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Dorinson | A Bundle of Contradictions Joseph Dorinson Long Island University A Bundle of Contradictions Mark Winokur. American Laughter: Immigrants, EthnFcity, and 1930s Hollywood Film Comedy. St. Martin's Press, 1995. (304 pages. $29.95) / t a recent Popular Culture conference, a book on display beckoned. Above a picture of Charlie Chaplin and Edna Purviance as immigrants peering anxiously to the left, bright gold (like the proverbial American streets) letters beamed from a stark black cover highlighting the title: it seemed ideal for a course in humor. The author, Mark Winokur, takes a giant step toward interdisciplinary linkage. History, sociology, psychology, political theory, popular culture, literary criticism, and film studies all serve as grist for his critical windmill. After a cogent introduction in which many of these connections are made; the author forays into the world of Charlie Chaplin and the process of transformation. Winokur correctly perceives Charlie Chaplin as a bundle of contradictions. He concentrates on an often overlooked facet of Chaplin's persona: the immigrant. When he writes biographically and probes historically, Winokur's prose flows and his substance sparkles. He makes a compelling case that Chaplin altered his tramp figure to audience taste and tailored his transformation to cultural need. Not unlike Orson Welles whose biography was reviewed in the last issue of Film & History, Chaplin mirrored his dysfunctional family. He acquired his acting skills from his insane mother and negative behavior from his father who was "drunk, dissolute, peripatetic." The tramp is a refashioned comic Irishman, despite Chaplin's alleged Jewish genes, who fuses farce and melodrama into "the anti-self" on whom one can project repressed urges and fearful tendencies. Here, Winokur relies heavily on Maureen Waters', The ComicIrishman, to delineate the tramp with traits that constitute fantasy elements. Evidently, the hobo evoked xenophobic fear argues Alan Trachtenberg. Intuiting this danger, Chaplin transformed the tramp into "the little fellow," whose gentle, childlike, helpless demeanor rendered him less 100 I Film & History Regular Feature | Book Reviews threatening. Thus, the tramp serves as both a nightmare of middle class instability and a rationale for impoverished immigrants as products of "reduced circumstances." Soon, Henri Bergson is added to the stew, appropriately to illustrate a salient point. Comedy, particularly slapstick , mediates between people and technology just as technology mediates between people and their environments . Indeed, Winokur deserves credit for making Bergson accessible to the lay reader. He explains the opaque French philosopher's oft quoted formula that laughter results from "the mechanical encrusted on the living " as a triad of behaviors: a rigidity of body, a rigidity of mind, and a rigidity of character. Winokur draws his own paradigm to illuminate a comparison between Bergson and Chaplin, showing how Chaplin converts the machine to a comic instrument of escape. Jumping from the Bergson bandwagon to more recent engines of analysis designed by Elaine Scarry and Michel Foucault (whose cult following is just as baffling as Rush Limbaugh's), Winokur focuses on body functions in a noble attempt to relate theory to practice in Modern Times. Charlie's tramp tries manyjobs. None prove suitable. His body does not fit except, strangely, in prison. The workplace into which he enters is inverted and transformed. As the tramp progresses, he ascends a few rungs of social mobility attended with footfalls ofphysical mobility. He moves inexorably from factory worker to singing waiter. So far, so good. Winokur's next chapter takes us down to the Marx Brothers. Like Chaplin, they too became gentile largely because ofThalberg's tutelage. Based on and departing from an earlier work by HenryJenkins, Winokur agrees that Hollywood , vintage 1930s, desemitized Jewish stars to increase their national reception. But he takes a tenuous thrust further into Marxist analysis, psychoanalysis, and the attempt to build a community of landsleit. As doppelgängers run through the narrative, Winokur perceives the contradictory tendencies that animate marginals, i.e., accommodation and resistance. The Marxs (including Karl) satirize the wealthy and prick those great pretenders to wealth with equal force. Penetrating beyond cultural veneer, they race through society as if engaged in a demolition derby. Groping for a community base, a landsmannschaft, they are ethnic rather than Jewish in their quest. Stripping away surfaces, assaulting...

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