for laughter. You know, there is, like, triggers for things. Right, bang. And as I hit the floor, I went bang, and it was like – beat – that’s when it should have been. And the audience went, ‘Huurr.’ I realized – like they laughed – but there should have been a laugh and a round of applause. It was too realistic. So that takes the edge off it, you know, the show’s now only a 99.

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It’s all those little elements as well of when you play around, when you say something sarcastic that people don’t realize it’s sarcasm, that can take the edge off it, you know. You know, when you do something like, when an audience doesn’t realize you’re joking about something. And even though the audience are applauding and standing and going, ‘Hooray!’ and in their heads they’re going, ‘Oh, it couldn’t get better, that show,’ in your head you’re going, ‘It’s only 64, that,’ you see what I mean? But that’s good, because it means when you get one that’s up there, you go, ‘Fair enough,’ you know.

3 Closing thoughts A number of interesting contradictions emerge during the course of the interview. Noble’s early experiences in the Newcastle comedy scene of the early 1990s have led him to prefer the rough and authentic to the slick and packaged, yet he clearly puts great amount of thought and effort into his work. His DVDs are commercial products, but he has applied his intelligence and creativity to explore the potential of this comparatively new medium, and in doing so has found a way of documenting his work which is every bit as effective as the documentation produced by any avant-garde theatre company or live artist. He rightly shuns the idea of there being a definitive version of his shows, instead presenting the film of one main performance alongside footage from many other shows. He understands that there is more to stand-up comedy than just getting laughs, and these extra elements are necessary for him to be fully satisfied by his performances. Working as a compère and a TV warm-up man has led him to understand the necessary contradiction in stand-up between following his own humour and artistic ambitions and pleasing the audience. Without the audience as a sounding board, his DVD commentaries have ‘shitty bits’ that are ‘really, really boring’ alongside the moments that are ‘laugh-out-loud funny’. However, in his live work, by collaborating and interacting with the audience, he improvises surreal trains of thought, enacted with such physical precision that what he does is as much art as entertainment. Source: Oliver Double (2010) ‘Not the definitive version: an interview with Ross Noble’, Comedy Studies, 1:1, 5–19.

Notes 1 See Double (1994) for a detailed account of the provincial scene at this time. 2 Billy Connolly, Jasper Carrott and Max Boyce were the three most prominent stand-up comedians to emerge from the British folk music scene in the 1960s and 1970s. 3 Bev Bevan (1944-) was the drummer with British rock bands The Move and Electric Light Orchestra. 4 ‘The Magic Roundabout’ was an early stand-up routine by Jasper Carrott, in which he parodied the animated children’s series of the same name by incongruously adding sexual content into it. A recording of the routine was included as the B-side to Carrott’s single ‘Funky Moped’, and its notoriety and popularity was said to have accounted for the success of this record, which reached number five in the UK pop charts in 1975. 5 The Wow Show was a group of performers on the early alternative comedy circuit, made up of Mark Arden, Lee Cornes, Mark Elliot and Stephen Frost. 6 Now a well-known name on the national comedy circuit.

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7 In Birmingham. 8 When alternative comedy was starting off with the opening of the Comedy Store, the founding of Tony Allen’s Alternative Cabaret group, etc. 9 A well-known competition for new stand-up comedians, established in 1988, which takes place at the Edinburgh Fringe. 10 Two audio CDs, released in 2001 and 2003, that were sold via Noble’s website. 11 A film of this routine can be seen on Noble (2005). An audio recording of a different performance of the same routine can also be heard on Noble (2003). 12 See Noble (2006). 13 Because of his improvisational approach, even Noble’s prepared material is constantly changing and evolving. So by the time he came back from touring Australia, the whole show had evolved to the point where it was completely different from the previous UK tour. For more on this, see Double 2005: 241.

References Allen, Tony (2004), A Summer in the Park: A Journal of Speakers’ Corner, London: Freedom Press. Carrott, Jasper (1986), Sweet and Sour Labrador, London: Arrow Books. Carrott, Jasper (1979), A Little Zit on the Side, London: Arrow Books. Double, Oliver (1994), ‘Laughing all the Way to the Bank? Alternative Comedy in the Provinces’, New Theatre Quarterly, 10:39, pp. 255–62. Double, Oliver (2005), Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy, London: Methuen. Maxwell, Dominic (2005), ‘I’m brilliant. A very funny man’, The Times (Features; The Knowledge), 15 October, p. 23. Noble, Ross (2003), The Official Bootlegs – Part 2, London: Stunt Baby Productions. Noble, Ross (2005), Sonic Waffle, London: Stunt Baby Productions. Noble, Ross (2006), Randomist, London: Stunt Baby Productions.

Contributor Following a career as a comedian and comedy promoter in the 1980s and 1990s, Oliver Double now works as Reader in Drama at the University of Kent. He is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (1997) and Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (2005) and co-editor of Popular Performance, with Adam Alston and Louise Peacock. He has also written chapters and articles on comedy, cabaret, Variety theatre and punk. His stand-up comedy DVD Saint Pancreas, produced as part of a practiceresearch project, is available from the University of Kent website.

Chapter 16

Scenes in the House of Comedy: Interview with Stewart Lee (2:1) Tony Moon

Opening notes Stewart Lee is palpably different from other performers. He is not interested in the quick fix, the box set or any of the tropes associated with the carcinomic celebrity culture that has engulfed and emasculated much of modern stand-up. As a performer he is a restless figure. Comedy – developing it and honing it into his act act is all. His best-selling and critically received book How I Escaped my Certain Fate is not yet another Christmas shelf-filler designed to be knocked out at Asda next to the one-pound chickens. Rather it is a cogent and entertaining examination of what it is to be a comedy performer. Lee is always questioning not only the world at large, but also himself. What is comedy? Why do we laugh when we do? What do audiences want? These are some of the issues that preoccupy Lee in his constant exploration of the comedic vibe. I met Stewart Lee in London towards the end of his critically acclaimed ‘Vegetable Stew’ tour, which had played in theatres across Britain before settling in for an extended residency at the Leicester Square Theatre in London’s West End. It first seemed appropriate to ask Stewart about that book title – what exactly was the fate he escaped from? SL: By about 2000 I had been doing stand-up for about ten years and I found that I couldn’t make enough money to cover the basic running costs. A model seemed to have come into being for comedians whereby you did panel shows and guest slots on things and that is how you got better known. This didn’t suit me, and also the circuit had become commercialized to the point where what I did was being seen as not doing comedy properly, but also it hadn’t become so big that there was a viable fringe circuit so how I escaped my certain fate was firstly – how did I escape from that problem? But also I guess it was trying to find a way to carry on doing the sort of comedy that I wanted to do – make it cost effective and reach people who wanted to see it. Between 2000 and 2004 I wasn’t actually doing stand-up – I couldn’t see a way of doing it. It was during this enforced hiatus that Lee became involved as a co-writer with Richard Thomas with the successful but also contentious musical project Jerry Springer-The Opera. Successful in that it garnered four Laurence Oliver awards including one for Best Musical, contentious because it was attacked, and eventually scuppered, by right-wing Christian groups who claimed that aspects of the show were blasphemous.1 Eventually Lee decided to return to his

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first love: stand-up comedy. The time out had given him a new vigour and a hunger to perform again. ‘I was like a punch drunk prizefighter with no other viable skills who thought that maybe there was still a battle to be won’ (p. 39). Was it also a bid to reclaim the somewhat tarnished term ‘alternative comedian’ and give it some credibility again? SL: I think I was really trying to give credibility to myself. A lot of things that one says or complains about I realize in retrospect that what you are doing in a way is trying to brand yourself. Although lots of us are a bit confused by the mass acceptance of someone like Michael McIntyre, the good thing about that is that it does give you something to position yourself in opposition to. Like I’m a comedian but I’m not ‘one of those’ comedians, whereas before it was jumbled up and if you said that you were a comedian people would always say things like ‘oh do you play Jongleurs? We went there once for an office night out [. . .]’. No I don’t play there. And they’d go on to assume that it was because you weren’t very good, whereas now I think that people realize that there must be some other kind of thing because there is ‘all that’ out there and when there is an ‘all that’ there is always going to be a ‘something else’. Also I realized that what I was doing really wasn’t going to fit with where everything was going. So trying to remember what it was like when we started out in the 1980s when it really was alternative was a useful thing. Stewart cites several performers from this formative period as being key influences when he was starting out, chief among them one Ted Chippington, a self-described ‘anti-comedian’ from the Midlands who combined a deadpan style of delivery with a diffident on stage persona to deliver an act that Lee has described as being ‘a mixture of surrealism and insolent provocation and uncompromising boredom’.2 SL: I saw Ted when I was sixteen. Before I had ever thought of doing stand-up. By the time I actually had decided to do it three years later I did it using influences from the three or four people that I really liked and who I had seen in that period: they were Ted Chippington, Arnold Brown, Norman Lovett and Kevin Macaleer. But the thing about Ted Chippington is that you wouldn’t copy him, although I did, I suppose, but it was that he wasn’t like what I thought a stand-up comedian was – he didn’t have any of the things that I thought a stand -up comedian should have and yet he was funny.3 It was about being up on the stage and you could do anything so it was liberating in that way in much the same way as a generation before they had seen the Sex Pistols and it wasn’t like they wanted to sound like the Sex Pistols, it was just that you didn’t have to be ‘Yes’ 4 – you could be something else whatever that something else was. And that was the important thing about it really. I mention to Stewart the work of the American documentary film-maker Fred Wiseman, whose work is characterized by long takes, no commentary, no music, no formal interviews, the so-called ‘fly on the wall’ type of film, and a review I had come across that had said of his films ‘we have all the fascination of looking into another world without the annoyance of being told what to think about it [. . .]’. I wondered whether the same could be said of Stewart’s work? SL: The annoyance of being told what to think [. . .] that annoys me across the board in all forms of art. Like I don’t like musical theatre-type singing where the person emotes. I don’t like films where the soundtrack tells you how you are supposed to respond. A really

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good example of that is in King Kong, the original 1933 version, King Kong falls off the top of the Empire State Building and he lands at the bottom and you are a bit taken by surprise as a kid when you first see that because you think I felt sympathetic for that ape, whereas in Peter Jackson’s remake as he falls in slow motion, there is a stringladen minor-key soundtrack that tells you that you are to respond to this as a ‘sad thing’, whereas the exciting thing about it in the original is that your emotional response took you by surprise – it wasn’t directed. Likewise I think that – and you can do it if you want – but I don’t think that you should laugh at your own jokes. Or flag them up. I think you should let the audience decide for themselves – I think good writing is like that in fiction – for example, that is the reason that Dan Brown5 is bad writing because Dan Brown says something like ‘the sad man felt depressed and then he left the room’. Whereas a good writer or any writer who is not shit would give you something like an example of the way he was doing something – the way he made pasta or how he moved things around in the room that would allow you to interpret his emotional state and would involve you on an imaginative and intellectual level and there doesn’t seem to be much other point in making art unless you are a government propagandist and isn’t that the point? To actually involve the consumer in an imaginative or emotional journey – and I would argue that all those things that guide that response don’t do that and that often they do turn out to be the most popular things. So a lot of all this stuff that you read about me where they say ‘well he hasn’t got any jokes’ – I’ve got loads of jokes, I mean where are the laughs coming from? But I think for years people actually thought that I didn’t know what I was doing and that it was all a mistake. Another performer mentioned by Lee, who is also interested in the anatomy of comedy, is the film-maker and comic Paul Provenza, who directed the documentary film The Aristocrats.6 SL: It’s the sort of finger pointing at the moon – the finger obscures the moon, the ‘finger’ being the subject material – the joke (The Aristocrats) is quite obscene. So a lot of people think that it is a film about obscenity and taste, and it is partly, but I think that what it is about is how can you tell the same story and deliver the same punchline in so many different ways and where to laugh falls into the cadences of that. I think that is the really interesting thing about it. Because you are still finding the joke funny an hour into the film even though you know what the punchline is. And yet if you talk to a critic or a member of the public they always think that the funny part of a joke is always the punchline and it isn’t always – it can be anticipation of the punchline or the texture of the joke. It is too hard for critics to write about that or describe it so they ignore it. We know this about the novel – how many great novels of the twentieth century where the beginning might in fact be the end. It may be that at the start the person is dead. And then you find out how they got there. And yet in those cases we don’t think ‘well I know what happens now, I’m not going to read it’. You might do that in a Dan Brown book because the only pleasure in that is finding out what happens because it goes ‘and then this happens and then this happens’. There is no pleasure in its literary stylings or the texture or tone of it. It is just a list of events. Whereas in a good novel it doesn’t matter what order the events happen – they can be backwards they can be in all different orders and we know that. It is the same in paintings – a Picasso painting can still look like a thing even though the bits are in the wrong

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places – you can still tell what it is and you have the pleasure of assembling it. So the idea that a joke, the funny bit of joke, is the punchline seems to be demonstrably not true. In the time that Stewart has been working there has been something of an explosion in the scale of the comedy map. Today comedians are ubiquitous in the media and play at venues unheard of fifteen years ago. Stewart has cited Rob Newman and David Baddiel performing at Wembley as the moment it all started to go wrong [. . .].7 SL: I slightly did that to be provocative. Because a lot of people say that Newman and Baddiel playing Wembley was the beginning of comedy as we understand it today so I thought that it would be funny as a sort of insider joke to say that it was actually the point when it finished. But in a way I sort of think it is. There is no turning back from that. I remember at the time their agent, who was also my agent at the time, said Newman and Baddiel had made £300,000 playing Wembley, compared to today when people are doing, not just one gig, but a tour of stadiums – people must be making millions. But I think it was hard to come back from that point because it set a precedent. And it gave the impression that that was something that you should aim for. And it can be, and I’m not saying that I wouldn’t do it if it appeared like it was doable but [. . .] if we look outside comedy for a moment there are all sorts of people who have in their various fields died without being recognized. Like Kafka didn’t even want his books published and yet now the word Kafkaesque is an adjective that everyone uses without even knowing where it is from. There is a word from what he did. Nick Drake is written about today as if he was a significant figure. But back in the 1980s his records were not even in print and when he was alive he sold very little. People reverse-engineer these things – we know that it is not the case that mass popularity equals artistic significance and yet people seem very reluctant to apply that to comedy. That logic. There is also that assumption in comedy that if that person is any good why haven’t I heard of them? Well because there are about 5000 working comics out there. When I started there were only about 300. There are so many that why would you assume that you have? There are all sorts of ways of doing it, and all sort of people doing it in different ways. But these articles that are written about ‘turnover’ and audience size – whatever – I think actually obscure the critical study of it. Lee has referred to these large-scale comedy gigs as being more like ‘rallies’. SL: The thing about things on a big scale goes back to what you were saying about directing emotional responses, and I partly feel this having worked on commercial musical theatre and it is like a reaction to that and I never want to be in that position again, where the idea is that you get everyone to go ‘ahhhh’ at the same thing and at the same time. Because I realized that the stuff I like is when you don’t quite know what you are supposed to feel – it’s like the feeling you get off some folk music or avant-garde jazz or even some punk things when you have to figure out are they angry or are they sad or what is it? I like the fact that different people in the same room can experience different things, whereas the stadium comedy gig is the opposite of that. What it drives towards is to have 18,000 people all making the same response at the same time over and over again. Even in a room of 300 people like tonight, I don’t like that. Where is the excitement in that? It’s a bit like King Kong again falling off the Empire State building where you can have two different emotions playing at the same time – stadium comedy doesn’t do that. It has nothing to do with anything that I like.

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Lee’s work is characterized by a need to constantly challenge what it is to be a comedic performer and also what it is to be an audience member. This can extend even to the choice of pre-show music that is played in the auditorium before he goes onstage. SL: I do like to defeat expectations. In the book I do refer to one club, The Amused Moose, and they always play ‘Pumping on the Stereo’ by Supergrass as you go on. And the idea is that here comes the rock and roll comedian and it’s Friday night! And whoa! And then I kind of think that is one kind of comedy but what about just making a confused feeling in the room and play music in the room which doesn’t really suggest anything so that they are not predisposed towards thinking –‘It’s going to be exciting’. That’s what it is about. When I was trying to change the way that comedy was perceived in my own little way in as far as it affected me in 2004/2005 there were still people who were coming to see me who would ask the sound mixer to turn off the pre-show music because it was annoying them. I kind of think well that was good. Because they are already learning to submit to my will (laughs), which is that it will not be turned off. It is not for them to come in and have what they want. And I think more than anything the way comedy is consumed these days the consumer is king. It is like someone once said to me at the Cosmic Comedy Club, which is a ‘Friday night – Night out’ club in Fulham, ‘You didn’t do enough jokes [. . .] we’ve paid for jokes and you didn’t do enough of them’. As if there is a number per minute. I remember there was some heckling on stage ‘You are not doing enough jokes’. I said ‘Well people are laughing aren’t they?’ He wanted things that he could take away. I kind of think you know what? I appreciate that you have all paid and whatever but I don’t want to play to those audiences who come in with an expectation of what they are supposed to get, and partly putting Derek Bailey and Evan Parker8 on before a show was to stop those people coming (laughs). Or if they did come to suggest before the show that it was not going to be ‘Pumping on the Stereo’ Supergrass – Friday Night. One memorable show that seemed to epitomize this deliberate unsettling approach was Stewart performing in Scotland (which was subsequently broadcast on television) an extended riff on the whole William Wallace Braveheart fantasy as depicted by Mel Gibson.9 SL: Yes. I specifically wanted that show to be filmed in Glasgow because I thought that there was more chance of it going badly there and I thought that it would be interesting to see how that went. The interesting thing is now – and it would be wrong not to admit it – but the majority of people who come and see me, two-thirds of the room will like me and will know what is going on. Rather perversely I tend to focus in on any area of dissent or of confusion in the room and amplify it a bit. In order to try and get something going. At the start of a run that provides a springboard for genuine improvisation after two months – again to be honest, you have probably encountered most of what it can throw up and the responses tend to become a little bit – not instant – there is like a little tree of where you could go – I don’t like when that happens but it does. You’ve got all this material that is prepared but you have to try and make it feel spontaneous. I’m not like that – I’m not an actor and in order to create a degree of spontaneity I have to actually try and wrong-foot myself. To make something happen, because I’m not good at faking it. I wish I was.

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Performers like Eddie Izzard are very good at making it feel spontaneous by giving the impression that things have just occurred to him. Billy Connolly and also Frank Skinner are good at being onstage in a huge place and giving you the impression that they arrived there by accident – they were still ‘the fool’ who got invited to the film premier and is telling you about it or got to go to the Queen’s garden party and is telling you about it with a degree of ‘you won’t believe what this was about’ – they were still like the fool that had somehow got in there. I was curious about how Stewart viewed the role of the comedy performer when compared to other forms of theatrical presentation. SL: Well in theatre there are all sorts of people making a big deal about improvisation and performers talking directly to the audience and so on. People in theatre get excited about this, but the most down-the-line hack Jongleurs comedian does that every night. He goes into a room, reads it, works out how to judge the performance, talks directly to the people from what he has written himself, and when playwrights do that people go ‘give them an award’. But a comedian does that all the time. I also think that it can enable you to think of an idea during the day and implement it at night. One of the reasons that comedy took off perversely under Thatcher was that in an era of harsh cuts it was a very cost-effective form of art and it was peopled by people who were largely refugees from left-wing political theatre who suddenly were not getting their local funding grant anymore. I think you can find out a lot more about taste and judgement and what people are anxious about and what they care about from what they laugh at than you probably can do in anything in a play or a piece of music. Finally I wanted to ask Stewart whether he had any what I called ‘Bill Hicks’10 moments, in reference to when he was erroneously asked by people unaware of his persona to do an ad and sell his soul to the devil. The terse reply seemed to sum up the man and his entire ethos. SL: I wouldn’t do it because the adolescent me would be disappointed. Part of being a comedian for me is that hanging on to the adolescent you, the precocious, precious part of you. What I tap back into as a comedian is what I was like when I was teenager still, and I find that quite funny. Source: Tony Moon (2011) ‘Scenes in the House of Comedy: Interview with Stewart Lee’, Comedy Studies, 2:1, 5–12.

Notes 1 At the court case that ensued the judge threw the claim out. 2 See Stewartlee.co.uk. Chippington retired from performance claiming that he was getting ‘too popular’. 3 Richard Herring talks of Chippington’s ‘contempt for the very idea of jokes’. 4 Progressive rock band from the late 1960s/early 1970s that specialized in florid depictions of fantasy-based mythical sci-fi worlds. A review of their eponymous LP ‘YES’ received one of the shortest reviews in the history of LP criticism in New Musical Express when the reviewer simply wrote ‘NO’. 5 Author of risible airport fiction such as The Da Vinci Code that is then turned into equally risible Hollywood blockbusters.

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6 The Aristocrats is a notoriously rude joke that has become the ultimate shaggy dog story. The film explores how the gag works and the different ways different performers have tried to deliver it. 7 Rob Newman famously ‘flew’ across the vast audience of 12,000 suspended on a wire. 8 English avant-garde jazz musicians who specialize(d) in improvised ‘free’ music. 9 The central point being the incredible array of historical inaccuracy at play in the film. 10 Hicks was once asked to do an orange juice ad. The story is recounted as ‘Orange Drink’, a sketch on ‘Rant in E-Minor’.

References Hicks, Bill. ‘Rant in E-Minor’, Rykodisc RCD 10353. Lee, Stewart. (2010), How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Death of a Stand Up Comedian, London: Faber. Richard Herring.com Stewartlee.co.uk

Contributor Tony Moon is an award-wining film-maker and academic working at Southampton Solent University. He lectures in documentary, drama production and scriptwriting. He is also the author of Down by the Jetty, the authorised biography of the beat group Dr. Feelgood.

Chapter 17

Up and down with Barry Cryer: From an interview conducted on 22 July 2011 (2:2) Tony Moon

Introduction He started out like many young performers, then, as now, performing in and directing sketches in university revue shows. It was at Leeds University where he first got a taste of life on stage. But this was never a part of some long strategy to become a professional performer. As Cryer himself says of this period in his life I didn’t decide. It is something that just happened. I was at university and we all performed there, we all did shows in rag week for charity and that was it, you just performed. I had no show business ambitions at all. Despite the lack of any formal game plan, it did at least give the young Cryer a hint that he might be good at it and that it was at least worth a shot. Cryer found himself dropping out of university and quickly setting out to be a professional comic performer on the variety circuit, appearing in such revues as ‘Fanny Get Your Gun’ and ‘Nudes of the World.’ It was a leap too far. Well, I was doing student shows and then moved off in something of a false start in show business with a few weeks work, and I went back to Leeds with my tail between my legs and I went to see a chap called Johnny Gunn who was the stage manager at Leeds Empire, and he took me on as a stage hand and also during the day I would empty and restock the theatre bars. During that time, I saw many performers working on stage. Although the young Cryer had, by this time, put his own stage ambitions to one side. He was unconsciously absorbing the world of the performer and performance. At that stage in my life I was not even thinking about going back into show business as a performer. I was just taking things as they came and going with the flow. During this period, the magician, David Nixon, arrived in Leeds to do a pantomime. And his arrival was tragic; he and his wife had drove up from London in separate cars and she had a heart attack en route, crashed the car and died. David Nixon was told of this upon his arrival in Leeds and he collapsed. But after the doctor had been called he insisted that he would still go on and do the show. I was at the time regarded as the eccentric stage hand, known as ‘the toff’ simply because I had been to university, and

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Leo Lion, who was the theatre manager, summoned me up to his office and said, ‘You are going to look after Mr. Nixon.’ Meaning offstage, be his dresser, and we became friends and I looked after him. This professional relationship soon developed into a genuine friendship. David Nixon, sensing Cryer’s comic potential, urged him to get out of Leeds and go down to London and give it a real shot. He said to me ‘you have to go to London.’ He gave me his number and so I got an overnighter to London on a seventeen day return ticket and David showed me all around the various theatres and shows. Introduced me to various people.

London It was during this fateful visit that Cryer came across the infamous Windmill Theatre in Soho. The theatre was run by the charismatic figure of Vivian Van Damm. Its stock in trade was nude revues and striptease shows. This was the place that had famously never shut even at the height of the Blitz and had later put up a sign outside that proudly declared ‘We Never Closed’ (often verbally changed to ‘We Never Clothed’). In between the girls cavorting or holding themselves in frozen tableaux, a range of comics tried to keep the audience amused. Cryer got himself an audition. The day before the train ticket ran out and I was due to go back to Leeds; again with my tail between my legs, I landed an audition at the Windmill Theatre at ten in the morning. And at twelve thirty, I was up on the stage in front of an audience in a state of shock. I was wearing my ordinary clothes with a bit of stage make up applied and I performed the act I did at my audition. Cryer was a ‘bottom of the bill’ performer doing six shows a day, six days a week back to back. The pressure to turn over and generate new material was constant. The show would run for three or four weeks and a week before the end, he (Van Damm) would say, ‘Come on I want a new act’ and I would have to audition again. He turned me down twice and as the date of the new show approached, I did another one and he said ‘turn up on Sunday.’ He kept you on your toes all the time. What was it like to do so many shows per day and per week? You learned to die with dignity because they hadn’t come to see you they had come to see the strippers. Even brilliant comics got used to a quiet afternoon – three shows in the afternoon and then three in the evening and you might get the odd laugh in the afternoon and it would liven up a bit in the evening. But it was a great school. Bruce Forsyth was a performer there. The Windmill was much the same kind of proving ground that The Comedy Store would become decades later when a whole new generation of young comics would try their hand on a small stage in front of a critical audience and risk being ‘gonged’ off by an MC

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like Alexi Sayle. By the late 1950s, Cryer was successfully plying his trade and making small forays into the worlds of radio and television. ITV came in 1955. I was at the Windmill in 1957. I did a programme called Bid for Fame in Harrogate, it was a sort of discovery show of its day. I didn’t win that one. Then I did a radio programme called, I believe, Search for a Star and a singer won on the night but I won the listeners vote and I started to get offers of work on the strength of that. Outside of the Windmill, there was a variety bill circuit well established across the country. The ‘number ones’ were the Moss Empires, almost every town had one. But for me, after the Windmill, I was playing at more modest places, like the Regent in Rotherham or the Royal Bilston – known as the ‘number threes.’ I never found out what the number twos were.

Writing It was during this period of Cryer’s life that he was forced to stop being a performer. He suffered at the time from a debilitating form of eczema, which severely curtailed his physical abilities. Unable to perform regularly, he started to develop his skills as a writer for other performers. Again, luck played a role in him finding work. . . . that just happened . . . I’ve been dogged by good luck all my life. I was friends with an actress called Anna Quayle and she was going to appear in a review show – songs and sketches, and I wrote a couple of sketches for her. And through that, Danny La Rue saw the show and he invited me to write his night club shows, which led to thirteen years working with him during which time I met people like Ronnie Corbett. Danny eventually got his own club in Hanover Square, which became very famous. David Frost came in one night and I was introduced to him and from that, both myself and Ronnie Corbett were invited to work on his new TV programme the Frost Report. Again, these lucky breaks come along. And once the door opens you have to get on with it. People will go ‘well okay you’ve had your lucky break, now show us, get on with it.’ On the Frost Report, Cryer further consolidated his talent as a comedy writer. The programme ran for two seasons and 29 shows from March 1966 to June 1967. It attracted some of the brightest writing and performing talents then working in the United Kingdom, performers like Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker, John Cleese and Graham Chapman, who would all variously go on to dominate and define the comedy landscape in Britain during the coming years. Throughout, David Frost proved to be a very diplomatic producer; Cryer once called him ‘the master of rejection.’ He had a wonderful way – if you submitted something that he didn’t feel was up to it, he would say, ‘This is not up to your usual standard.’ You would go away feeling not bad at all. Thinking that you could do better. He had a great way of smoothing over the rejection.

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Now established as a comedy writer with a real track record, Cryer was soon writing for some of the biggest names in show business: acts such as Stanley Baxter, Ronnie Corbett, Dave Allen, Tommy Cooper, Les Dawson and Kenny Everett amongst those seeking original material cut to perfection. He also wrote episodes for the comedy series Doctor in the House that aired in 1970 and Doctor at Large (1971) that featured other writers, some of whom had worked together on the Frost Report, such as Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden.

Morecambe and Wise For very pragmatic reasons, Cryer always preferred, during this period, to work with a writing partner. For a time, this was the comedy performer and writer John Junkin. ‘I always had a partner because if you are on your own and you get blocked, then you are in trouble. When you are with someone else, you can bang ideas about.’ Cryer is very clear how the process of writing for other acts is supposed to operate. ‘It’s all about them. You’re like a tailor making suits.’ One of the most famous acts that Cryer and Junkin wrote material for during this period was Morecambe and Wise. Cryer and Junkin penned the first shows that the duo did when they dramatically (some would say controversially) moved from the BBC to Thames Television in 1978, and their main writer Eddie Braben, who Cryer still terms as simply ‘The “A” Team,’ became contractually unavailable. Cryer and Junkin would take a briefing and discuss sketch ideas before retiring to the writer’s room where Cryer would be the one who sat in front of the typewriter. There was a sitter and a walker. I would sit there scribbling and John would walk around the room twiddling his glasses being Eric. He did a very good Eric impersonation and that is the way we worked. Cryer and Junkin wrote the first of the Thames shows that went out in October 1978, featuring such sketches as ‘Peter Cushing Wants Paying’ and ‘Butler of the Year,’ and also the Christmas show of that year (which featured former Prime Minister Harold Wilson in a sketch) and had, by that time, become something approaching a national institution with a viewing audience of some 28 million people. Following this, Cryer moved on into mainstream television often appearing as a host presenter on such popular entertainment shows as Jokers Wild.

Stand up In more recent years, Barry has returned to being a performer both on stage and on the radio. It’s here that the life-long experience of watching and working with performers has come back into play. There, however, are no easy solutions. An empty stage is always an empty stage until you stand on it. You go on and start. And sniff the wind. Hope you get a laugh. You have to feel your way into the mood of the theatre or room. You’ve got to gauge it. And eventually you will get them along. But sometimes it takes a bit longer than others. Every audience is different in a subtle way. Every time you do it is the first time. I always think that as a comic you have the toughest job. If you are a singer you have to look after your voice and you get the right songs in the right order and people don’t

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heckle and shout ‘get off’ whilst you are singing a song; it’s the same for a band. But we are naked, we just go on and the audience decides within a very few minutes if they like you or not. Cryer is very self-deprecating about his own skills. He does not regard himself in any way as an ‘archivist’ or custodian of comedy in the way that some artists (Ken Dodd or Bob Monkhouse) like to collect and amass volumes of jokes and routines on file. Cryer prefers a more intuitive approach. No. It’s all in my head. A line or a joke will occur to you. I’m not actually a comedian. A lot of the younger stand-ups are. One or two of them have been rather puzzled when I have said ‘I’m not a comedian I say you are.’ You are original – they look at life. They go imaginatively all over the place. I tell stories, do lines and sing songs. I am, in that sense, an entertainer. Cryer is a fan of many of the newer acts that have come through in recent years. He particularly cites Ross Noble with his facility of off-the-cuff improvisation and leaps of surreal fantasy. But he is also critical of some contemporary comedy television projects and performers that he feels are often hitting a harsher, more cynical tone. ‘A lot of it is very highIQ comedy and very fierce and aggressive. I prefer a warmer, more laid-back style rather than the attacking style. Some of it is just too fierce for me.’ So does someone with so much experience under his belt have any advice for those setting out on a similar career?

Young Guns Be yourself. Which is the hardest thing. When you start out, you are often modelling yourself on someone you admire, even if you don’t realize it. You have to go through a circular process of coming back to who you are – of being yourself. You can’t teach anyone to be a stand-up. It is inborn. It is either there or it isn’t. The material might not be there or very good. You can look at someone and say that ‘you’re good but you need a better act’ but they have it – the innate talent to start with. Is laughter addictive? I don’t know whether I am addicted to it but it is a nice way of making a living. It is very different when they do not laugh. You have to ride over those moments. The ‘ups’ makes the ‘downs’ worthwhile. I’ve been lucky, I’ve had more ‘ups’ than ‘downs.’ Source: Tony Moon (2011) ‘Up and down with Barry Cryer: From an interview conducted on 22 July 2011’, Comedy Studies, 2:2, 173–178.

Contributor Tony Moon is an award-wining film-maker and academic working at Southampton Solent University. He lectures in documentary, drama production and scriptwriting. He is also the author of Down by the Jetty, the authorised biography of the beat group Dr. Feelgood.

Chapter 18

Interview with Charlie Hanson (3:1) Gary Turk

GARY TURK: Was it always your ambition to be a comedy producer? CHARLIE HANSON: Not at all. I started as a theatre director and always had an interest in

making films, but my path into being a director came through directing new plays with new writers in the theatre. It was an accident I got diverted into comedy, the head of comedy at a TV station saw some of my theatre work and then asked me to create a sitcom. So out of the blue I was asked to do something funny for television, and it became a hit, and I got diverted into working in comedy. I wasn’t really interested in comedy; I didn’t go and see comedians. I would watch comedy on TV but I had no ambition to work in comedy, I wasn’t even aware I had a sensibility for comedy at the time. Some of the writing from playwrights I was working with featured humour, and I could always bring the humour out of quite a serious play. Once I worked in comedy I got asked by other people to work with them and slowly crossed over from doing serious drama into comedy. G. T.: Is there a certain area, or style of comedy you prefer to work within? C. H.: I like the characters to be real and believable, and I can’t deny that I come from a drama background; I’m not one for outright slapstick and clowns. I like character relationships, structure, all the things you get from drama but added with humour as well. Often I like things that are dark and have a message, have something to say as well as being funny. G. T.: Can you give a brief description of what it is you do as a comedy producer on an average day? C. H.: It varies a lot. The most important thing has always been the script, and the writer. Whether that writer is a performer, or is eventually going to be the director, it starts with someone writing a script. Unless I think the script is funny or good, it is not really going to go anywhere. I always have certain scripts in development at any one time, and then it’s a question of finding the right director, and the right cast for that script. Obviously if it’s a project with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant I have already got the directors and some of the cast, so that’s a package that is already there from the start. But in some cases it might be an unknown writer, so we are starting from scratch. Everything varies really. G. T.: In your experience, does the best work come to you, or do you have to go find it? C. H.: Both really, I never really go and find work as much as maybe meet someone that has done something good, and I then start working them on something that evolves into something I’d like to work on. So it might be a talent I recognize and we get talking and then we decide to work on a project together. Way back, Lenny Henry came

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wanting to do a project that he was going to act and star in, but he needed a writer, so it started with him as the star and then finding writers to write Chef. (BBC, 1993-96). When I met Harry Hill he had his own peculiar form of comedy that he was going to star in so it became how to visualize and make his thoughts and ideas, that were often doodles and little drawings, come alive in a live TV situation. It varies, that’s part of the fun of being a producer, you never quite know what you’re going to be working on next. G. T.: You’ve worked closely with an impressive amount of big names in some of your projects. Do you think it helps having established names in your comedy, or do you think it is more about the writing and performances in general? C. H.: I still think it’s about the writing and performances in general. When I worked with Harry Hill he was an unknown, it was his first bit of TV. When I worked with Stewart Lee and Richard Herring, they had a following but it was still cult, and when I worked Garth Marenghi (Richard Ayoade, Matthew Holness and Matt Berry) they were all unknown. They had done performances in Edinburgh but they weren’t known at all on TV, however, they were talented performers. People such as Lenny Henry and Frank Skinner were already stars when I worked with them, but the others were all kind of up and coming talents. Ricky Gervais had already made The Office (Gervais/Merchant, BBC, 2001-3) when I first worked with him. Ricky is a good example because what attracted me to working with him were the ideas and the scripts. He does actually have good ideas and he can write a script. He is creative and hardworking, and comes up with lots of ideas, and delivers on time. He is perfect in that respect for a producer, as he is someone who will come and talk about an idea and you know he is going to deliver it. G. T.: How did the collaboration with Ricky Gervais first come about? C.H: I first met Ricky when I was doing The Sketch Show (various, ITV, 2001–4) and he was doing The Office. We were filming in the same location so we met just to say hello to each other. Then The Office won BAFTA awards at the same time as I won BAFTA awards for The Sketch Show and Alistair McGowan’s The Big Impression, so we again met socially at award ceremonies just to say hello, and then Stephen Merchant played a guest role in Garth Marenghi (Ayoade, Channel 4, 2004) for one episode and he went back to Ricky and said he’d just done this show and the atmosphere was really good on set, great crew, good creative atmosphere, and then a few weeks later Ricky rang me out of the blue and asked if I’d meet him and Stephen for lunch. I went and met them, and they basically told me the idea for Extras (Gervais/Merchant, BBC, 2005–7) and said that’s what they’d like to write next, and was I interested in producing, and it was kind of a no-brainer, I thought yeah of course! G. T.: When you produce new things, do you hope it is going to run for a long time, such as Birds of a Feather, (various, BBC, 1989–98) which ran for nine series, or are you quite happy to work on something that runs for just two series but wins lots of awards and international recognition, like Extras? C. H.: I’ve got no problem with something running for nine series, but I don’t do them for nine series. I will do something for two series and a special because in effect that’s three years of work, and for me three years is about right. I left Desmonds (various, Channel 4, 1989-94) after three years, and I left Birds of a Feather after thre years, and then I got invited back as a producer having left it as a director. I have always had this thing that after three years that is about enough for me, I want to move onto something else.

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I told Alastair McGowan that when I first worked with him, and I ended up doing four series with him, because I liked him, but he always remembered that I said to him that if it goes well I will only do three series and then you will have to find someone else. Eventually after four I left and they did have to find someone else, so I do tend to walk away from projects after a while. Its not just because I get bored, for me it’s for the same reasons some writers only want to do one or two series, because they think they’ve said enough. For me I’ve done everything I can do, if it’s a success after two or three series and its going to go on, there’s nothing more I can do really, it’s a machine at that point, so its better that someone else with fresh ideas and an enthusiasm can keep it going. If I carried on doing it indefinitely, it would merely be for the money, or because I’ve got nothing else to do. I’m one of those people that even when I’ve got a hit show on, whether its in the first or second series I’m always looking for something new for whatever my new pilots going to be in the next year. That’s what always reinvents my career as a TV producer, by working with new talent that introduces me to new ideas and new tastes, and kind of broadens my awareness of what’s going on. G. T.: You say you like to work on new projects, but do you ever work on things that have already been established? C. H.: I worked on the second series of Not Going Out (Hardcastle/Wood, BBC, 2006–9) but I did that because I did the pilot and then couldn’t do the series because it happened to quickly. So when they asked me to do the next series I thought I would because I believed I could do it better than the first series, and Lee Mack is somebody I enjoy working with. G. T.: Have you got any more thoughts on doing some more directing? C. H.: I have actually. The last thing I directed was the pilot for Armstrong and Miller on their last series. I’ve just directed a reading of a script for a new project, which gave me the bug and made me think about how I love working with actors, with the writer in the room, and getting the best out of a script. So if that project gets picked up then the likelihood is I will say I don’t want to produce it, I want to direct it. So yes, I intend to direct again but I am not going to stop producing. There are a lot of things I produce that I wouldn’t want to direct because my mantra as a producer is that I wouldn’t want to direct something that I can find someone who could direct it better than me. G.T: Comedy is very subjective, does knowing that not everyone will like your show or find it funny make things difficult, or does it push you to create more original and creative projects? C. H.: It doesn’t necessarily push me because my choices in a project are that I have to find it funny, and my taste isn’t necessarily going to appeal to everybody. I know when I make a choice that it may have a particular appeal. When I first read a script and it makes me laugh, the more I work on it, and see it in rehearsals, and see it being filmed, and see it in the edit, I always remember when I first read the script and remember the fact I was laughing. I have to have faith in my own sense of humour, and accept that there are people that share the same, sense of humour, and that’s not going to be everybody. G. T.: Do you enjoy working on shows that push the boundaries, or do you sometimes feel that there could be more of a challenge in that? C. H.: No, I do, I think that goes back to my days of being a theatre director, when you kind of always want to create something new and different. You are always looking for someone with a voice really, so when I’m looking for comedy, I’m looking for comedy writers

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or comedians that’s have a particular voice, or have something to say that makes them stand out from the rest. I don’t mind something being slightly edgier or controversial. G. T.: It is often said that it is the audience who will draw the line in comedy, but do you ever feel as a producer that it is your job to sometimes say when to draw the line? C. H.: No, I think as a producer I have responsibilities to a broadcaster legally, we have to check the legalities of what is being said, we can’t libel anybody, we have to abide by the law. I wouldn’t want to go out deliberately to cause offense because I don’t see the point in that. I have done things that have caused offense but it’s never been intentional, often you are left wondering how something did cause offense, but as we have discovered with many things over the years there is always somebody that will find something offensive that you think is perfectly normal and natural. You have to draw the line sometimes, and must always abide by the law when producing. G. T.: You said during a Q&A at the Cofilmic Festival in Manchester that ‘new waves of comedy come in cycles, and that if what you are doing is not flavour of the month, then keep at it as it will come back in’. What ways are there of telling what the current wave of comedy is, and when producing comedy, what can you do to make sure your projects are in tune with what people are enjoying at the time? C. H.: The minute you start to follow a pattern or a formula you’re doomed, because if you think ‘such and such is a hit on Channel 4 at the moment, lets make a show like that for BBC Two’, you are going to do something that is not as good as the original one on Channel 4, so there is no point trying to emulate it. When I say trends, what I meant by that is that there have been times where script was king, and there have been times when talent has been the king, where who stars in the comedy has been more important than the script, and that’s partly to do with the way some TV channels operate. They want star vehicles, and some executives are not as good at reading scripts as they used to be, because there are too many executive level people that haven’t had real script or producing experiences, so it goes in patterns. It’s been hard for the last five years for any real new talent to get on TV in this country, but I think that possibly the doors are opening up again at Channel 4 and BBC Three because they have cancelled some stuff that’s been on for a long time, and therefore will open the doors to new faces and new voices. G. T.: There seems to be a big boom in comedy everywhere at moment, with live shows, TV and DVD sales. What do you think the reason for this is and how long do you think it will last? C. H.: Well it’s been going on for some time, and it has changed. I can remember ten years ago stand-up was really big and then it went out of favour, but stand-up is back in favour now and back on TV. Scripted comedy is back in favour, and I think it’s here to stay for a while. I think certainly while you have a recession people want to be entertained, so they want comedy. There is a warmth about comedy, no matter how controversial and edgy it is. People tend to still look for comedy, and it’s grown to such an extent that I can’t see it disappearing in this country now, it’s an industry. G. T.: You have produced two feature films. A Way Of Life (Assante, 2004) which is a drama, and Cemetery Junction (Gervais/Merchant, 2010) a comedy drama. Do you like to use features as a break away from full comedy, and are feature films something you are planning on doing more of? C. H.: Yeah, certainly the features I am working on and have in development are dramas with humour, and in some cases pure drama. I am doing that because having gone through theatre, and gone through TV, I like to have something new that I have still got to

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improve on. I have only done two feature films and I have got lots to learn in that arena, so yes I want to make more films. G. T.: Have there been any significant changes in television comedy that you have noticed throughout your career? C. H.: There is less scripted comedy now and more panel shows, but they are not something I ever want to make. I don’t watch panel shows and I don’t find them challenging in anyway. They’re fun while they last for half an hour and then they’re done, and that’s it. There is an exception in ‘QI’ which I do think is really clever, but not all those late night panel shows where you have basically just get comedians on to give funny sound bites. They have grown enormously because they are cheap to make. Some are mediocre, and some are good, but I think there are too many of them. Scripted comedy takes longer to make, but they last, in ten years time they could still be funny. There also appears to be a lot of stand-up on TV, which is fine, there is a market for it, but I would much rather go and see stand-up live. As a producer there is not a lot I can do, for producing stand-up on TV all you need to do is hire a venue and book the acts, that’s a promoter, that’s not what I am, I like to have a script, cast it, get involved. I like the comedy and drama combination really. G. T.: Do you produce much live comedy or any more theatre work? C. H.: Sometimes in getting to a TV show I will do things at the Edinburgh Festival with people, or in small venues testing the material. So at the moment I tend to use ‘live’ as a testing ground for developing things. I will never say no to directing a play again, as you always have that in you. G.T: What has been the highlight of your career? C. H.: In my early career I would say the Birds Of A Feather special that I shot in L.A., because that was fun, and the team were all getting along well, and the special got something around seventeen million viewers when it was shown, and those were the days you really could get massive viewing figures on TV, the way that you cant anymore. In terms of my career highs, I would say the Extras special, and A Way Of Life because that was my first film, and certain days on Life’s Too Short (Gervais.Merchant, BBC, 2011) which were just joyous. G. T.: You continue to produce critically acclaimed comedy, but what else does the future hold for Charlie Hanson? C. H.: It is always nice to have critically acclaimed stuff, but for me, breaking new talent has always been my biggest thrill, and what I look to do. When I get a new act doing a completely new show, and it goes well that’s the ultimate challenge. Source: Gary Turk (2012) ‘Interview with Charlie Hanson’, Comedy Studies, 3:1, 117–122.

Contributor Gary Turk is a performer, writer and filmmaker.

Chapter 19

‘Words are my weapons’: Tiffany Stevenson interview (3:2) Tony Moon

TM: How did you start out as a stand-up? TS: As an actress I was doing comedy roles anyway. I was getting quite frustrated as an actor

because it is quite a reactive job, so I started writing and I found that the ‘voice’ I was writing in was a comedic one. I have always been funny – banter with friends, humor at school – comedy as a defense mechanism, so I have always known that I am funny. It was when I was in my late 20s that I decided: why not give it a go? In front of a crowd. So the first challenge was could I make a roomful of people laugh? It spiraled from there. TM: Can you recall when you felt that it was all coming together? TS: I used to make other actors laugh. There is always banter on set and I wrote a script, a sitcom pilot, and I got all the actors in a room to read it and they all really laughed, the characters came off the page and were funny and I thought there was something in that. And this was with material that I had written. TM: So writing your own material was something of a turning point? TS: When I first started doing stand-up. I was doing a character act. So I approached it very much like an actress. That gave me a ‘fourth wall’. It just meant that if they didn’t like it then it was the character that they didn’t like, not me. Eventually you progress, you realize that if you want to do a more honest style of comedy you have to move on and decide that it is going to be you, or at least a version of you. TM: So you were trying to find your voice? TS: Yes. Exactly, which is I think getting there now. I have been doing straight stand-up for about six years. So I am at that point where it has taken that long to find my voice. TM: How do you move from writing and performing five to ten minutes of material and being able to perform an hour-long show at the Edinburgh Festival? TS: For me, because I was doing a character initially and also because I was known as an actress, I started getting paid work quite quickly. I got the kind of gigs that I really wasn’t ready for, and that was a lesson. When I started working as myself I wrote five minutes of straight stand-up and I did it at Old Rope. Some of the other comics found it funny and that gave me a little bit of enthusiasm and fire. So you take that five minutes and you perform it at as many places as you can and you write a little more until you have ten minutes. You keep writing, you keep developing it. There is no substitute for doing gigs. TM: So stand-up cannot really be rehearsed? TS: Exactly. Because sometimes you’ll write a new joke and perform it and you’ll get a laugh where you least expected it and you’ll say to yourself ‘I thought the punch line was the funny bit’ or, ‘I thought that this point in the story was the funny bit’. You find things out that you didn’t expect. You can rehearse as much as you like in front of the mirror at

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home but when you get in front of an audience there is no substitute. The comedians that I admire like Joan Rivers and Rich Hall are out there every night of the week trying material. I mean you can be out there over a weekend doing three or four gigs a night and in the week, a couple of ‘new material’ spots. The people who are sharp at it like Rivers and Hall have to go out there and live it live. Comedians live and die onstage. There is no way of getting round that. TM: You mentioned earlier Old Rope, the club you have become closely associated with. Can you tell us how it works? TS: I see it as a school of comedy. Last night, for example, we had Milton Jones, Sarah Millican and Rich Hall, the week before Daniel Kitson. We have a great audience who are really into comedy and they come to see new material. So the comics love it because they are getting a smart, literate audience to try out their stuff on and because we all get to see each other it at times feels like a small Edinburgh reunion. There are no egos. Everyone is going out on the same level. It’s a much more level playing field. So someone like Rich Hall will be trying out new jokes along with performers with less experience. The comics enjoy this because someone like Rich will come down and then watch the whole show because he wants to know what other comics are doing. If you are a fan of comedy you will often see a routine that is being developed for the first time there right through to its completion when it is ready to be put up on a much larger venue or club. TM: So it fosters a very creative and supportive atmosphere? TS: People often write bits for other people, some of the comics will heckle each other. I threw a heckle out the other night at Rich Hall about something I knew was not in his act and he had to make something up. We challenge each other. At other times you might suggest something to add to a routine. Daniele Kitson was doing it the other night, suggesting bits to improve a particular routine. It is a workshop for us and the audiences get to see comics who normally would be playing much larger venues. TM: Can you explain more about the name of the club Old Rope? TS: The rope (which dangles down from the ceiling above the stage) represents the idea of ‘money for old rope’. So if a comic is struggling with their new material they can grab the rope and do an old joke. It also means that if you see someone getting up and doing old material people will call it and say ‘you can’t do that’. Because if one person can do ten minutes of old stuff and they have a great gig and someone else has then to come on and do new jokes that is not fair. So the rope is about leveling the playing field. It just means that if you are going to do an old tried and tested bit of material then you reference it and the audience and the comics all know that you are doing an old bit. TM: You recently took part in the ITV Show Me The Funny talent competition. How did the show work? TS: We would get the information about the particular challenge at the start of the week on the Monday. On the Tuesday we would be able to look around the place and find out about the audience that we were going to play in front of (from an army base to Blackpool pleasure beach and the Hammersmith Apollo theatre). On the Wednesday it was write the material and on Thursday perform it. It was pretty crazy. I don’t think that most people realize how hard it is to come up with five minutes of new material, stuff that is worthy and ready to go straight onto television. TM: A lot of pressure then? TS: You only get one shot to do it. You have had no chance to try it out. You had to trust the skills that you had to make it fly, that you could sell it, that you wouldn’t forget it,

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and even then you don’t really know how the audience is going to respond to it, which is what you were being judged on. You just had to do the prep work and hope for the best. TM: 2012 seems a very positive time for women performers and comics. Yet there is always a question in interviews like this about the male/female axis. Scottish comic Susan Calman has termed this ‘the issue that follows us all around’. Is she right? TS: It depends on what the question is. I mean if the question is: are men funnier than women? I find that insulting. Are black people funnier than white people? I mean that is the kind of level we are talking about. It is a non question that somehow is still being perpetuated by what amounts to lazy journalism. I think that there are differences in opportunities for men and women. For example, the lifestyle of a comic – people say that a woman is less likely to do it. I also think that it can be an age thing. If you are older or you just settle down with a family, which can be a man or woman, you might be less likely to go off trekking around the country. Overall I think that it is a good time for women in comedy. There have been some break-through acts in the past few years, Sarah Millican being the big one, which means that the doors are open for us more. The way I look at it is you can either go through people or around them. If people have ignorant attitudes then I am going to go around you and eventually you will see, or you are the kind of person who is never going to change your mind in which case I am not going to waste my breath. I do think that women could do with being more visible. There are less of us, not as few as people make out, but there are less of us in what might be regarded as the higher tiers getting booked for television and festivals. At ‘open spot’ level it is much more like 50–50. I do feel that the guys often get pushed and signed up quicker. Often they are seen as less risky. There are still some very unimpressive bookers out there who still think that having a woman on the bill is like a specialty act or akin to having a musical turn or an ethnic performer. TM: So there are still battles to be won? TS: The battle is against people’s ignorance, their inherited values. I mean you will get a lot of women coming up to you after a show and saying things like ‘I don’t normally like female comics but I thought you were great’. So you challenge them and ask them how many female comics have they seen and they will say ‘actually I’ve only ever seen you and maybe one more on the telly’. You just go, ‘that is ridiculous, why have you even said that to me?’ It’s their received wisdom and values. I just think that by keeping on being good at it and being judged against our peers – all of them, male and female – that is the way forward. Because half the time you are thinking ‘I should be fighting the battle, I should be getting angry’ but then you think, ‘I really just want to write jokes and perform them onstage’. The more time and energy I spend doing all of that the less time I have just to get on with being funny and let the work speak for itself. Source: Tony Moon (2012) ‘“Words are my weapons”: Tiffany Stevenson interview’, Comedy Studies, 3:2, 133–137.

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Contributor Tony Moon is an award-wining film-maker and academic working at Southampton Solent University. He lectures in documentary, drama production and scriptwriting. He is also the author of Down by the Jetty, the authorised biography of the beat group Dr. Feelgood.

Chapter 20

Russell Kane: Comic chameleon (4:2) Sam Friedman

Russell Kane is looking an alarming shade of orange. As he shows me around his handsome North London flat, I’m trying my best not to stare. But it’s tough. The streaky remnants of spray-tan are glaring at me from the semicircle of chest poking out of his low-cut t-shirt and his normally chiselled features look suspiciously like they’ve just been Tangoed. ‘Oh that’, he says offhandedly, finally noticing my gaze. ‘I think I’m the Torso of the Week or something for Heat, again. There’s a photo shoot tonight’. Glancing at the contents of Kane’s flat it strikes me that, actually, there’s nothing particularly incongruous about Kane’s tinted coating. In fact it fits quite neatly with the curious taste-adventure aesthetic of his home decor. A colossal flat-screen TV dominates the living room, and opposite sits a similarly flashy brown corner sofa. But jostling for place among the chrome and leather is also a substantial collection of vintage furniture, at least three bookcases stuffed full of classic literature, and a majestic copy of Pissarro’s ‘Hyde Park’. After Kane is finished giving me the grand tour, he leads me outside to his ‘pièce de résistance’ – a rather romantic wooden shed at the bottom of the garden where he’s been writing this year’s Edinburgh show. Lowering himself cross-legged into a battered armchair, he reflects on his omnivorous tastes. I’m a Chav – in an ironic sense; I’m reclaiming the word–from the bottom rung of the ladder, but I also have a First in English. So I can walk into the hardest pub in Cheshunt, full of Garys and Daves, walk straight up to them, have a pint, and talk about anything. But the next day I might also go to the Iris Murdoch convention at St Anne’s College and be in my absolute element. ‘In fact’, he says grinning, ‘that sounds like the perfect weekend’. This ability to straddle the class divide is most likely the result of Kane’s upward social trajectory. Brought up on a council estate in Essex, Kane describes himself as the ‘stereotypical drop-out’ at school, ‘fucking up’ his exams and heading straight for a dead-end job in retail. But after going out with a girl who was studying at university, something suddenly kicked in. ‘It was like someone had pulled back a curtain on another world and I saw what had happened to me’, he says. Kane immediately enrolled at college and raced to an A in A-level sociology ‘so quick I got an award from Betty Boothroyd!’ It was clear Kane had unlocked a voracious intellectual appetite, and this only intensified when he got to Middlesex University. ‘I had so much pent-up energy, that’s why I walked away with a First – I was so fucking angry. It was like a nervous breakdown in the other direction’.

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This frenzied pursuit of social mobility has also had a lasting impact on Kane’s comedy. Forever the class transfuge, he seems to have one foot in the world of his working-class origins and one in the cultured milieu of his destination – a tension that has proved a very fruitful vehicle for humour. Describing himself as ‘class bilingual’, the 31-year-old has used this unique social position to craft consistently insightful, articulate and sociologically critical comedy, with material notably taking aim both upwards and downwards – most prominently in his 2010 Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Award-winning show, Smokescreens and Castles. His recent career moves have also reflected this liminal position. While Edinburgh success has propelled him to the top of British stand-up, recent outputs have included contributions at very different ends of the cultural hierarchy. The critical acclaim of his comedy has thus been augmented by the successful staging of his play, Fakespeare, at the RSC and the recent publication of his debut novel, The Humourist. (2010) But at the same time Kane has also established himself as an unashamed patron of pop culture. Hence the orange-glow of Torso of the Week and even more conspicuous presenting gigs on Big Brother’s Big Mouth, I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and Geordie Shore. But stand-up remains where Kane’s gear-switching capacity is at its most impressive. Here he fuses the two sides of his career, presenting intellectual insights in a way that ‘brings in’ his reality TV audiences, rather than wilfully excluding them. I’ve got a pathetic need to be liked by everyone. So the thought that someone might not be getting it doesn’t make me think ‘yeah, you don’t get it, leave.’ I think ‘that’s sad, this person’s given me £17.50, they need to get this. I want the story to adumbrate the ideas without me saying, ‘here’s my thesis – laughter optional.’ In contrast, Kane laments a recent rise in ‘pseudo-intellectual’ comedy (he doesn’t name names), which he says generally consists of ‘big flowery displays of language with fuck all underneath, except usually the comedian sucking themselves off’. At the heart of Kane’s desire for inclusivity also lies a deep ambivalence with the traditional cultural hierarchy. He’s highly sceptical of elitist definitions of art, particularly the highbrow notion that culture is only legitimate if it makes you think. ‘How can you separate your thoughts and emotions?’ he asks incredulously. ‘Surely all good art should make you feel something?’. Kane has his own preferred definition of art, something that ‘elevates your perceptions, thoughts and emotions, so after you come out feeling different, more engaged with the world, even if just for a few hours’. If we use this definition, he says, comedy should definitely be seen as art. ‘But then again so should Eastenders. And if you buzz off your tits from The National Lottery Show, so should that’. Getting into his stride, he yells excitedly into my dictaphone, ‘And who are the elitists who are able to put Ballet up there and The National Lottery Show down here. Who are they to downgrade someone else’s artistic experience, because they don’t have a masters degree in Modernism? How dare they’. In his comic repertoire, Kane has a number of signature Big Ideas; class, family and – increasingly so, in recent years – gender. This year he continues to probe this latter theme with a show about fatherhood entitled Posturing Delivery. The genesis of the show, Kane says, was another painful relationship split (everyone thinks I’m gay but I’m not) back in February, after which he started to contemplate whether he was going to be ‘one of those people who never has children’. A female friend’s response (You’re a man, it doesn’t matter) fascinated and infuriated Kane.

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Yes, men are fertile into their 80s, and that takes the edge off the rush to reproduce, but therein lies the problem. If there’s not that rush and you think ‘fuck it, I can be a dad in my 50s,’ that’s the kind of slack attitude that leads to a lack of engagement in fatherhood and all sorts of problems. So, eschewing the usual tired comic meditations on male fatherhood (Hey I’m a new dad, I’m covered in sick, come and watch my hilarious show), Kane’s hour aims to reflect on fatherhood from the outsider looking in. At the start of the show he’ll be handed Ivan, a metaphorical baby, and over the next 60 minutes he’ll aim to successfully rear Ivan to the age of 18. Although Kane famously won the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2010, it’s striking that he continues to come back to the fringe. He says he knows he doesn’t ‘need’ to come back, ‘but by forcing yourself to go to Edinburgh, it shows you’ve got balls, even when you’re “established.” Edinburgh’s different to everywhere else. There’s a critical atmosphere, a different heat’. Kane, it seems, is forever walking this tightrope between critical and popular success. While many might see it as a contradictory, even fundamentally irreconcilable strategy, Kane has simply embraced the contradictions. His social trajectory, he says, has given him ‘two different passports’ and professionally he says he’s ‘at home in both worlds’. While, for many, such long-range upward mobility can lead to status anxiety or a sense of dislocation from one’s roots – feelings that, notably, Kane has alluded to in the past – today he seems remarkably at home in his (albeit artificially bronzed) skin. In the same way I’m confident enough of my heterosexuality that I can put on eyeliner and skip around the stage, I can sit down with my nutritionally balanced pescatarian meal, watch Geordie Shore, and piss myself laughing. Don’t get me wrong, I love BBC 4. And of course I want to watch the Storyville about child models being exploited in Russia, it’s just I also want to watch Holly from Middlesborough get double-teamed in America. Source: Sam Friedman (2013) ‘Russell Kane: Comic chameleon’, Comedy Studies, 4:2, 237–240.

Contributor Sam Friedman is an Associate Professor of Sociology and a commissioner for the UK government’s Social Mobility Commission. He is the author of The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged (2019), Social Class in the 21st Century (2015) and Comedy and Distinction (2014).

Chapter 21

Les Dennis: man out of time (4:2) Sam Friedman

Les Dennis has been spotted. ‘Ye’ve been captured, Les’, slurs a bleary-eyed regular in The Strathmore Bar, a classic Leith boozer and one-time working men’s club tucked away near the bottom of Leith Walk. Idling up to our table with a finger pointed at the bemused entertainer, the man continues: ‘Aw the boys back there, they aw spied ye. Now hows aboot ye buy us aw a roond-a drinks’, he says, only half-joking. Panicked, my mind turns to the scene in Trainspotting where Renton and Begby set upon a wayward American Fringegoer who accidentally stumbles into a Leith pub asking for the ‘mensroom’. Luckily, Dennis is distinctly unruffled. Bantering happily with his celebrity stalker, he trades a few well-meaning Family Fortunes jokes, invites the new friend to his Fringe play Jigsy, and promises to buy ‘the boys’ (all now laughing raucously at the back of the pub) a drink after the interview. It’s perhaps not surprising that Dennis is at home in local watering holes like The Strathmore Bar. At 17 he started his career playing similarly boisterous working men’s clubs in his native Liverpool. Back then the fresh-faced Dennis was a fledgling impressionist, although he admits ‘I nicked most of my act from the best’, meaning the great 1970s impressionists Sammy Davis Junior and Freddie Starr. The clubs though, he says in a now softened Scouse accent, were a fantastic training ground. ‘You had to learn to compete – with the Bingo, the pies. Literally, you would go on, do five minutes, and then the hot pies would arrive and the room would empty – brilliant’. Although Dennis went on to have a successful television career, including fifteen years as presenter of Family Fortunes, it is less well known that he continued to play the club circuit throughout. This experience made Dennis the obvious choice to star in Tony Staveacre’s new Fringe play, Jigsy, which is loosely based on the Liverpool comic Jackie Hamilton. The play joins Jigsy in 1997 when his career and the whole working men’s club circuit is on its last legs. ‘He’s a man out of time’, explains Dennis. ‘He’s getting on, he likes a drink, and he’s here to share his stories’. It’s clear that Dennis remains enamoured with the club comedy of his youth. During our hour-long interview he continually draws upon his impressionist skills to lovingly bring to life the club comics he idolized. Taking me on a vocal tour of the North, we travel to Yorkshire with Charlie Williams, Manchester with his comedy partner Dustin Gee, Liverpool with Eddie Flanagan and Newcastle with Bobby Thompson. He’s particularly nostalgic about Thompson, ‘The Little Waster’, whose comedy album – Dennis gleefully explains – ‘outsold the Grease soundtrack in Tyne and Wear in 1978!’

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Of course not everyone remembers working men’s comedy so fondly, particularly the bigoted stand-up of Bernard Manning and the cheap mother-in-law gags of Les Dawson, Jim Davidson and Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown. ‘In Thatcher’s 80s, “old-school” was a bit of a dirty word. We had to keep our heads down, we were seen as the old-guard, passé’, Dennis says. Like many of his generation he seems protective of the club legacy and grapples to defend the circuit even if this means sidestepping uncomfortable realities. ‘But not everyone was like that’, he protests, referring to the Bernard Manning school. ‘Yes, when you look back now you go fooooh. But at the time it didn’t seem [. . .] Maybe we were less aware . . .’ he trails off. One of the most striking things about Jigsy is the way in which the plot – a faded star reliving the glamour of past successes – seems to echo the trajectory of Dennis’ own career. Indeed at times Dennis seems to talk about himself and Jigsy as if they’re the same person. My TV career might not be thriving, but that’s just something you have to accept. Matt Lucas once told me, ‘every comic has their time’, and then audiences move on. But if you become bitter – and that’s one thing Jigsy isn’t – you get eaten up, you don’t progress. The story of Dennis’ misfortune in the 2000s is well documented. But for those who somehow avoided the tabloid orgy, first there was the acrimonious split from Amanda Holden, after her very public affair with Neil Morrissey, and then the infamous Celebrity Big Brother appearance, where a troubled Dennis was filmed conversing with chickens. I deliberately avoid these personal troubles, figuring Dennis has had more than his fair share of difficult questions. But interestingly he brings it up. ‘Things clearly took a nosedive after Big Brother’, he confides. ‘But then I was saved by Ricky Gervais’. That’s interesting, what does he mean ‘saved?’ ‘Big Brother certainly wasn’t the best timing but if I hadn’t done it then Ricky wouldn’t have picked up the phone and given me the chance to play a twisted, demented version of myself’. Dennis is of course referring to the 2005 episode of Extras, where Gervais cast him brilliantly as a deranged semi-fictional pastiche of himself. ‘It was a real turning point. I’d had 15 years on Family Fortunes and suddenly I wasn’t on telly anymore. And as Jigsy says: “It’s all you can do, so you carry on”.’ But this is where the similarities between Dennis and Jigsy end. While Jigsy is a relic of a dying culture, Dennis has demonstrated an impressive professional versatility in recent years. Certainly he’s older and a little wider than his TV days, but this hasn’t stopped him carving out a successful life as a stage actor. And the Fringe, he says, has acted as a pivotal staging point. ‘It’s like turning the Titanic when you’ve got a reputation as a gameshow host, but I’ve always done things that challenge me, like Edinburgh, put my head above the parapet. It keeps you going forward’. In person, Dennis certainly defies his lingering public profile as ‘sad Les’, the washedup entertainer plagued by his past. In fact he’s far more like Les from Family Fortunes – upbeat, good company and full of cheery charm. Indeed, as we leave, Dennis makes a point of returning to his now semi-inebriated Leith fanbase, before quietly taking out his wallet, putting £30 behind the bar, and honoring his round. Source: Sam Friedman (2013) ‘Les Dennis: man out of time’, Comedy Studies, 4:2, 249–251.

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Contributor Sam Friedman is an Associate Professor of Sociology and a commissioner for the UK government’s Social Mobility Commission. He is the author of The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged (2019), Social Class in the 21st Century (2015) and Comedy and Distinction (2014).

Chapter 22

‘Not a funny place to live’: an interview with Chris Rock (5:2) Kara Hunt

KH: What is your definition of comedy? CR: My definition of comedy is. . . it’s just what makes you laugh, I would imagine. KH: You’ve mastered every popular visual medium, film, television and stand-up. What sep-

arates the stand-up process for you from the others? CR: The cool thing about stand-up is: you’re not collaborating, you just do it yourself.

Movies, TV, everything else, you’re working with a bunch of people and you don’t really end up with a vision most of the time, you end up with a consensus. With stand-up, you get a complete vision. . . you can’t really get that in almost anything else. KH: How you prepare for a show – what, if any, changes have you made to your technique over the years? CR: I just prepare the same way. I would say there’s no such thing as writer’s block, it’s just reader’s block. It’s like you just read a ton of shit, just a ridiculous amount of stuff. When I’m writing for stand-up, I just consume a ridiculous amount of news, current events, pop culture, you try to take it all in, every. . . New York Times, Daily News, even nonsense like Star Magazine or whatever – just. . . Media Take Out, whatever, just everything, literally everything. Try to be abreast of everything. I don’t live every day like that, but when I’m getting ready to write stand-up, I kind of just take on everything, kind of know a little bit about everything but not too much. Sometimes you can know too much, it makes things not funny; so it’s great to be on stage trying to figure things out. KH: It’s interesting that you would say Media Take Out, because from some of your performances, one would think you’d be a little hard on the folks behind that website. CR: Yeah; here’s the thing though – it’s just important to know what people are looking at, reading, whatever. There’s a big difference between a comedian talking about something he doesn’t like. . . When you don’t like something, it’s always good to know a lot about it, because when you don’t know a lot about it, you just. . . You just seem like an old man, like the old guys that didn’t like rap music but never listened to rap music. If you’re going to. . . especially if you’re going to diss something, you should know more about it; it should come from an informed place, or else you’re just pompous. KH: Absolutely. Which do you think is more important – getting the audience to laugh, or getting your point across? CR: The most important thing is getting the audience to laugh. There are reverends in the world whose job is to get the points across. Al Sharpton exists, and Don Lemon and whoever, the newscasters, Diane Sawyer. . . to get a point across. My job is to make

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people laugh. They laugh when they understand you; so it’s hard to get laughs without getting your point across, obviously. KH: You pay homage to various comics performing on the Chitlin Circuit, like Pigmeat Markham and Redd Foxx; but the period in which they performed has wholly been overlooked due in part to the limitations of performing for a segregated audience, and also because many people seem to deem the period as monolithic – would you agree with that? CR: I don’t know; I mean. . . I don’t want to sound like a layman, but it was just a long time ago. That was a long, long, long, long time ago and frankly in a different world. We don’t even live in that world any more, for the most part. . . there’s still things going on. I’m no fool, I see what’s going on in Ferguson and I see what went on in Staten Island, but. . . Back to those guys. What are you saying, they didn’t get the credit or. . .? KH: Right, they don’t receive credit, there’s no Unsung [TV One, 2008–] for them. CR: Well, we’re in America and America and even African America. . . we’ve never really. . . We tend to treat our comedians as second-class entertainers. Richard Pryor is every bit as big as Michael Jackson – he just is; but you don’t see it that way. Bill Cosby is every bit as good as Prince; but we don’t view comedians in just that way – we never have. KH: Which is interesting, because Richard Pryor entered the mainstream that way; Eddie Murphy has; you have – there’s an argument to be made that those Chitlin Circuit comedians never had the opportunity to enter the mainstream. But you’re saying people like Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, they hit the mainstream and still they don’t have that long-lasting memory? CR: It’s hard, it’s just. . . again, it’s a different time, man. These guys came up before YouTube and before the internet. People need their own comedians. People don’t really enjoy old comedians, old comedy, the way they enjoy old music. KH: Right, that’s true, there’s no nostalgia. CR: Yeah, they can laugh at a joke here and there, but if you were a kid right now and I give you. . . you know, whatever, DeBarge, just one group – and you were like, ‘Oh, my God, they have three greatest hits albums?’ – you might listen to that for months. It could be a comedian, yeah; you might catch a movie or two, but you’re not going to immerse yourself in Redd Foxx the way you’re going to immerse yourself in The Commodores or Led Zeppelin or The Beatles, you know what I mean? Part of it, too, is: comedy rots. A lot of it is reference, and you had to be there. It’s very. . . not a lot of it is timeless. That adds to it. KH: You were quoted in a previous interview stating, ‘I want to believe that the joke will kill no matter what’. Do you ever visualize your audience in advance? Do you imagine who you’ll be performing for, or do you plan to perform the joke no matter the audience? CR: I’ve never visualized an audience, I never. . . I don’t see them until I get there. KH: Really? CR: Yeah, I don’t even think about it. KH: OK, it’s interesting because going back to your days with SNL (1975–) and the way everything ended, and then transitioning out to In Living Color (1990–94), right after, your performances, in particular, Bring the Pain (1996) and Never Scared (2004), were taped in [Washington] DC. I’m wondering if that was intentional? Did you move toward a black audience intentionally, or was that out of your hands? CR: I guess that’s who was there at that point in my career. I don’t know, I just. . . When white people watch something on television or whatever, they don’t really care who that

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audience is. I’ve found that black people will dismiss something as not being funny if there’s no black people in the audience, so I do kind of make it so when I do film these specials it is like, ‘Okay. . . You want a good audience, am I right?’. But, I do know. . . black people in particular feel something like, ‘Whoa’ – especially when you’re doing the kind of humor I do. It just relaxes everybody that it’s a black audience. KH: Right, do you think it’s more difficult to make a black audience laugh? CR: Nope. KH: No, same either way? CR: Yeah, I don’t say that. . . I don’t take it for granted, but. . . I guess as a kid, maybe; but a professional performer that’s good, it’s like just whoever’s in front of you. It’s black or. . . I’ve done black, I’ve done white, I played all Indian audiences, all Mexican audiences, all women, lesbian night at the Laugh Factory, whatever. I’m a professional comedian. KH: The vast majority of your material centers on race, and a lot of it is about blackness. If the audience is different, say you’re performing for a predominantly white audience versus a black audience, do you ever wonder whether your jokes are being received the way that you intended them to be received? CR: I don’t really give it much thought; I mean, I’m black, that’s me. I’m not. . . You could say the same thing about a white performer or The Beatles are from Liverpool and they have this experience, but when you do it good, everybody kind of joins in. You do it, you’re right, and you’re performing to be funny. When people like you, they kind of do their homework a little bit and they learn your language per se. When I was a kid, I just remember getting into like the Wu-Tang [Clan]. It seems like a little hop, skip and a jump to Staten Island, but we didn’t know nothing about Staten Island. Shaolin and all these weird references, the karate flicks and all of this stuff; but when you like somebody, you do the homework. You kind of, like, put yourself in their world. KH: So, for you it’s not as much about racism or difference as it is xenophobia, a difference in just not knowing where someone is coming from and then having to locate them there and becoming familiar with them in that way? CR: Yeah, I guess so. The biggest entertainers in the history of America have been depsyched. Black people have gone through such an experience that a lot of people don’t. . . like, what does anybody have in common with James Brown. . . you know what I mean? Even me, you know what I mean? – even me, what do I have in common with James Brown besides the color of our skin? But it’s so good that I’m right there. Louis Armstrong, these are like foreign experiences. KH: In a 2005 interview with 60 Minutes, you said you’ve never done the ‘Niggas versus black people’ routine again, and you probably never will, ‘because some white people that were racist thought they had license to say nigga so I’m done with that routine’. What prompted that response, and what did you want people to take away from that joke that they didn’t take away? What bothered you about it? CR: Nothing, I don’t do any of those jokes again. I don’t do ‘Trying to keep my daughter off the pole’ any more. That’s like. . . I’ve never been a guy that you knew what I was going to say next like, ‘Here’s the guy that says that’ – never been that guy. I had no desire to be a one-joke wonder, which I’ve seen happen. KH: Yes, especially as of late. CR: Milk one joke, and they’ve got a website about the joke, and there’s a movie about this one joke; I never want to be that guy.

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KH: Well, specifically here, you said that because of that joke, there were some people that

were racist who thought they had the license to say nigga. CR: Yeah, I guess so; I guess there were a couple. You can trip off it, or you can just. . . if you

put something out there, there’s going to be a ton of different reactions to it, especially in this world we live in where everybody gets to respond. I can’t really pay attention to it that much, or else I’m just nuts. KH: Is there a joke you’ve ever regretted, or a joke you wish you’d performed a different way? CR: Not particularly; I mean, every now and then, like I’ll do an award show or something and not realize, ‘Oh, man, we’ve got three jokes about this person’. BET the other day, I was like, ‘Oh, man, you know, if I had to do it over, I’d probably take out two Rick Ross jokes’. I just didn’t realize in the body of the show we had too much Rick Ross, so it’s like I’m picking on a guy. I did it at the Oscars with Jude Law, I was like, ‘Oh, we got a lot. . .’ – you know what I mean? Stuff like that, it’s like a small regret because it’s weird, you kind of. . . and this is a weird thing: you almost never joke about anybody you don’t like a little bit. People you don’t like at all, you just don’t even talk about them because it seems too mean. You don’t even seem funny; but sometimes when you pick on people, it’s just. . . it’s like, I like Rick Ross. Yeah, I wish he’d stop eating chicken and [not] have a heart attack, but I love his music. KH: Right, so your affinity for him is why you target him specifically? CR: Yeah, it’s weird; no, he’s not going to see that, he’ll smack me next time he sees me or whatever but yeah, if I didn’t like him. . . I’m not [making] jokes about Gucci Mane, because I don’t really like Gucci Mane. KH: Right, right. So, the reason I’m honing in on the ‘Niggas versus black people’ joke specifically is because now, that dichotomy [between Niggas and black people], it’s coming back up in articles and in the news because of the Mike Brown and Ferguson situation. . . CR: Oh, it comes up. KH: I don’t think it’s ever going to go away. CR: Since ’96, I’ve never not gotten some big news request to do some interview about that joke. KH: Really? CR: Yeah, but always like, ‘Nah, its over’. ‘We want you on Nightline, we want you on 60 Minutes, we want you on. . .’ KH: Why do you avoid it, just because you don’t want. . .? CR: I’m a comedian, I’m a comedian. I shouldn’t be talking about. . . I should be funny. KH: Well, but your funny merges with politics a bit, right? I mean, you do put a lot of political subject-matter out there. . . CR: On stage, these two should definitely match, and it will be great; but off stage, it’s just preaching. KH: Well, I suppose so – or maybe . . . CR: There are far more qualified people to talk about this stuff than me. KH: People relate to you, though; I mean, the qualified people aren’t the people that people relate to. You are able to inject a little humor and comedy into the situation, which makes it more powerful. CR: It’s hard to do that off stage. KH: That’s true, that’s true.

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CR: You’re Bill Cosby, you’re just talking. Go no further than Mr. Cosby. If he can say all

that stuff on stage, it would be amazing. If he could figure out a funny way to say the stuff he used to say, standing ovation. KH: On a different note, the Def Comedy Jam (1992–97) era, which was the era you rose to fame in has also been all but overlooked in historiographies and documentaries, the Why We Laugh (2009) documentary ends without really taking a look at the era. You’ve been critical of that era. I’m referencing your skit with Stuart Scott on The Chris Rock Show (1997–2000). But, you also found success there. Do you think there’s anything about the period or the show that’s being overlooked or missed? CR: That’s just such a small group of intellectuals; but most people love Def Comedy Jam, it was great. Martin Lawrence was as good a host as we’ll ever see, literally, as we’ll ever see. I’m about to be 50, I’ll die in 30 years, 40 years and I’m going to be. . . it’s going to be very hard for me to ever see anybody host a show that well. I love Def Comedy Jam. It had an energy to it; it was the first comedy show that the audience was really a part of. In a weird way, it’s kind of one of the first reality TV shows in a sense, like set the precursor to American Idol or something like that, because the audience was so involved in the Def Comedy Jam. Pretty much everything on TV now, the audience is really involved. We got a lot of great performers out of it. Even a bad version of Def Comedy Jam was always energetic. Yeah, people don’t like language, people don’t. . . there’s always stuff to criticize; but it was good. KH: Had Robin Harris not met an unfortunate and untimely death, do you think it may have changed the tone of the period or of Def Comedy Jam – because he was slated to host it first? CR: I don’t know. Here’s the weird thing: he was amazing – I worked with him a few times, I don’t know if the show [would have been] as big with Robin Harris because Martin was so much younger and fresh-faced and energetic, and I don’t know if Robin makes it that. . . I think Martin made it a crossover, honestly. I don’t know if Robin makes a crossover like that. I wish we would have got to see it, but I’m not sure it would have been as big if Robin had done it. I don’t know; Martin was really good. We forget how appealing Martin Lawrence was and still is, so I don’t know. KH: Studios are usually unwilling to market Black American material, especially black comedy overseas, under the guise that there’s no market for it; but your most recent special, Kill The Messenger (2008), proves that theory to be incorrect because much of your material – including jokes with an explicitly American context surrounding interracial dating, for example – landed. They landed hard. Did you set out to combat those notions in filming across the globe? What was the impetus behind that? Do you think that you changed those ideas at all? CR: I think some of that was definitely in the thought. Not that I was thinking about movies or anything. Just. . . the thought that a black comic is only big in America is kind of a little, Like, really? It wasn’t even about being a black comic; American comics tend to only be big in America. It was more to show just everybody in comedy. . . there’s a big world out here, and as big as the world is, it’s actually small culturally. Hey, I’m about to tell a joke that’s going to work in New York, Africa and London at the same time, watch. It’s like when I said earlier, if you do it good, it works everywhere. Good shit works everywhere, it’s the mediocre that ends up being regional. KH: There’s a marked shift in your handling of race between 1994’s Big Ass Jokes and 1996’s Bring the Pain. Earlier in your career, you worked with black critics and scholars such as

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Nelson George and Cornell West; how did working with them, or having a general conception of black studies or critical race theory, inform your comedy? CR: I don’t know, I just hang out. I hang out with Nelson because he’s just a cool guy. We both. . . we have a thirst for art, music, movies, just a nice thirst. . . I don’t know. I did Cornell, the same way. KH: Did they change your ideas about race at all? Did they add anything to what you already knew, or. . .? CR: No, I don’t think they changed my ideas about race at all. I was pretty grown. . . you know what I mean? I was pretty grown, I’d been bussed to school, you know what I mean, like I’d had my experience with race as a young person. Now, I was a grown man and I didn’t change that much; but I don’t know, I just like hanging out with the smart cats. You can’t really. . . If you’re hanging out with them for any other reason than because you like them, you’re not going to get anything out of it. KH: It’s not as if you were studying under them, but instead just. . . CR: Everybody is studying under their friends, you just are. KH: Having highly intelligent friends affected you in general. Just by being around them? CR: Yeah, it’s just what it is. I’ve seen many mediocre comedians. I’ve seen not even mediocre, like real famous comedians. [In my head I’d be] saying, ‘If you just had one smart friend, you’d be OK’. If this guy just had one smart guy in his life. KH: So this year marks 20 years since your first HBO comedy special. At this point, you’ve lasted longer. . . CR: Oh, my God, really? KH: Yes, 1994 to 2014. CR: Damn. KH: At this point, you’ve lasted longer performing black comedy in the mainstream than all of your predecessors; so what would you say has made your career so durable? CR: Really? I have not. KH: You have. CR: Really? Eddie, and, you know. . . KH: Didn’t do any more stand-up comedy specials past 20 years. CR: Well, I’ll put it this way: you know what’s been really good for me? I never really made that much money. I made a lot of money, but I never really got a $15 million check, it’s all been drips and drabs. It’s good – I live 1000 times better than my parents; but because I never really made money like that, I always had to work. I never got this big hunk of money where I could just, like, not work for long periods of time. I was always like, ‘OK, I was just off tour, oh, man, let me try to write a TV show, Everybody Hates Chris (2005–2009), OK, maybe they’ll like this, OK’. KH: You never had the chance to get comfortable. CR: Yeah, I never got a big check like that and I just have lots of interests. I always wanted to do a documentary, so. . . I always wanted to do Good Hair (2009). I always wanted to do this movie, I always wanted. . . I had a long list of things I wanted to do, and none of them honestly paid that much. KH: Several media outlets are reporting that you’re working on a new special. CR: I want to go on tour. . . specials. . . I just want a tour first; I don’t want to think about the end [result]. KH: Is there anything different you want to do, or is there any purpose behind doing another tour?

