Slapstick Comedy

Slapstick is both a genre in its own right, belonging mostly to the years of silent cinema, and an element in other comedies that has persisted from the early years of film till now, when it seems to be as an indispensable element of the teen or "gross-out" comedy typified by such films as the American Pie trilogy (1999, 2001, 2003) and movies directed by the Farrelly Brothers, such as There's Something About Mary (1998) and Stuck on You (2003).

Slapstick is a descendent of the comic routines of Italian commedia dell'arte (mid-fifteenth to mid-seventeenth century) touring players, who developed basic plot scenarios and broad, swiftly drawn characters. The fun for their audiences was not in watching innovative narratives or well-developed characters but in seeing how a slick troupe of professionals could manipulate the standard components of farce—zany servants, pompous masters, young lovers—with speed and efficiency. Each commedia player performed and perfected a single stereotyped character, bringing his own personality to bear in the particulars of his comic business—the lazzi—or, as we might call it, the shtick.

Comedy in slapstick lies in the basic tension between control and its loss. Both the verbal outbursts of the wordier comics (the Marx Brothers [Chico (1887–1961), Harpo (1888–1964), Groucho (1890–1977), and Zeppo (1901–1979)], W. C. Fields [1880-1946]) and the physical eruptions of those who use extreme body comedy (Charlie Chaplin [1889-1977], Jerry Lewis [b. 1926]) are predicated on the delicate balance between resistance and inevitable surrender—indeed, the resistance serves to make the surrender even funnier. Slapstick's classic moment, the pie in the face, is funny only if the recipient is not already covered in pie but is first clean and neat; slipping on a banana skin provides humor only when the before—the dignified march—is contrasted with the after—the flat-out splayed pratfall on the sidewalk. Slapstick comedians learned early on that humor could be prolonged if resistance, whether to gravity or another inevitability, could also be prolonged—in other words, as long as there were a chance that the other shoe might fall. This balancing act is the slapstick comic's main job: paradoxically, when we watch him—and it is usually a him—performing lack of control, at least part of our pleasure derives from his skill at controlling this lack.

Jim Carrey might beat himself up mercilessly in Me, Myself, And Irene (2000), but even as he seems to abandon restraint while punching himself, we are aware of the physical control needed to perform this routine. Part of the humor in this tension is also derived from the comic hero's insistence on maintaining control when others around him have abandoned it. Chaplin's Tramp tries to maintain dignity even though poor, starving, drenched, and an outcast: the humor lies in his scrupulous adherence to social niceties (he holds his silverware nicely) even when society is in chaos (he is having to eat his own boot from starvation in The Gold Rush, 1925).

BACKGROUND

Slapstick comedy derives its name from the flat double paddle (like a flattened, oversized castanet) that, when struck against another performer, produced a satisfyingly big noise but only a small amount of actual discomfort. This battacio, or slapstick, traditionally wielded by male performers, is said to have evolved from a symbolic phallus (Chamberlain); certainly the habitual association of slapstick comedy with male comics might be seen to bear out this symbolism. While early cinema slapstick boasted performers of both genders, including famous slapstick queen Mabel Normand (1892–1930) (Tillie's Punctured Romance, 1914), early flapper Colleen Moore (1900–1988) (Ella Cinders, 1926), and heroines of the 1930s screwball comedy genre, such as Carole Lombard (1908–1942) (Twentieth Century, [1934] and Nothing Sacred, [1937]), who was not afraid to take pratfalls amidst the glossy art deco sets of the genre, almost all major slapstick comedians since then have been male. Perhaps there is a reluctance on the part of female comedians to align themselves with a form of humor that relies so much on mess, violence, and pain; when female comics become involved in slapstick's routine business of physical humiliation this seems to be more as a punishment than a chosen route. For example, in Doris Day's

MACK SENNETT
b. Richmond, Quebec, Canada, 17 January 1880,
d. Woodland Hills, California, 5 November 1960

It seems appropriate that Mack Sennett, the father of slapstick comedy, made his first stage appearance as the rear end of a pantomime horse at the Bowery Burlesque in New York City. Responsible for inaugurating the conventions of both custard pie-throwing and the comic chase, Sennett's grasp of comedy was always physical rather than verbal.

