abstract: sabina amanbayeva

“Cony-caught into Belief: Early Modern Cony-Catching Pamphlets and Thomas Middleton’s City Comedy”

The paper follows the publishing success of Robert Greene’s series of cony-catching pamphlets, sensational stories revealing the “art of cony-catching,” or various tricks and deceptions that London criminals use in order to defraud naïve citizens of money. A total of at least five pamphlets published within a year (1591-1592), Greene’s cony-catching pamphlets demonstrate remarkable “adaptation” to the medium of commercial pamphleteering: they progressively become more comedic, openly advertising the “strange cunning” of London criminals for their exotic appeal. The next step in the “adaptation” story is the pamphlets’ transfer to theatrical stage, as they appear in a different form in Thomas Middleton’s city comedies about fifteen years after Robert Greene’s publishing success (1604-1606). The paper argues that there is a structural affinity between the comic and the forms in which it was expressed. It describes how Greene’s print pamphlets become more comedic, moving towards performance and away from the humanist values of permanence, knowledge, and education. It also considers the pamphlets’  last act of “adaptation,” Middleton’s city comedies, in light of theater’s medium specificity – theatrical emphasis on presence (physical presence of actors/audience and in-the-now immersion in the present) that is so vital to comedy. Thus, the paper shows how comedic ephemerality is tied to “cheap” pamphleteering and ephemeral performance.

abstract: andrew stott

“Labor Relations, Sad Clowns”

This paper aims to explore what happens to our sense of comic performance when we choose to foreground clowning as a form of work. Beginning with a review of autobiographies by clowns such as Emmett Kelley, Oleg Popov, Coco and Grock, the paper will investigate the frictions and continuities that emerge between the demands of humor and the practicalities of employment, management, contracts, and coping with work-related injury and fatigue. Focusing on the labor of clowning supposedly elided by the costume and make-up, the paper will consider the transformation of the entertainment industry in the mid-nineteenth century, and the effects of industrial change on both forms of performance and conceptions of comedy.

abstract: john bruns

“The Comic Rhythm of Adaptation, or: ‘Come Up to My Place’”

In Feeling and Form, Susanne Langer refers to the comic rhythm as “the rhythm of ‘felt life,’” by which she means “the sentient aspect of organic unity, growth, and self-preservation.” In short, she argues, the essence of comedy is adaptation, the impulse to survive. This impulse is spent not simply for purposes of self-defense and accommodation, for although the oncoming future is indeed fraught with danger and suffering, it is full of opportunities as well: “with physical or social events occurring by chance and building up coincidences with which individuals cope according to their lights.” In this paper, I argue that we have yet to fully appreciate the vitality of comedy—meaning the general exhilaration of its “livingness,” in the terms of this panel, its “perpetual timeliness” and “ephemeral persistence.” Comedies performed on Broadway, suggests Langer, “do not last the hour of their passing allusions.” The timeliness of comedies past, however, endures—specifically in the form of adaptation (from stage to screen, from page to screen etc.). In this paper, I address this curious paradox of comedy and adaptation by considering the successful Broadway musical, “On the Town” (1944), and its adaptation to the big screen in 1949. My primary focus will be the lyrics to the musical number “Come Back to My Place,” which includes the spoken line “Don’t you realize a big city like this changes all the time?” The comic conceit of this particular number is that a young sailor, Chip, asks a cab driver named Hildy to take him sightseeing, but the sights he wants to see no longer exist (his tour book is badly out of date). Part of my interest here is in the changes the filmmakers make to the lyrics of the original Broadway musical. My larger aim, however, is to imagine what a “timely” performance of “Come Back to My Place” might be—not simply in terms of its fidelity (to the original) but in terms of its vitality: the comic notion of moving on, the feeling that, in a world fraught with danger and disaster, our best hope is to adapt.

 

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press: 1992.

Comedy: Meaning and Form. Ed. Robert W. Corrigan. San Francisco, CA: Chandler Publishing, 1965.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form. New York: Scribner’s and Sons, 1953.

Rich, Frank. “The Greatest Dirty Joke Ever Told.” New York Times. 13 March 2005.

panel participants

Sabina Amanbayeva is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation, “The Pleasure and Profit of Laughter on the Early Modern English Stage, 1590-1610,” investigates the status of laughter and theories of comedy in the plays of Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare as well as in early modern cony-catching pamphlets and jestbooks. She is especially interested in the intersection between the early modern theories of embodiment and the role of contemporary theater as a source of laughter and bodily/psychological transformation for the audience. She has recently presented conference papers on Twelfth Night (Northeast Modern Language Association, March 2013), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare Association of America, April 2012), and Volpone (Shakespeare Association of America, April 2011).

John Bruns is an Associate Professor of English and the director of the Film Studies Program at the College of Charleston. He is the author of Loopholes: Reading Comically (Transaction, 2009). Among his many conference presentations and articles are several on comedy, including “Get Out of Gaol Free, Or: How to Read a Comic Plot,” Journal of Narrative Theory 35.1 (2005); “Baffling Doom: Dialogue, Laughter, and Comic Perception in Henry James,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 47.1 (2005); and “Laughter in the Aisles: Affect and Power in Contemporary Theoretical and Cultural Discourse,” Studies in American Humor n.s. 3.7 (2000).

Lauren Caldwell is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, “Trifling with the Law: Obligation and Compensation on the Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Comic Stage,” investigates the interpenetration of marriage law and marriage comedy in the long eighteenth century, asking how comic playwrights engaged with and intervened in ongoing popular debates about the nature and extent of obligation in marriage—legal and otherwise. Her article “‘Drink up all the Water in the Sea:’ Contracting Relationships in Congreve’s Love for Love and The Way of the World” is forthcoming from ELH.

