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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Huddersfield Repository University of Huddersfield Repository Parkin, Jennifer Dances with Sausages: Exploring Musicality in Comedy Through an Analysis of the Morecambe and Wise Show Original Citation Parkin, Jennifer (2016) Dances with Sausages: Exploring Musicality in Comedy Through an Analysis of the Morecambe and Wise Show. Masters thesis, University of Huddersfield. This version is available at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/28532/ The University Repository is a digital collection of the research output of the University, available on Open Access. Copyright and Moral Rights for the items on this site are retained by the individual author and/or other copyright owners. Users may access full items free of charge; copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided: • The authors, title and full bibliographic details is credited in any copy; • A hyperlink and/or URL is included for the original metadata page; and • The content is not changed in any way. For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at: [email protected]. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/ DANCES WITH SAUSAGES: EXPLORING MUSICALITY IN COMEDY THROUGH AN ANALYSIS OF THE MORECAMBE AND WISE SHOW JENNIFER PARKIN A thesis submitted to the University of Huddersfield in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts by Research The University of Huddersfield January 2016 Copyright statement i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns any copyright in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Huddersfield the right to use such copyright for any administrative, promotional, educational and/or teaching purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts, may be made only in accordance with the regulations of the University Library. Details of these regulations may be obtained from the Librarian. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of any patents, designs, trademarks and any and all other intellectual property rights except for the Copyright (the “Intellectual Property Rights”) and any reproductions of copyright works, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property Rights and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property Rights and/or Reproductions 1 Abstract This thesis uses established theoretical work on musicality in theatre in order to develop an understanding of the use of musicality in comedy, through an analysis of The Morecambe and Wise Show. David Roesner’s work on musicality in theatre is of particular interest, as it focuses on musicality as the influence of music on work that is not necessarily musical. This allows musicality to be considered within a performance form that can include the use of music, but is not reliant on music to create comedy. Theoretical work on comedy performance from authors such as Oliver Double also provides support for the analysis; although this theoretical work does not directly address musicality in comedy, it discusses elements of comedy performance that can be analysed within the framework of musicality. This theoretical base is used to analyse a wide range of material from the BBC episodes of The Morecambe and Wise Show, including material such as the ‘Breakfast’ routine, the ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ routine, and the ‘Grieg Piano Concerto’ sketch. The analysis of musicality in this material aims to develop an overview of the use of musicality in the show. As such, it covers a number of different ways in which musicality can be seen within the material. The ability of music to create humour is considered through the use of intermusicality and David Huron’s devices for creating musical humour. The role of rhythm within the use of musicality in comedy is also considered, and this is then developed through discussions of the use of sonic punctuation, the musicality of movement, and the musicality of speech. 2 Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................... 2 List of Figures ........................................................................................................... 5 Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... 6 List of abbreviations ................................................................................................... 7 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 8 Introduction to Musicality......................................................................................... 8 Why Musicality in Comedy? .................................................................................... 12 Introduction to Morecambe and Wise ...................................................................... 15 Outline of Sections ................................................................................................ 19 Chapter 1 The Use of Music in Comedy ....................................................................... 21 1.1 Musical Humour .......................................................................................... 21 1.2 The Referential Power of Music ...................................................................... 27 Chapter 2 Rhythm and Timing ................................................................................... 35 2.1 Sonic Punctuation ........................................................................................ 42 2.2 Physical Comedy: The Musicality of Movement ................................................ 49 2.3 The Musicality of Speech .............................................................................. 57 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 64 Appendices ............................................................................................................. 69 3 Notating rhythm within the ‘Breakfast’ routine .......................................................... 69 Bibliography ........................................................................................................... 73 Word count: 21,191 4 List of Figures Figure 1: Comparison of Morecambe's playing and the original music by Grieg. The first four bars of Grieg's music have been written an octave lower for easy comparison, as indicated by the dashed line. (TM&WS, 2010: cs1971; Grieg, undated) ....................................... 32 5 Acknowledgements Special thanks to Susan Craig for generously providing me with access to biographical material on Morecambe and Wise and original scripts from the television programmes. With thanks to my supervisor Doctor Ben Spatz and my proof-reader Jade Scotford. 6 List of abbreviations For ease of reading, in-text citations of The Morecambe and Wise Show have been abbreviated. All citations of The Morecambe and Wise Show cite the BBC Collection listed in the Bibliography. Citations will read as follows: (TM&WS, 2010: s1e1) indicates that the material cited comes from Series 1, Episode 1. (TM&WS, 2010: cs1969) indicates that the material cited comes from the Christmas Special from 1969. (TM&WS, 2010: me1970) indicates that the material cited comes from the Golden Rose of Montreux Entry Programme from 1970. Where the citation follows a transcript, this has been transcribed by myself from the BBC DVDs. 7 Introduction Introduction to Musicality The concept of musicality in a theatre or performance context goes beyond the use of incidental music or songs. It might be obvious, perhaps, to talk about musicality within musical theatre, with its all-singing, all-dancing spectacles. However, there is a growing amount of scholarship that uses musicality to explore relationships between music and theatre beyond this ‘exterior’ level of song and dance, “venturing beyond the territories of music as an audible phenomenon or as a metaphor for other practices and address[ing], instead, musicality in terms of dramaturgical and embodied processes” (Frendo, 2014: 226). This exploration of musicality as a part of the theatre-making process allows it to be applied across a wide breadth of theatre practices, perhaps confirming David Roesner’s view that “the notion of a musicality in theatre, as an art form and as the theatrical event itself, would refer to the intrinsic affinity of the stage to music, with which it was, so to speak, issued at birth” (2010: 294). This idea of an “intrinsic affinity of the stage” suggests that all theatre or performance has the potential to be considered within the framework of musicality, rather than its use being limited to one specific performance type. This is reflected in scholarly interest in the role of musicality in theatre; musicality has been used to analyse the work of, amongst others, Appia, Artaud, and Meyerhold (Roesner, 2014), Beckett (Kulezic-Wilson, 2011;