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CR: There’s no purpose; I mean, creatively, with me I would say. . . People are like, ‘How

come you don’t do it every year or every two years?’ I’m like, ‘Because you do sometimes and you come back and the world hasn’t changed and you haven’t changed, so you’re essentially doing what you’ve been doing’. Now, the world has changed since the last time I’ve done this and I’m different, older, in some ways smoother, some ways angrier, you know what I mean? I’m just another guy than the guy that did it last time. I think it’s time for an update from that guy. KH: Are you already thinking about subjects you might address, or any topics or anything you’ve pulled from Media Take Out? CR: I don’t know; I want to talk big time, I want to get into religion and. . . KH: Wow, are you religious? CR: No, I’m not religious, not in a classic sense. I believe there’s a universe, I believe that actions have consequences. KH: Black and not religious – you’re almost like a unicorn, right? CR: I grew up kind of in the church; my grandfather was a preacher, so I grew up around it. I believe there’s a God because there’s. . . When I say God, I don’t mean like this person that you tell things to in heaven and all the structure; but there’s no. . . because there’s never going to be a logical reason for the universe, because you can always go, ‘What happened before that?’, so let’s just call the universe God. Black and not religious. . . not religious is like you’re thinking actions don’t have consequences. I think my actions have consequences. KH: Absolutely; but the vast majority of our people are religious, to a fault maybe. CR: Yeah. . . they say it, doing it’s a whole other thing. I believe that Jesus existed. I don’t really want to get into religion, I want to get into just relationships on a deeper level – not just sex, just. . . you’ll see. It will be different enough. KH: Now, with your daughters growing up, do you think. . . not to be pejorative, but you’ve landed some pretty tough jokes about black women, Barack Obama having a black wife in the office, and things of that nature. Do you maybe think that your ideas are changing with your daughters growing up and becoming women themselves, or do you think, no, you’ll be the same? CR: All that stuff is. . . I think people can tell that I’m just joking; ‘There can’t be a black First Lady’ is obviously a joke. No, let’s hope not, let’s hope. . . Tarantino always says when you present a piece of art, somebody should be pissed. Somebody you know should be hurt, or something; or else you haven’t done the job. No, I’m not trying to hurt my daughters, or anyone in my life, or any of that; but I don’t think anybody wants that version of me, I don’t think my kids want that version of me. KH: Do they recognize the joke? Where the joke ends and the joke begins? CR: My oldest is 12 now; I brought her to the BET awards. I’m sure when she goes to her friend’s house or whatever, somebody punches me up on YouTube. It’s not even about that. The thing is, my kids know me; so my work’s in a sense not that important. It would only be important to them if they didn’t know me. That make sense? KH: Absolutely: they know Dad, and so they know the context. CR: Yeah, there’s no piece of work. . . I’ve ever done that’s going to affect my relationship with my kids, because my kids actually know me. KH: From Bring The Pain to Bigger and Blacker (1999) to Never Scared (2004), it seems there is sort of a beckoning in each special for America to understand that race relations and inequalities need to be absolved at some point, that they still exist in terms of access

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to wealth; and even in Kill the Messenger (2008), with respect to the very few black people who live in your neighborhood. Do you think now, the era that your daughters are growing up in, do you think that there’s been any change; and do you think that you are a part of that change, if so? CR: We are all a part of the change; there’s obviously been change, there just is. Yeah, with Ferguson going on. . . the stuff’s going on; but you can’t say the world isn’t a lot different. You can say there’s a lot more opportunity than there was, and hopefully it’s going to get better. Yeah, it’s a lot different. . . my dad’s not alive, he wouldn’t be able to believe if he were here right now, he couldn’t believe it. He died in ’88, and he might as well have died 100 years ago, that’s how much different the world is from ’88. KH: Do you think you’ve been a part of that? You’ve been heralded in the media in a way similar to Richard Pryor. They say Richard Pryor helped black and white people to laugh together, and that you’ve clarified a lot issues about race and about social inequalities that people wouldn’t have grasped otherwise. Do you consider that to be true? Is that what you set out to do? CR: I just set out to make people laugh honestly. I’m just another black guy some white people know. The more you know, I guess the more you know. Honestly, that’s ultimately what happens. It’s like, ‘Oh, there’s another guy white people know’. It’s no different than Michael Jordan, or whoever. . . I don’t get into all that. KH: No? CR: It’s not funny. KH: It has to be funny in order for it to resonate? CR: It’s not a funny place to live. If somebody wants to say it, fine, if I lived there. . . Source: Kara Hunt (2014) ‘“Not a funny place to live”: an interview with Chris Rock’, Comedy Studies, 5:2, 190–197.

Contributor Kara Hunt is an educator, mediator and researcher. Her graduate research at the University of California – Irvine centred on the intersection of diversity, critical theory, and communication and she now applies that research to her current work in civil rights investigations, mediation, and advocacy.

Chapter 23

A series of ghastly mistakes that turned out right in the end (8:1) Tony Moon interview with John Lloyd (Comedy Producer)

Interview taken from an Evening with John Lloyd which was a Royal Television Society event co-hosted by Southampton Solent University on 7 December 2016. John Lloyd has been a comedy producer for over 40 years. Despite having helmed, literally hundreds of radio programmes including ‘The News Quiz’, ‘Huddlines’ and ‘To the Manor Born’ and such enduring television hits as ‘Not the Nine O’ Clock News’, ‘Blackadder’, ‘Spitting Image’ and the more current ‘Q.I’ Lloyd remains unclear as to what the actual job description of a producer actually entails. A naturally a curious man, Lloyd says he welcomes an understanding of ignorance in his life as it inspires curiosity. And curiosity is certainly the grit in John’s oyster. No; scrub that, he has a whole sack full of the stuff shovelled direct from the beach. (This metaphor will now go out with the tide.) As if to confirm this mindset he was officially conferred as the Professor of Ignorance at Southampton Solent University. John has often characterised his highly successful career as being borne out of ‘a series of ghastly mistakes- that turned out right in the end’.1 He likes to quote Julia Margaret Cameron a Victorian photographer who once said ‘leap and the net will appear’. Before concluding ‘I think that is a great way to live’.2 It is this bullish persona that has been John’s greatest strength. He has worked with some of the most successful and well-known names in British comedy: performers such as Griff Reece Jones, Mel Smith, Rowan Atkinson, Pamela Stephenson and Peter Cook and writers such as Douglas Adams, Ben Elton and Richard Curtis. Despite his status in British comedy and his success rate John is an old fashioned grafter. He believes in hard work. He disdains inflated terms like ‘comedy guru’ and he certainly has no magic formula for success tucked away in his briefcase although at times many commissioning editors actually think he does. John Lloyd (JL): Many times over the past years I have been asked by various Universities if I wanted to be a Professor of Comedy and I have always said no. Because I have no idea how it works after forty four years in the business and nobody else does either we know that it works but we do not know how it is one of the great mysteries of the world so instead I am a Professor of Ignorance at Southampton Solent University. I am so ignorant that I do not even know where my office is.3 I am very happy to talk about ignorance of which I am a major expert. There are a category of things in the world that I call the ordinary mysteries, which are in some ways, the common things and experiences which are also often the strangest. So for example life nobody has any idea what that is, consciousness we have been studying that for over a

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hundred years and we still have no idea what it is or where it comes from. Art nobody can define that. Music is another one and laughter and comedy in general. So I’m working right at the edge of scientific exploration and I have always done so. My view is that an artist is looking to get themselves into what I call a ‘flow state’ to be ‘in the zone’ – they talk about this in sport as well when say a batsman goes out on to the crease and suddenly they cannot miss or people who go running talk of being in a heightened state of consciousness and that is what I am trying to do with comedy to get it right and by right I do not mean it’s my opinion I mean that it is as correct to me as a mathematician finding a formula and if you hit the spot with a really good joke then it can not have been done any other way. Tony Moon (TM): What is the job description of a comedy producer? JL: I don’t really know because I have failed every interview that I have ever done to be a producer. I have got my jobs by accident. My only job has been as a producer. I was twenty –two when some idiot gave me a job and I did not want it- because in those days to be a producer was to be old and wear a tweed suit and I did not want to do that. So I had never watched anyone else producing I know what I do but not others and there are lots of different kinds of producers working dependent on what genre you are working in. For example I have worked as a director in advertising The director is the guy who has all the fun working with the actors and the designers and going off in the helicopter and onto the aircraft carriers and shooting stuff with leading actresses and so on. The producer is what we call ‘The Three Ts’ – Teas, Toilets and Transport. That is what the producer in advertising does. It is a technical budgetary job. Crewing up deciding which camera man and how many lights. And so on. In film the producer is generally the guy who raises the finance and deals with the investors all that kind of thing. But in television the producer is really the big job. Somebody once said that in the BBC there are really only two jobs worth having-one is the director general and the other is a producer. That is the way the BBC used to work. There is a lot of responsibility and a lot of freedom. So when people ask what exactly do you do? I don’t really know! Being a Producer is not a jolly job, it is not enjoyable in that way. You are the last person to leave the office and often the least well paid and the one under the most stress and it never leaves you. Directors after the shoot they go to the bar and they chat up girls and they have fun and leave it all behind them and the producer is back in the office worrying about how this idiot has over spent by overrunning by four hours and so on. But it is very satisfying and the more you do it I do have very good faith in my own judgement. Not because I am arrogant it is the reverse actually because I have no idea how I know what I like but I do not think that it comes internally I think it arrives from outside in someway so I just stick to my guns and it goes on. My thing is simply that I know what I like and I would say to anyone who is intending to go into film and television is that is the most important thing that a producer can have and it has to be completely honest. Before he arrived in Television John cut his teeth on BBC radio as a producer. Between 1974 and 1979 he produced nearly five hundred radio shows. Prior to that, whilst a student at Cambridge, he was discovering his true comedic calling through the famous training ground of the Footlights review. Alongside comedy sketches Lloyd was also obliged to be involved in straight theatre projects such as La Machine Infernal by Jean Cocteau, which he soon found he was inadvertently undermining by injecting comedic turns into.

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JL: It’s an absolute searing retelling of the Oedipus myth. It has murder and blinding and incest and it is horrific. And there is a character in it called Anubis the jackal headed god, which I was cast as, and someone very kindly made me a paper mache dog’s head so every time I came on stage wearing this people would scream with laughter. I became a big hit in Cambridge and the play actually sold out but as a comedy and the rest of the actors never spoke to me again so when it came to the Footlights review the director said ‘you can’t be in it because you will destroy the whole thing.’ and so he fired me. One of Lloyd’s enduring strengths over the years has been to take such moments of apparent failure (of which he has had his fair share) and turn them into carp diem moments. It was during his time at Cambridge that Lloyd had his first taste of something that sounded like real success. He had met and become good friends with the aspirant writer Douglas Adams who was hatching plans for his big idea to come which was The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Originally conceived as a radio play Lloyd was drafted in as a co-writer – Adams being notoriously bad at hitting deadlines. This writing partnership was ended when Adams unexpectedly sacked his friend after deciding to write alone. So another apparent set back. But as John has oft stated ‘disaster is a gift’.4 Using connections made whilst working on Hitch Hiker’s Guide John was eventually invited to join up with a BBC training scheme to become a producer. A role that he was still very unsure about. However he took to it. Soon he was establishing himself as a prolific and highly effective producer of Radio comedy. Bringing projects such as – The News Quiz, The News Huddlines (with Roy Hudd) Quote. . . Unquote and To the Manor Born. To the airwaves. There is no doubt how Lloyd regards these formative years. JL: It’s the old thing of 10,000 hours isn’t it? You do not get good at anything until you have done it for 10,000 hours practice and I did a lot of practice.5 Radio is a brilliant way to train for television because you cannot really make radio without content. Television – you can have pyrotechnics and fancy lighting and celebrities and things and often you can be a quite a long way into a programme before you know what it is really about. (On Radio) It is hard to get away with that especially with comedy, in radio you are stripped bare and the script has to be good the performances have to be good. Eventually John started getting itchy feet. Many of his projects that had done extremely well on the radio had started to be looked at as potential Television crossovers. Notably To the Manor Born. Frustratingly John was not then being considered as a potential producer. This prompted him to decide to quit his job as a radio producer and try to get into television by becoming a floor manager. He went off to see the powers that be at the BBC to demand the role be given to him. Unexpectedly a conversation ensued that was to change John’s entire career path. His work at the BBC had not, as he had assumed, gone completely unnoticed. The tone of the conversation was along the lines of ‘what kept you?’ Suddenly he was being offered something from the top drawer that the high ups in the Beeb had already earmarked him for. All they were waiting for was for him to make the jump. Now he had done so and he was walking out of the office with a six half hour slot commission. Lloyd was now a bona fide Television producer. The commission had two caveats first that the imagined programme should probably be something with the working title of Sacred Cows. Essentially the BBC was looking for something a bit edgier in the comedy department. Second, that he was to be paired up with another more established producer Sean Hardie who was at the time working in current affairs and had already cultivated a reputation as being something of a maverick. It was prove to be a good match.

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JL: He said to me that you can learn everything technically that a producer needs to know in TV in two weeks but the thing that they cannot teach you is: know what you like. So we spent about nine months talking about it and we brought in lots of writers and kept talking and talking about what we wanted to do. The brief was, and this was 1979, we have had enough with ‘political correctness’ which was essentially about a year and a half’s worth of political correctness after all the casual racism and homophobia that had infested the Seventies. We started to ask ourselves about what sort of comedy programme we actually would like to see? And we had this idea that it might be like if you had gone up to Camden Lock with your mates; gone to see a concert maybe had a kebab or something and it would be funny and quite naughty it would reflect the kind of life that the two of us, then in our late twenties, had. We looked at clips of the Two Ronnies and it was a brilliant show but it did not look like anything to do with the life that I lived. In the Two Ronnies men wear blazers, cravats and cavalry twills. They go to cocktail parties. If you go into the country side all the yokels wear smocks with three X’s on them. People in pubs play shove halfpenny or skittles. I’ve never ever seen them or played them in a pub. When we went to a pub we played Space Invaders. If you see a telephone box in the Two Ronnies people use them to make phone calls. In seventies Britain people used them as lavatories – that is what they were for. It was through this process that what eventually became known as Not the Nine O’Clock News (NTNOCN) was conceived. With a young modern looking cast comprising of Griff Reece Jones, Pamela Stephenson, Rowan Atkinson and Mel Smith6 the programme was to define what television comedy was like in the post Monty Python era of the early eighties. Reflecting on the success of the show Lloyd says. JL: Television is weirdly quite a conservative medium it does not reflect the way life is it is often running several years behind what people are actually doing and thinking about and talking about. It is very true of comedy and it had not been yanked up to date for about ten years. Just the haircuts for example. I remember Chris Langham who was in the first series when he was in a scene he often would not have shaved the BBC were horrified ‘he came on TV unshaven!’ It was as if he had not worn a dinner jacket. The other innovation was the way in which Pamela Stephenson, as the only woman performer, was subtly cast in roles which served to undermine the standard expectations and preconceptions that prevailed in the society of late seventies Britain. JL: To cast Pamela Stephenson as the doctor not the nurse was considered at the time as being revolutionary. When you look at Monty Python Carol Cleveland plays nurses and busty waitresses if you have a funny part it is always played by a bloke in drag even in Python. So we had made a shift there. It is not so long ago for example if you were casting a barrister you would not have cast a black barrister unless you were doing something set in the West Indies. Otherwise it would really worry people because obviously all barristers are white men aren’t they? Well off course not but- that was the perception. And I remember thinking how far television had fallen behind. The career trajectory of NTNOCN in many ways follows that of many successful rock and pop groups. It goes something like- first album a hit, second album another even bigger hit followed by difficult third and troublesome fourth. The show had turned the cast into household names with books and records being sold in quantities that any selfrespecting rock band would be very happy with. The fourth series was probably the most

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professionally shot and directed with higher production values but something was beginning to drag. Lloyd puts his finger on it. JL: When we were doing NTNOCN I was only twenty seven and the cast were a bit younger than that and there were no rules, we had complete creative freedom to laugh ourselves stupid. And you actually do not know why it is funny it is just agreeing that it is and after about four series you start to realise what the joke is that you are doing, what the essence of a NTNOCN joke was, and we decided that it was a piece of news footage that we had of the Queen at the Trooping of the Colour and the horse (she is on) slightly bounces and we put the sound of a fart under it. When you realise what your own joke is it stops becoming funny. It is the most peculiar thing. It was Rowan Atkinson who eventually pulled the plug on the show by pulling out of the team. Once again John was on the move. As frustrating as this was it was to be Rowan who was to come knocking on John’s door a few months later with another project that he was envisioning in some ways as his very own Fawlty Towers. JL: Rowan Atkinson had always been a big admirer of John Cleese. And Cleese had moved on from Monty Python and effectively killed it and moved on to Fawlty Towers. Rowan had done something similar with NTNOCN and he wanted to move on a do a sit com in which he was the star. That was his plan. He and Richard Curtis, who were old friends from university, had written this script called King Edmund and his Two Friends they sent to me and I did not like it. So they did a pilot of it with someone else and I thought the pilot was okay but I still said no and they just badgered me for months and eventually I got on board with the first series. The first series of what was now something called Blackadder, a comedy set in the medieval period of British history, was to turn out to be a highly expensive production which took months to edit. When it was finally aired it was regarded by the BBC as being far too expensive for the audience that it was attracting. JL: Honestly we had all been very successful too young. We were cocky we all had BAFTA awards and we thought that we could do something spectacular. So we had these enormous sets, too large to fit into a studio with an audience, and we cast actors that we did not know because they were famous. Rowan had never written anything and he was not really delivering the scripts on time. Richard Curtis and I would stay up all night in the hotel room writing scenes for the next days shoot in the morning and Rowan would learn the lines at dawn so that never really worked. It was cancelled by the managing director of BBC TV Michael Grade which was a disaster because we had already written four episodes of the next series with Ben Elton and Richard Curtis and they were brilliant scripts. So I said if we can make it really cheaply they might change their minds. So we had this horrific weekend cutting out every scrap of exterior film, every set we could, every extra, there was nothing fancy at all and I took it back to my head of department and showed how we could do it cheaply. The ruse worked. Lloyd convinced the BBC that they could deliver using smaller sets bring in a live audience and cut the production values in a myriad of clever ways. The result was a much tighter and funnier show that set the model for all subsequent series of the show. One of the many roles that John occupies when producing these programmes is the role of script editor. Consequently John has some very clear ideas about what works and what does not in a comedy script. JL: All comedy is good if it is truthful. That is the first thing that I would say. The more truthful it is the funnier it will be. Most of us start out by writing one liners and

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then we maybe graduate to monologues which is a stream of one liners and then we move onto a sketch which is at least two people talking. Sketch characters tend to be very rudimentary You know there is a doctor and a patient. . . Once you get to sit com things start to become more complex. As do the parameters and the number of possible combinations. And the way to write a sit com is not to write it the way that every one thinks you write it which is not to think of a brilliant situation. Situation comedy is a misnomer it is really is a character comedy that what it really is. So people might say something like‘I’ve got a great sit com idea about three women who live on a canal boat. . .’ and really that is not the point because really who are they? It is about the characters, you should start with them-who are they? Why do they like each other? Why don’t they like each other? Secondly where are they and what are they going to do in this half hour? And thirdly the jokes. Most comedy writers start the other way around. They think of an incredibly funny idea about say how Dr. Johnson has written a dictionary and left some words out7 and then they think that they have this fantastic sketch in the middle and then they think ‘right now we need a plot’. And it all becomes very complicated to try and make it work. So I become almost like the comedy doctor and the writers come to me and say the script does not work it’s not funny what is the matter? It is very often the funniest joke in the script is the one that is holding it all up. That line or that aspect of physical comedy is not something that would ever occur in real life so most of the business of directing and producing Blackadder was trying to get the actors to sound like they really meant it and that might mean changing the words so that it is not just formal sketch jokes but actually a real line that someone would actually say. So, it is complicated. Following the end of Blackadder John was once again casting around for a project to take forward and develop. This lead to him discovering the talents of Fluck and Law and their all too grotesque latex puppets. Spitting Image was born. More recently John developed the comedy quiz programme Q.I which has been successfully running on television for 14 years. All the time he has discovered that when pitching and developing original ideas the only person you ultimately trust is yourself. JL: The trick is this-if you do only what you like beautifully, at least one person will enjoy it (you) I think that if you are completely honest you will discover that there are more people who also think like you than you expect. In the average business meeting anywhere in the world there are people there who are waiting for what is termed the HIPPO to come along. This is an acronym for Higher Paid Persons Opinion because everyone is sitting quietly in the meeting thinking ‘I’d better not say anything in case someone thinks that I am an arse’ And when the most senior person says ‘well I think we should do this.’ and everyone agrees. That is seriously how most of it works. Sometimes it is difficult. The first series of Spitting Image most of my friends wouldn’t talk to me because they thought it was so terrible ‘you have no idea how terrible this is ! Lloyd has laid a real egg here.!’ ‘The puppets are ugly and it is just not funny’. And this is a common theme when you are doing something that is genuinely different, you often find that you are ahead of the wave. Take Q.I I went to see the controller of BBC1, Lorraine Heggessey, and she said what is the idea? And I said well it is kind of like Mastermind meets Have I Got News for You and she expressed interest and asked ‘well how does it work’? And I said you only get

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points for being interesting not for being right and she did not understand it. How do we know who has won? I said that the chairman (Stephen Fry) will say what he finds interesting. She said ‘will it be warm and inclusive’ ? I said yes. She said we don’t want it. People did not understand it! Q.I is intentionally made for ordinary people, the people who really like it are thirteen year olds – they are fanatical about it because it tells them things that they do not know. And Taxi drivers they love it. I always had complete faith in the idea that everything could be made interesting and funny. It is a mad idea but it has been running now for fourteen years. It seemed to have worked. In recent interviews John has been particularly scathing about the modern world of television. The particular bug bear being that he believes that the people commissioning programmes are no longer the experts they once were. Rather they are as he has stated simply people who have worked in ‘scheduling, marketing and car parking’.8 JL: The BBC used to be patriarchal and arrogant – John Reith the first director general used to say ‘I know exactly what the public wants and I will be damned if I will give it to them’. He thought he knew best. And he thought that he was going to give the public something that was going to be higher than what they expected to consume and that is what the BBC always did. Now Television in general is trying to find out what you want first and give you more of that which is a disaster for creativity. TM: You have spoken in the past about the universal themes that many of your comedies have adhered to that is the key to their success, for example Blackadder- the boss is an arse. Spitting Image-famous people are no better than us and Not the Nine O’ Clock News-contemporary Britain reflected in comedic terms. JL: It is easy after the fact to say ‘well that is what this is about’ but at the time you are doing it you have no idea. That is the thing. You just think that it is a very funny idea. So when I for example saw the first puppets from Spitting Image that Fluck and Law had made I literally begged them on my knees to let me produce the programme because I was at the time literally the only person in the country who had that kind of experience with topical comedy. It is only later on that you work out what the appeal of it is. And I think that is the core appeal so essentially in Spitting Image – the Queen goes to the lavatory! And just because you are famous does not mean that you can’t have a big nose. . . it is very childish really but then again comedy is sex and death and poo and it is both childish and all important – it is about what it means to be human. Source: Tony Moon interview with John Lloyd (Comedy Producer) (2017) ‘A series of ghastly mistakes that turned out right in the end’, Comedy Studies, 8:1, 93–101.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

John Lloyd interview in Mustard comedy magazine, Issue 6, 7. John Lloyd interview in Mustard comedy magazine, Issue 6, 10. Spoiler alert: Because he does not actually have one. John Lloyd interview in Mustard comedy magazine, Issue 6, 7. This is a concept originated by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. The actor/comedian Chris Langham was in the first series only. Blackadder 3, Episode 2, ‘Ink and Incapability’.

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8 Cited in Furness and Lawrence, John Lloyd: TV comedy is a ‘disaster’ which could sink the BBC, The Telegraph.co.uk, 2 May 2014.

Contributor Tony Moon is an award-wining film-maker and academic working at Southampton Solent University. He lectures in documentary, drama production and scriptwriting. He is also the author of Down by the Jetty, the authorised biography of the beat group Dr. Feelgood.

Chapter 24

Interview with Kate Fox – stand-up poet (8:2) Ian Wilkie

INT: Kate, how is comedy important to you in your professional life? KATE FOX (KF): It permeates everything I do, I suppose. I’ve always used it in my poetry.

Although I am primarily a professional poet, I now always preface that with ‘stand-up’ poet to say ‘don’t worry there will be laughing’. And I do lots of stand-up comedy sets and my PhD is funny – oh, I have to hesitate when I say that. I hope. . . I think my PhD is funny. Sometimes my supervisors laugh and some bits of it have been performed live and have been funny. So that means it is funny. INT: Was there anything that drew you to comedy as a medium? What did you find that comedy did, that other forms of expression perhaps didn’t? KF: I want to say. . .. Everything comes down to class. But I am in-between the classes. I am not working class, I’m not middle class. I’m in that grey fuzzy area – that transitional zone – and I think that place - that in-between place – is the place of the observer. The place of the person with the ironic detached perspective on the foibles of both those class positions. But it’s not just in-between classes. It’s an ‘in-between’ in all sorts of ways. . . to the gender norms that we currently should be conforming to as a society? I don’t conform to, maybe, the norms of the what a Northern Woman should do. I do it in some ways. It is my duty, apparently, as a born-and-bred Yorkshire person to deflate pretension wherever I see it; I’m not allowed to have pretension; it’s just not allowed. In order to be secretly be pretentious inside I am allowed to do that if I then deflate it with humour. So therefore, for me, it is strongly related to in-between-ness. INT: Do you feel that comedy articulates – or it can be articulated through – the sense of inbetween-ness? An ‘observer-ness’– in it and apart at the same time? KF: Exactly. A big word for me at the moment is oscillation. I think, the to and fro of laughter and not laughter. The to and fro. . . I’m in something - I’m absorbed in it. . .oh, I’m out of it. I’ve popped out of it. It’s not that I want complete detachment. And it’s not that I want complete involvement. This is also, I suppose, a psychological position of being. I want to be able to jump from one to the other. So there’s that ambivalence. That to and fro-ness, that oscillation. That is what comedy gives. And so it works for me as a researcher as well as a, shall we say, nascent academic. . .I am in my research but I am also standing back and going ‘hang on, does any of this make in any sense at all, really? This world, this strange, strange world of it?’ INT: I’ve heard you speak before [at the TAPRA Conference, 2016] about. . . almost a political activism in stand-up and you alluded to people like Russell Brand, Josie Long, Mark Thomas. Where do you see the role of that kind of ‘political’ within comedy?

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KF: I think it is increasing, actually, for a number of factors, that political role. And yet it’s

not always as overt maybe as when you had it with the early days of alternative comedy, the Red Wedge tour and things like that. Now it’s probably connected to a society that oscillates. . . actually, I want to say the post-truth society, is the perfect set of conditions for comedians to have a voice. Because they are exemplifying something that is going on and it’s something. . . At one base level, a population saying ‘we do not trust politicians, we do not trust traditional sources of authority’. And comedians seem to embody and are able to embody, I think, both the distrust and yet the yearning for something else. So again, it’s about that in-between-ness. And currently, I suppose, postmodern theorists would say ‘we’ve been in this state for some time’. And yet, there is something particular about the last few years. In the rise of the comedian/activist or the comedian/intellectual like Russell Brand (who was named as one of the world’s top thinkers, apparently) and comedians increasingly. . . You see, I’m particularly interested in figures like Jon Gnarr the Mayor of Rekjavik. He is a comedian, he is a surrealist anarchist and that position where he says there is no contradiction for him in being serious and funny and that it is perfectly possible to have them both in the same frame at the same time, for me, it is that that is the perfect antidote to Trumpist populism. There is an antidote and it is that but I’m not sure if the world is quite ready for that on a wider platform. INT: Could there be an opposite form of that? People like Trump opposite using a form of stand-up comedy almost? KF: I have been asked this before. I think Trump is not. . .funny. He is not good at making jokes. He is not good at ambivalence and oscillation. So although there is a possibility that there could be some sort of demonic yet comedic figure that seizes the heart and minds of the nation for fascist purposes that would, more often than not, seem oxymoronic. I wonder if, subliminally, at some level, if people get Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator and Hitler a bit mixed up? Because that is a great example of the comedian – and I know I am being a bit idealistic – I know there are right wing comedians, I know it’s possible – but, generally, the comedian is the one saying ‘we cannot be totalitarians the world is more complex than that, we can be both’. INT: I wanted to ask you about role of comedy in the Academy. KF: I think that because of things like the impact agenda and public engagement agendas, comedy has the potential for a bit of moment. And I am certainly seeing it in things like the Bright Club where you’ve got researchers presenting their work through standup and seeing it in the academics I encounter in very diverse fields who are very interested in what comedy can do to allow their work to reach a larger audience. This could potentially be a very interesting moment. I think that it could be massively hijacked by universities going, ‘brilliant! You’ve got to now be brilliant at the Teaching Excellence Framework and Research Excellence Framework and you also need to be bookable on Live at the Apollo, did we mention?’ Now that would be bad, that’s not going to work in academia. Nonetheless, I sense there is a very nascent movement and I’m very interested in being a part of that actually. Because there’s the Emma Goldman quote ‘I don’t want to be part of your revolution if there’s no dancing’. I would twist that a bit to ‘I don’t want to be part of your academy if there is no laughing’. It’s the thing that is making me think ‘I could do this, I could be in this world’. But there is room for more laughter in it, I think.

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INT: I’m interested in your ‘Humitas’ idea in comedy as having some fluidity but also some

weight. You also characterised your idea of Humitas as a method as well? KF: I think it is really necessary to have a word and a concept to fight the ingrained separ-

ation of serious discourse and humorous discourse that goes back to Aristotle and beyond really. The idea that play is separate from the serious stuff of life. Of course, not every branch of philosophy has thought that, Eastern philosophers, Eastern mysticism, Buddhists are perfectly fine with the idea that you can be can be both fluidly humorous and affect change in the world. But in Western philosophy and Western thought they are still separated in the same way that body and mind are separated. I think philosophers like Derrida were overcoming many of these binaries, but for whatever reason, Derrida and perhaps Foucault – hilarious as I am sure they were in their private lives – did not explode the humour/seriousness binary as part of their binary explodings. For me, I needed something that would allow me to construct a framework by which I could talk about them operating in the same frame at the same time. For me Humitas. . . I see it as a process and a rhetoric and it is a methodology – a methodology of oscillating, possibly. . . ethnographers are well aware of that movement between ironic detachment and involvement – the participant observer – but it’s hard. Even though the great work that Mary Douglas has done in anthropology. . . it’s been hard to embody and enact that in their own work. I have intellectual allies in that way perhaps – performance ethnographers like Norman Denzin have tended to focus on work that is tragic rather than humorous and yet, you see, some performance ethnographers like Kip Jones in this country and Michael Hemmingson talked about this too, they say ‘actually, we can do our academic work and be funny’. And you’ve got Cate Watson (2015) in Comedy and Social Science: Towards a Methodology of Funny coming from a sociological point of view saying ‘it can be a methodology’. I certainly am able to use it as one. I basically have a dialogic voice in my thesis who comes along and punctures either pretentious statements or statements that really do need an alternative or that need to be exposed as binary and says ‘hang on, what are you doing there?’ I love having that voice. I’ve given myself permission to have that voice by developing the concept of Humitas. I’ve said I am still doing the academic work I need to do in this thesis. I am doing it by using humour. So that humour now has weight. It is fluid, as in the humours that flow through the body, yet it is solid. It is active. Another way of talking about it is that Humitas reinforces the idea that humour can be performative. Humour can make things happen. Once this word, perhaps, is used to use it is a rhetoric, to use it is an activist position. It is performative to use this performative word and say the opposite of what so many theorists say which is that ‘humour makes nothing happen’. We know humour can make a heck of a lot happen but it would make more happen if we acknowledged its power. Kate Fox has made a living as a stand-up poet for 10 years. Being funny and Northern is sometimes a help and sometimes a hindrance and she’s doing a PhD about why. Sometimes they let her on Radio 4. Her car radio is tuned to Radio 2. For more information, see www.katefox.co.uk. Source: Ian Wilkie (2017) ‘Interview with Kate Fox – stand-up poet’, Comedy Studies, 8:2, 217–220.

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Reference Watson, Cate. 2015. Comedy and Social Science: Towards a Methodology of Funny. Oxon: Routledge.

Contributor Ian Wilkie is a professional actor and a tutor in post-compulsory education at the Institute of Education, London. He is currently undertaking research into comic performance at the University of Aberystwyth.

Part VI

Critical angles Essays on a Joan Rivers routine

Chapter 25

From toothpick legs to dropping vaginas: Gender and sexuality in Joan Rivers’ stand-up comedy performance (2:2) Sharon Lockyer

Introduction A large body of academic and industry-related evidence suggests that the stand-up comedyscape has always been, and continues to be, male-dominated (Channel 4 2010; Chortle 2011; Gray 1994; Nilsen and Nilsen 2000; Ross 1998; Zoglin 2009). Such male dominance is reflected in the number of male stand-up comedians compared with female stand-up comedians and the aggressive performative features that this form of artistic expression utilizes, which are often perceived as ‘traditionally male’. Despite this, female stand-up comedians can, and do, penetrate this male-dominated industry and have successful stand-up comedy careers. This article examines how one eminent female stand-up comedian, Joan Rivers, negotiates this predominantly male space through close qualitative sociocultural analysis of her stand-up comedic performance. The specific Live at the Apollo (Wheeler 2007) performance chosen for analysis is interrogated in order to answer three inter-related questions: how does Rivers navigate the male-dominated stand-up comedy space? How does Rivers negotiate a form of expression that is largely aggressive and competitive? To what extent does Rivers use her stand-up comedy performance to reinforce or resist traditional dominant notions of gender and sexuality?

Funny women? Don’t Make Me Laugh! There are many factors surrounding gender and stand-up comedy creation, performance and appreciation. These factors contribute to a ‘masculine discourse’ (see Beynon 2002; Smith 1996), which is designed to promote and maintain male power and dominance across the stand-up comedyscape. Zoglin (2009: 6) argues that the stand-up comedy landscape is largely ‘defined by testosterone’ and notes that conventional wisdom suggests that women are ‘less suited by nature to stand-up comedy, an aggressive, take-charge art form’ (Zoglin 2009: 182). Those female stand-up comedians who do penetrate this maledominated sphere and adopt an aggressive tone are criticized for doing so. For example, the American TV host Johnny Carson (who provided the launch pad for many male comedians and also had Joan Rivers on his show as a regular guest) argued that stand-up comedy is ‘much tougher for women [. . .] You don’t see many of them around. And the ones that try, sometimes, are a little aggressive for my taste. I’ll take it from a guy, but from a woman, sometimes, it just doesn’t fit too well’ (quoted in Zoglin 2009: 192). This male dominance in stand-up comedy is reflected in the current British live stand-up comedy circuit. Of the 58 comedians described as ‘Comedians on Tour’ on the Chortle:

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The UK Comedy Guide website in early April 2011, only seven (or 12 per cent) are women (including Zoe Lyons, Sarah Millican, Shappi Khorsandi and Shazia Mirza (Chortle 2011)). Nilsen and Nilsen (2000) outline a number of reasons to explain the gender imbalance in stand-up comedy performers. They argue that stand-up comedy is highly competitive, and male stand-up comedians, who do not wish to have increased competition, have endeavoured to maintain separate gender stand-up comedy factions; female standups are more likely to be heckled and criticized; some comedy promoters insist that female stand-ups are not loud or strong-enough performers to close/headline performances; and that some audiences, despite the advances and reforms of the feminist movement, are not prepared to afford women the powerful position that a stand-up comedian has the potential to adopt. Furthermore, Ross (1998) and Gray (1994) have independently pointed out the myth that exists that maintains that women do not possess a sense of humour, which is perceived as hindering their comedy creation and appreciation. Some journalists and comedy critics perpetuate negative stereotypes surrounding funny women and hold them liable for what some comedy critics view as detrimental changes in stand-up comedy styles. Hitchens (2007) commented in Vanity Fair that successful female comedians are ‘hefty or dykey or Jewish’, and St John (2005), in the article ‘Seriously, the Joke is Dead’, blames women for the demise of the ‘short-story-with-a-punchline jokes’ (along with political correctness and the Internet) due to their observational-type humour (cited in Carr and Greeves 2007: 157–158). As suggested by Nilsen and Nilsen (2000), audiences also seem to perpetuate male dominance in stand-up comedy. In 2005, the men’s magazine FHM voted the UK’s funniest women as ‘none of them’ (Carr and Greeves 2007: 165), and in April 2010, in an audience poll conducted by Channel 4 entitled, the ‘100 Greatest Stand-Ups of All Time’, only six women made it to the top 100. Victoria Wood was the woman who was ranked the highest at 10th place, with Jo Brand reaching 30th, Jenny Eclair at 70th, Roseanne Barr at 93rd and Shappi Khorsandi at 99th. The focus of this article, Joan Rivers, was ranked 57th (Channel 4 2010). These polls reflect the findings of scientific studies, such as those conducted by Provine (1996), which suggest that both males and females laugh at male comedians more than they do at female comedians. Joan Rivers herself seems to perpetuate the masculine discourse surrounding stand-up comedy. She has argued: I don’t like funny women. I come out of that generation where a 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 a woman to be funny. (Horowitz 1997: 103) However, a number of women, from Victoria Wood and Dawn French to Jo Brand and Jenny Éclair, have productively negotiated this male-dominated performance space, have successful stand-up comedy careers, and challenge the masculine stand-up comedy discourses. There has been a steady increase in the number of female stand-up comedians performing in American comedy clubs. In 1990 Time magazine reported that in 1970 2 per cent of stand-up comedians were female compared with 20 per cent in 1990 (cited in Nilsen and Nilsen 2000: 137). One of the most successful female stand-up comedians is Joan Rivers. Although she has argued:

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Comedy is masculine. To stand up and take control of an audience verbally is very difficult. Women are oppressed in childhood and not allowed to do this. Also, women want to be attractive, and comics are not supposed to be that way. (Horowitz 1997: 107) Joan Rivers has a comedy career spanning five decades and thus is, to some comedy industry professionals and comedy audiences, a funny woman. The foundations of Rivers’ comedy career were laid at a time when the comedy industry was more male-dominated than it is today. As she has continued to be successful across five decades, it is important and interesting to consider the dynamics of her stand-up comic performance in terms of gender. It is to such dynamics that we turn our attention by closely examining Rivers’ performance. The chosen performance is Live at the Apollo (Wheeler 2007) originally broadcast on 10 December 2007. It was hosted by Joan Rivers and included Patrick Kielty as the guest comedian. Data for the article were gathered from two YouTube videos of this broadcast – Part 1 (9 minutes and 56 seconds in duration) and Part 2 (6 minutes and 11 seconds in duration) – in which we see Rivers open and close the show.1

Balancing the gender-imbalanced comedyscape Much of Rivers’ stand-up performance at Live at the Apollo is aggressive in tone and content.2 This aggression is directed towards either herself, through the use of self-deprecating comedy, celebrities and/or image-obsessed Western culture. Across her comedy career, and in the clips chosen for analysis in this article, Rivers has joked about her nonexistent love life. Whether single, married or widowed, the main thrust of Rivers’ comedy persona has remained the same – ‘Joan is the sexual loser, the ugly girl whom no man wants’ (Horowitz 1997: 98). For example, in the Live at the Apollo performance, Rivers’ topics of conversation suggest she has few, if any, sexual relationships with others: Cos it’s all about looks. This is my message Great Britain. This is my message. Looks count, education pah. Looks count. I’ve had no sex appeal and it has screwed me up for life. Peeping Toms look at my window and pull down the shade. You have no idea. My gynaecologist examines me by telephone. (Part 1, 9:01–9:22) Rivers also discusses her childhood experiences and her difficult relationship with her parents: My parents hated me OK, we’re all gonna hear the story ‘my parents hated me too’. All I ever heard, all I ever heard growing up was ‘Why can’t you be like your cousin Sheila, why can’t you be like your cousin Shelia?’, Sheila had died at birth. They just hated me. (Part 1, 6:01–6:23) Self-deprecating jokes were used by other women who shared the comedy landscape with Joan Rivers in the 1960s when there were fewer female stand-up comedians than today. For example, Phyllis Diller and Totie Fields both joked about their appearance and body shape/size in a derogatory manner (see Horowitz 1997). Such self-deprecating comedy

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used by these female stand-up comedians is based on negative female stereotypes, which are exaggerated for humorous effect (Horowitz 1997). Self-deprecating comedy is used by some stand-up comedians as a rhetorical strategy. When explaining her own use of self-deprecating comedy, Jo Brand maintains: I’ve always felt that the putting-yourself-down stuff did give you a bit of a ticket to go on and lay into someone else. Also, it gets it out of the way. Because as a woman you know when you come on stage the first thing you’re judged on is your appearance. (Wagg 1998: 134) As Horowitz argues, self-deprecating comedy eases the resistance to the idea of a woman comic – ‘the logic being that if you’re doing something women aren’t supposed to do, you might be accepted if you show that you don’t think much of yourself as a woman’ (1997: 103). Furthermore, Gray argues that self-deprecation ‘only works if it is clearly perceived to be an act’ (1994: 137, original emphasis). Some of the self-deprecating comedy in Rivers’ stand-up performance does appear to be an act. Rivers is a sophisticated woman – her carefully manicured nails, a face and body manipulated by cosmetic surgery, her expensive jewellery and her wellgroomed hair suggest that she is far removed from the woman she describes as having no sex appeal. The comedy lies in the incongruity and exaggerated differences between Rivers’ actual appearance and her self-perception (see Brett Mills’ article in this issue for more on incongruity in Rivers’ stand-up comedy performance). Rivers’ self-deprecating comedy may also serve to reduce the sociocultural distance between her, the performer, and the (non-celebrities in the) audience. Horowitz argues that River’s self-deprecatory comedy ‘evokes empathy and assures them [the audience] that underneath, she is like them – an outsider who feels like a loser’ (1997: 99) despite her celebrity status and financially secure lifestyle. Self-deprecating jokes ‘often surprise and amuse listeners or readers and leave them feeling superior to the comedian’ (Nilsen and Nilsen 2000: 273). They shift the power from Rivers to the audience, thus making the woman on stage more palatable for those audience members who may feel threatened by seeing a woman on stage. The use of self-disparaging jokes may also be a direct appeal to women in the audience, as Zillman and Stocking (1976) found that women have a preference for self-disparaging jokes. Men dislike self-disparaging jokes, particularly when made by females. Palmer suggests that this may be explained ‘on the ground that they [males] so much like mockery of female others that self-disparagement by a female takes the fun out of the situation’ (1994: 69). However, Rivers is not simply just a victim; she is an aggressor too who mocks and ridicules others, particularly celebrities. In her Live at the Apollo appearance, Rivers begins her stand-up performance by making a number of jokes at the expense of some of the male and female celebrities in the audience (e.g. Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford, Gok Wan, James Nesbitt and Craig Revel Horwood; Part 1, 0:21–2:29). Targeting celebrities and celebrity culture is one of Rivers’ comedy trademarks (see Rivers and Meryman 1986). We see Rivers joke about the ‘pelican lips’ of Angelina Jolie (Part 1, 3:45), the ‘toothpick legs’ of Katie Holmes (Part 1, 05:40–05:44) and the difficulties experienced by Heather McCartney in a tap dancing class – ‘a great little tapper, but, you know, just one way . . . She kept falling down in the hokey cokey’ (Part 1, 2:10–2:29). As Horowitz

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suggests, ‘in her comedy act, she becomes both the ugly, teased scapegoat and the catty schoolmates who inflict the teasing’ (1997: 99). Rivers intersperses the jokes made at the expense of others with self-deprecating jokes, or combines self-deprecating jokes and the teasing of others within the same comic moment: I actually belong to over-eaters anonymous. Does anyone here belong? Except you’re anonymous don’t answer. The lousy thing is that they don’t serve hors d’oeuvres, but the meetings are very interesting because these big fat ladies sit and cry and they go like nobody loves me, which is not true, because the butcher loves them, the baker loves them. One woman said, stood up and said, ‘They made me buy two seats in the aeroplane’. And I said ‘Yes, but you got two meals’ and she perked right up. (Part 2, 4:36–5:10) Although Rivers has a slender body, which implies that she does not overindulge and thus that the self-deprecating joke is an act, she has suffered from eating disorders, in which over-eating and body dysmorphia were component parts (Rivers 1997), which offers an element of plausibility to the self-deprecating joke. This signals to the audience that she has the ability to recognize her own flaws and not just the flaws of others; thus, she has comic licence to target both herself and others.

Reinforcing/resisting dominant notions of gender and sexuality This fluidity of laughing at both herself and others is also evident when considering the extent to which Rivers uses her stand-up comedy performance to reinforce or resist traditional dominant notions of gender and sexuality. Female comedians, such as Jo Brand and Jenny Éclair, have often used topics and issues related to the female biology (menstruation and childbirth) as comic material (see Gray 1994). Joan Rivers extends this comic repertoire to the physiology of the older woman. She proffers a complex combination of idiosyncrasies that simultaneously reinforce and resist western stereotypes about older women, their bodies and their sexuality. Cohen argues that ‘to be old in our [western] society is to be devalued. To be old and female is to experience double oppression’ (2002: 599; see also Sontag 1972). A large body of work exists which suggests that the western media offers a limited number and range of images of older women, which serve to perpetuate negative sociocultural stereotypes about older women (see Cohen 2002; Harwood and Giles 1992). When older women do appear in popular culture, they are often portrayed as ‘being helpless, unknowledgeable, disoriented, or in some other unfavourable fashion’ (Peterson and Ross 1997: 425). Other research demonstrates that negative portrayals of older women as eccentric and irrational are being replaced and resisted by increasing positive portrayals of older people as powerful, healthy, active and sexy (Bell 1992). One notable example is the American sitcom The Golden Girls (Terry Hughes, 1985–1992).3 The Golden Girls focussed on the lives of four 50-plusyear-old women who, due to divorce or widowhood, lived together in Miami, Florida. It was the first television programme in which all of the main characters were female and more than 50 years old. The sitcom was ‘framed, at least initially, in terms of increasing the visibility, and likeability, of the elderly on prime time’ (Harwood and Giles 1992: 405) and thus provided a welcome relief to the negativity that dominates the representations of older women in humorous television programming (e.g. see Barrick et al. 1990).

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Rivers tackles taboos surrounding older women head-on. In the selected performance, Rivers intimately discusses issues exclusive to female biology, through what may be described as ‘confessional stand-up’. In this instance, we are given access to issues related to the physiology of the ageing female body: And you know when it changes for a woman, when you no longer have your period. Every woman in this room, enjoy your period. I don’t wanna hear ‘I’ve got cramps’, you are, cos the minute you have no period, men couldn’t give a shit. I’m telling you. To this day, I carry, because no man will look at you if they think you’re over, I’m telling you, I still carry tampons in my purse. When no one’s looking at me, I open my purse and a tampon drops out. Huh! I could just die. (Part 1, 9:24–9:56) She continues: Cos you know what, age, you’ll all, it’s a young audience, you know what it’s like, age and it’ll happen to all of you, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. The body drops, my breasts, huh, I could have a mammogram and a pedicure at the same time . . . and this is horrible, do you know what really drops first? The vagina. No one tells you, the vagina drops. I woke up six months ago I went, ‘why am I wearing a bunny slipper, and why is it grey?’ (Part 2, 0:08–0:50) This section of the routine is significant as it is reminiscent of Bakhtin’s (1984) grotesque body. We see and hear an older woman talking about her own experiences of her ageing, protruding and misshapen body in an unfavourable and derogatory manner – we are given access to her menopausal experience and to her attempts to deceive others (men) into believing that her body has not reached this, in the words of Rivers, ‘horrible’, stage in her life. This may be viewed as reinforcing the popular characterization of older women in popular culture as helpless and in a negative fashion (e.g. Mrs Emery, Nora Batty and Mrs Richards).4 In doing so, she reaffirms the dominant position of younger women as sexually attractive and desirable (Bytheway 1995; Nelson 2002) and the attractiveness of women as dependent on physicality, and more importantly, the functioning of that physicality. In this routine, Rivers’ definition of sexuality is based on her relationship to sexual desire, not as the desiring one, but in a more traditional understanding of a woman as the stimulus of desire. Yet there is ambivalence surrounding Rivers’ experiences as an older woman. Although such material may serve to ridicule the ageing female body, Rivers speaks from an informed and knowledgeable position – she has direct personal experience of the physical changes experienced by older women – which places her in a position of authority and marks her as someone who knows the fate that awaits the younger unknowing female audience members – and thus inverts the hierarchy of the dominant younger woman and the subordinate older woman. Rivers has argued that if audiences ‘can be honest and laugh about some parts of their lives – the problems of getting older, becoming fat, having a child leave home, being a woman, being ordinary – then they can be honest and laugh about all parts of life’ (Rivers and Meryman 1986: 308). This honesty is evident in this routine. Yet, there is a caring side to this authority in the sense that Rivers is passing on the knowledge that she would have

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valued being given during her younger years and would have benefitted from, as it would have made the ageing process a more pleasant experience: Let me tell you something. And this is why I’m glad I have the chance to discuss this because our mothers don’t tell us. If our mothers told us, you would feel better, do you know what I’m saying. If my mother had said to me ‘Joan, when you get old, your vagina’s gonna drop, but it’s a good thing because you can have sex in the bedroom and still be watching TV in the living room’. Because if you don’t know, it’s trouble. (Part 2, 0.54–01:20) We see and hear Rivers transgress discursive boundaries as she discusses a body part – the vagina – that we seldom hear mentioned in popular culture and rarely discussed by an older woman herself (The Vagina Monologues is an exception here).5 Through her observations and discussions of the older woman’s physiology, Rivers widens the stand-up comedy agenda. The sheer delight that is evident from some members of the audience, particularly the women in the audience, suggests that women can, and do, laugh at their bodies and the bodily changes experienced across time. Such observations told in the comic mode sit in stark contrast to another dimension of the masculine discourses surrounding stand-up comedy. Hitchens (2007) maintains that ‘women do not find their own physical decay and absurdity to be [. . .] riotously amusing’. Rivers’ performance and the laughter from some female members of the audience challenge such masculine discourse. In this section of her performance, Rivers continues: Thirty-six hour erections on 90-year-old men, oh my god, and these poor women. Even if it’s ten minutes a session, that’s two hundred and twelve times you have to fake an orgasm. How often can you say ‘you’re the best, you’re the best, you’re the best?’ A nightmare, a nightmare [. . .] And do you know who I feel sorry for, not the men, it’s these poor wives, these poor dry old wives, and these guys on top of them, in and out, in and out, in and out, they’re gonna set them on fire. (Part 2, 1:54–3:03) This routine may be viewed as reinforcing and continuing the negative image of the older woman and her deteriorating physiology, evident earlier in her routine when discussing her ‘dropping’ body. Such material augments western society’s male-defined understanding of femininity and subordination of women, and may reaffirm the stereotype of older women seen elsewhere in popular culture as sexually inactive when compared with older men. As Palmer observes, in the late 1960s Legman argued that, ‘dirty jokes incorporate a vision of women which corresponds to masculinity’ as they uphold the ‘primacy of coitus, the universal availability of women, the subordination of women’s discourse to male discourse and in general portray woman as an object’ (1994: 73). Although Rivers’ material, as discussed above, can be viewed as objectifying women, Rivers’ own appearance, to some extent, serves to neutralize this construction. Although Rivers has had cosmetic surgery, has manicured nails and professionally groomed hair, her clothes, which have been described as ‘stylishly conservative’ (Horowitz 1997: 93), serve to desexualize her – she reveals little flesh and conceals her body shape by wearing long loose trousers, a high polo neck and a loose cardigan. This is maybe a deliberate strategy

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employed by Rivers to facilitate negotiation of the male-dominated comedyscape and to prevent her from being objectified as a woman. Gray has argued that for female stand-up comedians ‘to look physically threatening, to express enjoyment of sexuality, to be overtly feminist, is to become an object of laughter. To maintain her role as subject, a woman has to endorse patriarchal attitudes while distancing herself from the stereotype’ (1994: 137). Rivers’ material reinforces patriarchal stereotypes of women; she presents herself in a physically unthreatening desexualized manner and does not express enjoyment of sexual intercourse – she either has not experienced such activities or can appreciate how difficult sexual relationships are for older women – thus enabling herself to be positioned as a subject rather than an object. Such comedic contradictions are evident elsewhere in Rivers’ stand-up comedy performance. Rivers simultaneously reinforces and challenges the stereotype that ‘older women are invisible’ (Cohen 2002: 609). The above extract about men not looking at menopausal or post-menopausal women ridicules the older woman who tries to delay the onset of fading from view, or more specifically, from masculine view, by dropping her unnecessary tampons in public. Yet, as an older female stand-up comedian, Rivers commands the stage and she stands alone – on show and easily visible – holding a central position in the performance space and refusing to fade from view. Therefore, Rivers is able to contest the masculine discourses that perpetuate the male-dominated comedyscape.

Discussion The sociocultural analysis has revealed that Rivers’ stand-up comedy performance is one that is defined by contradictions and paradoxes. From her appearance to her joke content, Rivers is an interesting synthesis of complexity, drawing on features of stand-up performance that for some critics are ‘traditionally masculine’ and others that have often been employed by other female stand-up comedians. Her professionally groomed and manipulated body, face, nails and hair sit in opposition to the aggressive self-deprecating narratives of having no sex appeal and few sexual encounters. Although some of the jokes told may objectify women, Rivers wears loose flowing attire that desexualizes her, which inhibits the possibility of Rivers being objectified as a woman. Yet at other moments in the stand-up comedy performance, she deliberately becomes the objectified older woman. Throughout and across the stand-up comedy performance analysed, Rivers proffers a playfulness surrounding contemporary identity constructions. Some jokes, comic observations and comic narratives challenge and resist traditional notions of femininity; others support and maintain patriarchal views of society, whereas in others, often within the same joke or observation, resisting is intertwined with sustaining dominant discourses surrounding gender and sexuality. These constructions are fluid and flexible, and ebb and flow through and across the stand-up comedy performance. Rivers moves from the subject to the object of comedy with performative ease, whilst simultaneously reinforcing and challenging stereotypes related to gender, sexuality and the ageing female body. Sociocultural analyses of stand-up comedy performances are important as they provide interesting insights into the ways in which the performer negotiates the comedy space in relation to her/his own identity, the identity dynamics of the audience and the wider societal beliefs, values and ideologies. Although this article has focussed on the importance of Rivers’ gender and sexuality (and in a more limited manner, age) and how this is manifest in the comedic performance, it is not the intention of the analysis presented to suggest

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that sexuality and gender are the most important dynamics in sociocultural analysis, nor is it to suggest that Rivers’ performance can only be understood in relation to its relationship to gender and sexual stereotypes and ideologies. Other spheres of identity, such as race, ethnicity, nationality, ability, disability, religion and social class, are equally as important and interesting when analysing how stand-up comedians navigate the comedyscape. For example, religion plays an interesting role in Rivers’ Live at the Apollo performance – she recalls how she ‘had a very bad childhood, that’s because, and I’m sure none of you give a damn but, I was the only Jewish kid, this is the absolute truth, growing up in an allCatholic neighbourhood’ (Part 1, 6:43–6:53). Future sociocultural analyses could examine how religion interacts with other aspects of identity in order to extend the analysis. Finally, one of the most important contributions made by the sociocultural analysis presented in this article is to illustrate and make clear that women can be, and are, funny stand-up comedians.

Acknowledgements Grateful thanks to Margaret Montgomerie and Liz Sutton for their useful and insightful comments on an earlier draft of the article. Source: Sharon Lockyer (2011) ‘From toothpick legs to dropping vaginas: Gender and sexuality in Joan Rivers’ stand-up comedy performance’, Comedy Studies, 2:2, 113–123.

Notes 1 Part 1 can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNUkLzi46OI&feature=related.Part 2 can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXEt2gYcweQ&feature=related. Accessed 28 May 2010, 1 June 2010, 4 April 2011, 16 May 2011 and 23 May 2011. 2 Rivers’ comedy was inspired by the outrageous and no-holds-barred comedy of Lenny Bruce (Rivers 1997). 3 The British remake of The Golden Girls was called Brighton Belles (James Cellan Jones, 1993– 1994) and was less successful than its US counterpart, lasting only two series. 4 Mrs. Emery (played by David Walliams) in the British sketch show, Little Britain (Steve Bendelack, Matt Lipsey, Declan Lowney and Geoff Posner, 2003–2006), is an incontinent old woman who urinates uncontrollably (and unknowingly) in public places, from libraries to supermarkets, much to horror of observers and passers-by. Nora Batty (played by Kathy Staff) in Last of the Summer Wine (James Gilbert, Bernard Thompson, Sydney Lotterby, Ray Butt and Alan J. W. 5 The Vagina Monologues is a play written by Eve Ensler, which has been staged internationally and produced for television by HBO.

References Bakhtin, M. M. (1984), Rabelais and His World (trans. H. Iswolsky), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barrick, A. L., Hutchinson, R. L. and Deckers, L. H. (1990), ‘Humor, aggression and ageing’, The Gerontologist, 30: 5, pp. 675–678. Bell, J. (1992), ‘In search of a discourse on ageing: the elderly on television’, The Gerontologist, 32: 3, pp. 305–311. Bendelack, S., Lipsey, M., Lowney, D. and Posner, G. (2003–2006), Little Britain, BBC. Beynon, J. (ed.) (2002), Masculinities and Culture, Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press.

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Bytheway, B. (1995), Ageism, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Carr, J. and Greeves, L. (2007), The Naked Jape: Uncovering the Hidden World of Jokes, London: Penguin Books. Cellan-Jones, J. (1993–1994), Brighton Belles, ITV. Channel 4 (2010), ‘The 100 Greatest Stand-Ups’, 11 April 2010, http://www.channel4.com/pro grammes/the-100-greatest-stand-ups/articles/greatest-stand-ups-of-all-time. Accessed 4 April 2011. Chortle: The UK Comedy Guide (2011), ‘Comedians Currently on Tour’, http://www.chortle.co.uk/ shows/all/?current=3. Accessed 4 April 2011. Cohen, H. L. (2002), ‘Developing media literacy skills to challenge television’s portrayal of older women’, Educational Gerontology, 28: 7, pp. 599–620. Davies, J. H. and Spiers, B. (1975–1979), Fawlty Towers, BBC. Gilbert, J., Thompson, B., Lotterby, S., Butt, R. and Bell, A. J. W. (1973–2010), Last of the Summer Wine, BBC. Gray, F. (1994), Women and Laughter, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Harwood, J. and Giles, H. (1992), ‘“Don’t Make Me Laugh”: Age representations in a humorous context’, Discourse & Society, 3: 3, pp. 403–436. Hitchens, C. (2007), ‘Why women aren’t funny’, Vanity Fair, January, http://www.vanityfair.com/ culture/features/2007/01/hitchens200701?printable=true.Accessed 4 April 2011. Horowitz, S. (1997), Queens of Comedy: Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Joan Rivers, and the New Generation of Funny Women, London and New York: Routledge. Hughes, T. (1985–1992), The Golden Girls, NBC. Nelson, T. D. (ed.) (2002), Ageism, Stereotyping and Prejudice Against Older Persons, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nilsen, A. P. and Nilsen, D. L. F. (2000), Encyclopedia of 20th Century American Humor, Arizona: Oryx Press. Palmer, J. (1994), Taking Humour Seriously, London and New York: Routledge. Peterson, R. T. and Ross, D. T. (1997), ‘A content analysis of the portrayal of mature individuals in television’, Journal of Business Ethics, 16: 4, pp. 425–433. Provine, R. (1996), ‘Laughter’, American Scientist, 84: January–February, pp. 38–47, http:// cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Provine_96.html. Accessed 25 May 2010. Rivers, J. (1997), Bouncing Back: I’ve Survived Everything . . . and I Mean Everything . . . and You Can Too!, New York: HarperCollins. Rivers, J. and Meryman, R. (1986), Enter Talking, New York: Delacorte Press. Ross, A. (1998]), The Language of Humour, London and New York: Routledge. Smith, P. (ed.) (1996), Boys: Masculinities in Contemporary Culture, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sontag, S. (1972), ‘The double standard of aging’, Saturday Review of Society, 23: 1, pp. 29–38. Wagg, S. (1998), ‘Punching Your Weight: Conversations with Jo Brand’, in S. Wagg (ed.), Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics and Social Difference, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 111–136. Wheeler, P. (2004–present), Live at the Apollo, BBC. Zillman, D. and Stocking, S. H. (1976), ‘Putdown humor’, Journal of Communication, 26: 3, pp. 154–163. Zoglin, R. (2009), Comedy At The Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America, New York: Bloomsbury.

Contributor Sharon Lockyer is Lecturer in Sociology and Communications at Brunel University, UK. She researches in the sociology of mediated culture and critical comedy studies. She is the editor of Reading Little Britain: Comedy Matters on Contemporary Television

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(2010) and a co-editor (with Michael Pickering) of Beyond a Joke: the Limits of Humour (2005, 2009). She has published in a range of academic journals including Social Semiotics, Popular Communication: the International Journal of Media and Culture, Journalism Studies, International Journal of Social Research Methodology: Theory & Practice, Ethical Space: the International Journal of Communication Ethics, and Discourse & Society.

Chapter 26

Joan Rivers – Reading the meaning (2:2) Louise Peacock

Introduction This article evaluates how semiotics, which according to Eco, ‘is concerned with everything that can be read as a sign’ (1976: 7), as applied in theatre and performance studies, might be used to analyse the performance of Joan Rivers’ stand-up comedy. Semiotics has its roots in the Prague School of the 1930s and 1940s. Of particular importance in relation to performance is the work of Jiri Veltrusky, who was one of the first to recognize that ‘All that is on the stage is a sign’ (cited in Elam 2002: 6). The fundamental notion of the Prague School was what Elam identified as ‘the semiotization of the object’, indicating that when an object appears onstage, it loses its primary practical function and assumes a secondary function whereby it can seem to have a ‘symbolic or signifying role’ (2002: 6). This idea can be applied to the most obvious objects in performance, such as the set and properties, but the whole performance can also be read as a macro-sign. Furthermore, in theatre, both the performance text (that which is done) and the dramatic text (that which is written) can be considered. This difficulty of whether to prioritize the actual or the written is removed in the consideration of stand-up comedy because usually only the performance text is available to us. Another factor that renders a semiotic consideration of stand-up easier is that whereas the performance text of theatre is often only available to us in the live moment (necessitating a heavy reliance on memory or careful notes), stand-up is often available to us in a mediatized form. The mediatized version is not the same as the live performance, but it does provide us with a more efficient aide-memoire than notes scribbled in the dark of an auditorium. The polysemic nature of performance (whether that of theatre or stand-up) means that a global reading is fraught with difficulties. Many semioticians and theatre academics that use semiotics seek, in some way, to divide the performance into more manageable units. There are, therefore, possible strategies that can be followed in dividing performance for semiotic analysis. One of the primary difficulties presented by performance is that it works both synchronically (for example, everything that is available to be interpreted at one specific moment of the performance) and diachronically (meaning is accrued as the performance continues through time). Later in the article, the methods for identifying units of sense in performance as developed by Kowzan, Pavis and Beckerman will be considered.

Semiotics Before moving on to detailed analysis, however, it is necessary to establish a common semiotic vocabulary that can be used throughout the analysis. Some use will be made of

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Peirce’s tripartite system of icon, index and symbol. A clear summary of these is offered by Aston and Savona: (i) icon: a sign linked by similarity to its object, e.g. a photograph; (ii) index: a sign which points to or is connected to its object, e.g. smoke as an index of fire; (iii) symbol: a sign where the connection between sign and object is agreed by convention and there is no similarity between object and sign, e.g. the dove as a symbol of peace. (Aston and Savona 1996: 6) The fluidity of performance means that these three categories overlap and blur. One way of applying these to performance is to consider the iconicity of the performer’s body. This will be explored later in relation to Rivers’ identity and physicality. [T]he identity of a performer may make an important contribution to the process of signification [. . .] A performer who has achieved fame and public recognition necessarily brings the sign of celebrity into play. (Aston and Savona 1996: 102) It is also possible to interpret much of the performer’s action as indexical, as will be demonstrated later. The symbol is a particularly rich concept in relation to performance. It can apply to language (Peirce regarded language as a primary example of the symbol), but it can also be used to discuss physical action, overlapping and merging with indexical interpretation. The concept of ostension, borrowed from philosophy, which means the showing of an object, is important in performance. At its simplest level, it means the literal showing of an object; to show a book, the performer picks up a book. However, ostension can work in a more complex way through the performer’s body being used to show objects, and even other people, through mime and gesture. Rivers demonstrates both forms of ostension. At the beginning of the sequence, we see a simple form of ostension when she shows us her pink feather boa. More complex versions of ostension multiply as we are shown Angelina Jolie, Katie Holmes and elderly men with Viagra-induced erections through the way Rivers uses her body. The terms denotation and connotation are used in semiotics to indicate different levels of meaning. Denotation refers to the obvious, literal meaning of a word or object. In Rivers’ performance, for example, the pink boa is a pink boa. Connotation relates to secondary levels of meaning ‘whereby the sign vehicle of a one-sign relationship provides the basis for a second-order sign relationship’ (Elam 2002: 9). The boa with its pink colour and feathery texture can also be seen to indicate femininity. Second-order meanings tend to be socially and culturally located, and so the notion of pink being associated with femininity is a construct of western society. In these locations the boa also carries associations with cabaret singers and even strippers, and thus the boa conveys more than simply boa-ness. Theatre has established its own codes, which are instinctively read by an audience as indicating that a theatrical performance is taking place, and the performance of stand-up comedy can be established as a sub-code of theatre, sharing as it does many of the

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elements of the theatrical code. Additionally, stand-up has some conventions of its own, such as direct address to the audience and the use of an amplified introduction of the performer. The emphasis on introducing the performer highlights the centrality of the performer’s body and identity as a locus of signs. Everything about the stand-up comedian can be read. If the performer is well known, as Rivers is, then the audience also bring foreknowledge to the performance. They come expecting a particular kind of performance and delivery. The identity of the stand-up comedian, and the way they play to expectation, is central to the act. Indeed, as Beckerman recognizes, it is often hard to identify the point at which the performer stops and the performance begins: ‘Comic routines presented by stand-up comedians fuse performer, act and audience in a tightly bound exchange – indeed the performer and the act may be virtually indistinguishable’ (1990: 4). In many stand-up comedy performances, the presentation of the identity of the performer remains constant throughout (this is, of course, not true for performers like Victoria Wood or Rich Hall, who adopt distinct characters as part of their act). Joan Rivers is Joan Rivers throughout, and this, together with the fixed nature of elements such as set, lighting, hair, make-up and costume, means that these elements can be interpreted semiotically. The interpretations made in relation to these elements then form an underpinning against which the more fluid elements of the performance can be read.

The performer’s identity Rivers’ reputation is well established as a comic who is likely to shock. Frances Gray identifies her style as a ‘mixture of self-deprecation and conventional aggression’ (1994: 138). She is also well known for having had extensive plastic surgery. Equally important is her identity as a Jewish New Yorker. This is reinforced most obviously in her performance via her accent. Her sense of her Jewishness is reinforced by the content of her show. In the opening section, the line ‘£165 pounds so I gotta show it to you or it doesn’t go off my income tax’ (Part 1, 0:04–0:09) connects to common stereotypes of Jewish financial acuity. Later, in a more direct reference, she says of the Nativity scene, ‘I had the whole thing going, the wise men, the sheep, the only thing is I had the baby but, I’m Jewish, I got him a nanny’ (Part 1, 7:57–8:03). As she says ‘I’m Jewish’, she puts her hand to heart. The auditive sign (the words) plays into cultural conceptions of Jewish mothers, and the visual sign (the hand gesture) acts as an index to link herself more closely to what she is saying. Aston and Savona recognize that ‘the identity of the performer may make an important contribution to the process of signification’ (1991: 102). We read what Rivers says and does through a lens of who Rivers is. Identity is closely related to appearance for Rivers as she makes clear in the content of the act ‘my point is [. . .] it’s about looks’ (Part 1, 8:34–8:37). Rivers’ appearance in terms of costume, hair and make-up provides us with a clear set of signs, which can be interpreted semiotically. When we interpret the symbolic signification of garments and colours, those readings are culturally located, dependent on our personal, social and cultural experience. What then are the connotations of Rivers’ costume? She combines two colours: black and hot pink. One reading is that black, the colour of evening wear, is used in western society to signify smartness. Pink has an obvious

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association with femininity, but the shade chosen by Rivers suggests strength and confidence. The cut of her black trousers is such that they cling without being excessively tight, emphasizing her femininity and class. The hot pink jacket is simply cut but sparkles with sequins. There is a mixed signification here. The simplicity of the cut suggests class and, teamed as it is with a black roll neck, suggests that Rivers intends to conceal her body rather than reveal it. On the other hand, the sequinned nature of the jacket clearly signifies glamour. Her high heels and her dangling earrings support this signification of glamour. Whilst applying a semiotic approach to the relatively constant elements of Rivers’ performance is straightforward, there remains the difficulty of handling the polysemic nature of the more fluid elements of performance. As a way of tackling this difficulty, Beckerman (1990) suggests that any show can be divided into two elements: presentation and performance, and he offers the following definition, ‘Along with the word “presentation”, show refers to what is offered to a public, rather than, as in the case of “performance” the rendition of what is shown’ (1990: 1). Presentation, therefore, appears to refer to the content of the show, and performance refers to way in which that content is delivered. Initially, this seems like it might be a helpful distinction. The separation of content from action is one way of subdividing the text, yet there remains in both sections the difficulty of dealing with the diachronic nature of the show. Can we, for example, address the overall presentation of what Rivers offers without needing to subdivide further? Given the episodic nature of her set, I would argue that it would be sensible to segment the content into smaller sense units. Similarly, when considering the performance, there is still the polysemic nature of what she does. We are left with the challenge of synchronically interpreting costume, make-up, movement, gesture, facial expression and vocal qualities. One further difficulty is created by the artificiality of separating the what from the how of performance when the two are so closely connected. The desire to deal with the polysemic nature of performance led Kowzan to suggest a thirteen-element system for the semiotic analysis of performance. The classification is reproduced here.

Kowzan On Polysemics Kowzan’s approach prioritizes the actor as the ‘central signifying locus’ (Elam 2002: 106). This bodes well for its application to stand-up comedy given the importance of the persona and physical presence of the comedian. As the table shows, the first eight elements are associated with the actor, whereas the remaining five are located outside the actor. To aid subdivision further, Kowzan considers visual and auditive signs generated by the actor and those generated beyond the actor. To test the usefulness of Kowzan’s model, it should be applied to Rivers’ performance. Elements 6 to 11 have already been dealt with above. The ability to consider relatively fixed elements diminishes the difficulty of dealing with the diachronic element of stand-up comedy. As Kowzan notes, these elements occur in space rather than in time. However, dealing with elements 1 to 5 throughout Rivers’ performance is much more of a challenge. Although the chosen section of the performance only lasts approximately sixteen minutes, the polysemic density of elements 1 to 5 necessitates further segmentation.

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Auditive signs (actor) Visual signs

(actor)

Space and Time

Visual Signs (outside the actor)

Time

Auditive Signs (outside the actor)

Auditive Signs

13. So u n d Effects

Inarticulate sounds

12. Music

Space

11. Lighting

Outside the actor

10. Settings

Appearance of the stage

9. Properties

Space and Time

8. Costume

Time

7. Hair-style

Actors’ external appearance

6. Make-up

Visual Signs

5. Movement

Auditive signs

4. Gesture

Expression of the body

3. Mime

Actor

2. Tone

Spoken Text

1. Word

Segmenting Rivers’ performance For the purposes of this article, I have subdivided Rivers’ set into eleven subsections, detailed below. In this way, different sections can be readily identified and analysed using Kowzan’s model and, later, Pavis’ model. The multiplicity of sense units demonstrates how problematic Beckerman’s notion of a simple division between presentation and performance is. The content of Rivers’ set is so varied that the subdivision presentation is insufficient. It is not possible to deal with what is offered as a single entity. Similarly, dividing what she says from how she says it makes it harder to identify the humour in each section. For example, in Section 2, the content of what Rivers says deals with osteoporosis sufferers. However, in semiotic terms, the symbolism of the language is supported by the indexical nature of mimed gesture. As Rivers’ describes them stooping, she also shows them stooping (a version of ostension), and as she describes them clapping, she mimes the clapping. At this point, the timing of the way the words and the action are combined reinforces the humour. As

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No.

Title

Timing

Opening line

Closing line

1.

Introduction and celebrities

Part 1, 0:01–2:38

£165 pounds – I have to show it to you or it doesn’t go off my income tax

At the end of the show, OK?

2.

Illness and charity

Part 1, 2:39–3:34

Good, now I’m thrilled to be here

They’d applaud and you’d hear crack . . . anyhow

3.

Angelina Jolie

Part 1, 3:35–4:51

Also Angelina Jolie is a friend of mine who’s very charitable

Nicole Ritchie, right here in our town, sick of it

4.

Katie Holmes

Part 1, 4:52– interrupted

Who else adopted?

5.

Gay digression

Part 1, 4:57–5:13

Look who I’m asking – the straight guy!

Are you a lesbian? You look really butch

6.

Katie Holmes continued

Part 1, 5:14–5:46

Tom and Katie Holmes have that little Chinese baby

Get me an olive, here catch . . . it’s just . . .

7.

Childhood

Part 1, 5:47–6:43

Which I shouldn’t laugh at

Ask the funny man in the raincoat, does he have a van? (and applause)

8.

‘The only Jewish kid’

Part 1, 6:44–8:33

I had a very bad childhood

If she’d have looked like that she would have got into the inn . . . yes

9.

The importance of looks

Part 1, 8:34/ Part 2, 0:08

The point is it’s about looks

I could just die

10.

Age

Part 2, 0:10–1:19

Cos you know what . . . age

Am I wrong?

11.

Men and Viagra plus

Part 2, 1:20–3:12

See . . . men don’t know

They’re gonna set them on fire (and laughter)

she says ‘crack’ to indicate the bones cracking, her hands fly apart. In Kowzan’s terms, the auditive and visual signs combine to convey optimum meaning in the funniest way. If Beckerman’s bipartite division is not helpful, is Kowzan’s any better? In order to test Kowzan’s model, I am going to apply the first five elements of it to Section 8 ‘the only Jewish kid’.

Kowzan and an analysis of ‘the only jewish kid’ Although this system has some potential, a number of difficulties appear when we try to apply it. It is reductive. The table presents the opportunity to record only brief comments about what we observe. Furthermore, there is some difficulty in defining the distinctions between mime, gesture and movement. Doubtless, in delineating these three areas, Kowzan

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Signification

1. Word

Direct address Colloquial register Strong swearing

Confidence, willingness to engage On a level with audience, informality Reinforces established reputation

2. Tone

New York Jewish accent Imitating male voice Rapid delivery

Reinforces sense of identity Indexical – suggestion of other character Anger, frustration, strength of feeling

3. Mime

Indicating objects Bending down

Indexical – Christmas tree, menorah, nativity scene Talking to Mary in nativity scene

4. Gesture

Hands on hips Sweeping hand movements Hand on side of head

Confidence, strength Including audience, confidence Strength of feeling

5. Movement

Walking from side to side

Inclusivity, in command

was attempting to facilitate a more detailed approach, but one result is that more time may be spent deciding which box to put a movement in than decoding its signification. In terms of elements, only having word and tone seems limited in relation to the density of language signs in River’s performance. She is a stand-up who balances the visual and the auditive, but the model provides greater opportunity for considering the visual than the auditive. More worryingly, this model pushes us towards a consideration of the performance without considering the presentation. Although I rejected Beckerman’s model as too limited, it did at least recognize the importance of analysing both the how and the what. Kowzan’s model does not provide adequate opportunity for analysing the content of Rivers’ humour, nor (unless we cram it into tone) does it allow us to analyse the nature of her vocal delivery (such things as timings, pauses and variation in pace) sufficiently. Kowzan developed his model to analyse theatre, but it is clear that he was looking primarily at the realization of dramatic text where interaction between characters and where the visual elements of the setting and costume (elements 6–13 in his model) were far more important than in most stand-up. Therefore, whereas the model provides us with a starting point, to apply a theatrical model of semiotics to the performance of stand-up comedy, adaptations are necessary. Thus far, we have separated what might be defined as the constant elements from the dynamic elements so that our analysis of the constants forms a backdrop to the way we consider the remaining elements. This allows us to emphasize the importance of the identity of the performer in stand-up comedy. The remaining five elements could be more clearly defined, and some techniques of performance that are prioritized in stand-up performance are not adequately covered here.

