In Commedia dell’arte, characters balance on wobbly ladders, narrowly escaping the fall, they trip over their own feet while running away, or stumble over treacherous objects. Similar missteps are also celebrated in the comedic tumbles that populate early slapstick film: characters fail to climb steps, they roll down escalators, or fall flat on their noses. These “strange Contortions of a Body in a Fall” evoke laughter, as Francis Hutcheson notes in 1725. My talk considers them to be part of the rich and complex art of comedic falling.
Counterintuitively, on stage and in front of the camera, funny falls can be understood as a dissimulated corporeal technique. Towards the end of the 19th century, the advent of chronophotography and film bring forth media that preserve the fleeting movements of falling, enabling analysis to this day. But to what extent can they be studied today without such material? How can we grasp funny falls from around 1800, for example?
Exploring stumbles, trips and tumbles in film, images, drama, and prose (preparatory reading will be distributed), my talk develops options for research on falling and its cultural functions. In doing so, it traces the extent to which falling belongs to the corporeal and cultural techniques of comedy, and gages its affective dimensions.