Comic Figures Research Articles

‘Who is afraid of fairenesse or wanton ladies appearing in their barenesse?’: laughing at female desire in early modern English reception of the myth of the Trojan War☆

AbstractIn early modern England, as part of a broader interrogation of exemplarity, full‐scale works on the Trojan War often subjected the myth's heroes to humorous scrutiny, whereas the heroines remained surprisingly untouched by comedy. Testifying to the war's calamities already in antiquity, in the early modern period, the myth's women acquired a further link to destruction: their sexuality was believed to ‘undo’ men. Embodying different types of suffering, the heroines came to be regarded as inherently tragic. Read against this context, one aspect of William Shakespeare's and Thomas Heywood's interventions into the myth appears remarkably defiant. Pursuing divergent aims – in Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare explores the annihilating power of laughter irrespective of gender, in Oenone and Paris and The Iron Age Heywood specifically sets out to rehabilitate female characters – both authors temporarily turn the heroines into objects of comedy. However, if Shakespeare creates a Troy in which mockery is universal, Heywood does not. Thus, although both maintain that laughter against the myth's heroines ultimately backfires, turning those laughing into comic figures, Heywood, by having the women never resort to mockery, makes them seem more sympathetic, even tragic, whereas their Shakespearean counterparts laugh and suffer laughter's consequences alongside men.

Between Camp and Cursi: Humor and Homosexuality in Contemporary Mexican Narrative by Bisbey and Brandon P

Reviewed by: Between Camp and Cursi: Humor and Homosexuality in Contemporary Mexican Narrative by Bisbey and Brandon P Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes Keywords Mexico, Camp, Cursi, Humor, Parody, Homosexuality, Literature, Narrative, Lgbtq, Queer, Gay, Bisexual, Lesbian, Travesti, Transgender, Homophobia, Brandon P. Bisbey, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes bisbey, brandon p. Between Camp and Cursi: Humor and Homosexuality in Contemporary Mexican Narrative. SUNY Press, 2022, 252 pp. What is the relationship between humor and homosexuality in contemporary Mexican narrative, and how has it changed, given the notable transformations [End Page 143] in Mexican society regarding LGBTQ rights over the last decades? Brandon P. Bisbey tackles this question with great gusto and critical acumen, discussing a wide range of short stories and novels from the 1940s to the present. He shows a rather complex and at times contradictory panorama, in a social context historically dominated by “the association of male homosexuality with gender nonconformity, which contributed to the reification of a stereotype of homosexual men as effeminate” (1), frequently through the figure of the loca, and the association of “lesbian sexuality with traditionally masculine behaviors” (2), with popular representations and cultural productions in which “the homosexual characters are comic figures who are the targets of satire and ridicule” (1). Engaging scholars as diverse as Robert McKee Irwin, Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Emilio Bejel, Vinodh Venkatesh, and Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, Bisbey analyzes a rich archive. He examines how writers, some better known, others less, challenge these homophobic and misogynist stereotypes and envision myriad possibilities, subverting humor and transforming it to diverse ends. These can be seen particularly through queer practices such as camp (a type of minoritarian cultural viewpoint that privileges insider knowledge, seen as a postmodern gay sensibility and critical practice) and cursilería (an affectation and at times an ironic nostalgia that is particular to Hispanic contexts). As the author indicates, “In the texts that I read below, I find that the humor used to signal and talk about queerness includes camp (gender-based humor expressing queerness) that is also always cursi (expressing a postcolonial marginality from discourses of modernity)” (8). The critical readings of the literary texts are engaging and sometimes more convincing than others, as at times Bisbey errs on the side of excessive generosity. Nevertheless, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Mexican and Latin American literature and to readers interested in humor as a social practice and in how queer topics are dealt with in Mexico, with important parallels in other Latin American and Caribbean contexts. Between Camp and Cursi has an introduction, five substantive chapters, a conclusion, notes, a list of works cited, and an index. It also includes four images. The straightforward and highly accessible introduction richly engages the scholarly bibliography and provides summaries of the five chapters, which are organized by themes and not in strictly chronological order. All five focus on literary representations of camp and cursilería, mostly by cisgender men but also including some women authors. Bisbey highlights the context of heteronormativity and violence against women in Mexico and the toxic persistence [End Page 144] of bias, stating that “in the interest of challenging these uses of humor that uphold the dominant social structure, the goal of this book is to interrogate how literature uses humor as a queer, decolonial practice” (4). He also identifies the four main scholars he engages: “José Esteban Muñoz’s reading of camp performance as a strategy of disidentification for queers of color in the United States”; “Eve Sedgwick’s call to read camp texts and practices in a way that balances ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative’ approaches”; and “Lidia Santos and Carlos Monsiváis’s theorizing of cursilería in Latin America, which also balances paranoid social critique with a reparative emphasis on the creative, decolonial possibilities of lo cursi as an aesthetic practice” (4). The key critical move in this book is to read each literary text “in a way that looks to balance paranoid (critical) and reparative (celebratory) approaches” (8), an approach that at times becomes somewhat mechanical but which nonetheless generates very productive interpretations of texts that at times do not seem particularly progressive or that are marked by...

