Book Review: Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema, by Maggie Hennefeld

If the women laugh… I don’t care what the men do. I go ahead and prepare for a long run… (if) they don’t like the show - turn off the pipe organ, Tessie; there’s nobody behind you but the ushers and they’re all asleep. 

Broadway star Taylor Holmes, Motion Picture Magazine, May 1918

 

This book achieves the rare feat of being both enlightening and thoroughly entertaining; Maggie Hennefeld’ s work here is so rich in content but it is also packed with the light touch of someone truly on top of their subject who is also able to define and then extemporise on the humour under study. Maggie’s historical analysis is compelling and revelatory, with the fluidity of her style making light work of the detail of whilst gleefully leading us on to the most interesting of conclusions.

 

Here is a book that explains the influence of societal changes on cinema, a liberation of feminine laughter that fuelled the popularity and monetization of the new media of the 1900s, as well as the opportunities the industry provided to enable the further acceleration of these changed sensibilities. The studios may have been laughing all the way to the bank but women were laughing all the way to greater liberation, self-expression and representation. None of this happened in isolation – other factors were at play – but The Killing Joke was definitely on the archaic attitudes of the late Nineteenth Century medical-political consensus. In capitalist society, nothing speaks louder than a new market found and served. Trust me, I’m a marketer.

 

I’m also a historian though – I’ve got the paperwork to prove it (just about) - and the first two sections of the book provide a thorough and fascinating feminist, “hysterical-historiographical” description of the view and status of women on the edge of nervous breakdowns as defined by the male mentalities of the Nineteenth Century and beyond. The appeal of silent film is always its view of the culture of the time, it’s a primary source showing not just the evolution of technique but also social mores, Death by Laughter adds so much context and breaks new ground for me and I would expect many others.

 

Léontine s'envole (1911)

“… women’s laughs were ruthlessly suppressed, muffled, corseted, defanged, gaslit and hystericized throughout the nineteenth century.”

 

Part One: Death by Laughter

 

Hennefeld splits the book into three sections, the first looking at the way laughter – something we would now count as a freedom – was once considered not just improper but also dangerous. From 1879 to 1920 hundreds of women supposedly laughed themselves to death, including one Bertha Pruett, killed by a joke in 1893 – allegedly.  It’s easy to laugh now but far more serious to lose control then, especially as a woman, prone as they were to nervous complications brought in by merry excess and wild laughter. Whilst there have been cases of people laughing just too hard, the poor man who couldn’t stop himself watching The Goodies episode about the ancient Yorkshire martial art of Ecky Thump, the dangers were used for marketing purposes very early on in the cinema.

 

Yet there was also deep-rooted disapproval of allowing one’s funny bone the full tickle. According to Charles Baudelaire writing “On the Essence of Laughter” in 1855, all merry laughter was “satanic”, “grotesque” or a symptom of lunacy. As bad as this is, he never used the term hysterical which was a gendered signifier reserved in a non-humorous way for the “weaker” sex for whom excess excitement was considered inappropriate by many. Indeed, as Hennefeld observes, women’s joyful laughter was actively censored and suppressed in the Nineteenth Century, they simply required more control.

 

The evolution of mid-to-late Nineteenth Century perceptions of laughter is analysed through sentimental novels, those reported health impacts and the works of Darwin (evolutionary purpose) and Marx (revolutionary purpose) until we get to 1898 and The New Laugh offered by the New York Herald; a “ripple of merriment” for a generation of girls making far too much noise. Buckle up Herald, the next century’s going to be a bumpy ride, and making more noise shall be the whole of the law.

 

I like the way Hennefeld draws contemporary analogies, especially the reference to the Monty Python sketch about the most dangerous joke in the world; one that is so funny it kills in seconds and which is used to win the Second World War. It’s un-survivable and un-sayable. Even lethal in German.

 

No Monty without Mabel?

Part Two: Female Hysteria

 

“I therefore claim all symptoms of female hysteria as unrealized eruptions of exuberant laughter… I see women’s hysterical symptoms as laughs cut off at the knees…”

 

This long-debunked aspect of early psychological analysis has been the subject of much examination by feminist historians. Hysterical was not a word associated with rollicking laughter until the end of the Nineteenth Century and was a signifier of female strangeness for much of the time before that and even beyond during the work of Sigmund Freud who here stands accused of “gaslighting the libido” of his subject Dora who simply refused to surrender to his interpretation of her symptoms. Dora’s will to resist is surely under-pinned by increasing education and the broader movement towards self-expression among better educated women. In Britain the reforms of Liverpudlian William Gladstone’s Liberal governments would have a long-term impact on the thinking and expression of the middle and even lower classes… soon more and more would want to vote and the disenfranchised were not laughing anymore.

 

Hennefeld shows how the “hysteria chronicles… map onto long-standing debates about the subversive potentials of disruptive feminist comedy” – can women’s laughing defiance tangibly impact the social order or are they just blowing off steam. This debate continues to this day across a whole range of the arts and even sports: how much “protest” does it take and is this also a manifestation of wider processes of change and challenge? She delves into the historiography of hysteria and the views of contemporary feminists balanced against those of the time to provide a whole spectrum of interpretation – from Freud to Foucault, who, whilst he is not gender specific, the facts show that hysterical women incarcerated in asylums were in greater numbers than men with similar conditions.

