Machine-Age Comedy (review)

Given its anarchic and paradoxical nature, comedy is notoriously difficult to write about. One of the few truths universally acknowledged among humor theorists is that any claim about comedy and its exact opposite can both be argued thoroughly and persuasively. Therefore, it takes more than a little bravery and good humor to engage the topic, and clearly Michael North possesses both. He has written a compelling and creative book that asks new questions about the relationship between machines, modernity, and comedy.

It is not an altogether new idea to examine the links between modernity and comedy. Indeed, there are those of us who have already argued that some of the characteristics that define the modern aesthetic—fragmentation, incongruity, paradox, repetition—are the very characteristics of the comic, and as a result many modern works are inherently comedic even as they explore disturbing experiences such as alienation, loss of identity, and violence on a grand scale. Furthering this idea, North argues that machine age comedy does more than just satirize or critique the increasing mechanization of modern life, which has usually been considered a cause for dismay, and claims that artists working in various media—including film, literature, and the visual arts—actually embrace the machine aesthetic to create a new form of comedy that responds to the demands of a technological society.

Beginning with a discussion about the influence of popular culture icons such as Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse, North observes that their appeal rests on the idea of repetition—the easily identifiable movements and reoccurring situations in Chaplin’s films and in the very nature of animation, which rests on technological reproduction. Wondering why the purely repetitious aspects of comedy are just as funny as the novel parts, North then asks if there might not be something potentially comic in mechanical reproduction itself. Comedy has traditionally been associated with the spontaneous and the unexpected, and therefore a comic style that arises from machine-like repetition seems almost like a contradiction in terms. North then posits that if there is indeed something inherently funny in mechanical reproduction, might not modernity itself, which is characterized by mechanical reproduction, “be governed by a comic rhythm, even when it is not particularly amusing”(5)? North’s claim is that comedy in the machine age is a different form from the comedy of previous eras because modern artists had to engage technology, and their engagement was not just an expression of the anxiety caused by the increasing mechanization of modern life, but it is also an expression of the liberating possibilities of technology.

Filmmakers, writers, and artists seemed to see the process of mechanization in the modern world in at least two different but complementary ways: increased mechanization may rob human beings of much of their freedom, but it also fosters the creative and imaginative powers necessary for people to manipulate it. This idea occurs to North because of Walter Benjamin’s ambivalent response to film technology. Benjamin saw film comedy fairly consistently as a defense mechanism for a population victimized by its own technocracy, provoking laughter “over an abyss of horror” (16), but in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he suggests that film allows for one’s liberation from habitual forms of perception, creating a “vast and unsuspected field of action” (17).

It is this ambivalence that is explored throughout the book, and North is really at his best when he working with the visual arts—film, art, and animation—for this is where the real liberating aspects of technology can best be glimpsed. His chapters on Buster Keaton and Dziga Vertov and on Rube Goldberg and Marcel Duchamp are especially original and insightful. These were artists who used machines and the artifacts of machine culture, and North reveals the exhilaration, experimentation, and creativity in their work, even if they express a certain anxiety about the mechanized modern world itself. Examining the striking similarities between Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera, and Keaton...