This well presented, and well illustrated, volume takes up the challenge of placing the horror and devastation of the Great War in the context of the light-hearted responses to it. The potential grotesque at the heart of such a juxtaposition–gueules cassées setting out to se fendre la pipe–brings into focus both the role of humor as propaganda and the absolute necessity for a powerful, re-humanizing strategy among those close, and closest, to the carnage. This is a bold move on the editors’ p..

Harris, Trevor

English

OpenEdition

 
Transatlantica
Revue d’études américaines. American Studies Journal 
2 | 2015
The Poetics and Politics of Antiquity in the Long
Nineteenth-Century / Exploiting Exploitation Cinema
Clémentine Tholas-Disset and Karen A. Ritzenhoff
(eds), Humor, Entertainment and Popular Culture
During World War I
Trevor Harris
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/7703
DOI: 10.4000/transatlantica.7703
ISSN: 1765-2766
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AFEA
 
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Popular Culture During World War I”, Transatlantica [Online], 2 | 2015, Online since 01 June 2016,
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Clémentine Tholas-Disset and Karen
A. Ritzenhoff (eds), Humor,
Entertainment and Popular Culture
During World War I
Trevor Harris
REFERENCES
THOLAS-DISSET, Clémentine and Karen A. RITZENHOFF (eds), Humor, Entertainment and
Popular Culture During World War I, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 288 pages,
ISBN 978-1-137-44909-2, hardback $ 95, 86,15 €, £ 60.00
1 This well presented, and well illustrated, volume takes up the challenge of placing the
horror and devastation of the Great War in the context of the light-hearted responses
to it. The potential grotesque at the heart of such a juxtaposition–gueules cassées setting
out to se fendre la pipe–brings into focus both the role of humor as propaganda and the
absolute  necessity  for  a  powerful,  re-humanizing  strategy  among  those  close,  and
closest, to the carnage. This is a bold move on the editors’ part since, as Karen Randell
reminds us in the Preface, the way we invariably approach the Great War “is solemn,
respectful, and most certainly humorless” (xii). Strange, since humor, after all, is often
the spontaneous accompaniment to otherwise morbid occasions.  This book seeks to
allow the fun and the laughs back into the discussion and push to one side the cliché of
universally shell-shocked Tommies, or the definitive destruction of pre-war sensibility
and  its  replacement  by  a  world-encompassing  waste  land:  in  short,  to  challenge  a
presentation of 1914-18 as pure discontinuity. While no one denies the “unspeakable”
horror  of  that  conflict,  one  way  in  which  unspeakable  horror  was  articulated  was
through humor, however black or bleak: in spite of everything, many people managed
to cope.
Clémentine Tholas-Disset and Karen A. Ritzenhoff (eds), Humor, Entertainment ...
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1
2 The book brings  together  contributions from academics  based in  Australia,  Britain,
France, Holland, Italy, and the United States. The sixteen short, sharp essays (but all
devote ample space to notes and bibliographical  information)  are divided into four
sections which deal in turn with: “Laughter, Diversion and Nationhood in Great War
Films”; “Novels,  Newspapers and Illustrations”; “Entertaining on Stage”; “Promoting
War Values”. As with any collection of essays, some fit more snugly into their allotted
space than others, and some are more readable, more convincing than others. But the
editors should be congratulated on bringing together such a wide range of material
which deals with reactions at the front, but also in all the main warring powers. 
3 In the first  section of the book (“Laughter,  Diversion and Nationhood in Great War
Films”), the unifying thread is possibly best summed up in what Giaime Alonge and
Francesco Pitassio, in their study of the film Maciste Alpino (1916), call “body culture and
national politics” (53), as governments in the countries at war strove to consolidate the
idea of the nation and (re-)generate national energy. This policy was applied in the
trenches; but also on the home front, where Hollywood war films, for example, were
not afraid to promote the war through what Fabrice Lyczba calls “ballyhoo stunts” (59)
and  “excessive  theatricality”  (66).  Lyczba’s  argument  is  that  this  entertaining
approach, by allowing the audience to participate in a carefully marketed multimedia
version  of  the  war,  developed  the  American public’s  “hoax-debunking  skills”  (69):
though  whether  the  entertainments  thus  conceived  made  the  audience’s  aesthetic
discrimination more sophisticated or merely kept them in the dark about what was
