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his book is dedicated to the legacy of early slapstick film comediennes, who underwent horrific on-screen injuries to provoke spectator laughter. It was not unusual for a woman in early 1900s cinema to explode out of the chimney, to melt when sprayed with soda water, to dismember her own limbs to finish her housework on time, or to be dunked repeatedly into a pond as punishment for her political activism. Such comedienne catastrophes provided disturbing but evocative images for comprehending the momentous gendered social upheavals occurring at the same time in the world beyond the screen. Tropes of female physical fluidity helped navigate the rapidly shifting places of women’s bodies in the public sphere, in civic politics, and in the industrial workforce. From housemaids whose dresses caught fire while cooking (mockingly called “crinoline conflagrations”) to suffragettes who endured brutal police violence and prison force-feedings in their fight for voting enfranchisement, women’s violent domestic and activist histories found comical outlets in cinematic scenes of female transfiguration. “Slapstick,” literally a stick used for slapping someone (from the batacchio of the Italian commedia dell’arte1), has often missed the mark when it comes to women’s bodies. Viewers express discomfort about laughing hysterically at even lighthearted images of women being beaten. Due to the gender politics of knockabout violence, the topics of assault and
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battery are considered best left to the domestic sphere as scandalous private secrets rather than flaunted out in the open as playful sight gags. Film comediennes skirted these tensions between joyful laughter and gendered violence by means of their fluid and often spectral corporeality. In contrast to the iconic male clowns, who could get whacked in the head with a club or flattened by a runaway automobile, women tended to disappear and reappear, combust spontaneously, dismember their limbs, miniaturize their bodies, dissolve into paintings and billboards, or metamorphose into supernatural creatures (such as satanic butterflies, micrographic nicotine fairies, or cannibalistic spiders). These prolific comedienne histories pose major challenges to the foundations of our ideas about the slapstick genre and its gendered conventions. Specters of Slapstick reveals the gender politics of comedy and the comedic potentials of feminism through careful consideration of early slapstick silent films. Important work has been done on establishing the presence of women in silent slapstick film and on theorizing the foundations of feminism through early cinema’s public spheres. However, no other work has laid out the history of early cinema and its relation to feminism through close analysis of female bodily performance in slapstick film comedy. The timeframe of this book, from the mid-1890s to the late 1910s, follows the decades of cinema’s emergence: a period marked by constant transformation and experimentation before the solidification of the Hollywood industry’s narrative codes and ideological conventions by around 1917. I look at hundreds of slapstick comedienne films, many of which no longer exist (over ninety-five percent of American silent films are currently lost), discussing and contextualizing them through trade-press reviews, fan scrapbooks, paper print-fragments, and other archival resources. The films I focus on were both remarkable and unexceptional in their depictions of female bodily mutilation aimed at inciting uproarious laughter within early cinema’s transformative public spheres (figure 0.1). The trajectory of the book begins with “Early Film Combustion,” looking at short films from 1894 to 1907 in which women’s bodies spontaneously erupt in a variety of ways (out of the chimney and into the polis, or in haphazard defense against their vulnerability to sexual predators). From these early spectacles centering on combustive one-off gags, I move to the paradigm of “Transitional Film Metamorphosis.” In films from 1907 to 1914, women’s bodies adapted to the emergent codes of narrative film storytelling
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Figure 0.1 Frame enlargement from Rosalie et Léontine vont au Théatre
[Jane and Betty Go to the Theater] (Bosetti, 1911)
through their fluid transfigurations (metamorphosing, melting, and selfminiaturizing) rather than through their spontaneous combustions. From this periodization of female physical comedy (early combustion versus transitional metamorphosis), I survey the broader picture of “Feminist Slapstick Politics.” I analyze a broad range of suffragette film comedies, some sympathetic to the cause and others brutally derisive of it. Regardless of their intentional politics, I argue that these films use female slapstick as a gendered corporeal mode to navigate the slippery relationship between popular culture, public sphere upheaval, and the paradoxes of modern feminism. Across these three sections, my overriding focus is on issues of female slapstick corporeality, which I articulate through the interrelations between theories of laughter, historiographies of early cinema, and social histories of gender politics. Slapstick, the exaggerated performance of make-believe violence, provided a gateway into the untapped and previously unimaginable possibilities of female identity in modern society. At the same time, women’s flexible corporeality offered filmmakers blank slates for experimenting with the
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visual and social potentials of cinema. In hundreds of vividly memorable but widely forgotten slapstick comedienne silent films (from 1894 to 1919), the age-old debates about laughter and society take on new meaning and renewed relevance through the lived histories of early twentieth-century gender politics and the living archives of early popular visual culture.2
Comedy and Its Relation to Feminism: “Humorless Killjoys” and “Unruly Women” The project of writing comediennes back into film history demands a broader understanding of the relationship between feminist theory and comedy scholarship. Interpretations of comedy have long struggled with the status of real-world bodily violence, which slapstick bodies exaggerate ad absurdum. Comic clowns are both painfully vulnerable to injury and cartoonishly invincible to permanent damage. What is the cultural and political aftermath of spectator laughter at such barbarically gruesome but farcically innocent representations? In comedy studies, the lines of this debate are frequently drawn between “disciplinary” and “carnivalesque” interpretations of comedic violence: between Henri Bergson’s punitive definition of laughter as a “social corrective” and Mikhail Bakhtin’s utopian celebration of festive joy as a collective horizon for reimagining social politics.3 This is the tension at the heart of critical comedy studies. Does uproarious laughter, on the carnivalesque side, have the capacity to effect lasting social changes in the world? Or, on the disciplinary side, does aggressive laughter merely serve as a tool for shaming wayward bodies into normative social conformity? In a feminist context, the “disciplinary” versus “carnivalesque” debate concerns the degree to which laughter itself should be regulated—or indiscriminately unleashed—in the struggle for gender liberation. There have been two diametric approaches to critiquing the gender politics of laughter. First, feminists have refused to laugh in complicity with the misogynistic power dynamics of the joke whenever women are reduced to its butt or punchline. Against this anti-laughter polemic, other feminists have emphasized the radical potential of an unruly laughter that shatters the patriarchal codes of normative language and desire. It is a truth well established that dominant forms of humor tend to empower the sadistic male laughing subject (while objectifying women)
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and to amplify this patriarchal laughter under the auspices of humor in general. To this end, feminists have positioned their laughter against the misogynistic extremes of humor in general. I would characterize this as the “killjoy” line of feminism’s anti-laughter ethos, inherited from the antipleasure polemics of second-wave feminism. In 1973, Laura Mulvey famously called for the “destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon,” pushing back against women’s systematic disempowerment and objectification by mainstream cinema’s visual codes of narrative representation.4 Echoed by Mary Ann Doane, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, and Annette Kuhn,5 this anti-pleasure critique has been fiercely reclaimed by presentday feminist theorists of affect and emotion, who address the more diffuse ways in which neoliberal capitalism’s “mandate to enjoyment” coerces and constrains gendered everyday life.6 In this vein, Sara Ahmed describes “killing joy as a world-making project”; but it is by no means joyless—as she writes, “There can be joy in killing joy.”7 For Ahmed, and for Lauren Berlant (who now works on “humorlessness”8), feminist liberation hinges on shattering the mundane pleasure dynamics of laughter that repeatedly demean and objectify women while alienating their labor and emotion. This is no doubt why women have often been excluded from comedy and disregarded as “killjoys,” “humorless,” or “angry feminists”—not because their feminism lacks laughter but because this laughter forcefully denies the misogynist tendencies of humor in general.9 In contrast to the “killjoy” or “anti-pleasure” line, feminist revelers have sought to recuperate offensive laughter through the radically carnivalesque figure of the “unruly woman.”10 Unabashedly grotesque, the unruly woman flaunts her anti-normative, excessive, leaky, noisy, smelly, and generally disruptive corporeality against the traditional constraints of femininity and female decorum. In contrast to the feminist killjoy, who tells us explicitly not to laugh when the joke reinforces gendered systems of social oppression, the unruly woman laughs anyway; but her laughter positions itself beyond the patriarchal scripts of universalized humor. However empowering and affirming she is, the unruly woman, I argue, also has critical limitations. She is a disruptive presence, but she can only communicate or effect change on her own terms while largely sidestepping the gender politics of how women have predominantly figured in histories and realities of popular comedy. She abjects herself rather than risk objectification, thus placing herself outside of the ingrained libidinal economies of subjectivity, language, and power.
