Martial Poirson foregrounds France’s greatest writer of comedy and the most widely read, performed and translated French-language playwright in the world, Molière. Highlighting the myths that have thrived around this national treasure, Poirson notes that almost nothing is known about the biography and history of this national treasure. Inseparable from the nation’s narration of itself and of its status at the centre of colonial empire, Molière has been celebrated for his supposedly republican values, and his language – ‘la langue de Molière’ – has become foundational in France and exported, sometimes aggressively, across la francophonie, or the French-speaking world. Notably, Poirson provides insights into how Molière’s language and oeuvre fared in colonized Indochina. With astonishing constancy and unparalleled resilience, Molière has persisted in the French and international cultural subconscious for over four centuries.

Chapter Five charts Rogers’ move into silent pictures, a dynamic new entertainment form taking the country by storm in the late 1910s. He headed to Hollywood in 1919 to work for producer Samuel Goldwyn, for whom he would star in a dozen films over the next two years. His films combined humor with depictions of ordinary people struggling to surmount some kind of travail or imposition. In 1923, Rogers moved on and signed a contract with another pioneering producer, Hal Roach. Over a two-year period the Oklahoman would complete thirteen more films, while subsequently appearing in a few independent productions and starring in a series of European travelogue films. Involvement with silent films placed Rogers squarely within the new world of leisure entertainment, and further enhanced his status as a celebrity.

Chapter Thirteen examines Rogers’ emergence in the 1930s as one of Hollywood’s most popular movie stars. The development of "talkie" films provided an opportunity for showcasing perhaps the most popular person in America in every facet of his talent: folksy appearance, verbal dexterity, homespun wit, unpretentious but shrewd sensibility. Fox Films signed him to a contract, and from 1929 to 1935 he starred in a series of popular films that combined his trademark humor with common-man characters struggling with, and overcoming, pressing trials and challenges. These populist films often touted the virtues of rural and small-town life, hard work, plain-spoken morality, and community loyalty. Rogers made a trio of such films with famed director John Ford. The humorist became such a popular movie star and celebrity that he was judged to be Hollywood’s top box office attraction in 1934. Rogers’ success as a "talkie" movie star provided the capstone of his career and cemented his status as an American folk hero.

This chapter examines the irony, complexity, and pleasure in rhetorical ingenuity evident in the satirical essay in English, taking as its central exemplars some of the key historical figures in that tradition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the Irish authors Jonathan Swift and Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth through to the Romantic essayists Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Love Peacock. It demonstrates how the prose essay became a powerful satirical form in the Georgian period, and discusses the tonal richness and ambiguity which render the satirical essay a key subgenre in the tradition of the prose essay in English. It pays particular attention to the links between satire, colonialism, the Gothic, and the sublime in the form of the essay.

The Euripides described by ancient biographers is the Euripides Aristophanes portrays in the comedies he wrote for Athenian audiences after the devasting plague of 430–429 BC: immoral, sophistic, and irreligious. Biographers created new anecdotes about him, using the comic poets’ techniques, taking lines from his dramas out of their original contexts and placing them in anecdotes in which they could be repurposed to express his personal thoughts. The process of transforming literature into biography can be seen most clearly in the Life of Euripides by the Hellenistic biographer Satyrus, which is based almost entirely on anecdotes created to provide new contexts for some of Euripides’ most memorable lines; for example, an account of Euripides’ death mirrors the account of Pentheus’ death in Euripides’ drama Bacchae. The idea that Euripides was critical of ancient religion, like some famous philosophers, explains why Diogenes Laertius refers to Euripides more frequently than any other poet. These ancient characterizations continue to have a profound and misleading influence on modern interpretation of his dramas, demonstrating how transformative an effect a skillful comic poet can have on the course of literary history.

