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Miranda

Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone /

Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English- speaking world

19 | 2019

Rethinking Laughter in Contemporary Anglophone

Theatre

Édition

électronique

URL : http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/19821

DOI : 10.4000/miranda.19821

ISSN : 2108-6559

Éditeur

Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès

Édition

imprimée

Date de publication : 7 octobre 2019

Référence

électronique

Miranda

, 19

2019, "

Rethinking Laughter in Contemporary Anglophone Theatre

» [En ligne], mis en

ligne le 07 octobre 2019, consulté le 08 mars 2021. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ 19821
; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.19821 Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 8 mars 2021. Miranda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0

International License.

SOMMAIRERethinking Laughter in Contemporary Anglophone TheaterRethinking Laughter in Contemporary Anglophone TheatreSophie Maruejouls"'In the heart of each joke hides a little holocaust' (George Tabori): Horrendhilarious Wit onthe British Contemporary Stage"Elisabeth Angel-PerezHand to God: The Irreverent Laughter of Robert Askins - "Laugh, motherfuckers, that shit's

funny" (Askins 31)

Marianne Drugeon

Laughing Out Young: Laughter in Evan Placey's Girls Like That and Other Plays for

Teenagers (2016)

Claire Hélie

" Naissance des comiques gays et lesbiens américains : le rire queer comme performance esthético-politique »

Xavier Lemoine

Anasyrma et la hantise du rire dans le théâtre de Tennessee Williams

Emmanuel Vernadakis

Prospero's Island

Pushing for Efficiency: Gifford Pinchot and the First National Parks

Jean-Daniel Collomb

The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, or the promise of "something further"

Thomas Velasquez

Humanités numériques et études anglophones : Comprendre et explorer

Géraldine Castel

The Shulamite of Sodom: Wilde's Subversion of the Song of Songs and the Birth of the

Monstrous-Feminine

Gerrard Carter

Miranda, 19 | 20191

Ariel's CornerTheaterThe Snapper by Roddy Doyle and Alys, Always by Lucinda Coxon

Performance Review

William C. Boles

Textures and Layers of Sound: An Interview with Marcus Fischer

Interview

Alice Clapie

The Scarlet Letter : A comme adaptation

Critique

Aliette Ventéjoux

Tennessee Williams in translation : retour sur la première traduction en français de Camino Real

Retours d'expérience

Bertrand Augier

Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome: The Emcee and the Master of Metaphors in Bob Fosse's

Cabaret

Essay

Gerrard Carter

Music, dance

Regard sur Holy de la compagnie Affari Esteri

Festival Le Temps d'Aimer la Danse, Biarritz, Le Colisée, 7 septembre 2019

Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud

Singing to the Most High for those below: the construction of gay male identity and the motifs in Josiah Wise's "cherubim"

Alejandro Gouin

Three Ballerinas: A Moving Sketch (Jellybean Dance Collective, 2019) An interview with dancer and choreographer Victoria Niblett

Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud

Breaking Virginia's Waves (1931): from page to stage

Jean-Rémi Lapaire

Film, TV, Video

Interview with Maria Giese, April 16, 2019

Cristelle Maury et David Roche

Conference Report: 25th SERCIA Conference: "Trouble on Screen"

Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France, September 4-6 2019 - Conference organized by Elizabeth Mullen

and Nicole Cloarec

Sophie Chadelle et Mikaël Toulza

Miranda, 19 | 20192

British visual artsElizabethan Treasures, Miniatures by Hilliard and OliverExhibition review - National Portrait Gallery, London, 21 February - 19 May 2019Alice LeroyRecensionsFrançois-René de Chateaubriand, Voyage en Amérique. Édition de Sébastien Baudoin.

Christine Dualé

Julien Nègre. L'Arpenteur vagabond. Cartes et cartographies dans l'oeuvre de Henry

David Thoreau.

Mathieu Duplay

Édouard Marsoin, Melville et l'usage des plaisirs.

Mark Niemeyer

Rick Darke and Piet Oudolf, Gardens of the High Line: Elevating the Nature of Modern

Landscapes.

Claire Cazajous-Augé

Roy McFarlane. The Healing Next Time.

Eric Doumerc

Jean-Pierre Richard, Shakespeare Pornographe. Un théâtre à double fond

Armelle Sabatier

Julie Neveux. John Donne. Le Sentiment dans la langue.

Claire Guéron

Carine Lounissi, Thomas Paine and the French Revolution.

