COMEDY

THE BODY 87caricature makes us identifiable by deforming us. Caricature is mostreadily associated with satire, with physical distortion commensurate tothe vices of its targets. William Hogarth (1697–1764), the painter andengraver best known for his series of ‘modern moral subjects’ TheHarlot’s Progess (1732), The Rake’s Progress (1733–35), andMarriage à la Mode (1743–45), used caricature in a distinctly literaryfashion, adopting an Horatian tone that belittles greed and hypocrisy.Caricature’s place in national political debate was also established in theeighteenth century, where cartoonists used it as a means oftransforming targets into the personification of their vice. For Freud, thepleasure in caricature is derived from its ridiculing of political figures,even when the image itself is unsuccessful, ‘simply because we countrebellion against authority as a merit’ (Freud, 2001:105). Martha Banta,who has studied nineteenth- and twentieth-century caricature in both theUSA and Britain, sees it as a subtle but powerful forum for establishingthe nature of normality. The questions that were being asked in thesecartoons, she writes, dealt with ‘essential (essentialist) concerns’, which‘broke through as a series of pictorial enquiries: “What is ‘English’?”“What is ‘American’?” “What is ‘civilized’?” “What is ‘barbaric’?” andthe most basic anxiety of all, “Where can we feel safe?”’ (Banta,2003:23). Caricature helped to mediate these questions by pictoriallyimagining the ‘other’ and making it monstrous or ludicrous in order toservice the anxieties of the white, urban middle-class readership ofmagazines like Punch and Life. Pictorial caricature is therefore ashorthand that uses elements of the human figure as a means ofconveying a complete set of ideologically correlated ideas.SLAPSTICK‘Slapstick’ is generally understood as physical humour of a robust andhyperbolized nature where stunts, acrobatics, pain, and violence arestandard features. Broad comedy of this type has been around sinceAristophanes, but the form known as slapstick came into being aspractically the sole condition of comedy in early American cinema,along with the keen artistry of performers like Charlie Chaplin, BusterKeaton, and Harold Lloyd, and the enterprise of legendary producerslike Mack Sennett. Slapstick is a perfect example of the way in whichgenres are shaped by the media that present them, as moving picturesremained soundless until 1926, forcing humour to be silent and visual.For Stanley Cavell, the technological considerations of early film wereabsolutely central to the comedy it produced for two reasons: