Judith Roof - The Comic Event: Comedic Performance from the 1950s to the Present

For Andrew Robert

Ando the Great

Holzapfel

(19832011)

The Dude Abides

The Comic Event

Comedic Performance from the 1950s to the Present

Judith Roof

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The comic always owes other comics and so, too, does a book on the comic event, so I thank those whose comic events offered both material for this book and the inspiration to write it: Brian Holcomb for first raising the whole question of comedy in his project on wit. And there has been no more insistent comic presence than the inveterate joke-teller, Tom Byers, who most earnestly and continually thrust comedy into academic existence. One of Toms oft-repeated jokes (the only one I can ever remember) appears in this books Prolegomenon. When people learn that one is writing a book on comedy, everyone has a favorite example, so I have many friends to thank for material included in this book: Aaron Jaffe, Tim Morton, Michael Miller, Dennis Allen, Alanna Beroiza, Seth Morton, Jonathan Eburne, Charles Tung, Abby Goode, Lance Norman, Matt Bowman, Melissa Fore, Laura K. Richardson, Cary Wolfe, Joe Campana, Joe Carson, Roderigo Martini-Paula, Clint Wilson, Christian Johnson, Marley Foster, Daniel Crumbo, and Riley Smith. For the resulting script, I would like to thank various readers and commentators, including Katherine Burkman, Lynda Zwinger, Ray Ryan, and those who reviewed the manuscript for the press. I also deeply appreciate the care and insight of Bloomsbury editors, Mary Al-Sayed and Katie Gallof. The text wouldnt have emerged if it had not been for Jake Levens, who worked as my research assistant for this project, and Alex Adkins and Hannah Biggs, who helped prepare the manuscript. And I am most grateful to Melissa Bailar, who put up with the process of writing this book.

Sections of Bit III have been adapted from previously published articles: Sketchy Counterculture, Preserving the Sixties: Britain and the Decade of Protest , eds. Trevor Harris and Molly OBrien Castro, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 144159, and Aaa, aaa, aaa: Repetition/Compulsion, and Queer Comedy in Little Britain, Frames 22, no. 22 (2009): 1630.

Nell: (without lowering her voice): Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But

Nagg ( shocked ): Oh!

Nell: Yes, yes, its the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But its always the same thing. Yes, its like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we dont laugh any more.

Samuel Beckett, Endgame , 1819

This book will always have been too late, too after the fact. The thing has already spread its waves. The jostling and gathering and exploding are already past. Retelling is never an option because there can never be the same wave twice. We try anyway. We tell and retell and every time those waves spread away and hit one another and make more waves. Containing this surf is like holding fireworks next to a lit match in a fireworks factory. They can only explode and explode again and again, maybe with different colors or patterns, or maybe in new directions with new reverberation, or maybe, eventually, slightly less ambitiously. Or finally, maybe, inevitably fizzle.

The next hundred or so pages offer a theory of comedy and of the comic, aping the structure of stand-up, but beginning by rehearsing the conceptual necessities required for building a theorythe subject texts, a notion of the comic as a dynamic, the dynamics contributing elements, issues of genre, and the impossibilities of describing the comic without simultaneously destroying it. And after this, the endnotes offer another scene (as all comedy is a scene about another scene), this one critical, sometimes challenging, sometimes a tribute to voices that have already offered their insights. This study focuses on comedy as an event, a set of circumstances arranged (or that arrange themselves) to gather to a cut, a moment of perception, to a conscious or even unconscious recognition of something, or to something that maybe even sneaks up and produces an effecta grin, laughter, a knowing shake of the headwithout anyone exactly knowing the cause. The comic event is a set of dynamics by which the apparently incommensurate gathers, holds for a moment or... more (timing is all), finally explodes, opens up, proliferates, refers back to itself, begins to gather again. This notion of a comic event is both connected to and contrasts with the generic category of comedy/the comic, which is a register, a tonality, a holistic realm variously defined as everything from a friendly disposition to a happy ending. Despite the slightly fuzzy distinction between the comic event and comedy/comic, what follows will collapse the two unabashedly. There is no point in continuing the distinction. They are unruly.

Exemplars of the comic event I consider will be comic performances that have been recorded and preserved and are currently available in digital media. These include sitcoms, skit shows from the United States and the United Kingdom, parody films, recorded stand-up routines, comic exchanges from talk shows, etc., from the past 60 years. The problem, of course, is that as recordings, all of these examples lack the complexities of presence, feedback, and ambiance that characterize, according to Philip Auslander, the live comic performance itself. Recordings are shadows, pale copies, but good evidence of the discussion nonetheless.

The comic event focuses on the concatenation of acts, discourses, audiences, repetition, seriality, self-consciousness, and feedback that occur in performance (telling, enacting, observing), gathering momentum, delaying, accruing to the right moment to condense, cut, break apart, recombine. In this sense, the comic event is always a performance of sorts (even if only retrospectively) and usually self-conscious of itself as comedy. Jokers always know they are joking and generally we know, too, even if we think we dont know or believe ourselves to have been taken in. When we laugh at apparent accidents, we laugh at them because we instantly review the elements of the occurrence as constituting a comic event retrospectively. The comic event, thus, may be both or either deliberate or accidental jokes, bits, skits, caricatures, routines, sketches, happenings, routines, etc. As part of its dynamic of gathering, the comic event engages multiple perspectivesa teller or actor or more than one, an observer, listener, recipient, a consciousness of the comic tenor of the situation, a shared environment of some sort. It is also always a scene about another scene, opening out and folding in sometimes infinitely as a mise en abyme . As a performance broadly speaking, the comic event is not a phenomenon occurring generally

As a dynamic that engages a range of other scenes deriving from any sociocultural sourceeverything from momentary accident and coincidence to the history of comedy, linguistic play, caricatures and impersonations, social circumstances, political conditions, individual relationships, immediate circumstancesthe comic event builds, gathering self-conscious serial repetitions, delaying, arresting, and addressing multiple audiences, until at some moment this gathering suddenly congeals, cuts to one or even several among a plethora of hovering possibilities that retrospectively re-trope what has gathered. What has to that point been an unformed set of possibilities (even though we usually already know it is being formed) coheres as a separable event in time that nonetheless repeats, continues, going forward and backward at the same time. The comic events dynamic is also akin to the operations of psychical/media organizations denominated apparatus that engage processes that range from the social to unconscious responses and everything in between (see more on this later). Although participants in a comic event may know something is coming and may even know what that is, the dynamic of accruing operates anyway, always offering a focal point from which perspective the entirety of the gathering suddenly takes on one (or usually several) epiphanies (to hijack a loftier result), which then become fodder for new gatherings.