The Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Masculinity
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THE BUFFOON MEN: CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD COMEDIANS AND MASCULINITY By SCOTT DANIEL BALCERZAK A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2008 1 © 2008 Scott Balcerzak 2 For my mother, who gave me Abbott and Costello 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I thank my committee chair Maureen Turim for her support and guidance with this dissertation and all my professional ventures at the University of Florida. I am also grateful to the other members of my supervisory committee, Scott Nygren, Susan Hegemen, and Nora Alter, all of whom provided assistance with this project and other scholarly pursuits. I also thank the Alumni Graduate Program and the Department of English for the opportunity to teach and research film comedy. Heartfelt thanks go out to the many colleagues and friends who supported my work throughout the years, especially the students of my spring 2008 Classic Hollywood Comedy seminar for their inspiring insights and enthusiasm. Finally, I wish to acknowledge my mother and my late father for their loving encouragement throughout my academic career. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................4 ABSTRACT.....................................................................................................................................6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: BEYOND THE COMIC MASK..............................................................8 2 W.C. FIELDS AS MALE ICON ............................................................................................26 West Meets Fields: How Do the Icons Differ?.......................................................................29 Gender Classification and Comedians....................................................................................38 Fields as Con Man: Masquerades of Masculinity...................................................................46 Fields as Husband: Breakdown of the Familial Order............................................................57 Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................69 3 EDDIE CANTOR UNIVERSALIZES THE NEBBISH........................................................76 The “Feminine” Jewish Male: Resistance and Adaptation.....................................................82 Cantor as Populist Nebbish.....................................................................................................92 A Pre-Oedipal “Eddie-Pus”: Cantor and Women.................................................................101 Blackface and the Whitefaced Nebbish................................................................................107 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................118 4 THE VOICE AND BODY OF JACK BENNY ...................................................................125 Benny and His Radio World.................................................................................................130 The ‘Masochism Bit:’ Benny as Radio/Male Subject ..........................................................137 “Picture Jokes”: Voice and Body on the Radio....................................................................146 The Radio Voice on Film .....................................................................................................154 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................168 5 THE COMEDY DUO AND QUEERING THE FRATERNITY.........................................175 Man/Man Couplings Onscreen and Fraternal Myths............................................................180 Laurel and Hardy: The Comedy Duo as Queer ....................................................................188 Two Popular Variations on the Duo .....................................................................................201 Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army...........................................208 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................222 6 BEYOND CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD / BEYOND THE BOYS CLUB .............................229 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................252 5 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy THE BUFFOON MEN: CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD COMEDIANS AND MASCULINITY By Scott Balcerzak August 2008 Chair: Maureen Turim Major: English This study provides an alternative understanding of Classic Hollywood’s depictions of masculinity through an analysis of 1930s comedians. These figures initiated what I call the masculine comedic, an entertainment trend for much of the 20th century consisting of a popular fraternity of male comedians that aggressively excludes women. While certain female performers such as Mae West challenge this trend, they tend to be the exception that proves the rule. In contrast to other types of mainstream cinema, films of the masculine comedic provide a valid history of the cultural undercurrents driving American male identity. In each of my chapters, I explore a different current that greatly defines this alternative narrative, from the economic to the ethnic to the technological to the fraternal. The first chapter examines W.C. Fields as an ironic male icon who can be seen as a telling contrast to Mae West’s iconic position as feminist icon. The second chapter considers ethnic influences upon the masculine comedic in the form of Eddie Cantor’s influential progression from a Jewish stereotype onstage to a ‘whitefaced’ version of a ‘nebbish’ onscreen. I then examine technological influence through radio’s effect by analyzing Jack Benny’s on-air ‘queer’ voice and its only partly successful adaptation to cinematic stardom. The dissertation concludes with an analysis of fraternal myths 6 as they relate to the queered relationships highlighted in three popular comedy duos: Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. All these comedians illustrate a complex range of comedic commentaries on masculine ideals and expose the fragilities of gender performance itself. As such, they reveal the often peculiar, yet revelatory, relationship between masculinity identity and comedy as it still permeates throughout much of popular culture. 7 INTRODUCTION: BEYOND THE COMIC MASK He is the average American upon whose simple features life has placed a vaguely comic mask. He is the surprised and blinking troll entangled in the details of his day, who fights to get into crowded elevators, who sometimes falls down a flight of steps, who, in short, is forever raising his head out of what the alarmists call the debacle of modern civilization to crack a joke. -J.P. McEvoy (Curtis 159) In 1925, cartoonist J.P. McEvoy wrote a show for Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. based on the types of families regularly found in the newspaper funny pages called The Comic Supplement (of American Life). His star was W.C. Fields, who would develop into one of America’s most popular and problematic comedians with, among other roles, film variations on the henpecked husband that he perfected onstage. McEvoy’s description of Fields’ character is telling, since the comedian often is presented in film as a supposedly average American male only distinguished by the addition of a “vaguely comic mask,” even if this mask could be alcoholic, bitter, and misanthropic at times. This original aspiration behind Fields’ characterization fits neatly into definitions of character comedy found in Henri Bergson’s Laughter (1900), itself an influential work written at the dawn of a century when the comedian reached new heights of popularity through the spread of cinema, radio, and television. In his final chapter, after analyzing humor in situations and words, Bergson turns his attention to the comic within character, relating his general thesis on the automated and mechanical aspects of humor as a social construct to the individual human subject. To Bergson, it can be argued that “all character is comic” since it contains a universal “mechanical element which resembles a piece of clockwork,” that ready-made human attribute in all of us that “causes us to imitate ourselves.” As he profoundly suggests, “Every comic character is a type” (156). 8 In describing Fields’ character, McEvoy suggests a similar universality in the type of the henpecked husband. This is a comic character meant to be a representative subject for a large portion of the audience of average Americans, exposing through lampoon the “debacle of modern civilization.” Yet, McEvoy’s description reveals a profound oversight when viewing comedians as reflecting and, in turn, exposing the farce of society. For this scenario to work, there must be such a thing as an “average” American. For this to work in particular relationship to Fields, this average American must be white, heterosexual, and, above all, male. As such, McEvoy’s description forces us to ask a difficult question in relationship to gender identity.