A Cultural History of Comedy in the Modern Age by Louise Peacock;

Author:Louise Peacock; [Peacock, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350187856
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2020-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

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The Body

LOUISE PEACOCK

If, as other chapters in this volume have suggested, serious academic attention to comedy has been slow to develop, it is not unreasonable to suggest that physical comedy, sited in the body with minimal reliance on verbal wit, has long been regarded as the lowest of the low. Slapstick has rarely been analyzed in any detail and it is only in very recent years that popular forms of performance have been given any serious consideration in a way that focuses on what the performers actually do or did. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that comedy conveyed primarily through the body is indeed worthy of and repays analysis. In order to investigate the ways in which the body can be used to convey comedy, it will be necessary to establish a framework for identifying which physical comedy is created primarily by the writer and which is created primarily by the performer. This is not to suggest that there is no connection between the two, but one helpful distinction can be to think about comedy in terms of that which is written into the performance and that which is generated by the performer.

In the early days of cinema there was little distinction made between writers and performers, as the rising stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton wrote, directed, and performed their work and there is evidence in biographies and autobiographies from performers of early film comedy that much of the business was improvised on set as filming was taking place. This early development of mediatized comedy had its roots, as did so many of the performers, in vaudeville and music hall. Indeed, it is not too great a stretch to suggest that many of the tropes of physical comedy we recognize today have their origins in the acts seen in the popular light entertainment of the period preceding the one that concerns us here. The comic modes that make most of physical comedy—such as circus, silent and sound film, music hall, sitcoms and sketch shows—have one thing in common: they are predominantly popular forms of performance. Whilst Oliver Double’s definition in Popular Performance applies primarily to popular theater, his assertion that popular performance is “from the wrong side of the Great Divide, seen as being low, disreputable and unworthy of serious attention” (Double 2017: 7) is highly relevant to the forms of performance considered in this chapter. They do not aspire to literary or intellectual heights. Instead, they create comedies which can be enjoyed by the widest audience possible.

As we move through the period under consideration, film comedy develops more of a separation between writer and performer, a separation even more present in theater comedy. In television comedy, many sketch shows, from Monty Python onwards, have been written and performed by the same team, but in the world of sitcom there is often a writing team, which operates separately from the performers. In the latter, writers may indicate specific uses of the body relating to the plot.

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