Born Michael Sinnott in Quebec, Sennett left Canada for New England in his youth. Although opera was his initial career goal, he pragmatically settled for a position in burlesque, making his horse's-end debut in 1902. Sennett enjoyed the rapid-fire dialogue and punishing physical comedy of vaudeville and absorbed from this milieu many lessons about gag-driven narratives, which inspired his later films. In 1908, D. W. Griffith gave Sennett a job acting in, and later writing and directing, Biograph comedies. Eventually, Sennett decided to form a company of his own, and after securing the financial backing of two bookie friends, he lured away other Biograph players, including his off-again, on-again fiancée and eventual star, Mabel Normand, to form Keystone Pictures in 1912.

In his Keystone silent pictures, Sennett perfected slapstick, physical comedy. It is to his credit that Sennett could make his short films so successful at a time when cinema was otherwise veering toward feature-length films and more refined narrative- and character-based comedies. The typical Sennett short featured stereotyped characters drawn in broad strokes, who engaged in knockabout routines resulting in pratfalls, custard pie fights, and pursuits. These roles were played by such actors as Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Harry Langdon, Ben Turpin, and Gloria Swanson, all of whom began at Keystone. Those flat-footed, uniformed incompetents, the Keystone Kops, tried to catch stripe-suited convicts, the escalating pace of their madcap antics inevitably culminating in a chase that brought both law breakers and law keepers into contact with the Keystone Bathing Beauties, a troupe of swimsuited lovelies.

Sennett pioneered comedy features with Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914), starring Normand, but mostly he kept to shorts, which showcased his mastery of physical comedy at the expense of narrative and character. Sennett's type of comedy which was motion, not dialogue, -driven, was heavily affected by the introduction of talkies: physical comedy proved to be ill-served by the static cameras used in the early sound years. Sennett did, however, continue to make films into the mid-1930s, including the famous W. C. Fields shorts The Dentist (1932), The Pharmacist, and The Barber Shop (both 1933).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Barney Oldfield's Race for Life (1913), Mabel's New Hero (1913), Mabel at the Wheel (1914), Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914), Dough and Dynamite (1914)

FURTHER READING

Louvish, Simon. Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett. New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2004.

Siegel, Scott, and Barbara Siegel. American Film Comedy from Abbott and Costello to Jerry Zucker. New York: Prentice Hall, 1994.

Tamar Jeffers McDonald

1950s and 1960s films, the comedienne is often the butt of elaborate slapstick jokes that revolve around besmirching her habitual cleanliness and purity: she is dunked in mud (Calamity Jane, 1953), ketchup (The Thrill Of It All, 1963), and sudsy water (Move Over, Darling, 1963). Lucille Ball was one of the few genuine slapstick comediennes of that era, less in her films than in her television series, I Love Lucy (1951–1957).

The very physical style of comedy engendered by commedia dell'arte influenced later theatrical styles, including pantomime and circus, and persisted in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century vaudeville, with its emphasis on swift, gag-based knockabout comedy. For American audiences in the large new industrial centers that supported vaudeville theatres, comedy could succeed only when it was able to reach and please the widest possible audience; thus physical comedy prevailed over verbal humor, which depended on the audience's shared language skills. Early cinema, too, relied on immediately appreciable setups, clearly drawn characters, and physical humor that did not rely on language (intertitles) to reach the widest demographic. Many early films further tapped into situations with which new city dwellers could readily identify. Their humor derived from the perils of modern life, including vehicles, machinery, and inanimate objects that seemed to possess wills of their own, as in Chaplin's One A.M. (1916), in which the comedian encounters a malicious wall bed.

Many of the early slapstick film performers learned their comic timing, troupe playing, swift setups, and knockabout delivery of gags in this vaudeville milieu. Mack Sennett (1880–1960), the Marx Brothers, and W. C. Fields began their careers "treading the boards" and carried the lessons learned in this noisy and volatile arena into their film comedy. Sennett himself moved from performing to producing and directing; he gave many slapstick comedians their start in film at his Keystone Studio, established in 1912, the first and most successful specialist film-production unit. There, Sennett employed comedians such as Normand, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd (1893–1971), Buster Keaton (1895–1966), Harry Langdon (1884–1944), and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle (1887–1933). Later, after the coming of sound, W. C. Fields and Bing Crosby (1903–1977) were part of his stable of slapstick comedians. Sennett is credited with inventing the custard pie fight and with realizing the comic potential of the chase; the typical Sennett film ends with one, in which Kops, Bathing Beauties, stripeclad convicts, passers-by, and dogs careen across the screen, fall over, collide, and generally create mayhem.

