'My missus ...': an essay on British comedy and gender discourses.
I recently came across an article published by the Department of Television, Radio and Film of the University of Texas at Austin, Texas, focusing on BBC America's screening of the Benny Hill Show.# The Benny Hill Show, a show staring Benny Hill, the comic sketch actor and one-time UK single chart-topper, had been re-edited for re-screening to American audiences, and the aim of such editing was to remove politically incorrect elements that would not be tolerated in today's America as part of a TV schedule--namely racial stereotypes. Perhaps more accurately, racial stereotypes relating to races sufficiently well represented in the mainstream socio-political discourse for their stereotyping to cause alarm. What was left of the show after said incisions, the article argued, was the objectification of women. Interestingly enough it didn't offer any comment on the fact that this is apparently screenable content as part of the British mainstream's contribution to the American slipstream.Whether or not that might pass for contextualisation, I would like to use this as the launch pad, springboard, or indeed twanged knicker elastic to discuss the ways in which British comedy has responded to--and, if you must, participated in--changes in popular gender discourses since the 1940s.
Comedy reflects what is accepted as a given within the larger discourses of a society at a particular time, and it is indeed in its nature to question such assumptions, at times programmatically, at others implicitly and perhaps coincidentally. In order that the following observations do not simply reflect the advancements in gender equality that have taken place over the last 80 years, I focus solely on comedy written and produced by men, and on some comedy performed by men only. This ignores the questions of women's roles offered since the 80s by French and Saunders and Victoria Wood and the more consciously feminist-branded performances of Jo Brand. It also ignores the provocation in questions of gender and sexuality delivered by Julian Clary and Eddie Izzard. (It was Izzard who offered the observation that he didn't mind homophobics, as long as they kept their homophobia behind closed doors and left him alone.) The intention is to limit the focus to reflect the change in discourses performed by those typically identified as representing hegemony, that is, men performing in the mainstream media and generally presenting themselves as heterosexual males. This includes, then, drag, where it is not used as part of a consistent persona. For the purposes of this discussion, it should be taken as read that British comedy's treatment regarding gender and sexuality have become more complex and indeed more inclusive with the gradual advancement of gay rights--but that is another discussion for another time.
That's who. Now here's what: my discussion is limited to stand up and sketches only. Jokes and sketches operate through the reduction of a character to types; sitcom on the other hand allows for character development, to which I can't do justice in these pages. Some films on the other hand do work with types, particularly if they are strewn with characters, as indeed the most prolific of British comedy films, the Carry On films, are.
The 1940s present an apt starting point--the war effort reintroduced the economic and military necessity of reintroducing the challenge to the common perception of gender roles that had surfaced in the earlier part of the century. Again a limitation: the raciest of the comics then broadcast on the BBC, Max Miller. Commenting directly on women doing 'men's work' during the war, he singles out the act of window cleaning. A woman was "right on top of a ladder, five stories high, cleaning windows. And they say it's unlucky to walk under a ladder ... here, listen ... I took a chance."
Miller specialized in ribald gags in the music hall tradition, operating with innuendo and often not finishing jokes but interrupting them to admonish the audience for its filthy mind just as it constructed the punchline for itself or was prompted to do so by this form of flag. The Brighton-based comedian worked with the sort of humor also to be found on the saucy seaside postcard. Typical subjects are sexual relations--the frustrations of a suitor at the coyness of his wooee or on the other hand her actual readiness to break with moral standards in that regard. Miller portrays himself to this end as the energetic womanizer. This entails to some degree the narration of tensions with his wife, a target in current discourses widely interpreted as symptomatic of latent misogyny: "Can she talk? ... I was riding my motorbike with her on the back the other day. [...] I was doing 90 miles and hours when a copper pulled me over. He said I'm not going do you for speeding, I just think you ought to know that your wife has fallen off about 5 miles back. I said thank God for that I thought I'd gone stone deaf."
