The Comedy Studies Reader

Abstract

Readers—collections comprised mainly of previously published scholarship—are by design a mixed bag. They stake out fields or topics established enough to merit targeted collections of foundational texts and attempt to be representative but not comprehensive. Their appeal is to accessibility—grounding the initiate and appeasing the seasoned scholar. To that end, most of us automatically assume that “readers” are for students. We look to them as a way to anchor an undergraduate survey course. Maybe we suggest one to a graduate student who needs a quick primer or refresher. For scholars, however, readers rarely provide more than casual strolls along well-worn paths. This is not the case, however, with Nick Marx and Matt Sienkiewicz's Comedy Studies Reader, an expertly conceived collection that proves both familiar and new.Comedy studies is a patchwork field, composed of scholars from a range of disciplines, including (but certainly not limited to) literature, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, media studies, communications, rhetoric, and anthropology. It's a field born of nagging questions. Why do we laugh? Why do we laugh at things we probably shouldn't? A “comedy studies reader,” then, might prove more valuable than a generic reader. A comedy studies reader might provide a useful snapshot of a multifarious field. It might serve as a mission statement or a foundational testament. It might even serve ontological necessity. Marx and Sienkiewicz's collection doesn't lay claim to any of these, exactly. Instead, it “serves as a call to expand both the scope of comedic media that scholars and students consider and the tools they use to do so” (13). The collection “offers an opportunity to consider comedy as both a theoretical concept and a commercial product, while illustrating the ways in which these things are inevitably intertwined” (6). These statements of purpose reveal the editors' disciplinary homes (media studies and communication) and evince the book's preoccupation with film and television comedy (each chapter begins with an epigraph formatted as a film or television script). Although the text does, as its editors claim, probe “the history of Western thought about comedy, joking, and humor, in order to encourage its reexamination in the classroom,” the focus on comedy's commercial aspects tips the collection's hat more toward media studies than any of the other disciplines under the comedy studies umbrella (14). That said, it would be a mistake for us to consign the collection to media studies.The Comedy Studies Reader is expertly ordered. It consists of a clearly articulated (and accessibly written) introduction followed by eight chapters centered on key concepts. Each chapter has its own short introduction from the editors, excerpts from seminal authors, and essays that exemplify how “contemporary scholars have applied comedy theory to media texts” (15). Finally, each chapter includes a new essay that builds on the preceding materials. It is in these new essays that The Comedy Studies Reader achieves its most salient purpose. Students can take note of the scaffolding, how arguments are introduced, synthesized, and built; they can use the theoretical excerpts as foundations for further exploration, the representative and new essays serving as models. Scholars familiar with the theoretical frames, however, can find inspiration in the new essays. We can revisit old concepts in search of nuance and discover unexplored angles worth pursuing.Marx and Sienkiewicz begin chapter 1 with an excerpt by Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Carnivalesque,” which seems to suggest that the Russian philosopher and literary critic serves as an appropriate starting point for comedy studies theory. A contestable point, maybe. However, the Bakhtin excerpt is followed by Umberto Eco's “The Frames of Comic ‘Freedom,’” which both complicates (dismantles) and extends Bakhtin's position. “From antiquity to Freud or Bergson,” Eco writes, “every attempt to define comic seems to be jeopardized by the fact that this is an umbrella term … that gathers together a disturbing ensemble of diverse and not completely homogeneous phenomena, such as humor, comedy, grotesque, parody, satire, wit, and so on” (25). Reading this—after Bakhtin—alerts us to the constraints and affordances of comedy studies as a field. It puts us in a position to critically consider and thoughtfully engage all that is gathered under the umbrella of The Comedy Studies Reader. What we are in for, then, is not a chronological walkthrough of the tenets of comedy studies; rather, we are invited to consider how the diverse ensemble of not-so-homogeneous phenomena might usefully connect and overlap. The new essay, by Philp Scepanski, concludes the chapter by invoking Bakhtin. Scepanski's essay takes as its object of study the “notoriously base, self-consciously offensive, and largely critically reviled” animated