Beyond a Joke

Parody in English Film and Television Comedy

Neil Archer

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786720900
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

At the opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics, a global audience of nearly one billion viewers were treated to the unprecedented sight of James Bond meeting Queen Elizabeth II. Shortly after, the 'Queen' hurled herself out of a helicopter, her Union Jack parachute guiding her down to the Olympic Stadium. What it is about moments such as these that define both a particular idea of Britishness and a particular type of British film comedy? How has British cinema exploited parody as a means of negotiating its sense of identity? How does this function within a globalized marketplace and in the face of dominant Hollywood cinema? Beyond a Joke explores the myriad ways British film culture has used forms of parody, from the 1960s to the present day. It provides a contextual and textual analysis of a range of works that, while popular, have only rarely been the subject of serious academic attention – from Morecambe and Wise to Shaun of the Dead to the London 2012 Olympics' opening ceremony. Combining the methodologies both of film history and film theory, Beyond a Joke locates parody within specific industrial and cultural moments, while also looking in detail at the aesthetics of parody as a mode. Ultimately, such works are shown to be a form of culturally specific film or televisual product for exporting to the global market, in which 'Britishness', shaped in self-mocking and ironic terms, becomes the selling point. Written in an accessible style and illustrated throughout with a diverse range of examples, Beyond a Joke is the first book to explore parody within a specifically British context and makes an invaluable contribution to the scholarship on both British and global film culture.

1

Cricklewood vs. Hollywood: The Roots and Routes of British Parody on Screen

Running through my head as I have written this book are a number of sequences encapsulating the parody tradition in British film comedy: Wallace and Gromit battling with a Cyborg sheepdog; Graham Chapman’s King Arthur skipping along to the accompaniment of coconut shells; Simon Pegg and former James Bond Timothy Dalton slugging it out in a model village; the destruction of the Earth by the bureaucratic, poetry-loving Vogons to make way for an inter-planetary bypass. Such images, across a range of contexts, provide a neat visual summary of a certain type of film. We might easily recognise this type of film as ‘English’. My interest in this chapter is to work out where this idea comes from, why, and what exactly it means.

What, we might ask, is so ‘English’ about parody? A study concerning itself with the relevance of parody to English film and television will need to address this important initial question. Sequences like those above may seem ‘typically English’, but in understanding this notion we get into a circular argument. Does English film and television comedy take this form because this is what ‘Englishness’ is about? Or do we only define this idea of Englishness in light of these particular representations?

It should be clear, one hopes, that these apparently very similar ideas are two very different frameworks for understanding film and television. To talk about parody as playing a role in constructing a national culture is not the same as saying parody is inherent to that culture itself. But the potential eliding of these two notions is symptomatic of a pitfall in national film or television studies, where the effect is taken for the cause; where what is in truth a specific form of dialogue – the main focus and argument of this book – is taken as a form of natural speech, unproblematic and assumed. As I will discuss, such assumptions about what is ‘essentially English’ overlook a wide range of factors – economic and political, as well as cultural – underpinning parody’s use within English comedy.

While comedy and realism are often seen as antitheses within English film and television culture, both types are often marked in critical discussion as oppositional to some notion of a dominant global cinema, usually Hollywood. Within this discourse, the qualities of realism are nationally specific, partly because of their focus on particular regional or class contexts (especially those outside the dominant social and economic strata), but also because their settings, narratives and aesthetics mark them as distinct from other dominant types of cinema. Arguments for realism as somehow native to wider British film, for instance, are numerous, giving rise in fact to the established generic category of ‘British social realism’. But what does it really mean to say that such film practices, within a medium so relatively new and already international as cinema, have some sort of claim – in the case of realism, for some advocates, an almost moral claim – on our sense of cultural identity and our ideas about what film is supposed to do? And what, in this case, underpins the claims of one type of film or television to speak for ‘us’, over and above those other types existing alongside it?

As we will see, parody has itself been incorporated into this prevailing discourse of realism-as-English, in its putative oppositions to Hollywood illusionism. Such arguments identify the way certain texts exploit or foreground the discrepancy between the contexts of English film (its settings and its economic realities) and those of Hollywood. Implicitly or otherwise, though, such arguments also acknowledge the dominant imaginary of Hollywood’s powerful ‘other’ as a structuring factor in these representations. Moreover, they risk a prescriptive line of thinking once they presuppose that there is an inevitably distinctive, ‘authentic’ Englishness behind such parodic tactics; or in their tacit assumptions that realism is the inevitable and ‘natural’ state to which these same texts should eventually devolve (a subject I will pursue in more detail in Chapters 2 and 4).