Nevertheless, it is worth questioning whether the traits assigned to women are entirely negative. In another joke, his wife is approached by another woman who informs on his philandering. "This woman said to my wife, I saw your husband the other day on the beach with a blonde on his arm. She said, what do expect him to have on his arm at his age, a bucket and spade?" The wife is seen neither as an irritant nor as lacking in intelligence--nor is she jealous or hysterical. Instead, she is above such worries and takes matters in her stride. Nor is Miller's wife long-suffering. She can play similar games, and indeed this he meets with admiration. "Here's a funny thing, now this is a funny thing. I went home the other night--there's a funny thing. And I went in the back way through the kitchen through the hallway and into the drawing room. And there's a fellow standing there, not a stitch on him. (Can you imagine that lady? How's your memory gal?) Not a stitch on him, I caught the wife in. She said don't lose your temper Miller, don't go raving mad. I said I'm only asking a fair question, who is he? She said he's a nudist and he's come in to use the phone. There's a clever one from the wife ."
While the aside asserts the assumption of sexual dormancy after middle age, there is also an implicit shifting of gender roles in this joke--and before anyone else should go raving mad, I'm not suggesting it's programmatic or indeed deliberate. While the punchline of sorts suggests admiration, itself perhaps unexpected, the beginning also creates a minor surprise--which I also refrain from claiming as intrinsic to the joke. It is, I feel, more a coincidence that the beginning has been crafted in such a way that we are confronted with male philandering, but that any anticipation we might indulge in that particular direction is confounded with the reversal of the expected roles.
The music hall's seaside postcard-style of humour had a long shelf-life it was retained as the staple of a string of films produced between 1958 and 1978 by Peter Rogers which usually contained in the most prominent roles Sid James, Barbara Windsor and Kenneth Williams. (Williams rather disdained the cheapness of the humour and paucity of artistic endeavour.) A series of films running for two decades allows observations to be made on the development of discourses; while never departing from its stock in trade of double entendres, innuendo and slapstick, the films reveal an increase in nudity and became more sexually explicit--or, perhaps more accurately, explicitly sexual. Spanning the 60s and 70s, it was perhaps inevitable that one of the films should engage more or less directly with women's liberation.
The film in question is entitled Carry on Girls. The plot centres on a struggling seaside resort and the plans of a local entrepreneur on the town council to boost tourism by staging a beauty contest--and the attempt of a female councilor, the head of the local Women's Liberation Front, to put a stop to it. The project passes through the council session in her absence, mainly because the mayor is rather interested in seeing young women in bikinis. The Women's Liberation Front successfully sabotages the event and the police are called to arrest the organizers of the debacle, but the entrepreneur flees to safety with one of the beauty queens. An extra tension is added by the reluctance of the local hotel owner, a woman long since involved with the entrepreneur and frustrated at his lack of a marriage proposal, to host the contestants. There are thus domestic tensions that reflect those at the local political level--and indeed the hotel owner and the mayor's wife join the Women's Liberation movement, which is ultimately triumphant.
Three male types are constructed by the film, and five female. All the men, typical for a Carry On film, are overawed by sexual advances, with the exception of the character played by Sid James, who is always looking for it and nearly always gets it. The men fall into four generations: lecherous old men, a youngish fiance, and a youth--sexually inexperienced but sexually enthusiastic, and a photographer for the local press. In the case of the women, we have generally middle-aged women opposed to the pageant, two younger but long-suffering partners of the contest's organizers, also opposed to it, a jealous but devoted young fiancee, who ends up a contestant, and highly sexed, game-for-anything young women. And finally a lesbian who dresses in men's clothes--significantly, a rare instance of a lesbian in a series of films that contain plenty of homosexual innuendo.
In portraying the women's lib stance, the film offers a response to feminist issues of the day--and rather ridicules them. In 'casting off the bonds of womanhood', the feminist rebels are forced to rely on a stereotype of the heroic male: they call the fire brigade after an act of ritual bra burning gets out of hand. But an aggressively male dominant approach is also suggested as being out of time--Sid advises the compere on how to deal with women: "Treat them rough." This is overheard by Sid's girlfriend, around whom he then acts not submissively, but certainly elusive and placating. The film offers, then, plenty of recognition of contemporary gender issues and some oscillation between two competing positions. Ultimately, the trailer probably best sums up the overriding stance taken: it promises a cast of stars, listed by name, and 'lots of gorgeous girls'. Or as the hotel concierge remarks when con fronted with a banner proclaiming 'Women's liberty or bust', "I'll take bust any time."
