COMEDY

92 THE BODYin a department store, the new couple enact a fantasy of leisure and plenty,characterized by their unfettered access to the luxury goods on theshelves. A similar bourgeois ‘green world’ idyll is conjured up as thecouple sit on the lawn of a suburban bungalow and imagine life asmiddle-class pastoral, where the trees are heavy with fruit and the cowsdeliver fresh milk. Ultimately, Chaplin’s slapstick in Modern Times isthe dumbshow of bodily cravings against social denial.THE FEMALE BODYThe golden age of Hollywood slapstick was not a golden age for femalecomedians. Women rarely performed the kind of stunts their malecostars were famous for, and were used instead as figures of eroticinterest, sentiment, or ridicule. The prolific producer of silent-eraslapstick, Mack Sennett, imposed rules for the use of women in hisfilms according to a descending scale of hilarity that held that old maidswere the funniest targets, mother-in-laws were second, but that it wasabsolutely forbidden to make a mother the butt of jokes for fear ofalienating the audience (Dale, 2000:92). Women who occupy the rolestraditionally considered sacrosanct by men, the romantic partner or themother, could not be represented as either physical or humorous inslapstick cinema, whereas the old or the unattractive could. This isbecause ‘Comedy positions the woman not simply as the object of themale gaze but of the male laugh—not just to-be-looked-at but to-belaughedat—doubly removed from creativity’ (Gray, 1994:9). Theobjectification of the female body in comedy is clearly evident: as thereward that awaits the hero, or in jokes as the primary locus of taboo, animaginative source for the proliferation of obscene and visceral humourthat focuses on sexual attributes.As we have seen in Chapter 3, a woman’s place in comedy has beendefined by either her sexual identity or her availability for marriage. Asa result, comedy engages in the repetition of negative stereotypes.Women are handed the role as the ‘handmaid of laughter, not itscreator’, in television programmes such as The Benny Hill Show(1969–89), where women actors wore ‘revealing frocks…an expressionof perpetual surprise (men are so clever/naughty) and a special way ofmoving that jiggles as many separate parts of the body as possible whilecovering the minimum ground’ (Gray, 1994:21–22). ‘What unites thenarrow spectrum of female types in the traditional modes of popularBritish comedy’, writes Lorraine Porter, ‘is their a priori definition byphysicality and sexuality: the tart or dumb blonde by her