In Hokum!: The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture, Rob King works to counter the notion that the arrival of sound portended the death of slapstick short films. He argues, “A form becomes residual when changes in those dichotomies disable this function, consigning the form in question to one or the other side of a new set of orchestrating divisions. Slapstick’s decline in this sense bespeaks changing hierarchies of comedic value that were no longer primarily governed by the dichotomies of class that spawned the form’s initial success” (pg. 13). King draws upon the work of other cultural historians like Lizabeth Cohen in his analysis.
Examining the historiography, King writes, “the early sound period has thus come to mean two things in the historiography of film comedy: the displacement of the genteel, sentimental mode favored by the major 1920s slapstick clowns and the corollary advent of a new style of crazy or ‘anarchistic’ comedy derived from the Broadwayites’ stage repertories” (pg. 39). He continues, “For all its productiveness, however, the notion of a vaudeville aesthetic flattens a near fifty-year theatrical tradition of stage variety into a general, undifferentiated category and in consequence fails to explain they very difference it is called on to illuminate” (pg. 39). Further, “A historical poetics of early sound comedy should rather attend to the particular inflections that gave comedians and humorists of the 1920s their distinctive flavor and that they subsequently brought to film” (pg. 39). He argues, “The media diffusion of cuckoo humor might in fact be said to have met its Waterloo in motion pictures three times over – in its clash with swiftly reestablished standards of narrative enclosure, in the comedic preferences of directors who had learned their trade in the silent era, and especially in shorts, in the rapidity of production processes that exhausted the cuckoo comedians’ fund of stage material” (pg. 53).
King writes of audience reception, “Any cultural history will of course operate with a certain idea of the public for its product, but there are two vectors through which the idea may be approached. There is, first, the empirical ‘who’ of the public, the actual audience for the industry’s products (women/men, young/old, etc.), as this might be determined by, say, a statistical analysis. But there is also an ‘imagined’ public or, perhaps better, an ‘idea’ of the public as rhetorically framed by that industry, as hailed by a particular address” (pg. 57-58). Further, “It is evident, for example, that the turn away from conventionally ‘highbrow’ fare resulted in broader success for the Vitaphone reels, at least to judge from one early historian of sound, Fitzhugh Green [author of the 1929 study, The Film Finds Its Tongue]” (pg. 62).
Using the example of Educational Pictures, King writes, “The issue, then, for independent short companies like Educational was not only that the 1930s saw a weakening of the slapstick short’s industrial position; it was also the more complex process that had witnessed an emerging split in the nation’s exhibition market and a corollary change in the cultural affiliations of knockabout comedy, its increasing marginalization as small-town ‘hokum’ within the cultural hierarchies of the period” (pg. 113). In a further example, King argues, “One of the distinctive aspects of the Roach Studios’ passage through the conversion era…was the role that music came to play in negotiating that transition” (pg. 126). Further, “The use of music supplied Roach’s organization with a third path that promised to salvage its product from the cultural and industrial marginalization against which all short-comedy companies struggled during this period” (pg. 126). Of Columbia’s Three Stooges shorts, King writes, “Nostalgia, in this sense, stood for a kind of affective logic whereby the ‘old’ could be reinvested as ‘old-time,’ outdatedness reclaimed as surplus value; it was, in other words, the very process through which slapstick, as a residual form, nonetheless sustained a lingering place within the mass cultural market” (pg. 162). King concludes, “Slapstick’s fate bespeaks the degree to which Americans by the 1930s understood themselves to be living in the time of media. Cinematic forms like slapstick were now temporal markers for measuring cultural and, indeed, biographical life, ‘time machines,’ if you like, whose continued circulation either as pastiche or as reissues opened portals onto the youth of the movies as well as moviegoers’ own youth” (pg. 195). ( )