Precedent Names from Russian Literature in English-Language Cartoon

The paper analyzes precedent names of Russian origin in polycode texts of pictorial caricature genre, published in American magazines and available in the licensed cartoonstock.com database. The particular focus is made on the names of Russian writers and poets (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn), and the titles of Russian-language literary works featured in American caricature (War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Karamazov Brothers, Cherry Orchard, The Three Sisters and The GULAG Archipelago). Methodologically, the study is based on cognitive, linguo-semiotic, linguo-axiological, and contextual analysis. It is noted that the cartoons convey stereotypical ideas about the works of Russian writers: the intimidating large volume of Tolstoy’s works, and the conciseness of Chekhov’s are both treated ironically; stylistic features (Chekhov’s attention to detail; Dostoevsky’s psychological tension) are ridiculed. Content references are often superficial and only touch upon the most mundane, utilitarian issues, overlooking more complex social and psychological problems (generation gap, internal conflicts). In a truly caricatured light, the authors are depicted as money-makers, and their characters turn into comic figures of popular computer games. Some works of Russian writers are presented in an axiologically deflated way: Anton Chekhov’s plays were turned into sports competitions and ice shows, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s GULAG Archipelago became a musical. The authors conclude that in English-language polycode texts, Russian precedent literary onyms are predominated with ironic evaluative semantics, and the general irony is accompanied by a tendency towards a simplified, formalized perception of works of Russian literature.

Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sir William Davenant and the Duke’s Company

Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sir William Davenant and the Duke’s Company

Amusing Abusers and Humourless Survivors: Analysing the Role of Comedy in Media Representations of Sexual Violence

This article reflects on the importance of comedy when considering media engagements with sexual abuse themes. This approach is informed by how closely the study of humour is rooted in the analysis of power relations, with comic theorists, both historical and contemporary, grounding the work.The comic figures of both the child sex (CS) abuser and the sexual violence survivor are first identified, before exploring what exactly about these tropes evoke laughter, and what this means for wider conceptions of interpersonal abuse and victimology.
 In analysing examples of CS abuser themed British and American comedy, animated adult comedies such as Family Guy (1999-present) and Monkey Dust (2003-2005) are considered in the context of early 2000s anxieties towards the suburban dirty old man and online child safety. In the case of the sexual violence survivor, Saturday Night Live’s 1993 ‘Is It Date Rape?’ sketch is considered within the context of 1990s anxieties regarding feminist campus politics, and is paralleled to the mid-2010s media panic surrounding British and American university students and trigger warnings through examples including The Simpson’s 2017 ‘Caper Chase’ episode and early to mid-2010s online academic polemics on the humourless feminist, such as Mark Fisher’s ‘Exiting The Vampire Castle’ (2013) and Jack Halberstam’s ‘You are Triggering Me!’ (2014). The article concludes by considering the changing consensuses for sexual violence themed humour in the Me Too era through the 2018 episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-present) ‘Times Up For The Gang.’

