by Tim Rayborn
Pedrolino’s lazzi include: comical imitations of Capitano; being (or pretending to be) mute—another association with modern mimes—thus causing comic confusion as the others try to understand what he is communicating; sleeve comedy, such as having them tied together, flailing them around in the air, and so on.
The scenarios
Commedia plays were not always written out as plays, especially in the earlier centuries. Rather, they made use of scenari (“scenarios”), outlines of stories that were meant to be improvised by a given troupe. So, while there might be a basic story, the actors would have to improvise dialogue, insert their lazzi at given points, and keep the whole thing going along to bring it to a logical (or illogical) conclusion. By the eighteenth century, these outlines might be posted backstage for the benefit of the actors who could read.
In 1611, Flaminio Scala (1552–1624), a playwright, director, and actor who portrayed the male lover in his troupe, published a large collection of his scenari, Il Teatro della Favole Rappresentative (“The Theater of Tales for Performance”). The collection contained fifty scenarios, forty of which were comedies. Commedia groups did occasionally perform serious works and tragedies, usually for wealthy patrons on more permanent stages.
The thing is, when reading through them, they seem a bit dry and even dull. This is because so much of the magic of a Commedia show relies on its physical comedy and improvised humor. It was up to the actors to take these simple outlines and turn them into something hilarious, using all of their considerable talents. Here is example of a scenario by Italian playwright, Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806):
Brighella enters, looks about the stage, and, seeing no one, calls.
Pantaloon, frightened, comes in
Brighella wishes to leave his service, etc.
Pantaloon recommends himself to him
Brighella relents and promises to aid him
Pantaloon says (in a stage whisper) that his creditors, especially Truffaldino, insist on being paid; that the extension of credit expires that day, etc.
At this moment:
Truffaldino (scene of demanding payment)
Brighella finds a way of getting rid of him
Pantaloon and Brighella remain
At this point, additional characters enter, and the scene continues. None of this seems very funny, but imagine how it could be interpreted, with exaggerated movements, grotesque masks, wide eyes, funny voices, pleading for more time to pay off the debt, making funny faces behind the villain’s back, doing asides to the audience, bringing up topical or dirty jokes—the possibilities are endless. Each time the actors took the stage, the scenario would be different and could be tailored to the audience and to current events.
There were also “mixed plays,” which were a combination of written-out dialogue with improvisations and scenari, as well as actual plays that still allowed room for the actor’s own ideas and talents. Taken as a whole, Commedia productions were a unique form of theater, combining satire, physical comedy, vulgarity, and comic violence in equal measure, all to get audiences laughing.
The slapstick and physical comedy
The very term “slapstick” has come to mean physical comedy, usually involving people having mishaps, falling over, crashing into things, and other such actions that are unpleasant for those experiencing them, but completely hilarious for the rest of us. Why do we laugh at the misfortunes of others? That’s a very good question with lots of deep psychological answers that may have to do with unconscious drives relating to aggression, projection, the feeling of safety in knowing that the action is happening to another, and the projection of our worst fears onto the experiences of others, allowing for a cathartic release. Or, it may just be because it’s damned funny.
In any case, the slapstick was originally an actual object, a prop used in the Commedia, most often wielded by the zanni and intended for loud, painful, and comic effect. As used in skits, it was called the batacchio (or bataccio) and was a paddle-like wooden club with two slats, one on a hinge. When it was swung, preferably when the actor simulated whacking another character on the butt or any other part of the anatomy, one slat would slap against the other, creating a loud smacking sound that made spankings and beatings seem much worse and much funnier. The stick could be used again and again, producing these repeated loud cracks, while the actor on the receiving end wouldn’t be hurt at all. It became an essential prop, crucial to the physical comedy at the heart of Commedia scenes.
It seems to have originated in the sixteenth century, and it quickly became a staple of Commedia humor. It was still in use in vaudeville and other comedies in the nineteenth century, but seems to have gone out of fashion after that. The idea of physical comedy was kept alive, though, and the silent films were a great age of Commedia-like laughs. Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Cops, Buster Keaton, and the Marx Brothers were all heirs to the legacy of these zany masked clowns and their pain-for-laughs brand of humor. Their weapon of choice gave its name to a whole genre of violence and accidents for amusement.
Punch and Judy—violent and comical Commedia puppet shows
You may remember the scene from the film This Is Spinal Tap where the band, their fortunes ever waning as their ill-fated tour wears on, finally ends up at a county fair playing as the opening act for a puppet show. We tend to think of such shows as silly little whimsies for children’s birthday parties, but the art of puppetry has a long and noble (or sometimes ignoble) history that can be anything but childlike in its theatrical content. And so it is with Punch and Judy.
Long a staple of English seaside entertainment, the original shows grew out of Commedia themes. Punch derives, as we have seen, from Pulcinella (“Punchinello” in English, hence the name) and brings that character’s violent tendencies into the realm of puppetry. Indeed, so savage can his behavior be that it can result more in nervous laughter and shock rather than genuine hilarity. Traditionally, a single puppeteer would operate both Punch and his companions, sometimes assisted by a musician who would play fiddle or other instruments and draw in an audience, collecting their money and sometimes repeating dialogue that was difficult to hear.