actually going on in Europe is a moot point. Precisely what did audiences take away
from these performances? What meanings did they create? Clémentine Tholas-Disset
looks at similar uncertainties in the relationship between Hollywood and the official
stance on the war, indicating that audiences were not necessarily as streetwise as one
might think. 
4 Part II (“A War of Witty Words and Images”) opens with a piece in which Jakub Kazecki
underlines  comedy  as  mockery  in  Walter  Bloem’s  war memoir,  Vormarsch (1916).
Bloem’s writing produces a relatively state-subservient text in which “the aggressive
and  chauvinistic  elements  of  humor  [bring]  Vormarsch very  close  to  the  German
propaganda images of the time” (99). Koenraad Du Pont’s account of the “Nature and
Functions of Humor in Trench Newspapers” underlines, by contrast, the free-ranging
content of the newspapers produced–in their hundreds–during the conflict, as well as
the variety of types of humor they included: the latter, however, being used more often
than not as a safety valve rather than as the articulation of rebellion against authority.
Renée Dickason, who looks both at humor in the front line and at home in Britain, also
underlines  the “uncontroversial”  (130),  conformist  approach adopted in  Mr.  Punch’s
History of the Great War (1919). Punch tends to toe the Establishment line, peddling an
image of a Britain which sees itself as superior, firmly in the “moral ascendancy” (127),
and which feels comfortable with derision, denigration and demonization where the
“Teuton” is concerned. Even the class and gender divisions of pre-war Britain still seem
firmly in place, as they do in the “World War I Bande Dessinée” (Anne Cirella-Urrutia),
with the mobilization of French children capable of operating “as the subject and the
object  of  propaganda discourses” (137).  Indeed,  total  war affects  all  sections of  the
population.  Children were  thus  used as  both the  motivator  and justification of  the
conflict,  with  Bécassine  being  portrayed  as  France’s  national  heroine,  part  of  a
“psychological strategy to reunite all regions of France and the colonies” (141). Another
Clémentine Tholas-Disset and Karen A. Ritzenhoff (eds), Humor, Entertainment ...
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2
female figure is  pressed into service  in “Marianne in the Trenches” (Laurent  Bihl),
where we are shown how the personification of the French Republic fulfills a complex
diversity of national roles. 
5 The third part of the book is devoted to stage entertainment. Felicia Hardison Londré
leads us deep into the atmosphere of the work done by the United States’ “Over There
Theatre  League”,  and the rapport  between the theatre’s  performers and the young
American  “doughboys”  in  France.  Although  it  was  anything  but  a  joy  ride  for  the
actors–who  performed  on  (at  best)  makeshift  stages  and  whose  average  day  was
exhausting, and run with military precision–, a clear sense of fun emerges: both among
the audiences and among the performers themselves. This is a therapeutic, escapist
laughter also explored by John Mullen (“Humor and Symbolic Empowerment in Music
Hall  Song”),  the largely working-class  audiences eschewing propaganda or strategic
German-bashing, and instead bating their own government or indulging in songs based
around a risqué or bawdy theme, or just singing along to a comic tongue-twister. The
working-class audience may often have given vent to the prejudices of the day, in the
music  hall  they  nonetheless  found  their  own  voice.  Jenna  L.  Kubly’s  piece  on  J.M.
Barrie’s Echoes of the War (four one-act wartime plays brought together for publication
in 1920) is more preoccupied with middle-class attitudes to war, which tend to focus on
the disillusionment, even the sentimentalism engendered by the conflict. 
6 Class-based reactions to the war also permeate the last section of the book. Amy Wells
looks  at  “culinary  activism”  on  the  American  home  front,  where  wartime  sugar
shortages  served  as  a  pretext  for  the  government  to  encourage  willing  patriotic
middle-class  cooperation  in  the  war  effort.  Women,  particularly,  by  signing  a
“conservation pledge”, were incited to help win the war by enforcing frugality in the
home: another form of quasi-enlistment for a non-combatant section of the population.
Robert  Crawford  (“Chunder  Goes  Forth”)  investigates  the  “intersection  of  humor,
commercial interests, and national sentiment” (226) in Australian wartime advertizing.
A highly racialized Australian identity is conveyed through the character of “Chunder
Loo” used in “Cobra” boot polish advertisements. But in spite of himself, or rather in
spite of his Australian creators, as we follow him through the war, Chunder accedes to
