Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes

Film and Culture Series

by Maggie Hennefeld

Women explode out of chimneys and melt when sprayed with soda water. Feminist activists play practical jokes to lobby for voting rights, while overworked kitchen maids dismember their limbs to finish their chores on time. In early slapstick films with titles such as Saucy Sue, Mary Jane's Mishap, Jane on Strike, and The Consequences of Feminism, comediennes exhibit the tensions between joyful laughter and gendered violence. Slapstick comedy often celebrates the exaggeration of make-believe injury. Unlike male clowns, however, these comic actresses use slapstick antics as forms of feminist protest. They spontaneously combust while doing housework, disappear and reappear when sexually assaulted, or transform into men by eating magic seeds--and their absurd metamorphoses evoke the real-life predicaments of female identity in a changing modern world.

Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes reveals the gender politics of comedy and the comedic potentials of feminism through close consideration of hundreds of silent films. As Maggie Hennefeld argues, comedienne catastrophes provide disturbing but suggestive images for comprehending gendered social upheavals in the early twentieth century. At the same time, slapstick comediennes were crucial to the emergence of film language. Women's flexible physicality offered filmmakers blank slates for experimenting with the visual and social potentials of cinema. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes poses major challenges to the foundations of our ideas about slapstick comedy and film history, showing how this combustible genre blows open age-old debates about laughter, society, and gender politics.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film

384 pages, Paperback

First published March 27, 2018

About the author

Maggie Hennefeld is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes.

Reviews

[Cindy Walters]

I've always loved funny women: Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Moms Mabley, Gilda Radner, Joan Rivers, et al. I was intrigued by this book but also unsure of whether I would get it because it seems like a hefty academic read. I have to say that it is absolutely enthralling. I found it very compelling and relevant. I am absolutely amazed by how many funny women acting in film comedy there were a century ago during the the suffragette wave feminist movement! Some of the names of the comediennes are still unknown, but the author mentions Mabel Normand, Florence Turner, Sarah Duhamel, Laura Bayley, and some others. I bought this book on a whim but am so glad I did because it's given me a lot to think about!