SOUND AND AFTER

For James Agee, slapstick was dealt its death blow as a viable comic form by the talkies. The coming of sound required, at least initially, a more static camera, which slowed the comic antics on screen to a less frenzied pace. Other film theorists, such as Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik, however, disagree, and suggest that slapstick was already a marginal subgenre by the time of what is considered its heyday, from about 1912 through 1930. As a "low" form of humor, slapstick fell out of step with dominant tastes, which were moving toward a more genteel comedy of manners in order to find favor with middle-class audiences, which filmmakers were beginning to court. By itself, sound could not kill slapstick, which relied on a combination of physical and verbal comedy; rapid-fire patter was a major part of the Marx Brothers' art, along with pratfalls and consequence-free violence. The Three Stooges, too, while not known for word twisting and puns, did employ pig Latin, verbal insults, and nicknames along with eye poking and hair pulling.

Like commedia performers, the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges remind us that slapstick is ensemble comedy, each performer bringing a particular character to life, repeating and refining this persona's idiosyncratic lazzi in every performance. Slapstick comics, especially after the arrival of sound, have tended to work in pairs rather than as troupes of three or more: Stan Laurel (1890-1965) and Oliver Hardy (1892-1957), Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Bud Abbott (1895-1974) and Lou Costello (1906-1959), and Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin exploited the comic tensions between a straight man and a gag guy, a natural winner and an all-time loser, a matinée idol and a clown. Lewis, with or without Martin, is considered the preeminent performer of post-silent slapstick. His willingness to reduce himself to a state of infantile idiocy—spastic limbs and primitive language—proved hugely popular in the 1960s with both American audiences and French critics.

While slapstick can be seen to have lost its dominance as a solo comic mode (except in cartoons where it continues to be honored—see, for example, The Simpsons (beginning 1989)—it can still be found as a component of many other forms of comedy, including genteel strands of humor, such as romantic comedy, and the subgenre that most resembles its earlier incarnation, the new teen 'gross-out' comedy. Whenever a romantic heroine finds herself so dizzy with love or the need for revenge that she walks into an office plant (Sandra Bullock in Two Weeks' Notice, 2000) or pours coffee over her white business suit (Meg Ryan in Kate and Leopold, 2001), the film is invoking the conventions of slapstick comedy to remind us of the basic (and loveable) idiocy of people in love. Jim Carrey has built entire film vehicles around the body torsions and physical violence of this genre, making him Jerry Lewis's purest heir.

While slapstick interludes in contemporary comedies are now less likely to end with a chase, which seemed inevitable in the era of silent slapstick, they continued to be used through the 1960s to create a modern "swinging" feel that married contemporary comedy to slapstick traditions—for example, in the finales of Sex and the Single Girl (1964), ModestyBlaise (1966), and almost the whole of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). Silent slapstick persists in modern films, including its emphasis on consequence-free violence, humiliation, and physical pain. Archetypal characters similarly endure: the good-natured but physically and/or romantically inadequate hero; the physically superior but morally inferior jock, who is the hero's rival for the good girl; the demanding, ill-tempered boss, who is either revealed to have a heart of gold and a sense of humor after all or who is symbolically castrated. Alongside this basic romance plot may stand another thread, either subordinate or dominant, involving fast-talking, wise-guy con men linked to the tradition of slapstick ensembles. For example, the con men conspiring to win Cameron Diaz's Mary in the Farrelly Brothers comedy are the heirs to the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, and perhaps Bugs Bunny. Although slapstick iconography may have left behind the custard pie per se, similar use is now made of more taboo matter: the bodily fluids and wastes of the gross-out movie, whether the semen hair gel in There's Something About Mary or the excremental smoothie in The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999).

SEE ALSO Comedy;Early Cinema;Genre;Silent Cinema

FURTHER READING

Agee, James. "Comedy's Greatest Era." The Film Comedy Reader, edited by Gregg Rickmann, 14–28. New York: Limelight Editions, 2001.

Bonila, Paul. "Is There More to Hollywood Lowbrow than Meets the Eye?" Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2005) 22: 17–24.

Chamberlain, Kathleen. "The Three Stooges and the Commedia dell' Arte." The Film Comedy Reader, edited by Gregg Rickmann, 53–59. New York: Limelight Editions, 2001.

Dale, Alan. Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Gehring, Wes. Personality Comedians as Genre. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.

Krutnik, Frank. Inventing Jerry Lewis. Washington, DC, and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

Neale, Steve, and Frank Krutnik. "The Case of Silent Slapstick." In Hollywood Comedians: The Film Reader, edited by Frank Krutnik, 57–71. London: Routledge, 2003.

Tamar Jeffers McDonald