Historiography and Humorlects

History/Theory

I once had a competition with a screenwriting instructor in my program. Which of our students would most appreciate W. C. Fields's oddball melodrama parody The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933): the MFA screenwriters (his team) or the MA class in film studies (mine)? The result, a draw. Love-all. Two classes at Columbia that year got to sit stone-faced through one of Fields's most divisive two-reelers; two instructors were shamed in their tastes by their unlaughing students, and no amount of appeals to the work of Linda Hutcheon would save us.¹ Such are the delights of teaching comedy.

This essay is an exercise in licking my wounds. Because I want to use that experience—and, indeed, that film—as a way of thinking about the oft-perplexing qualities of past laughter and the difficulties of evaluation that they impose. What methodological protocols do we draw on, as historians, to make sense of old comedies? And what in particular do we do in the case of past texts whose comedic properties puzzle us, leaving us uncertain as to their operations? At issue here is not just the tricky task of how to explain an old joke—which always risks killing it—but also the way our theoretical and historiographical methods can have a pigeonholing effect on the apprehension of past laughter. For too long, the media historiography of comedy has made do with only a paltry set of theoretical templates—primarily Bergson, Freud, and Bakhtin, with occasional nods to Bataille, Douglas, and (for parody) Hutcheon—with the resulting effect of flattening comedy's history into a tiny series of prescribed themes and variations (the return of the repressed, the grotesque body, and so forth).² But the historiography of comedy has also, I think, failed to give sufficient traction to humor theory's most singular virtue—namely, its sensitivity to how humor works in the moment as an innovative practice of sense-unmaking. As Paolo Virno has written, jokes—and we may include other forms of humor here—are "diagram[s] of innovative action" that display our capacity to make abrupt deviations from collective norms and conventions; they turn upon a "practical shrewdness" that seizes on "states of exception of discourse," and in so doing, they provoke in microcosm the "variation of a form of life."³ And yet once a joke enters history, it may begin to appear simply as part of a past "form of life" and not as the latter's state of exception, a dead letter that sediments into its contexts, more easily read as culturally symptomatic than as a live resource of cultural transformability.

The challenge, then, will be to formulate a historiography that somehow holds close to this "in the moment" work of comedies past. What makes The Fatal Glass of Beer a keeper, in this respect, is that its very strangeness has, over the past eighty-plus years, provoked several readings that seek to do exactly that. We can learn from them how different interpretive modes in humor studies can be related to different protocols within the genealogy of criticism itself—what I call, in what follows, hermeneutic, modernist, and vernacular reading strategies. But we can also gain a sense of more labile possibilities for historical evaluation that would avoid extinguishing humor's fuse between the rock and the hard place of a theoretical demonstrandum on the one hand and a determining historicism on the other.

The Fatal Glass of Beer

Before we plunge into these readings, however, some words on the film itself. The Fatal Glass of Beer was Fields's second two-reel short for legendary comedy producer Mack Sennett, made after the critical success of the first—The Dentist (1932)—persuaded Sennett to give Fields a carte blanche that the producer would soon come to regret. What Fields did was go experimental, turning back to the well of his vaudeville experience to offer an eccentric adaptation of his stage sketch "The Stolen Bonds," a parody of antique melodramatic theater he had first performed for the Earl Carroll Vanities of 1928. (This sketch supplies the...