The Comedian as Confidence Man: Studies in Irony Fatigue

The Comedian as Confidence Man: Studies in Irony Fatigue

Comedy in Wuthering Heights

A careful reading of Wuthering Heights shows that, notwithstanding the grimness permeating its various narratives, there are elements in the text which may be said to be of essentially comic interest. That Emily Brontë seems to have no mean gift for comedy is apparent enough, say, through Joseph’s witty utterances; through the satirical portrait of the housekeeper Zillah; through the silly things said by some of the main characters as youngsters; and through a number of more or less farcical incidents and episodes, to cite a few obvious examples. Much less obvious, on the other hand, are some of the ways in which Emily gives us to understand that her two principal narrators, Lockwood and Nelly Dean, should be viewed as somewhat comic figures, thereby confirming for us the idea that, for all its distressing content, her novel nevertheless represents a happy blending of comedy with tragedy.

El homosexual como juguete cómico en el cine de Juan de Orduña: el tío Frasquito en Pequeñeces (1950)

Abstract During the 1940s, Francoist censorship troubled and banned the representation of homosexuality in cinema. However, some representational cracks existed and some queer characters (sissies, transvestites, mannish women) were visible, almost always as comic figures. These representations (especially, effeminate men) were frequent in films directed by Juan de Orduña, a homosexual filmmaker integrated in the Francoist cinematographic industry. This article studies these characters and proposes some hypothesis to read Orduña’s authorial position towards them. In particular, it suggests that Orduña negotiated his creative expression with dominant discourses concerning homosexuality in order to represent it, as other homosexual creators had made before him and many others would make afterwards in Spanish culture. Scripts, censorship documents and films are compared to show how significant elements related to homosexuality were added when filming. Specifically, this article focuses in a queer character, Tío Frasquito, and how it was developed during the production of Orduña’s film Pequeñeces (1950).

How to Read Harold Bloom and Why

How to Read Harold Bloom and Why Benjamin D. Carson (bio) Urge and urge and urge,Always the procreant urge of the world. Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" No other well-known literary critic elicits the kind of praise or vitriol, and not in equal measure, as does Harold Bloom. He is either championed as a professional provocateur—a "colossal" among critics—or, as is more often the case, he is condemned as a pretentious windbag. If he is not a genius, he is, in the words of Joseph Epstein in a particularly nasty hit piece for The Hudson Review, "that most comic of unconscious comic figures . . ., the intellectual equivalent of that character in P. G. Wodehouse of whom Wodehouse writes that he looked like someone who was poured into his clothes but forgot to say when" (215). "So far as one can determine," Epstein continues, "The Anxiety of Influence has had very little influence and appears to have caused anxiety chiefly in Harold Bloom, who claims that few people really understand it" (215). And, Terry Eagleton, in his Figures of Dissent, writes that Bloom's theory, "as Henry Fielding observed of the belief that the good will get their reward in this world, had only one drawback, namely that it was not true" (Figures 168). About How to Read and Why, specifically, Eagleton goes on to write, Bloom's "portentously self-important book would collapse at the faintest whiff of" irony (169). Eagleton and Epstein are hardly alone in their critique of Bloom's project. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their The Madwoman in the Attic, suggest Bloom's theory, rooted, however nominally, as it is in Freud's Oedipus Complex, is "offensively sexist to some feminist critics" (47) while other critics follow in the same way: Geoffrey Hartman, in his Criticism in the Wilderness; Elizabeth Bruss, in her Beautiful Theories; Jonathan Arac, in his Afterword to The Yale Critics; and Edward Said, in his The World, the Text, and the Critic, all conclude that Bloom is less than what Arac labels an "iconoclast" (179) than a conservative defender of the Western, maledominated literary canon.1 In this essay, I argue for a way of reading Bloom that allows us to give Bloom his due without taking recourse to ad hominem attacks (Epstein) or outright dismissal because his theory is not "true" (Eagleton). Rather than asking questions like "Is Bloom right?" or, more specifically, "Are poets really embroiled in a heroic struggle with their poetic fathers?"—we might instead read Bloom the same way Richard Rorty reads Plato, Heidegger, [End Page 3] Proust, and Nabokov: as the author of a new vocabulary, a new way of talking, describing and re-describing the world. In other words, we should read Bloom ironically—that is, through a pragmatist's eyes. In this sense, Bloom, like William Blake, is not just an ironist in an agonizing struggle for self-creation. Rather, the tetralogy of books in which Bloom outlines his theory of poetic influence—The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), A Map of Misreading (1975), and Poetry and Repression (1976)—can be understood not as offering a new epistemology that must bear the burden of truth claims but, in Cynthia Ozick's words, "as a long theophanous prose poem, a rationalized version of Blake's heroic Prophetic Books" (46).2 If Ozick is correct about the how we should read Bloom, what about the why? Bloom's theory, finally, is about the relationship between what Nabokov calls "aesthetic bliss" and being (314). The former breathes life into the latter. Difficult reading, David Denby writes, "develops . . . stamina in the way that track practice builds lung power and muscle" (236). In a passage that sounds like it could have been written by Harold Bloom, Denby argues in his recent book, Lit Up, You make a self by matching yourself against the text. When you respond to the text fully, understanding how it is constructed, and what the parts mean, you come into being. This was hardly a narcissistic exercise; the students [at the Beacon School, Mamaroneck, and Hillhouse] couldn't do what they did without the...