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It is the goal of this book to find a third way, an alternative to the impasses of the killjoy’s refusal and the unruly woman’s disruption. When can involuntary laughter at fluid and shape-shifting images of female corporeality give rise to affective rupture and social transformation? This is the central question posed by so many excluded feminist works, which become invisible not just due to archival neglect or historical oversight but to ideological incomprehension.11 The tropes of female slapstick in early cinema defy dominant notions of comic clowning (epitomized by the male clown’s mugging deadpan and inoculation against injury that allow for the laughing spectator’s emotional distance and callous apathy). These images haunt the archives and provoke us to transform our retrospective gazes at the history of female representations in comedy and cinema. Recognizing both the presence of women in slapstick and the broader potentials of the genre beyond its most familiar conventions has revolutionary social and epistemological implications that will influence how we reimagine the past and thereby shape the future.
Wounded Attachments: Involuntary Laughter Versus Nonconsensual Enjoyment Feminism has always had an uneasy relationship with comedy. Popular humor can be spectacularly violent, offensively profane, sexually objectifying, or, more routinely, aggressively normative. It is thus not surprising that feminists would want to protect women from the symbolic and envisioned corporeal violence that frequently sparks laughter. Wendy Brown has referred to this in States of Injury as feminism’s “wounded attachments” or the investment of identity-based politics in foregrounding “the logics of pain in subject formation,”12 which escalate when “identity is unraveling . . . as rapidly as it is being produced.”13 As semiotic theory argues, subjectivity in language is always a trap, because the agency afforded by the ability to say “I” (whether the performative “I” of the utterance or the cinematic “I” of the camera) is simultaneously constrained by the differential systems underpinning the articulation of meaning in language. (Just as the ear might perceive “cut” in distinction to “cunt,” ideological stereotypes of femininity police gender roles through an endless war of relational oppositions: ingénue versus vamp, mammy versus Jezebel, killjoy versus unruly woman, et al.) Against the tyranny of the patriarchal signifier, feminist theories of semiotic
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critique necessitate the decentering of gendered subject positions in language: from he to s/he to zhe. In the aftermath of semiology’s decentered subject, individuals now carry the mantle of inventing and performing their own identity positions. “Wounded attachments” (or the fetishization of victimhood), according to Brown, offer traction for mitigating for the confusing dispersal of identities in the wake of the decentered subject. This messy unraveling of identity has tremendous implications for theorizing both the power politics of laughter and the gendered corporeality of slapstick. The attachment to injury—collateral damage from the deconstruction of patriarchal subjectivity—leaves little space for the comic’s ruthless mockery of injury. Whereas slapstick displaces the image of physical violence through underlying reassurances about the impermanence of its corporeal effects, feminisms based on “wounded attachments” instead approach all instances of gendered violence as irreversibly damaging. If slapstick treats the body as purely textual (a blank slate for inflicting a sadistic array of ultimately harmless injuries), then “excitable” feminisms (to invoke Judith Butler14) literalize even linguistic violence as a mode of aggravated assault. In this vein, juridical feminisms have further attempted to repair the residual harm of decentered subjectivity by regulating the expression of hate and aggression in cultural discourse.15 Mostly excluding comedy, these censorship debates have tended to focus on pornography and hate speech, though they are starting to implicate comedy more frequently due to the viral circulation of offensive stand-up via social media,16 and misogynistic abuses perpetrated by predatory Internet trolls.17 However, this regulatory drive is much murkier in the context of slapstick comedy, in which the body of the clown is repeatedly laughed off as pure text (invulnerable and unreal), even while the power dynamics of the gag can be egregiously humiliating. Where, then, does one draw the line between involuntary laughter at an offensive joke and the nonconsensual enjoyment one risks displaying before a demeaning representation? This has been the wager of feminism’s incitement to humorlessness (again, not a lack of humor, but a strategic refusal of complicit laughter). For example, in “Masquerade Reconsidered,” Mary Ann Doane analogizes the bawdy joke to classical film’s logistics of patriarchal voyeurism, citing the sight gag of “Un Regard Oblique”18 (an iconic photograph by Robert Doisneau) as “a kind of dirty joke at the expense of the woman.”19 Analyzing
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this photograph through Freud’s theory of smutty humor,20 wherein women must be absent from the scene of the telling in order to elicit erotic laughter, Doane argues that “our desire to laugh [at a sexist joke] must not blind us to the still pervasive ideological ordering of the sexual.”21 Although Doane concedes feminist counter-readings, in response to a critique of her own argument by Tania Modleski,22 this ultimately comes at the expense of the eruption of laughter itself. According to Doane, “the one who ‘gets’ the joke automatically, unthinkingly, colludes in the maintenance of the systems of sexual oppression which support its meaning.” Against this complicit involuntary laughter, Doane recalls, “I was able to read the Doisneau joke without really getting it, due to the historicity of the feminist enterprise.”23 In other words, feminist reading and spontaneous laughter here are mutually exclusive experiences (see figure 0.2 for another image in this vein, from Kiss Me!). The feminist impetus to relinquish “unthinking” (i.e., automatic) laughter has offered a prolific alternative to the thoughtless, misogynistic laughter provoked by many sexist sight gags in film. In the context of early cinema, Constance Balides focuses on the formal excesses of the image and its
Figure 0.2 Frame enlargement from Kiss Me! (Biograph, 1904)
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open-ended composition in order to derive humorous, feminist counterreadings that exceed the immediate visibility of the erotic sight gag. For example, in A Windy Day on the Roof (Biograph, 1904), a woman hangs laundry on a rooftop clothesline while a painter looks up her skirt from a lower vantage point at the side of an adjacent building. Balides explains that “a comic tension . . . is produced as the spectator’s attention is divided between the two activities.”24 She elaborates, While the pressure of expectation regarding the imminent gag—what will the woman do when she discovers the painter looking?—gives a priority to the painter’s activity, the fact that are no cuts, inserts, or shifts of camera position to focus the spectator’s attention, as one might expect in a classical Hollywood film, gives some autonomy to the woman’s activity; it is not simply subsumed within the terms of the joke.