For the sake of argument, though, to what extent can we identify a type of national character in the study of comedy cinema? Geoff King lucidly outlines the problems inherent to any attempt to define ‘national’ as a characteristic of cinematic output:

The problem of seeking to isolate distinctive ‘national’ comic traits is complicated from two directions: from both inside and outside the particular national context involved. To demonstrate that particular aspects of the comedy produced in one nation are uniquely characteristic of that country is extremely difficult, given the number of potential counter-examples that would have to be taken into account […] We can [however] move away from broad claims about the nationally-representative-or-otherwise qualities of particular forms of comedy, to consider the question at the level of industrial strategies of audience-targeting.¹

King’s insistence that formal characteristics of national film comedy are hardly unique to that one cultural context, and that we understand the national in ‘relative rather than absolute’ terms,² are views this present study shares. In pursuing this line, though, we must be wary of overlooking the longer representational and institutional histories that may inform the shape and content of these ‘industrial strategies’. Whether or not we believe (and I do not) that types of English parody emerge as naturally as waters from some eternal spring, we can still make sense of how, when and why certain forms of film emerge; as well as understanding why, at particular points, modes of parody acquire different kinds of discursive value. I will therefore start with a consideration of one of English parody’s most immediate predecessors: music hall, and its related cinematic output. I will then see how this tradition finds different embodiments through different contexts in British film and television, identifying the form and discursive function of these varied outputs. In doing this we can start to identify certain recurring types of practice, aesthetics and performances of parody. This chapter will therefore sketch the movement of some of these recurring tropes through to the present day, and in turn, consider their applicability to a type of ‘parodic imaginary’ in English film and television.

Music Hall, Character Comedy and Parody Performance

Andy Medhurst has identified the ways that the traditions of music hall prescribe an English space of popular humour and community, in ways that, as we see, finds its distinctive way into both film and television. The specifically working-class contexts of the music hall, from its Victorian origins through to and indeed beyond the twentieth century, imbue it with a particular kind of political, collective identity. The typically profane, ironic and knowing laughter of the music hall is, Medhurst writes:

a laughter that is communal, collective, resigned, blunt, basic, a way of getting by, of alleviating the depressing limitations of low horizons […] Music hall was often vibrantly vulgar, testing the limits of censorship and questioning the stranglehold of ‘decency’, so often a code word for attempts to foist the constrictions of middle-class propriety on to working-class lives […] The halls, in effect, became the primary cultural space in which…alternative values were articulated, and the articulation took concrete, collective shape in the punchy, combative performance styles of the singers and comics and in the audience’s active participation.³

As this type of entertainment for a particular people, in an etymological and evaluative shift, becomes identified with the popular, this comic ‘spirit’ of the music hall comes to be associated with a type of culture that – depending on your perspective – is either the ‘low’ culture of mass entertainment or, conversely, an oppositional culture rejecting ‘the constrictions of middle-class propriety’.

Music hall is therefore instructive for the way it is at once debasing and, potentially, political in its vulgarity and lampooning of bourgeois traditions and dominant representations. As Medhurst notes, possibly the earliest parody films in the English tradition were those (now mostly lost) starring comedian Dan Leno, which poked fun at the ‘overwrought melodramas’ popular at the time.⁴ There were also the satirical ‘Pimple’ films, as performed by Fred Evans, which played with topical subjects and even legendary episodes of British history: titles included Pimple’s Battle of Waterloo (1913), Lieutenant Pimple’s Dash for the Pole (1914) and Pimple’s Charge of the Light Brigade (1914). What is noticeable even in the titles of these short films is the way they position themselves so parodically alongside national discourses and even films of the time: Pimple’s Battle of Waterloo was even produced as a specific response to The Battle of Waterloo (1913), one of the earliest feature films to appear, with significant hype and fanfare, on British screens. In the positioning of the ridiculously-named Pimple alongside evocations of history, adventure and the epic, these films clearly look to undermine the pretensions and grandeur of national myth-making, and shape the emerging role of a popular cinema itself in this process.

The form of the ‘Pimple’ films also reminds us of the importance of ‘character comedy’ to parody cultures, and emphasises the importance of performance, personality and communication to the parodic imaginary. The incongruous placing of Fred Evans’ character in an almost endless succession of nominally grandiose contexts encourages the type of identification with an ‘everyman’ figure that King sees as central to the character-centred comedy film.⁵ We need only to look at the success of Rowan Atkinson’s effectively silent ‘Mr. Bean’ character, both on television (ITV, 1990–95) and in two cinematic outings (Bean [1997] and Mr. Bean’s Holiday [2007]), to understand the continued appeal of this type of character comedy. In terms of the economics and profile of English production, the Bean brand, as well as the other Atkinson vehicle Johnny English (2003)/Johnny English Reborn (2011), give support to King’s assertion that character comedy ‘has proved extremely successful in a range of national, regional and international markets’.⁶ King is not of course limiting his discussion to non-Hollywood production, referring to the broader production practices and reception of the comedian vehicle; and as much as we might wish to see Mr Bean as an English phenomenon, his is in many respects a type played out across any number of national and Hollywood contexts.