Punch seems to have made his English debut on May 9, 1662, as recorded by the diarist Samuel Pepys, who was in Covent Garden in London near St. Paul’s Church, when he wrote that he went: “into Covent Garden to an alehouse … Thence to see an Italian puppet play that is within the rayles there, which is very pretty, the best that ever I saw, and great resort of gallants.” A modern plaque in Covent Garden marks the place where Pepys saw the soon-to-be-famous character. Rather than being a hand puppet—as he was most commonly depicted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Punch and his comrades would originally have been marionettes, operated by one Pietro Gimonde.
A legend records that King Charles II and his mistress Nell Gwyn saw one of these early versions of the show, and the king was so impressed that he issued a royal decree permitting the performers to call themselves “professors.” Well, this was the story they liked to tell about themselves, anyway, and they adopted the title without any further academic qualifications.
From the later seventeenth century onward, this grotesque character became something of a British institution, which is a little bizarre considering his Italian origin and violent nature. He wears a kind of jester’s outfit and sports a sugarloaf hat (a pointed cap that curves forward at the top). He has a long crooked nose, a hunchback, and carries a slapstick that he is prepared to use on everyone. Indeed, there is little that Mr. Punch won’t do: wife beating, child beating, child murder, attacking the police, even taking on the devil himself. The plotline varies and is less of a cohesive narrative than a series of encounters and skits between the characters. In some versions, Punch’s wife, Judy, tasks him with babysitting and things soon go horribly wrong: he drops the infant, sits on it, or accidentally puts it in a sausage machine. When she returns, she is outraged and beats him. Police arrive and more violence occurs. During these skits, the
re are certain stock characters and actions that audiences expect to see at every performance. Punch and Judy are the ultimate dysfunctional family, and the violence that ensues has long been used to get laughs; traditionally Judy has been just as horrible and violent toward Punch, which plays on old Commedia jokes about a henpecked husband. What could be horrific and in very bad taste is mitigated by the fact that the puppets are wooden and their facial features are frozen, so no expressions of pain can be made; it causes the scenes to be more funny than offensive.
Further, Punch’s voice is deliberately comic. It’s produced by the swazzle, a device made of two strips of metal and a reed of cotton that the puppeteer voicing Punch holds in his mouth. It distorts his voice, making it sound like a high-pitched kazoo, and the character immediately becomes ridiculous, no matter how awful his actions. The problem with this little device, of course, is that it is small, and the operator risks swallowing it mid-performance. Sometimes professors would attach a bit of string to the swazzle; it dangled out of their mouths and could be pulled forward if it crept too far back toward their throats, but this plan didn’t always work. Indeed, there grew up a tradition that no operator of a Punch puppet could truly call himself a professor until he had accidentally swallowed a swazzle at least twice.
Irish puppeteer Martin Powell (fl. 1709–1720, d. 1729) is most often credited with establishing the format and stock plot of Punch and Judy shows, which spread from London to other English cities and Ireland. In the later eighteenth century, marionettes began to be replaced with much lighter hand puppets, and the show evolved into a form that is more familiar to modern audiences; it also gained a following in Paris and the American colonies, where even George Washington was said to be a fan. But the productions didn’t lose their outrageous acts of violence and slapstick comedy as the nineteenth century dawned. Indeed, they thrived in Victorian England, when one would think that society’s prudishness would have called for them to be banned, especially if children were in the audience. But the shows had no less respectable a defender than Charles Dickens, who wrote in 1849:
In my opinion the street Punch is one of those extravagant reliefs from the realities of life which would lose its hold upon the people if it were made moral and instructive. I regard it as quite harmless in its influence, and as an outrageous joke which no one in existence would think of regarding as an incentive to any kind of action or as a model for any kind of conduct.
Actually, Punch and Judy’s antics were originally intended for adults, but over the course of the nineteenth century, they evolved into more of a children’s entertainment, possibly as a result of those Victorian societal pressures. Certain characters, such as Punch’s mistress, Pretty Polly, and the devil, were eventually cut because they were deemed inappropriate for young minds, but much of the comic violence remained. This is an interesting commentary on societal values: the implication of infidelity and images of Satan must be removed, but have all the violence you want, that will make the kids laugh!
The show was always topical, and despite its stock plots and characters, it managed to poke fun at the establishment and sometimes used its chaos to satirize those in power, introducing puppets into the skits that caricatured public figures, from Napoleon in the nineteenth century to Margaret Thatcher in the twentieth. In the wake of the restrictive Licensing Act, this kind of show, which was technically not a “play,” could say the things that theatrical productions could not, and did so with relish. The ridiculous puppet and his big stick could hold up those in power to ridicule, with his silly voice and stupid appearance. It was a perfect way to mock politicians and others who thought too highly of themselves. Punch lives on. There was even a famous British humor and satire magazine called, appropriately enough, Punch, that began in 1841 and survived in various forms until 2002. The original Commedia actors would be pleased.
