Shakespeare’s Practical Jokes: An Introduction to the Comic in His Works (review)

David Ellis rightly points out that most discussions of the comic in Shakespeare’s plays are actually about comedy as a genre or mode. Studies of comedy generally scant the difficult tasks of defining what is comic in a given play and analyzing why certain scenes make us laugh fairly reliably and others don’t. To limit his study strictly to the comic within the plays, he addresses that intriguing and dangerous subgenre of jesting known as practical jokes, a term derived from the “practice,” or trick. This is a canny move because many tricks characters play on each other are manifestly engineered as machines for producing laughter, so that the comic intention is more evident than with more ambiguous speeches and acts. Ellis spends most time on the comic deceptions practiced on Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, the royal tricks played on underlings in 1 Henry IV and Henry V, the humiliation of Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well, the hoodwinking of Falstaff in the Henry plays and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the maltreatment of Malvolio in Twelfth Night.

Ellis sets out to investigate how Shakespeare the dramatist makes us laugh, rather than how this or that clown put these scenes across. The playwright poured so much energy into these mischievous or cruel fictions that they often exist in sharp outline within a given play, inviting us to peer into the workings of laughgetting, from invention and setup to the payoff and its aftermath. Ellis explains that he hit on “tightly scripted” practical jokes (19) in an attempt to reduce the variable factors of performance and the one-off genius of individual clowns, whose comic bits and improvisations could make even a humdrum passage funny. Along the way he engages with Bergson and Freud, and to a lesser extent Bakhtin and Sidney, in his search for a workable theory about what makes practical jokes funny or unfunny, and why we laugh at jests that humiliate people. While this strategy has its virtues, it turns up a selection of japes that share structural similarities but vary widely in significance and dramatic meaning, posing a considerable organizational challenge. The book does not always rise to meet it, unfortunately. A handful of Shakespearean scenes are mulled over in chapter after chapter, producing a repetitiousness interlarded with meditations on comic theory, modern jokes, and comic performance, many of them interesting but digressive. The table of contents indicates the structural problems posed by the material. The first two chapters promise to address the gender and status of the target and trickster, referring to networks of social relations within and outside the stage fiction (“Female Victims and Female Jokers,” “The Privileges of Rank”) but the third, entitled simply “Falstaff,” inevitably overlaps with the first two chapters. The last four chapters, which grapple with the aesthetic, ethical, and social questions prompted by the excesses of much comic laughter (“The Ideal Victim,” “How Far Can You Go?” “The Triumph over Shame,” and “Practical Jokes and Evil Practices”), consist largely of new angles on core themes and characters (including Falstaff) rather than genuinely distinct topics.

Ellis’s chief concern is to explore the cruelty of practical jokes and the social danger they pose to both trickster and victim. By beginning his book with a chapter on female victims and jokers, he suggests that gender difference will structure much of what is to follow. Yet the chapter does not examine the social, rhetorical, or humoral gendering of aggressive witplay, or at least in the depth one might expect from such a title. Nor does it explain why this provocative subject is given pride of place as the opening salvo. Instead the chapter starts with a sketchy comparison of Bergson and Freud, glances at clowns and comic language, and promises that practical jokes will open new doors onto “the workings of the comic” (33). Ellis stresses...