The Carry On films themselves have occasionally been the subject of parody: in the 1990s by The Fast Show and in the 21st century by Reeves and Mortimer, joined by Matt Lukas, Johnny Vegas, Ulrika Jonsson and Will Self on their game show Shooting Stars. In each case, the comic technique of innuendo and double entendre is sent up, as is the focus on sexual encounters and the pursuit thereof. The Fast Show combines the Carry On theme with the 70s Confessions of a Window Cleaner format in foregrounding the contemporary slang for attractive female, 'crumpet'. The gesture of these latter-day parodies would seem to be an assertion of a new climate in which gender equality and sexual preference are commonplace enough to render such humour dated. But it would be wrong to conclude that the Carry On films only contain such features, even if they are indeed dominant. And certainly the common perception that the carry on films reflect a society with a lot of sexual hang ups can be questioned. While I would agree with the basic premise behind such an interpretation, that it is the existence of taboos that provides the scope for humorous treatment, I would also argue that the Carry On films reflect changes in British society's dealing with such taboos. The saucy picture postcard has been transposed onto the cinema screen, but the making of such images flesh--in order that they may again become image--is indicative of a greater acceptance of the body. Indeed, while the humour of the lecherous in pursuit of crumpet and the acknowledgement of female sexuality have been maintained from the interwar period, the films also engage with the tensions between the free love brigade and those who would uphold Victorian notions of decorum and decency. (Particularly Carry on Loving, Carry on Camping and Carry on Behind, from 69, 70 and 75 respectively.)
An interesting parallel can be offered with a comedy hit of the late 60s and early 70s that is generally heralded as breaking with traditional comic form: Monty Python's Flying Circus. For all their much-celebrated revolutionizing of comedy--certainly a valid point with regard to structure and language the Pythons are actually less sensitive to issues of gender equality and complexity than the Carry On films.
The Python team reduced women to two roles: old women, 'pepperpots' as the scripts call them, and dolly birds who do not speak. Carol Cleveland's only line, certainly her only memorable line, and her only line of comic significance, is to complain about a lack of masculinity in her lumberjack boyfriend who has just outed himself as a transvestite. Otherwise she is to cavort, undress or generally orm about. Actually she does have two other comic lines--one is the complaint that it is her only line, another is, in the role of a Hollywood star, to voice the complaints of a stereotypical diva on set. Before running away from a man-eating filing cabinet and losing her clothes in the process.
The pepperpots, paradoxically, are more in keeping with the more revolutionary approach to comedy, just not from a gender perspective. Social criticism is implied by the portrayal of old women as small-minded petty bourgeoises stuck in their ideas of moral conformity, regularly displaying indignation and racial prejudice. It is interesting that the Python stock in trade in such social criticism should be almost consistently gendered thus. The working class or petty bourgeois man does not escape ridicule, but in his case it is the stereotype of unintelligence that is intensified. With the exception of the police, and one sensitive sketch on working class prejudice regarding the arts, petty bourgeois social and racial prejudice is voiced by screeching old women. This is most neatly demonstrated by the vox pops that follow Adolf Hitler's campaign to win the North Minehead by-election: an old woman opines, "I think he's right about the coons. Then again, I'm a bit mental." Prejudice and corruption are also satirized in the male domain, but it is a different class that is focused on: the middle and upper classes are male characters in city jobs or old boys' networks such as the MCC.
By the 1980s, feminist debate becomes clearly recognized in a mini-serial featured by the Two Ronnies: The Worm that Turned. In a reminder of feminism's Marxist heritage, combined with British comedy's tradition of cross-dressing, we have a matriarchal police state in which the subjugation of men is expressed primarily through the reversal of established gender roles and clothing. The comic treatment of gender suppression particularly foregrounds male hegemonic discourse by having it adopted by the ruling women. The skit, however, cannot exactly be said to subvert the male gaze: sexualized masochistic tendencies are reflected in the Nazi uniforms of the matriarchal figure played by none other than pin up Diana Dorrs and her team of stormtroopers kitted out in what would resemble a Nazi SA uniform in all but one respect: leather hotpants. It is the men's quest to perform a successful revolution liberating themselves from unnatural oppression at the hands of militant, misandrist women.