Andrew Stott is Professor of English and Dean of Undergraduate Education at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He is the author of Comedy (Routledge, 2005) and The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, Madness, and the Story of Britain’s Greatest Comedian (Canongate, 2009), which won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction, the George Freedley Memorial Award, and the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography. Most recently he has published “Clowns on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Dickens, Coulrophobia, and the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi” in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 12.4 (2012). Other essays on comedy have been published in The Upstart Crow and The Renaissance Theatre: Performance, Design (Ashgate, 1999).

session description

Among scholars of English literature, comedy remains a rather neglected category. In fact, comedy is sufficiently slippery that we even have difficulty determining what type of object it is. Is it a genre? A form? A mode? This special session is predicated on the conviction that such basic difficulties both necessitate and provoke critical conversations across disciplines and historical periods, opening onto rich new avenues for capacious, collaborative work. This panel seeks to showcase recent writing by three of the small group of scholars who are committed to direct and specific engagements with comedy—whatever it may be.

While elements of the comic appear in many print genres, this panel focuses on comedy’s long life in performative media, for it is here that comedy’s special problems emerge most clearly. We humans have performed comedy in some form or other since first we learned to laugh, and we’re still laughing today. However, such transhistorical endurance is inextricably linked with a conflicting truism: the idea that “you had to be there,” that comedy in its supreme timeliness often fails to translate beyond the moment of its performance. This pair of recognitions comprises a central paradox of comic experience, one that this session takes as its motivating problem. Perpetual timeliness. Ephemeral persistence.

One way of imagining how this paradox functions is through the idea of adaptation. The question of comic adaptation—especially with regard to comedy’s more ineffable manifestations (the joke du jour, popular ephemera)—is practically and pedagogically urgent. But as we participate in contemporary comic culture, our continual return to the comedy of the past suggests that adaptation’s importance lies deeper still: that we are ceaselessly drawn to that original moment of comic timeliness, that our timeliness is in dialogue with theirs. Adaptation acknowledges that every version is an act of creation— that without performance we have nothing—while retaining the idea that there is something to adapt, that any conversation about comedy must, like its host form (or genre, or mode) locate its own timeliness in the long sweep of time.

Classic theorists of comedy, like Bergson, Freud, and Bakhtin, inform any conversation about comedy, but this panel’s interest in performance and adaptation prompts attention to a more diverse and excitingly resonant body of recent scholarship. These include foundational studies in adaptive theory, like W. B. Worthen’s Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (2003) and Linda Hutcheon’s Theory of Adaptation (2006). Historicist work on adaptation, like that of Jean Marsden, Michael Dobson, and Katherine Scheil, traces the ongoing life of classic comedy, while scholarship on popular ephemera associated with comedy (farce, burlesque) by scholars like Stephen Purcell, Carol Chillington Rutter, and Richard Schoch expands the comic field. Finally, work on contemporary comic performance—from Judith Milhous and Robert Hume’s classic Producible Interpretation (1985) to practical manuals on comic effect—speak to this panel’s conviction that comedy is only comedy when it lives.

The papers in this session engage with a number of disciplines, historical moments, and media; what unites them is the understanding, born of the material that is their matter, that the history of performance is a history of adaptation. Through each paper’s unique contextualization of comedy, we approach a better understanding of comedy itself. Andrew Stott, for instance, explores what happens to our sense of comic performance when we choose to foreground clowning as a form of work. In “Labor Relations, Sad Clowns,” Stott examines late nineteenth­-century representations of clowns in a changing popular entertainment market that regarded them as faded survivors of an age before technological spectacle and associated them with anachronism and a naïve nostalgia for the pre-industrial. He argues that this history is a pre-­history: that the technology­-driven marginalization of clowning—its negative adaptation from comic performance to work—comes to influence the conceptualization of comedy and humor in classic theorists such as Bergson, Freud, and Herbert Spencer.

By contrast, John Bruns works with the problem of comic post­history in “The Comic Rhythm of Adaptation, or: ‘Come Up to My Place.’” Bruns argues that if comedy, in Susanne Langer’s phrase, is defined by its “sentient aspect of organic unity, growth, and self-­preservation” (Feeling and Form, 1953) we nevertheless have yet to fully appreciate that comic vitality. Comedies performed on Broadway, for instance, seem lively but ephemeral—but what if they are adapted, as the successful musical On the Town (1944) was adapted? Bruns meditates on the musical number “Come Up to My Place,” a comic song about a young sailor whose guidebook to the big city is badly out of date—as it would be again when the musical was adapted for the big screen five years later. Bruns uses the sailor’s comic problem to imagine what a “timely” performance of “Come Up to My Place” might be, not simply in terms of its fidelity (to the original) but in terms of its vitality: the comic notion of moving on, the feeling that, in a world fraught with danger and disaster, our best hope is to adapt.

After these pre-­ and post-­histories, our final panelist relocates us in the world of historical practice by examining the way that comic adaptation, then as now, allows us to engage with and refigure our perceptual experience. Sabina Amanbayeva will present her paper, “Cony­-caught into Belief: Early Modern Cony­-catching Pamphlets and Thomas Middleton’s City Comedy.” In it, she explores how Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters (1606) transforms the print genre of the cony­-catching pamphlet (short stories about the criminals of London) into a dramatic mode, and she asks us to re­ think adaptation in light of media specificity. Amanbayeva argues that the staging of cony-catching stories in Middleton’s comedies intensifies the similarity, or even the identity, between representing and actually committing a crime. Yet in Middleton’s hands, London’s criminals—ostensibly condemned in the moralizing prose narratives—find new life as heroes and comic entertainers. Confronted with this new guise, we, like Middleton’s original audience, must ask: has adaptation changed them, or us?

Doesn’t it always?