Objects of humour: the puppet as comic performer

Many of the studies that explore the fascination audiences have with puppets have focused largely on the relationship between the operator and the object and the illusion engendered through performance. Those that attend to the issue of humour, such as Dina and Joel Sherzer’s Humour and Comedy in Puppetry in 1987, tend to address generic comic components of specific puppet practices, and only minimally engage with the more fundamental concerns about how the object may be viewed humorously by audiences. This article intends to bridge this gap in scholarship by exploring the similarities between spectatorship and humour in relation to puppet practices. Drawing links between the incongruities inherent within puppet forms, particularly those revealed through the juxtaposition of object and human operator, and theories of humour, I argue that there is amusement to be found in seeing the inanimate animated, which is similar to the pleasure found in incongruous humour. While not all puppets are used for comic purposes, my argument suggests that the fundamental collaboration required for an audience to appreciate a puppet performance lends the form a particular comic specialism which may help explain why, historically, puppets appear to thrive in comic contexts

Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One

"The 48 essays and photographic dossiers in these three volumes examine the history of the human body as a field where life and thought intersect. They show how different cultures at different times have entwined physical capacities and mental mechanisms in order to construct a body adapted to moral ideas or social circumstances the body of a charismatic citizen or a visionary monk a mirror image of the world or a reflection of the spirit. Each volume emphasizes a particular perspective. Part 1 explores the human body's relationship to the divine, to the bestial, and to the machines that imitate or simulate it. Part 2 covers the junctures between the body's "outside" and "inside" by studying the manifestations - or production - of the soul and the expression of the emotions and, on another level, by examining the speculations inspired by cenesthesia, pain, and death. Part 3 brings into play the classical opposition between organ and function by showing how organs or bodily substances can be used to justify or challenge the way human societies function and, conversely, how political and social functions tend to make the bodies of the persons filling them the organs of a larger body - the social body or the universe as a whole." -- Publisher's website