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69
STEFANIE SCHÄFER AND WIELAND SCHWANEBECK
An Introduction in Three Jokes
One
Q: What's the difference between a man and a condom?
A: Condoms have changed – they're no longer thick and insensitive.
Masculinity: perpetually dominant and perpetually in crisis, perpetually all-around-us
and perpetually invisible. Why would the field of comedy be different from the rest?
On Rolling Stone's list of the 50 greatest stand-up comedians of all time, men
outnumber women at a rate of four to one (Love 2017). The same rate applies to the list
of the 50 highest-grossing comedies of all time, only ten of which have a female lead
("50 Highest-Grossing" 2012). Women fare only marginally better in the Radio Times's
2019 poll of the greatest Britcoms, featuring prominently in about a third of the entries
(Rosseinsky 2019). The further one goes back in history, the more clear-cut the case
seems to be, which is why some authorities take comedy to be synonymous with
masculinity per se. In Jerry Lewis's famous assessment, "the premise of all comedy is
a man in trouble" (qtd. in Dale 2000, vii), the implication being that there can be no
comedy unless there is a man involved. Apparently, when Adam donated a rib for Eve,
he did not part with his funny bone.
But there is a curious incongruity here. If comedy truly is a 'man's world,' then why
has there been so little scholarly interest in the nexus between masculinity and humour?
Very few of the existing scholarly works in masculinity studies highlight humour in
any way (Kehily 2007), with some of the most prominent handbooks in the field
including biographical sketches and short entries on landmark comedies of the 20th
century. These tend to remain on a descriptive level, without explaining what exactly
is funny about masculinity or what the relationship between masculinity and humour is
characterised by. Overall, the material that dominates throughout these publications
reflects the widely-held belief that masculinity is, first and foremost, marked by crises
and violent behaviour, and scholarly work tends to privilege allegedly more serious
dramatic genres like war movies.1 Elsewhere, sociologists have drawn attention to the
gendered culture of telling jokes, scrutinising how men take the initiative and women
merely comply when it comes to humorous interactions (Hinz 2003; Merziger 2005;
Kuipers 2008; Abel and Flick 2012). Psychologists, in turn, hint at the underlying
gender disparity by supplementing these findings with musings on sexual
aggressiveness and the importance of humour when it comes to "positive self-
presentation" and the achievement of "gender-relevant social goals" (Martin 2007,
149). Crucially, though, these approaches do not highlight how gender clichés are
perpetuated in the process, and they appear to be equally disinterested in what kinds of
1 Cross-dressing comedies like I Was a Male War Bride (1949), Some Like It Hot (1959) or
Tootsie (1982) are an exception in that they have received quite a lot of critical attention
(Tasker 1998, 19-47; Phillips 2006, 61-84).
Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 31.2 (Summer 2020): 69-76.
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laughter masculinity is tied to, and how humour challenges or (re-)affirms the
boundaries of gendered norms. To paraphrase one of the most well-known joke
formats: three men walk into a bar, but not all of them leave with their masculinity
intact.
Comedy, then, appears to be no different from other areas where patriarchal
privilege reigns supreme by, paradoxically, putting men front and centre but allowing
masculinity itself to escape the analytical gaze altogether, in the manner outlined by
Michael Kimmel in his seminal book on The Gendered Society (2004): "[W]hen we
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study men, we study them as political leaders, military heroes, scientists, writers, artists.
Men, themselves, are invisible as men. […] So we continue to act as if gender applied
only to women" (6; original emphasis). In his insightful reading of the work of the
controversial comedian Louis C.K., Todd Reeser stresses the importance of going the
comedic route when it comes to challenging established norms, showing the way
forward and arriving at new forms of masculinity. Both Louis C.K.'s stand-up routine
Winter Journals
and his TV show are full of deliberately awkward and unconventional scenes that
highlight this agenda, for instance when Louis talks about how he has to help his
daughters open their milk cartons in the pilot episode of his sitcom Louie (2010):
[Kids] can't open their milk [on their own]. They can't do it, because it's 2009, and we
still put milk in this little paper box […]. We put it in this envelope that was invented by
some Dutch fuck in 1773, and they can't do it, they can't open it. It's too subtle an idea, a
design, for a seven-year-old […]. So they raise their hand, and I do it for them. I'm not
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better at it, I just deal with the stress better than they do. I don't cry like a little bitch
because I can't open my milk. I'm a man!