Not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, the feminist counter-humor of this example derives precisely from its excess of possible readings that slow down or disrupt the eruption of the erotic gag: the painter looking up the woman’s skirt and the woman presumably reacting with injury or offense. Balides’ approach (adopted by numerous feminist scholars of early cinema, including Miriam Hansen, Judith Mayne, Lauren Rabinovitz, and Lynne Kirby), like Doane’s, assumes an incompatibility between instinctive laughter and the pleasures of feminist critique.25
Laughter at the Limits of Theory Some of the most exciting and generative theories of comedy have pursued the possibility of a simultaneous eruption of laughter and breakthrough in thinking or knowledge. In other words, the “thoughtless,” instinctive reaction to a funny joke would not be antithetical to speculative critique but essential to it. According to comedy theorists, including Georges Bataille, Charles Baudelaire, and Wyndham Lewis (three thinkers whom I will discuss throughout this book), the irresistible convulsions of laughter provoked by humorous thoughts and rapidly unexpected insights can be channeled beyond their short-lived embodied durations. Baudelaire refers to this as “laughing philosophy,” Bataille actively pursued it as “the consequences of unknowing,” and Lewis celebrated it as “the meaning of the wild body.”26
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In their accounts, laughter’s visceral upheavals become dually intellectual and corporeal gateways to philosophical breakthrough and social transformation: the shattering and overturning of established categories of knowledge, experience, and reason. When we laugh irresistibly and convulsively at suggestively destructive and disruptive images, do our laughing bodies make their marks upon the social formations that operate to constrain and contain them, or is laughter merely an outlet for discharging pent-up nervous energies? The tension released during laughter always comes from somewhere, but whether it’s from repressed libidinal fantasies, nervous muscle memories, or simply jocular escapism depends radically on the context and dynamics of laughter. Bataille, going beyond Freud’s notion of laughter at jokes as an emanation from the unconscious, suggests that laughter opens a gateway into the realm of the unknown. He articulates a philosophical view in which unknowing represents both the capacity to think insightfully while still in the grip of laughter’s destabilizing convulsions and, most importantly, the ability to remember the substance of these laughing insights afterwards.27 Such an alignment between sensory overstimulation and transformative critical thinking has also held an important place in feminist studies. Feminist phenomenological (or body- and affect-oriented) approaches to cinema have sought to intermingle the eruption of pleasure with the innovation of gendered critique. However, the mood or tone of these recuperative readings almost always excludes laughter. This is why Linda Williams pointedly rejects comedy as a “body genre,” “because the reaction of the audience does not mimic the sensations experienced by the central clown” (though the clown in question here evokes Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, rather than Mabel Normand or Louise Fazenda).28 Unlike in melodramatic pathos, pornographic arousal, or horrified bristling, Williams argues, the laughing spectator of slapstick comedy is ultimately distanced and alienated from the bodily position of the harmlessly but sadistically violated clown. The rejection of comedy as a “body genre” apparently hinges on a more conservative definition of slapstick laughter, viewing it as antithetical to emotional sympathy or critical engagement, as epitomized by Bergson’s notion of laughter as a cruel or callous “social corrective.” (In general, brutality against women has been coded as melodrama while men enjoy far greater license to render their suffering as farcical—to defer the pathos of life’s horrible abuses.) Feminist scholarship on film-spectator emotion,
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exemplified by Williams’s approach here, forecloses its own speculative laughter: its potential alignment with critical efforts to capture the insights unleashed during laughter and to harness these ruptures toward transformative intellectual and social-political ends.29 These gendered exclusions of comedy thereby reinforce what has been an overriding disconnect—or a missed opportunity—between feminist and comedy-focused critical theories of knowledge and pleasure.
