COMEDY

4THE BODYMan consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only thebody has more fun.Woody Allen‘The comic hero, by his very nature,’ writes Maurice Charney, ‘needs todeclare himself the patron of everything real, physical, material,enjoyable, and the enemy of all abstractions, moral principles,seriousness and joylessness. This is a matter of basic allegiance to thelife force’ (Charney, 1978:160–161). If the comic hero is a sensualist,then his or her main ally in hedonism is the body. The body in comedyis the medium through which humanity’s fascination with its instinctsand animal nature is explored. The comic body is exaggeratedlyphysical, a distorted, disproportionate, profane, ill-disciplined, insatiate,and perverse organism. Any Tom and Jerry cartoon exemplifies thisextenuated corporeality in its parade of bodies that mutate, disassemble,reconfigure, and suffer endless punishment while refusing to die. Comicheroes are often disproportionate caricatures themselves, excessively fator ludicrously thin like Laurel and Hardy, myopic and fragile like MrMagoo, or elastic like Rowan Atkinson and Jim Carrey. We might alsosay that the comic body privileges the facts of physicality over the idealof the physique, and its functions over poise, however those ideas mightbe structured at any particular historical moment. Jerry Seinfeld oncesaid that conventionally attractive people do not make good stand-upcomedians, as the audience distrusts beauty in comedy and wants theirclowns to be imperfect. An ideal of physicality must exist against whichthe comedian can be found lacking, thereby reassuring an audience thatcomic substance will be found in departure from those ideals.