For Reeser, the monologue is emblematic of Louis C.K.'s mission statement as a
comedian: he uses his privileged position as a white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual
middle-aged man "to pry open boxes of subjectivity that were poorly made in the first
place" (Reeser 2017, 62). It's not pretty; in fact, it's messy, and not free of crude
stereotyping in its own right, but it might be thought-provoking enough to generate
change. Needless to say, approval of the joke does not necessarily imply approval of
the joke-teller himself who dons a persona to perform this act. Arguably, the two can
be quite hard to separate, especially because the persona of the stand-up comedian is
often an extension of the real person, and the performers then go on to extend the
fictional universe around their persona in sitcoms and feature films: this is as true of
Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David as it is of Ricky Gervais and Zach
Galifianakis's socially awkward interviewer (Between Two Ferns, 2008-).
In the age of #MeToo, which has exposed the abusive and exhibitionist (workplace)
behaviour of comedians like Bill Cosby, Louis C.K. and Aziz Anzari,2 audiences in the
UK and North America increasingly face the challenge of having to put up with the rift
between subversive and inspiring comedic material and the problematic men who
2 By listing these performers, we do not intend to stigmatise all of them as sexual aggressors,
or to imply that all their alleged misdoings deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. But
all of these comedians have, to a different extent, been implicated by #MeToo.
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produce it. Even before #MeToo, there were iconic humourists who fell from grace. If
some members of Monty Python's Flying Circus resemble Angry White Men these
days, as they articulate frustrations with feminism and the alleged dictate of political
correctness,3 it is worth remembering that they also thought up the most magnificent
gallery of fragile masculinities in 20th-century popular culture: horseless knights like
Sir Robin, "the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot," who famously failed to
overcome "the vicious chicken of Bristol" and who "personally wet himself at the Battle
of Badon Hill" (The Holy Grail, 1975), guerrilla fighters who try to come to terms with
their transgender identity (Life of Brian, 1979), and soldiers who refuse to go marching
because they'd rather attend piano practice (The Meaning of Life, 1983).
Two
Q: Why don't some men have a midlife crisis?
A: Because they're stuck in adolescence.
Why is comedy so important when it comes to approaching the problem of masculinity?
Classic accounts of masculinity studies, like Klaus Theweleit's seminal work on the
fascist male body, include the observation that masculinity amounts to rigidity and
immobility, and that men excel at producing "a kind of permanent erection of the whole
body" in the face of danger (Theweleit 1981, 250; our translation). In Theweleit's
account of early 20th-century military culture, it is the 'feminine principle' that emerges
as the major threat against this self-concept, with denigrated women like the prostitute
taking on the role of a dampening force in the male imagination, "the promise of all the
fountains and rivers" in the world (ibid., 374; our translation). Interestingly, dissolving
is but one means of attacking something inflexible and monolithic. Other strategies may
include bending what is rigid, or kneading and gradually deforming it into grotesque
shapes – this is the prerogative of comedy, of course. In his well-known essay on
Laughter (1900), Henri Bergson argues that comedy is related to life in the same way
as "a jointed dancing-doll [is] to a man walking," with the doll's exaggerated
movements amounting to an exaggeration of "natural rigidity" (Bergson 1994, 127).
Slapstick is the most obvious strategy to put this into practice – just think of the
absorption of Charlie Chaplin's mad labourer into the machinery of Modern Times
(1936), the pratfalls of Jerry Lewis or Jacques Tati, and Rowan Atkinson's dance-like,
self-absorbed approach to social etiquette, which so frequently revolves around those
"serious [games] of human existence" that Pierre Bourdieu discusses at length in
Masculine Domination (1998, 49). In the pilot episode of Mr. Bean (1990), an exam
candidate takes a pen out of his bag, only to enter into a rather bizarre game of one-
upmanship against Mr. Bean. Bean not only produces his own pen but twenty others,
not to mention a Pink Panther toy with the tail stuck between its legs, like a bizarre
rendering of a mock erection (figure 1). Bean's face seems impervious to the obscenity
in his hands, which allows the scene to proceed without resorting to bawdy humour.
