Slapstick Modernism: Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy Pop by William Solomon (review)

As humor scholars often point out, works of humor tend to receive less critical attention and respect than so-called serious works. If this is true, then slapstick comedy gets the least respect of all because humor focusing on the pitfalls of the physical world is often considered juvenile and simplistic when compared with parody or satire. William Solomon’s new book Slapstick Modernism offers a welcome antidote to such critical dismissal. “Slapstick modernism” is the label that Solomon assigns to works created by many important artists of the 1950s and 1960s. Solomon focuses the most on Jack Kerouac and Joseph Heller, but he also includes numerous others, such as Eudora Welty, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon. Solomon’s primary claim is that these authors are inspired not only by the experimental modernist writers of the early twentieth century but also by those high modernists’ “lowbrow” contemporaries working in the film industry: figures such as Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon. In Solomon’s own words, “the rise of slapstick modernism signaled the coalescence in cultural practice of the artistic experimentation associated with high modernism and the socially disruptive lunacy linked to the comic film genre” (2).

Despite its title, however, the bulk of the book is actually not about those 1950s and 1960s artists who contribute to slapstick modernism. Rather, Solomon devotes most of his work to tracing the two cultural strands—high modernism and slapstick—that would eventually “coalesce.” Solomon’s goal here is to show that while on the surface the works of film comedians and experimental writers are very different, their thematic concerns and ideology often overlap. In particular, Solomon contends that both high modernism and slapstick film were concerned with offering coping mechanisms for individuals who found themselves overwhelmed by various forces in the modern world, such as “the mechanization of bodies and minds and the anxiety-inducing conditions of existence in the city” (9). Solomon organizes his material, then, by pairing modernist writers and slapstick comedians and drawing various thematic connections between them. Chapter 1, for example, pairs William Carlos Williams’s experimental Great American Novel (1923) with two Mack Sennett slapstick films, Lizzies of the Field (1924) and Super-Hooper-Dyne Lizzies (1925). All three works focus on the rise of the automobile (and by extension on the sort of mechanized factory work advocated by Henry Ford). For Solomon, both the Sennett films and Williams’s novel offer an “ethical opposition to the priorities informing economic rationalism by integrating the Model T into decidedly destructive undertakings” (32).

Along similar lines, chapters 2 and 3 loosely pair John Dos Passos’s novel Manhattan Transfer (1925) and several of Harold Lloyd’s thrill films. According to Solomon, both Dos Passos and Lloyd create works that are designed to affect audiences in specific ways. Manhattan Transfer utilizes literary collage (a technique Solomon develops an account of via filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s montage theory) in order to “persuade readers to adopt a hostile attitude toward the environment they inhabit” (68), whereas Lloyd’s slapstick “constituted an effort to help facilitate his prospective audience’s acquisition of the bodily and mental skills necessary to survive everyday life in the metropolis” (99). Chapter 4 focuses on the childlike comic persona of Harry Langdon, and chapter5—while not explicitly paired with the Langdon chapter—again returns to childlike personae in a detailed discussion of the works of Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, whom Solomon sees, along with Louis-Ferdinand Céline, as one of the earliest creators of a genuine slapstick modernism. Throughout all of these chapters, Solomon provides excellent analysis of the works under discussion, and he reveals many unexpected connections between high modernism and slapstick film. He has a tendency, however, to make assertions about the artists’ intentions that are not fully supported. For example, in the Harold Lloyd chapter, Solomon claims that Lloyd’s comedy “was intended to serve as a way to train people to master...