Figuras palhacescas: um percurso até os palcos hospitalares

Este artigo busca investigar as figuras cômicas, em especial as palhacescas. Para isso, realizou-se pesquisa de natureza qualitativa, exploratória e bibliográfica, que tem em obras já publicadas - como livros, artigos e publicações online - suas principais fontes de pesquisa. Chegou-se à conclusão de que se pode traçar um percurso destas figuras aos palcos hospitalares, onde contemporaneamente geram novos saberes no campo da atuação cênica e de suas relações com o cotidiano.

Brian O’Nolan, the Conspirator

Brian O’Nolan, writer and civil servant, wanted the Irish to explore alternative realities and build a new country. He unsettled taken-for-granted relationships between words and things, and used storytelling devices to engage his readers. However, once his status had been achieved, he profited from his ‘specific weight’ in society to launch deeper attacks on conventional beliefs. As a comic writer, he had the duty to criticise society even at the risk of losing benefits. As Bakhtin noted, inertia is maybe the worst social threat. In this respect, comic figures function as actors of solidarity, and keepers of a “culture in common”, in Raymond Williams’s words. Brian O’Nolan the comic writer was a negotiator of change, offering a comfortable and distressing perspective, but in the end not as harmful as that of the ruling class. He let us peep into parallel worlds for the improvement of our understanding of things.

Parody as Translation: Ibsen’s new woman in the pages of Punch

“Parody as Translation: Ibsen’s new woman in the pages of Punch” examines four comic parodies of Ibsen written by Thomas Antsey Guthrie, a British journalist and humourist also known as F. Antsey. The plays examined include parodies of Rosmersholm, A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, and The Master Builder — comically abbreviated renditions of Ibsen originals that featured striking new women characters. Reading these parodies as responses to their originals, I examine what happens to the new woman character when she is subjected to comic parodic treatment. Although the parodies do not directly focus on the alteration of these key female characters, I argue that Antsey’s parodic critique of Ibsenian dramaturgical mechanics, conventions, and tropes indirectly impacted their representation, transforming them from tragic heroines to comic figures and raising further questions about the relationship between gender and comedy. In each parody, the psychological complexity of the new woman character is compromised through Antsey’s alteration of one or more of her key purposes within Ibsen’s text. Overall, I argue that the reassessment and reinterpretation of these key Norwegian texts can be viewed as a mode of transition between Ibsen and those impacted and influenced by him, providing a cultural medium or “buffer” that helped connect the notably “serious” Scandinavian playwright with British audiences.

