Slapstick

Slapstick is a form of physical comedy generally involving broad humor, horseplay, absurd situations, or violent actions. Other familiar examples are pies in the face, pratfalls (landing on one’s backside), walking into walls, slipping on banana peels, goofy faces, and “wedgies” (pulling up someone’s [Page 701]underwear at the waistband so as to wedge it between the buttocks). The term comes from a slapstick, a theatrical prop consisting of two sticks that slap on each other so that they produce a loud clap when applied with little force, thus simulating a hard blow with no risk to the actors.

Film examples of slapstick include works by or starring The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Lucille Ball, Jerry Lewis, Dick Van Dyke, Mel Brooks, Rowan Atkinson, Chris Farley, Michael Richards, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Jim Carrey, which feature cartoonish physical (and verbal) abuse, tit-for-tat fights, near-elastic facial expressions, over-the-top gesticulating, and general physical clowning. In fact, some of these stars are so recognized for their slapstick talents that they’ve had difficulty succeeding in serious roles.

Slapstick comedy also serves as a convention of some of Hollywood’s earliest feature-length comedy subgenres. For example, the Marx Brothers' anarchic comedies such as Horse Feathers (Norman Z. McLeod, 1932) and Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933) incorporated broad physical humor alongside complex double entendres, sight gags, and stream-of-consciousness plots (Monty Python and the aforementioned Mel Brooks almost singlehandedly revived this declining subgenre in the 1970s). As well, screwball comedies such as Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938) and His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) featured pratfalls and roughhousing alongside rapid-fire verbal gymnastics, farce, and heterosexual romantic plotlines. Today’s audiences will recognize the same in screwball descendants such as Bridget Jones’s Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001) and Something’s Gotta Give (Nancy Meyers, 2003). Finally, many of Hollywood’s animated shorts were constructed almost entirely of slapstick situations. Warner Bros.’s Wile E. Coyote, Elmer Fudd, and Daffy Duck, for instance, frequently fall down holes, fly off cliffs, shoot themselves in the face, find their heads stuck in rocks, or crash into painted images of caves. More recently, animated television shows such as Spongebob Squarepants (1999– ), Family Guy (1999– ), and Phineas and Ferb (2007– ) carry on this tradition in some of their episodes.

But Hollywood “talkies” and television shows are not the only media to embrace slapstick. In fact, since slapstick humor can also be understood and appreciated without words, screen clowns such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Mabel Normand, and Mack Sennett’s Keystone

Cops relied heavily on the form in their silent films. For instance, to escape a skirmish and gunfire in The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin, 1925), Chaplin’s Little Tramp climbs up and down walls, ducks under tables, and leaps dexterously from one piece of furniture to the next. In a later scene, to avoid plummeting to his death over a cliff, the character seesaws across the floor in a teetering cabin as well as shimmies up a gold-prospector’s body, ultimately standing atop his companion’s head. Most famous perhaps are the scenes from The Gold Rush in which Chaplin’s Tramp, virtually dying of hunger, attempts to eats his own shoe and in which the prospector, also famished, hallucinates the Tramp as a giant chicken. While silent, the comedy here is broad, the situations absurd.

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