Knockabout and Slapstick: Violence and Laughter in Nineteenth-century Popular Theatre and Early Film

This thesis examines laughter that attends violent physical comedy: the knockabout acts of the nineteenth-century variety theatres, and their putative descendants, the slapstick films of the early twentieth-century cinema. It attempts a comparative functional analysis of knockabout acts and their counterparts in slapstick film. In Chapter 1 of this thesis I outline the obstacles to this inquiry and the means I took to overcome them; in Chapter 2, I distinguish the periods when knockabout and slapstick each formed the dominant paradigm for physical comedy, and give an overview of the critical changes in the social context that separate them. In Chapter 3, I trace the gradual development of comedy films throughout the early cinema period, from the “comics” of 1900 to 1907, through the “rough house” films of the transitional era, to the emergence of the new genre in 1911-1914. Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 present my comparative analyses of the workings of four representative “tropes,” ubiquitous in various forms of knockabout performance and in various representative slapstick films: i) The burlesque prize fight (in variety theatre, in the Ethiopian sketches of blackface minstrelsy and in Keystone’s “The Knockout”); ii) the Pete Jenkins act (in nineteenth-century circus) and the “Wild Ride” (a sub-subgenre of chase film); iii) the “One-Two-Three-Switch motif” in knockabout song and dance and in the slapstick pie fight; and iv) The “White Night” of the Ethiopian sketches and the “Inn Where No Man Rests” of early film. Chapters 8 and 9 present my attempt to synthesize my findings and come to a conclusion by concretely theorizing what this comparison teaches us about knockabout and slapstick performance. Slapstick has a twofold nature: as a performance style, it is a quasi-verisimilar acting “anti-technique,” incorporating acrobatic elements. As a film genre, slapstick represents an intervention in the superfluous violence of everyday life: it functions to recuperate the spectator’s sense of his/her own potential freedom from complicity in social violence; and to make reconciliation with others possible. Nevertheless, the spectator may well reject these functions and use the slapstick film as a pleasurable outlet for his/her own sadistic energies.Ph.D.2018-02-05 00:00:0