Comedy/Cinema/Theory

James Morrison

Department of English
North Carolina State University

 

Comedy/Cinema/Theory. Edited by Andrew Horton. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.

 

Comedy’s not pretty–as the title of an early-eighties Steve Martin album instructed us–and to judge from Comedy/Cinema/Theory it’s not very funny either. Peter Brunette on the Three Stooges: “In the refusal to have meaning, to make sense, the Stooges’ violence in fact constitutes an anti-narrative. It is precisely their violence, as an ‘originary’ writing, that both allows for and destroys narrative . . .” (178). Dana Polan on Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith: “Screwball comedy bears the traces of confusions and contradictions in a later moment of capital when this commodification of desire reaches new extremes” (146). Scott Bukatman on Jerry Lewis: “The feeling of entrapment and of the impossibility of action or change arises agonizingly. Within such spatiotemporal distension, the physical dominates character, as the individual is reduced to automaton . . . ” (195).

 

Bound to become a standard in university film-comedy courses, this collection of essays eschews Lubitschean epigrams or Stoogean banana-peels in favor of Derridean stencils or Heideggerean slip-knots. The volume is necessary and useful, and some of the essays are brilliant, but the effect is at times one of unmistakable homogeneity. In his introduction, the book’s editor, Andrew Horton, makes much of the “non-essentialist . . . thus open-ended” (3) theoretical approaches the contributors favor, but by the time this panel of unreconstructed post-structuralists get through with it po-mo comedy looks a lot like any other po-mo genre (if post-modernism can be said to leave any genres in its wake, a question the contributors here never ask). It represses the feminine/maternal (as Lucy Fischer suggests); it articulates the phallocentrism of Hollywood’s unconscious (as Peter Lehman claims); its carnivalesque potential is either triumphantly realized (as in Horton’s own essay) or self-consciously stymied (as in Ruth Perlmutter’s), thereby either subverting dominant ideology (as in Stephen Mamber’s) or reproducing it (as in Dana Polan’s). Unapologetically recuperating the genre for post-structuralism (hereafter PS), the versions of comedy constructed in this volume tell as much about contemporary academic film criticism as they do about comedy itself. What the book most forcefully proves, finally, is that you can put the same top-spins on comedy that you can on, say, melodrama or horror or soap-opera–as if anyone ever doubted it.

 

In fact, some may well have doubted it, and a book like this one is comparatively late in coming, after a line of similar anthologies dealing with less problematic genres, perhaps because of an assumption that comedy does not readily lend itself to PS analysis since, in effect, comedy beats the critic to it. Much eighties criticism of popular culture is heavily dependent on a conception of the text (and to a lesser extent of its consumer) as naive. Theories of comedy, though, tend to emphasize the selfconsciousness of the genre, claiming that comedy by its very nature draws attention to its own stylistic operations, explicitly positions its audience in relation to it, catalogues all its own intertexts–performs, that is, the very functions criticism of popular-culture ordinarily arrogates to itself. Lucy Fischer’s psychoanalytic discussion of “comedy and matricide,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” in itself a fine essay, also exemplifies the effect of such critical claims to apprehending the “unconscious” level of a naive text in cultural criticism. Her analysis of the Howard Hawks film His Girl Friday (1940) finds in that text a particularly striking instance, because “the humorous text does not mandate [the mother’s] presence through the exigencies of plot” (65), of the “elimination of the maternal” she sees as endemic to Hollywood comedy. The “devaluation of the maternaI” (66) emerges here as, if not exactly unconscious, at least “gratuitous” (65) in Fischer’s view. But Fischer’s argument depends on her repression of the text’s keen self-consciousness about gender in, for example, its satirical references to the historical personae of its male actors, Cary Grant and Ralph Bellamy, or–more importantly–in its overt parody of its source, Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page (1928), by switching the gender of Hildy (male in the original) and thereby commenting on the homosocial potential of the prior text. Moreover, Fischer’s survey of “gratuitous comments that malign motherhood” (66) culminates with the most literal rendering in the film of the repression of the maternal:

 

Finally, when Hildy's mother-in-law appears on the scene, Walter orders his cronies to cart the lady away, at which point she is bodily carried from the room. These images (of kidnapping, sudden death, and hanging) are resonant metaphors for the fate of the mother in comedy itself. (66)

 

Fischer significantly fails to mention the return of the repressed mother (in the name, of course, of the Law of the Father) to seek revenge, a turning point in the film insofar as it is the mother who transgresses the text, insistently revealing what the narrative has concealed (an escaped prisoner in a roll-top desk). My point that Fischer effaces the self-consciousness of the text itself hardly invalidates her argument or undermines its gravity. The question is whether such effacement is required of a certain mode of criticism and whether, in that case, such criticism can answer without concession the special demands of an especially self-conscious genre.

 

Indeed, a number of the essays in this book, either explicitly or implicitly, present comedy as the decisive link between Classical Hollywood and the impulses of modernism/ post-modernism. Brian Henderson’s study of “Cartoon and Narrative in the Films of Frank Tashlin and Preston Sturges” argues that Tashlin’s cartoon-like ellipses open, on what must be seen as a most unexpected site, a “gateway to the modern cinema” (158). Henderson’s argument pivots on comedy’s presumed greater formal liberty: Initially unavailable to other genres, the adventurous, brazen ellipses or paralipses of a Tashlin or a Sturges, licensed for comic purposes by the genre itself, trickle down to those other genres or movements, gradually eroding the stodgy “classicism” of the whole tradition. One of Henderson’s examples:

 

Tashlin condenses the journey from Chicago to Las Vegas by cutting to various background locations behind (and around) the characters . . . it recalls in this respect Chuck Jones's remarkable Duck Amuck (1953) in which the backgrounds keep changing behind an increasingly frustrated Daffy Duck. (Godard's multiple cuts to Jean Seberg against ever-changing backgrounds in a car trip across Paris in Breathless is both cartoonlike in technique and a specific evocation of Hollywood or Bust [the Tashlin film].) (160)

 

A more obvious precursor would be Keaton’s hyper-reflexive Sherlock Jr. (1923), but in fact Henderson may be essentializing this technique in his analysis. After all, an example of the same device appears in no less a film than Casablanca (1942), a movie often cited as the key example of Hollywood’s “classicism.” In the flashback sequence of that film, the dissolves among shifting backgrounds of Paris (in a close-up of Rick and Elsa driving) similarly condense their journey–but rather than reading the shots as a modernist elision, the audience is likely to read them simply as an instance of visual shorthand. Since, then, it would seem that such a device can be accommodated by classicism, the question becomes whether the distinction between “classical” and “modern” remains a useful category for film theory. Yet it is a distinction on which Henderson, like most of the contributors to the volume, insists, contrasting Tashlin with Sturges through it, for example: “[Sturges’s] ellipses are also classical: carefully built up to and returned from, never disrupting the viewer” (161). Or again:

 

Several Tashlin ellipses lie somewhere between the classical and the modern. As a result, like Tashlin's work generally, they can be dismissed by classicists and dogmatic champions of modernism and valued by makers of cinematic modernism (Godard) and those as much interested in the becoming of a movement as in its achievement (right-thinking critics). (157)

 

The binarism raises another question: Is Tashlin’s work of interest chiefly as an antecedent of Godard, the High- Modernist? The implication that it may be is redolent of an ethics of modernist self-formation, along the lines of earlier studies such as those of the English music-hall tradition claiming legitimacy from T.S. Eliot’s interest in that hitherto “low” tradition.

 

