COMEDY

THE BODY 93over-determined sexuality, or her excess of sexual difference, and thetyrant or spinster by her absolute asexuality, or her lack of sexualdifference’ (Porter, 1998:70). While we might consider that the‘spinster’ or other unattached women often represent a more sinisterthreat of sexual otherness, rather than the negation of sexual difference,Porter correctly identifies the female body as the genesis of woman’splace in comedy. A sanitized version of this phenomenon results in thevirtual elision of the female body in the pleasant but asexual Anglo-Saxon wives and mothers of early TV sitcom. In 1952, for example, theAmerican show I Love Lucy was unable to refer to pregnancy, eventhough its star Lucille Ball was heavily pregnant and the show featuredan episode in which Lucy was delivered of a son (Horowitz, 1997:30).In this, the treatment of women speaks not so much of a risible andcaricatured sexuality, but a fear of female corporeality and thereproductive consequences of male fantasy. There is a long tradition ofconduct literature and etiquette books instructing women to controlthemselves and to be deferential and remain largely silent. Wit inwomen, while common, was to be discouraged and seldom displayed inpublic. John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774),warns that,Wit is the most dangerous talent you can possess. It must beguarded with great discretion and good nature, otherwise it willcreate you many enemies. Wit is perfectly consistent withsoftness and delicacy; yet they are seldom found united. Wit is soflattering to vanity, that they who possess it become intoxicated,and lose all self-command.(quoted in Burney, 1998:341–342)One is reminded of Jane Austen’s Emma, sharply reprimanded by MrKnightley for making a joke at the expense of the meek Miss Bates(Austen, 1987:368). Gregory’s equation of wit and vanity repeats amisogynist commonplace that women are prone to narcissism, and willsuccumb to it as easily as Eve did to temptation. The connectionbetween humour and moral suspicion has existed since the earliestwritings of Christianity. Joseph Addison mentions that he once heard asermon on the belief that ‘laughter was an effect of original Sin, andthat Adam could not laugh before the Fall’ (Addison and Steele, 1979,vol. 2:237), while Baudelaire held that ‘Laughter is Satanic; it istherefore profoundly human’ (Baudelaire, 1992:148).