3 Terry Gilliam was widely criticised for labelling #MeToo a witch-hunt (Helmore 2020),
while John Cleese has repeatedly argued that political correctness destroys the essence of
comedy (Derschowitz 2016).
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The presence of the Pink Panther toy also serves as a little nod to Blake Edwards's
famous film series – classics of the slapstick genre, starring another iconic example of
parodistic masculinity in Peter Sellers's Inspector Clouseau.
Figure 1: Mr. Bean's good-luck charm caricatures virility (still from Mr. Bean, "Pilot," dir. John
Howard Davies, 1990, 04:28).
Characters like Mr. Bean seem to be situated in a gendered non-space, as they
embody the happy-go-lucky man-child, the pre-adolescent trickster who has yet to be
housebroken into the confines of the symbolic order, yet this is very much the point: it
is their comedy that affords them this space. Because the man-child distinctly resides
outside established masculine ideals, he tends to escape the derogatory laughter of
ridicule. Other age-old representatives of masculinity are not so lucky. In a famous
conversation between Theodore Dreiser and Mack Sennett, the godfather of slapstick
comedy, Sennett insists that "no joke about a mother ever gets a laugh," whereas with
fathers, "[y]ou can do anything you want to with them. Father's one of the best butts we
have. You can do anything but kill him on the stage" (qtd. in Dale 2000, 92). Cultural
archetypes like 'dad' abound in jokes; in fact, there is no professional status group that
does not have its own joke category. This might be the price men pay for outnumbering
women in all fields of comedy, be it stand-up, sketch comedy, feature films, late-night
television or TV series. Of course, the ridiculing of police-men, priests, or senile elderly
statesmen does not mean that a substantial critique of masculinity is involved, but at its
core, every joke, conservative as its underlying structure may be, involves a
transgression that, for a brief moment and for the purpose of a punch-line,
acknowledges the norm that usually remains invisible.
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Three
Q: How many comedians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: 87. One to change the lightbulb, and the other 86 to slag off Donald Trump.
In 2020, no introduction to the concepts of masculinity and ridicule would be complete
without recourse to the yellow-haired elephant in the room: the President who single-
handedly sustains the satirical segment of contemporary popular culture with his tweets,
his hand-shakes, and his outbursts of narcissism, who never manages to reconcile his body
private to the body politic, and who has made the liberal world come together as a
community of laughter, albeit the laughter of desperation. Where the Bush administration
operated in a climate of "ontological awkwardness" (Kotsko 2010, 17), Trump's is the first
presidency to run on vicarious shame (Fremdschämen), with a white supremacist President
completely untroubled by political correctness and common courtesy, mocking disabled
people and regularly lashing out against minorities.
The predominant facial marker of this political caste of populists is not the subtle,
tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of irony, it is the wolfish grin. In modern comedy, the
latter is the prerogative of unapologetically deluded narcissists like Ricky Gervais's David
Brent character (The Office, 2001-2003); in politics, notorious alpha-males like Silvio
Berlusconi and Nigel Farage have worn it (and continue to wear it) proudly. It is not a
coincidence that Farage was cast in the role of the grinning Cheshire Cat in Alice in
Brexitland (2017), a contemporary rewriting of Lewis Carroll's famous tale of nonsense –
the book also features the American President as a tweeting 'Trumpty Dumpty,' with
"orange skin, squinty eyes and a puckered little mouth that reminded Alice of her cat's
bottom" (Carroll 2017, 51). His is the spiteful laughter of superiority, which attempts to
ridicule and scorn the political opposition into oblivion, emulating the spirit of the political
beast the way Jacques Derrida has characterised it: sovereignty as a devouring force that
tries to exhibit "absolute potency" and "power of devourment (mouth, teeth, tongue,
violent rush to bite, engulf, swallow the other, to take the other into oneself too, to kill
it or mourn it)" (Derrida 2009, 23).