Rachel Rogers

Ophélie Siméon, Robert Owen's Experiment at New Lanark; From Paternalism to

Socialism.

Alexandra Sippel

Xavier Kalck,"We said Objectivist". Lire les poètes Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen,

Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky.

Fiona McMahon

James Gifford. A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical

Fantastic.

Béatrice Duchateau

Silvia Pellicer-Ortín, Julia Tofantšuk (eds.), Women on the Move. Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing.

Sara Strauss

Rachel Bouvet et Rita Olivieri-Godet, Géopoétique des confins

Françoise Besson

Miranda, 19 | 20193

Sophie Maruejouls-Koch and Emeline Jouve (dir.)Rethinking Laughter inContemporary Anglophone Theater Le Théâtre anglophone contemporain et les nouveaux enjeux du rire

Miranda, 19 | 20194

Rethinking Laughter inContemporary Anglophone TheatreSophie Maruejouls

1 The revival on the contemporary stage of long-established aesthetic categoriesinherited from the comic tradition and comprising a wide variety of styles, ranging

from the burlesque, the slapstick or the farcical to satirical and black comedies, calls for a re-examination of the role and function of laughter in anglophone theatre since the second half of the twentieth century. In a post-Auschwitz world where, according to Theodor Adorno's much-quoted dictum, it has become impossible to write poetry, the diversity of comic forms seems to have provided playwrights with the means of filling the void of the unspeakable. As early as 1958, Ionesco felt the need for a theatrical medium that had to be violently comical, that had "to push everything to paroxysm, to the point where the sources of the tragic lie" (Ionesco quoted in Esslin

142). In this light, the comic voice, as it manifests itself on stage today, could prove to

be the catalyst for a new understanding of the tragic. This idea was suggested by Mireille Losco-Lena in 2005, when she wrote that the use of comic forms could breathe new life into theatre and help redefine the tragic (249). So, if it is still possible for spectators to laugh today, what makes them laugh? What is the meaning of the bursting, inarticulate voice that shakes them? Is it simply the only possible answer to the strangeness of the world, to its radical inhumanity? Or, in that shared space created by laughter, couldn't there be a desire to go beyond nihilism and an affirmation of humanity? The Rabelaisian experience of laughter as pure outburst or Baudelaire's description of the intoxicating power of laughter seem indeed to hint at something absolute, "something terrible and irresistible" (Baudelaire 156) that unsettles the relation of the public to the spectacle and renews the comic tradition to expand the potentialities of laughter, making it not just "the only imaginable and definitively terminal result" (Bataille 99), but also a means of setting thought in motion and continuing to be human in a world that no longer seems to be so.

2 The use of the term "contemporary" has to be understood as covering the period fromthe Second World War to today, a period marked by the horrors of two world wars, by

the widening of the gap between the rich and the poor, by climate change, by the

Miranda, 19 | 20195

gradual extinction of animal species, by terrorism... the list is long and could be even longer. Yet, through these troubled times, the comic form has developed into a highly reflective mode of understanding and representing the real. It has become a means of making sense of a multi-faceted, complex and ever-changing world whose propensity for not making sense, whose absurdity, resists our interpretative power, our need for coherence and order, a world that leaves us at times with only two options: laughing or crying. In its multiplicity of forms, motives and effects, laughter remains a highly enigmatic, highly theatrical externalization of something that cannot be named, which is why plays that make us laugh cannot simply be categorized as light-hearted art that refuses to take part in the violence of the world. After all, it is that violence that prompted such art, and it is because artists refused that violence that they chose to laugh at it.

3 Each contribution examines laughter from a specific angle, providing new insights on

the political, cultural, ethical and mythical implications of laughter on contemporary British and American stages. Each offers us a glimpse of our times through the lens of humour, revealing the endless potentialities of the comic voice, its capacity for renewal and for addressing a wide range of audiences.

4 Elisabeth Angel-Perez demonstrates how post-Beckettian playwrights use wit as a new

locus for tragedy to relocate, stretching the limits of language to produce a new form of laughter. Described as "horrendhilarious," it is a laughter that bursts in the midst of horror, a laughter characteristic of a neo-satiricist tendency inherited from the theatrical and verbal experimentations of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Her exploration of the way the innovative, politically committed playwrights of the last two decades have dealt with language, pushing its metaphorizing process to its limits while liberating it from the constraints of visual representation, sheds light on the infinite potentialities of wit as a political tool and as a central device in what has come to be known as In-Yer-Ear theatre.