Given that Mr Bean distils a rich and broader tradition of physical character comedy, stretching back into the silent era (via Jerry Lewis, Jacques Tati and Peter Sellers amongst others), his identification as a specifically English figure – culminating in his guest performance at the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony – may owe therefore to the particular narrative contexts of his adventures, as it does to Atkinson’s wider association (most prominently, through the various Blackadder series [BBC, 1983–89]) with English comedy film and television. The incongruities of character comedy, and its narrative potential for chaos, owe a substantial amount to the way its comic figures are located; both within terms of the genre in which they find themselves, but also as removed from their familiar locale. While the character comedy of the Bean and Johnny English films may eventually conform to the structural tropes of the Hollywood film, in which the protagonist successfully brings about narrative resolution, these same tropes are also frequently parodied by virtue of the same protagonist’s obvious incongruity; the clear evidence that they are the wrong person for the task (even, or especially, if they don’t themselves acknowledge this discrepancy).

Music hall – or more specifically, the film stars to have emerged from its later contexts – once again offers a precedent here, insofar as it is often identified with a particular type of narrative, performance style and audience engagement. In his analysis of the Gracie Fields vehicle Sing As We Go (1934), Andrew Higson looks for clues as to the film’s frequent associations with a type of Britishness: a Britishness which Fields, the music-hall star who at the time was also one of the highest-paid actors in Britain, was often seen to embody. The narrative of Sing As We Go centres on Field’s adventures as a newly-redundant mill worker seeking employment, and getting into unexpected adventures, in the seaside resort of Blackpool. Fittingly, it is to some extent the incongruity and comic spectacle of the actual Fields body, always slightly chaotic, comically never quite at ease with its surroundings, to which Higson attributes much of the film’s national associations. The motifs of character comedy are central to this process:

There is something of a tension between Grace, the narrative character, and Gracie Fields, the attraction. The tension is true of all stars, but in Fields’s case […] it seems to be accentuated […] She clearly does inhabit a relatively autonomous imaginative world, but it is not a world (a diegesis) where space and time are rigorously organized by narrative requirements.⁷

Higson’s analysis in effect answers the concerns of Medhurst, in his own consideration of the music-hall film star, when he highlights ‘the central problematic of the 1930s variety star film – how to accommodate such performers within existing cinematic genres’.⁸ Since performers such as Fields or George Formby established their popular performance personae through their engagement with their audiences, with the confidentiality and community that come with it, how – if at all – could this ‘be fitted into the demands of the ninety-minute narrative film?’⁹ Higson’s argument is that it does not need to be. Sing As We Go’s tendency toward spectacle, in the form of musical or comic numbers, but also in Fields’ engagement with a putative audience beyond the camera – a camera she, like Formby in his films, often addresses¹⁰ – becomes the real point of the film. The consciousness of Fields herself as a performer, rather than a fully-integrated character within a diegetic story-world, and the sense in which the film suspends narrative development to the promotion of performance as an event, works to create a sense of film as participatory, speaking to an ‘implied live audience’¹¹ beyond the camera. An aesthetic of interaction, communication and community, in other words, descended from the same type of music-hall performance to which the film owes much of its content and form.

While we are not describing parody as such here, we are dealing with a mode of performance that is to a significant extent disruptive, knowingly so, of the conventions of dominant narrative cinema and its tendency toward verisimilitude. Just as importantly, these spectacular disruptions are, via the performers who embody them, enacted and marked with very specific cultural connotations and identifications. The audience that laughs and sings with Fields and Formby is also positioning itself alongside these stars, and by implication, on the other side of all those things that stand in their way. Participation through a type of reflexive film practice; identification with a central performer; opposition to everyday authorities, be they diegetic (the bosses...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface: Repeat Performances
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• General Editor’s Introduction
• Introduction: Why Parody, and Why Now?
• 1 Cricklewood vs. Hollywood: The Roots and Routes of British Parody on Screen
• 2 Silly, Really: Parody, Genre and Realism in Monty Python’s The Holy Grail and Life of Brian
• 3 History and Hysteria: The Charge of the Light Brigade, Royal Flash and Ripping Yarns
• 4 ‘The Shit Just Got Real’: Negotiating Hollywood in The Strike, Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz
• 5 From Distance to Difference: Parody, Participation and the Cultural Canon
• 6 Where No Joke Has Gone Before: Parody as Science Fiction in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Paul and Moon
• Epilogue: James Bond, Runner Beans and Jumping Queens
• Notes
• Bibliography