Comedy and politics are closely related modes of performance, specifically in
political allegories. In the US, laughing about the national character, and the embodiment
of politics, has been constitutive of national self-consciousness, and Uncle Sam is first and
foremost a funny character (Schäfer forthcoming). In acknowledging Sam's street-
smartness and his superiority over the dull Bull, American audiences agreed on a primarily
comic and self-ironic version of themselves. On the occasion of the US winning the 1895
America's Cup, Puck magazine showed the two main contestants on its cover, emphasising
Sam's sportsmanship and masculinity traits opposite his dull and unshapely European
relative, John Bull.4 Notably, both figures' exaggerated body features update the tradition
of national allegory, from the classical to the cartoonesque. In showing these national
bodies as aesthetically deficient, with a short overweight English Bull opposite an aging
bean pole American Sam, Puck reminds its readers that, in the modern era, nations do not
sport normative beautiful bodies.
4 See https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2012648568/ [accessed 10 June 2020].
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Present-day politics has seen comedians become politicians, most recently with
Saturday Night Live alumnus Al Franken, Beppe Grillo as head of the Italian Cinque Stelle
party or Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, and audiences show similar
responses to stand-up comedians and politicians' speeches (Wells and Bull 2007). The
'politics is/as comedy' conundrum showcases, first, that the political body in the Western
world is heteronormatively male, and typically crisis-ridden; and second, it pinpoints what
Toni Morrison (1992) has called the "blinding whiteness" at the centre of politics and of
comedy. Hence, funny men are overwhelmingly white.
The articles gathered in this section seek to address various masculinities in
Anglophone comedy formats and media, from iconic eccentrics to comic personas and
ageing white men. The first two contributions showcase iconic eccentrics: Franziska
Quabeck discusses Charles Dickens's 19th-century take on established gender norms
through camp and Anette Pankratz reads the British soldier body in two sitcoms from
the 1970s. The next papers highlight comic personas, with Nele Sawallisch focusing
on Ricky Gervais's sentimental men and Ulla Ratheiser examining US late-night hosts
in the wake of #MeToo. The last two papers close in on age, as Lucia Krämer traces
the ageing of actors performing the Western cultural archive in Michael Winterbottom's
The Trip series (2010-), while Franziska Röber looks at ageing men in the contemporary
Britcom. In their various ways, these articles, all written by female scholars, interrogate
how funny men reconfigure the performance of masculinity, how the normative white
male body is 'bent' in comedy, and how laughter and ridicule – articulated by men, but
also aimed at men – (re)write masculinist myths and narratives.
Finally, we want to express our gratitude to the organisers of Leipzig's 2019
Anglistentag, who were instrumental in planning the event and in overseeing this
thematic issue. We are also indebted to the contributors who made this panel fruitful
and have already started working with us on a 'sequel' that will throw Funny Men into
sharp relief, tentatively called "Funny Women."
Works Cited
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2020].
Abel, Millicent H., and Jason Flick. "Mediation and Moderation in Ratings of Hostile
Jokes by Men and Women." Humor 25.1 (2012): 41-58.
Bergson, Henri. "Laughter." Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1994. 61-190.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1998.
Carroll, Leavis. Alice in Brexitland. London: Ebury, 2017.
Dale, Alan. Comedy is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
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Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign: Volume 1. Eds. Michel Lisse, Marie-
Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. London:
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Derschowitz, Jessica. "John Cleese Condemns Political Correctness on College
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Kimmel, Michael. The Gendered Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Kotsko, Adam. Awkwardness. London: O-Books, 2010.
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Phillips, John. Transgender on Screen. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
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Rosseinsky, Katie. "Best British Sitcom of All Time Revealed." 8 April 2019. Evening
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Schäfer, Stefanie. Yankee Yarns: Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in
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Tasker, Yvonne. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. London:
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