sitcom Family Guy and mines the controversial text for answers to how irreverent comedy can provide us with “a better sense of how American comedy and culture respond to collective trauma in our time” (34). The essay serves as proof positive of the kind of scholarship Marx and Sienkiewicz invite us to engage with and produce.After Eco's citation of Freud and Bergson, it should come as no surprise that the central figures of the next two chapters are Henri Bergson (chapter 2, “Comedy Mechanics and Absurdity”) and Sigmund Freud (chapter 3, “Psychoanalyzing Comedy”). Chapter 2 pairs Bergson with an excerpt from Jerry Palmer's The Logic of the Absurd (1987) and Donald Crafton's 1995 piece on slapstick, “Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle, and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy.” These three foundational pieces lead to a truly fascinating essay by Evan Elkins on the shocking, antitalk show The Eric André Show. Elkins builds on Bergson and Palmer, as well as Bakhtin, exploring how the narrow-casting logic of postnetwork American television is drawing us into “darker, more absurd, aggressive, and avant-garde forms of comedy” (59). Chapter 3 begins with excerpts from Freud before presenting us with Paul Flaig's 2011 essay “Lacan's Harpo,” which proves a thorny though revelatory exploration of how Harpo Marx's absurdist comedy dissolves the arbitrary boundary between the symbolic and the real. Flaig's heady piece is followed by an essay from Andrew J. Owens who considers a much less controversial text than either Scepanski and Elkins do, opting to explore through a psychoanalytic approach CBS's extremely popular, though decidedly middle-brow, Big Bang Theory.For the most part, the remaining chapters cover expected but necessary bases: irony (chapter 4), genre (chapter 5), race and ethnicity (chapter 6), gender and sexuality (chapter 7), and nation and globalization (chapter 8). Like the first three chapters, each of the remaining chapters includes excellent texts that serve as foundations for the essays that follow. This review risks minimizing the value of these later chapters by not fully explicating them—something I am loathe to do, as the works collected here are just as strong as those in earlier chapters. What becomes clear as one navigates through The Comedy Studies Reader is that the dynamics of the field (comedy studies) make for wildly diverse, infinitely generative scholarship that has clear and useful connections across its myriad interests and domains. I'll confess that early on, I expected to skip through the chapters, reading only those essays whose titles piqued my interest. Yet with each chapter I found myself deeply invested in how all the pieces fit together—and before I knew it, I'd read the entire collection cover to cover, marking many of the selections with notes for work I hope to pursue in the near future.The Comedy Studies Reader meets its claim to be a wide-ranging introduction to comedy studies aimed at both scholars and students. While a majority of the primer is housed in media studies, this is not a bad thing. Marx and Sienkiewicz's selections and organization invite cross- disciplinary dialogue across issues that concern scholars of all fields. For instance, in chapter 5, we find ourselves reading about the features of the television sitcom. In the included excerpt from Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik's Popular Film and Television Comedy, amid discussion of shows like M*A*S*H and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, we are met with a reference to Freud. In itself, this is not surprising, as recourse to Freud is part of comedy studies' DNA, but for the reader of the collection it triggers recall of earlier excerpts; it invites backward glances to how the themes and goals of earlier chapters, though occasionally embroiled in generic, disciplinary features, easily build on and influence each other. Owens's essay on The Big Bang Theory, included in the psychoanalysis chapter (3), can be pulled forward and considered in terms of genre (chapter 5). Ji Hoon Park, Nadine G. Gabbadon, and Ariel R. Chernin's essay on Rush Hour 2 (chapter 6, “Race and Ethnicity”) hearkens back to chapter 4 (“Irony”) and the excerpt from Linda Hutcheon. Alfred L. Martin Jr.'s essay (“Generic Closets: Sitcoms, Audiences, and Black Male Gayness”) from chapter 7 (“Gender and Sexuality”) connects to chapters 4 and 6, and the excerpt from Andy Medhurst's A National Joke, included in the book's final chapter, brings us full circle, recalling Bakhtin and Eco. So while there are those of us who might have liked a more wide-ranging selection of comedic texts (Medhurst's piece is the only one to really address stand-up comedy, for instance), The Comedy Studies Reader expertly follows through on its promise for scholars—providing a clear invitation to play, to revisit old streets and explore new territories under the sheltering sky of comedy studies.