COMEDY

THE BODY 81Concomitant with the idealization of beauty is a cultural insistence onmastering the body, and making it conform to ideas of deportment andappropriate behaviour, regulating its functions and odours according towhat is considered acceptable, and what must be suppressed as crude orbestial. Norbert Elias, whose ground-breaking work The CivilizingProcess (1939) demonstrated how a concept of the body, and theappropriate way of managing it, lay at the heart of ideas like refinementand civilization, argues that one of the principal means of governingbodily manners has been through the introduction of shame. Feelingashamed, or developing a heightened sense of delicacy aboutnakedness, table manners, flatulence, and other ‘unpleasant’ biologicalfacts, requires disciplining bodily functions to fit the codes of etiquetteand avoid being shunned. As the rules of bodily discipline becomeincreasingly refined, a parallel sense of the primitive and brutish iscreated in its wake:The greater or lesser discomfort we feel toward people whodiscuss or mention their bodily functions more openly, whoconceal and restrain these functions less than we do, is one of thedominant feelings expressed in the judgement ‘barbaric’ or‘uncivilized’. Such, then, is the nature of ‘barbarism and itsdiscontents’, or, in more precise and less evaluative terms, thediscontent with the different structure of affects, the differentstandard of repugnance which preceded our own and is itsprecondition.(Elias, 1978:58–59)By demonstrating our disapproval of standards lower than our own weconstruct a category of barbarism against which we guarantee ourelevated level of civility.It is against these ideals of beauty and manners that physical comedyis produced. Put simply, comedy strategically bypasses civility to returnus to our body, emphasizing our proximity to the animals, reminding usof our corporeality and momentarily shattering the apparently globalimperatives of manners and beauty. Obscene, sexual, or taboo humouris predicated on an understanding of the socially tolerable body that itperverts in order to provoke laughter. Yet this does not amount to anauthentic moment in which we are granted a genuine and unmediatedexperience of our material selves, but rather a discovery of the bodythrough the contravention of civility. Out of the concept of bodily order,then, emerges the comic body.