Australianness,  even as  Cobra  successfully  build  their  commercial  brand.  T.  Adrian
Lewis  (“Mobilizing morale”)  then picks  his  way through William Stevenson’s At  the
Front in a Flivver (1917), the memoir of an American ambulancier whose matter-of-fact
narrative conveys the absurdity and the horror of war. Its bleak humor functions often
through an apparent empathy disconnect, as Stevenson plots the gruesome paradox of
dynamic, able-bodied medics rushing around the Western Front collecting the corpses
and  mutilated  men  churned  out  by  a  static  war.  Karen  A.  Ritzenhoff  closes  the
collection with an “illustration of the idiosyncrasies of American society at the time of
the conflict and of the changing role of women instigated by the war” (266).
7 In common with their  World War II  counterparts who “kept calm and carried on”,
many of those caught up in the Great War did their best to place sandbags of quotidian
ordinariness in the path of on-rushing terror: how else was one to maintain some sense
of  human  agency  in  view  of  the  hyper-mechanized  logic  of  war?  Humor  was  a
cornerstone of this strategy to distill a few drops of normalcy from all the madness and
had a number of serious objectives. The fun was often pedagogic, transforming “the
war into a humorous tale to make it more palatable and accessible” (79) to the civilians
far  from  the  front.  But  bending  the  populace  to  the  tasks  of  war  and  to  the
Clémentine Tholas-Disset and Karen A. Ritzenhoff (eds), Humor, Entertainment ...
Transatlantica, 2 | 2015
3
government’s  purpose  could  never  control  all  the  laughs.  Several  contributors,
inevitably,  find  themselves  alluding  to  Bergson.  But  his  view  of  humor  as  “the
mechanical in the human” is here turned on its head, since the argument of much of
the book is precisely that what we witness during the war is something irrepressibly
human in something mechanical. Some observers of wartime humor will perhaps be
tempted to see the laughter and entertainment as so many manifestations of panem et
circenses. But the agency of soldiers, and others, cannot be so easily spirited away: who,
for example, retained sufficient wherewithal–writing in The Wipers Times–, to encourage
“platoon commanders to ask themselves the question ‘Am I as offensive as I might be’”
(109)?  Just  a  wisecrack perhaps,  but  a  crack through which leaps a  comic spark of
wisdom: as the military equivalent of middle management, junior officers were bound
to displease.  True,  the young lieutenants were probably not all  dupes,  and neither,
clearly, were the non-commissioned ranks beneath them. 
8 There  are  limits  to  what  is  achievable  within  a  single  volume:  taking  on  humor,
entertainment and popular culture is ambitious to say the least. Not surprisingly, there
are criticisms which might be made: it is a shame, for example, that no historian or
colleague currently working in cultural studies in Germany (or Austria) is among the
contributors. Some of the English in the book is a little shaky and there are a number of
typos (xiii, 41, 67, 81, 83, 84, 92, 114, 135...). But dwelling on the quibbles would not be
much fun,  or  fair.  This  is  a  book which,  in the end–by the end–has accumulated a
momentum which throws Lawrence Napper’s argument in the opening essay into much
sharper  relief:  total  war  did  indeed  have  its  epoch-altering  properties.  But  the
confusion, the cock-ups, the mud and the mess, all lent themselves to comic treatment
and cried out, come what may, to be sent up, kept at a distance. Creating any sense of
perspective when one is so completely up against a wall of monstrosity was bound to
test  even  the  most  resilient  souls.  But  quite  a  few  somehow  managed  it,  whether
retaining their phlegm or by way of slapstick, and tried to make sense of it all using the
language available to them: for this, too, we owe them our thanks. 
9 The interpretation of World War I as replacing one civilization with another will likely
not be shifted easily: the ownership of this part of our communal past will continue to
be contested. Although it would be over-stating the case, therefore, to say that Humor,
Entertainment and Popular Culture gives us sufficient purchase to prize the Great War out
of modernist hands and make a case for a degree of cultural continuity after 1918, the
book certainly asks some important questions. There is the war that has been passed
down to us, but an important aspect of the war that actually happened is reinstated
here. 
AUTHORS
TREVOR HARRIS
Université de Picardie Jules Verne
Clémentine Tholas-Disset and Karen A. Ritzenhoff (eds), Humor, Entertainment ...
Transatlantica, 2 | 2015
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