ABSTRACT
Perhaps no image caused early film spectators greater discomfort in the 1890s than the public eruption of female laughter: the convulsive explosion of ribs heaving in their tight corsets, loud ripples of vocal mirth issuing from the oral cavities, and, worst of all, the implication that inappropriate innuendos were not lost on female viewers. While many of these tense and uncomfortable visions of female laughter have been long since forgotten, they pose crucial historiographic challenges for feminist film scholars today, and remain broadly resonant and provocative reminders of the very deep-seated social anxieties about women’s relationship to laughter and comedy. As this chapter will explore, slapstick comediennes in early cinema both enacted and reflected heated cultural debates about the relationship between gender, comedic pleasure, and feminist social politics. From early 1900s trick films about exploding housemaids, to 19-teens knockabout comedies depicting domestic assault, to 1920s flapper films about commodity capitalism, silent movies featuring slapstick comediennes represent archival traces that reveal crucial formations of modern feminism and popular screen culture. During the years while moving pictures were emerging as a mass medium and commercial
institution, there was an explosion of discourse attempting to regulate and constrain female laughter in public. In 1898, theNew York Herald advised women to adopt something called “The New Laugh”: “It is a laugh, all but the sound, all but the opening of the mouth and the showing of the teeth. It is fun and amusement personified, but all silence.” At the same time as the Herald coaxed women to pursue an ethereal experience of laughter that would efface the role of the body, the Woman’s Home Companion leveled its censorship at “the funny woman” ad hominem: “We know you are very funny, but one’s face aches with continual smiling, and an exclusively funny diet is about as sustaining as a ration of mere pepper and salt.” Whether a site of inappropriate bodily excess or of gastronomical starvation, the female laugh was characterized as corrupt, immoral, and distinctly unfeminine. Yet, early motion pictures tell a completely different story about women and laughter.
It was completely conventional and uncontroversial for women to laugh uproariously onscreen, exemplified by films such as Rube and Mandy at Coney Island (Edwin S. Porter, 1903), Laughing Gas (Edwin S. Porter, 1907), Betty and Jane Go to the Theatre (Rome´o
Bosetti, 1911), Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Florence Turner, 1914), and The House of Fifi (Viggo Larsen, 1914). In Laughing Gas, an African-American woman, Mandy (Bertha Regustus), experiences uncontrollable laughter after being given nitrous oxide (laughing gas) by her dentist, and then proceeds to spread her laughter contagiously throughout the public sphere: to fellow streetcar passengers, gospel churchgoers, white police officers, and even to a justice of the peace. In Daisy Doodad’s Dial, a bored housewife practices for an amateur face-making competition in public, eventually getting herself arrested and then having hysterical visions at night of her own disembodied laughter and spectral facial contortions (Figure 13.1). In numerous bourgeois “comedies of manners” throughout the 19-teens and 1920s, women’s laughter often functioned as the glue that held the film’s narrative together. For example, in House of Fifi-a German comedy made shortly before the eruption of
World War One-a female hat shop proprietor practically causes the downfall of the Prussian Military by enticing high-ranking officers to purchase increasingly expensive ladies’ millinery. As the gift exchange and marital cuckoldry plots get messy, Fifi (Wanda Treumann), reorients the spectator by halting narrative time, stepping outside of her film character’s own body to share an ironic laugh with the spectator. Similarly, in American comedies from this time, such as Love and Gasoline (Mabel Normand, 1914), Are Waitresses Safe? (Hampton Del Ruth, 1917) with Louise Fazenda, and The Danger Girl (Clarence G. Badger, 1916) with Gloria Swanson, women’s extra-diegetic laughter-residing between the fictive world of the film and the living body of the film spectator-provided an image for stabilizing the comic slippage of misidentifications sustained by a film’s plot. Female laughter covered over the missing links in comedic film narration. Beyond the literal image of women laughing, ladies frequently performed outrageous and
perverse bodily gestures in order to provoke the convulsive amusement of laughing film spectators. For example, in popular films of what I call the exploding housemaid genre (see Hennefeld 2014a)—such as Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903), A Shocking Incident (AM&B, 1903), and How Bridget Made the Fire (AM&B, 1900)—working-class women accidentally incinerate or electrocute themselves while attempting to perform traditional domestic chores with modern mechanical devices. Using jump cuts adapted from vanishing
lady films-“now you see her, now you don’t!”—women disappear in puffs of smoke after heaping too much paraffin onto the hearth fire. The instantaneity of the film cut was thereby synchronized with the spontaneous eruption of laughter it provoked for the spectator. Women’s calamitous, contortionist, and disappearing bodies somehow had the power to mediate the otherwise very charged relationship between startling screen effects and uproarious spectator embodiment: between onscreen explosions and nervous spectator convulsions. While audiences delighted in the spectacle of moving pictures throughout the 1890s-at
vaudeville variety theaters, traveling shows, garden parties, and community centers-the physical encounter with women’s laughing bodies in the public sphere provoked considerable displeasure. Society columnists advised their female readers “to banish the giggles once and for all,”1 while derisive journalists warned all readers against the hazards of female senses of humor: “The funny woman per se is a pestilence in the land. Carelessly and roguishly she seeks only to make the world laugh, sends her merry shot and shells here and there and takes no note of the wounded in the field.”2 Women’s humor was here ideologically weaponized-equated with military violence-while female laughter was singled out for public censorship and repression. Early motion pictures, with their mystifying and slippery relationship to the history and
presence of the bodies that they capture, possessed the tremendous capacity to defuse pervasive social anxieties about the eruption of women’s laughter in the public sphere. Moreover, the instance of onscreen female comedy provided a curiously potent image for mediating the spectator’s own bodily experience of madcap cinematic movement. Like comedy, which hinges on surprise, reversal, and incongruity, filmmaking is all about the spectacle of paradoxes: animating past moments and still photograms as if they had come back to life and were really moving again before our eyes. In late-nineteenth-and earlytwentieth-century American culture, filmmaking and comedic performance represented crucial interlocking sites for women to redefine the norms and constraints of femininity. Meanwhile, the charged image of female humor onscreen gave filmmakers an impetus to experiment with both the aesthetic and formal potentials, and the social and political limits of narrative filmmaking (see Hennefeld 2014b).