La controverità delle madri: la ballata «à la manière de Villon» tra Sanguineti e Pasolini

The aim of this study is to show that, in the early Sixties, the Italian poetry, with Sanguineti and Pasolini, tried to use comic forms. In fact, among the many reuses of the metrical forms during the Twentieth century, the ballad by Villon created a curious event: in 1961, Sanguineti published Ballata delle controverita (Ballad of countertruth), a Villonian parody, and Pasolini wrote the Ballata delle madri (Ballad of mothers), a satirical text dedicated to the mothers of journalists that vexed him, taken from a metrical pattern of the French poet. Through a historicistic investigation, this work tries to show that the use of comic figures is determined, in large part, by the influence of Brecht, who had used texts by Villon in his Threepenny Opera. The survey made it possible to detect that these attempts to write comic verses, made in the case of Sanguineti in a parodic tone and in the case of Pasolini in a satirical tone, have determined, as a way to balance the comical figures, the adoption of stanzaic forms and rhyming schemes.

Life, The Crocodile, the Pisikoa and the Wind: Representations of Teaching in The Writings of Three Pacific Authors

In the course of research involving the experiences of teachers of Pacific ancestry in New Zealand public schools, I became interested in the ways in which teachers were represented in Pacific thinking. Published works give relatively easy access to at least some of the patterns of thought evoked by the term teacher. In this paper I shall look at the kinds of teacher and teaching shown by Ruparuke Petaia, Albert Wendt and Sia Figiel. These authors, all confidently Samoan, portray some of the complexities of learning and teaching from within Samoan sensibilities. 'Life', 'the Crocodile', 'the Pisikoa' and 'the Wind' are all the names of teachers in this literature. My discussion of Kidnapped by Petaia (1974), Ola by Wendt (1991) and Where we once belonged by Figiel (1996) is not chronologically ordered so much as thematically arranged. The three themes are: decolonisation of education, the European teacher of Pasifika students and the Samoan teacher of Samoan students. Petaia presents a decolonising stance: the teacher as instrument of colonisation or enslavement. This perception is followed through by a discussion of Figiel's character, Siniva, who likewise rejects European knowledge as a form of darkness, and a brief reference to this idea by Wendt. Both Wendt and Figiel portray European teachers as arrogant in their assumptions about the universal nature of their knowledge, and as comic figures of enlightenment colonisation, somehow cut off from embodied human experience. Wendt sees the Samoan teacher as ineffectual, an instrument of a kind of hopeless enlightenment, frustrated by regulations and village traditions, while Figiel sees her as a real presence in village life but a tragic figure of local ignorance.

Hijras in Bollywood Cinema

ABSTRACTHijras are a community in the Indian subcontinent that is well known for a number of reasons and rituals. The hijra community is heterogeneous and has been known in the historical context for millennia, forming a key part of rituals in Hindu culture, celebrating marriages and child birth. Hijras have been physically attacked and have been the focus of fun (ridicule). They have been portrayed both negatively and positively in literature and in Hindi films—which reach a significant audience not only in India but also among the Indian diaspora—involving hijras as comic figures and as caring maternal figures. In this paper we discuss the heterogeneity of such portrayals, illustrating various types with scenes from Hindi films. Social and cultural contexts and understanding of the context is important in understanding sexualities.

The Lure of the Other: Sheridan, Identity and Performance in Kingston and Calcutta

How did the American War affect ideas of nationality, identity, and belonging for the widely dispersed and varied British subjects? This article addresses this question through an examination of the performances of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comic opera The Duenna (1775) in Kingston, Jamaica, and his comedy The School for Scandal (1777) in Calcutta, Bengal. In each of these sites, theatrical performances enabled residents to embrace both the love of alterity and the longing for home that were each endemic to colonial life. Yet the comic figures of Jewish characters in each play suggested that Britishness and otherness were not far removed from each other, as theatrical performance, almost despite itself, began to sketch in more similarities than differences dividing us from them. In a moment when metropolitan anxieties about empire and colonial engagements with otherness had become entangled with practices and peoples that seemed to put British identity at risk, Sheridan’s two comedies hint that empire could make everyone an “other,” a “them.” Sheridan then attempted to diffuse that insight in his plays, inviting the audience to laugh at itself as it engaged in the pleasures, and pains, of real and imagined identifications.

