69 STEFANIE SCHÄFER AND WIELAND SCHWANEBECK An Introduction in Three Jokes One Q: What's the difference Between a man and a condom? A: Condoms have changed – they're no longer thick and insensitive. Masculinity: PerPetually dominant and PerPetually in crisis, PerPetually all-around-us and perpetually invisible. Why would the field of comedy be different from the rest? On Rolling Stone's list of the 50 greatest stand-up comedians of all time, men outnumber women at a rate of four to one (Love 2017). The same rate applies to the list of the 50 highest-grossing comedies of all time, only ten of which have a female lead ("50 Highest-Grossing" 2012). Women fare only marginally better in the Radio Times's 2019 poll of the greatest Britcoms, featuring prominently in about a third of the entries (Rosseinsky 2019). The further one goes back in history, the more clear-cut the case seems to Be, which is why some authorities take comedy to Be synonymous with masculinity per se. In Jerry Lewis's famous assessment, "the Premise of all comedy is a man in trouble" (qtd. in Dale 2000, vii), the imPlication Being that there can Be no comedy unless there is a man involved. Apparently, when Adam donated a rib for Eve, he did not part with his funny bone. But there is a curious incongruity here. If comedy truly is a 'man's world,' then why has there been so little scholarly interest in the nexus between masculinity and humour? Very few of the existing scholarly works in masculinity studies highlight humour in any way (Kehily 2007), with some of the most prominent handbooks in the field including biograPhical sketches and short entries on landmark comedies of the 20th century. These tend to remain on a descriptive level, without explaining what exactly is funny aBout masculinity or what the relationship Between masculinity and humour is characterised by. Overall, the material that dominates throughout these publications reflects the widely-held belief that masculinity is, first and foremost, marked by crises and violent behaviour, and scholarly work tends to Privilege allegedly more serious dramatic genres like war movies.1 Elsewhere, sociologists have drawn attention to the gendered culture of telling jokes, scrutinising how men take the initiative and women merely comply when it comes to humorous interactions (Hinz 2003; Merziger 2005; Kuipers 2008; Abel and Flick 2012). Psychologists, in turn, hint at the underlying gender disparity by supplementing these findings with musings on sexual aggressiveness and the importance of humour when it comes to "positive self- presentation" and the achievement of "gender-relevant social goals" (Martin 2007, 149). Crucially, though, these aPProaches do not highlight how gender clichés are perpetuated in the process, and they appear to be equally disinterested in what kinds of 1 Cross-dressing comedies like I Was a Male War Bride (1949), Some Like It Hot (1959) or Tootsie (1982) are an excePtion in that they have received quite a lot of critical attention (Tasker 1998, 19-47; Phillips 2006, 61-84). Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 31.2 (Summer 2020): 69-76. Anglistik, Jahrgang 31 (2020), Ausgabe 2 © 2020 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 70 STEFANIE SCHÄFER AND WIELAND SCHWANEBECK laughter masculinity is tied to, and how humour challenges or (re-)affirms the boundaries of gendered norms. To paraphrase one of the most well-known joke formats: three men walk into a Bar, But not all of them leave with their masculinity intact. Comedy, then, aPPears to Be no different from other areas where Patriarchal privilege reigns supreme by, paradoxically, putting men front and centre but allowing masculinity itself to escaPe the analytical gaze altogether, in the manner outlined By Michael Kimmel in his seminal Book on The Gendered Society (2004): "[W]hen we study men, we study them as Political leaders, military heroes, scientists, writers, artists. Men, themselves, are invisiBle as men. […] So we continue to act as if gender aPPlied only to women" (6; original emPhasis). In his insightful reading of the work of the controversial comedian Louis C.K., Todd Reeser stresses the imPortance of going the comedic route when it comes to challenging established norms, showing the way forward and arriving at new forms of masculinity. Both Louis C.K.'s stand-up routine and his TV show are full of deliberately awkward and unconventional scenes that highlight this agenda, for instance when Louis talks about how he has to help his daughters open their milk cartons in the pilot episode of his sitcom Louie (2010): [Kids] can't oPen their milk [on their own]. They can't do it, Because it's 2009, and we Winter Journals still Put milk in this little PaPer Box […]. We Put it in this enveloPe that was invented By some Dutch fuck in 1773, and they can't do