Slapstick

Slapstick is a comedic performance style featuring boisterous, physically excessive, accident-prone stunts and activities resulting in exaggerated harm to the performers’ bodies and dignity for amusement. Comic violence and clumsiness lies at the root of slapstick comedy.

Slapstick performers purposefully slip, collide, twist, or blast each other with explosive chaos for unpredictable and ridiculous spectacle. They incorporate overstated labored movements and expressively pained reactions for maximum absurdity. Frequently used slapstick props include mock weapons like rubber chickens, cream pies, seltzer bottles, oversized hammers, and anything else facilitating hilarious havoc.

While seemingly random and disjointed, skilled slapstick requires careful rehearsal and choreography to safely achieve extreme physical comedy without real lasting damage. Precise comic timing is key between the performers, as is comradery and trust to present themselves at their most foolish while knowingly expecting frequent pain in their quest to accentuate laughs.

Origins & History

“Slapstick” came from a wooden prop device used in Medieval Italian Commedia dell’arte theater to create slapping noises, accentuating buffoonish violence between actors. The term later become synonymous to all highly physical clowning and comedic humiliation.

In early American vaudeville and British music halls, duos like the Three Stooges performed routines featuring constant eye poking, face slapping, and prop enhanced battles for rowdy reactions from drunken audiences. Comedians like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd later elevated film slapstick with cleverly planned visual gags and precisely timed large scale stunts. Their influential 1920s silent movie era shorts remain models for dynamic, catastrophic physical comedy.

Modern slapstick crossed over to children’s television with shows like “The Soupy Sales Show” which famously instructed juvenile audiences to throw pies at their parents. Current iconic slapstick performers include motley circus clowns like Avner the Eccentric who crafts riotous mishaps with complex dangerous props. Contemporary slapstick cinema continues influencing new generations with manic franchises like Jackass , which features amateur stunt performers self-inflicting vulgar bodily punishments solely for shock laughs.

While often crude and absurd, dedicated slapstick performers contribute invaluable cultural functions as licensed fools critiquing societal pretensions and the arbitrary randomness of existence through unhinged hyperembodied comedy.

Styles & Techniques

Varied approaches to slapstick clowning evolved as traditions passed between interpreters. Notable techniques include:

The Comic Collision - Two or more performers accidentally smashing into each other in the pursuit of something, highlighting lack of environmental awareness. Forward momentum mixing with awkward falling.

Mechanical Incompetence - Fools struggle to operate machinery, always resulting in accidents and damage. Overconfidence, ignorance meets engineering chaos.

Malicious Magnetism - Certain performers possess intrinsic attraction towards any nearby messy substances, aggressively targeting them for maximum embarrassment by the end.

Bizarre Contraptions - Overly elaborate Rube Goldberg-like mechanisms engineered for mundane tasks but inevitably spectacularly failing at great expense.

Witless Battles - Short tempered clowns instigate fights using ridiculous makeshift weapons for prolonged overblown skirmishes, highlighting the absurdity of violence.

Bodily Anarchy - Blatant disregard for even basic human anatomy and dignity. Naughty taboo violations, absurd assaults on the senses to undermine manners for libertine misrule.

These examples demonstrate the wide range of contexts adaptable for exaggerated physical comedy staged by clever clowns. Fusing carefully rehearsed choreographed mishaps with unpredictable improvised reactions, slapstick practitioners produce unrelenting chaotic hilarity while secretly maintaining firm control over their seemingly uncontrolled madness. By mockingly dismantling pretense and decorum, slapsticks jokers reveal deeper cultural truths through the profane and preposterous.