Carnivalesque Laughter: Body, Excess, Risk, Redemption In contrast to feminist works that focus on either advocating censorship or critiquing and complicating ideological pleasure, the carnivalesque has offered an alternative methodology for preserving the joys of “unthinking” laughter while valorizing visual displays of female bodily excess. Feminist comedy theorists have thus sought to recuperate the tendentious content and risqué carnality of many gleefully offensive examples of female physical comedy. Under the rubric of the carnivalesque, the very female bodies that would be abjected by normative, derisive laughter appropriate the logistics of the sadistic mockery aimed at them. The feminist carnivalesque celebrates images of female excess—loud laughter, grotesque corporeality, inappropriate exhibitionism, and anti-classical displays of femininity—to defy sexist conventions and to assert women’s entitlement to the exuberant pleasures of laughter and its liberating social potentials. If anti-laughter polemics have disarticulated “unthinking” eruption from feminist critical thinking, then carnivalesque approaches have tended toward the opposite extreme, embracing eruptive laughter unmoored from any social constraints or intellectual contexts. Drawing largely on Bakhtin’s analysis of comic-grotesque systems of imagery in medieval folk humor,30 scholars such as Kathleen Rowe, Mary Russo, and Natalie Zemon Davis have pointedly critiqued Bakhtin’s exclusion of women from the scene of the feast. (The medieval carnival is epitomized by its ritualistic cycles of temporary revolution, jubilant anarchy, and social renewal.31) Zemon Davis names this female grotesque figure the “woman on top,” focusing on visual representations and social practices of carnival in early modern Europe, while Mary Russo has adapted the historical specificity of carnival (which waned in the fifteenth century) to think about “the female grotesque” and her social signification in industrial modernity.32
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Rowe (and many other feminist media scholars, including Alison Kibler, Victoria Sturtevant, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Mizejewski) further innovate these concepts of the “female grotesque” and “woman on top” to analyze the iconography of female comedic disruption in twentieth and twenty-first century media representations.33 For example, in her opening to the Unruly Woman, Rowe describes the “contagious, uncontrollable laughter” of the unrepressed housewives who commit spontaneous, anti-patriarchal homicide in Marleen Gorris’s A Question of Silence (Netherlands, 1982). According to Rowe, “Their laughter is explosive and irresistible. It breaks boundaries, filling the void left by their refusal to speak, or bear witness, in the language of their oppressors.”34 Exemplified by this destructively gleefulhorrific scene, the carnivalesque laughter of unruly women actively refuses the symbolic constraints of comedic timing, a necessity for most sight gags and joke punch lines, instead deriving its forceful rebellion from its temporally and spatially unmotivated outbursts. Rowe further draws on psychoanalytic feminist writings about Medusan laughter beyond the Bakhtinian line, particularly Hélène Cixous’s 1976 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa.” In this foundational feminist text, Cixous explicitly rejects the patriarchal strictures of symbolic language by positioning feminist laughter outside of this system. She writes: “That which is ours breaks loose without our fearing any debilitation. Our glances, our smiles, are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths. . . . We never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we’re not afraid of lacking.”35 In other words, the eruption of Medusan laughter is emphatically sundered from any legible contexts in symbolic language. In this vein, Rowe argues that the unruly woman “wields laughter as a feminist weapon. . . . Female grotesques and female laughter . . . have the power . . . to challenge the social and symbolic systems that would keep women in their place.”36 The unruly woman and her comic-grotesque variants directly assert their subversive defiance through their refusal to acknowledge symbolic social norms, and this is manifested by their eruptive laughter and inappropriate corporeality. Though the cultural connotations associated with these excessive female bodies remain ambivalent—an important point that these feminist theorists all emphasize—the actions of their rebellion tend to be very straightforward and decisive. For example, in A Question of Silence,
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women laugh at the misogynistic jurists judging them for allegorically murdering the patriarchy (and for literally murdering its male subjects). At a San Diego Padres game, Roseanne Barr grabbed her crotch while singing the national anthem,37 which Rowe describes as a primary example of “female spectacle making” that puts derisive laughter back into Barr’s own hands as “a powerful means of self-definition and weapon for feminist appropriation.”38 Whether they are described as “unruly” (Rowe), “rank” (Kibler), “female-grotesque” (Russo), “Medusan” (Cixous), or simply “wild” (Sturtevant), the point is that these women become active agents of their own grotesque bodily difference, thereby asserting a feminist politics of the all-people’s feast intrinsic to carnivalesque folk ritual. Beyond Bakhtin’s account of the people, “a people who are continually growing and renewed . . . [to] transgress . . . the limits of their isolation,”39 these unruly women mobilize a micro-politics of festive rebirth and regeneration in industrial modernity’s gendered public spheres. In the context of silent cinema, Victoria Sturtevant characterizes the rotund comedienne Marie Dressler as a carnivalesque queen. Dressler played the quintessential country bumpkin, who becomes the victim and scapegoat of repeated comic torments in her screen debut as the title character of Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Keystone, 1914).40 However, as Sturtevant argues in A Great Big Girl Like Me, Dressler also epitomizes the “expression of carnival excess” through outbursts that “emphasize unassailably the life of her body,” such as her wild dancing, overt drunkenness, and haphazard clumsiness.41 These unruly gestures enable Dressler to assert her body as “temporarily, dangerously, and pleasurably out of control,”42 according to Sturtevant, who seeks to redeem Dressler’s demeaning humiliation by making her the intentional agent of her own comic degradation. In other words, this unruly woman, Dressler, is actually quite in control of her paradoxically out of control body: she defines the terms of its visibility and then powerfully assumes the consequences of whatever type of laughter her corporeal indiscretions might provoke. In contrast to the sadistically misogynistic comic scenes that many feminists have used as justification for condemning the gender politics of slapstick comedy (or, at least, for puncturing the eruptive spontaneity of its “unthinking” laughter), carnivalesque feminisms make women into the active agents (not the passive objects) of comedic violence and anarchic destruction.
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From Medieval Carnival to Slapstick Modernity Feminist scholarship, for the reasons I have outlined, typically favors engagement with carnivalesque representations of female unruliness, often sidestepping issues of sadistic violence or bodily violation. At its core, slapstick is about the displaced representation of physical violence: the appearance of gruesome injury that provokes laughter instead of terror (though often a palpable intermingling of these two entities), because the effects of this violence do not cause permanent damage or excessive suffering for the apparently invincible clown. Thus, slapstick comedies abound with comically exaggerated images of battered wives, assaulted housemaids, sexually harassed shopgirls, persecuted female bystanders, gruelingly overworked factory laborers, and vindictively tortured feminist activists and suffragettes. Although women fight back and even laugh last in some of these films, many of these examples do not primarily foster recuperative or carnivalesque readings (figure 0.3). These are clearly not, at face value, redemptive texts. They would certainly not provide useful material for feminist methodologies focused on positive examples, or even on actively subversive ones. Beyond these value estimations, there are many important and striking differences between comic slapstick clowns and carnivalesque-grotesque bodies. While the two possess similar characteristics—the appetite for disruption, as well as anti-social behavior, anarchic physicality, and delight in profanity—slapstick bodies are never intentional agents of their own difference. Slapstick bodies are utterly tormented by their hapless inability to
Figure 0.3
Frame enlargement from Cunégonde Reçoit sa Famille [Cunégonde Has Visitors] (Lux, 1912)
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conform to the physical and social laws of their environment. Carnivalesque bodies, in contrast, revel in their inappropriate spectacle. Their unconstrained speech and grotesque self-display enact temporary insurrections against the cultural codes dictating female behavior, knowledge, and pleasure. The dying-regenerating body that Bakhtin characterizes as carnivalesque is fundamentally open to the world and forms part of a cosmic unity of bodily and material belonging. Against this carnivalesque unity, slapstick comedienne bodies live in violent tension with their industrial landscapes. Their slapstick destruction is not a sign of their cyclical death and rebirth but an effect of their finitude. Their vulnerability stems from the danger and peril that shadow events of female pleasure and liberation, and from the existential threat to the very meaning of femininity posed by the emergence of feminist politics and its ongoing liquidation of separate public and private spheres. Slapstick bodies are always in the wrong place at the wrong time, moving at an inappropriate speed (too fast or too slow), with their desires or intents never quite adhering to the objects at hand. In contrast, the point of the carnivalesque is that all grotesque excess is given a temporary rightful place. Aesthetically, carnivalesque bodies revel in their own physical degradation, whereas slapstick bodies incessantly take flight from their own humiliation and abasement. Temporally, carnivalesque bodies assume their own eternal return and afterlife (their ritual excess undersigns a cyclical reassertion of state authority and religious teleology), whereas slapstick bodies enact fundamental uncertainties about the meaning of time and the endpoint of bodily efficiency. Socially, carnivalesque bodies take part in a “pageant without footlights . . . [that] does not acknowledge any distinction between actor and spectator,”43 whereas slapstick bodies perform uproarious gestures to provoke an active but removed spectator’s convulsive laughter.
