Vividly bringing to light the tradition of physical comedy in the
French cabaret, cafe-concert, and early French film comedy, this
book answers the perplexing question, "Why do the French love Jerry
Lewis?" The extraordinary emphasis on nervous pathology in the
Parisian cafe-concert, where the genres of the Epileptic Singer and
the Idiot Comic took center stage, and where popular comic
monologues and songs included "Man with a Tic" and "I'm
Neurasthenic," points to a fascinating intersection between
medicine and popular culture. The French tradition of comic
performance style between 1870 and 1910 nearly exactly duplicates
the movements, gestures, tics, grimaces, and speech anomalies found
in nineteenth-century hysteria; the characteristics of hysteria
became a new aesthetics.
Early French film comedy carried on this tradition of frenetic
gesture and gait, as most film performers came from these
entertainments and from the circus. Even before Chaplin's films
triumphed in France, film comics were instantly recognizable from
their pathological gait, just as Jacques Tati would be a
half-century later. Comedy, a genre that dominated French cinema
until World War I, has often been linked to a mass public for film;
the author elucidates this link by proposing a broadly generalized
cultural-medical phenomenon as the explanation for the dominance of
the comic genre. Comic performance style drew from a group of
nervous disorders characterized by the psychological automatism
emanating from the "lower faculties" nervous reflex, motor
impulses, sensation, and instinct.
Building on her previous work on hysteria, the cabaret, and
pathologies of movement in the films of Georges Melies, and drawing
on over 400 French films made between 1896 and 1915, the author
contributes to a new theory of spectatorship at work in the
cabaret, in shows of magnetizers, and in early French film comedy.
Jerry Lewis touches a nerve in French cultural memory because, more
than any other film comic, he incarnates this tradition of
performance style.
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