5 In her analysis of American playwright Robert Askins's play Hand to God, Marianne

Drugeon explores the intricate connections tying comedy to tragedy. Drawing upon Bergson's famous essay on laughter, Drugeon further extends the philosopher's definition of comedy as mechanical repetition to shed light on Askins's use of puppets, revealing the originality of a playwright influenced both by a post-modern, American tradition inherited from Edward Albee and by British In-Yer-Face theatre. The combination of the funny and the disturbing in Askins's play is given particular attention, providing new insights into the regenerative power of the comic form as a means of putting thought in motion and creating alternative ways of seeing the world. Drugeon's final comparison of the various venues for the play, from off-Broadway to Broadway, then to London and Paris gives a broader perspective on the different types of laughter induced by different types of staging, inviting further reflexion on the reception of comic plays.

6 Claire Hélie's contribution focuses on British-Canadian playwright Evan Placey's

theatre for young audiences. Using research in psychology, her identification of the different types of adolescent laughter present in Placey's texts brings to light both the exclusive and cohesive functions of humour. Analysing the modalities of laughter in the stage directions and in performance, she demonstrates how laughter participates in the creation of a "youth effect" that reaches the audience through the maintaining of a

Miranda, 19 | 20196

constant tension between distancing and empathy, laughter eventually serving as a means of involving the public into the aesthetic and ethical issues raised by the plays.

7 Xavier Lemoine's article on queer laughter offers a well-documented andcomprehensive overview of the history of queer stand-up from the 1960s until now inthe United States. The variety of artists and shows mentioned richly illustrates the

author's argument, providing the reader with a new angle of perspective from which to approach queer studies. Drawing upon scholars Michael Warner, José Esteban Munoz and Jean Luc Nancy, to name a few, Lemoine explores such notions as "counterpublic," "disidentification" or "presence" to find a theoretical ground for laughter and queerness to meet. Laughter as outburst, as something ephemeral and unfixed, belongs to the margins of humanity, to those moving limits that allow for the emergence of a queer subjectivity. As a privileged space where new horizons can be glimpsed at, the comic stage, queer stand-up especially, is reappraised by the author in order to bring to light its aesthetic as well as political potential and the significant part it has played in the transformation of American culture from the 1960s on.

8 Emmanuel Vernadakis's analysis of Tennessee Williams's ambivalent sense of laughter

through the 1948 play Summer and Smoke and two short stories written around the same period explores the many layers of intertextuality present in Williams's writing in order to shed light on the salutary, haunting authority of a laughter that originates in autobiographical material. Positing the gesture of anasyrma as a central, verbal as well as performative device in Williams's theatre, Vernadakis traces the origins of the American playwright's literary influences back to ancient Attic comedies, relating Williams's use of puns to Aristophanes's own mastery of language. The multiplicity of hidden meanings and influences that reverberates through Williams's texts are thus brought to the surface in an in-depth study that reveals the multi-layered dimension of Williams's comic voice, a voice that multiplies and overdramatizes the sense of "I" in order to bridge the gap between art and life, a voice that produces an ambivalent form of laughter, both apotropaic in its liberating, regenerative function and tragic in its stemming from a censored sexuality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor W. "Cultural Criticism and Society." Prisms. Trads. Samuel et Shierry Weber.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983: 17-34.

Bataille, Georges. "The Use and Value of D. A. F. de Sade." Ed. Allan Stoekl. Trads. Carl R. Lovitt et

Donald M. Leslie. In Theory and History of Literature (Vol. 14). Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press (1985): 91-105.

Baudelaire, Charles. "Of the Essence of Laughter, and Generally of the Comic in the Plastic Arts." In Baudelaire Selected Writings on Art and Artists. Trad. P. E. Charvet. New York: Cambridge

University Press (1972): 140-162.

Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. New York: Random House (1961), 2004.

Miranda, 19 | 20197

Losco-Lena, Mireille. " FoRire, chaos, désastre : vers un nouvel espace comique dans le théâtre

contemporain ». Recherches & Travaux (N°67), 2005: 239-249.

