COMEDY

90 THE BODYyou…at last you’ve come…take us now, and turn us into somethingdifferent’” (quoted in Welsford, 1935:309). Laleen Jayamanne sees theclown’s ingenuity as ‘an unsevered link between perception andaction’, that amounts to the ability to think with the body rather than themore familiar coordinates of subject—object relations, resulting in ‘thecapacity to make correspondences, the perception of nonsensuoussimilarities across incommensurables’, such as eating an old shoe as if itwere a gourmet meal, as in Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925)(Jayamanne, 2001:189). The idea that the slapstick gag represents aninterruption of conventional knowledge is put forward by DonaldCrafton, who argues that the utility-turned-unpredictability of slapstickgags amounts to a rupture in the linear process of understanding. ‘Oneway to look at narrative’, he says,is to see it as a system for providing the spectator with sufficientknowledge to make causal links between represented events.According to this view, the gag’s status as an irreconcilabledifference becomes clear. Rather than provide knowledge,slapstick misdirects the viewer’s attention, and obfuscates thelinearity of cause-effect relations. Gags provide the opposite ofepistemological comprehension by the spectator. They areatemporal bursts of violence and/or hedonism that are asephemeral and as gratifying as the sight of someone’s pie-smittenface.(quoted in Jayamanne, 2001:185)Rather than taking events and shaping them into coherent order,slapstick events treat the world as if it were capricious, unpredictable,and suddenly explosive. To think of a gag as an ‘irreconcilabledifference’ is to emphasize its incompatibility with our understanding ofhow the world normally works. Slapstick, then, opens up the possibilityof the world becoming inhospitable and strange to us.A useful way to consider slapstick is through the work of HenriBergson. Bergson, as discussed in Chapter 1, believed that human beingsexist in a state of continual ambient awareness of the animated Vitalspirit’ of themselves and others, and that when a situation causes vitalityto be obscured and the ‘humanness’ of humans is lost or denuded,comedy is born from the sudden eclipse of life. ‘The comic’, he says, ‘isthat side of a person which most reveals his likeness to a thing, thataspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveysthe impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without