Patrice Pavis and analysing performance Working approximately a decade later than Kowzan, Patrice Pavis created a questionnaire in 1985 that was designed to facilitate the semiotic analysis of performance. In his book, Analyzing Performance, Pavis (2003) presented his ideas at greater length. As it was for

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Kowzan’s model, it is helpful to consider the model and apply it to a section of Rivers’ performance. Pavis’ questionnaire (as presented in Analyzing Performance) is too detailed to be presented in full here. Pavis’ main headings are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

General characteristics of the mise-en-scène Scenography Lighting system Objects Costumes, make-up, masks Actors’ performances Function of music, noise, silence Rhythm of the performance Reading the plot through the mise-en-scène The text in performance The spectator How to record the performance? What cannot be put into signs (semiotized)? Final assessment

Structurally, this model is more readily applicable to stand-up than Kowzan’s as Pavis identifies the relative constants of performance in the opening stages of the questionnaire. So we have already considered points 1 to 5 in our analysis above. Of the remaining points, some seem more pertinent to stand-up comedy: others less so. If we substitute the word ‘performer’ for ‘actor’, it is clear that point 6 is important, as is point 8. Point 7 could easily be relevant to some stand-up comedians (such as Bill Bailey). Points 9 and 10, focussing on plot and text, are irrelevant. Interestingly, Pavis identifies the spectator as worthy of analysis, and the sub-questions provided in the questionnaire make this section highly relevant to stand-up comedy. The most useful questions beyond points 2 to 5 (covered above) are:

Q6. Actors’ performances a. Physical description of the actors (bodily movements, facial expression, make-up); changes in their appearance c. Construction of character: actor/role relationship f. Voice: qualities, effects produced, relations to diction and song g. Status of the performer: past, professional situation

Q8. Rhythm of the performance b. The overall rhythm of the performance: continuous or discontinuous rhythm, changes of system, connection with the mise-en-scène

Q11. The spectator a. Within what theatre institution does the production take place? b. What expectations did you have of the performance?

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c. What presuppositions are necessary to appreciate the performance? d. How did the audience react? (Pavis 2003: 39) Taking the relevant points together with a selection of the most relevant subquestions for each of these, I will now apply Pavis’ methodology to an analysis of Section 3 ‘Angelina Jolie’.

Pavis and an analysis of ‘Angelina Jolie’ It is worth noting that this section lasts for less than one and a half minutes in performance. Although elements such as costume and make-up (as analysed earlier) remain the same, the nature of Rivers’ performance in this section means that there are rapid changes in both bodily movements and facial expression that can be related to the semiotic terms above. For clarity, initial observations are presented in table form. A more detailed interpretation follows:

Q6a – Bodily movements and facial expressions

• • • • • • • •

Q6c – Construction of character

Operates in two ways:

Hand gestures to indicate pelican lips Stands sideways Gesture of throwing fish Hand gesture to signal one person Lips pouting Mouth opening and closing Expansive hand gestures Twirling and showing off jacket

1. Continued characterization of Joan Rivers as professional performer 2. Characterization of Angelina Jolie • Physically, through pouting lips and mouth opening and closing • Auditively, through comments on charity work, giving Jennifer Aniston her husband back, adopting ugly children, they go in to basement and sew, sew, sew, you never see them again Q6f – Voice

New York Jewish accent Clear diction Blows raspberry Questions and rising inflections Fast-paced

Q6g – Status of performer

Well-established stand-up comedian Reputation for being rude Reputation for swearing

Q8b – Rhythm

Fast moving Established physically and vocally Pauses for effect Pauses for laugher

Q11a – Theatre institution

The Apollo Theatre, London

(Continued )

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(Cont.) Q11b – Expectations

Live at the Apollo – host (Joan Rivers) had mobile phone that could be texted by audience Expectations of humour Expect to be shocked

Q11c – Presuppositions Need to understand sub-code of stand-up performance Q11d – Audience reaction

Laughter Silence in response to rhetorical questions Laughter and clapping together

What the above table does is present a selective outline of what occurred in the performance. However, the brief comments inserted still need to be interpreted in terms of both meaning and impact. Rivers’ act relies heavily on bodily movement and facial expression to support and extend the meaning of the verbal content. In seeking to define bodily movement further, Pavis follows the work of Michel Bernard, which offers a means for further categorizing bodily movement to include the body’s iconicity, body orientation, postures, attitudes, movements and facial expressions (for a more detailed explanation, see Pavis 2003: 65). In terms of orientation, Rivers utilizes a range of positions including facing the audience straight on, standing sideways and twirling. These positions combine with the verbal content to extend either the meaning or the impact of the content. Initially, Rivers faces the audience to mime Angelina Jolie’s lips. Jolie’s lips are used as an index, the lips point to the individual as she is so well known for her pout. When Rivers turns sideways, she is miming throwing fish for Jolie to catch in her mouth. Here, we have a physical representation of a fictional scene in which Rivers moves between representing herself throwing the fish and Jolie catching them (indicated by the opening and closing of Rivers’ mouth). When she imitates Jolie, she is both herself and Jolie. She creates a sign that stands both for herself and for someone else, and the audience reads and understands both simultaneously. The use of a hand gesture to represent lips, which in turn signify Jolie, is an example of what Elam identifies as ‘transcodification’, ‘whereby a given bit of semantic information can be translated from one system to another or supplied simultaneously by different kinds of signal’ (2002: 77). Later in the section, Rivers uses expansive hand movements to support her comment ‘give Jennifer Aniston her husband back’ (Part 1, 4:06) in order to draw the audience in. Her twirling movement to show off the jacket supposedly sewn by Jolie’s children is another example of physical movement being used to signify a fictional occurrence to the audience and is one in which, once again, the movement supports the verbal content. In terms of creation of character, Rivers works on two levels in this section (as in others in this set) by presenting herself as herself or at least the professional performer element of herself and then using that self to signify another. Here, she uses words and actions to construct her view of Jolie’s character for the audience. The physical representations point to Jolie’s physique in ways that are not complimentary. Similarly, the content of the auditive signs is also critical. The lines identified in the table combine to represent Jolie in a bad light, as a husband-stealer who turns her adopted children into slave labour in her basement.

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Vocally, there is much to interpret from Rivers’ trademark Jewish American accent that works to support her presented personal identity and the pace and delivery of her jokes. She blows a raspberry as an auditive sign to combine with the visual hand gesture to signify Jolie’s pelican lips. In terms of pace, this section moves at speed suggesting confidence on Rivers’ part. She pauses only for effect or to allow laughter to fade before she moves on to secure the next laugh. Semiotically, this control acts as an index pointing back to her professional status. Rivers uses many questions in the structure of her material and the pattern of rising inflections works to suggest to her audience that they are part of the show. All of the elements considered thus far work in combination with Rivers’ status and reputation as a stand-up comedian. The critical angle taken on Jolie fits with the audience’s expectations of Rivers who, despite her age, is well known for outspoken attacks on celebrities. What Pavis’ model offers, which Kowzan’s did not, is a consideration of the impact of the performance space and audience’s expectations on the way the performance is received. The Hammersmith Apollo is known for staging live performance of stand-up comedy that is linked to the television show Live at the Apollo (Wheeler 2007) from which these clips are taken. In this show, a convention is set of a compère who links the various acts, opening the show with approximately ten minutes of their own material. The compère also addresses celebrity members of the audience and makes jokes with them or at their expense. With regard to what Pavis terms ‘presuppositions’, audience members who are aware of the conventions will be likely to have an understanding of the subcode of stand-up performance. They will be expecting direct address; communication between audience and performer, comic content and the potential for heckling. The final element of Pavis’ model to be considered is audience reaction. As shown in the table above, this comes in three forms: laughing, silence and laughing whilst clapping. In the section considered, the audience reactions are entirely positive. Their willingness to play by the rules of stand-up comedy (for example, by not shouting out comments in response to Rivers’ rhetorical questions) evidences an acceptance of and admiration for the performer.

Conclusion The models of Kowzan and Pavis, supported by the underpinning theory outlined by Elam, provide a sound basis for analysing stand-up comedy. The convention of sign and signified allows for the interpretation of both performance and content within a sociocultural context. Both models highlight areas of the performance to be focussed on in any analysis. However, taken separately or even taken together, limitations become apparent when attempting to apply primarily theatrical models to stand-up comedy. A combined model offers a list of ingredients to be analysed some of which remain relatively constant in stand-up comedy. These are scenography and objects (Pavis and containing Kowzan’s properties, setting and lighting), make-up, hairstyle, costume and masks (identified by both) and the lighting system (Pavis). Semiotics serves these areas well because an analysis can be offered that holds good for the whole performance and that forms an interpretive foundation for the more fluid elements of the actor’s performance (Pavis and containing Kowzan’s word, tone, mime, gesture and movement) and the rhythm of the performance. Pavis’ question 11 contains some elements that are fixed and some that are fluid. Thus, the theatre institution and expectations can be

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dealt with alongside the constant elements, but audience reaction must be considered alongside the more fluid elements. Despite the potential for such a system as a means of analyzing stand-up performance, there are also limitations. The difficulty of dealing with the density of synchronous signs remains. Equally dealing with the diachronicity of performance presents challenges. Consider the Angelina Jolie section above that lasts only a minute and a half but which took around a thousand words to even begin to analyse. The analyst, therefore, cannot use such a system to analyse the whole of a stand-up performance but must select brief sections to use as examples, and much may be lost in this selection. The models provided omit key areas that must be considered in the analysis of stand-up such as joke content, humour and laughter theory and, importantly, performance skills, which are particularly relevant to comedy such as timing, irony and audience anticipation and participation. Therefore, although the work of Kowzan and Pavis can be adapted and applied to enable a rewarding analysis of stand-up comedy, further work is needed to establish a model that draws on semiotics alongside content analysis and humour theory. Source: Louise Peacock (2011) ‘Joan Rivers — Reading the meaning’, Comedy Studies, 2:2, 125–137.

References Aston, Elaine and Savona, George (1996), Theatre as Sign-System. A Semiotics of Text and Performance, London and New York: Routledge. Beckerman, Bernhard (1990), Theatrical Presentation: Performer, Audience and Act, London: Routledge. Eco, Umberto (1976), A Theory of Semiotics, London: Macmillan. Elam, Keir (2002), The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, London: Routledge. Gray, Frances (1994), Women and Laughter, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Pavis, Patrice (1985), ‘Theatre analysis: some questions and a questionnaire.’ (trans. Susan Bassnett), New Theatre Quarterly, 1: 2. Pavis, Patrice (2003), Analyzing Performance. Theater, Dance and Film, London: Routledge. Wheeler, Paul (2007), Live at the Apollo (10 December 2007), http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=YNUkLzi46OI and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXEt2gYcweQ&feature=related. Accessed 23 March 2011.

Contributor Louise Peacock is an Associate Professor of Theatre, and head of critical studies and comedy at the University of Southern California. Her research interests are in the areas of clowning, Commedia dell’Arte, slapstick and stand-up comedy. She is the author of Serious Play: Modern Clown Performance (2009) and is currently writing a book entitled Slapstick and Comic Performance. She has also published a number of articles that examine stand-up comedy, commedia and comic performance.

Chapter 27

‘A pleasure working with you’: Humour theory and Joan Rivers (2:2) Brett Mills

Introduction At the end of the Live at the Apollo routine under analysis in this edition, Joan Rivers faces the audience and says, with sincerity, ‘A pleasure working with you’ (Part 2, 6:09), before taking a bow. This follows a protracted piece of audience interaction wherein Rivers encourages the whole audience to acknowledge the other members sitting around them, which she then twists into an insult. The choice to end the routine in this way highlights the importance in live, stand-up comedy of the relationship between performer and audience. Inviting the whole audience to acknowledge one another’s existence underscores that this is a communal activity, and that the comedian’s success is dependent on the audience acquiescing to the activities onstage. Indeed, to end with an acknowledgement that Rivers has been ‘working with’ the audience is an interesting statement; here, Rivers does not suggest that she is performing for or leading the audience, but that her routine is dependent upon a division of labour between all parties involved. Furthermore, Rivers foregrounds the ‘pleasure’ she has found in this interaction. We might assume that the role of the comedian is to give pleasure to the audience, but here, a parity of work is suggested, with Rivers’ pleasure as significant as that which the audience has enjoyed. Although it is common for performers to thank the audience at the end of a routine, this often implies that the role of the spectator is merely to respond to the comedian; phrases such as ‘You’ve been a great audience’ make clear the specific roles the teller and the told have, and the audience is being thanked for responding appropriately. ‘Working with’, however, points towards an ongoing negotiated relationship, in which Rivers’ activities are dependent on the workings of the audience. By this account, a standup routine is not performed by a comedian and consumed by viewers: it is a performative moment constituted out of the negotiations between all people onstage and offstage, from which the comedian can get as much pleasure as the audience. The intention of constructing an ongoing, working relationship with the audience is evident throughout Rivers’ routine. She constantly refers to the audience, asking them to confirm her statements through questions such as ‘Am I right?’ In some sequences, she explicitly aligns herself with the audience by talking about ‘us’, that is, the audience and Rivers. This use of language aims to express a commonality between everyone in the room, implying that those events she recounts as funny are ones experienced, or capable of being experienced, by all, and, to an extent, this aims to undercut the performer/audience hierarchy evident in all stand-up routines. This incorporation of the audience into the programme is evident in the number of cutaways to laughing (or sometimes horrified) audience members there are in the

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sequence. As will be shown below, these can be seen to function in slightly different ways at various points in the programme and often point towards the different kinds of humour being offered. The analysis of comedy has often highlighted how audience reaction is commonly incorporated into a text, with, for example, one of the most common tropes of the television sitcom being the laugh track. In sitcoms, unlike Live at the Apollo, we do not usually see the audience and instead simply hear them. In this way, the audience becomes nothing other than a reactor to the comedy being performed, a disembodied validation of the funniness of the sitcom. That Live at the Apollo allows us to see the audience responding serves to individualize that audience and gives a visual evocation of the constantly negotiated relationships between the comedian and the audience. This also helps to highlight the liveness of the event, even if, for the television audience at home, this is most definitely not live comedy. That comedy often aims to foreground its liveness – as shown in the titles of programmes such as 10 O’clock Live (Chaplin and O’Grady 2011) and Saturday Live (Jackson 1986–1987) – shows how the notion that this is an event, which could change at any moment, is one of the pleasures of comedy. The specialness attached to such an event is foregrounded, for ‘even within our hyper-mediatized culture, far more symbolic capital is attached to live events than to mediatized ones’ (Auslander 1999: 59). This article aims to use this aspect of the comedian–audience relationship to explore the ways in which humour theory can be used to think about stand-up comedy. Humour theory is conventionally thought of as constituting three broad theories of humour and comedy: the superiority theory, the incongruity theory and the relief theory. This article will take each of these in turn and see what their application to this sequence of Live at the Apollo can tell us about their usefulness and their limitations. A brief outline will be given for each theory in turn; more thorough examinations of their key ideas, their development and debates concerning their use can be found in Morreall (1983, 1987), Billig (2005: 35–172) and Mills (2009: 77–92). One of the recurring problems relevant to the use of humour theory for the analysis of stand-up comedy, or television comedy, is that none of them were developed with this aim in mind; they are instead, more accurately, theories of social humour, with the intention of exploring the social roles humour can play and, to some extent, examining the positive and negative consequences these might lead to. In that sense, one of humour theory’s key interests is the question: what is humour for? I want to argue in this article that that question can be fruitfully examined in this instance by foregrounding the nature of pleasure, with the implication that such pleasure is at most a positive, and at least a benign, outcome of humour. There are, of course, many different kinds of pleasures that a comedy performance can engender, and the different humour theories usefully focus on different kinds of pleasure. The fact that Rivers ends her routine by signalling her pleasure suggests that, in this instance, one of the key aims of the routine is the production of such enjoyment. Of course, this article does not intend to argue that pleasure is monolithic; different audience members might find different things funny, and some people might find offensive that which others find hilarious. However, such different reactions – and the displeasure that can result from comedy – only demonstrate how central to this comic performance pleasure is.

Superiority The superiority theory of humour argues that comedy works through a joketeller constructing a hierarchy between himself or herself and that which is joked about. Although

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the superiority theory is the oldest of the three approaches exploring humour, it remains extremely useful today because of its congruence with debates about communication, media and power. Much contemporary analysis of culture – particularly in a mass media age – assumes that the social norms presented and disseminated within culture have extremely powerful consequences. This is partly about whom gets to be represented within culture, but also about how individuals and social groups are represented by others (Hall 1997; Toynbee 2006). Perhaps the most overt and obvious playing out of this debate within contemporary society was the rise of alternative comedy in Britain in the 1980s, which aimed to move beyond racist and sexist humour because it assumed that the prevalence of such jokes helped support and normalize comparable attitudes in wider society (Wilmut and Rosengard 1989; Macdonald 2002). Debates about political correctness (Ross 1998: 101; Littlewood and Pickering 1998) and offence (Lockyer and Pickering 2005) in humour are deemed to be worthwhile precisely because humour has power beyond that of ‘merely’ being funny. By this account, to use humour to construct a position of superiority over others is an extremely powerful act and one which audiences acquiesce to via their laughter. This means that, for the superiority theory, analysis of the relationships between the teller, butt and audience of a joke is paramount because the humour is dependent on those relationships. Furthermore, because the pleasure offered by such humour is one which revels in, and upholds, hierarchical differences of power, the superiority theory suggests that comedy typically has negative social consequences because it is ‘disciplinary’ (Billig 2005: 39) and is therefore a phenomenon that should be regulated both by particular individuals and by society as a whole. There are many instances during Live at the Apollo in which Rivers employs jokes that neatly fit the superiority theory model. Much of this involves deriding the behaviour or attributes of others and presenting such derision to the audience as laughable. Some of this involves mocking the audience; when she asks for gay members of the audience to make themselves known, she derides a male volunteer for not conforming to a homosexual stereotype and asks, ‘Are you a lesbian? You look really butch’ (Part 1, 5:10). However, the majority of such mockery involves joking about celebrities who are not in attendance, including Angelina Jolie, Katie Holmes and Mother Teresa. That the largest part of the comic scorn is reserved for people who are absent shows how comedy can function to align an audience in their beliefs, with the audience’s laughter serving to legitimize the laughter at absent others whose behaviour and appearance are understood to be inferior in some way. Yet a significant proportion of Rivers’ performance involves mockery of herself. When she makes a joke about her parents’ wish that she had died at birth (Part 1, 6:10–6:20), she is submitting herself to be laughed at and offering the audience a superior position. There is, of course, a context of gender that is at play here, and authors such as Gray (1994) and Horowitz (1997) have noted that women’s humour is much more self-deprecating than that of men, which results from the wider social roles women are and are not allowed to play in society. That we are invited to find laughable the (supposedly fictitious) notion that Rivers’ parents wished her dead is dependent on an idea that statements about women’s suffering can be seen as laughable, and that we know that one of the key tropes of female humour is mockery of the self. Such jokes, however, cause problems for the traditional concept of the superiority theory. That theory usually assumes that the teller of the joke is the person attempting to assert superiority, and the butt of the joke is someone else. This assumption is central to

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the theory’s argument that telling jokes can be a socially regressive act, for it relies on the notion that the teller’s motivation in mocking others is, in Thomas Hobbes’ famous words, ‘sudden glory’ (Hobbes 1839: 27). Yet how does this work with self-mockery? The complexity here is that, whereas Rivers’ jokes encourage the audience to laugh at her, it is Rivers who remains in the powerful position of being onstage with a microphone, setting the parameters of what is laughable and what is not, and the only person in the room able to express an individual voice. That is, although such a joke encourages the audience to see themselves as superior to Rivers, the fact that it is Rivers carrying out the encouragement means that she could be maintaining a powerful hierarchical position. This would suggest that the superiority evident in humour is dependent less on the content of a joke than on the act of being able to tell a joke at all. Indeed, in response to debates about racist or sexist humour, Littlewood and Pickering have argued that ‘There can be no significant context-shift until members of subordinated groups are the ones telling the jokes, regardless of their content’ (1998: 308). Yet it is possible to argue that the comedian–audience relationship is one with multiple, contradictory power hierarchies. That is, although it is only the comedian who gets to express a voice, it is the audience that must sanction that voice through its laughter. It is audiences that can boo comedians off stage either through rejection of comic content or by being unimpressed by a particular performer’s skill. The fact that women’s humour is often self-deprecating has often been read as evidence of women’s desire to be liked and accepted, coupled with an awareness of a lack of social power, and so, while Rivers remains in a powerful position through the expression of her voice, her economic and cultural status as a successful comedian is dependent on approval by audiences. What this suggests is that although the superiority theory is useful for thinking through the relationships between joke-tellers and their audiences, the ways in which comedy functions hierarchically is a complex process in which participants in the exchange have access to different kinds of power at different times.

Incongruity It is fair to say that, amongst contemporary theorists, it is the incongruity theory which is often held as the most useful way of thinking about humour, and it is from this that linguistic theories of comedy such as those of Raskin (1985) and Ritchie (2004) arise. This theory argues that humour works by offering some kind of incongruity, but it is an incongruity that must have, somehow, some kind of logic enabling its comprehension. Such incongruities might involve the bringing together of two ideas, people or objects that are typically kept, or thought of, as separate; it might involve playing with words whereby the intended meaning of language is shifted and audiences realize their comprehension of what is going on is flawed; or it might involve an incongruity between action and intention, with the words someone is saying contradicting the behaviour they are carrying out. Yet, it is argued that, in order for incongruity not to be primarily frightening, confusing or simply illogical, a rationale for such incongruity must be on offer. It is this which Palmer (1987) refers to as ‘the logic of the absurd’, whereby the pleasure inherent in comic incongruity is dependent on a causal reasoning that points towards why and how the illogicality may have come into being. By this argument, comedians tread a fine line between ensuring audiences have enough information for such incongruities to make pleasurable sense and withholding enough information for the ensuing joke to be a surprise. We can see the ways in which this negotiation is carried out in Rivers’ performance.

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Many of the jokes in this comic routine depend on playing with language, and this is evident in some of the puns Rivers makes early on. When she suggests the lollipops she can make with the fashion celebrity Gok Wan be called ‘Gok-suckers’ (Part 1, 1:10), there is an internal logic to the bringing together of ‘suckers’ (referring to lollipops) and the name ‘Gok’ (sounding like ‘cock’). This is a joke that, in terms of the audience in front of her, Rivers can only really do with Gok Wan; and his laughter, with its slightly weary response, suggests that this is not the first time such joking references to his name have been made. It is worth noting here the way in which this joke is performed. The majority of Rivers’ delivery in the routine is extremely quick-fire, with a rapid verbal delivery and few pauses or digressions. But in-between setting up this joke and delivering the punchline, Rivers pauses, laughs to herself, puts her hand on her chest and then delivers ‘Gok-suckers’ very rapidly. The final delivery of the pay-off is then performed in a manner incongruous to the pause that preceded it, and its position as the end of the joke is extremely clearly signalled. However, that pause and laughter perhaps also point to the ridiculousness of the joke and the fact that it is – in comparison with the confessional and ‘real-world’ aspects of the majority of Rivers’ routine – nothing more than a quick and silly gag. Here, Rivers signals her awareness of the ‘joke-ness’ of this joke, foregrounding the incongruous work required for it to make sense. It is also worth noting the audience reaction to this comic moment. As a pun that relies on an awareness of the socially offensive term ‘cocksucker’ for its effect, it could be a gag that, like a lot of the routine, causes shock and pleasure in the audience; but this is not the case. The laughter is one that implies simply a pleasurable response at the craft of the joke, and the sexual import of one of its key terms appears not to be a part of its pleasure. In that sense, it seems that the enjoyment of incongruity humour can not only sometimes be predicated simply on the work required for such jokes to function, but, if performed in this knowing way, also actually undercuts any offensive potential in such sexual humour. This is quite at odds with the material that is explored under the section on relief humour below. A quite different way of performing incongruity humour is evident in Rivers’ recounting of having a coffee enema (Part 1, 3:00). After stating that she undertook such a procedure on her doctor’s advice, she delivers the punchline, ‘And now I can never go back to Starbucks’, almost as an aside, with a quieter tone of delivery than most of the jokes. Furthermore, there is less obvious signalling of the format of the joke than in the previous example, and the arrival of the punchline is, perhaps, unexpected. Although Rivers signals the ‘joke-ness’ of this gag just as she does with the previous one, here, however, she does this after the joke is completed; that is, after the punchline she holds her hands up and briefly mimes laughing hysterically, appearing to signal the traditional nature of the joke, and that, again, this is a gag that does not aim to serve as a piece of self-confession like much of the rest of the routine. This analysis therefore suggests that whereas much of the comedy herein is dependent on incongruity, there is something about the obvious construction of certain kinds of one-liner gags that Rivers feels she must acknowledge as formulaic. This is not to deny the pleasures of these comic moments, especially as they are ones which the audience clearly enjoys. But it is to note that it is significant that a performer such as Rivers seemingly feels that, at some times, depending on the type of joke she is telling, she must acknowledge the very structures she employs for comic effect in order to maintain a suitable relationship with her audience. Perhaps more importantly, incongruity can only work if there is a congruity from which deviances can be marked. Furthermore, this must be a congruity which audience members

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and performer agree to, and which must appear so naturalized that deviance from it is surprising enough to be comic. Unless we all know what Starbucks is, what a coffee enema is and what appropriate behaviour in a coffee shop is, then the incongruity of a coffee enema taking place in a high-street coffee shop cannot make sense and therefore cannot be funny. By making a joke that relies on these things, Rivers requires the audience to accept the ‘normal’ ways in which we make sense of the world, which is necessary for the comic incongruity to have any meaning at all. By this account, the incongruity theory is helpful in pointing out what is naturalized within any cultural context and what assumptions underlie any piece of communication. The pleasure in such jokes might then be as much about a large group of individuals finding that they have ways of making sense of the world in common, as much as it is about the rewriting of that normality that is presented by incongruity jokes.

Relief The relief theory argues that humour functions as a release valve, allowing individuals and societies to express ideas and attitudes which the ‘civilizing process’ (Elias 1978) of much of Western culture represses. It has its origins in Freud (1905), who saw humour as a useful tool for such expression, without which repressed thoughts would have no place for escape and would therefore develop into psychosis. It is, therefore, a theory useful for thinking about societal taboos and the social psychologies of both individuals and cultures. This theory also acknowledges and investigates the pleasures associated with comedy; for Freud, the physical reaction we call laughter is an embodiment of the escape of ‘psychical energy’ (1905: 200) built up by the repressions society relies upon. By this account, comedians are, therefore, vital social phenomena, and comedy must, in order for it to fulfil its psychological role, explore topics deemed offensive and unseemly. Freud’s theory has therefore commonly been used to examine jokes which deal with the physical phenomena that societies commonly refuse to discuss in public. We can see this in Rivers’ routine in her discussion of the effect of the aging process on her body (Part 2, 4:10–5:15), especially as the audience reaction to these jokes is a different sound, and of a different intensity, than that of many other parts of her routine. When Rivers announces that, like other parts of the body, ‘the vagina drops’ in old age, there is an extremely large laugh but it is one which clearly also encompasses deep intakes of breath and other verbal cues of shock and surprise. At this point, the programme cuts to a female member of the audience who, although clearly amused, also has her hand on her face and looks surprised, turning to the person sitting next to her for, it seems, some kind of support or comfort. For the relief theory, it is precisely this kind of reaction which demonstrates the useful role comedy can play, allowing audiences to escape from the repressions of civilization and engage communally in acknowledgement that all bodies age, collapse and wither. It is telling that Rivers plays this part of the routine as a conspiratorial moment between herself and the women in the room, stating that she is simply passing on information that ‘Our mothers never tell us’. By doing this, the moment remains a collective (if divided by gender) event, in which the audience can, as a group, engage in the common pleasure of acknowledging physical phenomena that society usually requires repression of. This taboo-breaking moment is even more powerful precisely because of its gendered nature. King (2002: 77) notes that whereas ‘gross-out’ humour is commonly dependent

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on the public discussion and representation of physical phenomena, it is far more common to see such jokes about male bodies (masturbation, semen) than it is about female ones (periods, menstrual fluid). The ‘psychical energy’ released by Rivers’ routine is one predicated not only on the refusal to conform to civilized social norms; it is made even more powerful by her being a woman, talking about the specifics of the female body. In this sense, Rivers conforms to the characteristics of the ‘unruly woman’ (Rowe 1995) who refuses to accept societal norms for feminine behaviour and expresses power via that rejection. The unruly woman is a powerful force in comedy and has been the object of many analyses (Mellencamp 1992: 311–53; Gay 1994) precisely because of her rarity and the (usually negative) social reaction comedians such as Roseanne and Sarah Silverman cause. That these comedians have been ridiculed, criticized and seen as dangerous social phenomena is evidence of the very cultural norms their comedy aims to query and transgress. That is, if there was not such a fuss about these unruly women, it would suggest that they are not being unruly enough, and, according to the relief theory, the comedy they employ is failing to offer the release necessary for social harmony. It is because the relief theory foregrounds the social nature of comedy that the communal nature of Rivers’ performance can be explored by it. Not only is this a piece of comedy performed to hundreds of people in a room, it is also being recorded to be broadcast to millions of television viewers across the country (and, via YouTube, across the world). It might perhaps seem odd that a public service broadcaster such as the BBC engages in the transmission of such material, especially as one of its defined purposes as a publicly funded body is ‘sustaining citizenship and civil society’ (BBC 2010: 11). Yet the British notion of public service broadcasting – unlike that of some other countries – has always acknowledged the social value of things like entertainment and comedy, not least because a sense of humour is perceived to be one of the defining characteristics of the British national identity (Medhurst 2007). The existence of the relief theory – and cultural texts such as Rivers’ performance on Live at the Apollo – points towards an acceptance of the vital social role comedy plays and the incorporation of that role into public bodies such as the BBC. By this account, comedy explicitly aims to serve a social function, and British society is willing to fund a public body to ensure that that function is fulfilled.

‘A pleasure working with you’ As this analysis shows, one of the key difficulties in using these three theories to explore any specific comic example is that their foci are different, and therefore they are, in reality, theories of slightly different things. This Rivers’ routine can be seen to show evidence for each of them, although it is simultaneously difficult to argue that every moment in the sequence can be understood by all of the theories. The value in analysis such as this is that it shows that using the theories in conjunction with one another might be a fruitful progression, helping to outline the varieties of humour commonly in existence and the range of ways these can be enjoyed. However, what I have hoped to show in this analysis is that foregrounding ideas of pleasure might be a fruitful way of thinking about comedy as a whole. The physical and psychological benefits of laughter have often been explored (best summarized by Provine 2000), placing this phenomenon in a predominantly scientific context. Yet here it is clear that we can think about laughter and comedy as having some kind of social value, with the communal nature of joking being one which brings disparate individuals together in a collective act

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of enjoyment. Rivers’ statement that she enjoyed ‘working with’ the audience shows that this pleasure is one open to the performer too. Although each of the humour theories explores how jokes work, they might perhaps therefore be better used collectively to examine the nature of the activity which is joking and which involves a number of people agreeing to find something comic. Therefore, although the superiority theory suggests that comedians exalt themselves over their comic butts in order to make humour, Rivers’ performance suggests that comedy relies on a much more complicated negotiation of hierarchies, whose movement might itself be one of joking’s pleasures; although the incongruity theory might foreground the ‘logic of the absurd’ that humour relies on, this phenomenon can only work if all participants in a comic moment have the same repertoires of knowledge to draw on, and so comedy is dependent on confirming and finding pleasure in similarities; whereas the relief theory foregrounds the psychological benefits of comedy, it is clear that it has, according to Freud, significant positive social outcomes. Using the three humour theories, then, is a useful way of thinking about comedy as a social phenomenon, and, by this account, joking is always about a ‘working with’. Source: Brett Mills (2011) ‘“A pleasure working with you”: Humour theory and Joan Rivers’, Comedy Studies, 2:2, 151–160.

References Auslander, P. (1999), Liveness, London and New York: Routledge. BBC (2010), The BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2009/10 – Part 1: The BBC Trust’s Review and Assessment, London: BBC. Billig, M. (2005), Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. Chaplin, A. and O’Grady, G. (2011), 10 O’clock Live, Channel 4. Elias, N. (1978), The Civilizing Process, Oxford: Blackwell. Freud, S. (1905), The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gay, P. (1994), As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women, London: Routledge. Gray, F. (1994), Women and Laughter, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hall, S. (ed.) (1997), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. Hobbes, T. (1839), Leviathan, London: Everyman. Horowitz, S. (1997), Queens of Comedy: Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Joan Rivers, and the New Generation of Funny Women, Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach. Jackson, P. (1986–1987), Saturday Live, Channel 4. King, G. (2002), Film Comedy, London and New York: Wallflower. Littlewood, J. and Pickering, M. (1998), ‘Heard the one about the white middle-class heterosexual father-in-law? Gender, ethnicity and political correctness in comedy’, in S. Wagg (ed.), Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics and Social Difference, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 291–312. Lockyer, S. and Pickering, M. (2005), Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Macdonald, C. (2002), That’s Anarchy! The Story of a Revolution in the World of TV Comedy, Hartwell: Temple House. Medhurst, A. (2007), A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities, London and New York: Routledge. Mellencamp, P. (1992), High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age and Comedy, Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press.

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Mills, B. (2009), The Sitcom, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Morreall, J. (1983), Taking Laughter Seriously, Albany: State University of New York Press. —— (1987), The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, Albany: State University of New York Press. Palmer, J. (1987), The Logic of the Absurd: On Film and Television Comedy, London: BFI Publishing. Provine, R. (2000), Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, London: Faber. Raskin, V. (1985), Semantic Mechanisms of Humor, Dordrecht, Boston and Lancaster: D. Reidel. Ritchie, G. (2004), The Linguistic Analysis of Jokes, London and New York: Routledge. Ross, A. (1998), The Language of Humour, London and New York: Routledge. Rowe, K. (1995), The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, Austin: University of Texas Press. Toynbee, J. (2006), ‘The politics of representation’, in M. Gillespie and J. Toynbee (eds), Analysing Media Texts, Maidenhead: Open University Press, pp. 157–185. Wheeler, P. (2004), Live at the Apollo, BBC. Wilmut, R. and Rosengard, P. (1989), Didn’t You Kill My Mother-in-Law? The Story of Alternative Comedy in Britain from the Comedy Store to Saturday Live, London: Methuen.

Contributor Brett Mills is Senior Lecturer in Art, Media and American Studies and Film, Television and Media at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of Television Sitcom (2005) and The Sitcom (2009), and a co-author (with David M. Barlow) of Reading Media Theory: Thinkers, Approaches, Contexts (2009).

Part VII

The world of comedy Culture and satire

Chapter 28

Obscenity, dirtiness and licence in Jewish comedy (5:2) Debra Aarons and Marc Mierowsky

In this article, we examine the notion of obscenity in relation to constructions of Jewish sexuality in stand-up. Since Lenny Bruce, stand-up has been defined by extreme licence. Stand-up as a genre is reliant on the construction of performer identity in conversation with an audience. We argue that Bruce used his construction of Jewish identity as a scourge to beat the larger society, whereas Belle Barth and Pearl Williams, female contemporaries of Bruce, used theirs as a way to diminish, ridicule, and deflate themselves and their largely Jewish audiences. These comedians all referred to themselves as ‘dirty’. Never far from the perception of the ‘dirty Jew’, and often largely steeped in Jewish ritual notions of uncleanliness, casting themselves in this way implied a contrast between dirtiness and obscenity. Using this distinction, they all attacked hypocrisy. Their goals, however, were different. The women mocked and parodied themselves and other Jews; Bruce’s attack was aimed at a wider audience, but he was not above targeting some Jewish constructions too, if they fitted into his particular purview. All played on the distinction between the obscene and the dirty to push the latitudes of comic licence. But while Bruce is widely acknowledged as the father of extreme, edgy stand-up (he is remembered, immortalized and now beatified for his crucifixion), Belle Barth and Pearl Williams are forgotten – except that their personae persist, in Bruce’s female inheritors, the brave stand-up performers: Joan Rivers, and Sarah Silverman. Bruce makes a crucial distinction between the obscene and the dirty. Following him, we adopt ‘dirty’ as a term to cover crude or vulgar words used to exhibit aggression against propriety and ‘obscene’ as a term to cover those same words when used in contexts of sexual prurience. It was in reaction to his unremitting persecution: the surveillance of his routines and his three obscenity trials (in 1961, 1962 and 1964) that Bruce contended, based on Justice Brennan’s formula in the case of Roth v. USA (1957) for determining obscenity, that for him to be obscene he must ‘stimulate you sexually. That’s what obscene is – the prurient interest: if you get horny. That’s it’ (Cohen 1975, 66).1 When Bruce uses ‘dirty’, he means non-titillating. He was not ashamed of using ‘dirty’ words. After all, the title of his autobiography was How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. In relation to dirtiness, we follow a strand in the genealogy of Jewish female comics from Sophie Tucker through Belle Barth and Pearl Williams, to Joan Rivers, and finally, to Sarah Silverman. While focusing primarily on Barth and Williams, we locate them in the particular trajectory of dirtiness we trace: both Barth and Williams employed provocative, sexually explicit and crude elements in their performance and, like Bruce, referred to themselves as ‘dirty’.

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Sara Blacher Cohen (1990) discusses the idea of dirtiness among Jewish female comedians. She contends that they were fundamentally unkosher, because they were unclean: ‘The comediennes disbar themselves from performing Judaism’s central commandment for women: the enforcement of the ritual of kashrut, keeping kosher, keeping clean. As creatures of unclean lips, they make dirty, they sully, they corrupt’ (Blacher Cohen 1990: 101). If talking dirty signifies unclean lips and worse, these women might be said, in the name of entertainment, to present an aggressive and angry attack on the culture that defines them and excludes them on that very basis.2 These comedians, the bawdy broads, were primarily in the business of entertainment, and not overtly in the mode of social criticism.3 Tracing the trajectory, we must begin with Sophie Tucker (1887–1966), who styled herself as ‘the last of the red hot mamas’, but was more accurately the first of them. With only a brief stop in the Catskills, Tucker soon became a household name and a national and international star.4 Regarded as prodigiously talented, she sang, danced and performed risqué comic routines. Crucially, she was not considered to be threatening to the status quo of her audiences, Jews and Gentiles alike. If there was aggression, it was dissipated through her self-caricature and exaggeration: laughing washed out the dirt. She was adored by large audiences, and fêted as a comic maestro, poking fun at herself and ridiculing the sexual hypocrisy and double standards of the time. Rather than erotic, her routines were bawdy. Her acts, as a rule, were comically mercenary, stereotyping the attitude of the ‘naughty hungry girl’ held at the time. These routines played not only on the ‘naughty girl’ myth, but also on the Jewish myth. The effect was to combine two prominent stereotypes – the dirty, moneygrubbing Jew and the promiscuous female. Thus she played disgusting and mercenary, both to comedic effect. The prodigious sexual appetite of Tucker, as she portrayed it, was a central part of her routine, and she successfully exploited the excesses of being red hot, fat and funny, without delivering the aggressive, targeted challenges so prominent in the routines of Barth and Williams. Like Tucker, both Belle Barth (1911–71) and Pearl Williams (1914–91) started off in the ‘Borscht Belt’ where, historically, Jewish entertainers played to Jewish audiences. Women entertainers were not well received in that context, the expectation being that public entertainers – especially comedians – should be men (Bronski 2003). Many highly successful Jewish comics began their careers playing the Borscht Belt, but once they began to perform for wider audiences (read: white, American) they made their comedy more mainstream (read: less Jewish) and less identifiably ethnic, until the pressuretank that was Lenny Bruce turned on his intensely Jewish hose to spray Jews and non-Jews alike. Though both Barth and Williams started in the Catskills, they moved away into less insulated and more appreciative professional environments, playing in small nightclubs and occasionally bigger venues in the major US capitals. Despite leaving the Borscht Belt, neither toned down the Jewish material in their routines, but flaunted a working-class, bawdy Yiddish sensibility, vulgar and basic: sex, food and money were the staples of their routines. Barth set up her own club, Belle Barth’s Club in Miami Beach, where she alone decided what would be included in her act. Barth produced a series of what were called ‘Party Records’, including ‘If I Embarrass You, Tell Your Friends’ and ‘The Customer Comes First’.5 From early in her performing days, Barth was frequently accused of obscenity, and on occasion, arrested and fined. She claimed to have two suspended sentences for obscenity.6 The police in Miami Beach regularly raided her club. Several lawsuits were mounted against her, including one in which she was accused by some schoolteachers of corrupting them morally and affecting their mental health.

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The accusations of obscenity raise an interesting question in relation to Barth’s audiences. Her first record was awarded a golden disc, and she was able to draw large audiences in places like Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. Her risqué songs and jokes had popular appeal outside of the clubs. Given that public opinion is usually the barometer of acceptability, she clearly did not strike these large audiences, presumably made up of Jews and Gentiles, as obscene. In Miami at her own club, Barth drew audiences who were, for the most part, Jewish. The Jewish audiences who came to Barth’s clubs had expanded their playgrounds: they no longer restricted themselves to the Borscht Belt. Yet certain features rolled over from the old ways: stand-up entertainment, stories, jokes and songs, asides in Yiddish. These audiences would have understood the full vulgarity of her act, yet they too gave her complete licence. Such audiences sought entertainment, enjoying laughter at others enough like themselves to be recognizable, yet sufficiently stereotyped to be harmless. They knew the tradition of ‘Mr. Segal, you Gotta Make it Legal’, Sophie Tucker’s 1929 vaudeville ditty in which Brenda Moskowitz tells Mr. Segal that she’s pregnant by him, in English/Yiddish doggerel. Songs like Mr. Segal were a reminder to upwardly mobile, aspirant mainstream American Jews that they came from a world in which richer, worldly men could take advantage of poorer (and perhaps more naïve) girls and where the girls bore the consequences, and the men only if they were caught. Jewish society demanded respectability: women who were not married and who were not kosher had no protection. In this world, courtship and sex were fun; the idea of romance was completely punctured, and the stakes for women were measured in terms of respectability and financial stability. In the tradition of bawdy, Barth and Williams played themselves as naughty girls, who became naughty women, unafraid of the consequences because they specifically targeted respectability. As performers, they ridiculed the idea of faithful marriage, sexually continent men, and girls who needed to be the most desirable commodity. They explored the lies and delusions of sexual commerce, in which broad and schmuck were equally ridiculous. Constructing themselves as experienced women of the world, who had seen and done everything, they mocked human nature in its naked vulnerability. Audiences came to laugh at their own follies: if there was something to be learned, it was through embarrassed recognition. They gave licence to a fool, a bawd, to entertain them. Barth’s routines were interspersed with Yiddish, regarded in the US at the time as a vulgar, unrefined patois. Like Sophie Tucker, she played on her appearance – by the mores of the time she would have been regarded as overweight, over-made-up, overly bejewelled; as well as inappropriately sexual and vulgar, especially for her age – and thus established herself as a challenging contrast to the stereotypical Jewish grandmother, mother and wife of the time. Barth’s behaviour flagrantly transgressed all the unwritten rules. She revelled in taboo topics, combining talk of bodily functions (excretion and sex, sexual ‘deviations’) with money, greed and ambition. She referred to herself as an M.D. (Maven of Dreck).7 Interestingly, already in the early 1960s, Jewish wives were becoming targets of another stereotype, with a more defined but just as restrictive set of characteristics: sexually withholding, mercenary, acquisitive and controlling.8 Running all the way through these stereotypes, respectability in the eyes of the community was a basic prerequisite for Jewish women, an attribute embraced by themselves and expected by the men in their communities. In stark contrast, Barth wallowed in dirt. Her scatological repertoire in Yiddish is said to have dwarfed Bruce’s (Blacher Cohen 1990, 111). If any woman could have claimed to be unkosher, it was Barth.

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Barth’s material was not blasphemous: she confined herself to the matters of the house – in most cases the bordello, a public atmosphere she was keen to evoke. She distanced herself from what she understood to be obscenity. In one of her routines, she asks, ‘Did you ever read Lolita? Charming book. They say I’m risqué. This guy . . . if you‘re over 12 years old, you’re too old’ (Barth 1961). Her routines were delivered in a husky, overtly coquettish way, throatily seductive, and the material was crude and direct. The effect on the audience was not titillating: rather than being sexually aroused, they guffawed. Her knowing, coquettish interactions with the audience were designed to embarrass. Her sideswipes included comments on the snobbish aspirations of the nouveau riche. All the characters in her stories were greedy, money-hungry, vain and foolish; the men were weak, the women were working, sex was a transaction, women wanted their vaginas to be tight (they lusted for virginity and the promise of financial security), men wanted their phalluses to be long and strong (they lusted for virgins and sexual affirmation), money was what they were all after, and there were no honest brokers. Over this world presided Barth, offering commentary, muttering curses in Yiddish for those in the know, proffering advice (warmly addressing individual audience members as ‘Honey’, publicly confiding the benefit of her vast experience), breaking out in ditties, accompanied by the piano. ‘This? This is not a piano; this box is older than mine’ (Barth 1960). The shows ended with a romantic song, the irony coated in dark chocolate. The audience left; not apparently angry or politicized, simply exiting a world that they recognized but from which they could escape. Like all fools, Barth was given licence to speak the unmentionable. Her customers gave her that power. And it is clear that her customers wanted what she dished out. It was after all, Belle who said, deadpan, ‘The customer always comes first’. Much like Barth, Pearl Williams, also a self-identified Jewish entertainer, started off her professional life as a singer and pianist. In 1961, she recorded her first album, A Trip Around the World is Not a Cruise, one of her many double-entendre album titles. Like Barth, she considered herself in the line of the red hot mamas (and like Barth, spent the last and longest part of her professional life performing in Miami). More overtly aggressive on stage than Belle Barth, with a baritone voice, Williams in person was known to be ‘pleasantly inoffensive’ (Obituary from LA Times, September 22, 1991). ‘Good evening, this is Pearl Williams. A raconteur, a storyteller – dirty stories, clean stories. I’m also a chanteuse – which is French for kurva’ (Williams 1961). Whereas chanteuse is indeed French, referring to a nightclub singer, kurva is Yiddish and means whore. Here Williams sets the scene for her monologue, informing the audience that she is accomplished (she tells stories and sings in three languages – all of them dirty). A woman who in this era introduces herself as a whore is confronting for an audience that was more likely to have known the word kurva than chanteuse. Revelling in her self-definition, she confirms this identity with her declaration: I own a vibrator. A French poodle. And I went out and bought a Roto-rooter. Oh that Rotorooter mechaya.9 Oh I love my Roto-rooter. A looong Roto-rooter, I can lend it to two broads standing behind me. Definition of ‘indecent’: If it’s long enough, hard enough, and in far enough, it’s in decent. Notably, as early as 1961, Williams was talking in public about a vibrator. This is one of many remarks that contribute to the claim that both Williams and Barth were in the business of denigrating men’s penises (and therefore, men).10 A vibrator has more power

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than a penis; the woman controls it, can turn it on and off; and it is never limp. The French Poodle is probably a reference to a French lover (a pet for a woman who can afford one). She can also afford to go out and buy a Roto-rooter®, which is a plumbing device, a motor-driven thick suction pipe lined with blades used for clearing out drains and sewers. This device is even better than a vibrator for Pearl’s purposes. She loves her Roto-rooter, because not only is it powerful, it’s ‘looong’ – long enough to extend to as many as two women standing behind her. No man can compete with a Roto-rooter for Pearl’s purposes, she implies. Then, having created the clear insinuation that a man’s penis might not do the job, she acknowledges that what she is saying might be indecent (an excuse to introduce the oneliner). She concedes, doing a pseudolinguistic analysis of the word indecent, that if it’s long enough (compare the Roto-rooter), hard enough (compare vibrator and Roto-rooter) and in far enough, given what she can take, then the member is in decent(ly). In other words, then the phallus is sufficient for the job. That’s her minimal definition of what would be required. The one-liner works by her playing on the ambiguity between in, meaning inside, and the prefix in-, which causes the stem decent to carry its opposite meaning, that is to say, ‘indecent’. The colloquial use of decent as an adverb further indexes a rougher, less refined persona, as does the regularly used term ‘broads’ to refer to women. Williams’s jokes, too, were about women and men, schmucks, schlongs and knishes: like Barth, her on-stage identity was vulgar and her mouth was filthy. The common colloquial Yiddish expressions schlong (a snake, slang for penis), knish (a small dumpling, slang for vagina) would not have been foreign to her audiences, although certainly not for use in polite company. As we will see, this is in contrast to the way Bruce used putz or schmuck, seldom referring to actual body parts, but simply as a means to insult people, without any particular sexual connotations. Discussion of knish size appears to be central to the discourses of both Barth and Williams: they regard women as competing for the greatest claim to tightness and smallness (and thus, the least sexual experience). The benefit of the smallest knish was currency for snaring a man. Not for sex, but for marriage – the road to money and post-hoc respectability. Thus, jokes such as the following taunt women for their hypocrisy about promiscuity: ‘Broad says to a guy playing with her knish: “Put in one finger. Put in another finger. Put in your whole hand. Put in your other hand. Now clap your hands. Told you it was tight!”’ (Williams 1961); or ‘The girl swore she was a virgin, sat down on a fire hydrant and slid to the floor’ (Barth 1960) and ‘The guy who on his wedding night had to have his feet tied to the bedpost so he wouldn’t drown’ (Barth 1960). Some analyses have proposed that in their mockery of the broads’ knish size, there is another message: a warning or a threat.11 If a man cannot fit into a woman and fill her, it may be perceived as his inadequacy, not hers. Such a woman, with such a knish, under those conditions is frightening. It is his virility that is at stake: he is not big enough, not man enough to satisfy her. When Barth sings about taking a hundred men against the wall, she is swaggering (Barth 1960). She boasts that she can take them all and still want more. In the battle for endurance and survival, the knish wins. Men’s schlongs are seen to be unreliable, weak and beyond their control. Knishes, on the other hand, are under the control of the women. They are big and dangerous.12 The use of the term knish is in a long tradition of referring to women as food, or kinds of food – very often cakes, tarts and fruit. These metaphors are not confined to a Yiddish tradition. Williams and Barth refer to men’s genitals as meat, chopped meat, sausage,

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wiener (weenie), baloney. ‘I am strictly kosher, I never eat any pork, but I get plenty of baloney on the sidewalks of New York’ (Barth 1960). Despite the obvious implications of oral sex for both parties, there is a menacing undertone that these women can consume men. This dynamic of female sexuality seems to be entirely absent from the ‘dirty talk’ of Bruce. In the performances of Barth and Williams, it is both domestic (having a meal) and dangerous (consumption). Everyday sexual practices can scare but, it seems, not excite. Barth and Williams were highly successful in their careers, presumably wielding more control and power over their own lives than would modest, quiet, respectable Jewish wives and mothers.13 Barth and Williams understood that the selling of sex was basic: they talked tachliss.14 Women use sex, or the promise of sex, they seem to be saying, to get men to marry them and support them. Men want sex, but they don’t want kurvas for wives. Women want money, and men have to show it before the women will give anything. It is this triangle of needs – sex, money and power – that forms the basis of their comedy. And what the bawdy broads sell is the possibility of exploring all three and laughing at the ludicrous mercenariness, the pettiness and dirtiness of humans at work and play. In control of it all, they’re in it for the money. As Barth said, ‘There’s only two Yiddish words you need to know: gelt and schmuck. If a man has no gelt, he is ‘(Barth 1960). The misery of others for erotic titillation is not their schtick. They’re dirty and funny, and they ‘pin-prick our inflation of the prick’ (Blacher Cohen 1990, 113), but they are not obscene. During Lenny Bruce’s obscenity trial, he is reported to have said that his mother’s response to his arrest for obscenity included the question, ‘Why don’t they arrest Belle Barth [or B.S. Pully]? They’re dirtier than he is’ (Schwartz 1966). For Bruce (as indeed for Barth), however, dirtiness and obscenity were crucially different, even though his mother did not make this distinction. And arguably, they were dirty rather than obscene; they shocked, satirized and amused, but did not titillate. In constructing themselves as independent, bawdy and frank about their own sexual prowess, the unkosher comedians flaunted their vulgarity, thus situating themselves outside the hypocrisy of their targets who used their wiles as a path to money, social success and respectability. They were not scourges, though. Their audiences did not come to be railed at, schpritzed and implicated in the practices of social injustice. This kind of attack was Bruce’s work. In highlighting social hypocrisy, Lenny Bruce took himself seriously as a prophet and teacher. Using outrageous examples and remarks, his performances often verged on harangues, which were biting, satirical and didactic. In this way, he transformed stand-up comedy, shaping it as aggressively pointed social critique. And it is in this respect that he can be considered to belong to the tradition of the great moralists: the normative definition of obscenity he adopts is part of a program to subvert social approaches to the taboo (see, for example, Kofsky 1974). Bruce made use of every social taboo he could enlist to point out the hypocrisy and evils of American society of the 1950s and 1960s. He used humour as a lash with which to excoriate racism, religiosity, materialism and inequality. In his stand-up, Bruce adopted a persona suited to his purpose and disposition. He used Yiddish expressions, assumed a discourse style more akin to informal lecturing than to the comedy patter of the time, and propounded an out-group sensibility with which to attack mainstream attitudes and behaviours, playing out the absurdity of the hypocritical practices he derided. Bruce’s act was not a strip-tease. He may have shocked and startled his audiences, but what he was serving up was no surprise. Audiences knew what they

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were going to get, although they may have been surprised at the intensity of the performance itself. The terms he used and the activities he described were intended to blaspheme, disgust and embarrass. Crucially, the ingenuity and wit he employed made the routines bitingly funny, and this, along with his comedic timing and delivery led the way for generations of serious comedians. Bruce believed that his keen skills enabled him to perceive truths about society that no one else had the courage to express. He did not try to encourage a warm reception. The laugh for him had a higher purpose – it was the laugh that would make the truth digestible. In aiming for the laughter, without any of the safety nets provided by in-group camaraderie, self-deprecation and vaudevillian humour, and given his tendency to berate audiences and the police, there was always the risk that he might destroy himself. He took comic licence in its pure form – like the fool, Bruce was guided by the belief that anything is permissible as long as it is funny. But, as is the case with the fool, while humour may grant licence in the moment, it does not prevent backlash. The aftershock of certain jokes reinforced, in Bruce’s case, the undeniable fact that comedians cannot restrict how their audiences interpret their routines, nor can they be free from the social conventions of taboo and the legal mechanisms to suppress its expression. Bruce’s attempts to redress these external controls and his success in pushing their boundaries are the reasons he is claimed to be the founder of stand-up as acerbic social critique: he inaugurated a genre whose conventions are defined by fearlessness and extreme licence (Gleason 1965; Hentoff 2001, 1991). As part of his routine, Bruce incorporated official accounts of his obscenity trials. He read out the words from arrest reports – ‘bullshit, shit, motherfucker, penis, asshole . . . tits, pricks, cocks, cunts’ (Cohen 1975: 133–134) – that were cited by the arresting officers as concrete evidence of obscenity. The form of the list itself, an officer’s attempt to note the obscene words, was rendered bathetic by Bruce imitating a police officer desperately trying to write down the routine and only catching certain words; crucially, certain dirty words. The use of some words in public discourse was illegal, a fact that George Carlin’s routine – a homage to Lenny Bruce, Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say on Television – satirized a few years later. Bruce rendered them, out of context, as a series of sounds, leached of meaning, demonstrating that words are not intrinsically dirty, nor are they intrinsically obscene. The humour in the routine lay in exposing the arbitrariness that determined the legal limits of obscenity. In Bruce’s recount of his obscenity arrest in San Francisco, the ‘obscene’ is rendered into everyday practice: if a term refers to a practice that is usual among heterosexuals, why should it be considered obscene, simply because it describes a homosexual practice as well? I was arrested for obscenity in San Francisco for using a ten-letter word which is sort of chic. I‘m not going to repeat the word tonight. It starts with a ‘c’. They said it was vernacular for a favourite homosexual practice – which is weird ’cause I don’t relate that word to homosexuals. It relates to any contemporary woman I know or would know or would love or would marry. But they got hung up with faggotry. (Cohen 1975, 136–137) Rulings about obscenity rely upon interpretation and community standards. As Bruce shows, if you are turned on by someone saying ‘shit in your hand and squeeze it’ (Cohen 1975, 66), the interpretation lies with you and you need to seek psychiatric help. He

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plays here on the distinction between the socially unmentionable and the obscene, questioning, fundamentally, the use of the unacknowledged ‘c’ word to which he refers – defining it as a legitimate and common sexual practice. In so doing, he repurposes the word ‘cocksucker’ by redefining the practice. The use of the word itself, he argues, cannot be viewed as stimulating prurient interest.15 He shows that ‘cocksucker’ is used as an insult precisely because it derogates the target as homosexual. In drawing attention to the immediate association of ‘cocksucker’ with gay men, he charges his accusers with this interpretation, drawing attention to their homophobia and hypocrisy. Following this line of reasoning, Bruce addresses the officer’s failure to acknowledge female sexuality. Interrogating his objection to hearing the word ‘cocksucker’ on the grounds that he’s ‘gotta wife and kids’, Bruce remarks: Unless you’re the kind of husband that is that loving that he shields his wife from every taboo derogatory phrase. Or are you the kind of husband that maybe just keeps his old lady knocked up and chained to the kitchen and never brings her a flower and does raise his hand to her and does rap her out? But if I say ‘shit’ in front of her you’ll punch me in the mouth that – kind of chivalry man? (Cohen 1975, 137) If it is chivalry to deny that women are active sexual beings with desires and rights, an accusation Bruce levels, this is far more dangerous than the use of a ‘dirty’ word. Bruce, in any event, wasn’t ashamed of using dirty words. He targeted taboos. As Blacher Cohen (1990) points out, breaking a taboo can be considered an act of aggression against propriety. As words to refer to taboo practices are also taboo and considered dirty, and as Bruce was specifically targeting propriety, this, if anything, would have been a spur to dirtiness. In one of his routines, ‘Dirty Lenny, Dirty Lenny said a Dirty Word’, Bruce focuses on how the word ‘dirty’ is construed and understood (Cohen 1975, 137). He invokes the image of the dirty Jew, suggesting that it is never far from the public perception, and plays on the (now politically incorrect) perception of the Jew as dirty to cleanse his act of its apparent obscenity. Bruce explains why Jews are not obscene, using his own lexical application. ‘Literally, a schmuck is a yard. A fool’. But, ‘The Jews take it humorously, make a colloquialism out of a literal word’ (that is, it comes to mean penis) ‘and some putz who doesn’t understand what we’re talking about busts you for obscenity’ (Cohen 1975, 58). The accusation of obscenity here arises from a particular kind of misinterpretation. Shmuck is used by speakers of Yiddish to refer to someone as a dickhead;16 and so Bruce’s recourse to the literal is disingenuous – a fact he delights in when he refers to those who bust him as putzes, another Yiddishism for dickheads. There is no erotic reference in the term putz, nor indeed in schmuck. Though this vulgarism does not shy from the label of penis, using it to denigrate people bears a meaning closer to ‘moron’ or ‘asshole’, implying that these are idiots and merely human body parts, rather than whole human beings. The ‘dirty talk’ of Bruce is entirely devoid of the dynamic of female sexuality that marks the female comedians’ use of similar Yiddish terms. In Bruce’s routines, use of the cultural patois of Eastern European Jews is intended to separate them from Gentiles, those who understand Yiddish from those who do not, the in-group from the out. The ‘dirty’ words are notionally hidden, but this does not preclude recognition of the insult by those unfamiliar with Yiddish.

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Bruce used this construction of himself as Jewish – one that he consciously adopted as an adult, and honed – as a way to situate himself as the Other. This allowed him to critique mainstream hypocrisy. The construction of his particular Jewish identity was central to the public performance of his comedic persona. His use of dirtiness was accompanied by cerebral discourse, including disquisitions on ‘neologisms’. This is the paradox of the Jew delineated by Damon in her analysis of Bruce’s 1962 obscenity trial.17 Damon described ‘the Jew’ in the Western imaginary as a ‘floating signifier’ that paradoxically has symbolized both elitist intellectual privilege and bestial low culture, the threats of capitalism and communism simultaneously, as well as Old World backwardness and subversive cosmopolitan modernity. Both Bruce and the bawdy broads used their Jewishness as a means of social critique. The broads constructed themselves as embodying dirty low culture: they reduced human sexual behaviour to commerce, thereby subverting tacit conservatism in every form. Their audiences were mainly Jewish and came to laugh at themselves. Bruce’s targets, however, were less domestic, his audiences more mixed – many of them middle-class and young, educated and aspiring to be cool, like the jazz music of the period. It is only with Joan Rivers (1933–2014), who cited Bruce as her greatest influence, that excoriating Jewish female comics truly reached a mainstream audience. Note, additionally, however, that the unkosher comedians exerted an important but largely unacknowledged influence on Rivers and those who came after her. Whereas the routines of Williams and Barth focused on detached, vaudevillian caricatures of themselves, or expressed disgust at or ridicule of the sex lives of others, in the work of Rivers these turned to somatic and selfdeprecating fixations and emerged, with Sarah Silverman (b. 1970), in unashamed reflections on her own sexual misadventures. In their social critiques, Rivers and Silverman are less one-dimensionally self-referential than their forerunners, Rivers suppressing sexual appeal through grotesque self-characterisation and Silverman adopting a narcissistic persona in which an exaggerated display of sexual appeal becomes in itself highly deprecating. However, the social criticism goes beyond simple somatic self-hatred, and self-deprecation is merely a means to the critique. Rivers describes her time as an ‘ugly child’: ‘when I was born. . . the doctor looked at me and looked at the afterbirth and handed my mother the afterbirth’.18 She takes the one-liners of Barth and Williams but turns them on herself, rather than others: ‘My gynaecologist examines me over the phone’; ‘I was the one who really caused Edgar’s suicide, because, while we were making love, I took the bag off my head’.19 Depicting herself as ugly removes the prurient interest, licensing her designed-to-shock portrayal of sex. Sex, in Rivers’ routines, is never appealing. It is mercenary, deflating and, as in the line about her husband’s suicide, it magnifies the pain associated with feelings of ugliness. Ugliness becomes the focal point to critique the way society fetishizes youthfulness and beauty. For Rivers, her image as ugly was never far from her construction of Jewish identity – ‘the pain I felt being a seven-year-old girl with a moustache’.20 When Rivers asks Silverman what her best feature is, the response denudes sexual appeal by particular reference to stereotypically Jewish features as she claims are perceived by mainstream society: ‘My eyebrows are like, highly coveted. . . I have them insured. First I have them waxed to define them as eyebrows. . . big heavy Jewish boobs. . . The most racist man is going to like a nice, heavy Jewish bosom’.21 Silverman extends the social critique to include the narcissistic preoccupations of her generation. In her performance, she typifies the persona of a deluded narcissist when discussing her own attractiveness.

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Rivers, who reacted to the line, often voiced by female comics, ‘You opened doors’ as a threat of her own obsolescence, ‘Fuck you, I’m still opening doors’,22 made an exception for Silverman, whom she regarded as an inheritor. Rivers’ assertion that ‘men don’t want you to be funny in bed’ and that ‘No man is ever going to put his hand up a woman’s dress looking for a library card’ (The Tonight Show, 1986), is extended by Silverman: ‘I learnt the hard way that you shouldn’t use a penis as a tracheotomy’ (In Bed with Joan, 2013). Unlike the bawdy broads, Rivers and Silverman do not use the inherently mercenary nature of sex as the end point of the joke. When Silverman quips, ‘I was raped by a doctor, which is a bittersweet experience for a Jewish girl’ (Jesus is Magic, 2005), she echoes Bruce’s propensity to shock audiences for the purposes of making a serious moral point. In terms of importance, the two experiences are presented as equal. This is a critique of a society in which the kudos of marrying a Jewish doctor might temper the violence of rape. In many ways, then, two important traditions in Jewish comedy converge in the performances of Rivers and Silverman. Adapting the techniques of the unkosher comedians, they use Jewish identity – specifically, constructions of Jewish sexuality – in a way that flirts with prurient interest, but, owing to daring and dangerous self-deprecation, is disingenuous in its seduction. And, because there are fewer strictures on comic licence thanks to Bruce, when these comedians push its bounds they are not just subverting social constructions of obscenity, but reacting to the imbalance in the world of stand-up, which is male-dominated. (See Lockyer 2011 for an illuminating discussion on this point.) Indeed, strictly speaking, it might be argued that Barth and Williams were not stand-up comedians in the same tradition, but rather entertainers who performed particular identities, creating a seductive and warm clublike atmosphere different and less dangerous than using only a microphone on a bare stage. Hitchens, in his infamous ‘Provocation: Why Women Aren’t Funny’, maintains that successful female comics are, on the whole ‘hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three’ (Hitchens 2007). Hitchens grants himself the catch-all category of Jewishness to account, for instance, for all the women considered here. He lets himself out of the corner he has painted himself into with the claim that Jewish humour, whether male or female, ‘boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition’ (Hitchens 2007). Imposing such an arbitrarily gendered distinction is surely not the relevant categorisation for the analysis of the humour described here. Rivers and Silverman may both be seen as aggressively political, though in Rivers’ routines this is often submerged by other topics.23 (On Rivers, see Lockyer 2011, 115; Waisanen 2011, 140). Silverman has gone so far as to record a series of mock public service announcements: one in which she encouraged Jewish grandchildren to threaten withholding visiting their grandparents in Florida unless they voted for Obama (Silverman 2008) and another in which she offered to ‘scissor’ Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire republican donor, ‘to fruition’ if he channelled his money away from Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign (Silverman 2012). Her offer to the billionaire to be scissored by ‘a bikini-bottomed Jewess with big naturals’ is made because as a ‘nice girl, she could not, in good conscience, fuck him’. Again, the play with relativity is a comment on the political and social hypocrisy of the time. Scholarship on Rivers’ self-deprecation has traditionally seen it as strategic; a means to reduce ‘sociocultural distance’ (Lockyer 2011, 117) between performer and audience; a levelling of self that promotes an audience’s empathy (Horowitz 1997, 99). Indeed, we may see this levelling as way of deflating both audience and performer. Viewed in the aftermath of the tradition of the unkosher comedians, this seems all the more plausible. Rivers, indeed, used her self-deprecation as a shield while attacking pretentiousness wherever she saw it.

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However, if, in addition, we follow the second strand in this article, connecting Rivers and through her Silverman to Bruce, another dangerous and destructive aspect of comic licence emerges. While Barth and Williams used self-caricature as a way of pricking audiences, and causing mirth, Rivers and Silverman magnify this tradition and like Bruce, they conduct brutal and targeted assaults on the narcissistic culture of the day. Both Rivers and Silverman employ their Jewish identity as the essence of their angst and self-deprecation, but their torrential force as performers drenches Jew and Gentiles alike. Thus, Barth and Williams, Rivers and Silverman are all dirty Jews in Bruce’s tradition; they embrace the idiom of low culture to question its very construction, to point out the extreme hypocrisy that inheres in those who hold themselves above it. The women are all unkosher, exploiting their personae as exemplars of sexual excesses, flaunting dirtiness in themselves and their own sexual beings. Bruce thought of his act as dirty, but he never implicated his own sexuality as a part of his performance. Despite being fearless in his perilous critique, edgy and self-destructive, he never paraded his own sexuality as a critique of the culture, as did the bawdy broads. They aired hidden parts, and did so using homely and dirty language. Bruce, Barth, Williams, Rivers, and Silverman have all been accused of obscenity, despite a more overtly liberal approach to freedom of speech in the US in the latter part of the twentieth century and early part of the twenty-first, which may have sheltered Rivers and Silverman from legal harassment. Our examination of obscenity, dirtiness and licence has demonstrated that in the creation of their personae all these comedians walked a very fine line. Their performances stringently interrogated social mores while simultaneously questioning and comically deflating obscenity. Through their intensely Jewish constructions of self, what might be considered obscene becomes licensed as merely dirty.

Postscript Joan Rivers died on 4 September 2014, while the editorial changes to this article were being made. We mark her passing and mourn her loss. We don’t apologize for a joke. We are comics. We are here to make you laugh. If you don’t get it, then don’t watch us. Joan Rivers. RIP.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank many perceptive readers, especially Mira Crouch, for careful comments and advice. We also thank our anonymous referee whose recommendations helped us with the finished product. Parts of this article were presented at the Australasian Humour Studies Network Colloquium in Wellington, New Zealand, in February 2014. We are grateful to participants for their comments, encouragement and suggestions.

Notes 1 The formula, given as part of the opinion in Roth v. USA 354 US 476 (1957), is a very controversial one, based as it is on four determinations: (1) Whether to the average person, (2) applying contemporary community standards, (3) the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole (4) appeals to prurient interest. A discussion

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of how these determinations can possibly be made while upholding First Amendment rights is beyond the scope of this article. However, in the course of Bruce’s six obscenity trials, these determinations were extensively argued, leading to some crucial refinements in the law pertaining to obscenity (Collins and Skover 2012). This is a point that has been picked up by others and highlighted. See especially Overbeke 2012. Although Blacher Cohen, in her work, refers to them as ‘comediennes’, in our discussion we adopt the more neutral ‘comedians’. ‘The Borscht Belt’ is a colloquialism for what are also called The Jewish Alps, the Catskills Mountain Range in upstate New York. This was a traditional vacation area for East Coast American Jews, from the 1920s to the 1970s. Borscht is a beetroot soup, much beloved of Eastern European Jews, and was the most stereotypical item on the menus of these resorts. Barth was not the only artist producing ‘party records’: Pearl Williams and Patsy Abbott too, were popularised by the release of their routines on record. If I Embarrass You, Tell Your Friends, 1960. ‘Expert in shit’. For example, a popular joke of the time exploits this stereotype: Q: Which position do Jewish women prefer during sex? A: Facing Macy’s. Yiddish for ‘delicious’. The claim that Barth and Williams (and other unkosher female comedians) were angry, aggressive and hostile to the social conditions that resulted in the sexual inequality and utter hypocrisy of the day, by which they were directly affected, has been made by various commentators, including Sara Blacher Cohen, Michael Bronski, Grace Overbeke, and others. Claims as to their early feminism have been made, although it might be more cautious to say that these are Feminist or Queer analyses, cast in terms that the subjects themselves might not have embraced. This is a claim made by Overbeke (2012). The idea of threat was suggested by Blacher Cohen (1990), though as part of a different argument. The image of vagina dentata is sometimes invoked without disguise. See for instance the joke told by Barth about the guy who was scared of women because his father told him the knish had teeth. When he finally married and consummated his relationship, he is said to have remarked, ‘with gums like that, no wonder the teeth fell out’. This stereotype too, is a construction. Jewish wives, reaching back many years to their Eastern European origins, have always been known as assertive and unafraid to express their opinions in the public sphere, usually on community matters. However, traditionally their focus has always been on the survival of the family, and by extension the community in which it is thought to flourish. In fact, Williams had a routine called ‘Now Let’s Get Down to a Little Tachliss Here’ (brass tacks/tin tacks/basics). Carlin (1972) makes a similar point when he asks why when we say ‘cocksucker’ we think of a ‘bad man’ and not a ‘good woman’? Schmuck is seldom used to refer to one’s own body part. Rather, it is used as a term of insult. In that sense, it is probably inaccurate to translate the intended meaning as ‘penis’, which is why we choose the term ‘dickhead’. Quoted in Mock 2011.

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18 Interview with Michael Parkinson, 19 May 2007 (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?vD cu2cw8-a4_w). 19 Parkinson interview, 2007. 20 Parkinson interview, 2007. 21 In Bed With Joan, 2013. 22 A Piece of Work, 2010. 23 Rivers has, on occasion, let loose her political opinions, but the most egregious occurrence was off-stage and not in her professional persona. See ‘Joan Rivers goes off on an epic Israel/Palestine rant’, TMZ, July 25, 2014. Source: Debra Aarons and Marc Mierowsky (2014) ‘Obscenity, dirtiness and licence in Jewish comedy’, Comedy Studies, 5:2, 165–177.

References Barth, B. 1960. If I Embarrass You, Tell Your Friends. After Hours Records (vinyl LP). Barth, B. 1961. My Next Story is a Little Risqué. After Hours Records (vinyl LP). Blacher Cohen, S., ed. 1990. Jewish Wry. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Blacher Cohen, S. 1990. ‘The Unkosher Comediennes: From Sophie Tucker to Joan Rivers.’ In Jewish Wry, edited by Sara Blacher Cohen, 105–124. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Bronski, M. 2003. ‘Funny Girls Talk Dirty: Shut Your Hole, Honey. Mine’s Making Money.’ Boston Phoenix, August 15–21 http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/ documents/03090915.asp. Bruce, L. 1965. How to talk dirty and influence people. Playboy Publishing. Carlin, G. 1972. ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.’ On Class Clown (Vinyl LP). CD released in 2000 by Atlantic. Cohen, J., ed. 1975. The Essential Lenny Bruce. St. Albans: Panther Books. Collins, R., and D. Skover. 2012. The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon. Chicago: Top Five Books. Damon, M. 1997. ‘The Jewish Entertainer as Cultural Lightning Rod: The Case of Lenny Bruce.’ Postmodern Culture 7:2. Gleason, R. 1965. ‘The ‘Symbol of Obscenity‘Pinpoints Life’s Paradoxes.’ San Francisco Chronicle, December 12, p. 43. Hentoff, N. 1990. ‘Lenny Bruce, Redeemed.’ Washington Post, December 29, p. 19. Hentoff, N. 2001. ‘The Crucifixion of a True Believer.’ Gadfly, March/April. http://www.gadflyon line.com/archive/ Hitchens, C. 2007. ‘Why Women Aren’t Funny.’ Vanity Fair, January. http://www.vanityfair.com/ culture/ Horowitz, S. 1997. Queens of Comedy: Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Joan Rivers, and the New Generation of Funny Women. London: Routledge. Kofsky, F. 1974. Lenny Bruce: The Comedian as Social Critic and Secular Moralist. New York: Monad Press. Lockyer, S. 2011. ‘From Toothpick Legs to Dropping Vaginas: Gender and Sexuality in Joan Rivers’ Stand-up Comedy Performance.’ Comedy Studies 2 (2): 113–123. Los Angeles Times. 1991. Pearl Williams, 77; Bawdy chanteuse and comedienne, September 22. Mock, R. 2011. ‘Really Jewish? Joan Rivers at the Apollo’, Comedy Studies 2 (2): 101–111. Overbeke, G. 2012. ‘Subversively Sexy: The Jewish “Red Hot Mamas,” Sophie Tucker, Belle Barth, and Pearl Williams.’ Studies in American Humor New Series 3 (25): 33–58.

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Rivers, J. 2013. In Bed with Joan. Episode 1: Sarah Silverman. Accessed July 31, 2014. http://inbed withjoan.com/. Schwartz, A. 1966. ‘Lenny Dies While Still Fighting Obscenity Conviction: Lenny at the Bar.’ The New York Village Voice 11 (43): 23–26. Silverman, S. 2005. Jesus is Magic. Roadside Attractions (film). Silverman, S. 2008. The Great Schlep. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgHHX9R4Qtk. Silverman, S. 2012. An Indecent Proposal from Sarah Silverman. http://scissorsheldon.com. Sundberg, A., and R. Stern, dir. 2010. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. Breakthru Films (documentary). Waisanen, D. 2011. ‘Jokes Inviting More Than Laughter: Joan Rivers’ Political-Rhetorical World View.’ Comedy Studies 2 (2): 139–150. Williams, P. 1961. A Trip Around the World is Not a Cruise. After Hours Records (vinyl LP).

Contributors Debra Aarons is a lecturer in linguistics at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Her most recent work, Jokes and the Linguistic Mind, was published by Taylor & Francis in 2012. Marc Mierowsky is a research associate in the department of English Literature and Creative Writing. He works mainly on Restoration and eighteenth-century literature and intellectual history, and the correspondence of Daniel Defoe.

Chapter 29

Satire in a multi-cultural world: a Bakhtinian analysis (9:2) Grant Julin

Introduction Political satire, as weaponised humour, is a double-edged sword. On one edge is its ethical core – a moral concern and seriousness that seeks political reform on some perceived wrong or injustice. Further, political satire’s moral edge is often perceived as a ‘punching up’ of the powerless against corrupt, unjust, and authoritarian power structures. Political satire’s less benevolent edge is its cut – a methodology that wounds by weakening its target through linguistic and artistic barbs. The Janus-faced nature of political satire has, from its earliest iterations, been of questionable moral status. Regardless of moral intent, should there be limits to the harm inflicted in satire’s sting, or is it the case that satire should be ‘hard-hitting and without apology’?1 This debate went global in 2005 when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. The subsequent protests, boycotts, violence, diplomatic unrest and political tumult on multiple continents that become known as the first ‘transnational humor scandal’ (Kuipers 2011) came to a violent head on 7 January 2015 when two men stormed the Parisian headquarters of satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 and injuring 11 of their staff. These attacks, a reaction to Hebdo’s own cartoons of the Prophet, revealed the ugly consequence of political satire’s sting. In the aftermath of this violent attack, many scholars in humour studies directed their attention to the power of satire as means of political upheaval, and the output of work in response to the humour crisis has successfully moved the debate beyond overly simplified discussions of free speech and tolerance, to larger discussions of political power and the ways satire can be used (for good and bad) as a political tool.2 While much has been done to further the debate, the increasing use and reach of satire in the digital age poses greater ethical demands to satirists who, unlike their ancient and medieval predecessors, can incite global unrest and violence with the click of a button. Given the global impact of political cartoons, what is needed is a general framework that can assess the multiplicity of cultures and voices that will witness and interpret satire’s sting. This essay does not intend to provide a comprehensive ethic of satire, nor does it claim to provide a universal standard to examine particular instances of satire. Instead, the aim of this essay is to provide a rough framework for assessing constructive from destructive satire in a multi-cultural context. The complexity of satire, like all humour, requires a fluid model capable of addressing the multiplicity of voices represented – not only those intended by the satirist but also to the multiplicity of interpretations that it allows. The model put forth in this essay is built upon a thinker who understands the polyphonous nature of satire and abusive speech – Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1875). In this essay, I

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argue that Bakhtin, through his ideas of ‘the carnival’, ‘festive laughter’ and ‘abusive speech’ offer a good lens through which we can assess constructive from destructive satire. I argue that much can be learned from Bakhtin’s ideas on the ambiguous and egalitarian nature of positive abusive speech as it relates to the complicated problems presented by certain forms of political satire.

The carnival Bakhtin’s philosophical views on laughter and humour are presented in his Rabelais and his World (1965)3 – a literary and historical analysis into folk humour and its culture. One of the oldest and most basic forms of folk humour is the ‘carnival’ – the various festivities and comic spectacles of the marketplace. Bakhtin traces these festivals back to the ritual pagan festivals of antiquity and most explicitly in the Roman festival of Saturnalia. During this winter solstice festival, celebrated at the temple of Saturn and followed by a public banquet, the people engaged in raucous revelry. Saturnalia’s unbridled and ‘unbreakable spirit’ persisted through the middle ages through such festivals as Feast of Fools and Feast of the Asses (Bakhtin 1984a, 8), which were arranged by minor clerics after the Christmas holiday. During these ritual comic spectacles, a joyous spirit ‘based in laughter’ pervaded religious, social and political life. Although these festive rituals were consecrated by tradition in both antiquity and the Middle Ages, with nearly all forms of medieval festivals ‘linked externally to the feasts of the Church’, these traditions were markedly distinct ‘from the serious ecclesiastical, feudal, and political cult forms and ceremonials’. For Bakhtin, the very nature of carnival festivities was to oppose the official and ‘established order’. Unlike the ‘official feasts’ which reinforced rank and feudal hierarchy and inequality, during unofficial feasts the hierarchy was abolished and the power structure subverted. Throughout Saturnalia the roles of slaves and masters were reversed, and slaves were reportedly given licence to impugn their masters without fear of retribution.4 Similarly, during the Feast of Fools and the Feast of the Asses, ‘the bishop was deposed and replaced with a boy’ (Morreall 2009, 2). Although these new hierarchies were in jest, the suspension of ‘all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions’ proffered a creative space where the people could live fearlessly. The suspension of hierarchies, ranks, norms and prohibitions is essential to carnival, for the . . . carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance. Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. (7) Unlike the official feasts and festivals of the Middle Ages, carnival festivities were not an artistic spectacle in which few participate. Instead, the carnival for Bakhtin is an all-inclusive world in which everyone participates and lives. This second world manifested as a social egalitarianism in which ‘all were considered equal’ (Bakhtin, 10). In this world, devoid of hegemony, the people temporarily engaged in ‘the Utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance’ (Bakhtin, 9).