Beyond Disciplinary Versus Carnivalesque Laughter These distinctions between carnivalesque femininity and female slapstick corporeality further reveal the slippery middle ground between disciplinary and revolutionary accounts of comedy’s social effects. As much as female slapstick corporeality offers an alternative to the strictures of traditional femininity, it also represents an inescapable response to industrial
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mechanization: an entrapment of the living body in the ceaseless production of revolutionary novelty. While there are moments of pure glee, to be sure, most of the examples that I look at in this book (and most that I have viewed during years of researching slapstick comediennes in early cinema) portray female comicality as a profoundly fraught and often agonizing state. For these (and many other reasons), I do not draw on the carnivalesque as a primary feminist-comedic methodology in this book. Corporeal excess and bodily invincibility are never uncomplicated gifts in the slapstick genre. For example, in chapters 1 and 2, I focus on films in which women spontaneously combust while doing housework (or undergo other horrific calamities such as decapitation and dismemberment in attempts to modernize their domestic labor). In chapters 3 and 4, I consider the limits of female metamorphosis in slapstick and trick film comedies. In films such as Princess Nicotine (Vitagraph, 1909), Tit-for-Tat (Pathé, 1906), The Red Spectre (Pathé, 1907), and The Cigar Box (Pathé, 1907), women get miniaturized and trapped inside of glass jars, sprayed and melted with soda water, incinerated, or cruelly dissected by scientists after undergoing interspecies transfigurations. While much has been written about the working-class politics of slapstick’s knockabout violence,44 less has been said about the gendered limits of when physical violence becomes funny. This is no doubt why the carnivalesque, again, has offered feminists such an appealing paradigm for recuperating the social excesses of sexual difference. The carnivalesque gives critics a way out of having to define that slippery line or boundary separating transgressive feminist violence from sadistic sexist abuse. This is another connotation of “specters” of slapstick: the inheritance of a corporeal plenitude that exceeds either critical dismissal or direct valorization. For example, in Eva Is Tired of Life (Pathé, 1911), an alienated female factory worker loses her job and then unsuccessfully attempts to commit suicide. Her efficient, technologized body, neither productive nor fun, becomes an impediment to her own finitude and longed-for mortality. She throws herself from a bridge and bounces back like a rubber band, she lounges in a hazardous construction zone as if it were a hammock, and then she survives multiple explosions completely unscathed. Eva is tormented by her mobility in the public sphere and actively disidentifies with the funmaking potential of her carnivalesque corporeality. Neither purely sadistic and automatically misogynistic nor transparently defiant and socially
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subversive, Eva Is Tired of Life exemplifies the social and aesthetic ambiguities of early cinema’s gendered slapstick practices. Films such as Eva call for new feminist methodologies in comedy theory and film historiography beyond the swinging pendulum of ideological critique and recuperative affirmation.
Laughing Methodology Instead of solely restricting my archive to redemptive examples, my gesture here is to inherit the “bad objects” along with the “good” ones. As a result, I have not limited my historiographic research or critical analysis to examples that portray women in a “positive” light (to invoke the “positive images” debates of the 1970s.)45 Nor do I contain my examples or close readings to films that explicitly represent female comedy as subversive or disruptive to the laws of patriarchal power and phallic desire. Most importantly, I never dismiss overt displays of gendered violence and sexual objectification, which often find alibis in the exaggerated mores of slapstick comedy, as beyond the pale of legitimate laughter. I do not regret any of my own laughs that slipped out during years of silent slapstick comedienne research. These laughs may have been spontaneous or even involuntary, but they were far from “unthinking.” My laughter at these images that most disturb me, that prick me and that call for further discussion and contextualization, has vividly shaped the feminist approaches to film comedy, archival historiography, and gendered social history that I pursue in this book.
Laughter’s Repressive Hypothesis One specter of my approach here is indebted to Michel Foucault’s notion of the “repressive hypothesis,” which posits that power operates subtly, often through the spectacle of its very transgression. In the context of Victorian prohibitions on sexuality, he argues, the regulation or censorship of inappropriate behavior often achieves precisely the opposite effect, giving rise to “a veritable discursive explosion.”46 For example, Foucault outlines the “steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex . . . a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward.” However, “more important,” he claims, “was the multiplication of discourses
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concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail.”47 In other words, social prohibitions, more than just restricting the behaviors that they seek to eradicate, instead give rise to debilitating cultural obsessions with inciting, monitoring, and administering the substitute discourses they will inevitably spawn. This repressive hypothesis of sexuality, which, again, argues that power operates more oppressively by way of its alleged subversion, has major bearing on the proliferation of discourses around female comedy and women’s laughter in industrial modernity. For example, even before the escalation of the “women aren’t funny” debates,48 numerous turn-of-the-century etiquette manuals dictated women’s comedic decorum: the well-bred woman “never laughs or talks loudly in public; she never raises her lorgnette and tries to stare people she doesn’t know out of countenance on the street; she never wears clothing so singular or striking as to attract attention in public.”49 From out of the corset and into the polis, the iconography of female slapstick in early cinema gleefully defied many of these Victorian constraints imposed on women’s laughter and comedic display in early twentieth-century Western culture. However, as Foucault reminds us, the transgression of a prohibition rarely achieves its desired effect: the dismantling of a prohibition.