The first half of the book consists of broad surveys of issues in film comedy: Fischer’s essay; Noel Carroll’s hectic encyclopedia of the sight-gag; a catalogue by Peter Lehman of penis-jokes in movies; Stephen Mamber’s “In Search of Radical Metacinema”; and Charles Eidsvik’s survey of Eastern European comedy films. The title of Mamber’s essay indicates one of the recurrent concerns of the section, crucial to every essay but Carroll’s: Is comedy “radical,” in some way inherently subversive of an established order? In the introduction, Horton implies that the question has already been settled in his reference to “comedy’s . . . subversion of norms” (8). Yet Fischer and Lehman see comedy’s claim to subversive potential as illusory. Lehman’s thesis is that “one of the most important functions of comedy in cinema is to sneak a joke by almost unnoticed, make us laugh, and then allow us to forget that we ever thought something was funny” (58), while Fischer, as we have seen, traces the process in comedy by which “woman–once the core of the joke structure (as the target of sexual desire)–is eventually eliminated from the scene entirely and replaced by the male auditor” (62). Mamber and Eidsvik are readier to grant comedy its radical force, Eidsvik by way of the overtly political nature of Eastern European comedy and Mamber through the route of post-modern parody, finding the signifiers of Kubrick’s parodic The Shining, for example, pointing “not to a failed horror film, as so many reviews stupidly labeled it, but to a deliberately subverted one” (84).

 

In the book’s second half, contributors focus on individual films or important comic figures. William Paul’s “Charles Chaplin and the Annals of Anality” argues that previous critics have ignored the “vulgar humor” that is “central to Chaplin’s vision” (120), failing to emphasize “the raucously insistent lover body imagery” (117) of his work. Replacing such imagery in what he takes to be its properly privileged place, Paul finds that the key questions raised by Chaplin’s work are “How can upper and lower body be made whole? How can the spiritual grace we accord the eyes be made commensurate with the other organs that bring us into contact with the outside world . . . ?” (125). Dana Polan’s “The Light Side of Genius” reads Mr. and Mrs. Smith through the paradigms of screwball comedy as much as through those of Hitchcockian authorship, concluding that “in the classical mode of Hollywood production, it may well be that too much emphasis on the singularities of a career may lead us to overvalue the individual director as someone special, a figure outside the dominant paradigms” (150). Ruth Perlmutter’s essay on Woody Allen’s Zelig sees it as an example of parody as “autocritique” (207); Bukatman’s on Lewis sees him as a key example of male hysteria; Brunette’s on the Three Stooges and Horton’s on Dusan Makavejev find varying degrees of comic subversion in these texts, while the volume is rounded out by Henderson’s fine essay on Tashlin and Sturges.

 

It is possible to point to weaknesses in individual contributions: Carroll’s is simply inconclusive; Perlmutter’s repeats without citation much of Robert Stam’s treatment of the same film in his book on Bakhtin and cinema, Subversive Pleasures (1989); Horton’s idealizes the carnivalesque: “Makavejev shows us that innocence can be protected through knowing laughter” (232). It is more useful, however, to identify assumptions shared across the range of contributors that confer on the book, for all the varied inflections of each critic, a certain ideological sameness, even perhaps a certain intellectual complacency. Here the figure of Bakhtin emerges as crucial, for well over half the contributors draw upon Bakhtin’s ideas to illuminate film comedy. It is not surprising at this stage in the evolution of PS to find Bakhtin constructed as the touchstone for theories of the comic in popular culture: the surprise, I suppose, is that Bakhtin does not figure prominently in every essay collected here. What is striking about the use made here of Bakhtin–that enemy of the totality of genre, that celebrator of the disruptive potential of laughter–is how fully domesticated he has become in this book’s version of him. After painstaking exegeses of Bakhtin by Horton, Fischer, Paul, Brunette and others, we come to the one authentically comic moment in this volume when Perlmutter blithely introduces us at the outset of her essay to one “Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian literary theorist” (206)–which in this context falls on the ear rather like “Gustave Flaubert, the noted French author.” Reading this book, one is re-introduced to Bakhtin so many times, each time as if it were the first, that one begins to dread the inexorable approach of this wan specter with its steady tread and its joyless homilies!

 

It’s (possibly) unfair to criticize a collection for the uniformity of its critical practices (if it’s a crime, nearly every anthology in film studies is guilty); and it’s philistine to suppose that a book about comedy should be spirited or exuberant–that it’s the task of criticism to share or even to be responsive to the superficial predispositions of its object. This book is an excellent contribution to film studies, and in pointing to its moral gravity and its analytic earnestness one risks being identified with a slob who grouses that those insufferable pointy-heads are at it again, ruining the belly-laughs for the rest of us. But the question I’m really asking is whether PS–especially given its enthusiastic valorization of carnival–is ever going to be capable of having any fun.