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The Comic Everywoman in Irish Popular Theatre pp 51–82Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Comic Women (Some Men Are Also Involved)

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Comedy ((PSCOM))

Abstract

This chapter links the comic analyses of the plays, drawn out in the last chapter, and allies those considerations of expression and purpose to some central ideas in humorous thought. The discussion begins with the comic mode of incongruity and its relationship to the comic device of the double act. It applies that thinking to the comedy couple in the plays, and to the women playing along its borders, before connecting the device to its comic intentions for the audience. The conversation then moves on towards an in-depth consideration of comic women in popular theatre and in Irish political melodrama. Finally, it proposes the comic everywoman as a means of encapsulating Irish comic women in the popular houses and in dialectical relationship with her audience.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Peter Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1997), pp. 24–35.

  2. 2.

    John Morreall, ‘A New Theory of Laughter,’ in The Philosophy of Laughter and Humour, ed. by John Morreall (New York: State University of New York, 1987), p. 130.

  3. 3.

    David Farley-Hills, The Comic in Renaissance Comedy (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1981), p. 20.

  4. 4.

    Simon Critchley, On Humour, Thinking in Action (Oxon: Routledge, 2002), pp. 3–6.

  5. 5.

    Farley-Hills, The Comic in Renaissance Comedy, p. 21.

  6. 6.

    Farley-Hills, The Comic in Renaissance Comedy, pp. 21–2.

  7. 7.

    Simon Critchley, On Humour, pp. 6–7.

  8. 8.

    Ken Dodd quoted in Louise Peacock, Slapstick and Comic Performance: Comedy and Pain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), p. 50.

  9. 9.

    Louise Peacock, Slapstick and Comic Performance, p. 53.

  10. 10.

    Oliver Double, Britain had Talent (Oxon: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 116–7.

  11. 11.

    Louise Peacock, Slapstick and Comic Performance, p. 50.

  12. 12.

    Oliver Double, Britain had Talent, pp. 116–7.

  13. 13.

    Louise Peacock, Slapstick and Comic Performance, pp. 53–4.

  14. 14.

    Louise Peacock, Slapstick and Comic Performance, p. 54.

  15. 15.

    Louise Peacock, Slapstick and Comic Performance, p. 58.

  16. 16.

    Louise Peacock, Slapstick and Comic Performance, p. 56.

  17. 17.

    David Farley-Hills, The Comic in Renaissance Comedy, p. 24.

  18. 18.

    Peter Berger, Redeeming Laughter, p. 101.

  19. 19.

    Peter Berger, Redeeming Laughter, p. 157.

  20. 20.

    Peter Berger, Redeeming Laughter, p. 158.

  21. 21.

    Peter Berger, Redeeming Laughter, p. 158.

  22. 22.

    Peter Berger, Redeeming Laughter, p. 118.

  23. 23.

    Karl Guthke quoted in Gail Finney, ‘Little Miss Sunshine and the Avoidance of Tragedy,’ in Gender and Humour: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives, ed. by Delia Chiaro and Raffaella Baccolini (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p. 228.

  24. 24.

    Andrew Stott, Comedy (Oxon: Routledge, 2005), p. 92.

  25. 25.

    Louise Peacock, Slapstick and Comic Performance, pp. 31–32.

  26. 26.

    Eric Weitz, Theatre and Laughter (London: Palgrave, 2016), p. 43.

  27. 27.

    David Crafton cited in Andrew Stott, Comedy, p. 95.

  28. 28.

    Louise Peacock, Slapstick and Comic Performance, p. 11.

  29. 29.

    Louise Peacock, Slapstick and Comic Performance, pp. 38–9.

  30. 30.

    Peter Berger, Redeeming Laughter, p. 157.

  31. 31.

    Elaine Aston and Ian Clarke, ‘The Dangerous Women of Melvillean Melodrama,’ in New Theatre Quarterly, (12:45), (1996), p. 35.

  32. 32.

    Elaine Aston and Ian Clarke, ‘The Dangerous Women of Melvillean Melodrama,’ p. 35.

  33. 33.

    Louise Peacock, Slapstick and Comic Performance, pp. 25–6.

  34. 34.

    Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin introduced the theory of carnival in his book Rabelais and His World, written in the 1930s and published in 1965. Embodied in the free space of marketplace, although sanctioned by the hegemonic order, the laughter of carnival can be represented as ambivalence towards official culture, so we understand that ‘in the carnival, dogma, hegemony and authority are dispersed through ridicule and laughter.’ Within the itinerary of carnival festivities, we encounter a ludic celebration of macabre humour (pregnant Death) and the grotesque body, which Bakhtin believed, contrary to Gnostic ideology, held the promise of true salvation. Bakhtin’s belief in ‘grotesque realism’ proclaims to the world that the power of carnivalistic laughter is trans-temporal and universal but that the carnival free space of play is the place in which the ‘drama of the body’ is enacted by and for the populace. Bakhtin argued for the “The drama of birth, coitus, death, growing, eating drinking, and evacuation. This corporeal drama applies not to the private, individual body, but rather to the larger collective one of the folk.” It is within the free space and free time, that is, the carnival space of play that a ‘myth of ambivalence’ is created that denies death in and through the power of laughter. For further discussions on Bakhtin’s concept of carnival, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Also, see Renate Lachmann, Raoul Eshelman and Marc Davis, ‘Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture,’ Cultural Critique, 11 (1988–1989), pp. 124–30.