Specters at the Limits of Laughter: Combustible Housemaids, Farcical Ghosts, and Metamorphic Women Early cinema offers an especially generative paradigm for pursuing the social consequence of laughter due to its chameleonic alternative public sphere politics,50 its tentative integration of women’s bodies into traditionally all-male homosocial spaces (such as the burlesque show and the boxing arena), and its viscerally solicitous on-screen images. In this book, I focus on trick films and comedies that depict female rupture—dismembered limbs, decapitated heads, exploded torsos, and metamorphosed internal organs— in order to make broader claims about cinema’s function in displaying and negotiating rapidly shifting perceptions of femininity in modern culture. Laughter, a fraught social discourse with scandalously ambiguous
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signification, represented the physiological glue between on-screen images of fluid female corporeality and the everyday gendered landscapes of industrial modernity. Slapstick comediennes in early cinema die and return as ghosts, miniaturize themselves during satanic rituals, metamorphose into spiders or aliens, and mangle their bodies into a panoply of horrific and fantastic shapes to adapt to the rampant contingencies of modern life. Women’s bodies in early film provoke every imaginable variety of laughter: from relieved to aggressive-derisive to jubilantly insurgent. Meanwhile, the prolific tropes of female comedy allowed laughing spectators to have it both ways: to take sadistic pleasure in images of violence enacted against marginalized bodies while also finding visual relief and social promise in the genre’s broader spectacles of anarchic destruction and utopian regeneration.
Roadmap to Specters Part I: Early Film Combustion “It is the chasm lying between non-being, over which it is impossible for logic to throw any bridge, that, in certain forms of laughter, we leap. We land plumb in the centre of Nothing.” —Wyndham Lewis, “The Meaning of the Wild Body”
Laughter gains advantage from the element of surprise. Slapstick comediennes in early cinema assumed jolting, startling, and destructively transformative changes in appearance to provoke convulsive spectator laughter. Part I, “Early Film Combustion,” focuses on early slapstick comedies (1894–1907) that depict violent upheavals of female corporeality: housemaids spontaneously combusting, harassed women playing defensive pranks on male aggressors, and pregnant women instantaneously giving birth in public spaces. I situate these scenarios of female explosion in their gendered social contexts of reception, drawing on histories of women’s domestic accidents (from dresses catching fire to victimization by sexual predation) and their perilous leisure practices in modernity’s colliding public and private spheres (urban traffic, bumpy streetcars, and breathtaking entertainments).
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Early filmgoing provided both a break from mundane domesticity and a stimulating source of potential volatility, involving loud machines, hazardous fires (from overheated projectors inciting the flammable nitrate film stock), disruptively mobile spectators, unpoliced audience decorum, and corporeally solicitous on-screen images. In chapter 1, “Early Cinema and the Comedy of Female Catastrophe,” I consider these interrelations between slapstick comedienne metamorphosis, gendered social upheaval, and film-audience pleasures through critical theories of laughter and comedy. Laughter and its conjunctions with comic objects and bodies present unique challenges for theorists of everyday life and experience in modernity. Philosophers have long debated the relationship between comic corporeality and the idea of the human in modernity. While Bergson has famously defined laughter as a “social corrective” for training bodies not to become overly rigid or mechanical (like robotic automatons),51 Wyndham Lewis valorized laughter as a reaction to the inherent absurdity of the very notion of the human: the fantasy of a civilized species whose members allegedly always act as conscious, intentional, or rational agents. On the other hand, as I emphasize throughout this book, female humorists and women writers at the time asserted gender as a key stake of these social and epistemological debates about the meaning of laughter. As Virginia Woolf remarked in a short 1905 essay on “The Value of Laughter,” “Humor, we have been told, is denied to women.”52 Feminist writers, like Woolf, often positioned female laughter somewhere between rational masculine agency and cutting feminine instinct in their definitions of comedy and humor. As Woolf puts it, “To be able to laugh at a person you must, to begin with, be able to see him as he is.”53 She speculates: “It is because their laughter possesses this quality that . . . women are looked upon with such disfavor in the learned professions.”54 Beyond corrective, women’s laughter was feared for exposing the masculinist fallacies at the core of erroneous ideals of humanity and civilization. In response to Woolf ’s call for the social recognition of female humorists, I have mined the archives of early film comedy, unearthing myriad short films in which female corporeality substitutes for the trick apparatus itself. For example, rather than stepping on a garden hose to play a mild prank on a male gardener (L’Arroseur Arrosé, Lumière, 1895), women pick up the hose (or the bucket of ale, or the tub of water) to douse male predators head-on,
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Figure 0.4
Frame enlargement from Cunégonde Reçoit sa Famille [Cunégonde Has Visitors] (Lux, 1912)
as in films such as Trouble with the Washerwoman (Lubin, 1903), Trouble with the Milkmaid (Lubin, 1903), and The Bucket of Cream Ale (Biograph, 1904). Whether drenching male mashers or exploding the kitchen with battery-wired turkeys, these female bodies unleashed utter catastrophes in so many early film comedies (figure 0.4). Chapter 2, “Female Combustion and Feminist Film Historiography,” considers the trope of female explosion as a major challenge for rewriting early film history. Here, I look beyond debates about laughter and modernity to focus on issues of historiographic representation, building on the ongoing feminist project to reinvent film history through archival evidence of women’s prolific work in silent cinema. Unlike the male comic clowns (such as Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd), who personify Bergson’s idea of a comic automaton, combustible comediennes derived comic energy not from their buffoonish rigidity but from their incredible flexibility. I outline eight key tropes of female slapstick fluidity (including combustion, dismemberment, and spontaneous metamorphosis), arguing that the image of female bodily transformation slows down around 1907 with the codification of narrative film practices and the impetus to draw out the shock of corporeal upheaval beyond the spectacle of combustion. I am particularly concerned here with what happens to the exploding housemaid after her combustion; for example, in Mary Jane’s Mishap (G. A. Smith, 1903), after Mary Jane erupts out of the chimney with her body parts raining down over the village skyline in dismembered pieces, she returns to haunt her own gravestone as a dancing specter. The seat of humor and its relation to gender in early cinema, I argue, often took root in images of female rupture: women’s bodies breaking,
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metamorphosing, exploding, disappearing/reappearing, and transforming. The chasm in perception that is impossible to bridge through logic—that can only be traversed through laughter—found fertile ground in the iconography of women’s slapstick comedy in early filmmaking.