In the 80s, in a response to the trenchant shiteness of Thatcherism, alternative comedy entered the mainstream. Jokes that operated within a thought system of racial prejudice became less acceptable, tellers of such jokes like Bernard Manning having all but disappeared from television screens by the late 80s while a new humour of overtly left-wing political criticism flourished. One of the foremost performers and creator of some of the finest sitcom scripts, Ben Elton, was a leading protagonist in this development. In one of his routines from the early nineties, Elton informs his audience, "Now, it is often suggested that feminists in demanding equality are somehow claiming that men and women are the same. Now, this is rubbish, no feminist has ever suggested this [...]" He then plays the careful commentator worried about offending women: "In a boy-girl relationship, a lot of women, not all women by any means [wipes brow] have a very strange attitude to chips". Both lines, while ostensibly at odds with one another, acknowledge the prominence of feminist thought and the importance for a comic not to be seen as prejudiced. Elton indeed parodied his own left-wing humour on the show Harry Enfield and Chums. In allusion to the Benny Hill Show, the finale of which regularly featured Hill being pursued by an increasing number of scorned women who join the chase as their clothes are inadvertently ripped off as he flees, Elton runs around to the same theme tune while covering up scantily clad women, turning them into feminist activists and correcting other scenarios such as heterosexual courtship--comedy serving as a barometer of gender equality's advancing position within establishment discourse.
Perhaps the most conclusive embracing of discourses of gender equality is presented by Harry Enfield himself. In a parody of 1940s education and instructional films, women are admonished for attempting to join in political debate at a soiree. As a correction, talk of kittens is suggested: "In thought be plain and simple, and let your natural sweetness shine through." The film's ultimate message is, "Women. Know your limits." It is here, in the parodistic adoption of the most misogynistic attitudes, that mainstream comedy performed by a male comedian presents the most assertive rejection of male hegemony on the premise of intellectual superiority and the limitations of the patronizing assignment of gender roles. (Patronizing in both the common and the literal sense.)
But while British comedy displays an increasing participation in the widening acceptance of gender equality, there has been a retention of gender roles that dates back at least to the 1940s--one that does not assume male superiority, at least not to the extent that is sometimes supposed. Admittedly, there has been a move away from the mother-in-law jokes narrated so splendidy by Les Dawson from the late 60s through to the early 90s. There may well be a misogynistic assumption in jokes such as "I've just had some bad news: tomorrow it's the mother in law's funeral ... and she's cancelled it." But the question is seldom asked how masculinity is being constructed here.
Kenn Dodd, like the late Dawson, is a comedian with a long career. As a remnant of an older generation of stand up comics, he has continued to tell jokes that portray a nagging wife and a hen-pecked husband. In a BBC performance in 1994 he used a well-worn, indeed outdated expression to refer to wives: "She who must be obeyed". But he placed it in the context of the terror felt in the later years of married life when the wife makes sexual advances towards the husband. There follows a rendition of the words spoken during intercourse--in international comparison. "When having a Romantic interlude, a French woman says, 'Sacre bleu. Ooh, sacre flipping blue. Oohhoo, Toute l'amour, tonight for sure.' In Italy when a lady's having a romantic interlude she looks up and says 'Sempre amore. Molte amore, sempre amore.' In Britain, [when] a lady's having a romantic interlude she looks up and says, 'That ceiling needs doing.'" But the joke is not on the woman. Ultimately, from the henpecked husband and the nagging wife, it is a joke about a lack of virility: in the throes of sexual intercourse, at the realization of the ceiling's need for renovation, she declares: "I will have to get a man in."
JOHN HEATH
john.heath@univie.ac.at
University of Vienna
John Heath received his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2004 on the American-East German writer Stefan Heym. Since 2004 he has been a Lektor at the University of Vienna, where he has taught on German Literature, English and Translation. His main field of research is Literature of the GDR, but other research interests include topography, metamorphosis, time, and the European reception of Bob Dylan.
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| Author: | Heath, John |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Journal of Research in Gender Studies |
| Article Type: | Essay |
| Geographic Code: | 4EUUK |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2014 |
| Words: | 3409 |
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