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The Bloody Theater
It seems that theater audiences have always enjoyed a good bloodbath, from the appalling mass murders of the ancient Greek dramas, to the equally violent tragedies of the Elizabethans, to the horrors of twentieth-century Paris (see below). Where would Oedipus be without his self-blinding? How interesting would Titus Andronicus be without the mutilations and enemies baked into pies? There is probably something cathartic about witnessing such horrors in a controlled environment, safe in the knowledge that the gore is false (and maybe even over-the-top and comical), it’s just a fictional story, and it can be left behind when one returns to the safety of the real world—well, as “safe” as the real world can be. Players and companies have employed a number of techniques over the centuries to represent such stomach-churning scenes, some more effective than others. From animal bladders filled with fake blood to hoses representing the intestines of the disemboweled, here is a messy tour through some of the yuckier aspects of depicting horrid deaths onstage.
Also, sometimes the deaths weren’t that fake after all; the Romans apparently actually murdered some of their cast, who weren’t exactly willing participants, it must be said. We’ll also have a glance at some actors who got so into their roles that they took the drama too far and expired onstage or soon after, thus taking suffering for their art to a whole new level.
Fake carnage for the stage: animal-blood bladders, red rags, and many body parts
Blood and guts on the stage have a long, if not-so-illustrious, history, going back to ancient Egypt and its live hippo sacrifices. Things moved on from there, thankfully, but the audience’s lust for graphic death scenes never waned. Here, we’ll take a look at some of the highlights and lowlights of theatrical splatter, and the creative ways that it was brought to life, or death.
Ancient Greece: Surprisingly, given the gruesomeness of many Greek tragedies, there was a convention, at least in those tragedies, that violence and killing were not be shown. It was perfectly okay to depict the results of violence, or even to have piles of fake dead bodies lying about, but one could not show a stabbing, a hanging, or even a poisoning (which would have been easy to simulate). In a tragedy, one could not even show a violent act, such as hitting another actor. Even violence against animals, such as a ritual sacrifice, could not be portrayed. Even more strangely, comedies had no such prohibitions, at least when it came to throwing punches, and it was perfectly fine to smack someone for laughs, a tradition that survived and flourished in Rome and probably into the Middle Ages and Renaissance, when the Commedia became so popular.
But why was there a ban on showing violent acts in the one genre where they would be most appropriate? Several explanations have been offered. One that seems likely has to do with Greek drama originating in religious rituals and devotion to Dionysus, and the sense that the god might be watching the play and thus be offended if people were to be shown being killed. Killing was forbidden in temples, of course, so even a fake killing wouldn’t go over well. This would certainly explain the lack of simulated deadly blows and actual animal sacrifice, since plays retained a sacred element. But as far as plain old hitting was concerned, comedy had no such prohibitions; so why would Dionysus be offended by such violence in a tragic story but amused by it in a funny one? Tragedians were likely trying to create a certain atmosphere in their works and this prohibition over time became an artistic convention. We don’t know exactly where or when this practice began, but it was likely less about some religious or moral authority using the no-fun police to force tragedies not to show actual blows, and more about aesthetic considerations and the belief that violence could be even more horrible if you only showed its effects.
Ancient Rome: The naughty Romans changed things considerably, and not for the better. While initially they modeled their plays on those of the Greeks, with Bacchus (the Roman Dionysus) being the great dramatic patron, in time Roman audiences wanted much more spectacle and grandiosity in their entertainments. This was the society that thrilled to gladiators fighting each other to the death and animals mauling hapless victims in the great arenas, after all, and thos
e shows were not for the squeamish.
While following Greek models, Rome’s comedies went ever more over the top, with painful physical hilarity akin to the later Commedia and even actual sexual activity eventually taking place in front of crowds. Tragedies, of course, demanded blood and death, and why bother talking about these events that had occurred offstage, when you could simply show them actually happening? If the plot called for, say, someone to be stabbed to death, there was no need to worry about faking it, you just killed someone for real. Wait, what?
Well, the Romans apparently devised a rather ingenious solution for how to convincingly portray onstage death (though how true this is remains unclear): just as some condemned prisoners were sent to the arenas for the amusement of the masses and their executions turned into entertainment, in plays, the condemned were sometimes brought to theaters and dressed as characters from the story. When a given character was due to die, the actor playing the part would simply step aside (or vanish backstage) momentarily, and the condemned, wearing the same outfit, would be pushed forward to take the thrust of the dagger or the swipe of the sword for real. Since they were most often wearing masks, the illusion of the actor dying was preserved, and the death was horrifically authentic. This might be taking method acting a little too far.
The Middle Ages: The medieval world did away with the excesses of Roman theater (probably a good thing), but the need to depict certain grisly scenes from Christian history became important, not for titillation, but for strict spiritual instruction. As a result, players started getting creative with faking horrific killings. Some plays detailed the lives and deaths of martyrs and saints, and what better way to scare an audience into good behavior than by showing them exactly how such pious people met their gruesome ends? Here is an example: A later twelfth-century French play, Le Mystère d’Adam (“The Mystery [Play] of Adam”), was a dramatization of Genesis, and for the murder of Abel at the hands of Cain, instructions were given that the actor playing the victim have a small pot of blood concealed on him, so that when the moment came, he could go out in a blaze of messy glory.
