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69 It is axiomatic that cartoons from the studio period were made to make us laugh. Big belly laughs. Speaking as someone who attended the local “show” almost weekly for most of the 1950s, after the big producers had been forced to divest themselves of their theaters, but before economic pressures, changes in audienceship , and competing entertainments put the industry in its downward spiral, I can attest to the producers’ and exhibitors’ success in the jocularity department. We kids laughed like crazy at cartoons. But so did grownups. Movie audiences seem to have been much more exuberant then; if it was funny, we laughed. We cried when appropriate too. I recall my parents sniffling along with the kids when it dawned on us that Wendy unfairly could not fly with Peter Pan back to Neverland just because she was growing up. Was this the origin of our 1960s rage against injustice? Did the models of parenting so strongly presented (and so Victorian) affect our behavior as parents? I believe that, as my generation did, the young and old moviegoers of earlier days laughed en masse at cartoons. I have no way of proving it except to note that theatrical performance historically has involved responsive audiences, and there is no reason to think that classic cartoons were an exception. I want to examine here how the films of the 1930s used the performative signature of infectious laughter to convey meaning. It is obvious when watching them that there was more to the films than just some sort of tickle. The filmmakers had multiple audiences in mind from the beginning. Hollywood cartoons before the 4 Infectious Laughter Cartoons’ Cure for the Depression Donald Crafton There are 1,583,687.62 laughs in this collection of treasures from the Looney Tunes vaults. Your count may vary and, of course, contents will settle during shipping. —Package description, Looney Tunes Golden Collection, vol. 4 70 Donald Crafton age of television addressed adults as well as children. Since the films participated in the articulation of the visual culture of their day, meaning was densely and sometimes ambivalently packed. Assumptions about class, race, and gender were silently at work too. BENIGN LAUGHTER: FORGETTING THE DEPRESSION There are so many books on the nature and function of laughter, it makes you want to cry.1 I won’t try to reinvent a couple of hundred wheels here but, rather, introduce the subject by pointing out that interest in the connection between laughter and audience behaviors has established credentials. “Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common,” Bergson wrote in 1904. “It must have a social signification.” Bergson also recorded something obvious to anyone attending spectacles, sports, or lectures: “Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. . . . How often has it been said that the fuller the theatre, the more uncontrollable the laughter of the audience!”2 In Freud’s book on humor he devoted a chapter to “The Joke and the Varieties of the Comic” and claimed that it takes at least three people for a joke to work. For Freud humor was always about power, often favored the weaker side over the powerful, and was capable of use as a weapon to make someone “contemptible and rob him of any claim on dignity or authority.”3 So laughter seems to have a built-in proclivity toward group expressivity . How appropriate for Hollywood. On the question of the social efficacy of their products, the movie moguls (and Disney was exhibit number one in animation) often retreated behind the “mere entertainment” apology, saying that they were in a business foremost and that they wanted to please most people while offending few, thus denying responsibility for whatever social message their films might contain.4 Richard Maltby has commented on the entrenched politically and socially conservative stance in the production companies of Hollywood. “The entertainment ethic,” he wrote, “proscribed an area of human activity, going to the movies, as being detached from political significance. Movies were, according to the accepted wisdom of their manufacturers, mere ‘harmless entertainment,’ at most influencing only fashion and shirts.”5 It should be added, though, that producers were willing to take credit for progressive social content when it suited their purpose—as Jack Warner did for the Warner Bros. social problem and crime films. Many people object when writers, teachers, or cocktail party raconteurs “read too much” into films, but there also are serious scholars who defend the notion of benign entertainment. Peter...

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