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Free from the hierarchies and norms of official life, the carnival for Bakhtin is its own self-sustaining world with its own laws and its own sense of time. ‘While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time, life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom’ (7). Throughout Saturnalia, ‘sexual rules were openly violated, and religious rituals were lampooned’ (Morreall 2009, 2). Similarly, during the Feast of Fools and the Feast of the Asses, some clerics ‘wore women’s clothes and recited the divine office mockingly, with howls’. Others ‘held their prayer books upside-down, wore spectacles made from orange peels, and burned soles of old shoes, instead of incense, in the censers’ (Morreall 2009, 2). Carnival festivities are marked by their reversal of the world’s order and Bakhtin describes the carnival as ‘the reverseside of the world’ and ‘life turned inside out’. A dominant feature of the carnival is the comic ‘crownings and uncrownings’ that turn the pious seriousness of official culture on its head. During the carnival, vagrants become kings, fools wise (and vice versa), and what is lowest and base becomes what is most revered. The switching up of the order, in liberating people from the norms, laws and prohibitions of society, provided carnival participants the freedom to explore the creative depths of human agency and ‘consecrate inventive freedom’. For Bakhtin, festivals had an essential role in the life of folk culture. Carnival festivities served as an ‘escape’ from ‘the existing world order’, affording them a reprieve from the ‘the usual official way of life’ and the ‘pious seriousness’ of official culture. During the merriment and mirth of the carnival, which consumed up to a quarter of the year, everyone indulged in ‘relaxation’ and ‘gay recreation’ (9) and no one was exempt from the ‘irresistible’ spirit of carnival laughter: It made a man renounce his official state as monk, cleric, scholar, and perceive the world in its laughing aspect. Not only schoolmen and minor clerics but hierarchs and learned theologians indulged in gay recreation as relaxation from pious seriousness. (13) Works Cited Yet, Bakhtin does not depict the carnival as a derivative world that is merely valued for its ability to provide a temporary reprieve from the stifling order of official life. To the contrary, the carnival ‘had always an essential, meaningful philosophical content’ that was revelatory and liberating. Bakhtin argues that the true power of carnival spirit is its ability to: . . . permit the combination of a variety of different elements and their rapprochement, to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world, from conventions and established truths, from clichés, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted. This carnival spirit offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world. to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things. (34) For Bakhtin, the true value of the carnival is its ability to shake people from the convention of the status quo through presenting the world and human nature in all its complexities and incongruities. The carnival provides a fresh perspective to the world – a new outlook that presents the world in its ‘gay relativity’. Consequently, the playfulness of the carnival experience is not derivative and secondary, but instead an authentic expression of the droll carnival spirit underlying human nature that is frequently distorted by the officialdom of culture and society.

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The mirth and joy of free carnival spirit is based on a temporal framework embraced by the whole of folk culture – an approach to time that opposes that of the official world. Unlike official feasts which ‘asserted all that was stable, unchanging, perennial: the existing hierarchy, the existing religious, political, and moral values, norms, and prohibitions’, the carnival ‘was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal’. The universal spirit of carnival frivolity celebrates crisis, incompleteness, and is ‘hostile to all that was immortalized and completed’ (10). These two opposing temporal frameworks present us with two opposing approaches to truth. One the one hand, we have the temporal schema of the official world and the official festivals, which were backward-looking, using ‘the past to consecrate the present’. This approach represents a ‘triumph of a truth already established, the predominant truth that was put forward as eternal and indisputable’ (9). On the other is the temporal schema of the carnival and the festive ‘perception of the world’ which embraces ‘incompleteness’, renewal and change. Contrary to the official approach to time which represents all that is stable, the carnival rituals and feasts ‘were linked to moments of crisis, of breaking points in the cycle of nature or in the life of society and man’. For Bakhtin, the carnival is essential to the health of a society and culture and a reminder to the people of an essential fact. For as long as carnival (or the ‘carnival spirit’) exists outside of and in opposition to official culture and political authority, it will remind authority that it is not eternal or immune to change – that other forces exist outside and independent of it and that it, too, must pass. (Clark and Holquist 1986; Renfrew 2014, 134–135)

Carnival laughter The foundation of Bakhtin’s notion of the carnival, in all its diverse forms, is ‘carnival laughter’. Carnival or festive laughter for Bakhtin has three primary qualities. First, carnival laughter is ‘a festive laughter’ (Bakhtin, 11). Unlike laughter that is a private, individual response to some ‘isolated “comic” event’, carnival laughter is ‘the laughter of all the people’ (Bakhtin, 11). The laughter that erupts out of carnival festivities is ‘not private, egoistic, and cut off from the sphere of life’, but a shared, organic laughter that is representative of all people and embodies ‘the wholeness of the comic world’. This shared laughter affords a social egalitarianism where everyone is truly considered equal and no one individual is defined through power or status. Second, carnival laughter is ‘universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone’ (11). Festive laughter is all inclusive and no one is exempt from the spirit of carnival laughter, ‘even those who laugh’. Bakhtin contrasts the raw and unbridled energy of the ‘people’s festive laughter’ with the ‘negative’ and ‘pure satire of modern times’, which disregards the ‘wholeness of the world’s comic aspect’, and reduces the comic to a ‘private reaction’. Because modern satire overlooks the comprehensive nature of the comic and instead directs laughter at some specific thing, event, idea or group, Bakhtin argues that the modern satirist, ‘places himself above the object of his mockery’ and is ‘opposed to it’. To the contrary, carnival laughter ‘expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it’ (12). For Bakhtin, the positivity of carnival laughter radiates from in its inclusivity and laughter becomes negative and destructive when the universalism becomes ‘watered down’ and laughter is directed at a particular person or group. The third aspect to carnival laughter is ambivalence. Unlike the dogmatic certitude and seriousness of the official world, carnival laughter is by nature ambiguous and equivocal.

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Because the collective joy of carnival laughter ‘expresses the point of view of the whole world’, its nature will always reflect the polyphonous and amorphous culture from which it erupts. Given its many voices, carnival laughter is by nature paradoxical: it simultaneously praises and derides, ‘asserts and denies, buries and revives’ (12). The Janus-faced nature of festive laughter for Bakhtin is best expressed in the pagan festivals of antiquity. Although the overall spirit of Saturnalias was light and the mood joyous, the majority of festivals were overt insults to Gods and were mockeries of official life and culture. ‘These abuses were ambivalent: while humiliating and mortifying they at the same time revived and renewed’ (16). The people’s ambiguous laughter for Bakhtin has two poles: a negative pole that is destructive and degrading, and a positive pole that is restorative and regenerative. The destructive pole of carnival laughter is vital to the spirit of folk humour, ‘unseating’ and ‘uncrowning’ the official order of society through its mockeries and parodies of official culture. Yet, unlike the purely negative parodies of modernity, the people’s ambiguous laughter is driven by a positive power which seeks to rebuild and renew. Where the ‘bare negation’ of negative satire and parody aims to destroy and ‘drive into the ground’ the object of mockery, Bakhtin maintains that the people’s ambiguous laughter destroys so that the world ‘can be regenerated and renewed’. Bakhtin argues that it is this forward looking and utopian aspect of the carnival laughter that distinguishes it from the negative satire and parodies of modernity. True ambivalent laughter for Bakhtin does not all out ‘deny’ and reject seriousness. Instead, it ‘purifies and completes it’. Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naiveté and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality. Laughter does not permit seriousness to atrophy and to be torn away from the one being, forever incomplete. It restores this ambivalent wholeness. Such is the function of laughter in the historical development of culture and literature. (122–123) Here Bakhtin’s approach to laughter distinguishes him from all other theorists of humour and laughter – he is the first philosopher to take humour seriously. For Bakhtin, the purpose of laughter is not, per superiority theorists, to express dominance over others, nor is it, per relief theories of humour, a physiological relief to dispense of nervous energy. Instead, humour for Bakhtin has an intrinsic value that is essential to human existence – a philosophical force capable of liberating people from dogmatism and intolerance and reveal to them the complexities and paradoxes of the human condition. For Bakhtin, a ‘striking peculiarity’ of carnival laughter’s liberating libertinage is ‘its indissoluble and essential relation to freedom’ (Bakhtin 1984a, 89). As stated, the purpose of the carnival for Bakhtin is to ‘consecrate inventive freedom’. The freedom afforded by laughter and the carnival spirit for Bakhtin is a fearlessness to create and grow outside the stringent boundaries of official culture. Bakhtin was the first to acknowledge the power of laughter and humour to liberate both the individual and the society from the dogmatism of the status quo, arguing that ‘complete liberty is possible only in the completely fearless world’. For Bakhtin: ‘Fear is the extreme expression of narrow-minded and stupid seriousness, which is defeated by laughter’ (Bakhtin 1984a, 47). This type of freedom afforded by humour is political and metaphysical: ‘just as the space/time of the official world

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seems to enforce restraints, the coordinates of the carnival world conduce to freedom and fearlessness’ (Clark and Holquist 1986, 302). It is for this reason that Bakhtin depicts the carnival as a liminal space belonging to ‘the borderline between art and life’ – a lived experience that is shaped ‘according to a certain pattern of play’ (7) and he depicts the carnival as a creative moment perpetually on the brink of generation. This playful freedom, with its own sense of space and time, is the universal spirit and nucleus of the carnival.

Carnivalised literature Bakhtin’s insights on the carnival reveal the true underlying force of folk humour – an unbreakable and indestructible carnival spirit that persists throughout history. As carnival festivities slowly diminish throughout the middle ages and into the Renaissance – becoming increasingly, controlled, sanctioned and officialised by the government until it is ‘gradually transformed into a mere holiday mood’ (Bakhtin, 33) – the carnival’s droll spirit finds new life in a variety of literary outlets, but most explicitly in parody and satire. Bakhtin classifies both parody and satire as part of the larger genre of the serio-comic,5 a ‘multi-styled’ and ‘hetero-voiced’ literary genre that rejects the ‘stylistic unity’ and the ‘the single-styled nature’ of the other dominant literary genres (epic, tragedy, high rhetoric, lyric). Instead, serio-comic’s ‘multi-toned narration’ mixes the ‘high and low, serious and comic’, employing a multiplicity of genres: . . . letters, found manuscripts, retold dialogues, parodies on the high genres, parodically reinterpreted citations; in some of them we observe a mixing of prosaic and poetic speech, living dialects and jargons (and in the Roman stage, direct bilingualism as well) are introduced, and various authorial masks make their appearance. (Bakhtin 1984b, 108) Carnivalised literature for Bakhtin is characterised by its mosaic of styles, voices and dialects in a way that embodies the polyphony of the people’s ambivalent laughter. In addition, the serio-comic is dialogical. Dialogical is a Bakhtinian term for the approach to truth that is the basis of carnival spirit. The dialogic means of seeking truth is counterposed to official monologism, which pretends to possess a ready-made truth, and it is also counterposed to the naive selfconfidence of those people who think that they know something, that is, who think that they possess certain truths. Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction. (Bakhtin 1984b, 110) The multi-voiced polyphony of carnival laughter, which Bakhtin describes as the people’s collective search for truth, challenges the ‘monological’ approach to truth that is the foundation of official life and culture. In contrast to the singular, unambiguous, univocal and ‘naively self-confident’ approach to truth embodied by the pious seriousness of official culture, the multi-voiced nature of carnival spirit, in presenting the world in all its complexities and contradictions, champions Socratic ignorance and ambivalence in a collective search for truth.

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One of the earliest and purest manifestations of dialogical serio-comic was the Socratic dialogue – a literary genre popularised by Plato’s early works but a prevalent genre throughout antiquity.6 Like other forms of serio-comic, Plato’s Socratic dialogues are playful in tone but serious in its message – a duplicity that Bakhtin attributes to its ‘folkcarnivalistic base’. In addition, the dialogues themselves, which are presented as a discussion between various people and ideas, are explicitly dialogical. As the reader bears witness to interplay of a Socratic discussion, a multiplicity of views and voices are presented. Socratic dialogue has two primary devices: ‘the syncrisis and the anacrisis’. Syncrisis was understood as ‘the juxtaposition of various points of view on a specific object’ – a literary device best suited for presenting the hetero-voiced ambiguity of carnival spirit. Anacrisis is ‘a means for eliciting and provoking the words of one’s interlocutor, forcing him to express his opinion and express it thoroughly’ (Bakhtin 1984b, 110). As interlocutors engage in the interplay of elenchus, their ideas are tested and refined. Both devices, Bakhtin argues, ‘have their origin in the notion of the dialogic nature of truth’ in that they ‘dialogize thought, they carry it into the open, turn it into a rejoinder, attach it to dialogic intercourse among people’ (Bakhtin 1984b, 111). Unique to the genre of Socratic dialogue is its critical eye which aims to ‘test’ ideas and the people who represent them. Bakhtin describes the Socratic Dialogue as ‘the purely ideological event of seeking and testing truth’ (111). When an idea is presented in a Socratic dialogue, it is not given to the reader as a singular idea, but is instead presented through the debate between Socrates and his interlocutors. Bakhtin describes this exchange as an ‘embryonic’ and ‘creative’ developmental process that the reader of a Socratic dialogue participates in. Although the Socratic dialogue is presented as a collective searching for truth, the individual reader who reads Plato is drawn into the discussion and forced to reflect on her own ideas and positions. Hence, dialogical literature like the early dialogues of Plato are essential to self-discovery and growth: ‘A dialogic approach to oneself breaks down the outer shell of the self’s image, that shell which exists for other people, determining the external assessment of a person (in the eyes of others) and dimming the purity of self-consciousness’ (120). No singular style, genre or authorship of Carnivalised literature persists throughout history – its highest expressions, after reaching its nadir, all begin a slow decline as it becomes increasingly degraded and weakened by the forces of the monologic. For Bakhtin, the degradation of Plato’s version of the Socratic dialogue is apparent in the middle and later dialogues, where Plato writes more in the style of a monologue. Once degraded, the carnival spirit of Socratic dialogue is reborn through Menippean Satire, which became the dominant vehicle of Carnivalised literature through modernity (113). Like its serio-comical predecessor, Menippean satire reflects a genre that includes a diverse and eclectic list of authors beyond its namesake.7 In addition, like the genre of Socratic dialogue, Menippean satire is philosophical in nature. However, Bakhtin views Menippean Satire as a purer expression of the carnival spirit and its Socratic predecessor,8 which he argues never fully liberated itself from the backward-looking, memoir style of Plato’s early dialogues. Employing a more diverse literary tapestry, Menippean satire for Bakhtin incorporates a variety of literary styles, inserting a variety of genres: ‘novellas, letters, oratorical speeches, symposia’ (118). Menippean satire is the freest and most creative of Carnivalised literature, placing a greater emphasis on the comic element than its Socratic predecessor. Menippean satire is marked by its ‘extraordinary’ narratives, which test ideas in a Socratic fashion, but to an even greater degree.

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The most important characteristic of the menippea as a genre is the fact that its bold and unrestrained use of the fantastic and adventure is internally motivated, justified by and devoted to a purely ideational and philosophical end: the creation of extraordinary situations for the provoking and testing of a philosophical idea, a discourse, a truth, embodied in the image of a wise man, the seeker of this truth. We emphasize that the fantastic here serves not for the positive embodiment of truth, but as a mode for searching after truth, provoking it, and, most important, testing it. (114) Menippean satire for Bakhtin is the most philosophical of carnivalised literature – surpassing its great philosophical architect. The menippea is a genre of ‘ultimate questions’, where ‘ultimate philosophical positions are put to the test’ (115). Entirely unrestricted by the confines of all hierarchy, Menippean satire experiments with the plastic and flexible space of carnival in a way that exemplifies the philosophical nature of the carnival spirit and its conception of incomplete truth and ‘contemplate the world on the broadest possible scale’. (115)

Satire as revolution Bakhtin’s literary-historical approach to satire has led some to overlook the political dimensions of his analysis. Yet, Bakhtin’s ideas on humour and satire are inherently political and can only be fully understood within the context of the political and cultural tumult that he lived and wrote. An author whose writings span the political unrest of the 1917 Russian revolutions, the short-lived academic freedom and cultural pluralism of Lenin’s Bolshevism in the 1920s, through the oppressive Stalinist regime of the 1930s that sentenced him to five years in exile for his alleged political affiliations, Bakhtin was all too aware of satire’s subversive power. By the 1930s, most forms of satire and irony were prohibited as Russian authors were forced to conform to the national aesthetic of socialist realism. In reaction to the singular monologism of Stalin’s Cultural Revolution that attempted to homogenise the multi-voiced plurality of Russian culture into a singular voice and style, Bakhtin viewed satire and other forms of Carnivalised literature as a means of empowerment over official culture’s oppression. Contrary to those who viewed the carnival and the carnival spirit as a mere pressure valve that ‘makes oppression tolerable’ (Holquist 1982–1983, 14) and hence prevents political unrest,9 the carnival for Bakhtin, ‘is not only not an impediment to revolutionary change, it is revolution itself’ (Bakhtin 1984a, xviii). In opposition to those who attack Bakhtin for his lack of political empowerment (Marcuse 1968), Bakhtin depicts the carnival spirit as a powerful tool for political revolution against dogmatic oppression.

Abusive language or throwing shit In addition to the various forms of Carnivalised literature, the people’s carnival spirit emerges in the crude and coarse language of the marketplace or billingsgate. Like other vehicles for carnival spirit, billingsgate is heterogeneous and has a multiplicity of manifestations (curses, profanities, oaths, blazons, abusive language). For the purpose of this essay, I will focus exclusively on what Bakhtin considers abusive speech, ‘a special genre of billingsgate’ (16).

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Like all other forms of billingsgate, abusive speech is a natural aspect of the marketplace and essential to the ‘free familiar communication’ that is the basis of carnival frivolity. The indecent and abusive expressions utilised during the carnival are not intended to harm. Instead, such expressions ‘are used in the affectionate and complimentary sense’ (165). Bakhtin compares the use of abusive speech to the free and informal discourse between two people who shift from a formal to a friendly relationship. For instance, when two persons establish friendly relations, the form of their verbal intercourse also changes abruptly; they address each other informally, abusive words are used affectionately, and mutual mockery is permitted. (In formal intercourse only a third person can be mocked.) The two friends may pat each other on the shoulder and even on the belly (a typical carnivalesque gesture). Verbal etiquette and discipline are relaxed and indecent words and expressions may be used. (16) Healthy abusive speech is mocking, but mutually so, and the abusive expressions of carnival festivities contribute to the levity of carnival spirit. Healthy abusive expressions and gestures express the ambiguity of carnival laughter, and Bakhtin maintains that ‘praise and abuse are . . . two sides of the same coin’, and ‘belong to the same body’. The line between praise and abuse is indistinguishable – praise is always on the ‘brink of abuse’ and vice versa – and authentic abusive speech must preserve Billingsgate’s Janus-faced ambivalence, ‘which abuses while praising and praises while abusing’. Examples of such abusive expressions are ‘I shit on you’ – variations of which, Bakhtin argues, can be found in nearly every language (148). This expression has its basis in the carnival festivities of antiquity and is ‘infused’ with the ‘imagery’ of the grotesque. In both antiquity and the middle ages, the ‘slinging of excrement and drenching in urine are traditional debasing gestures’, and during the feast of fools, excrement ‘played a considerable role’ in the festivities, used in place of incense during the service and, after the service, thrown at crowds by the clergy as they ‘drove through the streets’ (147). The throwing of excrement for Bakhtin epitomises the grotesque and the degrading nature of the lower bodily stratum, which preserve the ‘essential link with birth, fertility, renewal, welfare’. Consequently, the gesture of slinging excrement is not intended to harm. Instead, it is meant to express the joyous frivolity that is the spirit of the people’s ambiguous laughter. Yet, in a different context, these very same abusive expressions and gestures become ‘coarse’ and ‘cynical’ when stripped of their comic wholeness. If the positive and negative poles of becoming (death-birth) are torn apart and opposed to each other in various diffuse images, they lose their direct relation to the whole and are deprived of their ambivalence. They, then retain the merely negative aspect, and that which they represent (defecation, urination) acquires a trivial meaning, our own contemporary meaning of these words. (149–150) For Bakhtin, each element of an abusive expression should reflect ‘a single concept of a contradictory world of becoming’, and it is only through ‘its participation in the whole’ that the ambivalence of abusive speech is preserved. Abusive gestures that are isolated from the comic whole and fail to preserve both aspects of carnival laughter’s ambivalence, ‘weakening the ambivalent image’s positive pole’, transform the gesture into a purely

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negative expression that trivialises the meaning and purpose of the expression. These negative expressions, Bakhtin argues, destroy and degrade without reviving, leaving only ‘bare cynicism and insult’. Now that we have fully examined Bakhtin’s notion of abusive speech within his framework of positive and negative laughter in addition to his comments on satire, let us now apply this model to the present debate. What I want to suggest is that a Bakhtinian approach to satire has much to offer with regard to identifying positive and constructive forms of satire and parody from those that are harmful and destructive.

Identifying constructive and destructive satire: a basic framework Following his distinction between positive and negative laughter, constructive satire is all inclusive, i.e. it does not put itself about the mockery and is directed at all people. The satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it. The wholeness of the world’s comic aspect is destroyed, and that which appears comic becomes a private reaction. The people’s ambivalent laughter, on the other hand, expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it. (Bakhtin 1984a, 12) Consequently, satire that waters down the universalism of the people’s festive laughter – i.e. is directed at a specific group and does not include those who mock – will be considered destructive in this framework. In addition, the inclusive nature of positive satire must be polyphonous, providing a balanced representation of the multiplicity of voices implicated in the piece, especially those that challenge the satirist. Unlike destructive satire, which presents its object of mockery in crude and/or oversimplified manner – most often through reinforcing grotesque cultural stereotypes – constructive satire is nuanced in its depiction of its target. Further, the sting of satire must degrade in a way that balances both poles of the people’s ambivalent laughter. Satire that disparages its target without praising and renewing will be considered destructive in this framework, for the aim of the people’s ambivalent laughter is not to create divisiveness and resentment. To the contrary, positive and constructive satire works to put ‘questions to the ultimate test’ and further the dialogical discussion of the political climate. Finally, positive satire must challenge and critique the dogmatism of the status quo – it must ‘punch up’. Because the temporal framework of positive satire works to question all that is official and already established, it will always function as a challenge to official culture, its power structures, and its ideas and values. Consequently, any satire that is backward-looking and directed at ‘consecrating the past’ – manifesting as the ‘triumph of a truth already established’ – will not be considered constructive within the Bakhtinian framework. Constructive satire must embrace ‘crisis’, ‘incompleteness’, ‘renewal’ and ‘change’ with an overall view towards a victorious and triumphant future. Let us now apply this basic framework to some contemporary examples.

Putting Bakhtin to the test Because the purpose of this essay seeks to provide a rough framework for examining particular instances of satire in a multi-cultural context, it is necessary to use examples that involve

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multiple cultures and voices. What is more, it is essential that we use examples that have significant commentary from affected parties. Consequently, this essay will focus primarily on the controversial cartoons published by the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo leading up to, and after, the 2015 massacre. Let us now examine these cartoons.

Westergaard’s turban bomb The first cartoon, which depicts the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, was one of the original 12 cartoons published in the 30 September 2005 issue of JyllandsPosten that triggered the transnational humour scandal, inciting riots and protests in Muslim communities in Africa, the Middle East and Asia leading to the death of at least 50 people. The image was republished in Charlie Hebdo’s 9 February 2006 edition with the other original set of controversial cartoons, in addition to Hebdo’s own depictions of the Prophet. The issue more than tripled its regular circulation. Hebdo’s republication of this image in the 9 February 2006 edition was the aim of a hate speech lawsuit against then editor-in-chief Philippe Val by the Great Mosque of Paris and the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF). In a highly public trial dubbed by French Newspaper Le Monde as ‘a trial from another time’10 that engaged the entire country in debate on issues of free speech, tolerance, hate speech, immigration and discrimination, Charlie Hebdo was ultimately found not guilty on the argument that Val’s decision to publish the cartoon was free expression and did not target Muslims, only fundamentalists. From a Bakhtinian perspective, this cartoon is not inclusive and does not work to evoke a shared laughter. Instead, the satirist’s laughter is directed at a specific target, and the mocking of the target comes from above. The target itself was the source of debate during most of the defamation lawsuit. For the UOIF and those challenging Hebdo, the target of the cartoon was Islam as a whole, with the cartoon asserting that all Muslims are terrorists or that Islam is a violent religion. On the other side were advocates for Charlie Hebdo, who viewed the target differently. Fleming Rose, the editor Jyllands-Posten responded: The cartoons do not in any way demonize or stereotype Muslims . . . One cartoon – depicting the Prophet with a bomb in his turban – has drawn the harshest criticism. Angry voices claim the cartoon is saying that the Prophet is a terrorist or that every Muslim is a terrorist. I read it differently: Some individuals have taken the religion of Islam Hostage by committing terrorist acts in the name of the Prophet. They are the ones who have given the religion a bad name. (Rose 2006) The Danish artist of the cartoon, Kurt Westergaard, similarly remarked, ‘I have no problems with Muslims. I made a cartoon which was aimed at the terrorists who use an interpretation of Islam as their spiritual dynamite’ (McLaughlin 2008). Hebdo director and editor-in-chief Philippe Val stated during the trial that, ‘[I]n no way do they express any contempt for believers of any faith’.11 Regardless of the claims by Rose, Westergaard and Val, most critics of the cartoon were angered by Westergaard’s failure to distinguish fundamentalist from moderate Islam: ‘They should have shown two images: The fundamentalist view and the non-fundamentalist. They could have printed an image supporting peace’ (Leconte 2008).12 When asked if equating Islam with terror was the problem, Francis Szpiner, a lawyer representing the Great Mosque of Paris, responded:

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This is what bothers us. Showing the Prophet as a terrorist makes us terrorists . . . If it isn’t obvious I can’t help you. If you find it normal to equate a whole category of people with terrorism, if Islam means terrorism for you, if that’s not racist, I don’t know what racism is.13 Because the cartoon was so one-sided and unambiguous, lacking nuance and polyphony with regard to its depiction of Muslims as violet terrorists, one can understand why so many in the Muslim community took offense to the image. In addition to its lack of nuance and inclusivity, the cartoon degrades without offering a positive element to compliment the negative pole, with no suggestion of positive change. While the cartoon targets a monologic approach to Islam, it is not dialogical in its method and offers no positive alternative in its place. In addition, that the attack come from largely secular non-Muslims clearly indicates that the mocker is putting itself above the mocked. Consequently, this cartoon does not reflect both poles of Bakhtin’s ambivalent laughter. In the context of Westergaard’s own Danish culture, the image seems to ‘punch down’. Although Conservative paper Jyllands-Posten had a relatively strong reputation as an independent newspaper that was even awarded by the European Union for its positive coverage on Muslim integration (Ammitzbøll and Vidino 2007), the larger socio-political climate of Denmark problematises the cartoon’s power structure. Denmark has always lacked ethnic and religious diversity, with Muslims accounting for only 3% of its predominantly white, secular population. Further, Denmark has the strictest immigration policy of all of the European Union, and political shifts beginning in 2001 saw greater marginalisation of its Muslim community (Ammitzbøll and Vidino 2007). Consequently, given that Westergaard drew the controversial cartoon in a context when the Islamic community was victim to targeted discrimination seems to punch down on a marginalised group. ‘Rather than playing the part of the court jester . . . Jyllands-Posten functioned as a guardian of the social order’ (Kuipers 2011, 72). Consequently, in the context of Denmark and Jyllands-Posten, Bakhtin would consider this negative satire. As for France, then Hebdo editor-in-chief Philippe Val stated his motivations for publishing the cartoons in his country was an act of solidarity with their Dutch compatriots, in addition to the firing of France Soir Editor in Chief for publishing the cartoons, and the assassination of Dutch director Theodoor ‘Theo’ van Gogh in 2005 for his antiIslamic film Submission (2004).14 Although Val’s motives can be viewed as a punching up against what he perceived as a threat to France’s radical secularism and European democracy as a whole, France’s own relationship with its Muslim population, going back to Algeria’s fight for independence against France in the 1950s, complicates the power dynamics of these (and other) Hebdo cartoons. While France has the highest population of Muslims in Europe, France’s militant secular culture has seen major culture clashes with its over five million Muslim population with regard to the ability of public worship – the 2004 ban of hijabs in schools causing extreme tension in the French Islamic community. Consequently, regardless of Val’s claims, publishing this cartoon during such a tumultuous period for French Muslims seems more of a punching down than up. Overall, from a Bakhtinian perspective the cartoon seems largely destructive. Though both Vay15 and Westergaard16 argued that the publications of the cartoon and the defamation lawsuit led to productive debates in the Islamic community, many challenged how such a denigrating cartoon, which lacks nuance and depth, could instigate any meaningful civil discussion.

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There are no legal limits to free speech, but there are civic limits. In any society, there is a civic understanding that free speech should be used wisely so not as to provoke sensitivities, particularly in hybrid, multicultural societies we see in the world today. It is a matter of civic responsibility and wisdom, not a question of legality or rights. In that context, I think it was unwise to publish these cartoons because it is the wrong way to start a debate about integration. Such a move inflames emotions; it does not court reason. It is a useless provocation. (Ramadan 2006) Consequently, this image seems indicative of ‘negative laughter’ in that the satirist stands directly opposed to the target, and the mocking nature comes from a perspective where the mocker is judging the mocked from a place of power. In all, Westergaard’s cartoon does not meet the comic totality required by Bakhtin’s framework, instead offering a crude depiction of its target in a manner that is divisive and unproductive.

Cabu’s crying Muhammad The second cartoon, drawn by late Hebdo illustrator Cabu who would become one of the victims of the 2015 attacks, was featured on the cover of the same 9 February 2006 edition with the title ‘Mahomet débordé par les intégristes’ – ‘Muhammad is overwhelmed by the fundamentalists’. Alongside a cartoon of a crying Muhammad covering his face in distress is the accompanying speech bubble ‘C’est dur d’être aimé par des cons’ – ‘It’s hard to be loved by jerks’. Although not as contested in the defamation lawsuit, which focussed primarily on only two of the original Jyllands-Posten cartoons, this cartoon, as the cover in Hebdo’s issue that republished the original Danish cartoons, marked Hebdo’s contribution to the transnational scandal, and the cartoon was frequently discussed during the trial. Applying the Bakhtinian framework, Cabu’s cartoon appears more inclusive and nuanced than Westergaard’s. Although the target here is still specific, namely fundamentalists, the depiction of Muhammad invites other Muslims to participate in the dialogue, namely non-fundamentalist Muslims. While not necessarily indicative of Bakhtin’s laughter of the people, the cartoon is less divisive because it is more polyphonous than Westergaard’s cartoon, clearly distinguishing between fundamentalist and moderate approaches to Islam. Second, the cartoon seems to embrace both poles of Bakhtin’s ambivalent laughter. The negative pole of the cartoon is exhibited exclusively in its depiction of the Prophet, which is generally taboo in most types of Islam. However, this depiction of Muhammad, unlike the angry violent prophet in Westergaard’s cartoon, is loving and caring and clearly upset over the violent actions of fundamentalist followers. This charitable depiction of Muhammad – which even conceals Muhammad’s face through his crying hands – neutralises the cartoon’s negativity, providing an alternative to fundamentalist interpretations of Islam. Some critics saw a moral equivalency between both cartoons stating that, like Westergaard’s, Cabu’s cartoon unfairly stereotypes the Islamic tradition as jerks. ‘If Charlie Hebdo wanted to say that the traditionalists are jerks, I’d agree because they flout French law and preach a radical form of Islam. But saying Muslims are jerks is different’.17 Yet, from a Bakhtinian perspective Cabu’s cartoon – unlike Westergaard’s stern, wide-eyed and wild Muhammad – provides a more nuanced depiction of the Prophet and allows for

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greater philosophical depth. Although the cartoon clearly favours a moderate interpretation, the cartoon invites the reader to distinguish fundamentalist from moderate interpretations of Islam, providing the reader with a positive alternative to its target. As for the target, the satirist here seems to be punching up towards fundamentalists and a monological approach to Islam and not Muslims as a whole. As such, this cartoon seems largely constructive from a Bakhtinian perspective.

‘100 lashes if you don’t die laughing’ The cover of the 1011 issue of Charlie Hebdo was published on 2 November 2011 – a year that saw the overthrow of multiple governments throughout the Middle East (namely Egypt, Libya and Tunisia) in the Arab Spring uprising. In the lead up to the publication, Hebdo released the following statement: ‘To fittingly celebrate the victory of the Islamist Ennahda party in Tunisia . . . Charlie Hebdo has asked Muhammad to be the special edi-tor-in-chief of its next issue’ further remarking that ‘[t]he prophet of Islam didn’t have to be asked twice and we thank him for it’.18 The cover of issue 1011 is renamed ‘Charia Hebdo’ at ‘the promise of the president of the CNT that Sharia would be the main source of legislation of Libya’. Under the ‘Charia Hebdo’ title is a caricature of a bearded Muhammad in a white turban and thawb with a wide grin. Holding up his index finger sincerely a speech bubble in the top left of the cartoon reads ‘100 lashes if you don’t die laughing’. The cartoonist, Rénald Luzier (known by his pen name Luz), stated he began drawing this character in 2011 in response to increasing pushback from leaders in the European Union and the United States, whom publically criticised Hebdo and other papers for publishing offensive cartoons. From a Bakhtinian perspective, the cartoon does seem to evoke a shared laughter similar to the Cabu cartoon in its more charitable interpretation of Islam and Muhammad – one that is joyful and humorous. That this was the intent of the cartoonist is corroborated by the back cover of issue of 1011, which depicts a bearded Muhammad in a green turban with a red clown nose stating, ‘Oui, l’islam est compatible avec l’humour’ – Mohomet (Yes, Islam is compatible with humour). While even moderate Muslims seem to challenge this assertion,19 depicting Muhammad as having a sense of humour once again offers more nuance and polyphony than a cartoon whose only message is ‘Islam is a violent religion’. In addition, while it is true that the mocking here is at a specific target, namely extremists who favour Sharia law, it should be noted that Hebdo’s decision to make Muhammad a guest editor was both to ‘honour’ Libyans for their decision to institute Sharia law, but also to ‘celebrate the victory of the Islamist Ennahda party in Tunisia’ – what is known by some to be ‘the mildest and most democratic Islamist party in history’ with respect for gender equality (Worth 2016). While the honouring of Libya was in jest, the praise for Ennahda’s victory seems sincere. Consequently, this cartoon, consistent with Bakhtin abuse, abuses and praises in the same sentence. This is not to say that the cartoon as a whole is perfectly balanced in its praising and abusing. The primary means of degradation in the cartoon is a depiction of Muhammad that, in promising ‘100 lashes if you don’t die laughing’, reinforces the crude cultural stereotype that Islam is a violent religion. More problematic is Luz’s decision to draw this picture of Muhammad with an exaggerated nose, which drew comparisons to anti-Semitic cartoons that are illegal in many European countries. One may be inclined to think that Bakhtin, given his love of the grotesque and exaggerated body features, would take no

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issue with the depiction of a large-nosed Persian. However, a deeper analysis into the specific power structures suggests otherwise. Luz, as a white, secular Frenchman from a country with an antagonistic history with Muslim peoples and its own Muslim population, complicates the power structure in this cartoon. In addition, as Kuipers has noted, French society provides no mechanism for Muslims to respond to satirical attacks ‘in a dignified way’ (Kuipers, 76). Because there was no equivalent to Charlie Hebdo in the Muslim community, in addition to the fact that the Muslim community was not protected by French defamation laws, it could be argued that all of these cartoons, contra Bakhtinian satire, ‘punch down’. However, from the perspective of the Hebdo cartoonists, the case could be made that the paper was the one marginalised during the cartoon crisis, and the newspaper clearly perceived the situation in this manner. Most of the Hebdo’s editors and cartoonists, like their Danish Jyllands-Posten compatriots, expressed contempt for governments and newspapers who had failed to come their defence in the backlash of the boycotts, protests and deaths resulting from the cartoon scandal. Prior to the 2015 massacre and the ‘Je suis Charlie movement’, few came to the support of Charlie Hedbo, whom was considered by many to be the aggressor in this conflict. Given the complexity of this power structure, assessing this cartoon must take into consideration the multiplicity of voices and interpretations presented in a piece of political satire, including those that were not the intent of the cartoonist. Even though a satirist may have their own singular interpretation of how a piece should be read, political satire in multi-cultural context must factor in other readings, and Bakhtin’s dialogical approach, built upon the ambiguous nature of humour, is particularly effective at acknowledging multiple explanations without having to settle on a single interpretation. Such an approach is helpful not only to people interpreting satire, but also to the satirist, whom should take into consideration how others might interpret his/her work. On 3 November 2011, a day after the magazine announced the special guest edited 1011 edition, and hours before the magazine hit newsstands, the office of Charlie Hebdo was fire bombed in the early hours of the morning. Although no one claimed responsibility, it is generally believed that the Muhammad special issue was the primary impetus for the arson. No one was killed in the attack, but the headquarters was destroyed and the Hebdo website hacked with this message: While All Islam World regard with reverence to your prophet and address him as Hz. ISA A.S (Christ) (putting a holy prefix in front of his name). You keep abusing, Islam’s almighty Prophet with disgusting and disgraceful cartoons using excuses of freedom of speech. No doubt, Hz. Isa (Christ) would dislike and hate your nation. Be God’s Curse On You! We Will be Your Curse on Cyber World!20 For the fundamentalist, there is no greater insult than the degradation of their God. Although Hebdo and its apologists made a consistent argument for the protection of free speech – a value built into their culture that goes back to the French Revolution – free speech as a western democratic value means little to religious dogmatists, who view the cartoons as an ethical and spiritual assault against their God. While the firebombing of Hebdo’s headquarters is in no way morally justified, one could understand the anger of the fundamentalists, who, in light of Hebdo’s legal victory against Muslim organisations in France, saw no other means of retaliation beyond burning the Hebdo offices to the ground.

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Love is stronger than hate The cover of Charlie Hebdo’s 8 November 2011 issue, published just one week after the firebombing of its headquarters, featured one of the most provocative images in the humour scandal. The cartoon depicts a male Charlie Hebdo staff member (who is said to resemble Charlie Hebdo’s then editorial director Stéphane Charbonnier) embracing in a deep kiss with a Muslim man as the remains of its offices smoulder in the background. The title of the cartoon reads ‘l’amour plus fort que la haine’ (love is stronger than hate). This cartoon, also drawn by Luz, does not seem to be a cartoon of Muhammad. Although this individual is depicted with a ridiculously exaggerated nose, the nose looks nothing like Muhammad’s nose on the cover of issue 1011, and the person is wearing a white prayer cap with his thawb rather than a turban. Consequently, the figure is likely a representation of Muslim people rather than their Prophet. Despite the provocative nature of the cartoon, this cartoon seems inclusive to the degree that it represents both the Charlie Hebdo staff and Muslim people into the image, and the fact that both are engaged in a deep, slobbery kiss indicates love, acceptance and forgiveness to the Muslim community in response to the fire bombings, rather than hate and resentment. Nonetheless, the denigrating aspect of the cartoon is problematic. The cartoon degrades, like Luz’s other cartoon, with the ridiculously exaggerated nose, but more so in the homosexual kiss, which is, generally speaking, socially unacceptable in both moderate and fundamentalist Islam. The sexualised nature of the cartoon has drawn comparisons to Abu Graihb when United States military members took pictures of prisoners in positions suggestive of homosexual behaviour. While one could argue that the target of the cartoon, in the context of the firebombing, is once again fundamentalists and not moderate members of the Muslim community, the French, like many westerners, have a tendency to view Muslims as homophobic. Consequently, the attack seems more malicious than Luz’s 1011 cover in that it is offensive to a much larger contingent of Muslim people. While one may make the case that the cartoon is dialogical in that it depicts a more nuanced understanding of Muslim sexuality in way that might lead to greater tolerance in the Islamic community,21 the fact that so many Muslims find homosexuality immoral when 78% of non-Muslim French find homosexuality acceptable seems more an attack on Muslims as a whole – once again punching down on a marginalised group through a direct assault on their values. In short, however conciliatory, the sexual degradation of Islamic people seems more of a spiteful and reflexive reaction to the bombing of their offices rather than true forgiveness. In 2013, Hebdo’s then editor Stéphane Charbonnier (Charb) was listed on a most wanted list by al-Qaeda. After the firebomb Charb stated: ‘Muhammad isn’t sacred to me . . . I don’t blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings. I live under French law. I don’t live under Koranic law’.22 In an interview with French newspaper Le Monde, Charb stated, ‘It may seem pompous, but I prefer to die standing than live on my knees’.23 On 7 January 2015 Charlie Hebdo’s relocated, unmarked Paris headquarters was the target of France’s deadliest terror attack. At 11:30 am, two hooded gunmen forced their way into the offices, killing 12 of the Hebdo staff. Before open firing on the second floor offices where Hebdo staffers were having their first meeting of the year, the terrorists exclusively called out for Charb before opening fire on him and the rest of the office.24

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Je Suis Charlie/you are forgiven On 14 January 2015, one week after the attacks, Charlie Hebdo issue No. 1178 hit newsstands. The issue, assembled by surviving and former Hebdo staff, included new drawings as well as ones from slain cartoonists, and, at 7.95 million copies, became the largest print run in the history of the French Press. The cover of issue 1178 became the most recognisable cartoon in the magazine’s history. The cartoon, drawn by Luz, was stated by him to be ‘the same chap’25 from the 1011 issue, wearing the same white turban and thawl. However, instead of laughter, this Muhammad is seen crying as he holds the sign that became a global movement – ‘Je suis Charlie’ (I am Charlie). Under the Hebdo magazine title, and just above the crying Muhammad, reads ‘Tout est pardonné’ (You are forgiven). From an aesthetic perspective, that the cartoon involves death, sadness and forgiveness makes it particularly Bakhtinian. While this cartoon is not intended to be humorous or invoke laughter, the cartoon seems inclusive in that it invites the global polyphony of grieving voices to unite in their sorrow, and overwhelming outpouring of international support for the ‘Je Suis Charlie’ movement suggests the cartoon was effective in this sense. In addition, Luz’s decision to use Muslim Green as a background seems to invite all Muslims to participate in the message of the cartoon. As for the praising component of the cartoon, Luz’s cartoon, like Cabu’s crying Mohammad, provides a charitable depiction of the Prophet as a caring God who is emotionally devastated by the actions of violent extremists. However, the degrading aspect of the cartoon is more problematic. While some saw the cartoon as ‘a life-affirming work of art . . .’ (Jones 2015) others saw the newspaper’s decision to publish a cartoon of Muhammad in the context of the massacre to be a poor choice. Franco-British Muslim writer, academic and journalist Myriam François-Cerrah was troubled by Luz’s depiction of the prophet, which she argued, invokes racial stereotypes: Today’s front cover bothers me only in one regard and that is in the racial stereotypes employed in the depiction of the prophet Muhammad, a shorthand here for Arabs and Muslims more broadly. We (thankfully!) wouldn’t accept an image of a hookednose Jew, so it is unclear to me why images of hooked-nose Arabs – because forget who the prophet Muhammad is to Muslims, he is an Arab man being depicted in racially stereotypical terms – isn’t more disturbing to others. (Francois-Cerrah 2015) Others found the ambiguity of the ‘All is forgiven’ title to be more divisive than unifying. Nabila, a Parisian born freelance journalist of Algerian heritage remarked: This confusion is apparent on another level. Above Charlie Hebdo’s drawing of the ‘prophet’ it says ‘All is forgiven’ (Tout est pardonné). But who is being forgiven? Is this aimed at the killers – which would be strange because they barely deserve this after their acts of terror, and they are not referenced in the drawing? More likely, given the image of the prophet, it’s aimed at Muslims in general. But why do Muslims need to be forgiven? They have done nothing wrong. In claiming to be about forgiveness the cover therefore achieves the opposite, spreading guilt by association. (2015) Similarly, others were troubled by a cartoon that uses Muhammad as an apologist for Hebdo. Guardian’s deputy opinion editor Joseph Harker remarked:

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[I]n caricaturing him holding a ‘Je suis Charlie’ placard, they are adding insult to injury by claiming the prophet would support the values of the magazine, which for years has been widely criticised for targeting Muslims, in particular, under the cover of free speech. (Harker 2015) In short, the ‘Je Suis Charlie’ cartoon does not seem to embrace Bakhtin’s comic totality, and the fury of protests, violence, destruction in multiple Muslim countries, resulting in the death of 10 people in Niger, seems to suggest this.26 Luz’s own explanation of the significance of the drawing, in a very emotional interview, complicates the cartoon further: The strange thing in this whole story is that this Muhammad refers to this other one [pointing to the 1011 cover]. ‘Charia Hebdo’, the drawing that led to our office being burnt, and to a lot of polemics and it’s the reason 17 people, including some of Charlie’s staff, were killed. And when I didn’t have any ideas for the next cover, ‘What should we talk about?’ I drew this little chap. And when I saw this little chap, I spoke to him. ‘Poor old chap, I first drew you in 2011. We had a lot of trouble because of you’. In some ways it was a mutual forgiveness. Me as your creator, I’m sorry for having put you through all this, and he [tearing up] and him as a character was forgiving me. He said, ‘It’s okay, you’re alive, you’ll be able to keep drawing me. That’s my story. People can imagine whatever they want, but that’s my story.27 Luz’s anguish over his creation, a figure whom he had a deep emotional connection to, does not seem to imply maliciousness or spite, but profound despair. Nonetheless, that Luz interprets the cartoon as a forgiveness between cartoonist and character once again demonstrates the complexity of satirical cartoons and the need for a framework capable of addressing the multiplicity of voices involved.

Conclusion Long-time cartoonist for Hebdo and member of the Cartoonists for Peace Bernard Verlhac (known as Tignous), murdered in the 2015 attacks, remarked in 2011 of his own work: ‘A news cartoon is extremely hard to get right, because you have to get everything into a single image’.28 Tignous here seems to have understood the importance of ‘getting satire right’ and the problems that can result when a piece of satire fails to represent the comic totality of the wrong it hopes to right. As I have argued in this essay, Bakhtin’s ideas on the carnival, festive laughter and abusive speech provide a helpful framework to capture that comic totality so necessary for effective satire. Satire that is inclusive, balanced and dialogical, giving voice to the plurality of ideas, positions and views of the satirised will likely find more success in its aim than satire that degrades its target in an unreflective and overly simplistic manner from a position of power. Some may still maintain that satire is such a unique art form that satirists ‘must have a right to irresponsibility’ – Luz lamenting after the 2015 massacre, ‘I just want the drawings to be irresponsible again’.29 However, in a globalised, multi-cultural, digital age when satire’s sting can result in violent catastrophe, satirists are no longer free to be irresponsible. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Source: Grant Julin (2018) ‘Satire in a multi-cultural world: a Bakhtinian analysis’, Comedy Studies, 9:2, 150–170.

Notes 1 South Africa’s senior satirist Pieter Kirk Usy in 2012 in response to a cartoon depicting the South African President as a penis. https://mg.co.za/article/2012-07-10-zapiro-cartoon-zuma-spear. 2 In particular, see The Power of Satire (2015) eds. Marijke Meijer Drees and Sonja de Leeuw, a volume of the interdisciplinary research spanning 2009–2013 that was sponsored by the NWO – the Dutch National Research Board. 3 Although Bakhtin completed the work in 1940 and submitted it as his dissertation, Rabelais and his World were not published in Russian until 1965. 4 The ancient accounts of this practice vary, with some reporting that masters served the slaves, others reporting that the slaves simply dined with the masters. 5 Although the world ‘semio-comic’ did not come into vogue until 1793, Bakhtin applies the term to any instance of humour that is simultaneously serious and comical. 6 As Bakhtin points out, although Plato and Xenophon are the only surviving examples of this genre, Socratic dialogues appear throughout antiquity through the works of ‘Antisthenes, Aeschines, Phaedo, Euclid, Alexamenos, Glaucon, Simias, Crito and others’ (Bakhtin 1984b, 109). 7 Although it takes its name from Menippus of Gadara (c. 300 BCE) and its most immediate influences, Bakhtin locates instances of Menippean satire prior to its namesake (Antisthenes) and long after its most direct immediate influences in the first century (Varro Lucian) through a diverse and eclectic group of authors: Seneca, Horace, Lucian, Boethius, Rabelais, Voltaire, Swift and Dostoyevsky (113–114). 8 Although Bakhtin considers the genre of Menippean Satire to have some genetic relation to Socratic dialogue, the roots of Menippean satire is not ‘a pure product of the decomposition of the Socratic dialogue (as is sometime done) since its roots reach directly back into Carnivalized folklore’ (Bakhtin 1984b, 112). 9 A position held by Marxist Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933) – a leading Marxist intellectual and People’s Commissar of Enlightenment who prior to his death in 1933 had organised ‘a special government commission for the study of satiric genres and was himself at work on a book called The Social Role of Laughter’ (Holquist 1982-1983, 12). Although Bakhtin ultimately disagreed with his theory of satire, Lunacharsky was an advocate for Bakhtin and his work and played a major role in having his exile commuted (Renfrew 2014, 8). 10 http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/danish-caricatures-on-trial-in-france-cartoons-1muhammad-0-a-466403.html 11 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/france.muhammadcartoons 12 ‘It’s Hard Being Loved By Jerks’ (2008) 51:08. 13 ‘It’s Hard Being Loved By Jerks’ (2008) 52:02. 14 It’s Hard Being Loved by Jerks (Leconte 2008). 15 ‘[f]or them I think this will launch a debate that was necessary and that they had trouble starting’ It’s Hard Being Loved by Jerks (Leconte 2008) 1:43:00. 16 ‘We are discussing the two cultures, the two religions as never before and that is important’ (McLaughlin 2008). 17 It’s Hard Being Loved by Jerks (Leconte 2008) 30:00. 18 https://www.nouvelobs.com/medias/20111031.OBS3563/quand-charlie-hebdo-devient-chariahebdo.html 19 In the Muslim world, we are not used to laughing at religion, our own or anybody else’s. This is far from our understanding. For that reason, these cartoons are seen, by average Muslims and not just radicals, as a transgression against something sacred, a provocation against Islam. (Ramadan 2006). 20 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/8864063/French-satirical-newspaper-Charlie-Hebdo-firebombed-after-prophet-Mohammed-announcement.html

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21 A 2009 Gallup Global study on Muslim integration into France reported that 35% of French Muslims favour homosexuality. Comparatively, the same study reported that 0% of British Muslims favour homosexuality. https://www.olir.it/areetematiche/pagine/documents/News_2150_Gallup2009.pdf 22 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/charlie-hebdo-shooting-10-killed-as-shotsfired-at-satirical-magazine-headquarters-according-to-reports-9962337.html?fhn 23 https://www.lemonde.fr/actualite-medias/article/2012/09/20/je-n-ai-pas-l-impression-d-egorgerquelqu-un-avec-un-feutre_1762748_3236.html 24 https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/01/08/vous-allez-payer-car-vous-avez-insulte-leprophete_4551820_3224.html. In addition to seven other Hebdo staff, the fatalities included cartoonists Stephane Charbonnier (Charb), Jean Cabut (Cabu), Bernard Verlhac (Tignous), Philippe Honore, and Georges Wolinski. Luz, who was late to work that day, missed the attack. 25 Exclusive Interview with ‘“Charlie Hebdo” Cartoonist Luz’ Vice News, February 3, 2015. https:// news.vice.com/video/exclusive-interview-with-charlie-hebdo-cartoonist-luz (10:35–11:54). 26 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-30888188. 27 Exclusive Interview with ‘“Charlie Hebdo” Cartoonist Luz” Vice News, February 3, 2015. https:// news.vice.com/video/exclusive-interview-with-charlie-hebdo-cartoonist-luz (10:35–11:54). 28 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/charlie-hebdo-attack-all-12-victims-arenamed-9965864.html. 29 Exclusive Interview with ‘“Charlie Hebdo” Cartoonist Luz’ Vice News, February 3, 2015. https:// news.vice.com/video/exclusive-interview-with-charlie-hebdo-cartoonist-luz (10:35–11:54).

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

References Ammitzbøll, Pernille, and Lorenzo Vidino. 2007. “After the Danish Cartoon Controversy.” Middle East Quarterly 14 (1): 3–11. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984a. Rabelais and His World (Tr. Hélène Iswolsky). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984b. “Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics.” In Theory and History of Literature, edited by Caryl Emerson, Vol. 8. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Clark, Katerina, and Holquist, Michael. 1986. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Francois-Cerrah, Myriam. 2015. “The Magazine Drifts into Racist Caricatures.” In Did Charlie Hebdo’s Cover Get It Right? Our Writers’ Verdict. Guardian, January 13. https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2015/jan/13/charlie-hebdo-cover-right-image-prophet-muhammad-right. Harker, Joseph. 2015. “This Smashes a Moment of Genuine Hope.” In Did Charlie Hebdo’s Cover Get It Right? Our Writers’ Verdict. Guardian, January 13. https://www.theguardian.com/commen tisfree/2015/jan/13/charlie-hebdo-cover-right-image-prophet-muhammad-right. Holquist, Michael. 1982-1983. “Bakhtin and Rabelais: Theory as Praxis.” Engagements: Postmodernism, Marxism, Politics 11 (1/2): 5–19. Jones, Jonathan. 2015. “It’s a Life-Affirming Work of Art.” In Did Charlie Hebdo’s Cover Get It Right? Our Writers’ Verdict. Guardian, January 13. https://www.theguardian.com/commentis free/2015/jan/13/charlie-hebdo-cover-right-image-prophet-muhammad-right. Kuipers, Giselinde. 2011. “The Politics of Humor in the Public Sphere: Cartoons, Power and Modernity in the First Transnational Humour Scandal.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 14 (1): 63–80. Leconte, Daniel. 2008. “It’s Hard Being Loved by Jerks.” Films en Stock. https://www.imdb.com/ title/tt1289783/companycredits?ref_=tt_dt_co Marcuse, Herbert. 1968. “The Affirmative Character of Culture.” In Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, 88–133. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

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Marijke, Meijer Drees, and de Leeuw Sonja, eds. 2015. The Power of Satire (Topics in Humor Research (Book 2)). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. McLaughlin, Kim. 2008. “Danish Prophet Cartoonist Says Has No Regrets.” Reuters, AARHUS, Denmark, March 26. Morreall, John. 2009. Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor. Hoboken, GB: WileyBlackwell. Nabila Ramdani. 2015. “This Shows How Muddled the Debate Has Become.” In Did Charlie Hebdo’s Cover Get It Right? Our Writers’ Verdict. Guardian, January 13. https://www.theguardian.com/com mentisfree/2015/jan/13/charlie-hebdo-cover-right-image-prophet-muhammad-right. Ramadan, Tariq. 2006. “Free Speech and Civic Responsibility.” New York Times; International Herald Tribune, February 5. Renfrew, Alastair. 2014. Mikhail Bakhtin. New York, NY: Routledge. Rose, Fletcher. 2006. “Why I Published Those Cartoons.” Washington Post, Sunday, February 19. The Gallup Coexist Index. 2009. “A Global Study of Interfaith Relations with an In-Depth Analysis of Muslim Integration in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.” https://www.olir.it/areetema tiche/pagine/documents/News_2150_Gallup2009.pdf. Worth, Robert F. 2016. A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Contributor Grant Julin, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Francis University (Loretto, PA). His research interests are in comedy and humor studies.

Chapter 30

Silly meets serious: discursive integration and the Stewart/Colbert era (9:2) Amanda Martin, Barbara K. Kaye and Mark D. Harmon

When then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon made a surprise cameo on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In in 1968, looked into the camera and repeated the show’s quip, ‘Sock it to me?’ no one could have predicted that nearly half a century later a president, Barack Obama, would invite a comedian, Jon Stewart, to the White House for private conversations (Blistein 2015). Nixon used Laugh-In to reach younger voters by acting hip and by showing that he could take a joke. Politicians saw value in appearing on late-night comedy shows in subsequent years, but visiting these shows became virtually mandatory for presidential candidates after Bill Clinton appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show. Clinton was ridiculed for his 1992 saxophone-playing appearance on Arsenio, but after he won the presidency, other politicians clamored to appear on late-night programs, hoping for a boost in public opinion and the coolness factor (Baym 2009; Gray 2009). Almost two decades later when Jon Stewart lunched at the White House with Obama, television comedy shows could make or break a politician’s trajectory. Obama’s adviser Austan Goolsbee said the meeting was a chance for the White House to explain its side of the story after Stewart had criticised the Obama administration on a number of issues (Samuelsohn 2015). That Jon Stewart was invited two years later for a second visit with President Obama illustrates that late-night comedy and political satire television continued to shape public opinion. Two of the most potent programs were The Daily Show (1996 – present) and its spin-off, The Colbert Report (2005–2015). Both shows strongly influenced political opinions (Jones and Baym 2012; Compton 2011; Feldmanand Young 2008; Jones 2010). The Daily Show (TDS) gained prominence in the years following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, and The Colbert Report (TCR) debuted during the height of the war in Iraq. It was an era in which journalists admittedly failed to scrutinize adequately the George W. Bush administration’s justifications for invading Iraq (Kurtz 2004), and government propaganda painted a rosy picture of the situation in Iraq (Pilger 2010). Viewers turned to Stewart to point out politicians’ inconsistencies and hypocrisies, and to mock the news media for vacuous reporting. Jon Stewart’s common-sense interrogations of government officials and journalists – through interviews and commentary on video clips that he played on his show – helped him build a unique persona as the most trusted newsperson in America (Jones and Baym 2010). Likewise, Stephen Colbert’s show filled a role as media and politics critic. His character parodied the bombastic Fox News host and political pundit Bill O’Reilly, and criticised right-wing media and the Republican administration by pretending to sympathize with them. The show made a splash in its first episode, introducing the concept of

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‘truthiness’, which describes truth based on gut feelings instead of on facts (Jones 2010). ‘Truthiness’ addressed the distortion of truth in some cable news shows and in Bush administration propaganda. Jon Stewart ended his run on TDS on August 6, 2015 (Comedy Central 2015), and South African comedian Trevor Noah took his place. TCR went dark on December 18, 2014, as Stephen Colbert transitioned to host of CBS’s The Late Show (Stephen Colbert Signs Off 2014). Although TDS still airs on Comedy Central, Noah attracts little more than half of the number of viewers that Stewart captured, and he has not yet built the political clout and image that Stewart so carefully crafted (O’Connell, 2016). The loss of Stewart as host of TDS coupled with the end of TCR has left a hole in the heart of political satire. New voices in satire have emerged and are gaining attention, though have yet to gain the same influence as Stewart and Colbert. Satirical programs ‘expose political hypocrisy, ridiculous antics, congressional absurdity, candidate flubs, and legislative squabbles. They also ridicule media, especially cable television’s coverage of politics’ (Kaye and Johnson 2016, 9). To the audience’s delight, these shows are both funny and serious, hard-hitting and soft, entertaining and educational, and confusing and logical, but through it all they acknowledge that humor is serious business. This blurring of form, or discursive integration (Baym 2005, 2007), is what gives these programs life, and helps viewers ‘decode the real meaning behind the sarcasm’ (McOmber and Kaye 2013, 9). This paper uses the theory of discursive integration as a foundation to take an in-depth and scholarly look at The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and other satirical programs.

The nature of the beast: theoretical approaches Any exploration of political satire must ask fundamental questions about genre and, more broadly, about the purpose of this communication form. These questions are perhaps best answered through a theoretical lens. Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s work has provided a foundation for many scholarly explorations of television satire (Baym 2005; Jones 2010; Meddaugh 2010; Waisanen 2009). Bakhtin wrote about the traditions of medieval carnival, a significant feature of which was parody (Achter 2008). This culture of parody – what Bakhtin called ‘the people’s second life, organised on the basis of laughter’ (Bakhtin 1984, 8) – functions as an outlet for average people to mock and comment on powerful elites. These acts of parody provide a means for ordinary people to comment on social issues because, through comedic parody, they can address issues that are taboo in the circles of elites who are powerful in a society. Parody can be an act of resistance against the powerful status quo. Mikhail Bakhtin theorised that the tradition of medieval carnival offered ‘a social space outside official life’ to suspend notions of power structure and allow ‘egalitarian contact among citizens’ (Meddaugh 2010, 379). This theory can be applied to political satire shows that look at political and news media discourse from this outside space and both laugh at and critique it. For example, TCR’s recurring segment, ‘The Word,’ was based on Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly’s ‘Talking Points’ feature. Stephen Colbert was graphically framed in a visual scheme that featured written commentary that appeared while Colbert spoke. Unlike with O’Reilly’s version of this graphic technique, Colbert appeared to be unaware of the content of the written commentary. The setup allowed Colbert to offer commentary that mimicked either political or news media discourse,

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while the written commentary debunked his point of view. This dual presentation allowed the audience to become insiders because they were able to see the written commentary to which Colbert’s character was seemingly oblivious. This insider positioning contrasts to the public’s traditional role as outsiders who are fed talking points (Meddaugh 2010). Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert became two of the most recognisable political and media critics and satirists in America (Waisanen 2009). They used rhetorical criticism – often with a large dose of ridicule – to focus on empty talking points that are regularly found in politicians’ speech and pundits’ commentary. (Waisanen 2009). The incongruity between the video clips the shows presented and the perspective the comedians brought in their commentary highlighted the absurdity of political doublespeak. To highlight the incongruity in political talk, Stewart and Colbert used three comic-frame strategies that have been described as parodic polyglossia, satirical specificity and contextual clash (Waisanen 2009). Drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of heteroglossia and the polyphonic voice, the term ‘parodic polyglossia’ describes the way in which Stewart and Colbert used a multitude of voices in the course of their satire. In Colbert’s case, he often delivered his verbal commentary juxtaposed against written commentary. The two hosts also frequently mimicked the people they targeted in their humor or created new characters with false voices. The second critical strategy, satirical specificity, refers to Stewart and Colbert’s method of demystifying and sometimes debunking public discourse. The third critical strategy, contextual clash, refers to the satires’ invention of unreal situations in order to contrast with the ideas they critiqued (Waisanen 2009). For example, when Colbert interviewed the founder of an immigration watchdog group, the host told him that the audience members had been screened for illegal immigrants and Mexicans; the camera then showed a blond woman dressed in traditional German garb holding beer steins (Waisanen 2009). The absurdity of the situation Colbert created stood as a critique of his guests’ stance on the immigration of white Europeans versus the immigration of Mexicans. Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas provide the basis for scholar Geoffrey Baym’s theory of television satire, ‘discursive integration’ (Baym 2005, 2007). Bakhtin theorised that as society becomes more heterogeneous, there are multiple types of discourse that inevitably blend into a ‘hybridisation’ (Baym 2009). Baym describes this hybridisation as ‘discursive integration’ – marked by ‘permeability of form and fluidity of content’ (Baym 2005, 2009). Stewart and Colbert’s heyday came about in a media landscape in which ‘it becomes impossible to identify with any precision the divisions between news and entertainment, public affairs and popular culture, affective consumption and democratic discourse’ (Baym 2007, 361). Discursive integration is perfectly illustrated in Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s satire, which is described as ‘serious comedy’ (Baym 2009, 27). The concept of serious comedy refers to ‘a collage of once-disparate forms and techniques that results in an unpredictable and continuously shifting ensemble of politics, information and humor’ (Baym 2009, 35). Discursive integration, perhaps the most useful theory to come from Mikhail Bakhtin’s work, can be illustrated in an analysis of the recurring TCR segment ‘Better Know a District,’ in which the host interviewed members of the U.S. Congress. The ‘Better Know a District’ segment worked on multiple and sometimes contradictory levels that illustrated the discursive integration concept, and referenced national issues such as minimum wage, immigration, gay marriage and education (Baym 2007). Stephen Colbert interrupted an in-depth discussion, however, with silliness that poked fun at himself and at the lawmakers. Democratic leader

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Rep. Nancy Pelosi warned fellow members of Congress to avoid appearing on the show, lest Colbert make fools of them as he did of Georgia Republican Lynn Westmoreland. Westmoreland had sponsored a bill that would require courthouses to display the Ten Commandments, but when Colbert asked him to recite the Commandments, the congressman was unable to recall them all (Baym 2007). These ‘Better Know a District’ segments are an example of discursive integration because there is a blend of comedy, seriousness, parody, and critical inquiry. These segments are just one example of the complexity of form that was a hallmark of TDS, and particularly of TCR.

Terminology: describing the form The complexity of form in discursively integrated political satire shows might be the reason that scholars are not on the same page when it comes to the terminology they use to label the shows. Several terms are used interchangeably to describe shows like TDS and TCR – infotainment, soft news, fake news – and sometimes satire shows are grouped with late-night comedy. Some of these terms are problematic, and none provide a precise definition of the shows. For example, Jon Stewart often referred to TDS as ‘fake news’ (Baym 2005), but that phrase has taken on new meaning since the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Fake news has entered the national conversation since fictional stories about the 2016 presidential candidates and election disguised as legitimate reporting circulated on social media sites such as Facebook and search engines such as Google (Wingfield, Isaac, and Benner 2016). Therefore, the description of satire shows that feature factual news stories should not be conflated with fictionalised stories aimed at deceiving readers. The meaning of ‘infotainment’ is not static, either. One definition describes infotainment as a show that combines comedy and news (Browning and Sweetser 2013), but another as ‘a negative term used to lament the transformation of serious information sources into commercial entertainment products’ (Jones and Baym 2010), or as ‘news lite,’ when television news networks offer punditry, banter and light-hearted stories instead of hard news (Baym 2005, 273). So ‘infotainment’ is a broad term that covers more than a political satire. Another broad term frequently found in the literature is ‘soft news’ (Baumgartner and Morris 2006; Coe et al. 2008), which presents news in a comedic form, such as TDS, or a partisan frame, such as The O’Reilly Factor (Coe et al. 2008). Soft news also refers to traditional network late-night shows like The Tonight Show (Brewer and Marquardt 2007). Journalist also use the term ‘soft news’ to refer to light feature stories, as opposed to more serious stories (Patterson 2000). Although the terms ‘parody’ and ‘satire’ are sometimes used interchangeably, there is a difference between the two concepts (Gray, Jones, and Thompson 2009). Parody is a form of satire that imitates a specific aesthetic form. For example, TDS and TCR replicated the look and mannerisms of cable news networks, from the sets and graphics to the clothing and body language of television journalists. Stephen Colbert based the character he portrayed on a real-life right-wing cable news commentator (Baym 2007). Parody’s purpose is to critique that which it imitates (Gray et al. 2009). Satire, on the other hand, involves exposing some aspect of observed reality to ridicule by comparing it to implied, accepted norms (Druick 2009; Gray et al. 2009). Political satire such as that found in The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967–1969), Saturday Night Live (1975–present), TDS and TCR invite viewers to both laugh at and

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question political and media elites, and ponder current issues. The shows encourage viewers ‘to play with politics, to examine it, test it, and question it rather than simply consume it as information or ‘truth’ from authoritative sources’ (Gray et al. 2009, 11). Therefore, the shows may be called ‘parodies’ based on their structure, but their content is often satirical. Placing television satire on a spectrum that indicates how deeply a show explores issues is useful for understanding satire. One end of the spectrum provides a cursory commentary on surface characteristics of media and political elites, or on institutions such as Fox News, rather than on the effect of their actions. Saturday Night Live provides an example of this cursory satire, which provides quick laughs but offers little information and does not explore issues (Gray et al. 2009). The satire in Laugh-In (1967–1973) could also be described as cursory; although the show did bring up serious issues such as the Vietnam War, usually the quick-paced, riotous, vaudeville atmosphere allowed for quick jabs at the satirical object rather than a deeper look (Erickson 2000). The other end of the spectrum of satire is more in-depth because it delves into issues and provides sometimes extensive information in addition of making jokes about the characteristics of media and political elites. Shows on this end of the spectrum, like TDS and TCR differ from other late-night humor shows and shows that feature more cursory satire because they use ‘satire to convey a coherent political message’ (Caufield 2008, 5). This multi-dimensional satire is of particular interest because of its potential to educate its viewers and to discuss issues that the news media have not.

Serious comedy, serious influence Serious comedy shows increasingly have wielded their influence on their audiences, and on political and media culture. Therefore, scholars have attempted to determine the effects of this shift from traditional news to discursively integrated comedic satire. Studies of political satire shows have examined whether the shows increase knowledge about the issues they target, and if the shows increase cynicism and the effects that might have on voter participation (Baumgartner and Morris 2006; Cao 2008). Political satire shows influence not only individuals, but also they can influence the national conversation about important issues. For example, Stephen Colbert brought the decidedly unglamorous issue of campaign finance into focus by taking audiences on his informative and comical journey of creating a Super PAC. Although Colbert’s Super PAC did not engage the population outside of the show’s regular fan base, it did capture news media attention and resulted in a more widespread focus on campaign finance laws (Day 2013).

Value judgments A nagging question consistently lurks – though often below the surface – around studies of political satire television: Are these shows good or bad for society? The answer to this simple question is complicated. The basis for scholars’ concern lies in the conventional wisdom that voters must be informed if a democracy is to thrive (Cao 2008). There has been some dissent in the academic community about the idea that the shows contribute to a more informed electorate (Cao 2008). These shows act as gatekeepers by bringing up issues that audiences seek more information about from the news media (Xenos and

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Becker 2009; Young 2006). Viewers of late-night comedy, including TDS, paid more attention to network and cable news shows than non- viewers (Feldman and Young 2008), which could be because the shows lead viewers who do not habitually follow politics to seek more information on specific issues (Cao 2010). But young news parody viewers are better at recognising political information from the shows than at recalling it (Hollander 2005). This finding suggests that viewers who use satire shows as primary sources of political information lack depth of knowledge on political issues, though they do glean some information from the shows. The debate about whether satire shows, by poking fun at and criticising political leaders, increases audience cynicism is related to concerns about whether the shows negatively affect voter participation. Watching TDS caused viewers to have negative views of the presidential candidates in the 2004 election and increased their cynicism (Baumgartner and Morris 2006). TDS also raised viewers’ beliefs that they understood the complexities of events covered in the show, while lowering trust in the news media and public officials. These findings have led to predictions that the shows are likely to reduce political participation in the future. But if cynicism is thought to reduce voter participation, an elevated sense of efficacy for viewers of TDS could increase voting (Hoffman and Young 2011). Political participation through belief in efficacy is higher among college students who view both traditional news and satire shows than it is among those who viewed traditional late-night comedy shows (Hoffman and Young 2011). This finding corroborates studies that suggest that viewing political satire increases voter participation. But any blanket statement about the effects of these shows on viewers is bound to be misleading, because the effects are not monolithic; rather, different demographics respond to the shows differently. Viewers turn to satire shows for a variety of reasons, including for entertainment and for information. Some viewers trust satire television more because they see the shows as being less biased than other current-events programming. Therefore, viewing motives are complex and not as easily categorised as some studies would suggest (Young 2013). For example, four key factors have been found to determine who watches the TDS: age, affinity for political humor, and exposure to satirical sitcoms and to liberal television news (Hmielowski, Holbert, and Lee 2011). Furthermore, TDS increased political knowledge in two demographics, the young and the highly educated (Cao 2008). Another complication arises when attempting to measure the effectiveness of the messaging in discursively integrated satire shows. A study of how audiences perceived Stephen Colbert’s satirical character raises questions about whether the intent of satirists is lost on audiences. An experiment suggested that young viewers did not understand Colbert’s satirical intent. The criticism implicit in his depiction of a right-wing blowhard pundit was lost; instead, they viewed Republican figures and positions more favorably after watching Colbert. Like many parodies, Colbert’s satire worked on two levels: a direct message (that he supports conservative views) and an indirect message (that the views of the pundits he is mocking are ridiculous) (Baumgartner and Morris 2008). The ambiguity in complex satire like that of Colbert has led audiences to draw different conclusions about the meaning of his parody based on viewers’ political leanings (LaMarre, Landreville, and Beam 2009). Audience members who self-identified as conservative took Colbert’s comments at face value and concluded that Colbert, too, was conservative. Liberals, on the other hand, took Colbert’s ultra-right-wing character as a joke and determined that his message was liberal. But conservatives and liberals both found the show to be funny. These findings support the idea that audiences see what they want to see when they find ambiguity in a political message.

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Aside from concerns about how effective satire shows like TDS and TCR might be in communicating a message or in enhancing viewer knowledge and voter participation, journalism scholars have raised concerns about the fact that there is no normative ethical standard for political satire. If satire is, indeed, ‘artful,’ establishing a standard for an art form would be futile. But scholar Lance R. Holbert has taken a normative theoretical approach to consider how political satire – as ‘a legitimate form of political communication’ (2013, 306) – should function. Holbert asks what role political satirists should play in public affairs and what are the ideal functions of their messages. This approach treats satire more like scholars treat journalism because normative theories are applied to journalism to establish ideal journalistic practices. Holbert asserts that this theoretical approach puts empirical studies of satire’s effects into better context because researchers could determine if their findings are good, bad or indifferent based on ideal effects of satire. Holbert (2013) evaluates political satire through the lens of competing concepts of democracy – republicanism, pluralism, and elitism – in the same way he suggests the news media can be evaluated. In a republican system, the media has three tasks that should be performed as positive norms: ‘to promote civic virtue; to expose corruption or the ulterior motives of those who wield influence in the marketplace of ideas; and to create space in which debate can properly take place’ (312). Scholars disagree on whether satire promotes civic virtue, some saying it promotes cynicism and others saying it promotes critical thinking that is valuable to democracy (Brewer and Marquardt 2007). Holbert states that political satire is good at uncovering political figures’ vice and corruption because of satire’s defining function of uncovering folly. On the third point, Holbert again finds that the academic literature is unclear about whether satire creates a space for debate that would ideally be ‘informed, objective, and inclusive’ (313). In a pluralistic democracy, in which different interest groups advocate their ideas, Holbert finds that satire is generally not compatible with pluralistic ideals. He says that instances in which Jon Stewart has advocated for certain ideas, such as when he went on CNN’s Crossfire to chastise the hosts for their style of debate, Stewart was not in his role as satirist. Furthermore, Holbert cites instances in which Stewart targeted liberal politicians as an example of how satirists can and should discuss public figures no matter what group they represent. Under an elitist ideal of democracy, satire functions in a normatively positive way because it lives up to elitist ideals: exposing corruption and advocating for institutions and the political system.

Jesters, fools and satire television Exposing corruption and absurdity in the political system has been the goal of satirists for millennia. The tradition of jesters and fools traces back centuries across continents and cultures (Fox 2011). The most important role of jesters is to call attention to folly in current social and political life. Jesters historically held a status unique in their cultures because they could speak truth much more openly with fewer consequences than other citizens, even when they targeted powerful government or church officials. Some European fools actually were highly educated and could comment on current events with a knowledge-based background (Fox 2011). Likewise, today’s satirists are freer than journalists to criticise, and satirists also use humor to illustrate public folly; therefore, a parallel is seen in the roles of jesters and today’s satirists (Fox 2011).

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But centuries of tradition aside, when satirists took up the mantle of the jester and began to skewer public officials on tightly controlled, highly homogenous television networks in the late 1960s, censors and network executives were shocked and perplexed. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour broke new ground for a comedy/variety show by skewering supporters of the war in Vietnam and daring to bring President Lyndon Johnson and later, Richard Nixon, to task for not ending the bloodshed (Muldaur and Muldaur 2002). The Smothers Brothers debuted on CBS as a variety entertainment show, featuring music and comedy sketches. As the Vietnam War and civil-rights movement escalated, The Smothers Brothers gradually developed its critical satirical voice (Muldaur and Muldaur 2002). The Smothers Brothers also featured ‘editorials’ with comedian Patrick Paulsen sitting at a desk reading from a script (Osborne-Thomson 2009). Paulsen was introduced by one of the Smothers brothers as ‘vice president’, suggesting that the character behind the desk represented not only the network news hegemony, but also political powers. His commentary was a parody that presented an absurdly callous viewpoint, particularly toward violence and the war. The Smothers brothers’ trouble with network censorship became common and was highly publicised (Danelo 2013). The more blatant the challenges to government policy and network standards, the worse the conflict with censors became until finally CBS canceled the show in 1969 (Feil 2014; Muldaur and Muldaur 2002). The program’s experimentation with satire carved a place for such commentary about serious issues, a place that would be inhabited more than thirty years later by TDS. Joining The Smothers Brothers was Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In a comedic variety skit show that featured political barbs and a liberal ideology. Both shows provided viewers with an alternative view on the news, and were at the time the only way viewers could get a fresh perspective on the political world. In the 1960s and 1970s, the news divisions of three major networks – NBC, CBS and ABC – were the gatekeepers of political information. They had a standardised, professionalised approach to news that left little room for dissent or alternative voices (Feil 2014; Muldaur and Muldaur 2002). Laugh-In was a fast-paced, mod style of vaudeville skit comedy that made quick quips about issues such as the Vietnam War and civil rights (Danelo 2013). The show presented skits that were sometimes anti-establishment, in a party atmosphere (Feil 2014). Despite its edginess, Laugh-In had broad appeal to various demographic groups and was NBC’s highest rated show in its second and third seasons (Feil 2014). The Laugh-In dance parties are seen by some scholars as detracting from its subversive quips because the silliness dulled the message (Gray et al. 2009). But the show proved that comedy that was satirical, edgy and youth-oriented could be successful. Laugh-In’s most enduring legacy is that one of its writers, Lorne Michaels, went on to develop Saturday Night Live, which entered its 42nd season in 2017.

Saturday Night Live Saturday Night Live was a hit from the moment it burst on to late night television (Reincheld 2006). Parodies of political figures and celebrities were central to the comedy sketch show, and these impressions have had an effect on politicians’ images (McClennen and Maisel 2014). Chevy Chase’s parody of a clumsy, bumbling President Gerald Ford is thought to have hurt Ford’s election chances in the 1976 presidential race (Compton

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2008). Saturday Night Live’s politician parodies have influenced politics to varying degrees depending on the election cycle. For example, the show had strong effect in 2000, capitalising on the personality quirks of presidential candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush, but had less of an effect in 2004, with less memorable parodies of the candidates (Voth 2008). Tina Fey’s 2008 hilarious and spot-on impersonations of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin resonated in the public sphere because the news media had been reluctant to criticise the under-qualified candidate (Michaud Wild 2015). Despite these forays into politics, Saturday Night Live (SNL) creator Lorne Michaels claims the show does not to have a political agenda (Jones 2009). The more popular SNL became over the years, the more producer Michaels presented ‘neutered’ political critiques in an effort to appeal to diverse audiences without offending their sensibilities (Gray et al. 2009). In its political parodies as well as in its recurring news parody segment ‘Weekend Update,’ SNL does not provide in-depth commentary on issues (Voth 2008). ‘Weekend Update’ has kept news parody in the public consciousness but generally has offered quickjab, superficial silliness instead of exploration of issues (Gray et al. 2009; Tally 2011).

Animation and late-night comedy After The Smothers Brothers and Laugh-In were off the air, the edgiest satire on television could be found less on variety shows and more in sit-coms, especially those created by producer Norman Lear. All in the Family (1971–1979), Maude (1972–1978) and Good Times (1974–1979) confronted hot-button issues such as racism and sexism. The 1980s saw less satire on television, but a new form of satire emerged with The Simpsons (1989 – present). The animated sitcom about an average American family sends up suburban and family life, and it led the way for edgier animated shows like Family Guy (1999-present), South Park (1997-present), and Lil’ Bush (2007-2008). Some political humor could also be found on late-night shows such as The Tonight Show (1962-present) and The Arsenio Hall Show (1989-1994) (Gray 2009). Although shows like SNL have long made fun of presidents’ mannerisms (Baym 2009), Bill Clinton’s scandalous affair with a White House intern and resulting impeachment in the mid1990s provided comedy gold that late-night comedians could not resist. The Clinton scandal dominated late-night television for years (Niven et al. 2003) and provided fodder for satirical animated shows like South Park (Jones 2009). Between Clinton saturation and the contested 2000 presidential election, politics and politicians occupied a considerable space in satire and comedy shows. The politicisation of comedy helped set the stage for TDS, and so did the state of television news in the late 20th century.

