Louise Lee

Critics have often noted Darwin’s enthusiastic curiosity (Beer, Levine, Amigoni, Schmitt, Browne) in the Journal of Researches (1839)—particularly its “intensely libidinous” nature (Beer)—but his “strange antics” and numerous instances of “amusement” have been treated as little more than biographical gloss, or charming digressions on the way to a much larger story. But re-reading these understatedly comic episodes through the interpretive prism of incongruity produces a new set of emphases; and intellectual and affective affinities. For, like Michel Foucault’s laughter at the beginning of The Order of Things (1966), Darwin’s “scientific wit” has distinctly taxonomic implications.1 Incongruity figures the splicing of two previously un-apprehended interpretive frames, a kink in the logic of expectation. While Darwin later naturalizes (rather than spectacularizes) incongruity into his scientific method, in its first iteration in the Journal, it performs vital cultural and aesthetic work: upturning sublimity and delivering detail and present-ness rather than vastness and transcendental awe. Building on Arthur Koestler’s theory of “bisociation”, I argue that incongruity—a gentlemanly and Enlightenment theory of comedy that is fundamentally horizontal rather than vertical in its purview—operates by making Darwin’s own previous expectations, rather than any object, animal or person, the butt of the joke. The “clash” of comic frames at the point of observation limns incongruity’s usefulness as a form of visually self-stimulating agon. These “shifts of attention” (Koestler), I propose, have significant implications in his early evolutionary theorizing: gesturing towards Darwin’s own “nonsense” aesthetic: one that is highly suggestive of non-essentialist approaches to species thinking.

George Eliot’s seriousness is often treated as a genre in itself by twenty-first-century critics. This chapter aims to reset the aesthetic dial by reading her novels Middlemarch, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda through her forgotten Westminster Review essay on laughter, ‘German Wit: Heinrich Heine’ (1856). This was one of a number of essays Eliot wrote on Heine, a notorious iconoclast whose work also provided the literary mainstay of Sigmund Freud’s allusions in The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Considering Eliot’s advanced interests in the short-form of the joke alongside her theorisation of the more ‘prolix’ humour (‘the incongruous aspects of everyday life’) renders new ways to interpret both sympathy and the ‘real’ in her work.

This innovative collection of essays is the first to situate comedy and laughter as central rather than peripheral to nineteenth century life. Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent offers new readings of the works of Charles Dickens, Edward Lear, George Eliot, George Gissing, Barry Pain and Oscar Wilde, alongside discussions of much-loved Victorian comics like Little Tich, Jenny Hill, Bessie Bellwood and Thomas Lawrence. Tracing three consecutive and interlocking moods in the period, all the contributors engage with the crucial critical question of how laughter and comedy shaped Victorian subjectivity and aesthetic form. Malcolm Andrews, Jonathan Buckmaster and Peter Swaab explore the dream of print culture togetherness that is conviviality, while Bob Nicholson, Louise Lee, Ann Featherstone, Louise Wingrove and Oliver Double discuss the rise-on-rise of the Victorian joke -- both on the page and the stage -- while Peter Jones, Jonathan Wild and Matthew Kaiser consider the impassioned debates concerning old and new forms of laughter that took place at the end of the century.

Laughter is under-determined in twentieth and twenty-first-century critical accounts of Victorian culture. While the turn to affect and the rise of performance studies has done something to redress this imbalance, finding a common disciplinary language has historically proven problematic. Focusing on the practices of Victorian middlebrow literary reviewers, and also descriptive accounts of critics watching stage comedians, I argue that terms like ‘wit’, ‘humour’, ‘fancy’ and ‘incongruity’ may appear static—even recondite—but they are nonetheless important markers of changing subjectivity, and are dynamically shifting in the period. Considering particularly the rise of the joke from the 1850s onwards, the chapter also introduces a new cultural figure: the jokeur, the professional or semi-professional joke-writer, less visible than the flâneur, but increasingly significant.

Critics have often noted Darwin’s enthusiastic curiosity (Beer, Levine, Amigoni, Schmitt, Browne) in the Journal of Researches (1839)—particularly its “intensely libidinous” nature (Beer)—but his “strange antics” and numerous instances of “amusement” have been treated as little more than biographical gloss, or charming digressions on the way to a much larger story. But re-reading these understatedly comic episodes through the interpretive prism of incongruity produces a new set of emphases, and intellectual and affective affinities. For, like Michel Foucault’s laughter at the beginning of The Order of Things (1966), Darwin’s “scientific wit” has distinctly taxonomic implications.  Incongruity figures the splicing of two previously un-apprehended interpretive frames, a kink in the logic of expectation. While Darwin later naturalizes (rather than spectacularizes) incongruity into his scientific method, in its first iteration in the Journal, it performs vital cultural and aesthetic wor...

On the morning of the much-feared 'Monster'Chartist rally of 10 April 1848, London resembled a ghost town: two million protesters were expected to march on the capital; the Queen and Prince Albert had fled to the Isle of Wight; shops were closed; and an ageing ...