Comic Venus: Women and Comedy in American Silent Film by Kristen Anderson Wagner, and: Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes by Maggie Hennefeld (review)

Both Kristen Anderson Wagner's Comic Venus and Maggie Hennefeld's Specters of Slapstick make a necessary corrective to scholarship on film comedy performances by examining comedienne contributions from the early silent film era. A focus on major male comic silent film actors like Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin has overshadowed the work of comediennes, especially slapstick comediennes, who have been "virtually erased" from popular memory (Wagner, Comic Venus, 1). Hennefeld's and Wagner's efforts to correct the error of these discursive erasures also succeed in highlighting how many comedic and filmic techniques remain indebted to silent-era comediennes. More than projects anchored in recovery, each insists that scholars wrestle with understanding how popular culture relates to power and gender normativity. Perennial questions concerning women's capacity for humor, for instance, reify essentialist notions of femininity and contribute to the casual manner in which women's comedic efforts get disparaged and thus, excluded from histories of comedy and film. The denial of women's humor, Wagner argues, "is essentially a denial and suppression of women's social and cultural power" (3). While Comic Venus keeps these broader cultural concerns and feminist discourses in mind, Specters of Slapstick foregrounds how these feminist interventions relate to theories of comedy and laughter more explicitly. Hennefeld examines the overlooked nuances of female slapstick comedy in early cinema and in so doing engages feminist film criticism, comedy, and film history itself. Feminist film critics, she observes, are hesitant about comedy's ability to enact long-lasting change, especially given the myriad ways in which women have served as the butt of jokes and the object of sight gags. Hennefeld argues that a more rigorous engagement with the many representations, developments, and bodily transformations that slapstick comediennes underwent from 1894 through the late 1910s is a necessary step in understanding their significance within film history, gender politics, and protest.

Wagner organizes Comic Venus across an introduction, four body chapters, and a conclusion. Her chapters focus on tropes of female humor, beauty standards, explorations of desire adaptability to modern life by comediennes. Throughout, she juxtaposes three related comic genres and shows how each relates to that chapter's focus. "Light" comedies feature fewer physical gags and greater narrative cohesion and gained a greater market share during the transitional period (1907-15). Flapper comedies engage in bawdy humor and sexually suggestive situations. The third genre, slapstick, includes the most uproarious gags and physical comedy. Chapter 1, "'Have Women a Sense of Humor?,'" unpacks the enduring, sexist tradition that maintains that women are unfunny. Rather than simply disprove the stereotype, something her extensive archival research achieves implicitly, Wagner "interrogate[s] this line of thinking, to uncover what, specifically, about femininity is thought to be antithetical to comedy" (29). She concludes that a comedienne's identification with comedy, and with being funny, refuses sexist discourses that position funny women as antithetical to notions of refined femininity (71).

In addition to stereotypes about women not being funny, film comediennes faced strict beauty standards, which Wagner discusses in chapter 2, "'An Inferiority Complex in a One-Piece Bathing Suit': Beauty, Femininity, and Comedy." Appearance guidelines often dictated comedienne performances, the roles she could acquire, and marketing. Nevertheless, comediennes staged a subtle rejection of beauty standards as part of their comic practice by actively downplaying or masking their looks with costume and makeup. The variability of appearance—conventionally attractive women playing homelier women or making use of narrative tropes about makeovers/transformations—"served as a means of questioning the concepts of idealized beauty and femininity" for movie-going audiences (107). Against double standards that inevitably reify beauty ideals, Wagner imagines alternative ways to interpret these films, finding spaces in which comediennes can express their agency and, as...