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?