  35. 35.

    Susanne Colleary, Performance and Identity in Irish Stand Up Comedy: The Comic ‘i’ (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2015), p. 84.

  36. 36.

    Dmitri Nikulin, Comedy, Seriously: A Philosophical Study, (New York: Palgrave, 2014), p. x.

  37. 37.

    Nikulin, Comedy, Seriously, p. 54.

  38. 38.

    Northrop Frye quoted in Nikulin, Comedy, Seriously, p. 166n.

  39. 39.

    Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (Yale: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 32.

  40. 40.

    Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 32.

  41. 41.

    Susan Carlson, Women in Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 17; 20.

  42. 42.

    Susan Carlson, Women in Comedy, pp. 18–20.

  43. 43.

    Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, pp. 36, 41.

  44. 44.

    Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, pp. 41–2.

  45. 45.

    Victor Turner quoted in Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theatre: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 38.

  46. 46.

    Victor Turner quoted in Susan Carlson, Women in Comedy, p. 20.

  47. 47.

    Susan Carlson, Women in Comedy, p. 19.

  48. 48.

    Joseph Holloway quoted in Paige Reynolds, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 23.

  49. 49.

    Tracey Davis quoted in Sos Eltis, Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage 1800–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 2.

  50. 50.

    Jacky Bratton quoted in Sos Eltis, Acts of Desire, p. 2.

  51. 51.

    Tracey Davis quoted in Sos Eltis, Acts of Desire, p. 2.

  52. 52.

    Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), p. 22.

  53. 53.

    Katherine Newey, ‘Melodrama and Metatheatre: Theatricality in the 19th Century Theatre,’ in Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Spring 1997, p. 85.

  54. 54.

    Elaine Aston and Ian Clarke, ‘The Dangerous Women of Melvillean Melodrama,’ p. 31

  55. 55.

    Elaine Aston and Ian Clarke, ‘The Dangerous Women of Melvillean Melodrama,’ p. 33.

  56. 56.

    Frederick Melville cited in Elaine Aston and Ian Clarke, ‘The Dangerous Women of Melvillean Melodrama,’ p. 34.

  57. 57.

    Sos Eltis, Acts of Desire, p. 7.

  58. 58.

    See Geraldine Meaney et al., Reading the Irish Woman: Studies in Cultural Encounter and Exchange, 1714–1960 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), p. 186.

  59. 59.

    For a more comprehensive discussion on Irish representation through the colonial lens, see Mary Trotter, Ireland’s National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement (Syracuse N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001), pp. 43–63.

  60. 60.

    Mary Trotter, Ireland’s National Theaters, pp. 62–70.

  61. 61.

    R.F. Foster notes the “lively theatrical culture of nationalist theatre in Cork and Belfast” at the turn of the century, see Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in the 1890–1923 (UK: Penguin Random House, 2015), p. 79.

  62. 62.

    Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 129.

  63. 63.

    Meaney et al. discuss popular cultural production and consumption by working- and middle-class women during the period. She cites Rosamund Jacobs’ diaries which chronicle her theatre going activities in the 1930s often combining plays at the Gate, the Olympia and the Abbey Theatre, suggesting that middle-class women consumers crossed “high culture and popular entertainment,” for an evening’s pursuit. See Geraldine Meaney et al., Reading the Irish Woman, p. 204. For a comprehensive discussion of Irish audiences during the period, see Joan Fitzpatrick Dean, Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in 20th Century Ireland (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 2004), and Paige Reynolds, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle.

  64. 64.

    Allardyce Nicoll cited in Elaine Aston and Ian Clarke, ‘The Dangerous Women of Melvillean Melodrama,’ p. 32.

  65. 65.

    Geraldine Meaney et al., Reading the Irish Woman, p. 180.

  66. 66.

    Elaine Aston and Ian Clarke, ‘The Dangerous Women of Melvillean Melodrama,’ p. 32.

  67. 67.

    Geraldine Meaney, Sex and Nation; Women in Irish Culture and Politics (Dublin: Attic Press, 1991), p. 3.

  68. 68.

    Geraldine Meaney et al., Reading the Irish Woman, p. 181.

  69. 69.

    Robin Nelson, Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances, Ed. Robin Nelson (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2013), pp. 8–9.

  70. 70.

    Sos Eltis, Acts of Desire, p. 1.

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  1. Institute of Technology Sligo, Sligo, Ireland

    Susanne Colleary

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Colleary, S. (2018). Comic Women (Some Men Are Also Involved). In: The Comic Everywoman in Irish Popular Theatre. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02008-8_4

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