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- Publisher
- MIT Press
- Copyright
- © 2017 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- ISSN
- 0162-2870
- eISSN
- 1536-013X
- DOI
- 10.1162/OCTO_a_00288
- Publisher site
- See Article on Publisher Site
Abstract
Comedy and the Avant-Garde: An Introduction MALCOLM TURVEY This cluster explores some of the many ways in which comedy has informed avant-garde theory and practice from the 1920s to the present. Comedy is rarely mentioned in accounts of modernism, which tend to emphasize its solemn, pessimistic manifestations.1 Yet as these essays show, avant-gardists often employed humor in their work or drew on comic techniques and archetypes from popular culture, and comedy frequently served as a touchstone for theorists of the avant-garde. My essay offers an overview of the varied uses of the slapstick-film comedian by avant-gardists in the 1910s and ’20s, a phenomenon I name “comedic modernism,†in order to account for the pervasive appeal of the clown to modernists. Steven Jacobs and Hilde D’haeyere provide a detailed exegesis of Walter Benjamin’s, Siegfried Kracauer’s, and Theodor Adorno’s sometimes anachronistic views of slapstick film from the same period, clarifying not only crucial similarities but also distinctions between them. Jennifer Wild shows how Guy Debord’s critique of Charlie Chaplin in the postwar context played a pivotal role in Debord’s break with Lettrism and in the formation of Situationism and its tactic of détournement. Yvonne Rainer offers a witty and timely
Journal
October – MIT Press
Published: Jun 1, 2017