The eras of television news The surge of influential political satire shows in the 2000s has roots not only in preceding satirical comedies, but also in the evolving television news environment (Baym 2009). The evolution of television news can be understood best by dividing its history into three eras: the network news age, the cable news era and the current era of media fragmentation. Political satire’s history on television is traceable alongside that of news because satire reacts to the news media environment. The wall between news and entertainment divisions during the network age was based on limited outlets whose gatekeeping practices took place in an age during which news was not expected to be profitable, and there was

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little competition or room for ideas that blended entertainment and news. Information, commentary and debate from ‘unauthorised sources’ were not part of the network landscape (Baym 2009). On the other hand, defenders of shows such as TDS and TCR reason that informational media should no longer be based on an outdated network-era idea of news versus entertainment; instead, there is a continuum from pure news (fact-telling) to the carnivalesque (Baym 2009). Facts are facts, but exploration and context do not belong solely in the realm of the news media. Further fragmentation of media on the Internet has rendered a firewall between news and entertainment virtually impossible because there are so many sources of exploration and context of public issues. As competition for viewers – especially viewers in the younger demographic that appeal to advertisers – heated up, cable television channels became more open to taking risks than the networks had been, and they provided space for more experimental programming (Baym 2009). The politicisation of late-night comedy, plus the popularity of shows like SNL, were part of a convergence of once disparate genres, so a show that blended comedy, parody and current events seemed to be part of the natural tendency of hybridisation found in cable television (Baym 2009). The stage was set for Stewart and Colbert.

The Stewart/Colbert factor TDS made its on-air debut in 1996 as a parody of local news shows (Tally 2011). Tall, blond, handsome comedian and former sportscaster Craig Kilborn hosted the show and cultivated a smart-mouthed, fraternity-guy persona (Tally 2011). The news format provided a frame for jokes, and the show featured no politicians or politically oriented writers, and only one guest journalist appearance. Entertainers were the primary guests (Tally 2011). The show functioned more as a spoof than the political, media and social critique it would become under Stewart. Craig Kilborn left TDS to host CBS’ The Late, Late Show with Craig Kilborn (1999– 2004) (Keveney 2004). When Jon Stewart took over TDS, his persona contrasted with that of Kilborn. Stewart presented himself as a Woody Allen type – a short, neurotic, Jewish regular guy who used self-effacing humor to emphasize his regular-guy qualities (Tally 2011). Within a year, Stewart made his mark on the show with his candid and witty interviews with politicians, authors and journalists (Tally 2011). Criticism of television journalism became central to Jon Stewart’s mission (Tally 2011) and later became the basis for Colbert’s right-wing pundit character. Stewart summed up what he thought journalism ideally should do: You could create a paradigm of a media organization that is geared towards no bullshit – and do it actively – and stop pretending that we don’t know what’s going on. And stop pretending that it’s a right/left question. I don’t buy that the world is divided into bichromatic thought like tha (Young 2008, 247). Stewart played video of public figures speaking, then gave his own discourse in reaction. A dialogic contrast frequently featured on TDS (and TCR) was the juxtaposition of two clips of the same person speaking from different times that revealed public figures contradicting themselves. TDS has been described as a form of ‘alternative journalism’ (Baym 2005, 261) that uses satire to question power, parody to criticize the news media, and

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dialogue that promotes deliberation on public issues. Jon Stewart exercised his ideal of no-bullshit journalism because he did not attempt to display the type of objectivity many news organisations employ when they present the viewpoints of representatives from both sides of the political spectrum. The parodies were less interested in presenting each side in equal measure; instead, they pointed out absurdity wherever it may be found (Baym 2005). An example of this contrast between the parodies and mainstream news is the way they present public figures speaking. News shows conventionally play polished sound bites of politicians speaking fluently. TDS (and TCR), by contrast, often presented video of politicians stumbling over words and making gaffes (Baym 2005). Stewart (as well as Colbert) operated with an assumption that there is a common-sense reality that should be applied to public discourse. In the interest of objectivity, the mainstream television news media often avoids interrogating public figures with the type of common-sense logic that Stewart employed. Stewart presented his arguments alongside the statements of public figures, allowing the audience to compare and test the logic of both (Baym 2005). Some scholars and writers considered Jon Stewart to be a journalist in his own right, though Stewart always denied that his show was journalism (Pew Research Center 2008; Tally 2011). The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd called Stewart and Colbert ‘the Cronkite and Murrow of an ironic millennium’ (Dowd 2006). Stewart certainly had a direct influence on journalism, and made the critique of television news central to his show (Young 2008). Stewart’s criticism of CNN’s pundit show Crossfire led to its cancellation (Young 2008). Stewart wanted journalists to point out absurdities in politicians’ tendencies to evade tough questions with talking points. During an appearance on TDS, Stewart asked television journalism legend Ted Koppel if Koppel would be willing to abandon traditional notions of objectivity to call out politicians on their ‘BS,’ and Koppel responded, ‘no’ (Young 2008, 246). Whether Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were journalists in their own right, they played a role in supporting what traditionally has been considered good journalist practices because they criticised television news when it failed to live up to the profession’s ideals (Borden and Tew 2007). The comedians pointed out when the news media failed in its role as gatekeepers by focusing on the trivial and sensational. On the issue of factuality, Colbert and Stewart usually bought into television reporting as fact based, but the hosts criticised instances when journalists took facts out of context, or when a fact was subjected to radically different interpretations among the cable news networks (Borden and Tew 2007). And Stewart in particular often pointed out when journalists attempted to be objective to the point that they did not correct the record when they allowed the partisans they interviewed to misrepresent facts (Borden and Tew 2007). Jon Stewart’s show began a ‘new political television’ (Jones 2010) that counters fakery in politics and the media (Jones 2010). Stewart advocated for the news media to move away from bipartisan issue framing and to reject talking points in favor of critical inquiry. He wanted to ‘expose political spectacle’ for what it was, as opposed to participating in the spectacle, which he accused the news media of doing (Tally 2011; Young 2008). Because TDS and TCR did not approach objectivity in the same way as the news media, many studies of the shows’ content have attempted to determine whether the programs had partisan leanings. The results are far from uniform. For example, a content study from 2004 suggests that TDS took a more balanced approach in its criticism of both political sides than in either 2005 or 2007, the years examined in two other studies (Brewer and Marquardt 2007; Pew Research Center 2008; Young 2004) It is important

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to note that all three content analyses took place during a Republican administration. As one scholarly report states, ‘TDS . . . is generally thought to take a more liberal perspective. This is due in large part to the fact that it pokes fun at those in power and, until recently, the majority of those in power were conservatives’ (2008, 205). These comments echo the Pew report, which offers possible reasons for why Republicans were subject to more criticism than Democrats: One explanation is that the show’s writers and producers and Stewart himself are simply liberal, and in the course of offering their comedy are also offering their own political views. Another possibility is that the agenda is fundamentally more antiestablishment than anti-Republican. The party that controls the White House has the preponderance of power, and thus gets the preponderance of the satirical skewer (2004, 13).

Outside the box, outside the studio The idea of discursive integration is that various styles of communication – news, interviews, comedy, critical inquiry – are blended in satire shows like TDS and TCR. But in some cases, the performance does not end at the studio doors. Stephen Colbert was not on the studio set of his show when he gave perhaps his most controversial and celebrated performance. He raised eyebrows on both sides of the aisle in 2006 at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner when he performed in character and ripped into the Bush administration for issues such as the Hurricane Katrina response and the Iraq War, and into the news media assembled in the audience (Baym 2009). President George W. Bush became visibly angry during the performance, and the audience at times seemed shocked and confused about whether to applaud. Some of Colbert’s lines hit Bush and the media in one swipe: The president makes decisions; he’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people in the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check, and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you’ve got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know, fiction! (Baym 2009, 124). Some critics panned Stephen Colbert’s performance, but the public ate it up via viral videos. Colbert never confined his fictional character solely to his show. He testified in character on behalf of migrant farm workers in a 2010 sub-committee meeting of the House Judiciary Committee after having aired segments on his show in which he attempted to perform hard labor alongside the migrants (Jones, Baym, and Day 2012). He blurred the lines between a fictional character and real politics when he created a Super PAC and when he ran for president in his home state of South Carolina in 2008 (Hardy et al. 2014; Osborne-Thomson 2009). Stephen Colbert’s was not the first satirical presidential campaign to come out of a television show. Comedian Pat Paulsen, frequent guest on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, ran in 1968 (Osborne-Thomson 2009). Paulsen toyed with the real presidential candidates’ coy response to questions of whether they would run, and the comedian

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mocked their polished manipulation of the television medium. His clueless bumbling and slapstick humor contrasted with the grandiose images on the set surrounding him. He directly mocked stage-managed political appearances: After delivering a ‘fireside chat’ that was supposed to be from his own ‘common, ordinary home,’ a stage hand enters and tells him he has to leave the set so Nixon can use it (Osborne-Thomson 2009, 71). Paulsen’s fake candidacy looked beyond the pre-packaged, polished façade of the politicians and, in a serious moment, he told viewers: ‘I hope you will look for a candidate who offers the best hope of world peace and a man who is interested in equality and justice along with law and order’ (Osborne-Thomson 2009, 72). Stephen Colbert announced on TCR that he would run in his native South Carolina as both a Republican and a Democrat, during a deeply divisive 2008 election. Colbert parodied the excessive money in politics by blatantly accepting a campaign ‘sponsorship’ from Doritos. Fans quickly took to the Internet and began online petitions in an attempt to get Colbert on the ballot. Unlike Patrick Paulsen’s fake campaign, which took place exclusively on The Smothers Brothers, Colbert branched out beyond his Comedy Central show, writing an in-character guest column for The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Maureen Dowd, and appearing on Meet the Press (Osborne-Thomson 2009). These appearances illustrate how the mainstream media went along for the ride, engaging with Colbert’s character and bringing an air of legitimacy to his satire by allowing him to appear in respectable journalistic spaces. Both Paulsen and Colbert used their candidacies to parody the televisual, scripted, grandiose appearances of the serious candidates (Osborne-Thomson 2009). The theory of discursive integration is about blurring the lines between once-separated styles of communication. When satirists step outside the studio to perform and advocate for causes, another boundary is blurred, the one between television and reality. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that this theory also be applied to real-world action – satirists’ public performances or advocacy projects can be considered another element – along with the recurring elements of monologues, and field and studio interviews. For example, when Stephen Colbert broke his wrist in a fall while entertaining a TCR audience before a 2007 taping, he created rubber ‘WristStrong’ bracelets that were sold on the show’s website, with the proceeds going to The Yellow Ribbon Fund for wounded veterans (Silver 2010). Jon Stewart and Colbert also hosted the 2010 ‘Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’ in Washington, D.C., as a response to right-wing pundit and conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck’s ‘Restoring Honor’ rally. Stewart and Colbert’s event drew more than 200,000 participants (Tavernise and Stelter 2010). The performances did not support a particular candidate or party, but addressed frustration with perceived lack of action in Congress and countered the paranoia about the Affordable Care Act that ran rampant in far-right circles (Tavernise and Stelter 2010). The rally itself could be described as discursively integrated because it featured comedy, music and serious speeches. Neither Stewart nor Colbert likely will use the terms discursive integration to describe their comedy, but it fits well, and the world of satire is better for their efforts.

Conclusion American political satire television programs clearly can be explored using many theories or other critical and cultural approaches. Discursive integration, however, has great explanatory power for the look and sound, as well as the societal function, of such

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humor. The Colbert Report and The Daily Show brought together phenomena as old as the jester and as new as the tweet. The two programs effectively serve as exemplars of both modern political satire and discursive integration. Each blurs the traditional lines between factual news and fanciful pop culture entertainment. Each also helps audiences decode real meanings from the hubris often surrounding news accounts and thus may help viewers with informed self-governance. Studies of this television genre’s form, function and ability to influence its viewers are vital to understanding the overall picture of political communication in the twentyfirst century.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Source: Amanda Martin, Barbara K. Kaye and Mark D. Harmon (2018) ‘Silly meets serious: discursive integration and the Stewart/Colbert era’, Comedy Studies, 9:2, 120–137.

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Contributors Amanda Martin earned Bachelor of Arts degrees in writing communication and music, with a concentration in voice, from Maryville College, Maryville, TN. She completed her Master of Science degree in journalism and electronic media at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in May 2017.

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Barbara K. Kaye is Professor in the School of Journalism & Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee – Knoxville. She has co-authored three textbooks, published 70 journal articles and book chapters, and has twice been awarded a National Association of Television Program Executives Conference Fellowship. Mark D. Harmon is Professor in the School of Journalism & Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee – Knoxville. He also is a newspaper columnist, former TV news producer and former county commissioner.

Chapter 31

The comedian, the cat, and the activist: the politics of light seriousness and the (un)serious work of contemporary laughter (6:1) Ian Reilly

(Un)serious laughter In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious ([1905]1991), Freud presents a theory of laughter informed by the following observation – that ‘strictly speaking, we do not know what we are laughing at’ (146) – thereby introducing a degree of uncertainty into the social dynamics of how individuals and audiences are prompted to laugh. Do we laugh because we agree with the assumptions put forward by a joke or (joke-teller), or do we delight in the transgression of value systems and the breaking of taboos? To ascertain which part of a given joke prompts one to laugh (the technique or the content) is not always a straightforward undertaking (Jelavich 2012, 24). For example, elsewhere, David Foster Wallace nicely encapsulates the challenges college students have in appreciating and apprehending Kafka’s distinctly non-American humour. As Wallace explains, Kafka is more or less inaccessible in this regard because observers of contemporary humour have been ‘trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance’ (1998, 26); more specifically, they have been taught to see humour as something one ‘gets’. It is in response to these uncertainties that I present three prominent examples of contemporary humour that crystallize Freud’s problematic that we may still not know what we are laughing at, and Wallace’s concern that (in the company of certain writers and texts) we are ill-equipped to decipher the humour before us. Despite (and perhaps in light of) these ambiguities, I have selected three instances that present interpretive and hermeneutic challenges on the part of viewers, audiences and citizens. Drawing from Internet meme humour, situation/stand-up comedy and activist interventions, I explore the cultural significance surrounding the continued popularity of comedian–auteur/the ‘undisputed king of comedy’, Louis C.K.; the global success of an eight-bit meme depicting a half cat, half Pop Tart; and the unwavering hoaxing practices of the Yes Men, an activist duo author Naomi Klein has called the ‘Jonathan Swift[s] of the Jackass generation’. It is quite likely that readers of this text will be unfamiliar with these examples and unclear as to why these case studies figure in the discussion to follow. As I will argue, the comedian, the cat and the activists offer a compelling point of departure from which to explore modes of laughter that shed light on some of the defining features and dynamics at play within the realm of contemporary humour. These are texts that belie a degree or quality of unseriousness at the same time that they demand to be taken seriously.

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Laughter and/as un/work In a recent book, Laughter: Notes on a Passion (2010), Anca Parvulescu abandons the age-old question of what makes people laugh in favour of exploring ‘the burst of laughter itself’ (3). Her work seeks to pinpoint what the body looks like in laughter, to contemplate the sound(s) of laughter, to consider the moments and places in which laughter is produced, to examine what it means ‘for two or more people to laugh together’ (3) and to interrogate what kinds of subjects are produced in the act of laughing. Together, these larger questions underscore Parvulescu’s principal motivation: to explore the work or ‘unwork’ that laughter produces: ‘If laughter could be called a project, it would be a project against deep, heavy, oppressive seriousness’ (5). Not all seriousness need be cast in this light; for Parvulescu, heavy seriousness is tied to dogmatism, whereas light seriousness is associated with laughter (159). Following this line of inquiry, I extend her question regarding the unwork that laughter incites to include a more general discussion of seriousness and unseriousness in the interests of exploring the spaces, social dynamics, nuances and politics therein. When we laugh, we do not expressly think about how exactly our laughter materializes; laughter rarely encourages self-reflexive or meta-level thinking (Jelavich 2012, 24). When we pose the question – ‘What constitutes laughter?’ – we must begin, first and foremost, with an account of the body. As Martin describes, there are many physiological responses at play: To produce the distinctive sounds of laughter, we make use of a number of muscles that control our breathing, larynx, and vocal apparatus. . . . Following a laughter bout, a quick inhalation occurs, filling the lungs once again to normal capacity. . . . Due to this unusual amount of expiration, laughter produces a greatly increased breathing amplitude, up to 2.5 times greater than that which occurs during normal breathing. (2007, 159) At the physiological level, various muscles are summoned; the lungs are engaged; inhalation and expiration influence the scale of laughter and so on. In terms of my own laughter, I am often aware of both superficial and authentic modes of laughter. At a biological level, I associate any laughter projected from my lungs as more or less superficial, and any laughter emanating from the pit of my stomach as authentic. This distinction may prove artificial in both scientific and cultural terms, but it does seem a good example for measuring the scale of one’s laughter (deep vs. shallow). Laughter is often cast in serious and unserious terms. As Woody Allen once quipped, ‘I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.’ Perhaps more crudely, Louis C.K. paints this picture in reverse, drawing on the body as a source of laughter: ‘You don’t have to be smart to laugh at farts, but you have to be stupid not to.’ Of course, laughter is also in the business of producing sounds – some delightful, some dreadful, some benign – and the propulsion of these sounds can impact the way we see ourselves and others. Consider Lord Chesterfield’s views on the subject from the seventeenth century: Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill manners . . . . In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter . . . how low and

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unbecoming a thing laughter is. Not to mention the disagreeable noise it makes, and the shocking distortion of the face it occasions. (as quoted in Morreall [1983, 87]) For Lord Chesterfield, laughter is something to contain and control; he even delights in his mastery of not ever letting a single person hear him laugh (a feat made possible by his full use of reason). This tradition of scorning laughter comes up again, most notably in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). As Holden Caulfield bemoans, ‘I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I’d probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up’ (134). Laughter can thus prove a source of embarrassment or pride and can influence social dynamics in a number of cultural settings. Allen, C.K., Chesterfield and Caulfield all signal the anxieties and possibilities that inform the burst of laughter, bringing questions of (un)seriousness and propriety to the fore. If laughter can just as easily produce painful forms of self-reflexivity as it can the expression of positive perspectives, it begs the question of why exactly humans laugh. In The Will to Power (1968), Nietzsche suggests that laughter is a human invention of sorts, created as a form of solace from the constant realm of human suffering: ‘[Human beings suffer] so deeply that [they] had to invent laughter’ (56). Nietzsche argues that the invention and cultivation of laughter was by no means an arbitrary exercise – laughter had to materialize out of necessity as part consolation, part coping mechanism. The seriousness of this project cannot be overlooked. It follows that imbalances in the social order give way to uneven power relations, thereby adding to some of the human suffering Nietzsche so powerfully describes. It is thus noteworthy that ‘from Plato to Aristotle, Descartes, and Hobbes, humour has been philosophically attributed to betraying and undermining hegemony and power relations’ (Stiles 2007, 56–57). As a powerful agent of laughter, humour functions as an important tool for those without access to power, autonomy or agency. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Freud would write that ‘humour is not resigned; it is rebellious’ ([1927]1990, 429). While the rebelliousness of humour is neither constant nor guaranteed, it can offer brief reprieves from the pressures, constraints and social strictures of contemporary life. In ‘The Laugh of No. 13’ (1994), Anna Tilroe describes ‘laughter [as] the most beautiful form of boundary transgression. It desecrates, shocks and liberates’ (146). The articulation of such a culture is especially crucial in societies that have been structured and organized as systems of oppression and exploitation; it is precisely due to these conditions that subversive forms of laughter espoused by the likes of feminist humourists have created models of empowerment that recognize and champion the value of (traditionally fetishized and objectified) female experience (Merrill 1988, 279). Echoing Nietzsche’s previous remark and reinforcing Tilroe’s affirmation, Critchley argues that ‘what goes on in humour is a form of liberation or elevation that expresses something essential to what Plessner calls “the humanity of the human”’ (2002, 9). Thus, to answer the larger question of why humans laugh is to engage in a broader examination of laughter’s expressly serious work as consolation, coping mechanism and an agent of rebellion, liberation and empowerment.

Serious unseriousness Given the mass profusion of entertaining texts across popular culture – those manufactured by the culture industries, along with the vast pockets of amateur production on the web – there is

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no shortage of humour in the world today. What is perhaps most interesting about the explosion of humour we are witnessing is how the confluence of amateur and professional content serves as an important barometer for understanding contemporary culture. As Lewis notes, how a culture deploys humour in relation to things like national disasters, political conflicts, parodies, reality TV shows, blog rants and talk show hosts provides insightful feedback on its health and vitality, or adversely, on its discord and devolution (2006, 7). Thus, it is fair to ask not only what makes us laugh, but also what we are laughing at. Of late, my content streams would suggest that Internet dog memes (Doge), satirical blogs (PhD Stress), post-academic ‘quarterlies’ (Nein), botched How-To videos (Burning My Hair Off), fake Twitter accounts (Tweet of God) and staple comedians (Louis C.K.) seem to be satisfying the demand for hilarious, odd and incongruous content. Content of this kind can range from serious, to more benign, to bordering on trivial. Both serious and unserious forms of humour represent an opportunity for individuals, (sub)cultural groups and social formations to express a politics of affirmation, denial or laissez-faire ideology. As Lewis explains: Humour can help us cope with problems or deny them, inform or misinform, express our most loving and most hateful feelings, embrace and attack, draws us to other people who share our values or fallaciously convince us that they do when they don’t. Beyond this, a joke can highlight a point or blow smoke on it, call attention to a problem or cover it up. Especially at times when what we’re joking about is important, the good news about humor (that it is absorbing, delightful, relaxing, and dismissive) is frequently also the bad news. (2006, 7–8) Lewis offers a nuanced account of how humour and laughter produce real constraints and possibilities within satirical forms of expression; as a dominant mode of criticism, satire has the capacity to put forward both critical perspectives, sometimes simultaneously. The politics we embrace in our responses to humour (affirmation, denial, laissez-faire) gives rise to broader expressions of seriousness and unseriousness in both public and private discourse. In the following three case studies, I set out to further contextualize the interpretive challenges tied to (un)serious humour while examining the un/work that laughter performs.

Louis C.K. and uncomfortable laughter Of the three examples selected, the first can be more readily engaged because the realm to which it belongs (stand-up comedy) and the comedian to whom I make reference (Louis C.K.) present a clear path to discussing contemporary humour and laughter. I want to briefly explore both the cultural form and the setting as a challenging milieu that continues to foster unpredictable and uneven modes of social and political discourse. C.K. is an interesting case study not only because he is a gifted comic with a broad fan base, but also due to the kind(s) of comedy he performs. For the purposes of this article, I will narrow the scope to two instances where C.K. transgresses social norms and expectations to produce what he would deem serious critical commentary on current social mores, behaviours and phenomena. In the first instance, I discuss C.K.’s meditations on technology/media use; in the second, I examine his televisual construction of gender politics through the hazing of a female comedy club heckler.

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C.K. first captured my attention in 2009 with a monologue on Conan, in which he laments the culture’s inability to grasp the awe and overall ‘awesomeness’ of the technological innovations of the current moment. As C.K. puts it, ‘we live in an amazing world and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots that don’t care’. The general thrust of his critique is that the unprecedented speed of media change and technological innovation has effectively spoiled consumers to the point where they are unable (if unwilling) to appreciate just how good they have it. At the core of his argument lies an ugly truth: that privileged (North) Americans have become so accustomed to, and reliant upon, the tools and affordances of modern technology that their expectations are not only skewed, but they have also become conditioned to seek instantaneous forms of gratification at every turn. In a simple jab, he mocks people who suffer the indignity of having to wait for data/information to load on their phones. As he quips, ‘Give it a second! It’s going to space, would you give it a second to get back from space?’ In another illuminating example, C.K. describes his first experience accessing the Internet on an airplane: There was [high speed] Internet on the airplane – that’s the newest thing that I know exists. And I’m sitting on the plane and they go, “Open up your laptop and you can go on the Internet,” and it’s fast. . . . and I’m watching YouTube clips. It’s amazing! I’m in an airplane and then it breaks down and they apologize. The Internet is not working and the guy next to me goes, “This is bullshit!” Like, how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only ten seconds ago. Here C.K. cleverly depicts the outrageous sense of entitlement the passenger feels to things he barely knew even existed. It is precisely this disconnect between a culture’s growing sense of entitlement – and its lack of reverence for the very things over which it obsesses – that C.K. wishes to highlight. In isolating this strain of human behaviour, C.K. carves out a space for critical reflection in which others might recalibrate their expectations regarding technology and perhaps even re-instil a sense of wonder in their everyday interactions with media. C.K.’s handling of technology in this instance is more or less even-handed: the satire is more easily absorbed because he is openly mocking a growing swath of the population and the topic is one of great interest. When C.K. tackles the topic of heckling, however, he is broaching terrain that is more likely to strain the interest or sympathy of his audience. What’s more, C.K. does not always hit his mark. One need only watch the first half of C.K.’s comedy series Louie’s ‘Heckler/Cop Movie’ episode (Season 1, Ep. 6), in which Louie (C.K.’s character on the show, a fictionalized version of himself) eviscerates a female heckler during a nightclub routine. For the uninitiated, Louie is interrupted on two occasions by a female member of the audience and proceeds to humiliate and dehumanize an otherwise harmless heckler in front of the simulated live audience (as well as his television-viewing and Internet-streaming fan base). His first joke situates her as a participant on a float in a ‘parade of stupid cunts’; he jokes that she would have never been born had her mother never raped a homeless Chinese man; he asks her to die of Aids; he states that the hospital staff responsible for delivering her as a baby should be sued for medical malpractice; he says that she is the worst thing that ever happened to America (above slavery, Pearl Harbour, and 9/11 combined); he calls her dead mother a whore and a cunt and he finishes his diatribe by repeatedly

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calling her a cunt. Upon leaving the comedy club, his fellow comics (all male) lend him their support by endorsing his course of action. Once he is confronted by the woman, Louie argues that a ‘good person’ would not, under any circumstance, interrupt a comic on stage. Because she so rudely interrupted him, Louie suggests that she must not be a good person, thereby warranting him full license to publicly humiliate her (‘That’s what happens [when you talk all night]!’). What makes this example so problematic is not merely to do with C.K.’s performance, but more to do with the fact that the scripted scene relies purely on artifice. It is well documented that C.K. accepted ‘an unheard-of deal’ from FX (a digital specialty channel) – ‘a tiny budget in exchange for total [artistic] control, to the point that Louis doesn’t even get notes from network executives’ (Nussbaum 1951). With full creative control of the show, C.K. is free to depict a scenario that acts as a cautionary tale to all comedy club spectators, citing that if you step out of line, you are open to the most vile and dehumanizing ridicule conceivable. No stranger to voicing his supreme dislike of hecklers and vocal members of the audience, C.K. uses this scene to educate, civilize and discipline his (future) audience. If the goal is to produce a preferred mode of participation on the part of the audience, so be it – there are a number of ways to go about doing this. That C.K. relies on jokes depicting rape, racism, illness, sexual deviance, national tragedy and misogyny is alarming. There is certainly no shortage of this brand of humour online. Due in large part to the anonymity afforded everyday users, the Internet has given rise to a broad range of flaming websites dedicated to the less-than-noble enterprise of cutting people down and/or destroying an individual’s reputation (a veritable feature of contemporary web culture). More than this, sites like YouTube are brimming with videos dedicated to stand-up comics taming and humiliating hecklers, with varying degrees of success (see Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks, Mitch Hedberg and Michael Richards, to name but a few). While apologists might dismiss Louie’s heckler scene as a comedian’s flight of hyperbolic fancy, the scene goes too far in dehumanizing its female victim, and more than this, never affords her the opportunity to put forward a legitimate rebuttal. Instead, Louie explains to the young woman that she has no right to interrupt the (male) comic on stage: when you take that moment away from him, you are committing a horrible act that robs the comedian of his agency and any purchase he might have on happiness. The sanctity and sanctimoniousness of the comedian’s higher office, it would seem, should be preserved at all cost. One lingering critique of Freud’s writings on humour is that he essentializes the passive role of the woman and presents the aggressive behaviour of the man as natural (conduct which today would be referred to as sexual harassment) (Kotthoff 2006, 17). Here C.K. fits this profile to the letter: the string of derogatory jokes presented in this scene needlessly dehumanizes and objectifies the woman, leaving her no opportunities to meaningfully respond to her oppressor. Even in the most generative of contexts, jokes often stop short, merely allowing women to vent frustrations; as Bing argues, ‘they suggest no alternatives to the source of the frustration [oppression], and may even allow women to better tolerate an intolerable situation’ (2004, 24). Here the woman is cast as mere foil to the comedian with the microphone. This scene is equally problematic because C.K. crafts the performance to antagonize and provoke his audience. To critique him for an ignorant misstep would be to misunderestimate the painstaking care and attention he brings to each aspect of his work. In a recent email to his devoted fan base, C.K. paints the comedy club as a space where ‘no one here is being responsible’ and a milieu in which these kinds of interactions are only

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possible ‘when we are DONE working and being citizens’ (Haglun 2015). It is under this guise that gender politics are deliberately cast aside in the interests of indulging the comedian’s celebration of the profession and his preferred dwelling. The satirist’s work often shifts from the comic to the ridiculous, and from the satiric to the nihilistic, a disposition that leaves the audience on very shaky ground. Ultimately, the simultaneity of, and the interplay between, the comic/ridiculous and the satiric/nihilistic produce what Thomson calls ‘radical ambivalence’ (1985, 149). Elsewhere, Critchley reminds us that ‘it is important to recognize that not all humour [is critical of power], and most of the best jokes are fairly reactionary or, at best, simply serve to reinforce social consensus’ (2002, 11). As I have shown, these radical ambivalences are at the very heart of C.K.’s performances, a feature that should incite audiences to contemplate both the serious, generative and destructive dimensions of his comedy, leaving ample room for contestation, deliberation, acceptance or indifference. These two examples typify the unevenness of some of C.K.’s work in producing both serious and uncomfortable forms of laughter.

Nyan Cat and trivial laughter No matter the time of day, season or year, the Internet remains a veritable clearing house for trivial content. That is not to say that the Internet is home only to trivial things, but that the Internet is undoubtedly a safe haven for information and data of this stripe. When poet Charles Bukowski writes that ‘people are strange: they are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice’ (1992, 167), he may very well have anticipated the dominant logic of media consumption and social interaction in the mainstreaming of Internet culture. In frequenting any number of the Internet’s most visited websites, one immediately notes that information streams are arguably best characterized by content offering little to no decipherable intellectual reward. Of course, Internet cats, celebrity gossip, text message Tumblrs, juvenile memes, parodic send-ups and Twitter misfires reward us in different ways, appealing to our affective selves and engaging our sensorium in a wide array of registers. It’s not all bad, of course, and these manifestations of our pervasive visual culture provide muchneeded entertainment outlets for Internet dwellers. The ubiquity and primacy of these texts, however, present us with an interesting problem or quandary. As Magill argues, ‘A culture falsely enthusiastic over the trivial is ironically expressing the dead energy of loftier political ideology’ (2007, 40). The question of whether Internet users in 2015 are ‘falsely enthusiastic over the trivial’ is one I am ill equipped to answer, but the notion that enthusiasm for the trivial has the potential to trump engagement with ‘loftier political ideology’ is one that warrants further exploration. On the one hand, it seems reasonable to accept that an individual’s overt fascination with trivial matters would work to diminish one’s engagement with more serious issues (e.g., Why contemplate the plight of Syrians embroiled in a civil war when you can relish the hilarity of a site like animalsbeingdicks.com?); on the other hand, it would be a mistake to assume that (1) all users spend all their time online consuming trivial bits of information and that (2) the serious facets of their lives do not connect or correspond in any meaningful way to their entertainment streams. Indeed, over the past 10 years, media and communication scholars have produced an impressive body of work that identifies just how seamless the interactions between so-called serious and entertaining discourses can be (see

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Day 2011; Jones 2010; Delli Carpini and Williams 2011). The terms that have appeared are wide ranging and variable: ‘entertaining politics’, ‘infotainment’, ‘edutainment’ and so on. Needless to say, the sheer ubiquity of trivial content on the web problematizes the role humour plays in these instances. There is perhaps no better contemporary example from which to unpack these ideas than Nyan Cat. For the uninitiated, ‘Nyan Cat, also known as Pop Tart Cat, is an 8-bit animation depicting a cat with the body of a cherry pop tart flying through outer space’ (Nyan Cat/Pop Tart Cat 2011). In terms of audience, the original 3-minute flash loop animation of a Pop Tart Cat joyfully navigating through space has garnered over 117 million views, with a 10-hour version attracting upwards of 38 million views. At the first blush, Nyan Cat is the most perfect emblem of Internet visual culture: humorous, weird, quirky, intangible, spreadable and ubiquitous. In April, 2011 flying kittens and pastry cats added nothing new to visual culture on the web (they had already been around for some time), but as Know Your Meme makes clear that the combination of a pre-existing GIF animation with the ingenious looping of the well-known Vocaloid song (‘Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya’ by Japanese artist Daniwell-P) represented the perfect storm for a global Internet sensation. The video quickly spread across the most popular platforms on the web – Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter – and on tastemaker sites like Buzzfeed, Tosh.0 and CollegeHumor. Nyan Cat would soon after spread its tentacles elsewhere, • • • • • •

appearing in a Sprint commercial; accompanying Slipknot in its ‘Psychosocial’ music video; populating many online games; punctuating the architecture of many web browsers (the Nyan Cat progress bar); inspiring a host of musical covers (from metal to orchestral); and spurring the creation of countless other memes.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the meme’s larger cultural influence. A Google search of the term ‘Nyan Cat’ yields approximately 9,330,000 results; not to be outdone, a YouTube search produces 345,000 hits. As an outrageously successful meme, this text has spawned a host of replicators and adapters, ensuring for a short time its continued survival in a web culture that relishes and delights in novelty. However, what if anything at all, does Nyan Cat teach us about the dynamics of humour or laughter? There is no mistaking that either the visuals or sounds depicted in the video – or some combination of the two – produces genuine laughter. The kind(s) of laughter produced is contingent on a number of personal, social and experiential factors, but the general idea is that Nyan Cat has the capacity to generate laughter. Whether one laughs out of genuine connection (‘That’s funny!’), keen interest (‘This, I like!’), mild amusement (‘That’s not so bad . . .’) and/or genuine confusion or disbelief (‘WTF?!’), the video speaks to some of the more ambiguous outcomes of humour. Is the purpose of Pop Tart Cat to serve as pure entertainment and amusement? If the goal is to amuse, watching a cat leave a trail of rainbows while singing a ridiculous-sounding song certainly comes close. In framing the meme in this fashion, the text materializes as a more-or-less trivial blip on the pop culture radar and/or as mere fodder for the Internet masses. Once we have effectively shored up the meme’s entertainment function, the only difference between Nyan Cat and any other meme-of-the-day is the number of Internet users who have seen, responded to or recirculated the original.

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Importantly, not all online cultural activities need be cast as trivial or purposeless. For example, Stiles’ praise of ‘goofing-off’ is wholly appropriate to this discussion. It is precisely through goofing-off, she writes, that one is afforded the critical distance from which to recognize both the ‘illusory dimension’ and wonder of worldly objects and events (2007, 52). The fever pitch of Nyan Cat’s popularity cannot be dismissed out of hand as mere goofing-off due in large part to the social dynamics at work in its widespread circulation: the meme has been reproduced in countless formats across numerous platforms, speaking to its vaunted place within broader mimetic activities and participatory practices. The cat has morphed into dogs, unicorns, bananas, Legos, Vegemite, Batman, Super Mario, Homer Simpson, Lady Gaga, Guy Fawkes and Hitler, among others. Although these manifestations spread on a micro basis, their impact registers at the macro level, in that they shape the mindsets, forms of behaviours and actions of social groups (Knobel and Lankshear 2007, 199). Taking the popularity of Nyan Cat at face value – and positioning the meme as a significant instance of contemporary humour – we can begin to address the work on its own terms. As Phillips writes, memes of this ilk serve as excellent barometers for evaluating the function, logic and reach of Internet humour: Jokes are directly reflective of the communities out of which they emerge, which themselves are directly reflective of the cultural logics that undergird their formation. By working backwards from joke to community to culture, it is therefore possible to understand just how enmeshed our utterances really are – for better and for worse. (2013) Thus, to fully appreciate the merits of the Nyan Cat meme, one must move from joke (original meme) to community (Internet replicators and adaptors) to culture (meme/ Internet culture). As Shifman has argued, Nyan Cat-like memes help explain in part the social logic of participation that underpins meme creation, consumption and distribution, an all-toopowerful demonstration of ‘an enduring human longing for communality’ (2014, 33). Understanding the strange social dynamics pushing this phenomenon forward, the comedy duo, the Fine Brothers produced two accompanying videos (totalling over 30 million views): ‘Elders React to Nyan Cat’ and ‘Kids React to Nyan Cat’. In soliciting responses from ‘kids’ and ‘elders’ who watch the video in real time, the video makers are able to tap into the varied responses of two divergent sets of perspectives. What is perhaps most remarkable, however, is the overlap in their responses; the video is largely embraced as being funny or dismissed as being irritating. Again, many of the children and adults interviewed express their bewilderment and confusion. What is the point, they ask? Does this brand of Internet humour produce moments of fleeting laughter that, like the text itself, are destined to dissolve into the ether? Or, more productively, does the absurd and surreal quality of the meme produce laughter that inspires others to keep it going? As parody scholars have long argued, to replicate or adapt is to reinforce the legitimacy of the original and, to a lesser extent, to pay homage to the source text (see Gray 2006; Hutcheon 1985). When, in this instance, the original produces ambiguous responses regarding the kinds of laughter it generates, the difficulties of ascertaining the work and unwork of the text are palpable. What is clear is that the humour present in Nyan Cat (and in memes more generally) has inspired powerful ‘hypermemetic’ and social contexts from which to discuss how laughter produces sweeping creative practices and sharing

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communities. Popular and serious accounts of meme culture can be bridged, tying seemingly mundane artefacts to shared cultural norms and values (Shifman 2014, 15).

The Yes Lab and activist laughter One final example warrants attention for both the work and unwork that humour performs: media activism. To do this, I turn to the parodic and satirical pranking pioneered by media hoaxers, the Yes Men. As highly visible activist practitioners of satire, the Yes Men have made a career of leveraging humour as a powerful vehicle for exploiting flaws in the institutional structure, organization and logic of corporations, governments and mainstream media. Their construction of ironic, parodic and satiric spectacles has served to draw attention to various causes and sites of struggle and to create opportunities for dissenting perspectives to register with broader publics (Reilly 2013). Of late, the Yes Men have begun to offer a more hands-on approach to training others in their headline provoking methods. They call this new venture the Yes Lab for Creative Activism, an organization devoted to mentoring already emboldened groups in the hijacking of dominant news media, all the while demonstrating the tangible means through which satire can serve to bridge critique, reform and social change. Through these methods, partnering groups such as Avaaz, Greenpeace and the Occupy movement have accelerated the rate at which these and other timely critiques emerge in the public sphere. Indeed, for such groups/organizations to learn and re-deploy Yes Men-style tactics has meant a greater degree of visibility for causes and issues that do not traditionally penetrate the gatekeeping establishment and has led to an influx of ethically motivated pranks across mainstream news media. If as Magill suggests, ‘ironic critique has grown into the dominant operative strategy of social criticism in popular culture over the past decade [and that] it seems at times an alternative, in our cosmopolitan minds, to actual revolution’ (2007, x), then the Yes Men provide a compelling rebuttal that irony, satire, parody, humour and laughter can all be summoned in the interests of spurring revolutionary actions. Despite the tenuous outcomes tied to the use of satire as a political tool, the group continues to subscribe to the notion that ‘the main power that we try to exploit is the humour. Doing things that make people laugh. It’s the sugarcoating that gets people in the door’ (‘Interview’). In working with long-standing activist organizations such as Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network, the Yes Men have presented a model in which humour and laughter (are meant to) serve as the catalysts for generating greater interest in politics on the ground. A brief overview of a recent Yes Lab action will illustrate the tensions that currently underpin the seriousness of interventions of this kind.

Chevron’s ‘We Agree’ campaign When Chevron, a multinational energy company and one of the largest corporations in the world, engaged in an elaborate $80 million greenwashing campaign in 2012, members of the Yes Lab anticipated and pre-empted its dissemination with a campaign of its own. In it, they thoroughly outed, mocked and satirized the campaign across the web, pointing to the corporation’s misdeeds – its human rights abuses in Kazakhstan, Burma, Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon, as well as its massive two decades-long toxic dumping initiative in Ecuador. For ‘We Agree’, Chevron solicited Internet users to participate in a social media campaign designed to strip away the possible misconception that big oil

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companies and the general public share little to no common ground. The homepage is populated with a diverse group of airbrushed faces: everyday women, children and men. They are presented as belonging to an international community of global citizens concerned with pressing questions regarding the ways in which oil companies both act and function. ‘The World Needs More Than Oil’, one advertisement reads. ‘We Need To Start Building Again’, a second advertisement states. Yet another proclaims that ‘Oil Companies Should Support the Communities They’re A Part Of’. The Yes Lab would counter before Chevron’s official launch with their own fake ‘We Agree’ website, complete with four ‘improved’ advertisements and a press release explaining the company’s bold new direction: ‘We’re telling truths no one usually tells. We’re changing the way the whole industry speaks.’ The fake website would closely mirror the parent site, offering no discernible differences between the two, save the explicitly truthful and political tone of the advertisements. For unsuspecting onlookers, the slick website, press releases and advertisements would be enough to convince the first wave of visitors that the launch was legitimate and was part of Chevron’s newly aggressive stance towards corporate social responsibility. Visitors to the site would first bear witness to the following statement: ‘For decades, oil companies like ours have worked in disadvantaged areas, influencing policy in order to do there what we can’t do at home. It’s time this changed.’ In a bold step, Chevron alludes to wrongdoing and takes full responsibility for its past mistakes. The bold truths alluded to in the press release were reinforced through the depiction of four bold advertisements, each with their own taglines: • • • •

Oil Companies Should Clean Up Their Messes Oil Companies Should Fix The Problems They Create Oil Companies Should Put Safety First It’s Time Oil Companies Stop Endangering Lives

As with any good hoax, unsuspecting critics and journalists were quickly taken in by the prank. Noting the too-good-to-be-true tone of the announcement, one journalist reflects on his failure to catch the hoax from the outset: ‘In retrospect, it does seem ridiculous that any oil company would take such aggressive responsibility for oil spills, poor industry safety, and exploitation of foreign resources’ (Zax 2010). What ensued was a kind of back-and-forth between activists and corporate PR personnel, the former side arguing that Chevron was prioritizing high-priced glossy advertisements over positive operational reforms, with the latter side expressing the basic need to find common ground with everyday people. It is understandable to see how both sides of this greater divide should reach an impasse. Big oil companies like Chevron are well aware of their detractors’ activities. The current impasse might be described as such: activists are calling for major reforms in the ways multinational corporations do business and corporations are loath to concede to any demands if they work against their bottom line. The ‘We Agree’ debacle raises an interesting set of questions surrounding these kinds of strained relations. If both sides continue unabated in their ways, there is very little room for productive dialogue and little to no room for future trust or collaboration. Consider this telling reaction to the hoax from Dave Samson, General Manager of Public Affairs for Chevron: ‘Most businesses know they will always have their critics, but I think many companies would choose to engage with people who see benefit in having a meaningful dialogue versus those who simply

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resort to worn-out rhetoric and stunts’ (Ford 2010). Here Samson refers to the goodwill his employer brings to the table only to see it undercut by ‘worn-out rhetoric and stunts’ that serve to detract from the real conversation they wish to have. For Chevron spokesperson Morgan Crinklaw, ‘Yesterday’s stunt shows that there are groups out there that are not interested in moving forward responsibly together’. Indeed, the activists see Chevron acting in poor faith, spending dozens of millions of dollars to distract the public from the global horrors it has created. While sympathetic onlookers might relish the public shaming of a much maligned corporation, stunts of this kind may have the adverse effect of pushing these interests toward lesser and lesser compliance to the ethical ideals proposed. As Billig asserts, laughter communicates appreciation and amusement; unlaughter, disapproval and unamusement (2005, 192). Here, then, is the bind: the Yes Lab’s critique may very well be accurate, ethical and warranted, but it is worth asking whether interventions of this kind – engineered to publicly embarrass the company produce – a desirable effect. Does ‘conflict humour’ of this kind only enjoy limited power during its first wave of visibility or during a social movement’s period of ascendancy (Hiller 1983, 263)? Do hoaxes engineered to humiliate a corporation inspire the target to reform its ways, or does the act work merely to express a political position meant to galvanize the public towards greater mobilization? Do citizens tangibly benefit from the knowledge that powerful institutions such as Chevron go to great lengths to dismantle labour rights and environmental protections? Regrettably, Chevron has not reformed its ways and it remains to be seen whether hoaxes of this nature inspire greater political action on the part of everyday citizens. What is evident is that these actions are inspiring activists and organizations to adopt these tactics in larger awareness campaigns. Humour may hold ‘a powerful potential in facilitating outreach and mobilization, a culture of resistance and turning oppression upside down’ (Sorensen 2008, 185), but this case study raises the thornier question of whether pranks of this kind create an even greater rift between activists and corporations, deepening the mistrust both feel towards the other. If corporations are legitimately attempting to make the changes they publicize, are these pranks merely undercutting the company’s desire to do well by those they have previously harmed? In deploying humour in these instances, the Yes Lab simultaneously pushes to galvanize and expand its base while further alienating its target. The seriousness of the issues registers loudly from both sides (corporate profit and social justice), but the use of serious humour and the kind(s) of laughter it produces do not appear to offer any tangible solutions.

The burst(s) of laughter In framing the present discussion in relation to the (un)seriousness at play across a range of popular humour examples, I have argued that there is much to learn in addressing both the work and unwork associated with these texts. In this article, I have argued that laughter can be confounding and joyous and random and can unlock creative channels that may otherwise remain dormant; it can bring disparate groups together (both online and offline) and can momentarily spark the imagination of various Internet communities, such as in the case of Nyan Cat. Laughter can be paradoxical: it can work to dismantle fixed, narrow views, but it can also reinforce pervasive and oppressive ideologies, thereby shoring up the status quo, as we see in the case of Louis C.K./Louie. Finally, as the Yes Lab demonstrates, laughter can also politicize individuals, social groups and publics in

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such a way as to enlist them in the service of social justice issues at the same time that it can work to create increasing divides between already antagonistic groups. If the present discussion has anything to teach us about contemporary humour, it may be that laughter is the site through which ‘deep, heavy, oppressive seriousness” operates in tandem with (or alongside) other forms of ‘light seriousness’ (Parvulescu 2010, 5). The bursts of laughter incited by the serious and unserious humour of the moment introduce complex tensions within the realm of representation, cultural production and activism. The serious and unserious are not so readily disentangled and this entanglement enriches our engagement with the politics of contemporary humour and laughter.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Source: Ian Reilly (2015) ‘The comedian, the cat, and the activist: the politics of light seriousness and the (un)serious work of contemporary laughter’, Comedy Studies, 6:1, 49–62.

References Billig, Michael. 2005. Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour. London: Sage. Bing, Janet. 2004. “Is Feminist Humor an Oxymoron?” Women and Language 27 (1): 22–33. Bukowski, Charles. 1992. The Last Night of the Earth Poems. New York: Black Sparrow Press. Critchley, Simon. 2002. On Humour. London: Routledge. Day, Amber. 2011. Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Delli Carpini, Michael X. and Bruce A. Williams. 2011. After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ford, Sam. 2010. “Hoaxes and the Chevron Debacle.” Fast Company, October 27. http://www.fas tcompany.com/1697987/hoaxes-and-chevron-debacle. Freud, Sigmund. ([1905]1991) Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund. ([1927]1990) “Humour.” In Art and Literature, 427–433. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gray, Jonathan. 2006. Watching with the Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. London: Routledge. Haglun, David. 2015. “Half-Truths, Non-truths, and Louis C.K.” The New Yorker, January 28. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/louis-ck-comedy-philosophy. Hiller, Harry. H. 1983. “Humor and Hostility: A Neglected Aspect of Social Movement Analysis.” Qualitative Sociology 6 (3): 255–265. Hutcheon, Linda. 1985. Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen. Jelavich, Peter. 2012. “When Are Jewish Jokes No Longer Funny? Ethnic Humour in Imperial and Republican Berlin.” In The Politics of Humour: Laughter, Inclusion, and Exclusion in the Twentieth Century, edited by Martina Kessel and Patrick Merziger, 22–51. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jones, Jeffrey. 2010. Entertaining Politics: Satiric Television and Political Engagement. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Knobel, Michele, and Colin Lankshear. 2007. “Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production.” In A New Literacies Sampler, edited by Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, 199–227. New York: Peter Lang.

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Kotthoff, Helga. 2006. “Gender and Humor: The State of the Art.” Journal of Pragmatics 38: 4–25. Lewis, Paul. 2006. Cracking up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Magill, R. Jay. 2007. Chic Ironic Bitterness. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Martin, Rod A. 2007. Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach. Burlington, MA: Elsevier Academic Press. Merrill, Lisa. 1988. “Feminist Humor, Rebellious and Self-Affirming,” Women’s Studies 15: 271–280. Morreall, John. 1983. Taking Laughter Seriously. New York: State University Press of New York. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter A. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books. Nussbaum, Emily. 2012. “Black and Blue: The Bruised Hilarity of ‘Louie’ and ‘Episodes.’” The New Yorker, July 19. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/09/black-and-blue–3. “Nyan Cat/Pop Tart Cat.” 2011. Know Your Meme. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nyan-catpop-tart-cat. Parvulescu, Anca. 2010. Laughter: Notes on a Passion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Phillips, Whitney. 2013. “Dissecting the Frog.” The New Inquiry, April 8. http://thenewinquiry. com/essays/dissecting-the-frog/ Reilly, Ian. 2013. “From Critique to Mobilization: The Yes Men and the Utopian Politics of Satirical Fake News.” International Journal of Communication 7: 1243–1264. Salinger, J.D. 1951. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston, MA: Little Brown. Schjeldahl, Peter. 1991. “Ed Ruscha: Traffic and Laughter.” In The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978 1990, edited by Malin Wilson, 239–247. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shifman, Limor. 2014. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sorensen, M. J. 2008. “Humor As a Serious Strategy of Nonviolent Resistance to Oppression.” Peace & Change 33: 167–190. Stiles, Kristine. 2007. “Fluxus Performance and Humour.” In The Artist’s Joke, edited by Jennifer Higgie, 52–58. London: MIT Press. Thomson, Philip J. 1985. Comic Relations: Studies in the Comic, Satire, and Parody. New York: Peter Lang. Tilroe, A. 1994. “The Laugh of No. 13.” In The Artist’s Joke, edited by Jennifer Higgie, 144–148. London: MIT Press. Wallace, David F. 1998. “Laughing with Kafka.” Harper’s Magazine, July. http://harpers.org/arch ive/1998/07/laughing-with-kafka/ Zax, David. 2010. “Chevron’s New Ad Campaign is a Slick Yes Men Hoax.” Fast Company, October 18. http://www.fastcompany.com/1695892/chevrons-new-ad-campaign-slick-yes-men-hoax-update

Contributor Ian Reilly is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. His research explores the intersections of politics, humour, civic engagement, and media activism. His work has appeared in numerous publications and book collections; in 2012, he was awarded the Carl Bode Award for Outstanding Article published in the Journal of American Culture. His most recent monograph explores media hoaxing as an important twenty-first century cultural practice deployed by activists seeking to galvanize public opinion and to stir much needed political debate. He teaches courses about youth and media, internet politics, media criticism, visual culture, and telecommunications policy.

Chapter 32

Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen, and the seriousness of (mock) documentary (6:1) Cate Blouke

Introduction In January of 2005, a television reporter from Kazakhstan traveled across the USA, from New York to California, on a mission to document American culture for Kazakh viewers. Borat Sagdiyev and his producer Azamat Bagatov filmed interviews with a wide array of people (from retailers to politicians), asking them about American customs, products, and beliefs. In his broken and heavily accented English, Borat asked gun salesmen, ‘What is the best gun to defend from a Jew?’ and promptly received a recommendation for either a 9 millimeter or a 45. He asked car salesmen to suggest vehicles that would ‘attract a woman with shave down below’ (according to Jim Sell, a GM Salesman, a Corvette would do the trick). He also introduced traditional Kazakh customs to some of his interviewees, such as sharing cheese with Bob Barr (former Georgia Congressman), which Borat explained to Barr (after the Congressman had tasted the cheese), ‘My wife, she make this cheese. She make it from milk from her teat.’ At the time of the filming, Borat’s interviewees were unaware that Borat was also (already, as well) British comedian and television star, Sacha Baron Cohen.1 The film that subsequently emerged out of the interviews, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (hereafter BCL), was not (ever) released to an audience in Borat’s home country – as American participants had been led to believe it would be. The film also was not treated as a documentary in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, the film was touted as a comedy, and, after a limited release in the USA in November of 2006, it took off world-wide to great acclaim and commercial success – much to the dismay of those involved. With the backing of 20th Century Fox, the film became a media sensation, garnering an award nomination from the Golden Globes for Best Comedy, and named the Best Comedy Movie of 2006 by The Broadcast Film Critics Association. In addition, Cohen won a Golden Globe for Best Actor: Musical or Comedy that year, and received similar awards from numerous film critics’ associations. Nevertheless, Cohen rarely stepped out of character in his public appearances – extending the ‘joke’ well beyond the bounds of the film. It was Borat who appeared in interviews with news agencies such as CNN and Fox News, who made an appearance on The Tonight Show with David Letterman, and it was Borat who was awarded GQ Magazine’s Man of the Year Editor’s Special Award for 2006. In spite of such acclaim, the film also garnered accusations of racism, misogyny, and sheer vulgarity. Described by many as anti-Semitic, homophobic, and chauvinist, Borat espouses ideas and elicits interview responses that are nothing if not inflammatory and

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controversial. Many participants in the film later sought legal recourse, claiming they had been lied to and that the producers were guilty of fraud. Many groups found the film offensive, and the Kazakhstan Government complained of gross misrepresentation. BCL was banned completely in every Arab country, save Lebanon, and it failed to achieve certification for distribution in Russia (the first film since the 1980s to elicit such restrictions) (Meyers 2006). Granted widespread media coverage and eliciting candid responses from everyday people, Borat’s intrusion, of a ‘fictional’ character into the so-called ‘real world’,2 complicates any potential for dismissing Cohen’s performances as non-serious, un-real, or purely fictional. To write Borat or BCL off as not serious is to dismiss allegations of harm done and to stake a claim in superiority, in knowing better. Yet, how does one distinguish what is serious from that which is not? How do we know when someone is joking, when an utterance is (just) a joke? The answer certainly does not reside in language itself, so what is it that we read onto and around language that determines our response? This article extends a conversation about humor and offence taken up by editors Sharon Lockyer and Michael Pickering in their collection Beyond a Joke. They contend, ‘If a comic assault on someone’s sense of themselves as individual subjects, or on the sense of social and cultural identity of a particular social group or category, proves to have seriously damaging results and repercussions, we should take this seriously’ (2005, 4). Cohen’s performances have certainly had far-reaching implications for Kazakh identity, though the seriousness of the impact remains in question. By and large, the western media endorses Cohen’s antics as harmlessly comic, even though, to a certain extent, Kazakhs and the people he interviews do take his behavior quite seriously. By reading BCL and Cohen’s performances across the works of J.L. Austin, John Searle, and the poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida, this article will explore the concepts and implications of speech-act theory to address the problem of trying to draw clear distinctions between serious and non-serious uses of language and/or to hold them to different standards.

Borat and the battle of representation vs. reality Although the film was his most widespread media pageant, Borat first appeared on British television as part of Baron Cohen’s Da Ali G Show between 2000 and 2004, stirring controversy and legal battles well in advance of BCL’s filming and release. Borat’s invitation to host the 2005 MTV Europe Music Awards led to a denouncement by the Kazakh Government, claiming that Cohen’s representation of Kazakh culture was an ‘utterly unacceptable. . . concoction of bad taste and ill manners’ that was ‘designed to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way’ (Saunders 2007). The government of Kazakhstan threatened legal action if Cohen failed to cease his misrepresentations, and Borat subsequently replied to the Kazakh accusation via his ‘official’ website, condoning his government’s actions, claiming no affiliation ‘with Mr. Cohen and fully support[ing] [his] government’s decision to sue this Jew’ (Saunders 2007). The response resulted in the removal of Borat’s website from Kazakhstan’s servers, sparking accusations of government censorship and fueling the flames of controversy. For many, Cohen’s antics are serious business, not in the least just a joke. After BCL, Dharma Arthur, a television producer who gave Borat air time on a Jackson, Mississippi morning news segment, lost her job at the station and reported that the

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incident thrust her life into a downward spiral (Associated Press 2006). In addition, the Romanian villagers appearing in the film’s opening sequence (as citizens of Borat’s home town) were told that the film was to be a documentary of their hardship. Speaking little or no English, they had no idea that Borat was giving them titles such as the village ‘mechanic and abortionist’, or the ‘town rapist’. During the filming and production of BCL, the police were summoned 92 times (according to the film’s ‘trivia’ page on the Internet Movie Database), Borat nearly started a riot at a rodeo in Virginia, members of his crew spent the night in jail, and dozens of lawsuits were subsequently filed against Cohen and 20th Century Fox. Borat’s behaviors left people angry, hurt, and offended, even if for Cohen and much of the film’s audience, this was all just an elaborate joke. While Cohen’s representation of a disaffected hip-hop youth in his Ali G character from the TV series sparked more harsh criticism, condemned by several critics as a form of postmodern minstrelsy, the objections to Borat and BCL often fail to evoke as much public and academic empathy or concern. Pauline Carpenter points out that the power dynamics between American media and Kazakhstan serve to undermine or diminish critiques of Cohen’s representations. She notes how ‘negative responses to Borat by Kazakhstan have been presented in the western media as defensive and unaware of the actual intention of the film’ (2007, 20). Carpenter argues that from the perspective of American and British commentators, ‘Kazakhstan was not in on the joke and therefore could be seen as backwards, irrationally offended and their problem was that they did not “get it”’ (20). Similarly, facing the power and financial backing of a major motion picture corporation, none of the individual litigants (the people interviewed for the film) succeeded in their suits. Cohen’s various personas and his subversive approach to interviews illustrate how, although the boundaries between representation and reality, surface and substance, serious and non-serious have always been false binaries, the technologies now available are ushering in a heightened awareness of this instability. Cohen’s performances may convey some sense of ‘non-seriousness’ to the broader audience (of the show/movie) through the filmic medium, yet the people he interviews do seem to take him seriously – if, that is, we take ‘seriousness’3 in this case as a display of earnestness or sincerity. Many of his interlocutors patiently and earnestly explain mundane and (seemingly) obvious aspects of daily life, such as how to use the toilet or that in America ‘a woman has the right to choose who she has sex with’.4 In addition, as noted above, the Kazakh Government also took Borat seriously – here in terms of injury done – condemning Borat’s behaviors and threatening legal retribution. These bizarre interactions between Borat and the government of Kazakhstan generate a life for the character that exists beyond the confines of the film or television series. Just prior to the American release of BCL, Borat called an impromptu press conference outside the Kazakh Embassy in Washington DC. There, he made a statement responding to the Kazakh Government’s four-page advertisement placed in the New York Times and a meeting between Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev and President Bush (Snider 2006). Borat explained to several dozen reporters that: [R]ecent advertisments on television and in media about my nation of Kazakhstan, saying that women are treated equally, and that all religions are tolerated – these are disgusting fabrications. [. . .] part of a propoganda campaign against our country by evil nitwits Uzbekistan. [. . .] I must further say on behalf of my government, that if

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Uzbekistan do not desist from funding these attacks, [. . .] then we will be left with no alternative but to commence bombardment of their cities with our catapaults. (“Borat’s Statement” 2006) Although devoid of any official authority to call a press conference, and although (at this point) widely acknowledged as a phony, Borat nevertheless acted in the name of ‘his’ country and perpetuated the ‘hoax’ in a ‘real-world’ setting. His performance achieved international dissemination of an absurd statement by way of several conventionally serious news outlets. Borat thus crosses the boundaries between representation and reality – behavior that warrants serious consideration in spite of its farcical cloak. Perhaps as a result of the flagrantly vulgar (a three-minute long naked wrestling scene between Borat and Azamat) and the raucously offensive (Borat’s assertion to a group of feminists that women’s brains are ‘size of squirrel’) nature of BCL, however, popular journalists have been rampantly dismissive of complaints about the film, and few academics have analyzed the structural implications of Cohen’s works. Accused of ‘cater[ing] to the most prurient and sadistic elements of the human psyche’ (Saunders 2007), Cohen’s comedies have largely been discussed in terms of their content: issues surrounding attitudes of multiculturalism, otherness, anti-Americanism, national identity, the ethical considerations from a production standpoint, as well as assertions about the ‘true’ object of his satire. These accounts offer diverse readings of what it is that BCL does and who Cohen is or is not making fun of, yet they largely fail to consider his performances from a rhetorical perspective, thinking through the intriguing questions: how does he do it, why does it work, and what could it mean for our understanding of language and performance? The bizarre interaction between a ‘fictional character’ and a national government illustrates the crux of the Borat controversy – how Borat blurs the lines between many of the boundaries that both cannot and must be drawn in order for us to make sense of the world. Although widely labeled a ‘mockumentary’ (a genre of film that scripts narratives and characters within the recognizable conventions of documentary film), Cohen’s film is neither purely fictional, nor entirely ‘real.’ In an adopted persona whom he names Borat, he interviews people who are ostensibly just being themselves. Borat is working from a loosely scripted position, whereas the people he interacts with are not, nor are they aware of the adopted nature of his persona. As a result, Borat’s conversations model the dilemma of linguistic interaction in general: (how) can we tell when someone is being serious? To say ‘I was only joking’ is an act – of apology, of deferral, of excuse – evolving out of humor’s misfires. As Dennis Howitt and Kwame Owusu-Bempah argue, the ‘only joking’ excuse is a ‘rhetorical device’ often (and problematically) used to neutralize challenges to the underlying assumptions of racist jokes (2005, 48). Yet, the all-too-frequent necessity for us to qualify utterances as ‘just’ or ‘only’ jokes points not only toward the inherent volatility of humor but also to the fundamental nature of language itself: that mis-es (mistakes, misunderstandings, misinterpretations) are a structural possibility of language. Humor, or the so-called ‘non-serious’ use of language, shines a spotlight on this instability, and in making light of ‘serious’ subjects (be they people, objects, or concepts), humor has the potential to make people acutely uncomfortable. While we often turn to context and intention as the primary cues for reading an utterance as serious or not, speech act theory and post-structural approaches to language illustrate the problem of relying on these unstable markers.

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Speech acts and the inefficacies of context In the 1950s, J.L. Austin noted something he felt was not terribly new, but had nevertheless been largely overlooked or, at least, not attended to, in academic and philosophical discourse. Namely, Austin interested himself in the ways in which words do things rather than simply describe reality, words are active agents, effecting changes in the world around us. While this may seem rather obvious in the twenty-first century, and while Austin himself pointed out that this did not seem to be a huge revelation to anyone, the significant series of lectures collected in his volume How To Do Things With Words were the birthplace of much contemporary linguistic, philosophical, and theoretical discourse in the years to come. The notions Austin posits regarding the ways in which words are divided into ‘performative’ and ‘constative’ categories (and the way in which those categories ultimately cannot hold) have been the subject of conjecture, debate, and extrapolation, for decades. While later writers (such as Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, and Judith Butler) theorize the expansive implications of Austin’s notions of performativity, Austin’s lectures strive to tie the theory to concrete scenarios of ‘ordinary language use.’ Austin runs through a series of examples of ‘performative’ utterances – a name he selects to ‘indicate that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action – it is not normally thought of as just saying something’ (1962, 6–7). He draws on the examples of promising and the ‘I do’ spoken in a marriage ceremony as instances of spoken words performing an action. Walking through a detailed series of necessary conditions for what he dubs the ‘felicitous’ completion of these performative utterances, Austin explains, ‘it is always necessary that the circumstances in which the words are uttered should be in some way, or ways, appropriate’ (8). For example, in order for a marriage vow to take place, the affianced must not (in Christian tradition) be already married to another, and the person performing the ceremony must be endowed with the legal authority to do so. Although Austin works through a number of ways in which performative utterances might ‘misfire’ or suffer ‘abuse’ through the violation of appropriate conditions, his investigation ‘exclud[es] from consideration’ utterances said by actors or poets (1962, 22). Austin labels these sorts of utterances as ‘parasitical’ to normal language use and thus sets them aside as special cases for which his theory does not apply. By Austin’s standards, Borat’s utterances might be considered hollow or void, almost entirely infelicitous, and therefore not successful in a straightforward reading of performative utterances. But those labels fail to account for the effects that Borat nevertheless achieves. His press conference in which he ‘denounces,’ or ‘condemns’ the public relations campaign (more examples of performative speech acts) both adheres to and violates Austin’s doctrine of felicitous speech acts in a number of ways. The first criteria Austin offers for the performance of a successful or a ‘felicitous’ speech act is that ‘(A.1) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances’ (1962, 14). Press conferences are conventional procedures: a representative or individual reads a prepared statement, fields questions from the gathered members of the press, and the event then succeeds in eliciting publication and comment from the media. So far, so good – Borat’s press conference met the criteria sufficiently for the reporters to arrive and subsequently publish his statement. In this sense, the media (representatives of serious news outlets such as USA Today and the Daily Mail) take Borat

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seriously, publishing his statement just as they would publish that of an elected government official. Austin’s second criteria for felicity is that ‘(A.2) the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the particular procedure invoked’ (1962, 15). Here, Borat more clearly violates the criteria, as he was never granted official authority to speak for Kazakhstan, and was repeatedly rejected and condemned by the Kazakhstan Government. Yet, the media granted him audience and publication all the same. Austin explains that if, for some reason, the criteria of appropriate circumstance and position are not met, then ‘the act in question. . . is not successfully performed at all, does not come off, is not achieved’ (16). However, Cohen’s antics call attention to the loopholes in these criteria. Although, in theory, Borat has no official authority to hold a press conference or speak for Kazakhstan, the press tacitly validates his authority by both giving him audience and subsequently publishing his speech. The weight of the denouncement may be in question, and perhaps Uzbekistan saw no need to fortify their borders, but Borat’s press conference certainly took place and achieved the desired effect of garnering an audience. His threats may not have been taken seriously, and he may not have had any serious qualifications for making his assertions, but he was able to make them publicly and perpetuate the circulation of his version of Kazakh identity. Circumstances and conventions, it seems, are not as rigid as one might (like to) think, and a supposedly serious context is no guarantee against farce.5 If one is to address the ways in which an utterance (performative or otherwise) can go wrong, Austin urges consideration of ‘the total situation in which the utterance is issued— the total speech-act’ (1962, 52). For Austin (and later for John Searle), speech acts occur within ‘total’ contexts, the meaning and effects of performative utterances are determined (and determinable) by the situations immediately surrounding them. This approach urges an understanding of language (and the world) in terms of stable contexts and fixed meanings. In contrast, Derrida and his readers look to the very structure of language to find a fundamental openness of context and proliferation of meaning. Although Derrida’s arguments remain a point of contention amongst Searle and his readers, especially, in ‘Signature, Event, Context’ (and then more expansively in Limited Inc.), Derrida systematically demonstrates the impossibilities of ever determining either total context or fully saturated intention. As these are precisely the least stable and most contested aspects of BCL and Cohen’s performances, reading the film across Derrida’s work illustrates the founding presuppositions of this article – that there is nothing inherent in language to distinguish between serious and non-serious usage, that contexts are never ‘total’ or closed, and that readings of intention are always inherently flawed at best.

Cohen’s influence on ‘Kazakhstan’ Derrida’s linked concepts of citationality and iterability expose the problems of context and intention in both written and spoken language. Written texts depend on the repeatability of the sign. In terms of the production of meaning, a language is not a language, a code is not a code (cannot have a meaning), unless it is repeatable. For writing to operate, my words/marks/signs must nevertheless remain readable (repeatable) after the absolute disappearance of either myself or my intended readers. As Derrida explains, ‘To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder its functioning, offering

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things and itself to be read and to be rewritten’ (1988, 8). Repeatability of this ‘machine’ allows for citationality – signs/marks may be moved from one context to another, although this assumes prior contexts that attach to the citation. Borat was able to elicit responses from participants based on their (often limited) awareness of his home country. While they may not have been very clear on the details, the sign ‘Kazakhstan’ in Borat’s use nevertheless retained some glimmer of this prior context and the stereotypes that his interlocutors associated with eastern European identity. As Lockyer and Pickering explain, ‘[s]tereotypes, whether in comic or other forms of discourse, do not simply derive their ideological currency from a contemporary context. They often trail a legacy of meanings and associations that extend a good way back into the past’ (2005, 8). However, the repetition of signs (and stereotypes are a type of sign) always entails an alteration: the machine simultaneously produces new meanings because it reaches back to previous contexts, dragging those meanings along with it. Derrida explains this as the iterability of the sign: ‘Iteration. . . is at work, constantly altering, at once and without delay [. . .] whatever it seems to reproduce’ (1988, 40). With each iteration of a sign, it both draws on previous contexts to retain meaning and creates new meaning based on the new context. In other words, ‘Iterability alters, contaminating parasitically what it identifies and enables to repeat “itself”’ (62). Words and signs must be both repeatable and altered through repetition in order for meaning to occur. Without this possibility, ‘I’ could not refer to myself as the author of this article. The ‘I’ refers to Cate Blouke here, but it is neither the first nor the last time ‘I’ was used to refer to a person, myself or otherwise. The sign must be able to shift meaning in new contexts, adopting different referents as it is spoken or written by others and across time. To apply this concept to the case of BCL: while the sign, ‘Kazakhstan,’ may once have more cleanly referred to the ninth-largest country in the world, through iterability ‘Kazakhstan’ has been altered by Borat’s meanings, and the western world now recognizes Borat’s Kazakhstan6 as much as, if not more than, the national government’s Kazakhstan, or that of its people – a surprisingly serious consequence for the utterances of a ‘fictional’ character. In the film, Borat acts as a representative of Kazakhstan, even if Borat’s Kazakhstan is not the ‘real’ Kazakhstan. As Dickie Wallace points out, by ‘grafting western stereotypes and formulas of eastern European and Balkan characteristics into a hybrid of absurd “realities.” [. . . Borat] is close enough that viewers [and participants] can comprehend him without having to bridge an overly wide cultural gap [. . .] they find him familiarly exotic’ (2008, 35). People’s acceptance of Borat as a Kazakh creates a version of Kazakh identity that continues to exist (to be iterable, and to be cited) beyond the context of the film, as do the events and artifacts created by the production team to bolster the ‘reality’ of the charade. For example, the production company, Bagatov Films, founded solely in conjunction with the Borat character, nevertheless hosts a website explaining its affiliation with Borat Sagdiev, and even links to a petition to clear Azamat Bagatov (Borat’s producer who appears in the film) of accusations of ‘sex crime with horse’. Though the website has not been updated since 2006, as of March 2014, the petition’s most recent signature is dated a mere nine months prior. The living archive of the Internet allows the traces of Borat to persist years later. As recently as January and February of 2014 (more than seven years after Borat’s retirement from public appearances), British news outlets London Evening Standard and The Times ran articles with headlines and content drawing on meanings attached to Borat’s

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Kazakhstan. The Standard’s article ‘Cultural learnings for UK: Kazakhstan has more women MPs’ parodies the film’s title and draws on Borat’s version of a chauvinist Kazakhstan to critique contemporary gender disparities in Great Britain. The Times’ article, ‘A plot even Borat couldn’t make up – leader plans to rename Kazakhstan’, invokes the character to make a joke of a ‘real’ political dissident. These sorts of reiterations of Borat’s Kazakhstan illustrate the necessary slipperiness of language. Precisely because all signs must be iterable to be signs, Derrida points out that ‘every sign. . . can be cited; put between quotation marks; [and] in so doing it can break with every given context’ (1988, 12). He draws an explicit parallel between quotation and writing itself, neither of which can ever exist within a total, fixed context. He explains: [A] written sign carries with it a force that breaks with its context, that is, with the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of its inscription. This breaking force is not an accidental predicate but the very structure of a written text. In the case of a so-called ‘real’ context, what I have just asserted is all too evident. This allegedly real context includes a certain ‘present’ of the inscription, the presence of the writer to what he has written, the entire environment and the horizon of his experience, and above all the intention, the wanting-to-say-what-he-means, which animates his inscription at a given moment. But the sign possesses the characteristic of being readable even if the moment of its production is irrevocably lost and even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor consciously intended to say at the moment he wrote it, i.e. abandoned it to its essential drift. (9) If we take film as a form of writing (a means of recording meaning across an absence), Derrida’s arguments illuminate how and why Borat has the effects that he does. Borat presents himself as a legitimate Kazakh journalist to the people he interviews, and he does things in that context – asks inflammatory and provocative questions, insults people, claims to be practicing traditional Kazakh customs, and exploits social taboos. In viewing BCL after the fact, audiences are privy to the purported non-seriousness of Cohen’s performances – they read the inscriptions through the contextual lens of comedy or mockumentary. They laugh with Cohen at ‘the idiot who doesn’t know where Kazakhstan is’ (Stein 2006). Regarding the real people in the immediate, real context of filming, on the other hand, a generous reading assumes an earnest desire on their parts to be hospitable, to be sincere, to explain America to an outsider. For them, this was a documentary, a serious inquiry into American customs. Yet, that context is lost forever in the media hype and exposure of the ensuing years. Their responses are forever departing further and further from that context, as their inscriptions move from the present of the filming, to the cinematic screenings at film festivals, to the commercial theatrical release, to the DVD, to the global cultural climate of seven years later.

The system of différance and the institution of ‘reality’ In so many instances of humor that generate offense, people strive to read a speaker/ writer’s intention as the primary motivation for condemnation or exoneration. Michael Phillips explores this problem in his article ‘Racist Acts and Racist Humor’, highlighting the flaws in arguments that hinge on a particular intention on the part of the speaker for

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an act (or joke) to be considered racist. Although Phillips reaches similar conclusions via a process of logical reasoning rather than philosophy of language, I agree that ‘it is mistaken to focus on [a speaker’s] beliefs or feelings in our account of why [the speaker’s] act is wrong’ (1984, 78). Language itself undermines any possibility of relying on intention as a stable or determinable criteria. Derrida argues that as a byproduct of the very structure by which language operates, there is inevitably and inherently a gap between intention and receipt. Our words, all of them – written or spoken – depend upon a system that functions only via these gaps, via the space between. Derrida calls this the system of différance, that in every element of both speech and writing, what is present is the absence of all other elements. His playful terminology (a combination of deferral and difference) encapsulates the play of differences, the spacing between sensible terms (that is not itself sensible). We understand written or spoken signs by the spaces between, because they are not that. House is house because it is not cat; tree is not shrub; Borat is not Cohen (or is he?). In ‘Signature Event Context’ (hereafter SEC), Derrida explores the function of writing as a means of communication and highlights its inherent risks, building to the conclusion that speech depends on, and exists as a result of, the exact same risks. In so doing, Derrida reverses the traditional metaphysics of presence – the presumption that thought and consciousness come first and language is a secondary by-product created in order to convey meaning. In other words, he reverses the notion that absence is the withdrawal of a presence that preceded it – the idea that language refers to a once present thing that is now absent. That approach to language assumes an unmediated presence of meaning to which language refers back, an approach that Derrida rejects. By that train of thought, ‘Kazakhstan’ would be the name generated to refer back to a country that existed prior to its naming. From a Derridian perspective, however, the act of naming ‘Kazakhstan,’ rather than referring back to an entity that previously existed, performatively institutes the country’s presence. In the traditional model of semiotics, as put forth by Ferdinand de Saussure, the sign consists of a signifier (a word or mark) and a signified (the idea or image conjured up by the mark) that can stand in for a referent that exists independently in the world, though signs do not require a physical referent. Yet, in the traditional metaphysics of presence, the external referent is first; we presume to know a reality that we then want to name, a process of signification that results in the formation of a sign. Saussure recognizes, however, that there is no natural link between the signifier and signified, that this connection is arbitrary – and he points to various languages to illustrate this: dog, chien, perro, etc. There is no intrinsic reason for the connection between either signifier and signified, or between sign and referent, beyond common understanding. This means that there is no universal set of pre-existing signifieds or referents. As such, signs are purely relational, or differential. They order and produce the world into concepts and categories. The referent is not autonomous, but instead obtains its meaning from a system of signs. Saussure points out that this system is a system of differences without positive terms: we recognize things as different by what they are not. Kazakhstan is not Uzbekistan, is not Kyrgestan. However, signifiers point only to other signifiers (we read a dictionary to find the meaning of words); full presence never arrives; the circle does not close. In order to explain what or where Kazakhstan is, I must use other signifiers: it is the world’s largest landlocked nation, located to the north of Uzbekistan and bordering part of the Caspian Sea.

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However, for Derrida, the sign is the condition of possibility that enables presence. As he explains, ‘The sign comes into being at the same time as imagination and memory, the moment it is necessitated by the absence of the object from the present field of perception’ (1988, 6). Here, language does not refer back to or represent something else; rather, language institutes the presence of the referent by providing it with a signifier. Regardless of what might physically exist out in the world, Kazakhstan is a signifier that produces a mental image (a signified) that may or may not intersect with that physicality. In years prior, roughly the same territory has also been the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (part of the no longer extant USSR – a sign that nevertheless retains meaning), and the nineteenth-century Russian Empire. Borat is able to do what he does and to institute the ‘reality’ of his Kazakhstan because of the nature of the sign, because there need not be a physical referent somewhere in the world. Again, both signs themselves and the empirical act of writing presuppose an absence. In writing, the system presupposes the absence of the recipient (but also sender). Writing is a system of marks that subsist, that do not exhaust themselves in the moment of inscription, that must be repeatable, citable, iterable to have meaning. And Derrida takes great pains to illustrate how writing and speaking operate as part of the same system and are prey to the exact same risks. As a result, whether written or spoken, signs can be (and are) torn from their initial moments of inscription, leaving an inevitable gap between the intention of the sender and the receipt of her message. No matter how serious a person might intend to be, nothing in language can guarantee with absolute certainty either her seriousness or her intent.