Ancient historians regularly argue that the classical Athenians held sailors in much lower esteem than hoplites. They cite in support of this the extant funeral speech of Pericles. Certainly, this famous speech said a lot about courageous hoplites but next to nothing about sailors. Yet, it is also clear that this was not a typical example of the genre. Funeral speeches usually gave a fulsome account of Athenian military history. In rehearsing military history, funeral speeches always mentioned naval battles and recognised sailors as courageous. Old comedy and the other genres of public oratory depicted sailors in the same positive terms. All these non-elite genres assumed that a citizen fulfilled his martial duty by serving as either a sailor or a hoplite. They used a new definition of courage that both groups of combatants could easily meet. In tragedy, by contrast, characters and choruses used the hoplite extensively as a norm. In spite of this, tragedy still recognised Athens as a major seapower and could depict sailors as courageous. In Athenian democracy, speakers and playwrights had to articulate the viewpoint of non-elite citizens. Their works put beyond doubt that the Athenian people esteemed sailors as highly as hoplites.

Joyce subjected race to comic treatment without lessening its seriousness. He does this by broadening his perspective and deferring judgment about differences (“prejudice” literally means prejudgment). Human racial competition takes the form of a car race (in “After the Race”) and a horse race (in Ulysses). This play on different meanings of “race” allows Joyce to make fun of racism while simultaneously belittling it. People “pre-judge” the results of racial competition by betting. Racial hatred is no longer comic in Finnegans Wake, where Shem the Penman is excoriated as black, Jewish, and oriental. Joyce exposes the superficiality of race prejudice by suggesting that darkness is internal to everyone, and it can be transformed into a form of communication that is communal instead of being driven by self-interest and greed.

This chapter argues that television history has been neglected by jazz scholars. It describes a historical relationship between the music and the broadcast medium, noting particular trends such as musicians in variety and other performance settings, reenactments of key moments in jazz history, narratives of jazz in episodic drama and comedic treatments of jazz. While there is a growing literature on variety/performance programming, the chapter notes the ongoing absence of scholarship on dramatic and comedic treatments. Drawing on methodologies from television studies, case studies are presented which demonstrate rich engagements between jazz and television. The chapter ends by suggesting that we should turn away from considering exceptional moments in jazz television history and towards its presence in the everyday consumption of television.

Pater describes the writings of Charles Lamb as ‘an excellent illustration of the value of reserve in literature’. The remark is surprising because Lamb more often is celebrated for the warm familiarity of his essays rather than the withholding and coolness associated with reserve. It is Pater himself who was famed for his reserve, shy in company and elusive in his writing. But his essay on Lamb identifies a different quality of reserve and the different ways in which it can operate as an element of literary style. The humour of Lamb’s writing is a form of reserve that conceals the tragic facts of his life. Such concealment works through excess and deflection, masking the personal without seeming too remote or buttoned-up. What Pater values in Lamb provides insight into the peculiar reserve of his own writing, with its paradoxical mix of the personal and impersonal, and its style that is at once so elusive and so individually distinctive.

The Magic Flute was written specifically for the Freihaus Theater auf der Wieden. As such, it is useful to consider the physical aspects and the history of the building as well as some of the other repertory that was performed there around the same time. When we include works that were performed in the Theater in der Leopoldstadt under the direction of Karl Marinelli – Schikaneder’s main rival – we can see that they share some musical and theatrical aspects of The Magic Flute. Plot lines or character types that found favor with audiences were reproduced in various works at both suburban theaters, allowing a faster creative process and resulting in a somewhat formulaic product. This adds to the notion that while The Magic Flute is certainly an exceptional work, it was, nevertheless, significantly influenced by the popular entertainment common in Viennese theaters of the eighteenth century.

This chapter examines the ways in which pre-war drama explored growing fears over major international conflict. Works considered include Du Maurier’s An Englishman’s Home (1909), Zangwill’s The War God (1911) and a number of less well-known plays and comic skits. The chapter contextualises these works in relation to the fraught geopolitical landscape in which they were produced and the wider cultural phenomenon of ‘invasion fiction’. Both critical and public reactions to these productions are also examined. The chapter concludes by exploring how the pre-war plays established the play-book for propagandistic war-time drama as theatre mobilised for the war effort.