Part II: Transitional Film Metamorphosis Part II, “Transitional Film Metamorphosis,” considers the film industry’s rapidly shifting codes of narrative storytelling through the versatile tropes of female metamorphosis in comedies and trick films of the transitional period (1907–1915). The spectrum of female comedy during this period was very broad: it ranged from conventional slapstick mayhem such as knockabout chase films to situational “comedies of manners” (which were flagships of the film industry’s campaign for social respectability). At the edges of comedy, there were uncanny trick films featuring a variety of metamorphic female figures (miniaturized women, housemaids with auto-dismembering limbs, and ghoulish line dancers). Although they are evidently interesting and spectacular, most of these slapstick comedienne films from the transitional period have been excluded from film historiographies, and even from feminist and comedy-centric scholarship: they represent critical blind spots for scholars of comedy, gender, and silent film history. There are multiple reasons why this is the case. First, feminist theorists interested in issues of female sexuality have looked primarily at early cinema (1894–1906) with its prolific sight gags about pornographic exposure (a topic I discuss in chapter 1). Second, most feminist comedy scholarship about silent cinema has emphasized the stars, focusing on archives of film stardom and problems of historiographic (in-)visibility. Writings by Victoria Sturtevant, Kristen Anderson Wagner, Steve Massa, Jennifer Bean, Rob King, Kristine Karnick, Lori Landay, and Joanna Rapf have made major inroads in archiving and recirculating the names of forgotten comedienne performers.55 However, most of the slapstick comediennes who have been recuperated by these silent film histories did not start making films until at the earliest 1914 (many with Mack Sennett at Keystone56) and did not reach peak productivity until the 1910s or 1920s. The early comediennes are thus left behind. Keystone clowns Marie Dressler, Louise Fazenda, Gloria Swanson, Alice Howell, and Polly Moran appeared in their first films in 1913–1914;
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Fazenda worked briefly with the IMP Company, playing Mrs. Schmaltz in Thou Shalt Not Rubber (IMP, 1913) and The Cheese Special (Universal, 1913), while Dressler debuted as the country rube character Tillie in Keystone’s first feature-length film comedy, Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Keystone, 1914)—followed by Tillie’s Tomato Surprise (Lubin, 1914) and Tillie Wakes Up (Peerless, 1917). Keystone’s most celebrated comedienne star, Mabel Normand, began with the Vitagraph and Biograph companies in 1910. Normand’s films present special historiographic challenges; she made just a few situational comedies with Vitagraph but dozens of melodramas under D. W. Griffith at Biograph. Feminist historians have not known quite what to do with Normand’s slapstick excess in studies of Griffith’s melodramas, while these films have been of at best tangential relevance to comedy historians. I look closely at Normand’s “voluptuary” roles in what I call Griffith’s “slapstick-inflected melodramas” in chapter 5. Other slapstick comediennes such as Gale Henry (known as “the elongated comedienne” due to her facial elasticity),57 Cissy Fitzgerald (whose trademark wink was allegedly insured for thousands of dollars),58 Fay Tincher, Josie Sadler, Gertrude Selby, Constance Talmadge, Marie Mosquini, Mildred Davis, and Olive Thomas also started acting in films in the mid- to late-1910s for companies including Reliance-Mutual Komics, Al Christie’s Film Company, Universal (in their “Joker” series), Vitagraph, Triangle, and Lehrman-Knockout Picture (L-KO) (figure 0.5). The best remembered and most extensively
Figure 0.5
Publicity still of Gale Henry, 1919. Wikimedia Commons, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Gale_Henry#/media/File:Gale_Henry.jpg
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archived silent comediennes (in addition to Normand, Dressler, and maybe Fazenda) played flapper and ingénue characters in the 1920s. For example, in Synthetic Sin (First National, 1929), It (Lasky, 1927), and The Patsy (MGM, 1928), actresses such as Colleen Moore, Clara Bow, and Marion Davies starred as party-going shopgirls who flirt with sexuality, commodity fetishism, and wild dancing as interregnums between their adolescence and their upward class mobility achieved through marital coupling. Again, this tendency to focus on individual stars and their surviving films has contributed to the relative invisibility of transitional film comediennes (1907–1915) and their provocative body of work.
transitional comediennes: archiving anonymity Any study of gender, comedy, and transitional silent film history must go well beyond recuperating the lost names of forgotten comedienne stars. Although there were slews of popular slapstick comedienne performers during the late 1900s and early 1910s (including Florence Turner, Flora Finch, Florence Lawrence, Kate Price, Alice Davenport, Dot Farley, and Bebe Daniels), their names are not of central relevance here. Early film stardom represented a promotional discourse of the film industry that often abetted its marketing campaigns to establish filmmaking as a legitimate art and a respectable middle-class institution. For example, Lawrence, Turner, Finch, Lillian Walker, and Mrs. Sidney Drew appeared in bourgeois domestic farces or situational “comedies of manners.” The films I discuss in this section often feature unnamed and unknown comedienne performers. I focus on their gendered gags and character archetypes, rather than speculate about their star identities or personal life stories. Chapter 3, “Slapstick Comediennes in Transitional Cinema: Between Body and Medium,” outlines the central protagonists of female comedy from 1907 to 1915, which include sadistic pranksters, vengeful housemaids, spinster old maids and mothers-in-law (who get blasted into outer space, mesmerized, and frozen alive), inadvertent vixens (i.e., women whose sexuality causes mass upheaval and mob riots), and uncanny shape-shifters (women who undergo dismemberment, miniaturization, and interspecies transfiguration). I look at dozens of films, with titles such as Saucy Sue (Lubin, 1909); Betty Pulls the Strings (Pathé Comica); The Servant’s Revenge (Lubin, 1909); Jane on Strike (Pathé, 1911); Freezing Auntie (Edison, 1912); and Edith’s Avoirdupois (Lubin, 1910). My focus in these studies is on the
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thematic of violence, a crucial component of slapstick comedy. I give particular consideration to the question of how violence inflicted on female bodies is motivated and narrativized in these popular film comedies in ways that conflicted with the film industry’s mandates for narrative clarity, middleclass respectability, and the storytelling integration of its visual and corporeal excesses. The desire to capitalize on the popularity of female spectacle was often in direct contradiction with the film industry’s own stated goals of narrative transparency and moral refinement. Chapter 4, “The Geopolitics of Transitional Film Comedy: American Vitagraph versus French Pathé-Frères,” explores the reception politics of female slapstick through emergent film industry discourses of American nationalism. Focusing on two leading production companies, Vitagraph and Pathé, I look at comic women’s bodies as sites of struggle over national differences during a moment in American film history when the industry increasingly emphasized and exploited these differences. Tropes of female metamorphosis and bodily elasticity were instrumental for adapting the shape-shifting conventions of filmmaking aesthetics to the uneven conditions of international film markets. French Pathé films, which were exhibited widely in America, reveal especially striking tendencies to motivate their cultural flexibility through images of female bodily fluidity. Films such as Princess Nicotine (Vitagraph, 1909), Elastic Transformation (Pathé, 1909), and The Acrobatic Maid (Pathé, 1908) depict images of women’s bodies being burned, melted, duplicated, and dissected. They provoke something between comic laughter and uncanny awe. Beyond just American filmmaking, the chapters in this section engage the narrative aesthetics and social politics of many European comedienne series, including Britain’s Tillie (Hepworth, 1910–1915) with Alma Taylor and Chrissie White; Italy’s Lea (Società, 1910–1916) with Lea Giunchi; and France’s Léontine (Pathé, 1910–1912) with an unknown actress, Rosalie (Pathé, 1911–1912) and Pétronille (both with Sarah Duhamel), and Cunégonde (Lux, 1911–1913) with another unknown actress. Unlike the polite domestic comedies increasingly fostered by American companies such as Vitagraph and Biograph, these French, British, and Italian films depict drunk housemaids destroying their employers’ homes, female pranksters terrorizing the public sphere, educated women aggressively agitating for equal rights, and salacious ladies exhibiting their sexuality with broadly comical and destructive consequences. Many of these films were censored in the United States or exhibited unevenly and then denigrated and condemned by trade press
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reviewers. (The American film industry was very invested in promoting its national exceptionalism and singular moral integrity.) Chapter 5, “D. W. Griffith’s Slapstick Comediennes: Female Corporeality and Narrative Film Storytelling,” further pursues the physical and emotional limits of the slapstick genre by considering its kinship with melodrama. I take up D. W. Griffith’s work in slapstick during his years at Biograph (1908–1913), when he made dozens of short comic films (such as Those Awful Hats, The Wooden Leg, and Deceived Slumming Party) while working with future Keystone comediennes (especially Mabel Normand) in his pathos-driven melodramas (including The Squaw’s Love, Her Awakening, and The Mender of Nets). I argue that slapstick tropes of female corporeality profoundly shaped and influenced Griffith’s emergent paradigms of film narration and systems of film editing—and, via Griffith, influenced American cinema more broadly. Above all, the chapters in this section argue that comedienne corporeality in silent cinema made its mark on the articulation of film style during the most formative moments in filmmaking history. These comedienne films represent meta-discourses for scholars to consider in rethinking the co-development of narrative film style, film industry cultural politics, and experiences of gender and laughter. They thereby provoke us to reenvision the tentative and punctuated emergence of narrative film form through the aesthetics of female slapstick corporeality and metamorphic bodily mutation. The immense challenge of understanding historical transitions—not as clean breaks but as messy and complicated processes—is at once an imperative to recognize the central places of female bodies in mediating these historical transitions. Slapstick comediennes are the specters of our earliest film histories.
Part III: Feminist Slapstick Politics Suffragette feminism provided a fertile source of visual humor for silent filmmakers. Women’s activist campaigns for voting rights provoked heated political debates and widespread societal ambivalences about the effects of women’s suffrage on everyday life, conventional gender norms, and public sphere politics. Early film comedies played a crucial role in navigating this relationship between unstable appearances of traditional femininity and the rapid pace of historical change in industrial modernity. From mean-spirited
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sight gags about androgynous suffragettes to revolutionary slapstick visions of total feminist transformation, silent cinema was haunted by the hilarity of suffragette feminism. The potential effects of women’s political empowerment are depicted in all their hyperbolic absurdity in films such as If Women Were Policemen (Clarendon, UK, 1908), The Elusive Miss Pinkhurst (Warwick, 1912), When Women Vote (Lubin, U.S., 1907), When Women Win (Lubin, 1909), When Women Rule (Selig, 1912), The Suffragette Sheriff (Kalem, 1913), Cousin Kate’s Revolution (Éclair, 1912), and A Cure for Suffragettes (Biograph, 1913). In these films, women apply their traditional domestic roles to political governance, giving rise to absurdly catastrophic consequences. For example, women attempt to “clean the streets” of crime-ridden neighborhoods with a dustpan and broom. In other films, women seize the reins of legislative control, necessitating a rebalancing of sexual power that reduces all men to gross feminine stereotypes: wearing frilly dresses, gesticulating daintily, and nearly losing their heads at the sight of a rodent. The question of these films’ social politics boils down to the consequences of the spectator’s laughter: can laughter give rise to lasting social changes, or is laughter’s liberation doomed to remain wholly ephemeral (like the fleeting film images that provoke and mediate laughter)? At once carnivalesque in their topsy-turvy scenarios and sadistically mean-spirited in their abundance of misogynistic sight gags, these suffragette comedies, moreover, challenge critical tendencies to divvy up the politics of comedy between carnivalesque revolution and disciplinary mockery. These prolific suffragette-themed comedies (both pro- and anti-) provide traction for articulating new feminist theories of comedy. In this section, I revisit conventional notions of laughter, complicating their explanatory logic through close considerations of feminist theories of social justice and the gender politics of representative democracy. In chapter 6, “Film Comedy Aesthetics and Suffragette Social Politics,” I discuss dozens of internationally produced suffragette comedies, situating them primarily in their American spectatorship contexts to reveal the intimate relationship between popular film comedy and activist social change. Chapter 7, “Radical Militancy and Slapstick Political Violence,” focuses on militant wings of the suffragette movement, particularly in Britain: women blowing up mail boxes, waging hunger strikes in prison, and then enduring violent force-feedings at the hands of the state apparatus. I look at slapstick depictions of this militant violence; no matter how horrific, and even
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when inflicted on female bodies, this physical violence was not off limits for slapstick representation. I argue that this slapstick political violence, which emerged from the very paradoxes of modern feminism, represented a fraught but crucial mode for comprehending the rapidly shifting relationship between female corporeality and modern democratic politics. In a brief postscript, I chase the specters of early comedienne slapstick into the late 1910s, when the codified grammar of narrative filmmaking rigidly constrained the comedienne’s bodily fluidity. Focusing on a close reading of a scene from the drama/comedy Mickey (Normand, 1918), in which Mabel Normand plays a miner’s daughter who moonlights as a substitute horse jockey, I describe the visual absorption of Normand’s slapstick corporeality by narrative cinema’s storytelling machine. While classical silent film form integrated the comic excesses of female corporeality into its narrative grammar—subsuming sexual difference as a driving antagonism finally to be tied up by the plot—moments of radical alterity erupted within this economical system, both working against it and yet produced by it. I pursue these moments of brief but potentially extravagant, morbid, and debilitating laughter solicited by the limits of female corporeality against the visual logistics of narrative filmmaking. The feminist specters of early slapstick film comedy continued to provoke haunted laughter long after the alleged obsolescence of their film aesthetics and social politics. In that haunting, they reveal the lasting impact of early slapstick comediennes on the history and form of American cinema.