Serious intentions Nevertheless, with a wide array of offended audiences, we find a disparate collection of attempts to explain, argue about, or condemn what exactly Borat is doing – and most of these arguments hinge on assumptions about Cohen’s intentions and the ‘real’ target of the joke. Writing for the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Mark Cenite addresses the ethical and legal concerns raised by the film crew’s purported misrepresentation of intentions of the people they interviewed. He argues that in journalism or documentary filming, ‘including footage obtained without fully informed consent can be justified in two cases: if the depiction is harmless or if public interest – such as addressing an important social issue – outweighs potential harm to participants’ (2009, 23). Ultimately, by weighing the harm caused to the film’s participants against issues of ‘public interest’, Cenite deems the ‘deception’ used to obtain footage in portions of the film ethical because the film ‘targeted xenophobia, provincial attitudes, prejudices, and naiveté of ordinary people about “foreigners.” Simply put, participants who treat a character like Borat as real demonstrate their lack of worldliness’ (39). He likens BCL to a case of undercover reporting, ‘although the subjects of undercover reporting do not know they are being targeted at all, whereas Borat’s participants do not know the circumstances’ (28). As long as the film is intended to highlight social ills and therefore serve the greater good, Cenite finds the means of obtaining footage ethical. As we have seen, however, the Kazakh government finds Borat deeply insulting, regardless of Cohen’s intentions. Time columnist Joel Stein dismissively argues that the film is not mocking Kazakhstan, but rather the American ‘idiot who believes so much in cultural relativism that [he’ll] nod politely when a guy tells [him] that in his country they keep

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developmentally disabled people in cages’ (2006). Comparative literature scholar Alexei Lalo would seemingly agree. Lalo is equally dismissive of allegations that the joke is on Kazakhstan, claiming that the film ‘is really much more offensive to the United States itself’ and that ‘U.S. movie-goers missed the thrust of this film. . . [since] it is largely USAmerican civilization that is the true object of the joke’ (2009; emphasis added). Both of these authors dismiss Kazakhstan’s claims to offense because the ‘true object of the joke’ is American hegemony and prejudice, or, less kindly, idiocy. Their arguments hinge on the sense that Cohen’s behaviors are ‘only a joke’, and one directed at America rather than Kazakhstan. Certainly, that is what Cohen asserts his intentions were. In an interview shortly after the film’s release, the comedian claimed to be ‘surprised’ by Kazakhstan’s reaction since, as he sees it, ‘the joke is not on Kazakhstan. . . the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist – who believe that there’s a country where homosexuals wear blue hats and the women live in cages and they drink fermented horse urine and the age of consent has been raised to nine years old’ (Akbar 2006). Ludicrous as Borat’s Kazakhstan may sound in this academic (and implicitly more serious?) context, the fact remains that many people believed him, and Borat’s utterances did things in spite of Cohen’s intentions or the supposed seriousness of the context in which they were uttered. The Kazakh Government sees Borat as degrading their ethnic identity, and as Dickie Wallace points out, ‘Borat’s representation of Kazakhstan has replaced the real Kazakhstan. . . creat[ing] the only Kazakhstan, the completely bogus hyperreal Kazakhstan that exists in the American imagination’ (2008, 38–39). Though it shares a name with the real Kazakhstan, Borat’s act of naming and describing his Kazakhstan instituted a new reality mapped onto the imaginations of viewers world-wide, a ‘reality’ which persists in media representations of Kazakhstan even eight years after the film’s release. Our knowledge of Borat’s intentions derived from the film itself (that he is learning about America for the ‘benefit’ of Kazakhstan) both must be and cannot be separated from our knowledge (or lack thereof) of Cohen’s intentions in making the film, for they are both the same person and distinct identities. As Derrida says, ‘A parasite is neither the same as nor different from that which it parasites’ (1988, 96). Through his interactions with real people who accept his identity as foreigner, Borat, in a certain sense, exists in ‘real’ life. Viewing the film in hindsight, detached from the context of its filming, it may be easy for Joel Stein to find it ‘hard to believe’ that people could be ‘unaware they’re being fooled,’ and he derisively condemns them for their misunderstanding. However, the participants’ credulity illustrates that, as Derrida argues, ‘a mis- in general (“mistake,” “misunderstanding,” “misinterpretation,” “misstatement”. . .)’ is a structural possibility of language and a by-product of iterability (1988, 37). Derrida points out that ‘no criterion. . . inherent in the manifest utterance is capable of distinguishing an utterance when it is serious from the same utterance when it is not’ (68). Only intention can determine this, and, though intentions are never absent from a speech act, iterability entails that ‘no intention can ever be fully conscious or actually present to itself’ (Derrida 1988, 73). Iterability negates the possibility of stable, fixed meanings in language. Instead, we are faced with linguistic and societal conventions which are relatively stable but which, as Borat demonstrates, can and should be questioned. That the people in the film misread Borat as a sincere or ‘real’ foreigner shows us that there is nothing inherent in human speech or behavior that distinguishes the real from the representation. The film demonstrates that the iterability of both language and behavior ‘renders possible both the “normal” rule or convention and its transgression, transformation, simulation, or

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imitation’ (Derrida 1988, 98). Whether he is ‘serious’ or ‘unserious’, sincere or insincere, Borat blurs the boundaries between the two.

Conclusion As genres, the documentary and the mockumentary are set up as opposing terms, one ‘true’ while the other is a ‘fiction’, but both are generally used as tools for critique. The documentary film often works to highlight or uncover social ills and bring them to public attention. The mockumentary, on the other hand, picks a target and unabashedly holds it up for ridicule, and, as Leshu Torchin argues, the genre often critiques ‘the limits of human empathy and imagination’ (2008, 54). Cohen claims to have targeted American ignorance and xenophobia (and only incidentally mocked Kazakhstan). The 1984 cult classic This is Spinal Tap ostensibly mocks the audacious behaviors of popular musicians. The British and then American television shows of The Office adopt the documentary style to satirize the tedium of working an unfulfilling office job. And though he claimed to be making a documentary and interviewed people as himself, Bill Maher’s Religulous targeted an array of organized religions and incited accusations of deception in obtaining interviews, not unlike those leveled at Cohen. BCL and Religulous illustrate the problem people face when they feel their words have been taken ‘out of context’ and thus call attention to the instability of context itself. In both films, participants believed they were participating in a documentary, that they were going to be taken seriously, not offered up as objects of ridicule. Again, that Cohen and Maher were able to shape ‘serious’ responses into material for feature film comedies is a consequence of iterability: context cannot fully enclose an utterance or mark, and intention may not travel with it. As I have demonstrated in this article, the act inevitably exceeds its intentions, and the target is never cleanly struck. To write BCL off as just a joke is to claim access to some sort of superior knowledge – that confronted with this persona we could or would have known better. By the time the film was released, people had ample extra-textual clues for a non-documentary reading of the film: the trailer includes a short clip of the 20th Century Fox logo, and the posters include Baron Cohen’s name in large letters across the top, accompanied by the usual film credits in small print around the sides. Audiences, then, were privy to contextual signs that served to re-shape the film as fiction. Yet, Borat’s interviewees were not: rather, they were given official legal release forms, presented with a news contact person, asked to give straightforward interviews. It was only when confronted with a caricature of Slavic identity face-to-face that the people in the film had any opportunity to suspect otherwise. And it is important to note that we bear witness to only 84 minutes of nearly 400 hours of footage – a carefully constructed vision of the ‘reality’ of these interviews. Borat’s ambiguity, his devilish doing of things with words, illustrates precisely the kind of scandalous joking Shoshana Felman discusses in The Scandal of the Speaking Body. Felman takes up Austin’s speech act theory and applies it to Moliere’s Don Juan in order to deconstruct the metaphysical dichotomy of mind and body. Felman argues that any act is that of a speaking body: language is the vehicle by which the body knows itself, and without body, there is no language. Felman explores the implications of this in terms of the performative act of promising, explaining that, ‘every promise is above all the promise of consciousness, insofar as it postulates a noninterruption, continuity between intention

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and act’ (1980, 34). However, Felman demonstrates the potential for failure inherent in promising results from the body’s instability, its role as unconscious. She asserts that the scandal consists in the fact that the act (of a speaking body) cannot know what it is doing. It always does more than it means and means more than it does. Problems arise in the Don Juan play (and with uncanny similarity, in the Borat scandal) from opposing views of language – for the ‘antagonists and victims, language is an instrument for transmitting truth, that is, an instrument of knowledge, a means of knowing reality’ (13). Although the mockumentary may seem more straightforward in its agenda, the scandal of documentary films is that they promise a degree of objectivity that they cannot deliver. Documentaries claim a constative function, to present a picture of ‘the truth’, to elide the impossible division of reality and representation inherent in the medium. Yet, film is just another layer of language, and it cannot be divided from the fallible body that speaks it – the body that intervenes both behind the camera and in the editing room. And if every utterance is an act, so too is every picture. The attempt to distinguish between constative pictures (documentary films and photojournalism) and performative pictures (blockbuster films, artistic photography, and mockumentaries) is confounded by the intrusion of one upon the other. Borat scandalized people because they felt tricked, manipulated, lied to. They were invited to participate in a documentary made by a Kazakh journalist for Kazakh audiences. They did not imagine their performances would be shown to fellow Americans or treated as comedy. And yet, this is the risk inherent in every utterance, and every piece of writing – the necessary possibility that despite our best efforts to control them, our words can be torn from both our intentions and our contexts. While it is undeniably important to take things seriously, Borat reminds us that seriousness cannot be assured. That perhaps the best offense is a good defense: rather than taking things so very seriously, we might rather choose to celebrate the inherent playfulness and performativity of language. To take pleasure in Borat and BCL is to revel in his playing with language and ‘reality’, to laugh at the absurd impossibility of the serious. The mockumentary genre and Borat’s mock documentary also reminds us to take our documentaries with a grain of salt, as it were, since documentary films are just an heir to the pratfalls of language – created by fallible bodies whose intentions we can never know for certain. To try and bracket a text or an event or an utterance off as entirely serious (or even as entirely non-serious) is to take a step toward closure and finitude, away from openness and possibility.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Source: Cate Blouke (2015) ‘Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen, and the seriousness of (mock) documentary’, Comedy Studies, 6:1, 4–17.

Notes 1 I do not say that Borat Sagdiyev was ‘played’ by Cohen, for reasons that will become clearer later. My argument is that Sagdiyev and Cohen are separate and yet inseparable identities, and both, in a sense, exist in ‘real’ life. 2 Much of the scholarship dealing with humor and speech-act theory strives to separate non-serious or fictional utterances from those occurring in what critics unproblematically label the ‘real world’. My argument here will illustrate that the boundaries between ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ are, at

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the very least, porous. As such, my use of ‘real world’ will be the conventional meaning but should be understood as retaining a healthy dose of skepticism. I will variously work with and through the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of serious: ‘Of a person: having a grave or solemn disposition, as a permanent attribute or tendency; of an earnest nature; having depth or solidity of character;’ and ‘Of an injury, condition, etc.: significant or worrying; giving cause for anxiety or concern; grave, threatening, or dangerous.’ Michael Psenicska of Perry Hall Driving School explains this to Borat during a driving lesson. In a strikingly similar example, Comedy Central talk show host Stephen Colbert (notorious for his ironic, hyper-conservative political persona) testified in character before an American House of Representatives’ hearing committee on immigration in 2010 (Linkins 2010). While the popular American social news and entertainment site Buzzfeed is generally better for laughs than serious academic citations, it can arguably serve as a reasonable barometer of widespread public opinion. A 2013 article offers images of the results when ‘Americans Try To Place European Countries On A Map’. Three of the maps depicted label the region surrounding Ukraine as ‘the place Borat is from’ – Cohen seems to have usurped even more of the eastern European identity than he initially bargained for.

References Akbar, Afira. 2006. “Baron Cohen Comes Out of Character to Defend Borat.” The Independent, November 17. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/comedy/news/baron-cohencomes-out-of-character-to-defend-borat-424656.html Associated Press. 2006. “Humiliation, Job Loss for ‘Borat’ Victims.” Today.com, November 13. http://www.today.com/id/15698520/ns/today-today_entertainment/t/humiliation-job-lossborat-victims/#.VIYUomTF_JV. Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things With Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Borat’s Statement. 2006. Daily Mail, September 29. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article407702/Borats-statement.html Carpenter, Pauline. 2007. “Examining Borat and His Influence on Society.” Taboo 11 (1): 15–26. Cenite, Mark. 2009. “Ethical Learnings from Borat on Informed Consent for Make Benefit Film and Television Producers.” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 24 (1): 22–39. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Limited Inc. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman and Samuel Weber. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Felman, Shoshana. 1980. Scandal of the Speaking Body. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Howitt, Dennis, and Kwame Owusu-Bempah. 2005 “Race and Ethnicity in Popular Humour.” In Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour, edited by Sharon Lockyer and Michael Pickering, 45–62. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lalo, Alexei. 2009. “Borat as Tragicomedy of anti US-Americanism.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 11 (2). http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol11/iss2/3/ Linkins, Jason. 2010. “Stephen Colbert Hearing (VIDEO): Updates from Colbert’s Visit to Congress.” HuffingtonPost.com, September 24. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/24/ste phen-colbert-hearing-v_n_737813.html. Lockyer, Sharon, and Michael Pickering, eds. 2005. Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Myers, Stephen Lee. 2006. “Moscow Gives ‘Borat’ a Thumb’s Down.” New York Times, November 9. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/09/world/europe/09iht-borat.3473790.html Phillips, Michael. 1984. “Racist Acts and Racist Humor.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (1): 75–96. Saunders, Robert A. 2007. “In Defense of Kazakshilik: Kazakhstan’s War on Sacha Baron Cohen.” Identities 14 (3): 225–255. Snider, Mike. 2006. “‘Borat’ Now Make Benefit Kazakhstan Glorious Visit.” USA Today, September 28. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2006-09-28-borat-DC_x.htm

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Stein, Joel. 2006. “Borat Make Funny Joke on Idiot Americans! High-Five!” Time 168 (19): 62–64. Torchin, Leshu. 2008. “Cultural Learnings of Borat for Make Benefit Glorious Study of Documentary.” Film & History 38 (1): 53–63. Wallace, Dickie. 2008. “Hyperrealizing ‘Borat’ with the Map of the European ‘Other’.” Slavic Review 67 (1): 35–49.

Contributor Cate Blouke has served as an assistant director of the Univeristy of Texas Department of Rhetoric and Writing’s Digital Writing and Research Lab (DWRL). In addition to her roles as visual rhetorician and digital scholar, she reviews theatre for the Austin American Statesman. Her academic work focuses on the intersections of rhetoric, performance, identity politics and contemporary humor, examining the cultural implications of the kinds of jokes we make these days.

Part VIII

New comedy? Emerging platforms and forms of expression

Chapter 33

A book and a movie walk into a bar (6:2) Kyle Meikle

‘It’s time I told you—you were adapted’: so reads the caption of a May 2011 New Yorker cartoon by Frank Cotham featuring a television talking down to a book. Readers’ understanding of this joke depends on their familiarity with the cultural practice of adaptation, of adapting content from one context to another – turning novels into films, in the most repeated ratio (the ratio, not coincidentally, represented in the cartoon). The joke works through what Andrew Goatly would describe as ‘near homophony, or paronymy’ (2012, 81) – that is, through the lexical and semantic slippage between ‘adapted’ and ‘adopted’, words that not only sound similar but possess similar meanings. ‘Near homophony’ gives way to homology. If, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, adoption means to ‘take (a child) and bring it up as one’s own, (usually) assuming all rights and responsibilities from its biological parents on a permanent, legal basis’ (‘adopt’, 2015), then adaptation means to take (a novel) and film it as one’s own, (usually) assuming all rights and responsibility from its author on a permanent, legal basis. The New Yorker joke not only stresses the incongruity between books and films but incongruity itself: in adoption as in adaptation, one of these things is (and is not) like the other. The humor of the cartoon, then, stems from a connection between two different forms of incongruity. As Goatly notes in Meaning and Humour, incongruity is perhaps ‘the major technique for producing humour’ (2012, 21). Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo’s foundational verbal theories of humor are built upon the notion that most jokes involve ‘incompatible frames, aka scripts or schemas’ as well as a ‘disjunctor’ that ‘functions as both a signal to switch schemas and a form with ambiguous meanings which links them, a connector’ (22–23). In the New Yorker cartoon, ‘adapted’ serves as the ambiguous disjunctor that links its script or schema with adopted’s. If, as per Raskin, a script is ‘a large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word or evoked by it’, then ‘adapted’ evokes not only the ‘routines, standard procedures, [and] basic situations’ (1985, 81) of adaptation but also adoption. ‘Adapted’ is ‘compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts’ (99); it acts as the ‘element which triggers the switch from the one script evoked by the text of the joke to the opposed script’ (114). By anthropomorphizing books and movies, the cartoon sets up (and then resolves) an incongruity between adaptation and adoption. The adaptation script opposes the adoption script until it does not. By asking readers to set adapt’s definition against adopt’s, the New Yorker cartoon implicitly raises the question of what we joke about when we joke about adaptation. While some scholars have acknowledged adaptation’s comedic potential – in the form of parody, for instance – few have acknowledged the moment at which adaptation itself becomes the object of comedy. If most jokes rely upon the listener’s recognition of ‘certain routines, standard

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procedures, [and] basic situations’, then adaptation jokes have much to tell us about the perceived routines, procedures and situations of adaptations in popular culture and the public sphere. In jokes about adaptation, between which scripts do audiences switch? Two types of adaptation jokes offer answers to that question: jokes about adaptations (i.e. jokes about specific adaptations) and jokes about adaptation (i.e. jokes about the practice of adaptation). These two types are by no means mutually exclusive, since jokes about the practice of adaptation often involve specific texts, and since jokes about specific adaptations often involve the practice of adaptation itself; some adaptation jokes, like some adaptations, simply have more apparent source texts than others. The proliferation of such jokes in the age of social networkability – on platforms like Twitter and YouTube – suggests yet a third type of adaptation joke that is not really a type but rather an analogy: adaptations as jokes, or jokes as adaptations. Adaptation jokes not only invoke the scripts that have guided adaptation studies in the past (original versus copy, novel versus film, word versus image), they also suggest that the routines and procedures of adaptations hew closely to the routines and procedures of jokes themselves. Raskin writes that the semantic script-switch trigger introduces a joke’s second script and ‘casts a shadow on the first script and the part of the text which introduced it, and imposes a different interpretation on it’ (114). What are adaptations, when we see them as adaptations, if not long shadows cast on their source texts, or imposed interpretations? The novel supplies the set-up, the film provides the punch line. Adaptation is a ‘form with ambiguous meanings’, a connector and disjunctor that links seemingly incompatible frames, scripts or schemas (different media, different texts). If the pleasure of ‘adaptations as adaptations’ comes, at least in part, from script-switching, from ‘repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise’ (Hutcheon 2012, 4), then, as highly ritualized forms of surprise, jokes may share much of their generic makeup with adaptations. My own punch line, then, comes in considering how jokes work like adaptations, or how adaptations work like jokes, as well as why it matters whether and how they do. What we joke about when we joke about adaptation may be joking itself.

Jokes about adaptations The most obvious, and perhaps most prevalent, intersection of adaptation and joking comes in the form of jokes about specific adaptations, and certain adaptations seem to invite more mockery than others. In recent years, it is possible that no single adaptation has generated more jokes than Lee Daniels’s 2009 film Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire. Precious’s overlong title, born out of a necessity to distinguish the film from both the action pic Push (released earlier that year) and a British biopic entitled Precious in development at the same time, quickly became the film’s most enduring legacy in the pop culture pantheon. At the 2010 Academy Awards, where Precious was nominated in six categories, co-host Steve Martin deadpanned, ‘I love that Precious was nominated, because to me, it’s the one film that really lived up to its video game.’ A sixth-season episode of NBC’s The Office (2010) features Michael Scott (Steve Carell) listening to a book on tape – ‘a novelization of the movie Precious: Based on the Book [sic] by Sapphire’. And a fifth-season episode of 30 Rock (2010) has Dot Com (Kevin Brown) recommend to Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) that he take the lead in the film Hard to Watch: Based on the Book ‘Stone Cold Bummer’ by Manipulate. While 30 Rock presents a fairly

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straightforward parody of Precious and its title, both the Office gag and the Oscars quip reveal a rather more complicated understanding of adaptation. Michael Scott’s audiobook sets the novel-to-film script against the film-to-novel script, the joke stemming from our sense that any novelization of Precious would, in fact, be redundant (but, of course, such novelizations do exist, e.g. Deborah Chiel’s novelization of Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations, itself adapted from Dickens’s novel). The fact that the novelization has been further adapted to an audio format highlights the different adaptation vectors at play: adaptation involves not only a movement from book to film but from film back to book and then to audiobook. Martin’s joke somewhat similarly sets the novel-to-film script against the video game-to-film script: right relationship, wrong medium. Martin plays the dupe who does not realize that Precious is based on a novel – not a video game – despite it being right there in the title. In both cases, the riffs on that title remind the audience that novel versus film is merely one among many scripts encompassed by adaptation. These jokes raise the question of why, when we talk about adaptations, novel-to-film so often remains the default script. If any adaptation has rivaled Precious in its generative scope, it is surely Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013), aided in no small part by the rise of Twitter in the four years since the former film was released. While Gatsby did not arrive in theaters with a title as idiosyncratic as Precious’s, it did not need one; the film came accompanied by what many saw as opposing scripts from the start. There was the Luhrmann script, characterized by celebratory excess, and then there was the Fitzgerald script, characterized by a diffident attitude towards that excess: kitsch versus canonicity, to reduce those scripts to their Raskinian opposition. On Twitter, a bevy of professional comedians sought to emphasize this seeming incongruity. Joe Mande (@joemande) tweeted, ‘F. Scott Fiztgerald’s last words: “Promise me that the cinematic interpretation of The Great Gatsby features a song by Fergie”’ (May 2, 2013). Paul Scheer (@paulscheer) asked, ‘Is it Great Gatsby or Fast 6 that’s based on the Novel by F Scott Fitzgerald? Asking for a friend’ (May 20, 2013). Tom Scharpling (@scharpling) said, ‘I remember reading THE GREAT GATSBY in school and feeling like it would be better in 3-D with late period Jay-Z songs playing throughout’ (April 18, 2013). While these comics emphasize the Luhrmann script in their punch lines, other comedians used the adaptation as an occasion to undercut the novel’s stature in American letters. Mike Birbiglia (@birbirgs) breathlessly exclaimed, ‘Can’t wait to read this new book “The Great Gatsby!”’ (May 10, 2013) to which Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) responded, ‘Don’t bother. It’s just a novelization of the movie’ (Birbiglia responded in turn, ‘sometimes those are good!’). Damien Fahey (@damienfahey) wrote, ‘I hope The Great Gatsby is better than the book we all pretended to read in high school’ (May 10, 2013). And Julie Klausner (@julieklausner) asked, ‘Is Baz Luhrmann’s THE GREAT GATSBY based on THE GREAT GATSBY?’ (April 22, 2013). These jokes, like the Precious jokes, are as much about adaptation in general as they are about specific adaptations. But whereas the Precious jokes deal in materials, expanding adaptation’s range to encompass not just novels and films but novelizations and audiobooks and video games, the Gatsby jokes are more attitudinal, registering several different responses to adaptation. Mande, Scheer and Scharpling toe the ‘book was better’ line, framing Luhrmann’s adaptation of Fitzgerald’s classic in terms of opprobrium. But Birbiglia and Fahey upend the very idea that the book was better by wondering whether anyone has actually read the book in the first place. Klausner’s koan deconstructs the relationship between the

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two texts altogether. These jokes about specific adaptations not only call into question what kinds of source texts get adapted – as well as how – but also when audiences could, would or should experience adaptations as adaptations. Precious is an adaptation because its title says so, whereas the various Twitter responses to The Great Gatsby imply that the film’s status as an adaptation is actually up to its audience. A 2008 segment from the Onion News Network (The Onion’s online parody of broadcast news) crystallizes this confusion by raising the perfectly logical question of why movie trailers do not conventionally count as source texts and why audiences do not react to them as such. The segment begins with ONN anchor Michael Bannon (Joe Amato) reporting that while ‘Iron Man was one of the most popular trailers of last summer . . . controversy is sweeping the fan community today following the announcement that Paramount Pictures is planning to adapt the beloved trailer into a featurelength motion picture’. The camera zooms in on a faux Entertainment Weekly cover that bears the headline ‘The Iron Man Movie: Can it Measure Up to the Trailer?’ as faux Entertainment Weekly reporter Rorey Covey explains the ‘mixed reactions’ to the news: ‘The Iron Man trailer is near and dear to a lot of fans’ hearts. So you can imagine how worried people are . . . Apparently the plan is to expand that fast montage of very short shots seen in the trailer into full-length, distinct scenes. And in between those scenes they plan to add additional scenes that weren’t in the trailer’. Bannon muses that it ‘[j]ust doesn’t seem like that would work’ over shots of mock YouTube comments: ‘this should NOT be made into a movie. It’ll suck. Trailer is great’, writes ironMonger1; ‘Making a movie of this trailer is going to completely ruin all my good memories of it’, says PPoTTs21l; ‘HOLLYWOOD RUINS EVERYTHING’, complains IronBitch. Covey frames the trailer as a source text, as a ‘breathtaking ninety-second thrill ride’ that tells an ‘amazing story’ about a ‘cocksure billionaire and industrialist’ who ‘is kidnapped but turns on his captors by designing an amazing mechanized suit of armor, ultimately becoming a hero to the world’. She worries that ‘it’s very difficult to make the characters, story, action that work in a ninety-second format also work when they’re stretched out to eighty or ninety minutes’. When Bannon wonders if this will end up ‘alienating the trailer’s core fan base’, Covey explains that ‘the studio has tried to reassure the public that everything they love about the trailer will be incorporated into the movie adaptation, right down to actual lines from the trailer. And they are bringing Robert Downey Jr. back to reprise his role as Tony Stark’. Here the flipped scripts are trailer and film: we could think of the former as an adaptation of the latter, if we think of it as an adaptation at all, but by reversing these roles, the ONN crew exorcise the hoary ghosts of adaptation studies yore: original versus copy, faithful versus unfaithful. By making the trailer the source text and by questioning whether ‘the integrity of the trailer is in danger’ because of the film (as Covey says), the ONN clip asks where audiences draw the line when it comes to calling adaptations adaptations. Jonathan Gray, who situates the clip within the wider fray of paratexts, observes that it ‘plays with many anxieties of consuming media in a hype-, synergy-, and franchise-filled era, in particular the concern that the ads can prove better than the product itself, and that adaptations risk killing the core elements of the original’ (2010, 10). The clip argues that preferring the trailer to the film is not all that different from preferring the book to the film. Like the Precious jokes, the ONN segment expands adaptation’s scripts to include other materials besides books and films; like the Great Gatsby jokes, the segment implies that adaptation lies in the eye of the beholder.

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Jokes about adaptation As the ONN clip also attests, myriad adaptation jokes do not involve specific adaptations or at least not extant adaptations. These types of jokes draw us closer to the intersection of adapting and joking insofar as they constitute micro acts of adaptation in and of themselves. Following the ONN’s lead, such jokes ask not what has been adapted and why but what could be adapted and how. Birbiglia is exemplary in this regard: ‘I’d like to adapt Expendables 2 into a good movie’, he writes (December 9, 2012); ‘Mike Birbiglia to adapt “On the Waterfront” into twitter feed’ (May 2, 2013); ‘Writing the film adaptation to the game “Red Rover,”’ reads yet another (May 31, 2012); ‘They should do a movie adaptation of hamburgers. Those are popular’, he says in a fourth (August 2, 2014). In all four cases, adaptation serves as the lynchpin uniting disparate scripts: bad movie versus good movie, movie versus Twitter feed, movie versus game, movie versus food. Joking and adapting become, in some ways, inseparable. The same impulse is at play in Scharpling’s exclamation ‘SURE LAST VEGAS SUCKS BUT THE VIDEO GAME IS PRETTY COOL’ (November 3, 2013); or Paul Scheer asking, ‘When is someone going to adapt Capt Crunch cereal into a movie with Phillip Seymour Hoffman?’ (October 15, 2012); or Scott Aukerman (@scottaukerman) explaining that he’s ‘Thinking of adapting “The Money Pit” into a traditional Japanese Noh Drama. Anyone know who has the rights?’ (April 19, 2009); or Patton Oswalt’s (@pattonoswalt) response to a fan asking what comic book the comedian would like to see adapted to film, and by whom: ‘ARCHIE; Gaspar Noe’ (August 29, 2011). Amidst Gamer Gate, meanwhile, Ian Bogost proposed ‘Hatred: The Videogame: The Musical Coming to Broadway’ (October 17, 2014). This impulse extends past Twitter, too. The Onion is rife with such script-switching, featuring fake movie listings for House of the Rising Sun on July 15, 2013 (‘Adapted from the popular YouTube video with over 3 million views, this film features the entire Animals song from 1964 complete with a static picture of the Best Of The Animal album cover’), Chutes and Ladders on September 21, 2013 (‘An adaptation of the beloved Hasbro board game starring Bernadette Peters as a ladder’), and Basketball: The Movie on April 9, 2013 (‘The popular sport is finally adapted into a two-hour feature film’). An October 9, 2014 post on Clickhole – The Onion’s answer to Buzzfeed – lists the ‘6 Best Movies Inspired by “SNL” Sketches’, including Antichrist, a ‘film adaptation of the popular sketch “The Kissing Family” . . . taken in a darker direction by Lars von Trier’, and Slumdog Millionaire, ‘based on the wildly popular “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketches starring Will Ferrell’. The target of these jokes is far more general than Precious or The Great Gatsby; the target here is the adaptive process itself – a process that the writers and comedians partly participate in to sell their punch lines. The humor comes in the ridiculousness of what is being adapted (hatred, hamburgers, Hasbro board games) and/or what something is being adapted into (a Noh drama, a Twitter feed, a good movie). Adaptation serves as the semantic script-switch trigger. An October 2013 Saturday Night Live skit parodying the much scrutinized casting process for the film adaptation of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey – itself adapted from Twilight fan fiction – vividly illustrates this point. The skit begins with a voiceover: ‘This summer, Universal Studios spent months casting the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey. Research was exhaustive and Hollywood’s hottest stars read together to see who could bring the sexual chemistry of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey to the big screen.

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Here now are the screen tests’. Viewers are subsequently treated to a series of odd couples reading scenes together, each offering their own incongruity. Seth Rogen (Bobby Moynihan) and Emma Stone (Noel Wells) chuckle as Rogen wields a small whip. ‘I call it a flogger’, Moynihan says in Rogen’s gravely, stony drawl before he collapses into laughter as he playfully bats at Stone’s bottom. Rogen and Stone’s levity stands at odds with the self-seriousness of the S&M scene. The same applies to the next pair – Scarlett Johansson (played by host Miley Cyrus) and Christoph Waltz (Taran Killam); the former’s husky voice is juxtaposed with Waltz’s cheery Austrian affectation (when Scarlett-as-Ana assents to his fantasy, he ad-libs a ‘Wunderbar! That’s a bingo!’ reminiscent of Inglourious Basterds’ Colonel Hans Landa). The next scene, meanwhile, features an incongruity between intensity and indifference in the respective guises of Phillip Seymour Hoffman (Beck Bennett) and Kristen Stewart, star of the Twilight franchise (Wells again). Hoffman delivers a booming line about making his love ‘hurt’ before asking if the silent Stewart is asleep. On the one hand, these scenes represent bad adaptations of Fifty Shades of Grey; on the other hand, they remind viewers that any adaptation involves the collision of differing scripts. So it is that the next pair – Steve Harvey (Kenan Thompson) and Rebel Wilson (Aidy Bryant) – flip Fifty Shades’ script by making the scene more conservative than its actors. Harvey complains that ‘the script don’t make no sense, player. I mean, what is this? Vag—’ (he pronounces it with a hard ‘g’) ‘—vaginal sex? People still do that? . . . I’d go straight for the butt’. The next pair further challenges Fifty Shades’ sexual scripts by having Jon Cryer (John Milhiser) meekly tell Jane Lynch (Kate McKinnon) that he’s ‘gonna dominate [her]’. Lynch turns Cryer’s whip on him, calling him a ‘wet disgrace’ and asking if he’s ‘the half man from Two and a Half Men’. Cryer and Lynch flip the submissive/dominant script along with the feminine/masculine script. The remaining pairs – Mary Louise Parker (Vanessa Bayer) and Aziz Ansari (Nasim Pedrad), Tilda Swinton (McKinnon) and Tracy Morgan (Jay Pharaoh), and Kristin Chenowith (Pedrad) and Shaquille O’Neill (Pharaoh) – offer slight variations on these script-switches. While the skit clearly serves as a showcase for the various cast members’ celebrity impersonations, it also serves as a showcase for a series of micro adaptations of Fifty Shades of Grey as short as any of the aforementioned tweets, but adaptations nonetheless. These speculative adaptations are only as absurd as the adaptations that they lampoon – which is to say not that absurd at all.

Jokes as adaptations The narrowing distance between adaptation jokes and adaptations is even more pointedly illustrated in a pair of competitions run by the humor website Cracked.com, one tied to the release of The Social Network that asks users to imagine ‘the next “Website: The Movie”’ (October 13, 2010), and another that asks users to imagine ‘If Everything Got an Awesome Video Game Adaptation’ (August 26, 2012). Entries for the website adaptation contest include fan-made posters for Fanfiction.net, styled on Misery; Craig’s List, accompanied by the tagline ‘Their last hope . . . for an affordable used car’; Quentin Tarantino’s Cats That Look Like Hitler, styled on Inglourious Basterds; and Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia Movie, with various lead actors crossed out in favor of others and a ‘[citation needed]’ under the claim the film is ‘Directed by Cecil B. Demille’ [sic]. Entries for the awesome video game competition include a mock-up of a sperm racing game; Spectator ’13, an off-field send-up of sports video games; and a proposed PlayStation 3 simulation that lets players virtually pop the plastic bubbles that serve as package cushioning.

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Both of these competitions encourage users to set different scripts – sometimes literal scripts – in opposition to each other in a massive game of fill-in-the-blank. In this respect, they, as well as the Fifty Shades spoof, bear an overt resemblance to the hashtag culture of Twitter, whereby certain tags establish opposing scripts (#gentlehorrorfilms) and users come up with a semantic script-switch trigger themselves (e.g. ‘Nightmare on Elmo’s Street’, care of Tim Nutt [@tim_nutt_comic] on October 12, 2013). This operation is itself only a more carnivalesque version of something like the New Yorker cartoon caption contest, whereby readers are provided a picture and asked to come up with an appropriately funny caption. Indeed, the television talking down to the book in the ‘you were adapted’ cartoon was drawn by Frank Cotham, but the caption was actually provided by reader Bruce Cherry of New York City. Such captions are adaptations as well as jokes; caption contests and hashtags are merely variations on endlessly adaptable scripts in the vein of ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ or ‘How many x does it take to screw in a light bulb?’ or ‘x, y, and z walk into a bar . . .’ – invitations to adaptation all. As Goatly says, such formulaic jokes ‘prime us to expect certain patterns’ (158). Adaptations prime us to expect certain patterns too, and the pleasure of adaptations, like the pleasure of jokes, stems from their simultaneous adherence to and deviation from those set patterns. Goatly writes, for instance, of the ‘[i]nventive examples of intertextuality’ in rewritings of the common phrase ‘x rules OK’ (e.g. ‘Arsenal rules, OK’): ‘“French dockers rule, au quai” (dependent on homophony), “Dyslexia lures, KO” (transposition or metathesis), “Saliva drools, OK” (rhyme/paronymy), “Amnesia rules, O . . .” (deletion), “Royce Rolls, KO” (paronymy and metathesis)’ (158). The rewriters of ‘rules OK’, like Twitter’s hashtaggers or the New Yorker’s captioners, are adapters whose jokes depend on different modes of adaptation (indicated by Goatly’s parantheticals). This sort of joking turns readers into writers, into adapters themselves. Consider the ‘[i]ventive examples of intertextuality’ in another Cracked list that asks readers to imagine ‘If Classic Movies All Got Video Game Adaptations’ (April 20, 2011), leading to mock-ups for a Wizard of Oz game styled after the first-person shooter DOOM (‘PICKED UP A WATER BUCKET’ reads the text at the top of the screen), a Game Boy adaptation of Blue Velvet (with the option, ‘LOOK AT FRANK? Y/N’), and both Atari and RPG adaptations of The Shining (the latter of which asks players faced with the Grady twins whether they want to ‘Fight’, ‘Talk to Tony’, ‘Shine’, ‘Flee’, or ‘Play with us for ever [sic] and ever and ever . . .’). While these parodies only include a poster, cover or static screenshot of the game in question, CineFix’s ‘8-bit Cinema’ series on YouTube features nearly 40 of ‘[y]our favorite movies retold as old school NES/SNES/arcade games’, including The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Silence of the Lambs and, yes, The Shining: adaptations (as well as jokes) in their own right.

Comedy studies as adaptation studies This adaptive activity, which lessens the distance between adaptation and comedy, also lessens the distance between adaptation studies and comedy studies. As a field, adaptation studies is hardly at a loss for new scripts (Knock, knock. Who’s there? Translation studies or performance studies or intermediality), so what do scholars stand to gain from considering adaptations in the context of jokes or considering jokes in the context of adaptations? The first answer to that question is the texts themselves: at a moment in which viral videos and online parodies have inspired more interest than theory in adaptation studies, a

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turn towards the operations of humor is overdue. Such a turn may find adaptation scholars pivoting from Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation to her Theory of Parody (1985) instead. Hutcheon’s ‘knowing’ and ‘unknowing’ audience – that is, audience who ‘know the adapted text’ and those who ‘do not know that what [they] are experiencing actually is an adaptation’ (2012, 120) – would give way to audiences who get the joke and audiences who do not. As Goatly writes, ‘[e]xactly how texts create expectations semantically and pragmatically through context and co-text is . . . crucial to the understanding of humour’ (2012, 23). It is also crucial to the understanding of adaptations, which similarly ‘create expectations semantically and pragmatically’ through their contexts and co-texts. In this respect, comedy studies’ emphasis on expectations suggests the other major advantage of looking at jokes as adaptations or adaptations as jokes: a renewed focus on reception. If ‘humour depends on deviation from the normal degrees of processing effort demanded in discourse’ (254), so too do adaptations when they function as adaptations for their knowing audiences. Goatly comes close to this intersection when he writes that ‘[a]llusion can work in several ways in conversational humour’, since, following Freud, ‘[s]uccessfully weaving a familiar expression from a different text or script into a new text gives the childlike pleasure of finding familiar phrases in an unexpected context’ (271). He is quick to point out that ‘[a]llusion clearly creates intimacy, because some people may not be acquainted with the original text and the allusion may pass them by’ (271). Humor studies could nudge adaptation scholars towards the processing efforts invited by adaptations, towards their intimacies and intricacies. Audiences’ responses to adaptations could be measured by their laughter – derisive, exclusionary, hysterical, knowing, unintentional or otherwise. Approaching adaptations as jokes would allow scholars to ask why some adaptations, like some jokes, land better than others, as well as why some adaptations, like some jokes, do not land at all. In other words, borrowing comedy studies’ interest in reception would allow adaptation scholars to chart audiences’ affective responses to adaptations. Comedy studies’ deep ties to the fields of psychology and linguistics could push adaptation scholars further from the hermeneutics that have cast a long shadow over the field to bring to light more cognitive concerns, or inquiries into if, whether and when audiences experience adapted texts as adapted texts, rather than inquiries into what those texts mean. Such a model squares neatly with Patrick Cattrysse’s recent call for descriptive adaptation studies based in ‘the philosophy of science, the psychology of perception and cognitive studies’ – a model that revolves around a functional definition of adaptation as ‘any phenomenon that “functions” as an adaptation in one particular space-time context’ (2014, 16, 52). For Cattrysse, the benefit of functional definitions is that they ‘enlarge the scope of adaptation studies and recover phenomena that have been traditionally expelled from the discipline’, since ‘[d]ifferent phenomena may . . . “function” in the same way’ (115, 116). Analogous phenomena like jokes allow us to ask how audiences think about adaptations rather than what audiences think about adaptations – long the standard in adaptation studies. Cattrysse proposes a polysystemic (PS) approach to adaptation derived from translation studies that ‘reshuffles the binary study of T1 s and T2 s [source texts and target texts] and PS1 s and PS2 s [source polysystems or source contexts and target polyststems or target contexts]’ (316). His approach sounds somewhat similar to Raskin and Attardo’s General Theory of Verbal Humor, which revises (or adapts?) Raskin’s earlier, more binary Semantic Theory of Humor by introducing ‘five other Knowledge Resources (KR), that must be tapped into when generating a joke’ in addition

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to the script opposition: language (LA), or the ‘exact wording’ of the text; narrative strategy (NS), or the ‘narrative organization’ of the text; target (TA), or ‘who is the “butt” of the joke’; situation (SI), or the ‘objects, participants, instruments, activity’ – in short, the ‘props’ of the joke; and the logical mechanism (LM), or the ‘parameter that accounts for the way in which the two senses . . . in the joke are brought together’ (1994, 223–226). What knowledge resources do audiences draw on to make sense of adaptations? How do adaptations’ exact wording, narrative organization, targets, situations, logical mechanisms and script oppositions contribute to their being understood as adaptations? In raising these questions, adaptation studies could likewise expand the scope of comedy studies. In the last chapter of Meaning and Humour, Goatly contemplates an integrated approach to humor that complements older theories of incongruity (like Raskin and Attardo’s) with the ‘text-linguistic notions of priming and collocation’ (292). Key to this approach are the NS and LA categories of Attardo’s model, ‘the organisational properties of humour texts’, in particular the ‘foregrounding of punchlines’ and the ‘double cohesion of humorous texts’ (292) on a local level. Priming theory suggests that words are presupposed to possess certain meanings in certain orders in certain situations, and that humor effectively confounds such presuppositions. Goatly writes that ‘ambiguity (entropy) is much overestimated, and that, indeed, many of the jokes and humorous texts in [his] book depend upon the overriding of the most obviously primed meanings’ (276). In this respect, humor scholars could have much to learn from adaptation scholars, whose ostensible focus is over-primed and overwritten texts. For Goatly, ‘language and language use is driven by two opposing forces: the centripetal or forces for standardization, and the centrifugal or forces of variation’ (312). And while ‘[p]riming is clearly a centripetal or standardising force, pushing the language towards conventional collocation and cliché . . . the kinds of humour which override priming, though dependent upon it for their disjunction, can be seen as playful attempts at creativity’ (313). The imaginary adaptations discussed above are excessively ‘playful attempts at creativity’ that emphasize the both-and of adaptation, a practice that is itself both standardizing and playful, both connecting and disconnecting, both repetitious and differentiating. Goatly sees humor as falling on the side of ‘variation’ by ‘exploiting ambiguity, making or recording mistakes (paronymy, malapropoism, spoonerism, pseudomorphology, decomposition) and generally overriding priming’ (314). Adaptation, so often derided for its ‘“infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” [and] “bastardization”’ (Stam 2005, 3), can be celebrated for the very same sense of misuse and malapropism, for reading books as movies or watching movies as television or playing television as video games. Through misuse, adaptation becomes an act of invention that makes texts do things that they could not, should not or did not do before. This sense of invention points, finally, to the major, and maybe even philosophical incongruity underlying all adaptations and jokes. In On the Problem of the Comic, Peter Marteinson elaborates an Ontic–Epistemic Theory of Humor based on his conviction that ‘normal human cognition is subjective and anthropomorphic’, that we ‘see the world, not through “rose-coloured glasses,” but through multi-coloured and ever-changing lenses of which we are almost always unaware’, such that ‘the selection of facts we perceive in external states of affairs [is] very limited – by various forms of filtering, selections and simplifications’ (2006, 10). For Marteinson, ‘The comic then, that which causes laugher . . . is the perception that the criteria for truth in the social universe have momentarily become inadequate, and that social being itself has passed from a state of epistemological acceptance to a state of cognitive

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rejection’ (11). He sees in laughter ‘an “unravelling of the seams” between external facts, intuitive notions and cultural concepts, all of which are normally leveled and rendered equivalent in anthropomorphic perception’ (11). Adaptations possess a similar sense of disequilibrium by highlighting the fragility of frames of reference and by calling into question the boundaries between seemingly discrete media and texts. Adaptations are ‘ever-changing lenses’, forms of ‘filtering’, ‘selection’, and (sometimes) ‘simplifications’. Adaptations, as it were, unravel the seams and, in their mistakes and variations, cast ‘literature’ and ‘film’ as ‘arbitrary constructs first dreamt up and later passed down and acculturated into each new generation, without really being there at all’ (10). One last adaptation joke, itself an echo of the New Yorker joke with which I began, testifies to adaptation and comedy’s overlapping epistemological and ontological import. It serves as the punch line to ‘Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television (2015)’ the sixth-season finale of the television show Community, a show that is no stranger to adaptation jokes, with previous episodes featuring a stage adaptation of The Karate Kid (‘Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing’), Cougarton Abbey, a British drama that supposedly inspired the American television show Cougar Town (‘Biology 101’), and myriad parodies and pastiches (e.g. ‘Critical Film Studies’, an episode-length homage to My Dinner with Andre). The episode concludes with a cut to a commercial for a board game adaptation of Community. ‘The hit show is now a hit board game!’ exclaims an announcer voiced by series creator Dan Harmon, as a family of four sits around a dining room table playing along. ‘More like an “I’m bored” game’, says the daughter as she throws down a literal ‘Trump Card’. The son plays a ‘Friend Move’ card as he announces, ‘I like you, Winger . . . as a friend’. The mom responds with a ‘Drunk Dial’ card: ‘Sorry, Britta, but that friendship just got a benefit’. The announcer explains, ‘Collect all the other players’ identities and be the first to figure out if the game is part of the show or . . .’. The father finishes the thought: ‘I got it: The whole show is happening inside this game’. He brandishes a ‘Snow Globe’ card, an allusion to St. Elsewhere’s infamous series finale. ‘Then explain this’, the son retorts, handing his dad a tiny script. The dad looks stunned: ‘It’s a script of a fake commercial at the end of season six starring this family’. The boy is triumphant: ‘Sorry, dad. Guess I win’. ‘You stupid child’, replies the dad, ‘nobody’s winning anything. Don’t you see? This means we don’t exist. We’re not created by God, we’re created by a joke. We were never born and we will never actually live’. The camera slowly pulls back from the stunned, silent family to focus on the board’s packaging. The announcer continues: ‘Dice not included. Some assembly required. Lines between desire, perception and reality may become blurred, redundant or interchangeable’. This time, it’s time I told you not only that ‘you’re adapted’ but ‘we’re’ adapted, ‘we’re created by a joke’, a joke that (fittingly) takes the form of an adaptation. This adaptation, like the other imaginary adaptations, imposes a sort of ontic–epistemic vertigo. The Community gag affirms that just as jokes and adaptations blur the lines between each other, so too do they both blur the lines between ‘perception and reality’. Some disassembly required.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Source: Kyle Meikle (2015) ‘A book and a movie walk into a bar’, Comedy Studies, 6:2, 118–128.

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References 30 Rock. “Emanuelle Goes to Dinosaur Land.” First broadcast May 13, 2010, by NBC. Directed by Beth McCarthy-Miller and written by Matt Hubbard. “50 Shades of Grey Auditions.” Saturday Night Live video, 3:00, October 5, 2013. http://www.nbc. com/saturday-night-live/video/50-shades-of-grey-auditions/n41623 “82nd Academy Awards.” First broadcast March 7, 2010, by ABC. Directed by Hamish Hamilton. “adopt, v.” OED Online. June 2015. Oxford University Press. Accessed June 11, 2015. http://www. oed.com/view/Entry/2665?redirectedFromDadopt Attardo, Salvatore. 1994. Linguistic Theories of Humor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Cattrysse, Patrick. 2014. Descriptive Adaptation Studies: Epistemological and Methodological Issues. Antwerp: Garant. Community. “Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television.” Yahoo! Screen video, 27:18, June 2, 2015. https://screen.yahoo.com/community/community-episode-13-emotional-consequences070001302.html Goatly, Andrew. 2012. Meaning and Humour: Key Topics in Semantics and Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gray, Jonathan. 2010. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 2012. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. “‘Iron Man’ Trailer to Be Made into Feature Film.” YouTube video, 2:43, posted by “The Onion,” April 15, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?vDYBM3j7£4Lcw Marteinson, Peter. 2006. On the Problem of the Comic: A Philosophical Study on the Origins of Laughter. Ottawa: Legas. The Office. “Secretary’s Day.” First broadcast April 22, 2010, by NBC. Directed by Steve Carell and written by Mindy Kaling. Raskin, Victor. 1985. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Stam, Robert. 2005. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” In Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, edited by Robert Stam and Allesandra Raengo, 1–52. Oxford: Blackwell.

Contributor Kyle Meikle is an assistant professor of English and Communication in the Klein family school of Communications Design at the University of Baltimore. His work has appeared in Adaptation and Literature/Film Quarterly, and he is the author, along with Thomas Leitch, of the Oxford Bibliographies guide to adaptation.

Chapter 34

Kidding around: children, comedy, and social media (5:1) Peter Kunze

There is a glaring absence from both comedy studies and children’s literature criticism: children.1 This absence is perhaps most surprising in the latter. Nearly 30 years ago, Jacqueline Rose notably argued that ‘Children’s fiction sets up a world in which the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product, receiver), but where neither of them enter the space in between’ (Rose 1993, 1–2). Rose’s claims suggested that children’s literature was the result of adults addressing children without rebuttal, and that children themselves were the constructed result of an adult desire for innocence. Consequently, as Marah Gubar recently noted (2013, 450), discussing real children is ‘risky business’ for ‘children’s literature critics – even those of us who consider it ‘impossible’ to say or know anything about this topic – are always talking about children, whether we admit it or not’. Gubar argues that critics’ tendency to view children as ‘deficient’ has incidentally created the same concerns such critics claimed to describe regarding the disenfranchisement of children (2013, 451). As a result, critics of children’s literature cautiously avoid the primary audience of their field’s subject-matter. Even though several children have published books, including Louise Abeita, S.E. Hinton, Gordon Korman, Alexandra Elizabeth Sheedy and Mattie J.T. Stepanek, sustained critical attention is rarely afforded to children as creators or consumers. Several scholars – most prominently, Marah Gubar herself and Robin Bernstein – have furthered a new strain of children’s literature criticism (or, perhaps more accurately, childhood studies) that examines how children have inspired, collaborated, and participated in the very culture that is deemed to be their own. Drawing from performance studies and material culture, for example, Gubar and Bernstein examine the central role of children in the creation, performance, and reception of children’s culture. Their important work, however, is largely (and understandably) staked in the foundational shifts that occurred in the nineteenth century, so it obviously does not consider the ways in which contemporary digital culture enhances and expands the possibilities of expressive culture of, by, and for children. In this essay, I take Vine as a case study for what I see as fundamental transition in the production, distribution, and exhibition of culture. Though my focus is on children, the implications are far-reaching, and I seek to develop our notion of what children’s culture and its study are and can be going forward. Furthermore, such a study contributes to an often underexplored area of comedy studies – children’s humor – by complicating our understanding of what it is and its relevance today. Though social scientists have extensively explored the role of digital technologies (including social media) in the lives of children and young adults, the discussion of these implications for the humanities has been almost nonexistent. This oversight remains

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glaring when one considers the widespread popularity and usage of digital technologies by the younger portions of our population. Indeed, today’s children and young adults – roughly, those born in the past 30 years or so – may be known as what Marc Prensky calls ‘digital natives’. Writing in 2001, Prensky noted, ‘Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet’ (1). These individuals were raised during the Digital Age, and their world largely is or has always been one where computers were household fixtures and the internet was easily accessed at home, school, library, and now mobile devices. Consequently, they are comfortable with digital technologies and easily adapt to updates that require relearning and modifying one’s digital practices. Statistical data shows that digital technologies and web-based services are not only popular among these demographics; they are nearly indispensable. In a 2005 report for the Pew Research Center, Amanda Lenhart and Mary Madden suggests that 57% of online teens – roughly 12 million young people – were creating content to be displayed on the internet, including blogs, webpages, remixes of digital material, and creative work intended for online consumption, such as photographs, stories, and viral videos (i). The report found teenage internet users in urban environments (40%) more likely to create and share than their suburban (28%) and rural (34%) counterparts, and those with broadband internet access tended to share original content more than their peers with dial-up connections (36% versus 28%) (Lenhart and Madden 2005, 2). Despite slight variations in statistics, the popularity of these practices among teens was surprising: the internet was becoming a space for exchange rather than simply consumption, and faster connections fueled both of these processes. Following the dot-com bust of the early 2000s, the reinvigorated internet – the socalled ‘Web 2.0’ – allowed for a greater range of interactive uses by its consumers, including social networking, collaboration, and customization (Davidson 2008, 709). Compared with webpages, which simply presented lists of information, Web 2.0 allowed users to purchase goods, interact with colleagues via wikis and video conferencing, and connect with friends and family through sites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. A 2010 study found internet usage among teenagers between ages 12 and 13 was 88%, and 95% among those between 14 and 17 (Lenhart et al. 2010, 5), while 73% of teenage internet users participated in social networking online (Lenhart et al. 2010, 2). Furthermore, teenagers in ‘less well-off households’ were actually more likely to participate in social networking (over 80%) than their wealthier peers (70%) (Lenhart et al. 2010, 17). Such information suggests that the costs associated with digital technology usage – internet subscriptions, phone plans, devices – do not wholly impede widespread access across ages and socioeconomic groups. The focus of my discussion here is a relatively new mobile app (short for application) that has nevertheless gained increasing social currency among young internet users in the past year: Vine. The microblogging social media platform Twitter launched Vine in January 2013 to allow its users to go beyond its traditional 140-character ‘tweets’ to share six-second videos that play on a loop. Upon revealing the app, Michael Sippey, Twitter’s Vice President of Product, compared the ‘brevity’ of Vine with the Twitter’s main product and noted ‘Now that you can easily capture motion and sound, we look forward to seeing what you create’ (2013). Undoubtedly, users have a range of uses for Vine, including a medium to demonstrate personal talents (singing, dancing, physical stunts, and magic tricks), capture intimate moments with family and friends, and make pithy observations in the spirit of the microblog. The app enjoys continued popularity through regular

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compilations of Vine videos posted to viral video-sharing sites, such as YouTube and Vimeo, which allow for mass consumption of videos at once across various platforms. Yet the prevailing practice for the service appears to be the production and distribution of comedy, and its primary proponents are children and young adults. Close consideration of this usage not only speaks to the role digital technology plays in contemporary comedy, but also broadens our understanding of children’s culture beyond culture for children or starring children to include creative material produced by children. One might rightfully ask what is so novel about Vine compared to previous uses of digital technologies by children and young adults. After all, as the research described above shows, children have used digital technology to post stories and photos, videos and remixes, songs and artwork. Furthermore, Vine celebrities – that is, users who have built up considerable followings on the service – are often transmedia performers who actively maintain Twitter accounts and post vlogs (video blogs) on YouTube, for example. For me, the role of circulation remains central to Vine’s importance and popularity as well as its relevance to us as scholars of comedy, children’s culture, and digital media. According to rankzoo.com, the most followed user on Vine, KingBach (real name: Andrew Bachelor), has an estimated 4.3 million fans, while close behind are Brittany Furlan with 4 million and Nash Grier and Jerome Jarre with 3.7 million followers respectively (‘Vine Users’ 2013). While his following is barely 10% that of singer Katy Perry’s over 48.5 million Twitter followers (as of December 2013), KingBach does not have an offline reputation that fuels his online success. Indeed, he and the bulk of Vine’s most popular users are amateurs or aspiring entertainers who have built their cultural capital through a long-term commitment to Vine, marked by frequent videos (often several times a day), collaboration, and transmedia promotion. In fact, the most popular real-life celebrity on Vine is hip hop artist Tyler the Creator, who ranks at #19 behind nearly a score of lesser-known personalities (‘Vine Users’ 2013), most of whom are high school and college students. What makes most of this production and circulation possible, of course, is smartphone technology. Originally launched for the iPhone, Vine is now supported by both Samsung Android and the Windows Phone, and the six-second form imposed by the app is ideal for cellular phone users, including a demographic often excluded from digital culture production: children. In the previously mentioned 2010 report from the Pew Research Center, Amanda Lenhart and colleagues found that 75% of teenagers have a cellular phone, while the statistic jumps to 93% among young adults ages 18 to 29 (4). Surprisingly, 58% of 12-year-olds have a cellular phone (Lenhart et al. 2010, 4), and individuals between the ages of 8 and 18 spend over two hours every day consuming media on devices like cellular phones, iPods, and portable video game players (Tarpley 2012, 66). Furthermore, Todd Tarpley reports that about 20% of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 use their phone to view video, nearly one-third of which users create themselves (2012, 68). Tarpley notes that ‘barriers between creators and consumers are steadily eroding’ (2012, 68); and with this erosion, we are seeing an increased circulation of culture from young voices. So while young people have used websites, blogs, and YouTube for distributing their self-produced content before, the popularity of Vine demonstrates the rise of a celebrity subculture that is growing still. While mainstream audiovisual culture benefits from high production values, massive marketing campaigns, and first-rate talent, Vine succeeds by virtue of its almost complete inversion of this strategy: videos demonstrating minimal technical competency, interpersonal circulation (‘sharing’ on social media) rather than corporate-fueled promotion, and often anonymous talent. While there are some

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notable exceptions, including the occasional usage of trick photography or stop-motion animation, Vine’s capital seems to extend from what Mat Honan of Wired calls its ‘charged’ quality: ‘It’s completely improvised. It feels like a quick glimpse into someone else’s world. It’s high on emotion. It captures the frenetic energy of youth. It’s charged’(2013). Since Vine was originally introduced for use on mobile devices – particularly those running Apple’s operating system, iOS, like iPads and iPhones) – and seems to have maintained that status, it is a profoundly democratic form. All one needs is temporary access to a cellular phone, a tablet, a laptop, or a camcorder and desktop, in order to create and distribute one’s own six-second contribution to this growing online phenomenon. In a time when 58% of 12-year-olds have a cellular phone (Lenhart et al. 2010, 4), younger teenagers are getting in on the game, and the result is an inclusive, collaborative community that (co-)produces, circulates, and celebrates personal comedic expression. By examining three particular young users – Lillian Powers, Nash Grier, Marissa Mayne – I consider the complexity of young people’s humor as well as the way in which they use this app to appeal to and even mobilize their presumed audience. Children’s humor is often synonymous with low humor: a focus on the scatological, for example. Roderick McGillis nearly essentializes children’s humor, but pulls back, noting it ‘depends largely on the body. Not entirely, but largely. Slapstick, caricature, parody, the grotesque, ridicule and the improbable in human predicaments concern the body, and so too does nonsense’ (2009, 258). One can see parallels to Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of the carnivalesque and grotesque body in this understanding with its emphasis on flatulence, urination, eructation, and defecation (1984, 317), as one sees in humorous children’s books like Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Taro Gomi’s Everyone Poops, or Sylvia Branzei’s Grossology: The Science of Really Gross Things!. Consequently, McGillis connects children’s humor with defiance and rebellion against social norms and an adult-controlled world: ‘I suspect, however, that ostensibly subversive humor serves to satisfy the urge to question and resist’ (2009, 267). The humorous novels of Roald Dahl often foreground the power imbalance between children and adults, aligning the narrator (and presumably Dahl himself) against the oppressive adults, whose stupidity, fatness, and ugliness often signify the illegitimacy of their social superiority. Similarly, Doris Bergen notes that ‘children’s earliest attempts at humor involve language or nonsense sound play’, while so-called ‘adult humor’ is traditionally perceived as ‘highly cognitive, requiring recognition of subtle incongruities in concepts and language’ (2003, 26). Jennifer Cunningham problematically contends that ‘if there is one way to categorize what all funny things have in common, the answer is deceptively simple: Funny things are not serious’ (2004, 96). Though both Bergen’s and Cunningham’s chapters are based on scientific research, one cannot help but wonder if they underestimate children’s capacity for the ironic, sardonic, even grim in their humor production. Similarly, modes like black humor that demonstrate these qualities can be found in popular children’s books by Edward Gorey, Roald Dahl, and Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler). In the 1950s, Martha Wolfenstein, informed by psychoanalytic practice and the Freudian relief theory articulated in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, notes in analyzing a child’s drawing that the child demonstrates ‘wish to transform the grievous into the gratifying’ (1954, 28). Indeed, just as humor and laughter have various theories to explicate their origins and purposes, so children’s humor is varied in its practice, function, and reception. Lillian Powers rose to internet fame following a 28 August 2013 Gawker article referring to the 12-year-old as a ‘Vine genius’ (Juzwiak 2013a). Her videos – alternately parodic and nonsensical, but always good-natured – feature her engaging in a variety of

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genres specific to Vine, including going up to strangers to film their reactions, creating a scene in public, and responding to the literal meaning of pop music lyrics. Enforcing a policy that sets the minimum age at 17, Vine subsequently suspended Lillian’s account, and Gawker writer Ryan Juzwiak launched a campaign to restore the young user to the site, entitled #FreeLillian. Powers’ fame, suspension, and campaign speaks to various aspects of the Vine community. At one level, it demonstrates the range of talents and audiences the app attracts. As Juzwiak argues (2013b), there are numerous young Vine users. Furthermore, there are numerous Vines that prominently or exclusively feature young children who participate but do not necessarily post and monitor the videos, such as six-year-old Vine dancing phenomenon Terio. Vine consequently has to navigate between limiting free expression and protecting the interests of both children and its brand. In doing so, they remind us of the presumed need to protect children from certain forms of expression and, therefore, certain forms of knowledge, reinforcing the idea that the ‘child’ is ultimately a social construction imposed upon young people. Lillian’s own brand is staked in her gentle humor, which may best be described as ‘absurdist clowning’. Michael R. Mosher uses this phrase to capture the Felliniesque behavior he observed when children were performing before a video camera (2003, 73). Lillian’s Vines have shown a range of absurdist behavior, including one video of her licking her cat, while another featured her stating ‘Lumberjacks be like’ before slowly hacking at her breakfast with a knife. The latter video is telling because, more than just nonsensical play, it reveals the vibrant community that exists among Vine creators and its users. Like more traditional modes of comedy, the ‘be like’ genre on Vine plays on easily recognizable stereotypes for a quick laugh. For example, a video posted by Breanna Trauernicht of her young nephew that begins with him saying ‘Girls be like. . .’ and then quickly demonstrating three common social media behaviors: the ‘duckface’, where one purses their lips for the camera; the ‘selfie’, in which a person photographs him or herself in a mirror; ‘workout swag’, which plays upon people photographing themselves in their exercise attire. Therefore, in order for the humor of Powers’ and Trauernicht’s videos to work, one has to at least be aware of these tropes within social media, and, on a second level, know this recurring genre within Vine. This intertextuality elevates Powers above traditional understanding of children’s humor as silly play into one that illustrates the communal nature as well as the inherent intertextuality of humor. Lillian’s Vines are richly allusive, with a keen awareness of other Vine users (called ‘Viners’), Vine genres, and popular culture. This key aspect of digital culture – and, in turn, Vines – is the remix, in which users combining existing digital content, most often clips from television shows or movies. This strategy may be enacted in various ways. A user may film herself saying something and then follow it up with a clip, or a user may juxtapose two disparate clips for humorous effect. A third option includes maintaining the visual content but creating a new audio track or superimposing an existing music track; on Vine, this model seems particularly popular with content from children’s shows like SpongeBob SquarePants and which is consequently rendered more ‘adult-appropriate’ through voiceover. Lillian’s version, however, veers more towards the zany. In ‘When I cook. . .’, Lillian hands over an imaginary meal and asks ‘What does it taste like?’. The Vine cuts to a TV showing Top Chef judge Gail Simmons telling host Padma Lakshmi, ‘It’s like a weird greasy cookie’. With another cut, Lillian says ‘oh’ and walks away for an abrupt conclusion. By repurposing the clip, Lillian’s Vine uses self-deprecating humor both to demonstrate a personal inadequacy and to make a joke for the benefit of her audience.

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Kaveri Subrahmanyam and David Šmahel have suggested that online spaces allow young users to experiment with how they want to present themselves to their peers, while gauging feedback allows for a renegotiation of an identity-in-progress (2010, 220). Surprisingly, a majority of young internet users stay true to their offline identities, and ‘the virtual personas they construct may actually help to solidify their sense of self’ (2010, 220). Therefore, as social scientists are showing, performances such as Lillian’s allow young internet users to express themselves at the same time they are beginning to construct and understand who they are and want to be. Parody is also a common aspect of Lillian’s humor, and her targets include children’s cultural products as well as other Vine users. For example, Kidz Bop is a series of albums that cover current pop music songs in a manner considered to be appropriate for children. Powers parodies ‘Boss Ass Bitch’ by Pretty Taking All Fades (PTAF), a sexually explicit song that has become popular as a soundtrack for numerous Vines, and dances while singing, ‘I’m a boss butt itch’. This play simultaneously mocks the aggressive lyrics of the original while satirizing the ridiculous level of bowdlerization Kidz Bop goes to in order to be ‘kid friendly’. Clearly Lillian is aware of the original lyrics, and mocks the supposed Kidz Bop version, which is allegedly for people like her but ultimately serves adult ideas of what children can and should be exposed to in popular culture. Another video features Lillian parodying the Katy Perry song, ‘Roar’; after singing the lyrics ‘I used to bite my tongue and hold my breath’, the video cuts to Lillian hyperventilating. In this instance, Powers demonstrates clever linguistic play as she literally acts out the rather clichéd idioms that Perry attempts to use to capture her emotional hardship. One can read this moment as Powers deflating the supposed sincerity Perry is portraying, as well as an honest perspective on the figurative nature of language itself. What is clear is that children’s humor can go beyond wordplay and nonsense to draw upon satire, intertextuality, and irony. Rather than viewing children as innocent and even ignorant, Powers is one of many Vine users who testify to the comic ability of the youngest in our population to generate and perform original comedic content. Though only 15 years old, Nash Grier is the third most popular person on Vine, with over 3.7 million followers as of 18 December 2013 (‘Vine Users’). Even more striking is his rapid rise to that status: in a 16 October 2013 interview on ABC News’ Good Morning America, host Josh Elliott noted that Grier had 1.4 million followers (which went up to 1.5 million followers during the segment itself) and was already more popular on Vine than pop star Justin Bieber. While one cannot discount the power of celebrity in the entertainment industry, the popularity of Vine-created celebrities greatly exceeds those Viners whose careers preceded their Vine usage. Grier’s Vines also run the gamut from the absurdist play similar to Lillian Powers to the observational comedy we expect of more seasoned comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld or Louis C.K. Throughout his Vines, Grier shows a self-conscious artist who is deliberately manipulating and distributing his videos to both foster a persona and perpetuate a brand. Nash has over 150 Vines as of 18 December 2013, and one remarkable quality is his collaboration with other Viners. Nash’s humor helps foster his image as an impish, albeit inoffensive, teenager. In one frequently shared Vine, Grier overrides a song with the lyrics ‘Holy shit’ with ‘Holy Bible. . . all you hoes need to get out of the club at 4 A.M. and twerk your ass to church’. The video draws on Grier’s Southern Christian upbringing, but also satirizes the popularity of twerking on Facebook. Though Nash lives in Mooresville, North Carolina, he has frequently worked with California-based Viners, including King-

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Bach, Brittany Furlan, Curtis Lepore, and Cameron Dallas. These videos demonstrate a communal ethos over a competitive one, as well as an effort to meld the individual style of each performer in their joint video. For example, Furlan and Lepore’s videos are often more risqué, playing upon innuendo and stereotypes. In one of their videos together, Grier and Furlan pretend to be a couple, with Grier packing to head on a trip while his distraught girlfriend cries. As the video cuts to show him wheeling away his suitcase, it becomes clear that Furlan is inside. The video celebrates the ridiculousness both performers are known for, as well as the stereotypical commentary about women that Furlan typically invokes and often upends in her own work. Grier’s most frequent collaborator is his four-year-old sister, Skylynn, who has her own Twitter and Vine account – though one that is managed by their mother, Elizabeth. These videos often play on the children’s ages, especially Skylynn’s misunderstanding of the content she is being asked to act out. In one video, she and her brother sing Lorde’s ‘Royals’ – an ironic choice, since the song is about class mobility and Grier’s videos seem to suggest a comfortable middle-class life – and Skylynn misquotes the lyrics ‘You can call me Queen Bee’ as ‘You can call me Green Beans’. Another video features Skylynn in a wig, repeating the line, ‘Girl, this ain’t no weave’. A four-year-old engaging in a connotatively cross-racial performance that draws on the cultural politics surrounding AfricanAmerican hair again speaks to the creators’ rhetorical awareness of context within the videos and unintentionally alludes to the racial tension that has been a focus of much American humor, further complicated by the aforementioned class dynamics. Vine videos are ripe with satire, and the relative shortness of the videos often fosters an ambivalent attitude towards political (in)correctness. This observation leads me into an important concern regarding Vines in general, regardless of use by children or adults: the economics behind the app. Though Vine and Twitter by extension provide a worldwide platform for displaying one’s original content, they also do it within a corporatized structure that generates millions of dollars of revenue a year – Forbes reported $79 million in losses despite $317 million in revenue for Twitter in 2012 (Hof 2013)– with little financial benefit to the performers. Grier’s family seems to have figured out avenues to circumvent this issue. On 11 December 2013, Nash announced that he was taking over soft drink FlavorSplash’s Vine account, initiating an amateur–corporate partnership that will presumably result in a lucrative payday for Grier. Furthermore, a website maintained by the Grier family offers $5 ‘They Need Jesus’ bracelets and $25 ‘They Need Jesus’ T-shirts, based on a phrase uttered by Skylynn when Nash asked her in a Vine what was wrong with America today. Though the Vine was comically framed, the website – in Skylynn’s ‘voice’, but clearly managed by her mother – speaks to the values behind the videos, which seem to transcend the basic claim to fame many seek in Vines. The Griers’ efforts illustrate performers’ abilities to monetize their efforts in addition to the growing cultural capital of these performers, as evidenced by the presumed desire for related merchandise from a substantial online following. Marissa Mayne represents another comic use of Vine beyond fame and monetary gain: social justice. With over 895,000 followers and 571 Vines as of 18 December 2013 (‘Vine Users’), Mayne combines lip synching, observational humor, and anarchic nonsense with a positive message against bullying. The US Department of Health and Human Services anti-bullying website, http://www.stopbullying.gov, cites research that suggests cyberbullying affects 16% of students in grades 9–12, though developments in technology use by teenagers similarly create challenges for researchers attempting to track trends

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(http://www.stopbullying.gov/cyberbullying/what-is-it/index.html). Vine seems a particularly opportune space for countermeasures. Through the efforts of Team Bullyproof, Mayne – as a transmedia celebrity who actively maintains Vine, Twitter, and Facebook accounts in addition to a website – advocates tolerance, love, and self-acceptance. Her positive messages waver between silly and serious, as well as playful and aggressive, in her effort to use her platform to support teens like herself who face bullying both in school and online. One particularly goofy Vine shows Marissa singing, ‘This is my “I don’t give a fuck” face! Every day I wear my “I don’t give a fuck” face!’ She takes a noticeably more confrontational stance in a separate Vine, in which she follows up ‘People think calling me fat and ugly is going to change anything about me. I’m me. If you don’t like it. . .’ with a vulgar gesture connoting fellatio. While the content may veer toward the inappropriate for some viewers, Mayne successfully manages to reverse the tendency to use humor to deride and control the other (in the Bergsonian sense of laughter) while equally demonstrating that humor can use silly means to serious ends. Marissa’s Vines are often at their funniest and most emotionally resonant when she is joking about her physical appearance. This direct action allows her to address her online critics – often referred to as ‘haters’ in digital spaces – and to control the humor surrounding her body image. By making fat jokes herself, she in turn makes a strong effort to disempower the nameless detractors who target both her and other bullied teenagers. ‘My Life in a Nutshell’ features a close-up of Marissa stating in an exaggerated, over-enunciated manner, ‘I’m 19 years old. I don’t take life seriously. I love food’. A similar video includes the facetious observation, ‘So I’ve come to a conclusion today. God put food on this earth. . . and I’mma eat it’. Mayne mixes these messages of body acceptance and self-esteem with absurd videos, including one that shows her house decorated for Christmas, followed by the line, ‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. . . threw up everywhere!’. This interchange between positive reinforcement and subversive play often overlap; but more importantly, they allow Marissa to maintain an inviting web presence without overwhelming her audience with her commitment to anti-bullying activism. In his experience working with children, Michael R. Mosher came to the conclusion that ‘Humor in front of the camera demands a certain self-awareness and self-confidence. A sign of kids at their best was evident when they were swaggering and energized and turning on for the camera’ (2003, 80). Perhaps this quality is best seen in Marissa’s Vines, where she ably combines a confident, affirmative social message with an absurdist comic sensibility. At the very least, they pull Vine into productive new directions, expanding the possibilities for creative expression and social activism in online spaces frequented by youth. Admittedly, media like Vines pose difficulties for traditional critical paradigms, not the least of which is the concise nature of the Vines themselves. As I hope to have shown here, our focus may be best placed on the combined effect of watching multiple Vines by one producer-participant, thereby gaining a sense of his or her sense of humor, style, and ideological agenda. Digital media might also lead us to revisit and revise old critical methodologies while developing new ones, as theories surrounding convergence already work toward. It comes as little surprise that Kathryn C. Montgomery concluded in 2007, ‘The transition to the Digital Age provides us with a unique opportunity to rethink the position of children in media culture, and in society as a whole’ (221). Six years later, we are still wrestling with these questions, which could have consequences for how we understand a multitude of fields – including comedy, children, and digital culture. Vine is the latest addition to a creative era that places the tools of production, distribution, and

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reception directly in the hands of the everyday person, including children. While the corporatized nature of these online platforms and concerns over equal access to them raise legitimate, even urgent, concerns, we might also think how they inspire a reconsideration of authorship and consumption as well as the dominant modes of humor – both in the United States, where these youth live, and worldwide. Source: Peter Kunze (2014) ‘Kidding around: children, comedy, and social media’, Comedy Studies, 5:1, 2–11.

Note 1 The use of the word ‘children’ is, of course, quite loaded with possible meanings. For my purposes here, I use it as a collective term to describe individuals under the age of 21. Tied up in this understanding of children is childhood as a performance, and attention is often paid to how these children behave in a manner we may describe as ‘childish’.

References Bakhtin, M. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bergen, D. 2003. ‘Humor, Play, and Child Development.’ In Humor in Children’s Lives: A Guidebook for Practitioners, edited by A.J. Klein, 17–32. Westport: Praeger. Branzei, S. 2002. Grossology: The Science of Really Gross Things. New York: Price Stern Sloan. Cunningham, J. 2004. ‘Children’s Humor.’ In Children’s Play, edited by W.G. Scarlett, S. Naudeau, D. Salonius-Pasternak, and I. Ponte, 93–109. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Dahl, R. 2001. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Davidson, C. 2008. ‘Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions.’ PMLA 123 (3): 707–717. Forbes. 2013. http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/10/03/revealed-in-ipo-filing-twitter-stilllosing-big-money-even-as-2012-revenue-tripled-to-317-million: Accessed 17 December 2013. Gomi, T. 2001. Everyone Poops. La Jolla: Kane/Miller. Gubar, M. 2013. ‘Risky Business: Talking about Children in Children’s Literature Criticism.’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 38 (4): 450–457. Hof, R. 2013. ‘IPO Filing: Twitter Still Losing Big Money Even as 2012 Revenues Tripled.’ Forbes. 2013. http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/10/03/revealed-in-ipo-filing-twitter-still losing-big-money-even-as-2012-revenue-tripled-to-317-million: Accessed 17 December 2013. Honan, M. 2013. ‘Why Vine Just Won’t Die.’ Wired, http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/08/ why-vine-just-wont-die/. Accessed December 16. Juzwiak, R. 2013a. ‘This 12-Year-Old is a Vine Genius.’ Gawker, http://gawker.com/this-12-yearold-is-a-vine-genius-1210088776/. Accessed December 17. Juzwiak, R. 2013b. ‘Vine, We Demand That You Let Lillian Powers Perform Her Art.’ Gawker, http://www.gawker.com/vine-we-demand-that-you-let-lillian-powers-perform-her-1223278105/. Accessed December 17. Lenhart, A., K., Purcell, A. Smith, and K. Zickuhr. 2010. Social Media and Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults. Report, Pew Research Center. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ ED525056.pdf. Accessed March 19, 2014. Lenhart, A, and M. Madden. 2005. Teen Content Creators and Consumers. Report, Pew Research Center. http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media/Files/Reports/2005/PIP_Teens_Content_ Creation.pdf.pdf. Accessed March 19, 2014.

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McGillis, R. 2009. ‘Humor and the Body in Children’s Literature.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by M.O. Grenby and A. Immel, 258–271. New York: Cambridge University Press. Montgomery, K.C. 2007. Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce, and Childhood in the Age of the Internet. Cambridge: MIT Press. Mosher, M.R. 2003. ‘Laughing on Camera: Humor in Videos Produced by Children.’ In Humor in Children’s Lives: A Guidebook for Practitioners, edited by A.J. Klein, 69–85. Westport: Praeger. Prensky, M. 2001. ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.’ On the Horizon 9 (5): 1–6. Rose, J. 1993. The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Shippey, M. 2013. ‘Vine: A New Way to Share Video.’ https://blog.twitter.com/2013/vine-a-newway-to-share-video. Accessed December 16. Subrahmanyam, K., and D. Šmahel. 2010. Digital Youth: The Role of Media in Development. New York: Springer. Tarpley, T. 2012. ‘Children and New Technologies.’ In Handbook of Children and the Media, 2nd ed, edited by D.G. and J.L. Singer, 63–73. Washington, DC: SAGE. Vine Users. 2013. http://www.rankzoo.com. Accessed December 18, 2013. Wolfenstein, M. 1954. Children’s Humor: A Psychological Analysis. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Contributor Peter Kunze is Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Eckerd College. His research examines masculinity, childhood and comedy across literature, film, and new media.

Chapter 35

A new economy of jokes?: #Socialmedia #Comedy (6:2) Rebecca Krefting and Rebecca Baruc

Introduction This morning I turned off my alarm, which is also my phone, and while I was at it I used an app on my phone to check the weather and caught up on notifications from Facebook. I was notified of birthdays and dutifully posted a slew of ‘Happy Happy!’ and ‘Let them eat cake!’ on the pages of my friends born today. Next, I perused my morning Twitter feed. The Ukrainians are still pointing fingers at the Russians and vice versa for shooting a commercial airliner out of the sky, Hillary Clinton is signing her new book down at the local bookstore, and everyone’s trotting out their brand of funny in 140 characters or less. People increasingly incorporate social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Flickr, YouTube, and Tumblr into their daily lives for a variety of reasons both personal and professional. There is a bit of navel gazing going on, but it also allows you to stay connected to family and friends living far away, to keep abreast of current events and trends, and inform others of your accomplishments. The central role of social media (SM) in so many people’s lives changes how we interact and engage with each other. New media scholars Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green identify this dynamic online as new emerging forms of cultural participation and shifting sociality that lead to ‘spreadability’ or the ability for users to create and disseminate widely their own content (2013). This opens up commercial opportunities for those in the comedy industry, but also increasingly means that failure to incorporate SM in promoting a product or service can have serious monetary consequences for any commercial enterprise. In 2012, Patton Oswalt gave the opening address at the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal, Quebec. He read two letters aloud: one for his fellow comics and one for industry folks. To both he stressed the importance of changing with the times. In his letter to comics, he crows: ‘Everything I know about succeeding as a comedian and ultimately as an artist is worthless now and I couldn’t be happier about that.’ Referencing glacier-sized shifts in the comedy industry, Oswalt forecasts that comics are going to have to work hard using the technologies at their disposal. He concludes the letter: ‘. . . we’re beginning to realize our careers don’t hinge on someone in a plush office deciding to aim a little luck in our direction. There are no more gates’ (2012). Taking a cue from Oswalt and myriad popular sources supporting Oswalt’s claims, we seek to explore how changes in new media and emergent technologies impact the comedy industry and its many popular cultural forms. Our research questions include: How are comics harnessing emergent social media tools and to what effects? Do online platforms alter the exchange and consumption of humor and in what ways (if any) are these networking tools changing the

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substance, style, or means of humor production? What discourses are out there about what social media is doing to comedy and vice versa? To answer these questions, we employed a dual-method qualitative approach incorporating critical discourse analyses and ethnography. The two methods make for a happy marriage that captures data at the macro and micro levels of interaction. Analyzing themes emerging in popular discourses via primary sources such as newspaper and magazine articles, online publications, blogs, reader comments, videos, and performances offers a macro-oriented understanding of SM and comedy; whereas, interviews conducted with industry executives, comedy club owners, comics, actors/performers, comic writers, savvy SM users, and digital studies scholars illumine individual perspectives and experiences in the entertainment industry. We conducted over a dozen interviews, among them with comedy titans such as: Caroline Hirsch, John Leguizamo, Ike Barinholtz, Rachael Harris, and Paul Provenza and distributed interview questions to a number of comic practitioners who responded via email.1 Review of popular discourses, interviews, and scholarship yielded three important themes germane to understanding comedy in the digital age. First, the comedy industry is changing; however, those changes do not come on the heels of a static industry up to this point. Technological innovations routinely do their work to shape the contours of every form of entertainment over time and, not surprisingly, have changed the comedy industry today. Second, there are multiple uses of SM, which we will enumerate, and how comics use SM often hinges on their intent and status. Third, on one hand, the substance of humor remains fairly consistent in content and style of delivery. On the other hand, SM platforms offer fans a way to find comics with similar comic sensibilities – creating tribes based on emotional and ideological congruence – which has an impact on audience composition and the content of comedy. Beneath Patton Oswalt’s directive to comics to capitalize on SM lies a curious and oft-referenced allusion to the Internet as an egalitarian space where everyone has a shot at the limelight. While he is correct that the industry is changing, we are less optimistic that SM levels the playing field, so to speak, and conclude with some discussion of the problems inherent with maintaining this flawed conception, specifically as it relates to the enthusiastic declaration that ‘content is king’.