The Processes of Eavesdropping: Where Tragedy, Comedy and Philosophy Converge

Eavesdropping scenes, where one of the characters eavesdrops or spies on one or several of the other characters (usually with the knowledge of at least one of them) will serve as my point of departure for exploring the relations between tragedy, comedy and philosophy. The eavesdropper is a spectator inside the fictional world who because of what he (and most frequently it is a male) learns by eavesdropping or just by carrying out this act of transgression is transformed into a victim. I exemplify with Polonius (in Hamlet, III, 4) and Orgon (in Tartuffe, IV, 5), who are physically situated in a focal (liminal) point where the eavesdroppers become vulnerable and can quickly be transformed from tragic to comic figures and vice versa, transgressing the generic borderlines between tragedy, melodrama, comedy and farce. There are also many instances where philosophical discourses originate from an eavesdropping situation, the most obvious being the form of teaching practiced by Pythagoras, lecturing to his students from behind a curtain. My article also examines examples of eavesdropping in the writings of Plato and Walter Benjamin.

‘Who do you think you are kidding…?’ German comedy from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries

‘With a smart joke, I have let you see an easy game.’ Reuchlin in SergiuThe Germans have no sense of humour, have contributed nothing to the history of comedy and are arrogant compared to the English [sic!]. This article tests the veracity of such myths and statements and presents a history of German comedy from the tenth century through to the development of comic forms and characters in the eighteenth century. The Roman playwright Terence had a lasting influence on German comedy, from the adaptations of Hrotsvitha to the fifteenth-century playwrights when the complexity of his plots and clear moralising chimed with the ideals of the Reformation. From the sixteenth century, performative modes were established, such as the epic poetry of the minnesingers who performed at court, the more public Schwanke’s comic anecdotes that gave way to the farcical Fastnachtspiel and the Nachtspiel. Recurrent comic figures were used to draw the audience in and comment on proceedings: but the popular clown Pickelhäring was supplanted by the commedia-influenced Harlekin, who was replaced by the homegrown rustic Hanswurst, who in turn was superseded by the more domestic comic servant. The clown figure was eventually excised from eighteenth-century bourgeois theatre, signalling the end of German ‘rough theatre.’ This article argues against the crude stereotyping of Germans and their ‘lack of humour’ to present a map of neglected comic history.

Witches before Flying

This paper examines Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606), and The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, and considers in detail the witch scenes in both plays and their stage directions during their entrances and exits. The witches in the Jacobean Macbeth of the First Folio, do not explicitly fly in the stage directions. However, they do in the Restoration Macbeth, namely in Davenant’s second Quarto (1674). The question to be raised here is: what evidence is there in the pre-Restoration Macbeth that the witches flew? In order to explore this, we must consider what performance spaces were used for Macbeth in the Jacobean period. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Heywood and Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches form an interesting comparison since they were both revised by other writers. The Late Lancashire Witches has not received as much scholarly attention as the other witch plays discussed here. Therefore, as a comparative study, this paper will also discuss the joint authorship of Heywood and Brome in The Late Lancashire Witches and the stage directions of the witch scenes. Although it seems that the witches did not fly in Heywood’s and Brome’s version, there is evidence that the stage directions called for flight in The Lancashire Witches (1681), Thomas Shadwell’s later version. A further illuminating comparison between these plays is that the creatures we are considering here are sinister figures in Macbeth but comic figures in The Lancashire Witches. The audience can see that the three Weird Sisters enter the stage and then vanish into the air, but do not see them fly.

Design Pattern Retrieval and Style Analysis for Content Creation of Comic Figures

Placement of objects within a constrained space is a common challenge for designers; it is associated with decisions regarding the furnishing of a space with furniture, collocation of dressings, flower arrangement, and design of comic figures. Though many design elements can be shared on the Internet in the current age of technology, it is still not easy to compare or search for design patterns based on these elements. Thus, it is difficult for designers to efficiently retrieve similar patterns designed by others, to compare them, or to learn from them. This paper proposes the architecture of representing, comparing, retrieving, and analyzing the design patterns of digital contents for design support. This scheme can help the designers to explore the huge space of design patterns efficiently, to analyze and summarize the design styles quickly, and to improve design skills and stimulate imaginations effectively during the process of learning or creating. The proposed scheme has been verified with a design support system for the content creation of comic figures. It is generally applicable to the creation of digital contents and shows potential for applications in the fields of design and education.