AUTHOR

SOPHIE MARUEJOULS

Maître de conférences

Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès

sophie.maruejouls@live.fr

Miranda, 19 | 20198

"'In the heart of each joke hides alittle holocaust' (George Tabori):Horrendhilarious Wit on the BritishContemporary Stage"Elisabeth Angel-PerezIf we take it from Aristotle that comedy has to do with evil and the ugly1, then laughter

becomes the symptom of some kind of merry fatality telling us about the inevitable evil of humanity. Laughter is therefore often (always?) the sign of an assertion (acceptation?) of the worst and tends to elect comedy as potentially even more tragic than tragedy: and this is because comedy does not repudiate ugliness and evil - on the contrary, it thrives on them. Even if it puts them at a distance, the basic rhetorical principle on which comedy is based is close to praeteritio ("I will not tell you what in fact I'm telling you", as famously exemplified by the "He said Jehovah" joke in Monty Python's "Life of Brian"). One can feel therefore, to put it with Edward Bond, that "the comic does not alleviate the suffering entailed by the tragic. It makes it worse - yet", and this is what Bond adds, "so doing, it changes the nature of the real and gives us back our innocence."

2 Bond's intuition deserves further analysis. Is this statement

really valid in our post-Auschwitz, post-Adornian world? Can we be as optimistic as post-Marxist Edward Bond, who keeps repeating that he is "a citizen of Auschwitz and a citizen of Hiroshima" (Bond 2)? If "we come after", as George Steiner puts it (Steiner 8), is innocence retrievable at all? The link between laughter and violence has been extensively commented upon. As shown by Laetitia Pasquet, one of the earliest critics who made a point about the violence of English humour is Baudelaire. In his well-known reaction to a British pantomime performed in France, he claimed that what struck him in the performance given by the English actors was the violence emanating from the performance3. Whereas Baudelaire's impression invites us to consider violence as intrinsic to British humour or to British laughter, other theorists or philosophers, among whom Bergson of course, suggest that we understand laughter (no matter its cause or nationality) as a

Miranda, 19 | 20199

violence in itself: a violence performed on the body (both that of the farcical mechanised character and that of the laughing spectators who are jerked out of their rational composed stance). In parallel I would argue that wit can be seen as a violence performed on language which is forced out of its logic (nonsense, absurdism), taken off its course and severed from its conventional symbolical level. Ever since Beckett, we have known that laughter is the best of places for tragedy to relocate. Ever since Nell declared that "Nothing's funnier than unhappiness", the porosity between the tragic and the comic has been a fact. In Mein Kampf (farce), Hungarian playwright and theatre director George Tabori writes: "In the heart of each joke hides a little holocaust." In this article, I will contend that wit is a privileged form to express trauma (be it intimate, domestic or collective) on the contemporary stage. Tabori's cruel joke epitomises and radicalises the post-Adornian turn. The major rupture indeed concerns what Adorno calls "light-heartedness": Art, which if not reflective is no longer possible at all, must swear itself off of light- heartedness. Compelling it to do so above all is what happened in the recent past. The proposition that after Auschwitz not one more poem can be written does not hold utterly, but it is certain that after this event, because it was possible and remains possible into the unforeseeable future, light-hearted art is no longer tenable. (Adorno 1981, 603-604) "[L]ight-heartedness", "serenity", "gaiety" (Heiterkeit, in German) can no longer be part of the frame and this paradigmatic turn delineates a new sort of laughter, a sort of laughter which becomes the best expression possible of the tragic feeling. A number of books have addressed the subject, starting with J. L. Styan or Kenneth Steele White who popularised such concepts as "the dark comedy" or "savage comedy", or, on the French side, with Clément Rosset's "exterminating laughter" in Logiques du pire (1971) and, more recently, Mireille Losco-Lena's "Rien n'est plus drôle que le malheur" Du comique et de la douleur dans les écritures dramatiques contemporaines (2011). In her dissertation, Laetitia Pasquet demonstrates that these books focus on the contradiction there is between laughter and tragedy. In this paper, I would like to further Pasquet's reflexion and demonstrate that on the contemporary stage, wit, as a specific form of laughter, plays a central role in the aesthetic experience of tragedy as the spectators "experience the tragic in the middle of a chuckle" (Pasquet 2013, 432). One could argue that, after the critical post-Brechtian often grotesque laughter the

1970-80 (Howard Barker's first plays and Peter Barnes's Laughter! and Red Noses are good

examples of this) and the In-Yer-Face 'grunge' laughter (Kane's Hippolytus masturbating in dirty socks in Phaedra's Love, Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking in which men and women can be bought with yoghurts in the superstore), another kind of laughter takes precedence when considering the politically committed, formallyquotesdbs_dbs31.pdfusesText_37

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