Slapstick!

I love comedy. I especially love it if it involves falling over, head-hitting, tripping over, or any other humiliation based humour. I just love seeing other people fall over - it makes me laugh more than anything else.

If, like today, I am around when someone falls over or bumps into something, my first reaction is to giggle. The incident in question involved a woman tripping over a curb & spilling her shopping all over the pavement. Someone helped her - which they managed to do without even the vaguest hint of a smile, suggesting they didn't find it amusing - & I had to walk on quickly so that no one noticed me trying not to laugh. It's very juvenile.

If, however, anyone laughs at me when I fall over/trip up/stub my toe/bang my head on something (which happens rather more than I would like), I take umbrage in a big way. I normally follow the incident with a very hard stare at whoever is around - daring them to laugh at their peril. If they DO laugh they will either be treated to a strop, or the silent treatment until such time that they realise the error of their way & apologise profusely for their insensitivity. Of course this never happens - & why should it? Accidents like that are funny - I know that really.

I find Accident & Emergency Departments in hospitals similarly humourous, with all the bandaged body parts & so on. One of my favourite comedy sketches is the Monty Python one where the Intensive Care patients are taken on outside exercises. I realise that none of this reflects very well on me.

I don't think I'm on my own, though - a bit of research shows that slapstick comedy has been around for centuries. Shakespeare used it in both his comedies & his non-comedy plays, e.g. the travelling Players employed by Hamlet were essentially knock-about clowns. Some theatre historians argue that slapstick comedy originated in the Middle Ages; beating the devil off stage was a regular feature in most religious plays.

Later, slapstick was used with great success in the movie industry - originally by the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, & the Marx Brothers. It remains a major crowd-pleaser, today being employed by current Hollywood directors (such as the Farrelly brothers) & actors (such as Jim Carrey).

An article in the Times Online outlines a theory that the origins of laughter can be traced back 4M years. Evolutionary biologists have traced the origins of laughter back to before the evolution of mankind, with the apes stumbling around as they struggled to walk on two legs. According to the theory, when they saw a member of their group lose his footing they would laugh as a sign to each other that something was amiss, but nothing too serious. Matthew Gervais, the US evolutionary biologist who led this study, said: "Becoming bi-pedal means there was a greater chance of tripping & falling. Essentially the suggestion is that slapstick & humour evolved from that time. When we laugh at slapstick, we are laughing at the same things that amused our early ancestors. That's why we find them funny."

According to the study, the next basic elements of human behaviour that sparked laughter were flatulence and mild sexual mischief. Language appeared only 2m years after the first laugh, enabling people to combine laughter and words into numerous refinements, from amusement at a joke to sneering at a rival.

Gervais and his colleague David Sloan Wilson devised their theory after reviewing more than 100 studies of laughter covering isolated aspects such as psychology, archeology, history and neurology. The researchers believe that the forerunner of laughter was the panting noise made by apes and chimpanzees, often in response to tickling, which is believed by scientists to be a way of preserving harmonious relations in a family or other group.

"Witnessing another individual unexpectedly trip or slip (from an awkward bipedal gait?) while simultaneously recognising the non-seriousness of the mishap often elicits laughter in humans today," says the study, which appears this week in the Quarterly Review of Biology. "Such a mishap could have become a potent elicitor of laughter in early hominids as a result of Pliocene pressures for increased social play."

Whether or not this theory is true, it is certainly fair to say that slapstick will probably be around for a while yet.


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