it, they can't oPen it. It's too suBtle an idea, a design, for a seven-year-old […]. So they raise their hand, and I do it for them. I'm not better at it, I just deal with the stress better than they do. I don't cry like a little Bitch Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) because I can't oPen my milk. I'm a man! For Reeser, the monologue is emblematic of Louis C.K.'s mission statement as a for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution comedian: he uses his privileged position as a white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual middle-aged man "to Pry oPen Boxes of suBjectivity that were Poorly made in the first place" (Reeser 2017, 62). It's not Pretty; in fact, it's messy, and not free of crude stereotyPing in its own right, But it might Be thought-provoking enough to generate change. Needless to say, approval of the joke does not necessarily imply approval of the joke-teller himself who dons a Persona to Perform this act. ArguaBly, the two can be quite hard to separate, especially because the persona of the stand-up comedian is often an extension of the real Person, and the Performers then go on to extend the fictional universe around their Persona in sitcoms and feature films: this is as true of Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David as it is of Ricky Gervais and Zach Galifianakis's socially awkward interviewer (Between Two Ferns, 2008-). In the age of #MeToo, which has exposed the abusive and exhibitionist (workPlace) behaviour of comedians like Bill Cosby, Louis C.K. and Aziz Anzari,2 audiences in the UK and North America increasingly face the challenge of having to put up with the rift between subversive and inspiring comedic material and the problematic men who 2 By listing these Performers, we do not intend to stigmatise all of them as sexual aggressors, or to imply that all their alleged misdoings deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. But all of these comedians have, to a different extent, Been imPlicated By #MeToo. Anglistik, Jahrgang 31 (2020), Ausgabe 2 © 2020 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) AN INTRODUCTION IN THREE JOKES 71 produce it. Even before #MeToo, there were iconic humourists who fell from grace. If some memBers of Monty Python's Flying Circus resemble Angry White Men these days, as they articulate frustrations with feminism and the alleged dictate of political correctness,3 it is worth rememBering that they also thought uP the most magnificent gallery of fragile masculinities in 20th-century popular culture: horseless knights like Sir Robin, "the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot," who famously failed to overcome "the vicious chicken of Bristol" and who "personally wet himself at the Battle of Badon Hill" (The Holy Grail, 1975), guerrilla fighters who try to come to terms with their transgender identity (Life of Brian, 1979), and soldiers who refuse to go marching because they'd rather attend piano practice (The Meaning of Life, 1983). Two Q: Why don't some men have a midlife crisis? A: Because they're stuck in adolescence. Why is comedy so imPortant when it comes to aPProaching the ProBlem of masculinity? Classic accounts of masculinity studies, like Klaus Theweleit's seminal work on the fascist male Body, include the oBservation that masculinity amounts to rigidity and immoBility, and that men excel at Producing "a kind of permanent erection of the whole body" in the face of danger (Theweleit 1981, 250; our translation). In Theweleit's account of early 20th-century military culture, it is the 'feminine principle' that emerges as the major threat against this self-concept, with denigrated women like the prostitute taking on the role of a damPening force in the male imagination, "the Promise of all the fountains and rivers" in the world (ibid., 374; our translation). Interestingly, dissolving is But one means of attacking something inflexible and monolithic. Other strategies may include Bending what is rigid, or kneading and gradually deforming it into grotesque shaPes – this is the Prerogative of comedy, of course. In his well-known essay on Laughter (1900), Henri Bergson argues that comedy is related to life in the same way as "a jointed dancing-doll [is] to a man walking," with the doll's exaggerated movements amounting to an exaggeration of "natural rigidity" (Bergson 1994, 127). Slapstick is the most obvious strategy to put this into practice – just think of the absorption of Charlie Chaplin's mad laBourer into the machinery of Modern Times (1936), the Pratfalls of Jerry Lewis or Jacques Tati, and Rowan Atkinson's dance-like, self-absorbed approach to social etiquette, which so frequently revolves around those "serious [games] of human existence" that Pierre Bourdieu discusses at length in Masculine Domination (1998, 49).