The industry is (still) changing Robin Zucker started her digital marketing career at Yahoo! as Social Marketing Director, treating early stage platforms as mature in an effort to promote an event or person in entertainment. Astutely aware of how audiences can be fickle with new platforms, Zucker quipped at the end of our interview that what was true in the interview will not be in two weeks. Indeed, social networking sites are volatile and vulnerable to the rapidly changing tides of new media (Auletta 2009). The comedy industry and new media are moving in exciting new directions, but these two facets of popular culture are by no means unprecedented. The entertainment business has always confronted new technologies that shift aspects of content creation and distribution. Social networking platforms are no more exceptional than other past technologies, such as the telegram, the radio, the television, the computer, or the Internet, and garner similar public reaction, ranging from excitement to cynicism. Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World, offers this perspective: ‘The brevity of the telegraph’s message didn’t sit well with many literary intellectuals either; it may have opened access to more sources of

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information, but it also made public discourse much shallower’ (2011, 277). The radio, the television, and the Internet all dramatically changed the distribution of comedy and comics have always learned to adapt to new technologies. Seeing SM in a historical perspective sobers the bombastic excitement surrounding it. In an interview with us, Peter Clemente, an Internet industry pioneer and specialist in customer relationship management (CRM) at a film distribution company in LA, asserted that, ‘social media was a written letter and a telephone call twenty-five years ago’ (2014). Clemente sees the Internet as supplemental to the fundamental business model of marketing for CRM: sending the right message to the right person at the right time. SM might be distinguishable from past industry game-changers in its ability to specifically target consumers from many angles based on retrieved data, yet one could still argue that it is simply augmenting how the comedy industry has always kept itself alive, i.e., with new communication mediums. Major shifts are happening for comedians, distributors, and consumers, altering the relationships between these participants. Traditionally and most commonly, the power to produce and distribute creative content came out of major television networks and film companies and then spread to the consumers. Vis-à-vis SM, comics are finding new routes to success that circumvent the power of untouchable late night television talk-show hosts or business mediators. Comic actors like Abbi Jacobsen, Elaine Carroll, and Jen Kirkman are hailed as trail-blazers who found success using SM to skirt around traditional TV, which GQ writer John Naughton declares: ‘no longer exerts an iron grip over the business of comedy’ (19 April 2014). And as comedians are finding alternative entry points, gatekeepers have adjusted their orientation. Just as Peter Clemente’s business model prioritizes customers, so do major comedy distribution platforms: Netflix, Hulu, SiriusXM, Spotify, and Pandora are all customer-oriented platforms. When defending SiriusXM’s choice to withhold data intelligence from labels, CCO Scott Greenstein explained: ‘This service was built to be a fan service. It was meant to be programmed and curated for fans, by fans’ (quoted in Christman 2014). That means that these distributors will be interested in backing comics who can demonstrate a strong online fan base – thereby pleasing a known audience and assuring a profit for the distributor. Once gained, the immensity of a fan base can influence casting decisions by industry agents and executives, who are measuring SM fandom. To that effect, LA comedy agent Scott Matthews said that he often tells his clients that casting agents and producers will seriously consider the number of followers you have (2014). Though it may not be the result of better quality comedy, a bigger fan base increases the likelihood of getting job offers. For example, Comedy Central producers jumped at the chance to offer a TV deal to popular YouTube web series Broad City, a show about two young female best friends living in New York City. According to Paul Provenza, stand-up comic and host of The Green Room with Paul Provenza, transition to TV is possible because ‘anything that’s popular on YouTube gives [network executives] the opportunity to bypass the pilot stage because they already have metrics’ (2014). A fierce, visible following can be pivotal not just for stand-up comics and sketch teams, but also comedy writers. According to journalist Megan Angelo, Twitter has gone from ‘novel to necessary’ for any writer building their comedy career (The New York Times, 3 November 2011). One can easily assess the proficiency of a comedy writer on Twitter since tweets have the capacity to convey brevity, wit, and a strong handle on words. A writer’s finest qualities on display combined with a formidable fan base can act as a desirable resume for major television opportunities, like when producers hired Bryan Donaldson (formerly an IT guy at an insurance company) as a writer on Late Night with

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Seth Meyers after amassing thousands of followers on Twitter for his wry and cynical tweets (Rogers and Wright 2014). Similarly, comic writer and actor Ike Barinholtz reported that his tweets helped him to catch the attention of Mindy Kaling who later hired him on as a writer for The Mindy Project (2014). SM helps creative content flourish, but it also allows for more crap. More crap, not coincidentally, is what everyone in the comedy industry harrumphed about in 1980 s. With the influx of comedy clubs across the nation and the cable TV boom, the ’80 s saw an inundation of cheap, inexperienced stand-up comedians squinting into spotlights on stages and coaxing chortles form viewers on cable television. At that time, veteran comedians and gatekeepers alike bemoaned this seismic shift in the industry, and today comedy bookers, managers, agents, and comedians have a similar litany of complaints about the changing quality of the content, the deflated value of comedy, and the emerging myth of a comedian building a career on his or her own. Lots of content does not necessarily indicate quality nor does it boost the market value of comedy. ‘I think you’re getting people who are rising pretty quickly without the skills to back it up, and I think you’re getting a lot of comedians that don’t really deserve the success that they have in a certain way’, noted Peter Clemente without mentioning names (2014). It’s too soon to be sure, but perhaps Twitter isn’t making legendary comedians because the medium itself is fleeting; sharing is quick and less thoughtfully crafted. In an interview, Scott Matthews pointed out that ‘hour specials used to be something that was hard to get. And now you have forty different companies offering hour specials and three quarters of them are online so – what’s so special about having an hour special now?’ And while some folks see this as opening up space for comedic voices struggling to find an audience, some say that it is just breeding bad habits in producing comedy content. Gatekeepers are not the only ones skeptical about the flood of new comic material. Using SM, comics can bypass working the comedy circuit and some seasoned comedians lament the loss of this important form of training for novice comics. In a segment on Herlarious, Wanda Sykes scoffs at the prospect of SM replacing the kind of experience gained by traveling and performing live comedy (Huffington Post, August 6, 2013). Ironically, comics went on strike in 1979 to secure living wages for working the comedy circuit and now SM encourages comics to make their jokes/material accessible, if not free, to the public. Caroline Hirsch (2014), founder and owner of Caroline’s on Broadway, is baffled by comedians performing their live work for the same price that consumers have come to expect to pay online: ‘I’ve never been in business when I’ve seen so many free shows, all over town. From Manhattan to Brooklyn everything’s free. Okay, there’s no value then to your work, if you’re giving it away for free.’ The concern here is that these free shows uphold the supposition that the audience does not need to pay for comedy – a publicly held expectation bred from how we share content online and one that could adversely impact Hirsch’s business. Alongside the rise of SM and public triumph for all it can do, arose a belief that anyone who embraces the low-stakes tool of Twitter, hones their comedic voice, and builds an audience can launch their own career, i.e., the myth of the Rob Delaney effect. Rob Delaney, who struggled as a full-time professional comic, joined Twitter in 2009 where his funny tweets grabbed the attention of thousands. Within a few years, he had headlined for national comedy club chains, released a concert film, and written a book. Everyone thinks they can have the Rob Delaney effect – a meteoric, seemingly overnight, rise to fame – but few will rise above the din of funny voices clamoring for attention online.

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Talent agent Scott Matthews (2014) took issue with this myth, pointing out that attorneys, agents, and managers are still important. ‘Will you need them for every single thing the way you used to?’ Matthews shrugged, ‘Maybe, maybe not. But depends on how smart you are.’ Matthews admitted he has some savvy clients, but many still need agents to promote and advise them. If a popular comedian was sponsoring Bacardi but the new show they are on sponsors Absolut Vodka, ‘Is this a conflict?’ Matthews pressed. Yes, and it’s probably not solved with a punch line. Agents will continue to play a role, albeit narrower, in the oversight of entertainment contracts and there will always be comics who earn incomes that allow them to outsource promotion and marketing to awaiting agents.

Social media as industry imperative There is not just one approach for how comics use SM in the service of professional development or comedy production. Mindy Kaling boasts accounts with many social networking platforms, but primarily sticks to Twitter and Instagram, using them to build and sustain public excitement for her commercial ventures like the many films in which she appears, her comedic memoir: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (and Other Concerns) (2011), and her lead role on a sitcom, The Mindy Project, for which she also writes and directs. Importantly, Kaling puts a lot of funny material out there so the business of branding and promoting takes a back seat to her humorous posts. Alternately, Maria Bamford’s platform of choice for dispensing the funny is YouTube where she posts web series like The Maria Bamford Show and Ask My Mom! and, unlike Kaling, she reserves Twitter for primarily promotional purposes with an occasional ringing of the bell for a charitable cause or non-profit organization. Gabriel Iglesias, a stand-up comic known for his high pitched giggle, ‘fluffy’ physique, and colorful Hawaiian shirts credits part of his success to syncing various SM sites so that a tweet, for instance, will also show up on Facebook. This allows him to access all of his friends and fans in a single post to any one platform: ‘I can take a 10-minute stand-up comedy clip, I put it online, I send it out through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and I could have 5 million views in probably a week’ (quoted in Goldberg 2014). Comics may not have a unified strategy when using SM, but experts agree that whatever comics are doing is working. Over the past several years, a steady trickle of popular articles aimed at business owners delivered advice on how to use SM in the service of networking, marketing, and public relations. Many of them used stand-up comics as examples that illustrate some maxim for negotiating online professional sociality, like: ‘Focus on your tribe’, ‘Engage Your Hecklers’, or ‘Don’t Be Boring’ (Klotz-Guest 2014; Shea 2011; Erickson 2012).2 Journalists tout the particular way that comics navigate SM, i.e., using humor, being human, interacting with fans, etc., encouraging business owners to take lessons from comics, who are selling a brand just like they are. The underlying assumption is that being active on social networking sites is an industry imperative, which has become the reigning axiom of the twenty-first century. This section catalogs the primary reasons for and usages of SM for stand-up comics, offering some commentary on the ways status informs comics’ use of new media. While individual comics may go about implementing SM in different ways, they still use SM for some combination of the same six reasons: (1) To maintain and build relationships with fans. Of all the social networking sites out there, actor John Leguizamo prefers Twitter to connect with his fans. As he can attest, a strong fan base has attachment and loyalty to the comedian and will promote and fight for his/her work (2014). Fans have

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quickly discovered that throwing their collective weight in the right direction helps renew a show or start a new one. Disappointed when producers fired Conan O’Brien from The Tonight Show in 2010, fans leveraged SM to show their support for O’Brien, inflating his popularity online and assuring a strong fan base for his own show Conan, airing later the same year (‘What Late Comedians Can Teach You. . .’ 2014). Realizing his fans were younger, socially active SM users, O’Brien structured promotion and distribution of Conan to cater to the myriad ways people stream media. Disavowing the staid rule in the business to not give anything away before airing a new episode, his promotions team released excerpts of exciting parts of the show on various platforms in order to stoke interest and enthusiasm for the show airing that night. When asked if he was ‘bothered by the multitudes of ways people might watch his show (aside from tuning in live). Without pause or hesitation, O’Brien emphatically responded, “no, not in the least”’ (Ingraham 2012). By tapping into the needs and wants of his most ardent supporters, O’Brien effectively changed how and when he distributed his show only further enhancing his own popularity and the show’s. (2) To brand a comic persona. ‘Innovate boldy. . .or go home’ shouts one article in the effort to direct business owners how to brand themselves (Klotz-Guest 2014). This also happens to be the credo of Nerdist Industries, an entertainment company ‘focused on making programming and content that’s very inclusive in a way that viewers really feel like they are hanging out with these people’ (Chris Hardwick quoted in Poggi 2014). They brand themselves as producing hip entertainment for the digital native and consequently support creative projects that embrace new media both in content and distribution. Nerdist Industries’ owner, Chris Hardwick, stand-up comic and host of @midnight – a game show using SM to challenge a rotating cast of stand-up comics – suggests that comics are the quintessential model for branding: ‘In a stripped down way a comedian is an entrepreneurial brand machine–it’s about relating to the audience and being able to talk to the audience with a distinct voice. These are all the same things you do when you are building a brand’ (quoted in Poggi). For most comics, there is continuity between stage and online personae – with brand coherency there are fewer surprises at live performances and it becomes easier to retain and build a loyal following. (3) To know your audience. At a live performance, a good comic will know a little bit about their audience and the city hosting the performance. Familiarity breaks the ice and helps the audience identify with the performer. The same is true online and comics must learn how to connect with their fans. Different platforms cater to different demographics and so it’s important to know the capacity of that tool and the audiences you are likely to reach. Ike Barinholtz loves Twitter, likes Facebook, dislikes Instagram, and detests Vine. But, because Barinholtz is not trying to appeal to the tweens who flock to Instagram or Vine, he is exempt from needing to learn to navigate them. As he put it in our interview: ‘I feel like Twitter is kind of my sweet spot for people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who are actually saying things as opposed to “Oh my god, here’s a picture of my brunch!” [laughing].’ Loads of snarky tweets coupled with his many successful professional ventures ranging from television to film have earned him 153 K (and growing) followers on Twitter who can trust he will deliver the funny. (4) To promote. SM skills have quickly become a prized skill set and most companies have created positions devoted exclusively to management of SM accounts. In an interview with Scott Brown of Wired – a magazine reporting on how new technologies interact with culture – actor, writer, and director Paul Feig warns: ‘“If you’re a comedian, you cannot be a

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Luddite anymore,” Feig says. “You’re shooting yourself in the foot”’ (2009). Technological acumen is practically requisite for professional growth and visibility since most comics do not enjoy household name recognition and SM supplies a cheap, fun, though pretty time consuming way of staying connected with fans and enticing new ones. In this way, status informs usage of SM tools. Comics at different status levels utilize tools differently depending on their objectives. Lesser-known comics like Chelsea Peretti may seek to amass followers on Twitter by posting jokes or on Vine by posting short funny videos, while comics with more notoriety like Chris Rock may use Twitter strictly to announce shows to an existing (and substantial) fan base. (5) To entertain. This might be the most important reason that comics flock to SM. In the comedy industry there is never enough stage time, but with social networking sites there is always an audience ready to supply comics with a steady flow of comments, favorites, retweets, and likes. Comics can work out new material online in what Scott Brown describes as ‘a collective sketchbook, where comedians relax their legendary self-consciousness, territoriality, and joke-hoarding, and ideas evolve out of idleness, casually, almost by mistake’ (2009). Plus, being funny helps engage their fans and keep them watching while also pushing comics to improve. Writer for Splitsider, an online news and information archive on all things comedy, Emma Soren says comedians on Twitter must deserve the retweeting and favoriting of their followers/ fellow users, which is why she writes ‘Follow Friday’, a weekly column featuring ‘one person whose consistent shortform online humor deserves your attention and to be on your Twitter feed’ (2014). Positive media coverage and audience response can indicate to the comedian what jokes or ideas are worth developing more for the stage. While conducting interviews in New York City, we watched Phil Hanley perform at Caroline’s on Broadway and later noticed he had ‘performed’ a couple of the same jokes on Twitter earlier that day – after all, he had another captive audience, albeit virtual. (6) To circumvent industry gatekeepers and lower costs. Not everyone is in a financial position to produce their own concert film or fund their own national tour. Status and deep pockets allowed Margaret Cho to offer free download of Cho Dependent (2011) while trying to drum up enthusiasm and support for her Grammy nomination for the same and made it possible for Louis CK, Aziz Ansari, and Bo Burnham to eliminate the middle men and sell their work directly to the people online for as low as $5. HBO executives initially resisted the arrangement forged between Louis CK and HBO – that CK would sell his HBO special Oh My God online to fans after it aired on the network. Already having the $250,000 needed to produce the show. CK had the upper hand in this arrangement – HBO needed him, more than he needed them. Few comics have the fame necessary to negotiate similar terms and Louis CK acknowledges this saying: ‘The power I had was to be able to keep saying: “I’ll do it myself. I do not need you”’ (quoted in Itzkoff 2013). But, for people without similar status, SM offers an affordable means of delivering content to the public. After Jenny Slate was relieved of her duties as Saturday Night Live cast member (2009-2010), she created Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, a series of short films shot like a documentary exploring the life of the animated softspoken shell, Marcel. The films went viral and led to the creation of children’s books; offers for film roles came shortly thereafter. Not everyone’s efforts meet with this sort of success. Slate’s existing status and visibility most certainly helped; however, SM provides comics, regardless of status, tools for communicating directly with people/future fans minus the complication of other mediators or filters.

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Has the joke changed? Indubitably, SM has impacted the comedy industry. It has changed modes of delivery and how we communicate with each other, but has it changed the substance of humor or the styles used to deliver humor? The answer is yes and no. No, because research participants resoundingly reported and our own observations confirm that all the major comedy styles – e.g., self-deprecating humor, physical humor, shock humor, political humor, satire, charged humor, safe/family-friendly humor, parody, etc. – continue to circulate and flourish. Today comics test their material online and on stage, so jokes might develop through the parameters of Twitter, WhoSay, or Facebook. Given the brevity of interactions on SM, one might expect to see the return of the formerly popular one-liner joke. When we compared Phil Hanley’s jokes delivered in tweet form the same day as the live performance at Caroline’s on Broadway, we realized how much context he removed to deliver the joke via Twitter. To his followers, he tweets: ‘Some couples are embarrassed they met online. They should be happy and proud. Just think before the internet you would have died alone.’ Later that night, in the live performance he bantered with the audience about relationships and threw in the line when it seemed natural to do so. Hanley was rewarded with a healthy wave of laughter, as might be expected since 44 followers retweeted the joke and 64 followers favorited the joke. Favorable online responses gave him metrics for the joke, but he also had to figure out how to package the joke for a live audience in the context of a different cultural form. Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Farley reports that ‘comedy is going through a digital shift’ wherein ‘[v]iewers have grown accustomed to tweet-size comedy’ (20 February 2014). But, in live comedy venues, the audience isn’t expecting robotic recitation of tweet-sized comedy and unless you are Mitch Hedberg, you probably can’t get away with it. So, like Hanley, comics are not hitting the clubs with one-liners and knockknock jokes and they continue talking about what they have always talked about using a variety of styles to land their jokes. However, the substance of humor is not entirely impervious to changes wrought by SM, like allowing for new kinds of exchanges between audience and comic that strengthen a comic’s fan base. Comics can be vetted online now, attracting new fans who have never seen them perform live but who know it will be a good fit when they do. When supported by informed and committed audiences, Paul Provenza pointed out in our interview that the comedian has less to explain in their performance. A room full of loyal fans means that a comic does not have to work as hard to win over audiences – that work has already been done via online exchanges. For most comics, this is a welcome paradigm shift, one that will benefit both comics and their fans. For comics, it makes it easier to just do what they want to do onstage and fans excited about discovering a new comedic voice will happily spend money and encourage friends to do the same, engineering a kind of tribal orientation around certain comics. Comedy devotees enthuse over performers that most people have never heard of and the millions of stories, pages, and performances competing for our attention online ensure that our focus is increasingly diffused into small but scrappy homophilic tribes. Digital media scholar Amelia Wong noted in our interview that people’s tendency towards homophily – the sociological concept that similarity breeds connection – in turn shapes SM, meaning in virtual communities, just as in our real lives, we gravitate towards people like us, forming tribes. For example, interviewees often used Twitter to keep up with regional happening, such as Robin Zucker who spoke about checking Twitter to instantaneously hear what people were saying about

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the helicopter hovering over her home, or about the traffic disaster happening on U.S. Route 101. Tribes can be formed based on shared environments; however, they don’t have to be. Paul Provenza, explains the impact of the Internet on homophily or tribalism: What the Internet does is basically create tribes. And we’re all tribalists. It seems to be a basic fundamental aspect of human nature to be tribal whether it be sports teams you root for or the band you follow, the political ideology you hold, it’s all tribalistic. It really is. And what the Internet has done is remove geography from that equation and you now have tribalism on an ideological level, tribalism on an emotional level, tribalism that’s based not on the proximity of those who are not ‘other.’ You can find people who are not ‘other’ anywhere in the world because you ended up at the same websites. (2014) Proximity and even shared experiences are not proscriptive of how people congregate into tribes. This was especially apparent the night we interviewed three recent Skidmore College graduates. We gathered at an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, catching up on post-college life, eating pizza, and, later, subjecting our guests to a battery of questions. Gathered, we had three savvy SM users inhabiting radically different spheres of Twitter: Rebecca Stern, prolific SM user and assistant to a councilman in Brooklyn who uses Twitter to follow politicians and has her account set on private; Matthew Schonfeld, Gothamist intern who engages with journalism, rap/hip-hop music, and NYC culture; and Benjamin Jurney, a comedy writer (published online in The New Yorker), performer, and purveyor, who follows all things comedy-related. All of them living in the same city, sharing a degree from the same college and many of the same friends on Facebook, and yet each one plugged into separate virtual tribes and niches. Homophily or tribal tendencies occurs in virtual forums like SM and secure admittance for Ben, Becky, and Matt into different interest-based communities online. Virtual tribes are enthusiastic in sharing and reinforcing their community, thus comics can gain a following by appealing to the gays or the progressives or blue-collar workers. Tribes often form around social identities like ethnicity and sexuality and because comedy is such an identity-based cultural form it is easy to use shared social categories as the foundation for appreciating a comic. Using her own struggle with mental illness as comic material, Maria Bamford drew in fans experiencing similar difficulties. In a New York Times article, ‘The Weird, Scary and Ingenious Brain of Maria Bamford’, Sarah Corbett writes, ‘After the show, a crowd lingered late in front of the theater, waiting to speak with Bamford. She is frequently approached by people who view themselves as part of her tribe, who want to talk about their own diagnoses and tell their own tales of being misunderstood’ (July 17, 2014). People flock to voices that are speaking to their personal truth, who share the same tribulations and jubilations – especially when the speaker is adept at providing incisive and relieving commentary, such as a good comedian. The same dynamic and dialogue is happening in the virtual world, where SM makes one’s own Messiah more visible and accessible.

Conclusion: May the best (funny) man win! Patton Oswalt said it in his speech at Just for Laughs – ‘Content is king!’ – and John Leguizamo said it during our interview: ‘Beautiful thing about all this is that it has made

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content king. This is a great time for writers and creators. . . All great writers are going to cable TV, Amazon, Netflix. And great actors have gone to these too. . . where they are doing the most challenging stuff, the most freedom, the most mature.’ Content is also king in live performance venues because the only thing keeping those club doors unlocked and swinging is well-timed, laughter inducing jokes. Declaring that ‘content is king!’ implies a sort of democratic triumph because it promises reward for the best material regardless of creator: May the best (funny) man win! Fostering the illusion of democracy when it comes to SM is not all that surprising since social networking sites began as grassroots efforts to connect with others.3 A formidable number of popular articles characterize the Internet as a neutral space where all are welcome and all have the capacity to succeed. For instance, Christopher Farley enthuses: ‘Social media humor is more democratic and diverse than the trickle-down comedy of the heyday of Leno and Letterman’ (2014). Alex Leo champions SM for providing women comics with additional forums on which to capture an audience. ‘. . . [T]he level playing field of Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr means no one gets between ambitious talent and a potentially receptive audience. All it takes is perseverance, ability, skill and infinite patience’ (2012). Leo’s piece and another from Meredith Lepore (2012) making similar claims present a narrative of female empowerment and command over new media, omitting how issues of gender parity in comedy are not resolved online. Granted, women comics have alternative means of communicating with fans, but this does not do anything to disrupt common public misperceptions that are biased, such as men are funnier than women. Social inequality transcends the physical environment, meaning the Internet is fair game for all the same cultural and social biases evident in society. Scholar Evgeny Morozov (2011) compellingly details media sources overstating the value, benefit, and power of SM and warns that new modes of technology do not disrupt traditional ideologies, they just reflect them. In other words, nationalism, extremism, and prejudice still play out on the Internet because technology does not eliminate the effects of religion, culture, nor history. In Wired, Scott Brown offers a more nuanced celebration of humor in the digital age that acknowledges an existing social order: Thanks to market forces, the creation and purveyance of humor have become decentralized and deregulated. The class clown’s little monopoly is smashed: Laffs have gone laissez-faire. Obviously, some people are simply funnier than others, and there will always be a comedy aristocracy, either natural or appointed. . . But the implication here is that everyone can be funny. (2009, emphasis added) While he teeters on the verge of waxing jubilant on the Internet as the great equalizer, Brown accedes that social structures inform who audiences ‘appoint’ as funny. Since the current problematics of reception (i.e., a belief that men are funnier) occur live and online, SM may not be the democratizing force many would like it to be. Like Scott Brown, John Leguizamo tempered his evaluation of what is possible with SM with what we are more likely to see given current social behavior: ‘The digital age is very democratizing. I think it really equalizes everything because now everybody can start telling their story; everybody can start documenting themselves and their experiences . . . At the same time, you know people do put out a lot of bigotry and hostility’ (2014). As long as humans hold beliefs about social superiority and inferiority, those beliefs will pervade how social networking platforms are developed and manipulated by users. And, in all

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likelihood, those beliefs will outlive this research or any current technology. It is important to recognize that technology is neither neutral nor should we make it the target of our utopic fantasies. Even as we celebrate exciting new shifts in the economy of jokes, it is paramount that we remain critical. SM has done much to change the ways we exchange and consume humor. Unchecked celebration of SM – of the content-is-kingvariety – ignores the transference of biases into virtual spheres and rejection of SM altogether ignores shifts in the industry that make SM proficiency requisite for success. SM offers a tremendously powerful tool for comedians of all ilks – and while it has not challenged the social hierarchies already in place, it has fragmented where anyone can choose to discover their funny.

Acknowledgements We are eternally grateful to the many kind souls who donated their time for interviews, questions, emails and the like.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding This work was supported by Skidmore College through the 2014 Summer Faculty/Student Research Program.

Notes 1 The digitally recorded interviews lasted anywhere from 60 to 120 minutes and were conducted in New York City, Los Angeles, or via Skype. 2 Comments were taken from the following articles, respectively, and are just a sampling of the many popular articles that use comics as model for good public relations and branding online. 3 For a lengthy and detailed discussion of the cultural history of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and Wikipedia, see: José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Source: Rebecca Krefting and Rebecca Baruc (2015) ‘A new economy of jokes?: #Socialmedia #Comedy’, Comedy Studies, 6:2, 129–140.

References Aulette, Ken. 2009. Googled. New York: The Penguin Press. Barinholtz, Ike. Personal Interview. July 9, 2014. Brown, Scott. 2009. “Scott Brown on Twitter–Testing New Material.” Wired, July 20. http://arch ive.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-08/pl_brown Christman, Ed. 2014. “Scott Greenstein, SiriusXM President and CCO, on Firing a Host, Streaming, Data (Q&A).” billboardbiz, July 21. http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/radio/ 6174196/scott-greenstein-siriusxm-president-and-cco-on-firing-a-host Clemente, Peter. Personal Interview. July 9, 2014.

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Dijck, José van. 2013. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. New York: Oxford University Press. Erickson, Christine. 2012. “How to Master Social Media Like a Famous Comedian.” Americanexpress. com, August 7. https://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/openforum/articles/howto-master-social-media-like-a-famous-comedian/ Farley, Christopher John. 2014. “Will Jimmy Fallon Get the Last Laugh on Social Media? #Hashtag #Tonight Show.” Wall Street Journal, February 20. http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/tag/ jimmyfallon/ Goldberg, Haley. 2014. “Gabriel ‘Fluffy’ Iglesias, a Social (Media) Sort of Guy, Gets a Film.” LATimes, July 29. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-gabriel-iglesiasfluffy-20140729-story.html Hirsch, Caroline. Personal Interview. July 17, 2014. Ingraham, Nathan. 2012. “Conan O’Brien on the ‘Symbiotic Relationship’ of His Audience and New Media.” The Verge, May 23. http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/23/3038692/conan-obrien-onthe-symbiotic-relationship-of-his-audience-and-new Itzkoff, Dave. 2013. “The Joke’s on Louis CK.” New York Times, April 4. http://www.nytimes.com/ 2013/04/07/arts/for-louis-c-k-the-jokes-on-him.html?_rD0 Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press. Klotz-Guest, Kathy. 2014. “Hey, Social Media! Everything I Learned About Marketing Came From Comedy.” Marketingprofs, February 3. http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2014/24304/ hey-social-media-everything-i-learned-about-marketing-came-from-comedy Leguizamo, John. Personal Interview. July 23, 2014. Leo, Alex. 2012. “Lady Comics: Who Needs Late Night? We’ve Got Tumblr.” Tumblr, May 16. http://storyboard.tumblr.com/post/23163035436/lady-comics-who-needs-late-night-weve-got Lepore, Meredith. 2012. “Female Comedians Prefer Social Media to the Late Night Talk Show Circuit for Their Careers.” Grindstone.com, May 21. http://www.thegrindstone.com/2012/05/21/ office-politics/female-comedians-prefersocial-media-over-the-late-night-talk-show-circuit–101/ Matthews, Scott. Personal Interview. July 10, 2014. Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World. New York: Penguin Press. Oswalt, Patton. 2012. Keynote Speech. Presented at the annual Just For Laughs Festival; Montreal, Canada. https://www.youtube.com/watch?vDbrhuMYNzyQM Poggi, Jeanine. 2014. “Q & A: Branding Lessons from Comedian and ‘@midnight’ Host Chris Hardwick.” Advertising Age, May 28. http://adage.com/article/media/branding-lessons-a-comedian/ 293416/ Provenza, Paul. Personal Interview. July 16, 2014. Rogers, Jennifer and Callie Wright. 2014. “How a Middle-Aged IT Guy from Peoria Tweeted His Way into a Writing Job on Late Night With Seth Meyers.”Vulture, April 16. http://www.vul ture. com/2014/04/guy-tweets-his-way-from-peoria-to-30-rock.html Shea, Patrick. 2011. “3 Social Media Marketing Lessons from Comedians.” Hubspot, June 17. http:// blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/16959/3-Social-Media-Marketing-Lessons-fromComedians.aspx Soren, Emma. 2014. “Follow Friday.” Splitsider, June 20. http://splitsider.com/2014/06/followfriday-whitmerthomas/ Wong, Amelia. Personal Interview. July 11, 2014.

Contributors Rebecca Krefting, who goes by Beck, is an assistant professor in the American Studies Department, Affiliate Faculty for Gender Studies, and Director of Media and Film Studies

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at Skidmore College. In 2014, she published her first book, All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents, charting the history and economy of ‘charged humor’ or stand-up comedy aimed at social justice, and is a contributing author to the edited collections, Hysterical!: Women in American Comedy (2017) and Taking a Stand: American Stand-up Comedians as Public Intellectuals (2017), Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers (2018), and Political Comedy: Critical Encounters (2018). Rebecca Baruc is a music programme curator at Uncommon Ground, Chicago. She earned her BA in American Studies at Skidmore College, where she produced, performed and hosted stand-up regularly and was on the premier comedy improvisational team. She was the co-producer of the National College Comedy Festival, which was founded in 1989 by producer David Miner (Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock). The National College Comedy Festival has played host to some of the brightest college comedy talent in the country, alongside established and up-and-coming professional acts, and has always been entirely student run.

Chapter 36

Comedy meets media: how three new media features have influenced changes in the production of standup comedy (6:2) Jillian M. Belanger

Introduction With its vaudevillian roots in an era that predates video recording and the internet, stand-up comedy originated as a form of entertainment that took place in a specific time and place between a performer and an audience. Since its invention, the role of this art form has spanned everything from mindless comic relief to sharp social activism and everything in-between. In contemporary culture, the functions of comedy continue to span across that vast range, but the ways in which we are able to consume it have drastically changed. When comedy is studied, it is typically through a receiver-oriented approach. In a chapter entitled ‘Introduction to the Measurement of Humorous Communication’, Melissa Bekelja Wanzer and Melanie Booth-Butterfield cited sources that suggest much of the humor research being done by communications studies and social psychology fields uses a ‘receiver-oriented’ approach (DiCioccio, 2012, 54). A gap in the field of humor research, according to these and other scholars, is in producer-oriented studies. Using a produceroriented approach, I seek to examine and describe the ways in which changes in media have affected stand-up comedy as an industry. Specifically, the three features of new media that have been selected for examination and application to comedy are: prosumerproduced material, transmedia journalism and culture jamming.

Prosumer In Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (2013), Michael Serazio explained Alvin Toffler’s concept of the ‘prosumer’ as ‘the consumer subject to act, innovate, tinker and run free’ (127). Serazio’s treatment of the prosumer concept included an overview of the ways in which prosumers provide free labor by doing the work of producing content that is traditionally done by professionals. The word ‘prosumer’ itself comes from the combination of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’, and it blurs the lines between production and consumption. Amateur participants who engage in prosumer work can be considered more authentic by some audiences because they represent a decentralized, flexible, organic, disinterested node of power (Serazio, 2013). One example of prosumer work is the Dove beauty campaign, which invited ‘real women’ to create their own 30-second commercials for a product called Dove Cream Oil. Brooke Duffy analyzed this competition in her 2010 article ‘Empowerment Through Endorsement? Polysemic Meaning in Dove’s User-Generated Advertising’ and described

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prosumers as ‘free workers in a knowledge-based economy’ (27). Some implications of the free labor that these prosumers produce include rendering legacy media sources less important and less visible. In the case of the Dove Cream Oil Contest, women were invited to participate in the work of producing free labor. In other cases, free labor done by prosumers may be seen as a threat to the livelihood of the professionals who are producing similar content. Daniel Berkowitz asked the question, ‘Is YouTube killing comedy?’ in an article he wrote for Slate (2013). According to Berkowitz, free comedic content produced by amateurs and made available online may be getting in the way of professional comedians ‘breaking through’ and achieving mainstream visibility. For these purposes, professional comedians can be understood to include comedians or actors who have released full-length comedy specials or held notable roles in major productions released though a mainstream media source, while amateurs can be understood to include those who have not. Examples of amateur comedians whose work was widely viewed by YouTube audiences include Liam Kyle Sullivan’s videos ‘Muffins’ and ‘Shoes’ and Matthew Clarke’s series, ‘Conversations with My 2-Year-Old’. According to their Internet Movie Database (IMDB) profiles, both Sullivan and Clarke can be considered amateurs in the sense that apart from a few smaller acting roles or producing credits, they were relatively unknown at the time of their YouTube successes. Clarke stated in an interview that he was ‘blown away’ by the response to his videos, which feature real conversations he had with his daughter, who was two years old at the time he began making the videos, acted out by himself and another grown man (Miller, 2013). From the perspective of the amateur comedians, being able to access audiences through YouTube or other web-based platforms can serve as an on-ramp to recognition that may lead to paid, professional work. Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, two comedians who can comfortably be classified as professionals based on the parameters outlined earlier, launched the website Funny or Die in 2007, which they envisioned as a ‘clearinghouse for amateur comedy videos’, or a place for prosumers to share their work and be seen (Zoglin, 2010). Like the women creating Dove commercials for free, these amateurs are engaging in free labor with the hopes of an eventual payoff in the form of professional opportunity. From the perspective of professional comedians, however, the work of amateur comedians like Clarke and Sullivan can pose a threat to their already established audiences. Just as legacy media sources such as newspapers and broadcast television are dealing with the challenge of staying relevant and maintaining paid professional status in an age of growing prosumer work that offers free labor, stand-up comedians are also facing the challenge of blurred lines between amateurs and professionals. Popular comedian Sarah Silverman argued that consumers are less likely to pay for the material produced by her and by other working comedians when so much material is available for free viewing. Applied to stand-up comedy, the argument being made by Silverman and other comedians is that the months they devote to writing sharp, relevant and entertaining material for, say, a two-hour special for HBO or Comedy Central may well undersell once it comes out on DVD because audiences would rather watch a free, four-minute episode of ‘Conversations with My 2-Year-Old’ on YouTube than pay for said DVD. Douglas Rushkoff has contended that everyone’s output is not as relevant as everyone else’s, and has argued that an amateur blogger’s opinion expressed in a single post would not be as valuable as that of a seasoned, professional journalist who had conducted

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responsible, ongoing investigation on the same topic (2013). The years of work required to write and publish a book, compared with the instant, wide-reaching impact of tweets, articles and blog posts, are described as ‘writing opera when the people are listening to singles’ (Rushkoff 2013, 265). Likewise, the amateur work of prosumers on YouTube and Funny or Die can be likened to those singles the people are listening to, while the full-length comedy specials being produced by professional comedians are the operas, and the relative merits of either will depend on who’s doing the measuring.

Transmedia Another way in which changes in media have affected the industry of stand-up comedy is the growing presence and popularity of transmedia communication. Mark Deuze and Leopoldina Forunati briefly introduced readers to the concept of transmedia storytelling in ‘Journalism without Journalists’ (2010) as ‘convergent, crossmedia, or multimedia storytelling’ (13). Transmedia journalism occurs when a story unfolds across multiple platforms. In the case of the Half the Sky movement, Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn (2013) utilize multiple media to transmit their message: a book, a film, a website, a Pinterest page, Twitter, and Facebook, for starters. Student scholar Katherine Hypolite has also made the case for fantasy football to be considered a type of transmedia storytelling, because it unfolds across multiple platforms, namely physical football games and online forums. At a time when messages are increasingly being shared through multiple platforms in the style of transmedia communication, stand-up comedians are feeling the impact of this shift in their industry. Berkowtiz described the traditional path to becoming a professional comedian as follows: That old path resembled a pyramid: everyone started at the base, and the better one got, the higher one rose, until only a few reached the top. When a club owner or booker recognized talent, he’d offer a comedian a gig as an emcee, hosting the nightly shows. The next step was becoming a feature, essentially an opener for the headliner. Becoming a headliner was the ultimate goal. (2013) Social media, however, altered the professional trajectory from the path described to a new, more interactively demanding course. Berkwoitz offered multiple examples of the new course: Over the past couple years, the overwhelming majority of working comics have taken to Facebook and Twitter to broadcast pithy one-liners, communicate with other comics, interact with fans and generally support their own careers. Many have also taken to hosting podcasts in which they interview fellow comics. Some have even starting using the nascent videosharing service Vine, as well as Instagram, simply to keep churning out new media for a rabid fan base. And plenty of comics still use YouTube to create short sketches that showcase their acting and writing talents. Even Comedy Central has gotten in on the online action, hosting the first-of-its-kind Twitter-based comedy festival this past April. (2013) Michael Ian Black is one example of a comedian who brands himself across multiple platforms, such as sketch comedy, live comedy shows, Facebook, Twitter and a TV game

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show. Rob Delaney, an American born, London-based comedian, writes about leveraging his Twitter audience in order to bolster his stand-up career in his book Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage (2013). Delaney markets himself across live comedy shows, Twitter, television shows and the aforementioned book. In these cases, as in many others, comedians’ intentionally positioning their presence across multiple platforms is an economic strategy to increase their reach and popularity, and transmedia communication makes that possible. Some streams are profitable, some are revenue neutral and some result in potential revenue loss, but there is a trend of successful comedians spreading their presence across these streams, knowing that even the revenue neutral and potential revenue loss endeavors could contribute to becoming more widely recognized and celebrated. The growing pressure comedians are experiencing to contribute material across multiple platforms is indicative of the larger movement toward transmedia communication. The trend toward transmedia communication is not always viewed as burdensome additional work for comedians or as a breakdown to the traditionally traveled pyramid to fame, though. For some comics, transmedia opportunities have provided an avenue to success that had not previously seemed possible. For instance, Delaney reported seeing a major rise in his commercial success when he began using Twitter in 2009. Berkowitz addressed that instance, too: Delaney is, by all accounts, the exception, as few comedians have been able to use Twitter to directly change the trajectory of their careers. But the fact that social media can breed a national headliner is a radical departure from the hive of skinny ties dueling it out in front of brick walls in the 1980 s and early 1990 s. One either made it or didn’t solely within the confines of the dimly lit comedy club. Now, however, if used properly, social media allows the opportunity for anyone to circumvent the system and become a recognized voice. (2013) Transmedia communication has become the norm for everything from fantasy football to advocacy movements, and everything in-between, which includes stand-up comedy. Berkowtiz sagely concluded as follows: with more media springing up by which comedians can disseminate their content, and a therefore ever-growing sea of up-and-comers, it is becoming increasingly difficult to stand out [and] well nigh impossible to do so without doing a certain amount of work for free online. (2013)

Culture jamming The third and final feature of new media to be examined as an impact on stand-up comedy is culture jamming. Culture jamming occurs when mainstream ideas and media culture are subverted; Serazio characterized culture jamming as ‘playful, parody-based “semiotic jujitsu”’ and ‘irreverent’ (2013, 65). Quoting Elizabeth Moore, Serazio added, ‘culture jamming has often been said to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools’ (2013, 66). For his purposes, Serazio cited instances of culture jamming performed by anti-consumerist organizations such as Kalle Lasn’s Adbusters and Occupy Wall Street. For example, Adbusters famously mocked Calvin Klein’s ‘Obsession’ campaign in a

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‘subvertisement’ that ‘foreground[ed] the image of a bulimic model hunched over a toilet bowl’, which ‘tease[d] out that ugly reality beneath the slick chicanery’ (65). If anyone can be said to be doing the ‘semiotic Robin Hoodism’ (65) that Serazio described, it would be comedians. Jamie Warner, professor at Marshall University, explored the ways in which one particular comedian contributed to culture jamming in her 2007 article, ‘Political Culture Jamming: The Dissident Humor of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’. Warner has also published similar studies on Stephen Colbert and The Onion. In Warner’s assessment, ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart “jams” the seamless transmission of the dominant brand messages by parodying the news media’s unproblematic dissemination of the dominant brand, broadcasting dissident political messages that can open up space for questioning and critique’ (2007, 17). In other words, Jon Stewart practices semiotic Robin Hoodism. Warner compared Stewart’s style to subvertisements by Adbusters, explaining, ‘The Daily Show inserts its voice into the political conversation by plagiarizing the aesthetics of the media, in this particular case, the news media’ (2007, 24). The master’s tools, as described by Moore via Serazio, include news media aesthetic in this case. Another case in which a comedic television program usurps the aesthetics of a more traditional interview talk show format is Totally Biased. Produced by comedian Chris Rock and hosted by W. Kamau Bell, Totally Biased ‘dissects topical issues of race, sex, politics, class, and culture’, according to the show’s tagline. Additionally, one could not discuss comedy as culture jamming without including Saturday Night Live, which has been providing messages to subvert and disrupt mainstream political discourse since 1975. Nick Marx, Matt Sienkiewicz, and Ron Becker (2013) have edited a book of scholarly essays about Saturday Night Live, and Jeffrey Jones examines Saturday Night Live’s political input in one essay entitled ‘Politics and the Brand: Saturday Night Live’s Campaign Season Humor’. The fact that so many politicians have appeared on the show (81) suggests that this particular form of culture jamming has gained enough traction to now be considered mainstream itself. In the examples of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Totally Biased, and Saturday Night Live, comedians work within the format of a television show, and collaborate with other writers to come up with material. For stand-up comedians, a single comedic thinker does the work of performing semiotic jujitsu alone. In The Burden of Laughter: Chris Rock Fights Ignorance His Way, Jack Chung (2002) describes the rhetorical moves comedian Chris Rock makes in order to share messages about race through the vehicle of laughter. Chung labels Rock a public intellectual, a title that has been applied to other stand-up comedians as well, like Amy Schumer (Garber, 2015). By adopting the existing, accepted conventions of stand-up comedy to shape and share important messages about race and gender, Rock and Schumer perform playful, irreverent semiotic jujitsu.

Conclusion Certainly, changes in media and in information dissemination have impacted countless fields and industries. Conversely, multiple people, trends and situations have shaped stand-up comedy. This paper addresses the intersection of the two topics: media and comedy. In Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America (2008), Richard Zoglin made a compelling argument that comedians like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and Richard Pryor helped to shape the national dialogue of their time. Just as

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comedians have helped to shape their world, the world has shaped comedians, and the shifting trends of media have greatly impacted stand-up comedy as an industry. Economically, professional stand-up comedians are increasingly expanding their business models to accommodate new trends in information sharing, as evidenced by their participation in transmedia communication. Amateur comedians are engaging in free labor in an attempt to gain more visibility through YouTube and comedy websites like Funny or Die, which they hope will fast track their climb to professionalism more than the traditional route of making the rounds on the open mic circuits at comedy clubs might. Socially, comedians are taking advantage of changes in media production to reach wider audiences with their messages, and while some of those messages may consist primarily of fart jokes or in the reproduction of misogyny and hegemony through ridicule and other aggressive humor uses, some of those messages, from some comedians, can be filed squarely under the category of ‘semiotic Robin Hoodism’ discussed earlier. By examining how three specific media features – prosumers, transmedia communication and culture jamming – have impacted the stand-up comedy industry, we can begin to open meaningful conversations about the intersections of media and comedy, but there is much more work to be done in exploring the overlap between these two fields of study. Just as Wanzer and Booth-Butterfield called for more producer-oriented comedy research (DiCioccio, 2012), I would call for further discussion on how evolving media trends shape and inform stand-up comedy, which was once an industry that relied entirely on in-person experiences, if you can imagine a world before cell phones with cameras. You had to be there.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr Renee Hobbs for inspiring and supporting this project, and Eileen James for helping me to find a home for it in this journal. Above all else, my gratitude goes to Joe Belanger for joining me in the grueling work of research, i.e. enjoying comedy together.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Source: Jillian M. Belanger (2015) ‘Comedy meets media: how three new media features have influenced changes in the production of stand-up comedy’, Comedy Studies, 6:2, 141–147.

References Berkowtiz, D. 2013, Aug 13. “Is YouTube Killing Comedy?” Salon.http://www.salon.com/2013/ 08/03/youtube_is_killing_comedy/ Chung, Jack. 2002. The Burden of Laughter: Chris Rock Fights Ignorance His Way. Stanford, CA: Boothe Prize Essays. Delaney, Rob. 2013. Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. New York: Spiegel & Grau. Deuze, M., and L. Fortunati. 2010. “Journalism without Journalists.” In News Online: Transformations and Continuities, edited by G. Meikle & G. Redden. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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DiCioccio, R.L., ed. 2012. Humor Communication: Theory, Impact, and Outcomes. Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt. Duffy, B.E. 2010. “Empowerment through Endorsement? Polysemic Meaning in Dove’s User-Generated Advertising.” Communication, Culture & Critique 3: 26–43. Garber, Megan. 2015. “How Comedians Became Public Intellectuals.” The Atlantic, May 28. http:// www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/05/how-comedians-became-public-intellec tuals/394277/ Kristoff, N.D., and S. WuDunn. 2013. “Half the Sky Movement: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.” December 11. http://www.halftheskymovement.org Marx, N., M. Sienkiewicz, and R. Becker, eds. 2013. Saturday Night Live & American TV. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Miller, F.L. 2013. “Matthew Clarke, ‘Convos with My 2-Year-Old’ Creator, is a Little Bit Jealous of His Daughter.” The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/30/matthewclarke-convos-with-my-2-year-old_n_3359369.html#slideD1092894 Rushkoff, D. 2013. Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. New York: Penguin Group. Serazio, M. 2013. Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing. New York: New York University Press. Toffler, A. 1980. The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow. New York: Bantam. Warner, J. 2007. “Political Culture Jamming: The Dissident Humor of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart .” Popular Communication 5 (1): 17–36. http://nknu.pbworks.com/f/Political%20Culture%20Jam ming.pdf Zoglin, R. 2008. Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America. New York: Bloomsbury USA. Zoglin, R. 2010. “Funny or Die: How the Web is Changing Comedy.” Time, August 9. http://con tent.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2007406,00.html

Contributor Jillian M. Belanger is a reading support specialist at Nowell Leadership Academy in Providence, Rhode Island. She gained her PhD from the University of Rhode Island in the English department, with a specialization in rhetoric and composition, and a graduate certificate in digital literacy.

Chapter 37

The animated moving image as political cartoon (9:1) Lucien Leon

In 2007, for the first time in its history, The Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning was awarded to a cartoonist whose submission consisted of both print cartoons and animations. Walt Handelsman was awarded the prize ahead of two other finalists whose submissions also included animated work. In 2010, Mark Fiore was awarded the prize for a portfolio that consisted exclusively of political animations. Having amended the citation in 2006 to also accommodate online images in a print cartoon portfolio, the Pulitzer committee once again amended the citation in 2009 to remove altogether the prerequisite that entries be published in print. In 2012, the citation was further updated to unambiguously acknowledge animation, and The Pulitzer Prizes website now reads: For a distinguished cartoon or portfolio of cartoons, characterized by originality, editorial effectiveness, quality of drawing and pictorial effect, published as a still drawing, animation or both. While the cartooning community appears divided as to the merits of the Pulitzer committee considering animations alongside of static cartoon images (Stantis 2007; Gardner 2007), the committee’s acknowledgement of political animations as serious editorial content both legitimises their role in the journalistic landscape and also raises questions about hitherto commonly accepted determinants in the qualification of images as a political cartoons. The appearance of animation in cartoonists’ portfolios points to a broader shift in the consumption of news media, from news print to online. In the USA, UK, Australia and elsewhere the Internet has brought a gradual but inexorable decline in newspaper circulation and readership (Beecher 2013; Dyer and Robin 2015; Tiffen 2010) – with clear implications for the status of the political cartoonist. As readers explore alternative avenues for consumption of news and opinion, political cartoonists need to survey the contemporary mediascape and identify fresh opportunities for publication and dissemination of their work. Leon explores the socio-technological forces challenging newsprint media and the new-media strategies available to cartoonists (2017, 163). While there is a demonstrable audience for political cartoons and animation online, it is one that can be difficult to access and engage. The political cartoonist of the twenty-first century must negotiate their practice in a world of web 2.0, portable communication platforms and social media. In addition, the profession is moving away from the editor-cartoonist employment paradigm and towards syndication and ‘unique hits’ that translate into revenue. The digital media revolution has also ushered in an era where cartoonists find themselves, for the first time, operating in a news-publishing context that supports both

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static and audio-visual moving images. Where previous, historical technological shifts away from woodcuts to the incrementally more advanced printing processes that followed preserved the drafting-illustra-tion paradigm that has been the cartoonist’s traditional domain, digital media has expanded the cartooning toolset in the most radical of ways.

Static vs temporal For many cartoonists, a defining and essential characteristic of their work is that ideas are presented within the confines of a single, printed frame (Stantis 2007). Yet the acknowledgement of animations as political cartoons appropriates and recontextualises the grammar of film into the cartooning paradigm. The question of form needs to recognise structural and aesthetic elements that lie outside of the illustrative and drafting framework of the image. In film parlance, the ‘form’ of the image may be derived from time-based structures and processes such as timing, editing, cuts, arrangements and montage. In terms of the production of the image and the artist’s engagement with digital media, the cartoonist and the animator increasingly share similar modes of image capture, manipulation and output. Hand-drawn components may occupy the same canvas as photographic or film components; to a degree they are treated the same, as image data. Some techniques inherent in animation have their parallels in print. Static cartoons that include within the frame a number of panels designed to be read in a sequence provide the cartoonist with a strategy for delivering a linear narrative. This format implies change over time and is therefore effective in imbuing in a static image a sense of dynamism and temporality that is intrinsic to the audio-visual image but cannot be achieved within a single panel. This effect has been well researched by Di Liddo (2009), McCleod (1994) and Cortsen (2012) in relation to cartoon strips and comics. With respect to the classification and categorisation of political cartoons, the extant taxonomies (Manning and Phiddian 2004; Medhurst and Desousa 1981; Morris 1993; Press 1981; Seymour-Ure 2001) do not distinguish between the single or multiple-panel static image. The distinction is useful to make in comparative terms with the moving image as it points to a degree of cognitive equivalence in the narrative treatment of the respective image types. The capacity of the multiple-panel cartoon to represent space and time locates it somewhere on a ‘spatio-temporal’ spectrum between the single panel image at one extreme and the moving image at the other. On one hand, multiple-panel images are able to describe a temporal progression of narrated actions and events; on the other hand, like the single panel cartoon, the multiple-panel cartoon contains the beginning, middle and end of the narrative within a single frame, where past, present and future occupy the same compositional space (Cortsen 2012, 36). The conceptual and structural intersections that exist between static and moving images do not necessarily translate to a fluent application of techniques by the cartoonist conversant in each of the respective media processes. For example, the delayed irony achieved by the ‘Ken Burns’ effect, where the viewer initially is shown only a part of the scene before having the entire scene revealed – or the reverse – is easily replicated in both moving and static images. Some techniques in animation are not so easily communicated in the static image, such as events reliant on timing for comic impact. In addition, the use of sound in animation provides a metaphorical, temporal device not available in print. For all the distinctive qualities of political animation, however, the rhetorical devices used to engage the viewer are familiar to the static cartoon.

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Metaphor In her examination of political animations, Speckman and Ponche (2007) provide a coding system for the categorisation of political animations. In drawing a direct comparison with print cartoon imagery, Speckman applies Seymour-Ure’s categories in the examination of various political animation forms or modes. Speckman reveals that animated cartoons depend on the same categories and metaphors for understanding as static cartoons – with the notable distinction that animations may employ several or many categories in the one cartoon. The temporal nature of animation affords the artist conceptual strategies not available to the static image cartoonist. Animated images can allow greater scope for extending metaphors and exploring concepts in a more expansive way. What cartoonist Rocco Fazzari likens to a ‘tattoo’ or ‘stamp’ in the static cartoon becomes a more fluid and expansive device when employed in an animated sequence. Where a similar effect might be achieved in a multiple-panel cartoon, the execution is constrained by the limited detail that can reasonably be applied within the boundaries of the frame. Fellow Australian cartoonist Bruce Petty compares this unique capacity for animation to incorporate sophisticated and evolving metaphors with the manner in which a well written article or novel develops an idea or concepts. In describing part of the appeal of animation in constructing metaphorical images, Petty (2009) explains that: With [static] cartoons we just do a big suitcase and label it democracy – well you do the same with animation, but you can open the suitcase and then something comes out: voting systems or parties or corruption. . . Petty’s Human Contraptions series uses the metaphor of an evolving machine to communicate the chronological development of human activity in a range of key fields. In each animation, the respective machine evolves in response to each significant stage of human endeavour, beginning with a simple apparatus that becomes increasingly more complex as we reach the present day. In the episode dealing with government, for example, the viewer is introduced to the concept of ‘the common good’, the protection, administration and management of which spawns the first government ‘machine’ (Figure 1). In the ensuing frames the viewer is introduced to concepts such as politics, bureaucracy, corruption, union representation, political ideologies, welfare, corporations and regulation. The principal metaphor of the ‘contraption’ is sustained throughout, providing a visual and conceptual anchor for the viewer to maintain their grasp of sophisticated and often abstract ideas. Fazzari’s animation Julia and Obama: True Love comments on Australian prime minister Julia Gillard’s decision in 2012 to host a rotation of US marines in Darwin (Figure 2). The agreement is metaphorically illustrated as a tryst between Gillard and US president Obama that begins at a drive-in movie theatre and culminates in the birth of their lovechild, revealed in the closing frames crying in a crib surrounded by a brace of Chinese babies. Within the temporal context of the animation, Gillard and Obama’s relationship is shown through its evolutionary stages: from the initial impetus provided by the Chinese flag and silhouetted fighter jets appearing on the drive-in screen, to the aggressively amorous advances of Gillard towards Obama; and finally the post-coital embrace, all taking place in a convertible sports car brandished with ‘ANZUS’ number plates. The

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Figure 1 Bruce Petty, Human Contraptions: Government, 2002. Digital video. National Film and Sound Archives website. Accessed 10 June 2017. http://dl.nfsa.gov.au/module/1045/.

Ken Burns effect of zooming out from a smaller detail is employed in the closing frames, allowing the viewer to first absorb the image of the crying infant – unmistakably recognisable with its red hair and Afro-American features – before the Chinese babies are revealed as a benign, but – thanks to the overlay of more fighter jets – nonetheless ominous presence. The challenge in devising and framing metaphorical constructs in an animation context lies in the artist’s capacity to shape the metaphor into a broader narrative, one that will be sustained over a period of time. The manner in which the metaphor evolves ought to be in some way revelatory and suspenseful in order to maintain viewer interest and provide them a satisfactory resolution or pay-off. Where a static cartoon’s use of metaphor provides the clues for completion of the enthymematic chain in the one frame, these clues in an animation need to be presented and revealed to the viewer sequentially in linear time. In this way the cartoonist actively directs and orders the viewer’s reception of the ideas and information contained within the image. The cartoonist as animator thus needs to be aware of the form of a metaphor over time and how much time can reasonably be devoted to each frame to maximise the satirical potential of their work.

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Figure 2 Rocco Fazzari, Julia and Obama: True Love, 18 Nov 2011. Digital video. Poltoons Youtube site. Accessed 10 September 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzqIOijtuTc.

The intended rhetorical impact of the static and animated political cartoon image is the same: to achieve an enthymematic engagement with the viewer through the strategic selection and arrangement of imagery that introduces, explores and contextualises social and political constructs and events by way of easily recognised and processed metaphors. The two forms present as a similar brand of satirical puzzle; the cartoonist provides some of the parts of the puzzle and the viewer solves it through their grasp of the meaning of those parts independent of, and in relation to, each other. The static image performs this function within the confines of a single frame; whereas the animated image achieves this over a number of frames measured in time.

Temporality The temporal aspect of the animated image that is readily accepted by Fazzari, Petty, and Peter Nicholson as a mere convention of style is anathema to Jon Kudelka’s view of the two forms. Where Nicholson (2011) states that ‘a political animation is a cartoon, there’s no question about that’, Kudelka (2011) describes static cartoons and animations as

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‘completely different beasts’. He notes that ‘the form of the thing will definitely change the way you think about it’. Kudelka’s observation is supported by a raft of axiomatic, polemical and critical theory that makes clear the extant material and cognitive distinctions in the making and reading of static and moving image objects. Munsterberg, Arnheim, Delueze, Bezin and eminent others have written extensively on the representational qualities that separate the filmic image from the static visual arts. Gombrich (1960, 292) recalls Lessing’s concept of the ‘Pregnant moment’ in remarking that, in terms of the making of the image, the static caricature ‘has to compensate for the loss of the time dimension by concentrating all required information into one arrested image’. SachsHombach (2003, 293) advances Gombrich’s theorising on the nature of movement in images in declaring that: . . . with the temporal dimension of film there occurs a disambiguation of what is represented – dispelling many uncertainties, and leading to a more immediate, perception-like, recognition of pictorial content. More recently, Chow and Fox (2009) draw on the critical reflections of Manovich, Darley and Ward in describing the relationship between material and mental images: Moving images can be a vehicle toward reconciling our understanding of this intricate relationship because they constitute a specific type of embodied cognition process. As well, the empirical research of Detenber et al. (2000) reveals ‘significant and relatively specific effects on emotional responding’ with respect to a viewer’s engagement with static and moving images. The question that needs to be resolved with respect to locating the moving image in the political cartooning tradition is whether these distinctions ought to take precedence over their similarities in a categorical sense. In terms of their role in democratic discourse, I argue that the materiality and subsequent cognitive characteristics of the respective image types are of lesser consequence than their teleological function as visual satirical objects. In so doing I acknowledge Cubitt’s (2002) plea for a formal structure that supports the materiality of the different media practices as well as their commonality in communication. Extant political cartoon taxonomies, as well as various prize givers, scholars and cartoonists, do not acknowledge the audio-visual cartoon image as a part of the political cartooning tradition. The assertion that political cartoons ought be defined exclusively by the drafting-illustration paradigm that has hitherto comprised the material and mechanical processes of their production is a kind of media essentialism that art philosopher and media theorist Noel Carroll rails against. Carroll (1996, 49) repudiates the supposition that ‘each artform has its own distinctive medium, a medium that distinguishes it from other forms’ in saying: That an artform is not static – at least because it can acquire new media with unpredictable, nonconverging possibilities – indicates that one cannot hope to fix the telos of an artform on the basis of one of its constituent media. To insist, under the guise of the artform’s ‘historical and physical uniqueness’, that a single medium can and should direct the extent of the effects that can be employed

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within the artform, is to deny the capacity for the art to evolve and adapt to new technologies. It is not unimaginable that the newspaper will, in the coming decades, be consumed exclusively by digital means. Immediately, one of the traditional material assets, paper, is removed from the production rubric. Where does one draw the line with respect to what can be considered acceptable in terms of materiality? The media essentialist view of the world is in this regard unyielding and inflexible. It is also unnecessarily defensive in assuming that the incorporation of new media into the artform somehow presents an existential threat to the static image. Carroll (1996, 52) argues that, for the sake of sustaining a dynamic and vigorous tradition, artforms are better thought of in terms of media, as opposed to a single medium: For if artforms possess several media, there is no reason to suppose that they will all converge on a single effect or even a single range of effects. The media that comprise a single artform may sustain different, nonconverging potentials and possibilities. Cubitt (2002) has stated that any attempt to draw the audio-visual movement that typifies contemporary moving images with silent, still images ‘must do so by ignoring the distinctions between them or by creating a discourse which embraces the two in their difference’. His call for a formality stems from the concern that a purely ideological and discursive analysis may achieve the latter at the expense of the former. What then are the inherent distinctions that can be observed in the two media types? The grammatical structures employed in the two forms share attributes such as use of contrast, colour, composition and perspective; yet the language used in moving image production and analysis is one of temporality: shots, edits, frames, action and sound. Where the static image is an enduring physical object, the moving image is of a finite duration. Where the totality of the static image can be apprehended in one instant, the moving image can only be meaningfully observed via the structural and temporal relationships shared between constituent images in a sequence.

Movement Temporality affords the possibility of actual, as opposed to implied, movement. For the purpose of distinction, I shall follow Currie’s example in his philosophical treatise on film narration and discuss the notion of temporality in terms of change over time, and specifically the unfolding of action that characterises moving image works. Static image cartoons do after all, like photographs and paintings, exhibit temporality through representation as well as the experience the observer brings to its viewing (Currie 1995). However, the constitutive elements of an animation or video image share a temporal relationship that does not exist in the constitutive elements of a static cartoon, and in this sense the moving image is a distinctively, and intrinsically, temporal object. The relationship between constituent parts allows for four variations of movement in the moving image: that of the characters or objects in the frame; that of the camera, in terms of tilts, pans, dollies and tracks; optical lens effects such as zooms, focus shifts and distortion prisms; and movement achieved in structural terms through the editing and organisation of constituent frames in a sequence (Jacobs 1973). With respect to animation, and in terms of the creative focus of the artist, priority of movement is generally granted to characters in the frame above all else. This is especially the case for political

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animation, which necessarily emphasises character through animation of political figures and personalities. The primary function of movement in a political animation is not to demonstrate physicality a la the Disney model, but to facilitate a joke. Disneyesque characters are emotive agents that exist in a variety of narrative contexts, and their performance is designed to evoke and sustain a broad spectrum of emotional responses in the viewer. The characters that populate a political animation bear far less of a performative burden; creative decisions relating to timing and distortion are considered first and foremost in terms of their satirical context and anticipated comic value. In the early twentieth century Harry Julius operated at 16fps (frames per second) to produce his stop-frame animations. He designed a system that ostensibly allowed him to operate his figures as 2D puppets. Where primary animation was achieved through moving the character as a whole from point A to point B over a number of frames, secondary animation was achieved in rudimentary fashion through movement of the character’s neck, shoulders, hips and, occasionally, the eyes. Even animators practising today tend not to imbue their characters with more sophisticated, fluid movement than that which Julius realised in his animations. The character animation of Nicholson, Fazzari and Kudelka is also predominantly primary in nature. Secondary animation is applied sparingly as it adds a further burden on production that is often not vital in terms of conveying the cartoon’s message. On the other hand, perhaps somewhat serendipitously, the activation of predominantly primary animation affords the cartoon a comic value owing to its caricaturisation of movement.

Sound Temporality also affords the moving image artist the possibility of sound. Cubitt (2002, 360) observes that the moving image is ‘embedded in the sonorous’; that it is not merely a visual object, but rather an audio-visual one. In his study on audio-visual aesthetics, Chion (1994, 13) notes that sound, unlike vision, ‘presupposes movement from the outset’, thereby reinforcing the temporal character of moving images. Audio-visual artists have the capacity to select and manipulate sound to direct and control the viewer’s aural perception just as they direct and control the viewer’s visual perception through selection and manipulation of image elements (Jacobs 1973, 245). Speech, noise or music, purposefully fused with the moving image, can serve metaphorical or mnemonic functions that enhance and intensify meaning. Sound is capable of expanding the viewer’s experience and deepening the expressive and informative value of an image by providing information not afforded by the visual content alone. Indeed the relationship between sound an image is a symbiotic one, as Chion (1994, 21) notes: Sound shows us the image differently than what the images show alone, and the images likewise make us hear sound differently than if the sound were ringing out in the dark. As a component of film, speech is most often reconciled with image as either the embodied voice of actors or the non-diegetic voice of narrators. In the animated cartoon, speech is embodied insofar as its mediation by animated agents, which may be human or anthropomorphic in character. Speech is especially important to the political cartoon, because so much of its information is derived from the attributed thoughts and utterances

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of political figures. The expressive capacity of speech also facilitates voice, caricature through exaggeration of the characteristic features of the target speaker or agent (Zetterholm, Elenius, and Blomberg 2004). The emphasis and repetition of words or phrases related to the speaker can further enhance the impression. In the days before sound cinema, Harry Julius’ animations presented speech as text embedded in the image. While clear parallels can be made between the use of text in a static cartoon and its use in this moving image context, Julius seeks to imbue the reception of this text by the viewer with a narrated agency brought by a sequential and temporal reveal of the word elements in the text. The appearance of the words, one after the other to form their phrases, echoes the rhythm of aurally perceived speech. In the case of a static cartoon, the reader has a discrete period of time in which to absorb the text information. In Julius’ animations, it is the animator who directs the ideal speed at which the text is to be read and absorbed. Bruce Petty’s animations are dialogue-heavy, with the voice delivered exclusively in non-diegetic terms by a narrator. This contrasts with his static cartoons, where he employs speech bubbles as well as captions to convey text-based information. Petty has clearly made the decision to employ the most appropriate device to convey the required information in the respective media types. With respect to the animated works, the images are rendered incomprehensible when stripped of their accompanying speech. Noise is more easily incorporated in animations as sound effects are readily obtained from online libraries. Typically, noise will consist of synchronous sound that is paired in either a diegetic or non-diegetic sense to the image. In both cases the noise provides an acoustic envelope in which the visuals are contained and imbued with added meaning, mood and atmosphere. In his animation Johnny’s House, Jon Kudelka uses the non-diegetic noise of ‘canned’ studio responses as a device to both situate the animation within the conventional sit-com genre, as well as provide cues for the comic and dramatic events that punctuate the animation. In addition, non-diegetic audio provides cues and context for the action. The sound of an unseen rooster, for example, establishes the time of day; the sound of an unseen dog barking and eating food contextualises the actions of one of the on-screen characters. The noise of footsteps, doors closing and water splashing provide the diegetic sound effects that imbue the scene with acoustic depth by locating the actions in time and space. Music can serve a mnemonic and metaphorical function, by evoking in the viewer the mood, lyrics or symbology of a chosen song and coercing a correlation with the image content. Music also provides a rhythmic structure that, imposed on the image sequence, orders or augments the existing rhythmic structure provided by the visuals. Alternatively, a song may provide a foundational rhythmic framework within which the visuals are then created and inserted. In Nicholson’s animation Pulp Mill Rockers, a Midnight Oil song is ‘performed’ by that band’s lead singer-turned-Labor Minister Peter Garrett in an ironic juxtaposition that reminds the viewer of the apparent conflict between the environmental ideology portrayed in Midnight Oil’s music, and the pragmatic politics that Garrett has since embraced as a politician. In this way, the song serves a mnemonic function in contextualising Garrett’s political history, with the music becoming a metaphor for Garrett’s shifting ideologies.

Navigating the temporal in production In terms of developing the initial concept for a static cartoon or animation, Kudelka (2011) describes the contrasting approaches that exemplify his respective practices:

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. . . the political cartoon’s got to hit you all at one moment; anything that’s timebased and has a narrative in it immediately removes the possibility of one punch line. Structurally speaking, Kudelka observes the process of filling a panel with graphic elements as distinct from sequencing a series of images along a linear timeline. For Kudelka, the application of rhythmic montage in panel cartooning is not easily achieved when working with a timeline. Where he finds the former a very instinctive process, the latter, typically requiring the directing of voices and linear editing, is for him the opposite. The difficulty that Kudelka describes in wielding a narrative in a moving image context is visibly apparent in the political animations that he has produced. Where he delivers a succinct and economical narrative in his multiple-panel static cartoons, his moving image attempts have been comparatively awkward. The action sequence presented in his cartoon Expert Makeover is presented as eight panels of action contained within a single frame (Figure 3). Kudelka controls the timing and rhythm of the montage through the spacing of the graphic elements and the fragmenting of the text. The narrative reaches its conclusion in a measured and efficient fashion, delivering a satisfying reward for the reader. In contrast, the timing of Four UnAustralians is overly wrought; in lacking suspense, the pay-off is diminished as a result. The melody that accompanies the images appears to direct the timing of the action, but the visual elements that occupy the frame space are not dynamic enough to sustain interest in what is a simple and somewhat predictable narrative. Where there exists an evident disconnect between Kudelka’s static and moving cartoons, there is a harmonious synchronicity in Fazzari’s approach to image production across media. The treatment of line and form, construction of metaphor, and manipulation of spatial and

Figure 3 Jon Kudelka, Expert Makeover, 14 Aug 2012. The Australian. Kudelka Jon. Personal website. Accessed 10 March 2013. http://www.kudelka.com.au/2012/08/expert-makeover/.

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temporal elements resonate with a familiarity of character that demonstrates a similar thinking process in the development of both static and moving images. In reflecting on his foray into the moving image, Fazzari (2011) says that from the outset he observed sequential phases in his creative process and concepts; a kind of beginning-mid-dle-end structure that made exploring animation a natural progression. He remarks of his print cartoons that it is typically the ‘middle’ that provides the structure for his static drawings, so developing these concepts into a time-based narrative is simply a matter of bookending the middle act with a set-up and resolution. Some insight into this conceptual process can be gleaned from Fazzari’s blog posts that present both static cartoon and animation responses to a single issue. The juxtaposition of the two forms frequently reveals imagery that clearly indicates a conceptual synthesis between static and moving image. The animation Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott’s Horror Run features the two political leaders as visitors to an amusement park who endure a frightening train ride. The static image shows the two leaders in the train, replete with terrified expressions (Figure 4); while the animation expands on this metaphor by presenting the lead up to this action, as well as a concluding act that shows Gillard and Abbott emerge from a dark tunnel as laughing clowns (Figure 5). Fazzari (2011) explains that his use of sound, comprised of noise and music, comes from an illustration tradition that doesn’t incorporate speech bubbles. Instead of relying on speech as an acoustic device to communicate information, he conceives ideas that are largely conveyed by imagery, and supported in most cases only by incidental audio as a means for emphasis or metaphorical weight. Fazzari’s natural disinclination for dialogue and captions in his static cartoons is reinforced in his animation practice by the added burden it places on production. By applying himself predominantly to image making, Fazzari avoids those processes for which he has little interest or aptitude, thus maintaining a fluent and efficient workflow.

Figure 4 Rocco Fazzari, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott’s Horror Run, 8 Jun 2012. Digital image. The Sydney Morning Herald online edition. Accessed 10 March 2013. http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/blogs/ roccobloggo/julia-and-tonys-horror-run-20120607-1zxzd.html.

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Figure 5 Rocco Fazzari, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott’s Horror Run, 8 Jun 2012. Digital video. The Sydney Morning Herald online edition. Accessed 10 March 2013. http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/blogs/ roccobloggo/julia-and-tonys-horror-run-20120607-1zxzd.html.

In contrast, audio is for Petty a device that facilitates the conveyance of concepts that are far larger in narrative scope than those he conveys in his static cartoons. His animations are scaffolded by a tightly scripted audio track that has at its core a non-diegetic, narrated dialogue. The narration provides the broad narrative for the works, but also helps contextualise the images in an immediate meaning sense. But despite the scriptbased structure of his animations, they have at their heart a concept that is, like his static cartoons, serviced by visual metaphors. The oftentimes elaborate and visually complex elements that he affects in his static images are echoed in a similarly sophisticated animation style. Figure 6 shows the sheer volume of visual and conceptual information that Petty so fluently renders in his static cartoons, while Figure 7 shows a similar graphic treatment in his animation. Many of his drawings could almost be described as contraptions themselves; they are intricately engineered designs conceived through a profound and innate grasp of his subject matter, and an innate sense of conceptual coherence and flair for visual arrangement. Equally, Petty’s animations can be described as the temporally based twin of their static

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Figure 6 Bruce Petty, Untitled, 10 July 2010. The Age. Petty, Bruce. “Untitled.” The Age. 10 July 2010.

counterparts, harnessing as they do the same conceptual and graphic genealogy in their conception and execution. Petty (2009) observes that his drawing style exploits a line treatment that particularly lends itself to animation. Free of the burden of detailed shading, Petty is able to focus more energy towards the distortion of his lines. The energetic line work and frequent use of motion lines reveals something about Petty’s perception of the tableaux he creates in his static cartoons. To him, they are not simply moments frozen in time – the use of lines to convey movement in objects implies a scene that is perceptibly in motion. The notion of temporality then is integral to his thought processes and output in both static and moving image forms. Petty’s conviction that configuring a political cartoon into a timebased format is ‘as natural as going from cross hatching to another style’ is thus easily reconciled. Peter Nicholson is a versatile satirist who has worked across multiple media, including sculpture. He designed all of the 3D puppet caricatures for his Rubbery Figures sketches, and has been producing animation for nearly 40 years. His political animation practice was heavily informed by his experience with producing Rubbery Figures. Of the satirical puppet show Nicholson (2011) says:

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Figure 7 Bruce Petty, Human Contraptions: Law, 2002. Digital video. National Film and Sound Archives website. Accessed 10 June 2017. http://dl.nfsa.gov.au/module/1440/.

I always thought of Rubbery Figures as a cartoon because it used essentially the type of imagery of a cartoon; but it still always had to obviously be a script, because it had to have a beginning and an end, and a middle; whereas a cartoon has a beginning end and middle altogether in the one cartoon in the newspaper; so you only look at it once, and it leaves things open, it doesn’t have to finish with a big bang. The script development process that Nicholson underwent in realising his animations, and the three-act structure they assume, clearly distinguishes them from his static images. The same can be said though of Nicholson’s animations that I observe of Petty’s: that at their heart, in their initial conception, lies the purposing of a metaphor or metaphors to convey a rhetorical and satirical intent. As well, despite the script-intensive character of his animations, there are clear correlations between Nicholson’s static and moving image works. These are evident in the vibrancy of his signature colour palette and the distinctive style of his caricatures (Figures 8 and 9). Having established the satirical framework in which the drawings will reside, the constituent parts in both static and temporal forms conspire to achieve a similar result.

Figure 8 Peter Nicholson, Rudd to Keep Baby Bonus 550, 15 March 2008. Nicholson Peter. Personal website. Accessed 10 June 2017. http://nicholsoncartoons.com.au/rudd-to-keep-babybonus-550.html

Figure 9 Peter Nicholson, Boom Boom, 3 March 2008. Digital video. Nicholson Peter. Personal website. Accessed 10 June 2017. http://nicholsoncartoons.com.au/the-economy-flyinghigh.html.

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The compelling three-act structure that typifies Julius’ animations is defined by three separate and distinct media strategies: the live-action introduction; the lightning sketch middle; and the stop-frame pay-off. Each act also has its own temporal character, and serves as a scaffold for engagement by an audience whose literacy of moving image objects would have been necessarily limited. The first live-action frames showing Julius perusing a newspaper before proceeding to his desk to begin drawing, provide the context for the action to follow on two fronts: that the drawings that subsequently appear on screen are issued from his pen; and that these drawings directly correlate with the news of the day as presented in the principle news media of the day. The second act, which shows the graphic elements hand-drawn at double-speed onto the screen canvas, directs both the order and timing at which the viewer reads and understands the image content. When Julius’ hand is removed in the third act, and his drawings assume an agency perceptibly all their own, the audience engages with both the novelty of images apparently come to life, as well as the punch-line or resolution to the satiric narrative.

Figure 10 Harry Julius, Vote Labor, c.1929. National Gallery of Australia online collection. Accessed 10 June 2017. http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm? IRN=66665.

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In the absence of synchronised, recorded audio, Julius presents text-based information in the form of speech-bubbles and captions. As well as delivering information described earlier, the text appears as a sequential reveal of words and phrases, thereby directing the speed at which the text is read by the viewer. The writing itself also functions as an identifiable graphic signature of sorts, being written in the same style Julius adopted in his static cartoons (Figures 10 and 11). Coupled with Julius’ distinctive caricatures, audiences familiar with his newspaper cartoons will have had an immediate and direct association upon which to base their reading and engagement with the moving image screen counterpart.

Figure 11 Harry Julius, The Crown Prince of Death, c.1915. 16mm Film. Australian Screen website. Accessed 10 June 2017. http://aso.gov.au/titles/newsreels/crown-prince-of-death/clip1/.

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The combination of novel image-making processes with familiar graphic imagery, placed in a recognisable situational context, allowed Julius to capitalise on the creative opportunities afforded by the emerging film technology of the day without encroaching on the potential for audience engagement. The time-based nature of his animations presented for Julius a new way of exploring political cartoon imagery while at the same time retaining its principal rhetorical and satirical function. Julius identified in the emerging screen-based media a different avenue for engaging an audience with a brand of visual political satire that was distinctive in its temporal treatment of narrative, but nonetheless rooted in the tradition of static political cartoon imagery.

Conclusion The points of distinction that separate the static and moving political cartoon image from one another have been presented and discussed here in terms of both their teleology and materiality. The argument is not framed in terms of the two forms being in some sort of competition with one another; nor is it to be inferred that the ubiquity of digital telecommunications and media platforms must inevitably see the moving image political cartoon supersede the static political cartoon image as the preeminent form of visual political satire in the news media. Given the immediate nature of the static image and its capacity to respond to news events playing out in a 24-hour news cycle, the panel cartoon will inevitably endure and survive the technological shift in our consumption of news media. Equally, the moving image cartoon’s capacity to engage in a truly multimedia, time-based context, affords a dynamic experience where news events can be explored in ways that extend and enhance the viewer’s understanding of a given issue. In terms of embracing the moving cartoon image into the printmedia political cartooning tradition, the material distinctions acquiesce to the broader function of both forms. Julius recognised a century ago that the issues he explored in his animations were grounded in the news media, and that presenting them in animated form invited a visual and satirical treatment that was derivative of his static cartoons. Contemporary cartoonists exploring the moving image format are simply exploiting a material characteristic afforded by the medium in which their work is increasingly disseminated and consumed. While the digital and audio-visual creative process may require some adaptation of metaphorical and narrative approach on the part of the cartoonist, the intended satirical and rhetorical impact on the viewer should remain the defining feature of the political cartooning tradition. As the nature and character of news media platforms evolve, so too should the nature and character of the political satire tradition framed therein. To deny the tradition the opportunity to draw on all of the creative and material potential at its disposal in the contemporary news media landscape is therefore misguided. This approach would seek to preserve notions of historical and physical uniqueness that are tethered to a medium that may well not exist a decade hence. It also assumes that the printmedia newspaper is the ideal context in which political cartoons should be framed. Clearly, when reflecting on the role that cartoons play in democratic discourse, this is not the case.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Source: Lucien Leon (2018) ‘The animated moving image as political cartoon’, Comedy Studies, 9:1, 94–113.