Despite strict censorship laws, social and political critiques sometimes occurred in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century British theatre through comic and visual elements in melodrama, pantomime, farce and comedy. Drawing on texts and performances c.1790-1830, this chapter focusses on the evasion of censorship, particularly through non-verbal performance. While the pantomime or Harlequinade is the most obvious source for non-verbal critique, there are many other visually subversive moments in the drama of this period, including instances in John Bull (1803) Speed the Plough (1800) and Killing No murder (1809), which will be specifically addressed. The visual power of theatre to undermine censorship will be examined in conjunction with the satirical impact of contemporary prints and caricatures. While an emphasis on action and visual communication in theatre is partly attributable to the increasing size of theatres and growing demand for theatrical entertainment, less attention has been paid to the significance of this development for greater license in what can be communicated to spectators. While the theatrical politics of this period are somewhat more complicated than those of the print shop windows, the markets for theatrical spectacle and satirical prints must have overlapped, creating reciprocal modes of perception in this period.0

Shakespeare’s White Others’ conclusion engages The Comedy of Errors to reaffirm how race always matters. I argue that The Comedy of Errors’ concern with mistaken identity resonates with the modern Black experience. While considering my book’s preoccupation with the effects of racism, othering, anti-Blackness, and racial profiling, I turn to Patricia Akhimie’s Comedy of Errors criticism to consider how one can be “bruised with adversity” not just physically, but also psychologically. The conclusion’s title plays on the name of Shakespeare’s comedy because, as I see it, anti-blackness and anti-Black racism position white people, including white others, in opposition to Black people in what feels like a comedy of (t)errors: a space that is a genre of its own and akin to Negro-Sarah’s funnyhouse environment in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. Racial tribulation is a life sentence tied to the Black existence.

Chapter Six focuses on T-Bone Slim (real name Matti Valentinepoika Huhta), a second-generation Finnish-American hobo who became the IWW’s most popular and influential writer. In hisnewspaper columns and songs, Slim represented the hobo not only as a worker, as Anderson had, but also as the revolutionary vanguard of a post-capitalist society. He parodies mainstream and conservative ideas about work, hobos, and the working class more generally. He challenges the common stereotype of hobos and tramps as being unintelligent through wit and verbal dexterity that assumes intelligence in his transient audience. He uses puns, neologisms and dynamic wordplay to involve his readers in the process of making meaning. In doing so, he creates a mode of literary genius that is communal rather than individualistic, and which in turn allows him to challenge mainstream understandings of literary success. The chapter shows how Slim brings his body and the bodies of his working-class readers into his writing by representing hunger as a defining class experience.

This chapter explores the genealogy of the phrase ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous’, tracing the saying from Romantic period attributions to Thomas Paine and Napoleon back to seventeenth-century debates about the sublime as a literary style. Ridiculousness haunts sublimity from Longinus’s discussions of the comic in his treatise to Kant’s consideration of humour as an affect uncannily akin to the sublime. Returning to Romantic period theorizations of the ridiculous, the chapter considers Jean Paul Richter’s aesthetics and his influence on S. T. Coleridge’s thinking about humour as providing alternative perspectives on key Romantic concepts including our relationship to nature, society, and childhood.

‘Cancel culture’ is a new variant of an old phenomenon. The growth or spread that we associate with the contagion of cancellation has ‘making’ at its heart. The initial judgment plants the germ in Inventive mode. Causing the judgment to increase in consequence and extent makes it grow in Creative mode. Giving the judgment the air of publicity makes something new of it in Productive and co-Productive mode. Making a mistake triggers a whole series of making processes, and our language reflects this. The dominance of ‘making’ language in relation to individual errors and collective responses to those errors indicates that in social contexts an individual’s fracture of the social fabric is more than made up for by the fabricating impulses of society at large. The clustering of criticism operates in this sense almost like the cells of a body that rush to heal cuts in skin and breakages of bone – sometimes leaving the re-created tissue stronger than it was to begin with. On the other hand, where judgments are made hypocritically, too quickly, or with an inadequate grasp of the materials, the Product can be as shoddy as the original infraction.

This chapter considers the formal and thematic legacy of Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka, and Beckett on Kazuo Ishiguro’s late-modernist work. Situating Ishiguro’s lengthiest, most digressive, most formally challenging and funniest novel within the European modernist tradition, the chapter analyses its marked formal experimentation in the light of its idiosyncratic and often highly disturbing blend of humour and mishap, of comedy and adversity. The chapter proposes that The Unconsoled can be considered not only Ishiguro’s but also one of late-modernism’s great comic novels. As such, Ishiguro’s novel may be said successfully to resist the major consolation of meaning-making, parting company with narrative as a calmative and leaving behind the affirmations of consolation and solace.