ABSTRACT
Comedy treats matters of sex more often and more openly than any other form. Its festive structure and Dionysial associations afford sexual themes greater freedom, while also providing a fictional arena in which taboos may be openly discussed without fear of social contamination. The unquestioned bed-sharing and co-dependency of partners like Laurel and Hardy and Morecambe and Wise is evidence of a loosening of the usual rules, just as the enormous popularity of a number of openly gay comedians, such as Julian Clary or Graham Norton, both of whom have made effeminacy and homosexual innuendo central to their act, seems to be at odds with a society that remains largely homophobic. Of course, comedy places sexual desire and erotic arousal within the context of laughter, rendering discussions furtive, titular, and selfconscious, and complicating its aims. Freud writes that ‘the spheres of sexuality and obscenity offer the amplest occasions for obtaining comic pleasure…for they can show human beings in their dependence on bodily needs…or they can reveal the physical demands lying behind the claim of mental love’ (Freud, 2001:222). In both cases, sexual themes amuse because some masked or elided aspect of the animal subject peeps through the civilized exterior and shows itself to be insatiable. Studies of sexual content in humour, such as G.Legman’s two-volume Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1975) or Christopher Wilson’s scientific study of joke function, stress that sexual jokes ‘offer the furtive joy of
ignoring taboos’ (Wilson, 1979: 131). Yet while sexual content in comedy may be pleasurable because it outruns censorship, it is also important to acknowledge the extent to which sexual themes play a part in establishing or consolidating norms of sexual behaviour. Wilson discusses the use and effect of incest jokes, for example, and concludes that ‘Humour that dismisses incest and other socially disapproved relationships as “laughable” may be seen to illustrate and reinforce sexual convention’ (Wilson, 1979:177). Similarly, as US comedian Joan Rivers testifies, we may view comedy’s representation of male and female gender roles, especially in narratives that conclude in marriage, as confirmations of culturally orthodox views of the nature of men and women. Jimmy Durante’s crack, ‘my wife has a slight impediment in her speech. Every now and then she stops to breathe’, or Groucho Marx’s ‘women should be obscene and not heard’, are both midtwentieth-century verifications of the patriarchal view of women as incessantly verbose in violation of their ideal role as sexually attractive objects. Comedy therefore articulates sexual politics from a number of contradictory positions, including liberation from censorship, exploration of desire, and insistence on conservative categories of gender.