References Beecher, Eric. 2013. “The Death of Fairfax and the End of Newspapers.” The Monthly July. Accessed 31 January 2016. https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/july/1372600800/eric-bee cher/death-fairfax-and-end-newspapers. Carroll, Noel. 1996. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chion, Michel. 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Chow, Kenny K. N., and Harrell D. Fox. 2009. “Material-Based Imagination: Embodied Cognition in Animated Images.” Paper presented at the Digital Arts and Culture Conference. December 12–15 2009, in Irvine, USA. Cortsen, Rikke. 2012. “Comics as Assemblage: How Spatio-temporality in Comics is Constructed.” PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen. Cubitt, Sean. 2002. “Visual and Audiovisual: From Image to Moving Image.” Journal of Visual Culture 1: 359–369. Currie, Gregory. 1995. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Di Liddo, Annalisa. 2009. Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Detenber, Benjamin H., Robert F. Simons, Jason E. Reiss, and Christopher W. Shults. 2000. “Image Motion and Context: A Between- and Within-Subjects Comparison.” Psychophysiology 37: 706–710. Dyer, Glenn, and Myriam Robin. 2015. “Print Circulation Circling the Drain: Is it Time for Drastic Measures?” Crikey, February 13. Accessed 31 January 2016.http://www.crikey.com.au/2015/02/ 13/print-circulation-circling-the-drain-is-it-time-for-drastic-measures/. Fazzari, Rocco. 2011. Interview by Author. Canberra, Australia. 11 July 2011. Gardner, Alan. 2007. “Pulitzers Should Include Separate Category for Animation.” The Daily Cartoonist. Accessed 15 January 2009. www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2007/05/22/pulitzersshould-include-separate-category-for-animation/. Gombrich, Ernst. 1960. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. London: Phaidon Press. Jacobs, Lewis. 1973. The Movies as Medium. Toronto: Doubleday Canada. Kudelka, Jon. 2011. Interview by Author. Tape Recording. Canberra, Australia. 12 September 2011. Leon, Lucien. 2017. “The Evolution of Political Cartooning in the New Media Age: Cases From Australia, the USA and UK.” In Satire and Politics: the Interplay of Heritage and Practice, edited by Jessica Milner Davis, 163–191. 1st ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Manning, Haydon, and Robert Phiddian. 2004. “In Defence of the Political Cartoonists’ Right to Mock.” Australian Review of Public Affairs 5(1): 25–42. McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York, NY: HarperPerennial. Medhurst, Martin. J., and Michael A. Desousa. 1981. “Political Cartoons as Rhetorical Form: A Taxonomy of Graphic Discourse.” Communication Monographs 48: 197–236. Morris, Ray. 1993. “Visual Rhetoric in Political Cartoons: A Structuralist Approach.” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 8: 195–210. Nicholson, Peter. 2011. Interview by Author. Tape Recording. Melbourne, Australia. 25 April 2011. Petty, Bruce. 2009. Interview by Author. Tape recording. Sydney, Australia. 8 December 2009. Press, Charles. 1981. The Political Cartoon. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson.

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Sachs-Hombrich, Klaus. 2003. Das Bild als kommunikatives Medium: Elemente einer allgemeinen Bildwissenschaft [The Image as Communicative Medium. Elements of a General Image Studies]. Cologne: von Halem. Seymour-Ure, Colin. 2001. “What Future for the British Political Cartoon?.” Journalism Studies 2(3): 333–355. Speckman, Karon, and Kalen Ponche. 2007. “Animated Editorial Cartoons: Is Ben Turning Over in His Grave?.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the association for education in Journalism and Mass Communication, The Renaissance, Aug 8, in Washington, DC. Accessed 10 June 2017. http://citation.allacademic.com/meta/pçmlaçapaçresearchçcitation/2/0/3/7/5/pages203756/ p203756-1.php. Stantis, Scott. 2007. “A zany development.” AAEC Editorial cartoon News. Accessed 10 June 2017. www.editorialcartoonists.com/news/article.cfm/747/. The Pulitzer Prizes website. Accessed 10 June 2017. http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2012-Editor ial-Cartooning. Tiffen, Rod. 2010. “The Press.” In The Media and Communications in Australia, edited by Stuart Cunningham and Graeme Turner, 81–96. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Zetterholm, Elisabeth, Daniel Elenius, and Mats Blomberg. 2004. “A Comparison Between Human Perception and a Speaker Verification System Score of a Voice Imitation.” In Proceedings of the 10th Australian International Conference on Speech Science & Technology. December 8–10, New South Wales: Macquarie University.

Contributor Lucien Leon lectures in animation and video at the Australian National University’s School of Art and Design in Canberra. He is especially interested in the impact of the digital media revolution on the political cartooning tradition, and online political satire more broadly. Dr Leon’s political animations have been published in a variety of broadcast and online contexts. He is an active member of the Australasian Humour Studies Network.

Chapter 38

Is vlogging the new stand-up? A compare/contrast of traditional and online models of comedic content distribution (9:1) Matthew McKeague

Introduction Traditionally, the art and practice of stand-up comedy involved honing jokes with new audiences every night in different clubs or towns. However, developments of technology connecting storytellers in new ways online have allowed younger performers and digital natives to succeed in comedy without following this typical pattern and, in some cases, without even leaving their home. By using the very online technologies that oftentimes have more viewers than mainstream media outlets such as YouTube videos and podcasts, people producing humorous user-generated content (UGC) online are able to skip much of the legwork involved that conventional stand-up comedians must complete to thrive. Established stand-up comedians may look down upon these online content creators who have yet to put in their necessary time, however, the two career paths do have similarities and require substantial effort to rise to the top. In order to comprehensively cover the options available to comedians, we must first review audience expectations and preferences of those gravitating to the Internet to consume comedic content.

Digital native generations’ shifting preferences Digital native generations actively participate in online communities through comments, feedback and UGC that are changing the ways that human beings socialize and form relationships. Hence, it is no surprise that those looking to entertain others and spread laughter choose to venture online. Current generations tend to prefer these relationships online despite the lack of face-to-face communication involved (Bull et al. 2008; Bonebrake 2002; Yum and Hara 2005). Vlogging, the shortened expression for video blog or video log, is a way that connects comedians online with audiences as the creators share glimpses into their everyday lives, offering opinions on current events and issues that are important to them. Online friendships and interactions are enjoyed even more so by individuals who suffer from loneliness, depression or other issues because of perceived advantages of online anonymity or the ability to express oneself more effectively (Caplan 2003), connecting with the on-going inside joke that comedians can be known to have a drive, healthy or not, to feel accepted through making others laugh. This interactivity, along with digital native generations’ high regard toward freedom, liberty and online community participation, has become democratizing technology available to those with an Internet connection (Rettie

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2003), fitting well with those who want to make others laugh from the comfort of their own home through UGC vlogging. This technology-trained generation also places an emphasis on equitable participation (Hill 2003) that may correlate with their likelihood to use social networking sites as a part of a community . Bull et al. (2008) report that the rise of social media usage provides new opportunities for members who directly participate in an online community, such as You-Tube, which itself is enticing to digital native generations because of its visual and participatory nature (Schor 2005). Research has shown that these online, participatory audiences tend to be comprised of a younger demographic because they are also drawn to the often edgy and subversive subjects covered in UGC that are unavailable elsewhere (Hewitt and Vazquez 2010). These trends and audience patterns have created an environment where people are devouring storytelling in UGC online, and young comedians who have yet to step onto a stage now have the option to skip traditional pathways to success in potentially lucrative comedy careers.

Materials and methods The researcher performed a literature review, analysing the qualities of online audiences and the generational shift in comedic content viewing habits. This material was then compared to and contrasted with the literature regarding traditional stand-up comedy delivery as well as interviews with notable stand-up comedians and online UGC creators. Commonalities and differences were arranged in key areas related to finding success in both delivery models.

Results Similarities and differences regarding traditional stand-up comedy and online vlogging fell within four general areas. These areas were the following: starting one’s career, dealing with opposition, honing the craft and landing the big break that drastically increases popularity.

Starting off in the business Whether stage or webcam, one has to start somewhere. Beginning one’s career in comedy, stand-up entertainers must attend open mic nights to perform their short sets as unknown entities, competing against a crowd of other comics also awaiting their turn. These events are regularly scheduled in a bar or club during its slow night where business is typically slow and occupancy is low. Comics and venues then both benefit from such a relationship, as open mic events can drive business while at the same time offering that much-needed stage time for comedians to polish their sets and hone their craft. Those comedians who choose stand-up often do so for the immediate energy of a live crowd as well as the freedom the career entails. One notable example, Joe Rogan, first found success in stand-up but has since explored online avenues such as his podcast, starting in 2009. In an interview with the Phoenix New Times, Rogan’s love for his stand-up comedy craft cannot be expressed more clearly: ‘Everything else I’ve done has a million other people telling you what to do. With stand-up, no one is telling you what to do. There’s no direction given, you just go up there and whack it out. It’s as pure of a

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representation of your thoughts as you can do and still have people enjoy it’ (Chesler 2014). Comparing this stand-up starting point to entering online vlogging, where one must launch a channel or page with zero subscribers and fans other than immediate family and friends, there are similarities in that the struggle is an upward climb for attention with no force at the top demanding certain topics or jokes. In clubs, one’s competition may be the noise level, smoke or the state of inebriation of each audience member. However, online content creators must contend, for example, with YouTube’s 300 h of video uploaded each minute (YouTube Company Statistics 2016). In either sense, consistently getting laughs is tough. Such competition is no easy task in either comedy arena. Many online comedians have expressed their displeasure of a life filled with travel, hotel rooms and public scrutiny with crowds in their immediate proximity, leading them to make the decision to forgo traditional pathways into comedy. For example, TJ Kirk, formerly known as TheAmazingAtheist on YouTube, started in 2006 as a vlogger with a similar sensibility and style as the late comedians George Carlin and Bill Hicks. By growing up in the deep South of the United States with his views of the world and certainly edgy material, Kirk has expressed having an easier time finding audiences online (Kirk 2016). On an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, featured on his YouTube channel, Rogan interviewed Kirk about his rationale for choosing online distribution: ʻIf it weren’t for YouTube, before I probably would have tried to be a comedianʼ (PowerfulJRE 2016). Kirk also added that vlogging allowed him to be serious if he desired, giving him even more freedom, in a sense, than Joe discussed as his reasons for loving stand-up. Similarly, another vlogger, Boogie2988 who focuses on humorous gaming content and news, has expressed comparable early goals of pursuing stand-up comedy, but could not do so due to his disability of morbid obesity (Williams 2016). In his 2017 keynote speech at Vidcon, Boogie explained the significant impact that this new online career path had on his life: ʻI was in a very unhappy place in my life. . . living out of a bedroom that I very rarely left and I discovered a tool called YouTube. And after 10 years of creating videos. . . that across them have generated over 750 million views. And this has changed my life in so many different ways. When I first created my YouTube channel my body was physically destroyed. . . YouTube has given me access to healthcare for the first time in my life. Due to the ad revenue I was finally able to see a doctor for the first time in many, many years and that doctor has helped me follow a path in which I have finally defeated the majority of my demonsʼ (Boogie2988, 2017a). In July 2017, Boogie successfully completed gastric bypass surgery and has since lost weight and improved his health so that he was able to go off hid blood pressure and diabetes medication (Boogie2988, 2017b). Both Kirk and Boogie may be rare in the amount of money that both have made, however, they are not the exceptions. Though relatively few online creators make millions of dollars in comparison to the amount of online creators that exist, many creators are able to reach audiences in ways they would normally not be due to specific challenges. While disabled comedians have been succeeding in traditional formats such as Josh Blue who won the fourth season of NBC’s reality show Last Comic Standing with cerebral palsy (Downs 2011), online UGC outlets have expanded the options available to comedians unable to succeed due to geographic location or physical impairment. Considering both stand-up and online avenues, the increase of women, different races and the disabled has helped make comedy more diverse than ever before.

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Dealing with the haters As expressed in Mel Brooks’ History of the World: Part 1, as soon as the first artist was born in the cave man days, soon followed the critic (Brooks 1981). Similarly, after a comedian begins in the business, both on stage and online, somebody is bound to think that comedian is terrible. Comedians in clubs know that each time they step onto the stage they have the chance that a particular type of crowd member could try to throw a wrench into their rehearsed comedic machine – the heckler. Though sometimes hecklers can have good intentions, thinking that their comments and quips are helping a comedian’s performance, other times they are displeased with a performance and want the entire room to know. Stand-up comedian and former Saturday Night Live writer Dave Attell shared his perspective on heckling in 2007’s documentary Heckler: ʻIt’s kinda like prison. If you walk into the prison the first day and somebody says something to you and you don’t hit him back, you’re his bitchʼ (Addis 2007). In the same documentary, Eugene Mirman expressed possible explanations behind heckling: ʻMost people who yell at you at a show either want attention very badly to impress someone, or (they’re) just simply drunk, or they think they’re helping youʼ (Addis 2007). To combat such hecklers in person, the comedian must either have prepared quips applicable to many negative comments or be quick on their feet. While stand-up comedians may believe that vloggers and UGC creators get to avoid these awkward hardships by having complete control over their channels, one online must not forget the power of anonymous comments left on nearly all online videos, unless the uploader disables all comments. Online UGC creators, always on the search for new content, have devised a new tactic to show the online trolls who is boss – by profiting off of them. Yes, many popular YouTubers have created their own video segments reading the very comments meant to tear them down, refuting multiple online comments in one video. For example, vlogging YouTubers Domo and Crissy, a married female couple, have attracted hundreds of thousands of views in their video series fighting back against negative comments on their own content. In one of these videos, the duo addresses a disturbing trend they noticed about their comments: ʻ95 percent of these comments are about that we’re gay. And we are very, very gayʼ (Domo and Crissy 2016). By cracking jokes and tearing apart the arguments made in comments, Domo and Crissy not only get to have more time to silence the hate, but also profit from it in the process. Successful YouTuber PewDiePie also produces a similar series, not allowing the negativity to bring down his spirits: ʻThese types of comments are literally a tiny, tiny fraction compared to all the support that I get from you brosʼ (PewDiePie 2014). While in a club, audience members’ identities may not be known to the public it is still not as easy to hide compared to online environments. Online users have been shown to have a different understanding of civility and appropriate protocols when anonymous (Reader 2012) and frequently attract only those with extreme viewpoints or authoritarian personalities (Erjavec 2012). Left unchecked and anonymous, online users’ interactions tend to skew in a hateful or aggressive way compared to when their names are connected back to themselves (Keith and Martin 2005), which then can inspire more prejudice feedback as users who are exposed to such comments feel as if the practice is more acceptable (Hsueh and Yogeeswaran 2015). Though online, any feedback from users, even negative, has shown to encourage content creators to continue releasing new material (Joyce and Kraut 2006).

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The difference then between stand-up comedians’ and online vloggers’ hateful responses may be the delayed response to such unpleasant feedback left from the audience. A stand-up comedian on stage must be quick to respond in a way that lets the heckler know their feedback is not appreciated or acceptable in a social situation. Such a response is even more effective if funny. Online, UGC uploaders have time to respond to comments or the power to delete feedback and ban users from interacting on their channels, the equivalent of a bouncer at a club. In both scenarios, it is possible for the comedian to lose control of the room, whether that be a stage or YouTube channel, as the audience could applaud and boo in person or rate unpleasant feedback with up and down votes. One final key distinction between the heckling may be the physical state of the audience. Heckling, as expressed in the documentary Heckler, is commonly caused from drunken members of the audience. In the documentary, stand-up comedian Maria Bamford described how even she was tempted to heckle other comedians after drinking alcohol in a club, despite her usually pleasant and self-effacing demeanor (Addis 2007). Fights have broken out as well, where angered listeners have stormed the stage in a rage. While online encounters might at first seem to be tamer, the hate can actually become more aggressive with frequent death threats or even a development known as swatting when an online content creator is livestreaming. Swatting takes place when personal details about an online content creator leak, allowing a new form of cyber bullying to take place where a swatter calls 911 and reports that the livestreamer committed a serious crime such as murder and is hiding out at their home. Treating the call with urgency, police or SWAT team members then invade private homes in full force, which has been captured in multiple videos (Jaffe 2016; Wu 2015). In both distribution choices, hateful comments can be devastating if taken to the extreme. However, a comedian’s timing or punch line can only be ruined by a heckler in person. In this sense, it could be argued, because of the increased control, that the hate is less destructive to the comedy routine itself in the online format.

Honing the craft Finding success in both stand-up comedy and online vlogging requires working one’s way up from the top with no guarantees of a profit. As the humourist monitors feedback, whether that be from laughs in the same room or comments left under the video, in order to succeed they must find their own voice and learn the type of content that audiences enjoy. In order to judge such success in the traditional format, a stand-up comedian primarily must rely upon memories of jokes landing or bombing, or, record their performances to judge the laughter in the room. This face-to-face feedback is difficult to ignore and certainly takes guts in order to essentially learn in real time what type of content works and what does not. Online video content creators also require courage to release content to faceless strangers, and frequently go by online handles unconnected with their real-life persona or on a first-name basis, yet have a more thorough and concrete record of audience feedback like if a stand-up comedian could administer a survey at the end of every performance. Despite this lack of face-to-face encounters, online interactions have been shown to have the potential for individuals to share more than they would in real life and lead to a hyperpersonal state with increased levels of intimacy (Walther 1996).

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Sometimes, stand-up comedy and online distribution of comedic content cross with mixed results. For example, stand-up comedians post clips of their live performances online and may attract viewers, however, their audiences will not be as connected to them as an online content creator speaking directly to the camera – in the former, viewers report more of an objective viewing perspective even if the camera is located in the audience while a vlogger predominantly speaks directly into a camera. What has proven to be successful are those stand-up comedians who have used online formats, such as podcasts, to challenge the media system much like vloggers and alternative media by building an authentic yet outsider celebrity image (Symons 2017). Comedians such as Marc Maron, Adam Carolla and Bill Burr have all popularized podcasting, as well as found ways to share the interconnectivity feelings in a similar vein as vloggers. In this sense, the two forms contain comparable styles with levels of preparation and scripting up to the individual creator – they strive to connect deeper with audience and help establish a brand loyalty as part of their everyday lives rather than once every club appearance. Much like putting in the necessary stage time in the traditional format, online video makers only develop their long-lasting style after creating enough videos, often hiding or deleting their old material created before discovering their voice. Stand-up comedians, especially before the trend of crowds recording bits with their cell phones, have the slight advantage in this regard being able to escape old and potentially embarrassing material while online content creators’ videos are often downloaded by others and re-uploaded, unable to be controlled or escape in the future. It is also true that both online vloggers and traditional stand-up comedians must continue to reinvent themselves to succeed. Vlogger TJ Kirk discusses this challenge during another podcast with Joe Rogan: ʻIt seems like the shelf life of a YouTube channel is pretty short. . . Most people just watch and they don’t interact whatsoever, so it’s impossible to know what they thinkʼ (PowerfulJRE 2016). On a related note, traditional stand-ups hone and rehearse their bits to make them stronger, adding content, tags and better wording much like a writer going through drafts of a script. Yet, online video makers create more one-off separate pieces of comedic content that can be digested in a binge-watching style, almost like episodic serialized online television that digital generations crave (Matrix 2014). In both forms, the comedy creators are able to judge reactions and watch old material and learn from the past, yet, from the differences in how the content is saved and expressed to the public, online video makers have the opportunity for more exposure to an audience of millions. In online, there is also more rivalry and a greater number of videos to compete with, so the challenges arise in other ways. Online content creators have the added advantage of online analytic tools integrated into outlets such as YouTube that reveal the duration of average views, specific timestamps when audiences click away and even portions of the video that have been watched again (YouTube Analyze Channel Performance). Though these online tools are similar to judging laughter in the room like a stand-up comedian would, the available data to online content creators allows them to target weak areas and give audiences what they like in specific and analytic fashions. Finally, online video content creators do not seem to miss the community feeling a room can take on while doing traditional stand-up comedy, as interacting through written comments or video responses and sharing content with friends can create a sense of co-viewing online (Lange 2008; Haridakis and Hanson 2009).

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Landing the big break Success in stand-up comedy and online vlogging content is rarely instant and usually involves a large portion of unpaid work. Traditional stand-up comedians have a common path to pursue in order to achieve fame, usually starting with open mic nights followed by local and regional clubs that range from $20–$50 per night leading up to mid-level headlining spots at clubs or college gigs ranging from $3000–$5000 thousand). This path continues, eventually touring the country on the road, sometimes doing corporate gigs or cruise ships for those who can work clean rather than blue (Seizer 2011). Similarly, in order to profit in online markets, vloggers must opt-in for partnership or monetization on platforms in order to receive payment, sometimes first having to hit certain requirements such as Twitch requiring viewership of 500 or more viewers with three streams a week (Jaffe 2016). Revenue then increases based on the number of clicks on ad content as well as views, which drastically reduced during 2017’s YouTube Adpocalypse. During this time, advertisers wanted their ads to be displayed on more family friendly content and many controversial channels reported losing up to half of their overall revenue (Sawyer 2017). In this regard to profit considerations, the ability to work clean can result in a greater number of options in both conventional stand-up comedy and online vlogging. Some comedians prefer road work and want nothing more than to continue their craft, while others have hopes of pitching creative projects or being seen by booking agents in order to land a spot on a late-night talk show. Either pathway in traditional stand-up will allow them to pursue larger audiences, the most visual representation of this unofficial transition to fame perhaps being Johnny Carson’s approval on The Tonight Show and inviting the comedian over to chat at his desk. Today, that path for the traditional stand-up comedian has changed. Even though there are more late-night talk shows, these programmes frequently do not book comedians but instead choose scripted events with the host with the goals of going viral on the Internet (Weisman 2015). Stand-up comedians, in this regard, are in direct competition with the UGC creators online sharing comedic content, resorting to a variety of outlets such as podcasts, video channels and blogs, sometimes quite successfully such as Louie C. K.’s direct distribution method in 2012 when he sold his comedy special on his personal website for five dollars and made nearly five million dollars in two days (Kane 2015). Louie was in the public eye at this point, however, and results like that are not always the norm. Both traditional stand-up comedians and vloggers creating UGC include an important element of networking, as comedians often hire those whom they think are funny, know well or have worked with in the past. Though this would not always lead to major roles, by knowing the right person a comedian could land a guest appearance, cameo or minor role in a development deal for film or television. Vloggers and UGC creators perform similar actions with two major techniques: shout outs and collaborations. Shout outs, the easier of the two, involve impressing a content creator with a large number of followers or subscribers to the point where that user mentions the new discovery by name, suggesting viewers to investigate the person’s content, and make a final push to follow or subscribe with a direct hyperlink (Burgess and Green 2013). The second technique, collaborations, involves two content creators making videos that connect in some way, usually featuring special video clips recorded by the other and

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featured on the opposite channel with the goal of gaining new viewers. For example, after gaining a shout out from the popular gaming YouTuber PewDiePie, another gaming channel, JackSepticEye, saw his subscriber count jump nearly 13,000 in four days (O’Reilly 2014). JackSepticEye, who before the shout out had 2500 subscribers, used this momentum to gain 1.5 million subscribers in a year. Again, much like Louie C. K., while such giant leaps are rare, a series of minor shout outs and collaborations is part of the manner in which online vloggers and content creators must network. Such big breaks, through the power of the Internet, can allow vloggers from traditionally underrepresented facets of society to succeed, such as TJ Kirk, as discussed before. In a documentary regarding his history, Kirk addresses this idea in the beginning moments: ʻI have no sense of fashion. I have poor hygiene. I’m often rude, intentionally irritating, foul-mouthed and strange. I don’t support our troops. I don’t believe in the American dream. I don’t believe in god. I don’t like feel-good music or inspirational TV. I don’t believe in manners, traffic laws, or honor. I’m not conventionally handsome. I’m not someone who would have been handpicked to become a celebrity, yet. . . that’s exactly what I amʼ (Amazing Atheist Archive 2013). Comedy has been said to be the area where people who do not fit the typical idea of pretty can succeed, and it appears that UGC allows that as well.

Discussion The definition of success in the performing arts has changed in the past 20 years. Since comedy is included under the umbrella of performing arts, measures and variables dealing with the idea of success have also necessarily changed. It used to be much easier to assess: gigs, venue, audience, agents and money. Yet, the opportunities for comic expression and audience development have moved the novice, ambitious comic from being dependent on the opportunities given by others to developing opportunities based on individual initiative. Several factors have become abundantly clear. Among these is the fact that there are myriad avenues for success in the world of the stand-up comic given the explosion of technology and the shrinking world in general. Also viable is the idea that success has become at least, in some ways, a function of how it is judged in the eye of the beholder, or in this case, creating an individual comedian. Because of these distinct qualities of each comedy outlet, vlogging and stand-up appear to both be viable means to distribute funny content for the foreseeable future. Audiences desire comedic content and are devouring it as much as in the past, if not more, with streaming services and UGC. As the positive interactions between traditional stand-up comedian Joe Rogan and online UGC creator TJ Kirk show, both industries can get along, appeal to different audience types, and use each outlet’s unique characteristics to make specialized content so long as audiences still want to laugh.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Source: Matthew McKeague (2018) ‘Is vlogging the new stand-up? A compare/contrast of traditional and online models of comedic content distribution’, Comedy Studies, 9:1, 84–93.

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References Addis, M. (Director). 2007. Heckler [Motion picture], La Crosse, WI: Echo Bridge Home Entertainment. Amazing Atheist Archive. 2013. Amazing Special Edition, August 21 [Video File]. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=TEUIqyDdEfw. Bonebrake, K. 2002. “College Students’ Internet Use, Relationship Formation, and Personality Correlates.” Cyber Psychology & Behavior 5(6): 551–557. Boogie2988. 2017a. My Creator Keynote Speech at Vidcon 2017, August 8 [Video File]. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=A1s1t4nksI8. Boogie2988. 2017b. Two Weeks Post op, August 17 [Video File]. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=obb7pwKQFKY. Brooks, M. (Director). 1981. History of the World: Part 1. [Motion picture]. Culver City, CA: Brooksfilms. Bull, G., A. Thompson, M. Searson, J. Garofalo, J. Park, C. Young, and J. Lee. 2008. “Connecting Informal and Formal Learning: Experiences in the Age of Participatory Media.” Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education 8(2): 100–107. Burgess, J., and J. Green. 2013. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Caplan, S. E. 2003. “Preference for Online Social Interaction: A Theory of Problematic Internet Use and Psychosocial Well-Being.” Communication Research 30: 625–648. Chesler, J. 2014. “Joe Rogan on the Freedom of Stand-Up and Why He’d Choose Comedy over Pretty Much Everything Else.” http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/arts/joe-rogan-on-the-freedom-of-stand-up-and-why-hed-choose-comedy-over-pretty-much-everything-else–6579150. Domo and Crissy. 2016. Reading Hate Comments, June 21. [Video File]. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=QC6GzcVabZM. Downs, G. 2011. “Interview with Comedian Josh Blue.” https://www.sandiego.com/articles/201102-07/interview-comedian-josh. Erjavec, K. 2012. “You don’t Understand, This is a New War: Analysis of Hate Speech in News Websites’ Comments.” Mass Communication and Society 15(6), 527–583. Haridakis, P., and G. Hanson. 2009. “Social Interaction and Co-viewing with YouTube: Blending Mass Communication Reception and Social Connection.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 53 (2): 317–335. Hewitt, J., and G. Vazquez. 2010. Documentary Filmmaking: A Contemporary Field Guide. New York: Oxford University Press. Hill, R. 2003. “The Compassionate Organization in the 21st Century.” Organizational Dynamics 32: 331–341. Hsueh, M., and K. Yogeeswaran. 2015. “Leave Your Comment Below: Can Biased Online Comments Influence Our Own Prejudicial Attitudes and Behaviors ?” Human Communication Research 41(4, 557–576). Jaffe, E. M. 2016. “Swatting: The New Cyberbullying Frontier after Elonis V. United States.” Drake Law Review 64(2): 455–483. Joyce, E., and E. Kraut. 2006. “Predicting Continued Participation in Newsgroups.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11(3): 723–747. Kane, L. 2015. “Louis C. K.: When I First Started Making Tons of Money, it Freaked me Out.” April 14. http://www.businessinsider.com/louis-ck-on-making-money–2015–4. Keith, S., and M. E. Martin. 2005. “Cyber-Bullying: Creating a Culture of Respect in a Cyberworld.” Reclaiming Children and Youth 13(4): 224–228. Kirk, T. J. 2016. “The Amazing Atheist YouTube Channel.” http://www.youtube.com/TheAmazingAthe ist.

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Contributor Matthew McKeague received his PhD in Communications Media from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is an assistant professor at Kutztown University in Cinema, Television & Media Production. His current research focuses on comedy in the media.

Index

Page numbers in bold refer to figures. 20th Century Coyote 125–37; birth of 125–8; breakthrough 128–34; character template 133; The Church Bizarre – a Fete worse than Death show 130; criticism 133; Dead Funny show 130–4; formula 134; impact 133–4, 136–7; improvisation 130; later careers 135–6; members 125, 127–8; performance styles 130; Restoration themes 126–7; roots 126, 129; scene-by-scene template sheet 131–2; show amalgams 130; shows 134; success 134–5 30 Rock (TV show) 332–3 absurdist clowning 346 abusive speech 268–70 accommodation and assimilation, Piaget’s theory of 31 activist laughter 309–11 Adams, Douglas 201 adaptation jokes 331–40; about adaptation 335–6; about adaptations 332–4; as adaptations 336–7; scripts 332; studies 337–40; types 332 adaptation studies, comedy studies as 337–40 Adbusters 368–9 adultchild interaction: Child Directed Speech 18, 18–9, 23–4; and comic performance 18–26; and familiarity 20–1; the here-and-now 22; Incongruity 21–2; language-based humour 22–3; and laughter 18–9; and nonsense 24; repetition 23–4; sense of superiority 25; and smiling 18; surprise 19–20 Agamben, G. 71 agents 155 aggression 215 aging 218–9, 241–2

Akhtar, N. 35 Allen, Keith 124, 125 Allen, Tony 124, 151 Allen, Woody 301 alternative comedy 124–37, 238; 20th Century Coyote 125–37; breakthrough 128–34; character comedians 125; confronting political issues 124; definition 124; performers 124–5; political activism 208; racism 132; sexism 132 amateur comedians 366, 370 ambiguity 339 anacrisis 267 Andrews, R. 57 Angelo, M. 354 Anglo-American Western tradition xvi animation 290 animations, political 372–89; 3D 384–5; characters 379; digital media revolution 372–3; form 373; movement 378–9; music 380; narrative 381; processes 380–9, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385, 386, 387, 388; rhetorical impact 376; script development 385; sound 373, 379–80, 382–3; spatio-temporal spectrum 373; taxonomies 373, 374; techniques 373; temporality 374, 376–8; text-based information 387, 388, 388; use of metaphor 374–6, 375, 376 Ansari, Aziz 358 anticipation and fulfilment, cycle of 55 Apostolidès, J.-M. 44 Arab Spring uprising 274 archiving 140, 143, 143–4, 147, 159–60 Aristocrats, The (film) 166 Aristophanes 51; The Clouds 16; The Frogs 53 Aristotle xiii,xvi, 3, 4, 81

Index Arlecchino: battacchio 50, 52, 55; and Pantalone 49, 52, 53–5, 56–7; physicality 53–4 Armstrong, Frank 91 Armstrong, Louis 193 Arsenio Hall Show, The (TV show) 282 art, definition 186 Arthur, D. 315–6 Asimov, Isaac 33 Askey, Arthur 22 Aston, E. 225 Athenian drama xiv Atkinson, Rowan 25, 51, 202, 203 Attardo, S. 11, 12, 15, 331, 338–9 Attell, Dave 395 Auden, W.H. 25 audience: assumptions 101; emotional experience 117–8; engagement 109, 115–21; faith 108; familiarity with 357; female 96; Music Hall 86–7; participatory 393; physical state of 396; presuppositions 234; reaction xvi, 234; relationship with 115–21, 125, 191–2, 192–3, 236–7; social media 353; visualization of 192 Auslander, P. 63 Austin, J.L. 318–9 authority 319 authorship 41–6 autobiographical comedy 145 automaton theory xiv Babcock, B.A. 60 baby laughter 29–36; Baby Laughter project 32, 33–6; causes 34, 34–5; and clowning around 35; developmental psychology 31–2; and learning 31; literature review 30–1; onset 34 Baby Laughter project 32, 33–6; aims 29, 31, 33; analysis 33–4; and clowning around 35; conclusions 35–6; laughter causes 34–5; laughter onset 34; methods 33; participants 33; preliminary results 34 Baddiel, David 166–7 Bailey, P. 87 Bakhtin, M. xiv, 218, 261–2, 283, 345; and abusive speech 268–70; and carnivalised literature 266–8; and carnival laughter 264–6, 266; and Menippean Satire 267–8, 279n7, 279n8; notion of the carnival 262–8; satire analysis 268–78; and Socratic dialogue 267, 279n6 Bamford, Maria 356, 360, 396 Band on the Wall, Manchester 128–34, 131, 133, 134–5, 135 Banks, M. 102 Barba, E. 140

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Bard, Wilkie 88 Barinholtz, Ike 355, 357 Baron Cohen, Sacha 314–26; accusations against 314–5; agenda 326; Ali G character 316; awards 314; controversy 315; implications of performance 315; influence on Kazakhstan 319–21; intent 321–3, 323–5; interviews 314, 315, 325; negative responses to 316, 317; personas 316; press conference 316–7, 318–9; representation vs. reality 315–7; speech acts 318–9; subversive approach 316; targets 325 Barreca, R. 109 Barr, Ida 91 Barr, Roseanne 214 Barth, Belle 247, 247–50, 252, 255, 256, 257, 258n10 Barthes, R. 41 battacchio 50, 52, 55 bawdy 249 Baym, G. 284, 293 BBC 201, 202, 203, 205, 242 Bean, Mr 25 Beckerman, B. 227, 228, 229, 230 Becker, R. 369 Bell, W. K. 369 Benfield, Mimi 143 benefits 4 Benjamin, W. 41, 77 Bennett, S. 101–2 Benny, Jack 50 Bergen, D. 345 Bergson, H. xiv, 11, 11–2, 14, 23, 108, 116 Berkowitz, D. 366, 367, 368 Bernard, M. 233 Bernstein, R. 342 big scale gigs 167 Birds of a Feather (TV show) 177, 180 Blacher Cohen, S. 248, 252 Blackadder (TV show) 203 Black Americans 191–8 Black and White Minstrel Show (TV show) 93 black comedy 191–8 Black, Michael Ian 367–8 black performers 92 blackface 91, 93 blackness 193 blasphemy 5 blogs and blogging 366–7 Blue, Josh 394 bodily movement 233 Bolt, Joanne 130 Boogie2988 394 Booth-Butterfield, M. 365, 370 Borat : Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

404

Index

(film) 314–26; accusations against 314–5; agenda 326; ambiguity 325–6; awards 314; consequences 315–6; context 321; implications 315; intent 321–3, 323–5; interviews 314, 315, 316, 325; Kazakhstan 319–21, 324; negative responses to 316, 317; press conference 316–7, 318–9; release 314; representation vs. reality 315–7; scripted position 317; speech acts 318–9; targets 325; version of Kazakh identity 320; vulgarity 317 Bottom (TV show) 130, 133 boundaries 178–9 bourgeoisie, the 78 Boyce, Max 152 Braben, Eddie 174 branding 357 Brand, Jo 110, 214, 216, 217 Brand, Russell 118, 119, 123, 207–8 British Music Hall 86–93; audience 86–7; blackface 91, 93; black performers 92; and class 87–90; drag acts 90; further research 93; and gender 90–1; literature review 87; racism 88, 91, 91–3; rags to riches stories 87–9; salaries 88 Brockbank, P. xvii Brooks, Mel 395 Brown, Dan 166 Brown, Gary 135–6 Brown, J. 24–5 Brown, Roy ‘Chubby’ 189 Brown, Scott 357–8, 358, 361 Bruce, F. 22 Bruce, Lenny 247, 251, 252–5, 256, 257, 369–70 Bukowski, C. 306 burlesque 107 Burnham, Bo 358 Burton, R. 5–6 Buzzfeed 327n6 Cabu 273–4 Call the Midwife (TV series) 97 Calman, Susan 183 Cambridge Footlights 127 Cameron, Julia Margaret 199 career paths 392–9; the big break 398–9; hecklers 395–6; honing the craft 396–7; stand-up comedy 392–9; starting off 393–4 caregiver interactions xv Carlin, George 253, 369–70, 394 carnival xiv, 65, 67, 283; Bakhtin’s notion of 262–4; and carnivalised literature 266–8; laughter 264–6, 266; power of 263; suspension of norms 262–3

carnivalised literature 266–8 carnival laughter 264–6, 266 Carpenter, P. 316 Carrey, Jim 51 Carr, Jimmy xvi, 118, 123, 159 Carroll, Elaine 354 Carroll, N. 377–8 Carrott, Jasper 152, 153, 162n4 Carson, Frank xvi, 21 Carson, Johnny 213 Casino Royale (film) 112 CAST 137n6 castration 79–80 catchphrases 22–3, 24, 100 Catherine Tate Show, The (TV show) 100–1 Cattrysse, P. 338–9 celebrity culture 164, 165, 216 celebrity stalkers 188 Cenite, M. 323 censorship 6, 7 Chabham, Thomas de 4 Chakrabarti, Sukanya 63 Channel 4 124, 214 Chaplin, Charlie 50, 51, 87, 208 character comedians 125 character comedy 204 characters 176, 181, 204; familiarity 20; the miser 41–6 Charbonnier, Stéphane 276 Charlie Hebdo (magazine): firebomb attack 275, 276; issue 1178 277–8; massacre 261, 273–4, 276, 277, 278; Prophet Muhammad cartoons 261, 271–8 Chase, Chevy 289–90 Cheshire, D. F. 87 Chesterfield, Lord 301–2 Chevron, ‘We Agree’ campaign 309–11 Child Directed Speech xv, 18, 18–9, 23–4 children: absurdist clowning 346; cellular phone ownership 344, 345; culture creation 342; and digital technologies 342–3; disenfranchisement 342; humor 345–50; internet users 343; literature criticism 342; observational comedy 347–8; parody 347; and social media 342–50 chimpanzees 30 Chion, M. 379 Chippington, Ted 165 Chirgwin the White Eyed Kaffir 88 Chitlin Circuit, the 192 Cho, Margaret 107, 358 Chow, K. K. N. 377 Chung, J. 369 Cibber, Colly 7 citationality 319–20

Index Clarke, Matthew 366 Clark, K. 266 Clary, Julian 125 class 93, 207; and Music Hall 87–90; and women 97–8 class divide, the 185–6 class struggle 55, 77–84; English Revolution 78; and materialism 77–81; the power of jokes 78–9; power of the proletariat 81–4 claustrophobia 63 Clayton, A. 51 Cleese, John 203 Clemente, P. 354, 355 Cleveland, Carol 202 Clinton, Bill 282 clowns and clown ethnography 59–72; comparison with philosophers 60; as eccentrics 63–5; ethical dimension 60; as idiots 61–3; ineptitude 59–61; performance of failure 59–61; playfulness 70–1; as rabble-rousers 65–70; rule breaking 70–1; terrain 60; as tricksters 70–2 clown phobia 20 Cocteau, Jean 200–1 Cofilmic Festival, Manchester 179 cognitive dissonance xiv–xv cognitive respite 22 Cohen, J. 253, 253–4 Cohen, T. 116 Colbert Report, The (TV show) 282–3, 283–4, 284–5, 285–6, 295 Colbert, Stephen 282–3, 283–4, 285, 286, 287, 293, 294, 327n5 collaboration 177 collective effervescence 144 Collier, J. 6 comedy: conceptions of xii–xiv, xvii; definition xii, 191; early associations xiii; origins xiv; revolutionary power 81–4; and tragedy 81–4 comedy map, explosion in 166–7 Comedy Map (TV series) 128 comedy of manners 14, 16 comedyscape, gender-imbalance 213–7 Comedy Store, The 135 comedy studies xii, xvii–xix; as adaptation studies 337–40 Comedy Studies (journal) xviii, xix–xx, xxii; special issues xx comic body: definition 107; female 107–12 comic characters: familiarity 20; the miser 41–6 comic language 83 comic performance: adultchild interaction in 18–26; and familiarity 20–1;

405

the here-and-now 22; Incongruity 21–2; language-based humour 22–3; and nonsense 24; origins of 18–26; repetition 23–4; sense of superiority 25; surprise 19–20 comic stimulus, the 13 Comic Strip, The 124, 135, 153 comic tension 111 comic violence 55, 56–7, 57 Commedia dell’Arte 49, 50, 55, 126; central double act 53–5; characters 51–2; key features 52; masks 51–2; Pantalone and Arlecchino 52, 53–5, 56–7; scenario 52; slapstick 51–5; techniques 52 commissioning 205 Community (TV show) 340 comparability 100, 101, 102 conflict, and slapstick 49–57 Connolly, Billy 152, 153, 168 connotation 225 consistency 100 Constanduros, Mabel 97, 102; Emily 98–9 constructive satire 270 context: inefficacies of 319; iterability 325 coping mechanisms 4 Corbett, Ronnie 173 Corbett, S. 360 Cortsen, R. 373 Cosby, Bill 192, 195 Coser, R. 116 costs 358 Côte, Olivia 111–2 Cotham, Frank 331, 337 coulrophobia. 20 Cracked.com 336–7 Cracker John 5 Cramlington 152 Crawford, Michael 51 creative flow 143 creativity 142, 182, 197, 339 Crinklaw, Morgan 311 Critchley, S. 83, 110, 110–1, 125, 302, 306 critical thinking xvi, xxii criticism 77 cross-dressing 90 Crossfire (TV show) 288 Cryer, Barry 171–5; on laughter 175; move into writing 173–4; stand-up 174–5; at the Windmill Theatre 172–3; work with Morecambe and Wise 174; on young guns 175 Cubitt, S. 377, 378, 379 cultural constructions, subverting 112 culture jamming 368–9, 370 Cunliffe, Whit 88

406

Index

Cunningham, J. 345 Currie, G. 378 Curtis, Richard 203 Cusick, Frank 128 custard-pie comedies 56 cyberbullying 348–9 Czechoslovakia 8 Da Ali G Show (TV show) 315 Dahl, Roald 345 Daily Show, The (TV show) 282–3, 285, 285–6, 287, 291–3, 295, 369 Dangerous Brothers, The 125, 136–7 Darwin, C. xiii–xiv, 19, 25, 31, 35 Davenport, W. A. 78–9 Davidson, Jim 189 Davis, Sammy, Junior 188 Davis, T. 96, 101 Dawson, Les 189 death 83–4 deception 21, 323 deconstruction 60 deculturation 15 Def Comedy Jam era 195 degree courses xviii–xix dehumanization 304–6 Delaney, Rob 355–6, 368 Denmark 272 Dennis, Les 188–91 Denzin, N. 209 depression 5–6 Derrida, J. 60, 140, 144, 209, 319, 319–20, 321, 322, 323, 324 destructive satire 270 Detenber, B. H. 377 Deuteronomy 4 Deuze, M. 367 developmental psychology: Baby Laughter project 29–36; and infant laughter 31–2 Dewison, Mark 125, 127, 130, 136 dialogic, the 266–7 différance 322 Diggers 77 digital media revolution 372–3 Di Liddo, A. 373 Dilthey, W. 12 Dionysus 82 directors 200 dirtiness 247–8, 252–5, 257 dirty jokes 219 Dirty Sexy Funny (TV show) 112 disabled, the 394 discursive integration: beyond the studio 293–4; effectiveness 287–8; explanatory power 294–5; influence 286; political satire 282–94; role of 286–7,

288; Stewart/Colbert factor 291–3; terminology 285–6; theoretical approaches 283–5 disequilibrium 339–40 disguise 16 Disher, M. Willson 87 disruption 100, 101 dissent 8 documentary photographs 63 documentation: archiving 140, 143, 143–4, 147; further documentation 142–3; hermeneutics 146–7, 147; initial documentation 141–2; and memory 144–6; mnemonics 145, 145–6, 147; ritual 144, 145; in stand-up comedy 140–7 Dodd, Ken 117, 123, 175 Domo and Crissy 395 Donaldson, Bryan 354–5 Don Quixote 13–4 Dorothy, Anna 90 double act: importance of 53–5, 57; popularity 53 Double, O. xvi, 115, 152 Douglas, M. 209 Dowd, M. 292, 294 drag 202 drag acts 90 Drake, Nick 167 dramatic irony 16 Duffy, B. 365–6 Dunbar, R.M. 116 Durkheim, E. 144 Dürrenmatt, F. xiv,xvi DVDs, stand-up comedy 158–60, 162 Eagleton, T. 78, 84 eccentrics, clowns as 63–5 Eclair, Jenny 214, 217 Eco, Umberto xvii, xxii, 224 Edinburgh Festival 157, 180, 181, 186, 187, 189 Edmondson, Ade 125, 126, 127–8, 130, 135, 136 educative force 3, 4 Elam, K. 233 Elliot, George 91–2 Elliott, Josh 347 Elton, Ben 203 emotion 108, 115–21, 186, 349; and humour 115; literature review 116; manipulation 165–6; phenomenology 116–7; and relationship with audience 115–21; states 115 emotional experience 117–8 emotional need 119 empathy 119

Index engagement 186, 208; audience 109; rules of xv; successful xvi English Revolution, the 78 Epictetus the Stoic 3–4 Equity (union) 8, 129 Erasmus 4 Establishment Club 127 ethical dimension 60, 323–5 ethnography, clowns 59–72 Evanthius 4 exaggeration 56 expectations, defeating 167 Extras (TV show) 189 Facebook 357, 361 facial expressions 19 failure 201; performance of 59 faith 108 fake news 285 familial relationships, breakdown of 42 Farley, C. 359, 361 fatherhood 186–7 Fazzari, Rocco 374, 376, 379, 381–2; Julia and Obama: True Love 374–5, 376; Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott’s Horror Run, 8 Jun 2012. 382, 382, 383 fear, revelation of 99 Feast of Fools 262, 263 Feast of the Asses 262, 263 feature films 179–80 feedback 396 Feig, Paul 357–8 Felman, S. 325–6 female comedians 93; cross-dressing 90; Music Hall 90–1 female comic body 107–12; definition 107, 108–10; sexy 107, 108, 108–10, 111–2; the unruly woman 110–1 female experience 98–101 female identity 95 female sexuality, and Jewish comedy 251–2 feminist humour 110 Ferrell, Will 366 festivals 262, 263 Fey, Tina 108, 290 FHM (magazine) 214 Fielding, H. xiii Fields, W. C. 50 Fifty Shades of Grey (film) 335–6 film slapstick 50, 51 finitude 83 Fiore, Mark 372 Fisher, J. xviii flatulence 14 Fleming, Marjorie 24–5 folk humour 262–8

407

Ford, S. 352 forgetting history 101–2 Formby, George 88–9, 91 Forunati, L. 367 Foster, Glen 143 Foucault, M. 209 Fox, Kate 207–9 Foxx, Redd 192 France 272 François-Cerrah, M. 277 freedom 265–6 freedom of speech 257, 273, 275 French and Saunders 125 French and Saunders (TV show) 95, 124, 133 French, Dawn 125, 214 Freud, S. xii–xiii, 23, 30, 110, 241, 300, 302, 305, 338 Frost, David 173 Frost Report (TV show) 173 functional equivalence 41, 43 Funny Women 102 Gadamer, H. G. 146 Ganthony, Robert 92 Garrick, David 7 Garth Marenghi (TV show) 177 gatekeepers 358 Geertz, C. 60 gender and sexuality: Joan Rivers’ use of 213–21; and Music Hall 90–1; performance of 108; reinforcement of traditional notions 217–20 gender construction 101 gender imbalance 213–7 gender politics 304–6 General Theory of Verbal Humo(u)r 11, 12, 338–9 George, Nelson 196 Germany 7 Gervais, Ricky 177, 189 gestures, abusive 269–70 Glenister, Philip 136 Goatly, A. 331, 337, 338, 339 Goebbels, Joseph 7 Golden Girls, The (TV show) 217 Goldonim Carlo 51 Goldsmith, O. 6–7 Gombrich, E. 377 Goolsbee, Austan 282 Gordon, M. 52, 53, 55 Grade, Michael 203 Grange, W. 7 Gray, F. 102, 214, 216, 220, 226, 238 Gray, J. 286 Great Dictator, The (film) 208 Great Gatsby, The (film) 333–4

408

Index

Green, J. 352 Greenpeace 309 Greenstein, Scott 354 Greeves, L. xvi Grenfell, Joyce 97, 102 Grey, R. H. 88 Grier, Nash 347–8 Griffiths, T. 115 gross-out humour 241–2 grotesque 64, 218, 345 Gruner, C. R. 49 Guardian, The (newspaper) 95 Gubar, M. 342 Hall, Rich 182, 226 Hall, S. xviii Hamlet (Shakespeare) 16; Claudius’s fratricide 83; gravedigger scene 77–84; and materialism 77–81; the skull 80, 81, 83–4; wordplay 80–1, 82, 83 Handelsman, Walt 372 Hanley, Phil 359 Hanson, Charlie 176–80 Hanswurst 7 Hardee, Malcolm 124 Hardwick, Chris 357 Hardy, Oliver 25 Harker, J. 277–8 Harris, Robin 195 Hart, Miranda 95, 97 Hay, Will 93 hecklers and heckling 304–6, 395–6 Hedberg, Mitch 143 Heggessey, Lorraine 204–5 Hegley, John 124, 125 Hemmingson, M. 209 Henry, Lenny 153, 176–7 HE providers xviii–xix here-and-now, the 22 hermeneutics 146–7, 147 Herring, Richard 177 heteroglossia 284 Hicks, Bill 394 hidden transcripts 66–7 hierarchies, undermining 3 Hill, C. 78 Hill, Fred 87, 88 Hill, Harry 177 Hill, Jenny 101 hindsight basis, the 25 HIPPO 204 Hirsch, Caroline 355 Hitchens, C. 102, 108, 214, 219, 256 hoaxes 310–1 Hobbes, T. xiii, 16n11, 116, 239 Hobshawn, E. xviii

Hoggart, R. xviii Höher, D. 87 Hoicka, E. 35 Holbert, L. R. 288 Holmes, Mini 143 Holquist, M. 266, 268 homophily 360 homophobia 202 Honan, M. 345 honesty 218–9 Horowitz, S. 214, 216, 238 horrible gigs, experience of 155–7 Howard, Russell 118 Howitt, D. 317 Hoxworth, Kellen 63, 63–4 Hudd, R. xiii Humber College, Toronto xviii humiliation 304–5 Humitas 209 humour xiv, xv; children’s 345–50; and emotion 115; explosion of 302–3; and laughter 302, 302–3; and memory 144–6; potential 311; role of 303 humour studies xv humour theory 11–6; incongruity theory 237, 239–41, 243; and Joan Rivers 236–43; relief theory 237, 241–2, 243; superiority theory 237, 237–9, 243 Hurley, M. M. 30 Hurst, Alberta 93 Husserl, E. 117 Hutcheon, L. 338 Hypolite, K. 367 identification 119 identity 16, 226, 226–7, 229–30; female 95; Jewish 247, 255, 256, 257; social 13 idiots, clowns as 61–3 idolatry 4 Iglesias, Gabriel 356 ignorance 199–200 immaterial-versus-immaterial disjunction 15 impressionists 188 improvisation 64–5, 130, 151, 160, 168 inclusivity 186 Incongruity xii, xiii, xvi, 14, 21–2, 23, 26, 216, 284, 331 Incongruity principle, the xiv incongruity theory 237, 239–41, 243 Independent, The (newspaper) 95 indexing 143 ineptitude 59–61 inequality 361 infant laughter 29–36; literature review 30–1 information sharing 370 infotainment 285, 307

Index injury laugh, the 49 insults 5 intellectuals 195 intent: and language 319, 321–3; moral 261; problem of 321–3 satire 275, 287, 261; serious 323–5; transvestite comedy 4 internet irreverence 63–5 internet, the 291, 303, 306–9, 343, 353–4, 361–2, 372 Iron Man (film) 334 iterability 319–20, 324–5, 325 ITMA (radio comedy) 24 Izzard, Eddie 158, 168 Jacobsen, Abbi 354 Jahanmir, Yassi 63, 63–4 Jeancolas, J.-P. 20 Jenkins, H. 77, 78, 352 Jerry Springer-The Opera 164 jesters 288–9 Jewish comedy: dirtiness 247–8, 252–5, 257; and female sexuality 251–2; obscenity in 247–57; taboo-breaking 249, 250–1, 254 Jewishness and Jewish identity 247, 255, 256, 257 Johns, Dave 154 Johnson, S. 6 Johnston, D., L’Avare/The Miser translation 41, 45–6 jokes: about adaptation 335–6; about adaptations 332–4; adaptation 331–40; as adaptations 336–7; adaptation studies 337–40; aftershock 253; incongruity theory 240–1; Knowledge Resources 338–9; patterns 337; reflective nature of 308; regretted 194; relationship with audience 116; representational model 12; revolutionary power 78–9; rules OK 337; scripts 332; self-deprecation 215–7; structure xvi; subversive function 3, 8; superiority theory 238–9; truth 8 Jones, Griff Reece 202 Jones, K. 209 Joyce, P. 97 Julius, Harry 379, 380, 387–9, 387, 388 Jung, C. G. 13 Junkin, John 174 Juzwiak, R. 346 Jyllands-Posten (Newspaper) 271–2, 275; Prophet Muhammad cartoons 261 Kafkaesque 167 Kafka, F. 300 Kaling, Mindy 355, 356 Kane, Russell 185–7

409

Kelly, Fanny 97; Sally Simkin 98, 99, 100, 101 Kendal, Alec 86, 91 Khorsandi, Shappi 120, 123, 214 Kierkegaard, S. 21 Kilborn, Craig 291 King, B. 59, 241–2 King Kong (film) 165 Kirkman, Jen 354 Kirk, TJ 394, 397, 399 Kitson, Daniele 182 Knowledge Resources 338–9 Know Your Meme 307 Koppel, Ted 292 Kowzan 224, 227, 227–8, 234, 235 Kristoff, N. 367 Kudelka, J. 376–7, 379, 380, 380–1; Expert Makeover 381, 381 Kuhl, P. K. 25 Kuipers, G. 116, 272 Kundera, Milan 8 Lacan, J. 79, 82–3 Lahr, Bert 50 Laing, R.D. 115 Lalo, A. 324 La Machine Infernal (Cocteau) 200–1 Langer, S. xiv Langham, Chris 202 language: abusive 268–70; comic 83; driving forces 339; and intent 319, 321–3; iterability 324–5; non-serious use of 317; speech acts 318–9 language-based humour 22–3 language play 22–3 La Rue, Danny 173 Last Comic Standing (TV show) 394 late-night comedy 290 Late Show, The (TV show) 283 laughter 300–12; activist 309–11; addictive 175; and adultchild interaction 18–9; ambiguous 265; anti-erotic 109; baby 29–36; bursts of 301, 311–2; carnival 264–6, 266; cathartic effects xiii; as coping mechanism 4; cue xiii–xiv; developmental psychology 31–2; effect on the brain 116; and freedom 265–6; and humour 302, 302–3; Incongruity as trigger 21, 23; light seriousness 301; and madness 5–6; as medicine 118; and men’s inability to maintain erections 109; models 116; moderation in 5–6; negative 273; neuroscience of 120; notions of 302; origins of 30; physiological responses 301; Plato and 3; scorning 302; and self-reflexivity 302; sense of relief 21–2;

410

Index

significance of 11–2; subversive function 3–4; surprise as trigger for 19–20; as tension-discharge 32; trivial 306–9; uncomfortable 109, 303–6; (un)serious 300 Laurel and Hardy 50, 53, 130 Laurel, Stan 55–6 Lawrence, Martin 195 League of Gentlemen, The (TV show) 133–4, 134, 137 learning, and baby laughter 31 Lear, Norman 290 Lederer, Helen 136 Lee, Olivia 111, 112 Lee, Stewart 164–9, 177; annoyance of being told what to think 165–6; and challenge 167; on Dan Brown 166; early influences 165; ethos 169; and expectations 167; Glasgow show 168; improvisation 168; on role of the comedy performer 168–9; unsettling approach 167–8 legalities 179 Leguizamo, John 356–7, 360–1, 361 Lenhart, A. 343, 344 Lepore, Meredith 361 Letine, Albert 90 Levellers 77 Levi-Strauss, C. 60 Lewis, P. 303 libel 179 light seriousness 301 likeness 101, 102 Lime Cottage, Manchester 127 linguistic development 22 literature, carnivalised 266–8 Little Britain (TV show) 136 liveness 237 Lives of Others, The (film) 8 live theatre 136–7 Livius Andronicus 4 Lloyd, John 199–205 Lloyd, Marie 88, 93 Lockyer, S. 315, 320 London Evening Standard 320–1 Long, Josie 207 Louis C.K. 109, 300, 301, 303–6, 311, 358, 399 Love, Teddy 59–72 low humour 14 Lunacharsky, A. 279n9 Luzier, Rénald 274–5, 276, 277–8, 278 McCarey, L. 55, 56 McCarthy, Melissa 110 McCormack, B. 60

McGhee, P. 30 McGillis, R. 345 McGowan, Alastair 178 McHugh, Shaun 123 McIntyre, Michael 165 McKay, Adam 366 McLean, A. M. 44 McManus, D. 70 Madden, M. 343, 344 madness, and laughter 5–6 Magill, R. J. 306 Maher, B. 325 Major, Lillian 90–1 male/female axis 183 Manchester University 127; alumni 137n2 Mandelstam, Osip 7–8 Mander, R. 87 Mankind (morality play) 78–9 Manning, Bernard 189 Markham, Pigmeat 192 Marteinson, P. 339–40 Martinez, Ursula 110, 112 Martin, R. A. 301 Martin, Steve 332, 333 Marx brothers, the 50 Marx, Harpo 82–3 Marx, K. 78 Marx, N. 369 masculinity 219 masks 51–2 material: testing 180; writing and development 141–3 materialism 77–81 Matthews, S. 355, 356 Mayall, Rik 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 133, 135, 136, 137n5 Mayne, Marissa 348–9 meaning making xvi mechanical comic fantasy 57 mechanical inelasticity theory xiv Medhurst, A. 08, 96, 100–1, 102 Media Take Out (website) 191 melancholy 5–6 Mellor, G. J. 87 Meltzoff, A. N. 25 meme culture 306–9 memento mori 80 memory, and humour 144–6 Men Behaving Badly (TV show) 136 men, erections and laughter 109 Menippean satire 267–8, 279n7 Merchant, Stephen 177 mercy laugh, the 119 Michaels, Lorne 289, 290 Mikes, G. xv Miles, T. 108

Index Miller, Max 7 Mills, B. 24 Minar, E. L. 43 Miranda (TV show) 97 Mireault, G. 32 Mirman, Eugene 395 mirror neurons 23 miser character, translation and transformation 41–6 Mitchell, Kate 61 Mitchenson, J. 87 mnemonics 145, 145–6, 147 mockumentary 314–26; agenda 326; ambiguity 325–6; and context 321; ethical dimension 323–5; intent 321–3, 323–5; interviews 314, 315, 316; representation vs. reality 315–7 moderation 5–6 Molière: audience 44; Bourgeois Gentilhomme 16; L’Avare/The Miser 41–6, 47n4 Monkhouse, Bob 175 Montgomery, K. C. 349 Monty Python 202 moral intent 4, 261 Morecambe and Wise 95, 174 Morecambe, Eric xvii Morgan, Tommy 22 Morozov, E. 353–4 Morreall, J. xiii, 20, 108, 109, 115–6, 237, 262, 263 Morris, Steve 128 Morris, Will 92–3 Mortimer, Bob 125 Mosher, M. R. 346, 349 mother and infant interactions 30 Muhammad, the Prophet: Charlie Hebdo cartoons 261, 271–8; Jyllands-Posten cartoons 261, 271–2 Murphy, Eddie 192 Music Hall Commissioner 86–7, 87, 91, 92 Myanmar 8 Mylonia, Stefania 62–3 Nabila 277 narrative, personal 116 National Film and Television School xviii–xix natural sciences 11 Naughton, John 354 naughty girls 249 Nazi Germany 7 Neill, A.S. 23 Nerdist Industries 357 neuroscience, of laughter 120 Newcastle upon Tyne 152, 162 new-laddism comedy 136

411

Newman, Bob 166–7 New Manchester Review 128–9 new material 181–2 new media features, and stand-up comedy 365–70 New Yorker 331, 337 Nicholson, Peter 376, 379, 380, 384–5, 386 Nietzsche, F. 82 Nilsen, A. P. and Nilsen, D. L. F. 214, 216 Nixon, David 171–2 Nixon, Richard 282 Noah, Trevor 283 Noble, Ross 151–62, 175; archiving 159–60; breakthrough into touring theatre circuit 157–8; on comedy 161–2; conversational style 152; DVDs 158–60, 162; early career 152, 153–7, 162; early influences 152–3; experience of horrible gigs 155–6; improvisational approach 163n13; move to London 155; Muffins routine 160; Perrier nomination 157; prep work 160–1; shows 151; spontaneity 151; touring 160–1 nonsense 24–5 Northbrooke, J. 5 North, M. 63 Notaro, Tig 109 Not Going Out (TV show) 178 Not the Nine O’Clock News (TV show) 202–3 Nussbaum, E. 305 Nyan Cat 307–9, 311 Obama, Barack 197, 282 Oblivion Boys, The 125 O’Brien, Conan 357 obscenity: definition 257–8n1; interpretation 253–4; in Jewish comedy 247–57; women 247–52 observational comedy, children 347–8 observer-ness 207 oddness xiii Oedipus 79 offense 238, 315, 321, 323–4 Office, The (TV show) 177, 325 Old Rope comedy club 181, 182 Oliver, Ingrid 95, 102 Onion News Network 334, 335 online cultural activities 308 only joking 317 onomatopoeia 22 O’Reilly Factor, The (TV show) 285 O’Shea, Marina 118, 123 ostension 225 Oswalt, P. 352, 353, 360 Other, the 79

412

Index

O’Toole, Emer 64–5 Owusu-Bempah, K. 317 pace 160–1 pain 52, 53 Palmer, J. 116, 219, 239 Palmer, M. 128 panel shows 164, 180 Pantalone: and Arlecchino 49, 52, 53–5, 56–7; physicality 53–4 parody 285, 347 Parvulescu, A. 301, 312 Pascal, B. 4 Paulsen, Patrick 289, 293–4 Pavis, P. 228, 230–4, 234–5 Pearl, Steven 144 Peretti, Chelsea 358 performance: analysis 227–34; polysemics 227–8; rules of engagement xv; semiotic analysis 224–35; stand-up comedy 144–5 performance ethnographers 209 performative doing xvi performative essence xii performativity 318 performers: classification 4; moral position 4; role of 168–9 personal effervescence 144 personal narrative 116 personal troubles 189 Peters, Lloyd 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 134, 135, 135–6, 136 Petty, Bruce 374, 376, 380, 383–4, 384; Human Contraptions 374, 375, 385 PewDiePie 399 phenomenology 115, 116–7 Phillips, M. 321–3 Phillips, W. 308 philosophy 3–8, 11 physical comedy 26; see also slapstick physicality 53–4 Piaget, J. 26, 31 Pickering, K. 49 Pickering, M. 315, 320 Pitt, Dave 119, 123 Plato xiii, xvii, 3, 12, 115, 146, 267 plausibility 217 Plautus: Aulularia/The Pot of Gold 41–6, 46–7n3 play xiv–xv, 70–1, 266 playfulness 70–1 pleasure 237, 242–3 poetry, stand-up 207–9 political activism 207–8, 309–11 political correctness 202, 238 political satire: see satire and political satire political subject-matter 124, 194

polyphonic voice 284 polysemics 227–8 Ponche, K. 374 Pop Tart Cat 307–9, 311 populism 208 pornography tropes 111 postmodernism 208 post-truth society 208 Powers, Lillian 345–7 pranking 309–11 Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire (film) 332–3, 334 Prensky, M. 343 presentation 227 presuppositions 234 Priestley, J.B 20 priming theory 339 principles xii–xiv problems xiv–xvi producer oriented approach 365 producers 176–80, 199–205; job description 200 proletariat, the 81–4 promotion 357–8 Propp, Vladimir 15 prosumers 365–7, 370 Provenza, Paul 166, 359, 360 Provine, R. 30, 115 provocation 305–6 Prynne, W. 6 Pryor, Richard 192, 198, 369–70 pseudo-intellectual comedy 186 psychology 44 punk 129, 133 puns, translation 46n2 QI (TV show) 180, 204, 204–5 Quayle, Anna 173 rabble-rousers, clowns as 65–70 race, handling of 195–6 racism 88–9, 91, 91–3, 93, 132, 192, 193, 194, 198, 202 radical ambivalence 306 radio 201 Radio Parade of 1935 (film) 93 raideur 14 Rainforest Action Network 309 Randolph the Remarkable 125 Raskin, V. 11, 12, 15, 239, 331, 338–9 Read, A. 71 reality 321–3, 324; and representation 315–7 Reason, M. 117 rebellion 55, 56 receiver-oriented approach 365 Reddy, V. 30, 35

Index Redfern, Mike 125, 127, 128, 130, 136 Red Letter (magazine) 86, 86–7; and class 87–90; and gender 90–1; racism 92; rags to riches stories 87–9 Reeves, Vic 125 reflections xvi–xvii reflexivity xvii rehearsing 181–2 Reid, Beryl 101, 102 Reith, John 205 Release xii–xiii, xiv relief theory 237, 241–2, 243 religion 197, 221 Religulous 325 repetition 23–4 representation, and reality 315–7 Restoration comedy 6, 126–7 retribution 56 revolutionary power 81–4, 84 revolution, satire as 268 Rhymer, Dylan 144 Richardson, Peter 124 rigidity 14 Ritchie, C. xix–xx, 239 Rivers, Joan 182, 247; accent 234; aggression 215; Angelina Jolie routine 232–4, 235; appearance 226; audience interaction 236–7; audience reaction 234; bodily movement 233; career 215; childhood experiences 215; coffee enema 240–1; comedic contradictions 220; comic scorn 238; complexity 220; connotation 225; death 257; definition of sexuality 218; and dominant notions of gender and sexuality 217–20; dress 220; on funny women 107; honesty 218–9; humour theory analysis 236–43; identity 226, 226–7, 229–30; incongruity theory 239–41, 243; Jewishness 221, 226, 229–30, 256, 257; Live at the Apollo (2007) 213, 215–21, 234, 236–43; and masculine discourse 214–5; on older women 218–9; ostension 225; performance analysis 227–34; performance dynamics 215; relationship with audience 236–7; relief theory 241–2, 243; and religion 221; self-deprecation 215–7, 255–7; self-perception 216; semiotic analysis 224–35; sexual relationships 215; sociocultural analyses 213–21; success 214; superiority theory 238–9, 243; transgression 219; use of gender and sexuality 213–21 Roach, Hal 26 Robey, George 88 Rock, Chris 191–8, 358, 369 Rogan, Joe 393–4, 397, 399 Rosano, M. 145

413

Rose, F. 271 Rose, J. 342 Ross, Rick 194 Rothbart, M. K. 32 Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (TV show) 282, 286, 289 Rowe, K. 110 Royle Family, The (TV show) 08, 101 Rudlin, J. 54 rule breaking 70–1 rules of engagement xv rules OK jokes 337 Rushkoff, D. 366–7 Russell, D. 108 Sachs, Hans 7 sacrifice 71 St. Trinians films 97 Salford, University of xviii Salinger, J. D., The Catcher in the Rye 302 salvation 79 Samson, Dave 310–1 Sanders, A. 128–9 satire and political satire 126; and abusive speech 268–70; American 282–94; analytical framework 270; animation 290; Bakhtinian analysis 268–78; and Bakhtin’s notion of carnival 262–8; beyond the studio 293–4; and carnivalised literature 266–8; and carnival laughter 264–6; Charlie Hebdo cartoons 261, 271–8; complexity 261; constructive 270; critical strategies 284; and democracy 288; destructive 270; discursive integration 282–94; effectiveness 287–8; goal 288; inclusive 273, 276, 278; incongruity 284; influence 286; intent 261, 275, 287; late-night comedy 290; Menippean 267–8; moral intent 261; negative 265; philosophical depth 274; as a political tool 309; power of 261; pranking 309–11; as revolution 268; role of 286–7, 288; Saturday Night Live (TV show) 286, 289, 289–90; spectrum of 286; Stewart/Colbert factor 291–3; subversive power 268; targets 271–2; television news era 290–1; terminology 285–6 Saturday Live (TV show) 124 Saturday Night Live (TV show) 286, 289, 289–90, 335–6, 369, 395 Saturnalia 262, 263, 265 Saunders, R. A. 315, 317 Saussure, Ferdinand de 322–3 Savona, G. 225 Saxton, M. 30–1, 35 Sayle, Alexei 124, 133, 173 scenario 52

414

Index

Schadenfreude 30 Schopenhauer, A. xvii, 12–3, 14–5, 21 Schumer, Amy 369 Scotland 23 Scott, Maidie 91 Scott, S. 120 Scott, Sir Walter 24–5 Searle, J. 319 self-analysis 43 self-deprecation 107, 215–6, 253, 255–7 self-documentation: archiving 140, 143, 143–4, 147; further documentation 142–3; hermeneutics 146–7, 147; initial documentation 141–2; and memory 144–6; mnemonics 145, 145–6, 147; ritual 144, 145; in stand-up comedy 140–7 self-image 13–4 self-reflection 60, 302 Sellers, Peter 16 Semantic Script Theory of Humour 12 semiotics 224–35, 322–3; and identity 226–7, 229–30; limitations 235; performance analysis 227–34; vocabulary 224–6 Serazio, M. 365, 368–9 seriousness 326 sexiness 111; unfunniness of 108–10 sexism 132 sexuality-themed humour 110 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet 16, 77–84; Love’s Labour’s Lost 14 shared experiences 360 Sharpe, R. 115 Shawcroft, Lyn 143 Shifman, L. 308 shit, throwing 268–70 Show Me The Funny (TV talent competition) 182–3 Shultz, T. R. 31, 31–2 Sienkiewicz, M. 369 signification 322–3 Silverman, Sarah 247, 255–7, 366 Simpsons, The (TV show) 290 sit coms 204 skills, stand-up comedy 120 Skinner, Frank 168, 177 skulls 80, 81, 82, 83–4 slapstick 3, 26; central double act 53–5, 57; climactic battles 50; Commedia dell’Arte 51–5; and conflict 49–57; definition 49–51, 57; film 50, 51; origin of term 50; Pantalone and Arlecchino 49; parody of violence 49; physicality 53–4; purpose of 55–7; and status 54, 55, 57; tradition 51; ubiquity 51 Slate, Jenny 358

smiling 18 Smith, Mel 202 Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The (TV show) 289, 293–4 social aspects 30 social-class rebellion 55 social comment 57 social correction 126 social critique 255, 256 social egalitarianism 262 social hypocrisy 252 social identity 13 social inequality 361 social justice 309–11, 312 social learning 145 social media 352–62, 367–8; account management 357–8; affordability 358; approaches to 356–8; audiences 353; brevity of interactions 359; business model 355; celebrities 344; and children 342–50; comedians and 354–6; competition 394; creative content 355; development 353–6; economics 348; equitable participation 393; hecklers 395–6; illusion of democracy 361; impact 359–60; as industry imperative 356–8; interactivity 393; leveraging 368; Positive coverage 358; quality 355; research questions 352–3; the Rob Delaney effect 355–6; role of 352; shelf life 397; uses 356–8; vlogging 392–9 social mobility 185–6, 249 social status 3 social value 242–3 Socrates 12 Socratic dialogue 267, 279n6 soft news 285 Soren, Emma 358 Sound of Laughter Project xviii Speckman, K. 374 speech acts 318–9 Spitting Image (TV show) 204, 205 spontaneity 151, 168 spreadability 352 Springstien, Anvil 152 Sroufe, L. A. 32 stage writing 142 Stalin, Josef 7–8 stand-up xvi stand-up comedy: archiving 140, 143, 143–4; the big break 398–9; career paths 392–9; Cryer on 174–5; culture jamming 368–9, 370; DVDs 158–60, 162; emotional experience 117–8; ephemeral element 140; gear-switching capacity 186; gender imbalance 214; Hanson on 179; hecklers 395–6;

Index hermeneutics 146–7, 147; honing the craft 396; humour theory analysis 236–43; and identity 226, 226–7, 229–30; male dominance 213, 213–5; and memory 144–6; and new media features 365–70; origins of 365; performance 144–5; performance analysis 227–34; phenomenology 116–7; political activism 207–8; prosumers 365–7, 370; rehearsing 181–2; relationship with audience 115–21, 236–7; ritual 144, 145; Rock on 191; self-documentation in 140–7; semiotic analysis 224–35; skills 120; spontaneity 151; starting off in 393–4; transmedia 367–8, 370; validation 119; and vlogging 392–9; women 181–3, 213; writing sessions 142–3; see also Rivers, Joan stand-up poetry 207–9 Starr, Freddie 188 States, B. O. 116 status 54, 55, 57 Staveacre, T. 49 Stein, J. 323–4, 324 Stephen Joseph Studio, Manchester 127 Stephenson, Pamela 202 stereotypes 320 Stern, Rebecca 360 Stevenson, Tiffany 181–3 Stewart, Jon 282, 282–3, 284, 285, 288, 291–3, 294, 369 Stocking, S. H. 216 stock themes 46 stories, reworking 41–6 Stott, A. 50, 51, 107, 110 stottin rhymes 23 striptease 107 subversive function 3–8, 268 subvertisements 369 success, definition of 399 suffering 3 Sullivan, Liam Kyle 366 super-communicative agreement xv superiority xii, xiii, 26; sense of 25 superiority theory xiii, 116, 237, 237–9, 243 surprise 19–20 Sutcliffe, T. 95 Sutton-Smith, B. 70 Swift, A. 102 Sykes, Wanda 355 syncrisis 267 taboo-breaking 241–2, 249, 250–1, 254 Talbot, R. 59 targets 271-272, 325 Tarpley, T. 344

415

Tate, Catherine 95, 97, 110; Nan 100–1 technological innovations 304, 353; see also social media technology, clowns and 63–5 television news 290–1 tension-discharge 32 Tertullian 4 theatre, educative force 4 theatrical photographs 63 themes: reworking 41–6; stock 45–6 theoretical approach 12 This is Spinal Tap (film) 325 Thomas, Mark 207 Thomas, Richard 164 Thompson, Bobby 188 Thomson, P. J. 306 Tignous 278 Till Death Do Us Part (TV comedy) 92 Tilroe, A. 302 Time magazine 214 Time Out (magazine) 101 The Times 320–1 timing 120 Toffler, A. 365 Tonight Show, The (TV show) 285 Torchin, L. 325 Totally Biased (TV show) 369 To the Manor Born (TV show) 201 touring 160–1 Toylan, G. 133 tradition, living 46 tragedy, and comedy 81–4 transgression 219 translation 41–6; across languages, times and cultures 44–5; functional equivalence 41, 43; literal 42; play objectives 41–2; primary task 42; puns 46n2 transmedia communication 367–8, 370 transvestite comedy, intentions 4 Trauernicht, Breanna 346 trends 179 tribalism 360 tricksters, clowns as 70–2 trivial laughter 306–9 True Levellers, the 78 Trump, Donald 208 truth 8, 203–4, 326 Tucker, Sophie 248, 249 turnabout 67 Twitter 332, 333, 335, 337, 343, 348, 355, 356–7, 358, 359, 359–60, 360, 361, 368 Two Ronnies, The (TV show) 202 Ugly Scenes (performance) 59–72; auditions 61–3; cast 63; clowns as rabble-rousers

416

Index

65–70; clowns as idiots 61–3; clowns as tricksters 70–2; context 59; documentation 61; ethical dimension 60; finale 72; hidden transcripts 66–7; ineptitude 59–61; performance of failure 59–61; source folio 61; terrain 60 uncomfortable laughter 303–6 unconscious, the 326 understanding 11–2 unfunniness: of sexiness 108–10; of women 108 United States of America 191–8; political satire 282–94 universal themes 205 unruly woman, the 110–1, 241–2 (un)serious laughter 300 US Department of Health and Human Services 348–9 user-generated content 392, 398, 399 USSR 7–8 vagina dentata 258n12 validation 119 Val, Philippe 271, 272 Van Damm, Vivian 172 Vanity Fair (magazine) 102, 214 van Leeuwen, T. 19 Velody, I. 140 verbal humour, taxonomy 11 Verlhac, Bernard 278 Vernant,J.-P. 82 versatility 189 victimization 49 Vine 343–50, 357 violence: comic 55, 56–7, 57; parody of 49 vlogging 392–9; advertisers 398; audience 393; the big break 398–9; competition 394, 397; equitable participation 393, 394; hecklers 395–6; honing the craft 396–7; interactivity 392–3; shelf life 397; starting off in stand-up 393–4 vocabulary xvii vocal play 19 Voltaire 13 Waldon, Max 90 Wallace, D. F. 300, 320, 324 Wan, Gok 240 Wanzer, M. B. 365, 370 Warner, Jamie 369 Watson and Oliver (TV show) 95, 96–7, 102 Watson, C. 209 Watson, Lorna 95, 102 Weber, M. 11

Weeks, M. 109 Weitz, E. xiv Wells, D. J. 44 West; Cornell 196 Westergaard, Kurt 271–2, 273 White, E. B. xv Wilde, Oscar 14; The Importance of Being Ernest 15, 16 Wilkie, I. xix, 30–1, 35 Williams, Pearl 247, 249, 250–2, 255, 256, 257, 258n10 Williams, Robin 120, 123, 153 Willis, D. 22 Wilmut, R. xviii, 87 Windmill Theatre, London 172–3 Wing, John 141–3 Winter, Bernie 22 Winters, Jonathan 153 Wiseman, Fred 165 Wolfenstein, M. 345 women 93, 95–102, 394; black 197; and class 97–8; comic duos 95; comic heritage 96–7; dirtiness 248; double oppression 217; female comic body 107–12; female experience 98–101; forgotten histories 101–2; funny 107, 213–5; inequality of representation 95; Music Hall female comedians 90–1; naughty girls 249; negative stereotypes 214; obscenity 247–52; older 217–9; repertoire 96; representations of working 97, 98–101; revelation of fear 99; stand-up comedy 181–3, 213; stereotypical notion 108; unexpectedness of comedy 98; unfunniness 108; value 95; see also Rivers, Joan Wong, A. 359 Wood, Victoria 95, 97, 102, 214, 226 wordplay 80–1, 82, 83 working men’s comedy 188–9 Wright, J. 49 writer’s block 191 writing partners 174 writing sessions 142–3 WuDunn, S. 367 Wunsch, J. P. 32 xenophobia 193 Yes Lab for Creative Activism 309–11, 311–2 Yes Men, the 300, 309–11 Young Ones, The (TV show) 124, 128, 130, 133, 135, 136–7 YouTube 305, 307, 332, 335, 344, 354, 366, 370, 392, 393, 394, 395

Index Zarganar 8 Zarniko, Kurt 59–72 Zigler, E. 31–2 Zillman, D. 216

Žižek, S. 78 Zoglin, R. 213, 369–70 Zucker, R. 353, 359–60 Zupanèiè, A. 79–80

417