 

Next it is posited that pathological, noncomedic laughter is “the forgotten symptom” of female hysteria despite its frequent use as a cinematic signifier of unhinged evil/madness – think Bette Davis serving up a rat salad in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). “As a symptom – unlike hallucinations or somnambulism – laughter was never allowed to speak…” it was an uncoded message of madness, an end in itself in terms of cinematic creativity as well as contemporary psychotherapy.

Ultimately, the greater concern was possibly the transmissibility of hysterical laughter and the potential destabilisation of the social order. Living in the new age of mass hysteria – when the appearance or otherwise of a photoshopped princess can absorb the attention of millions – it is all too easy to relate to these turn of the last century concerns, “… emotional contagion and ideational suggestion are not so easily separatable…” as Hennefeld says.

Chrissy White and Alma Taylor. Dangerous women. 

Part Three: Early Cinema

 

“… female enjoyment was mined as a source of affective capital, conjuring transgressive fun as an exploitable compulsion.”

 

Did early cinema not only legitimise women’s freedom of hysteria but actively encourage it in the making and marketing of film? With the rise of this new media, women were able to become members of a “society of spectators”, participating in “…mass culture and a new urban crowd…” (Vanessa R Schwartz). A new context, new comedy and auditoriums enabling infectious mass merrymaking en masse.

 

Sadly, early cinema is, as Hennefeld says, “…a treasure trove for retroactive hope”; not all the news was good and she quotes Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai’s description of a nightmarish “permanent carnival” with its diminishing returns of compulsory enjoyment. This sits alongside Neil Postman’s concepts in Amusing Ourselves to Death, which, incidentally, had my son in ironic stitches as he read it for the first time recently and thought of Donald Trump: 40-year-old book, 80-year-old liar and 130-year-old lost opportunities.

 

Female and laughter from the marginalised was quickly commoditized in every conceivable way with phonographs featuring such as the “Hee-Haw Girl” Ida May Chadwick and “Laughing Girl” Sallie Strembler. Comedy films proliferated such as the 425 ft of laughter contained in Edison’s Sandy McPherson’s Quiet Fishing Trip (1908) and Essanay’s He Who Laughs Last, Laughs Best (1908) containing even more laughs per foot…

Frank Tinney &“Hee-Haw Girl” Ida May Chadwick, Philadelphia Inquirer, November 9, 1919

Hennefeld prefers the period of “early” cinema, from 1896 to 1907 “at which point films became increasingly concerned with storytelling and character development”. This formative decade of white-hot innovation and “…hasty exhilarating temporality- the sheer enthrallment with unforeseen play of wild, shape-shifting figures. This is surely an energy we can all connect with, youthful, risk-averse, putting the show on here and with a pre-jazz ideology that there are no mistakes. It sounds like hysterical unruly production, one with fewer rules and more room for everyone outside of the settled hierarchies of theatre.

 

As the medium developed so too did a “moral panic” about the impact on audiences with films such as The Soul Kiss (1908) advertised as “…free from the slightest trace of suggestiveness… “even as the main make character goes on a kissing spree, something a female protagonist would not be allowed. The worry began that films with “too much meaning” might make their audience anxious, hysterical even – that old hack phrase making a comeback. There were even advisory notices attached to certain films such as Vitograph’s Jerry’s Uncle’s Namesake (1914) which was, “one of those wild comedies that are dangerous for hysterical persons to watch”.                                                                                                                                                                 

By 1915, movies were established (and, no, not because of Griffiths’ lengthy advert for the bed linen industry) as were its clientele with Hennefeld introducing a Madame Medusa as an exemplar of the every-woman crowding most cinemas. She quotes Mauritz Stiller’s The Mannequin (1913) in which Lili Ziedner jumps upon screen to knock out a boxer (Andre Deed) before re-joining the audience in ways that clearly foreshadow Keaton’s Sherlock but also reveal how women wanted more control on and off screen. Dangerous thinking at the time and a challenge to a society in which the needs of the many cannot possibly be met in reality.

 

Cinema was a hysterical medium that “let our minds fall asleep and create with our eyes whatever the soul desires…” (a sadly unknown German writer in 1910) and “hysteria-historiography” means understanding cinema as a somatic language – the body not the mind – and “… proxy reality for a spectator on the cusp of having a powerful voice.” In this case it was to be a reality increasingly controlled by male-dominated studios but they were addicted to their audience; this push and pull continues.

Florence Turner in Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914)

 

The book also covers neurodivergent spectatorship in asylums as well as the fascination with mental health which led to such gems as Ham in the Nut Factory (1915) which does exactly as the title suggests. Tales that witness madness include of course, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) a depiction of the rise of the tyrannical psychiatrist, the cure being confused with the symptoms in a word of cognitive uncertainty in which films are also projected onto our doubts and fears.

 

Léonce Perret’s The Rocks of Kador (1912) is also quoted as “perhaps the most remarkable example of a meta film…” founded on the curative properties of cinema especially for female hysteria. Here, after having her sanity pushed to the limit by those wishing to make her miss out on her inheritance, a filmed reconstruction of her breakdown brings clarity back to her. Cinematic kill or cure would drive so much content as we were turned it on, tuned in and were turned on in return.

 

In her spectacular final chapter, Maggie brings forth the spirits of Daisy Doodad (Florence Turner) and her amazing Dial along with the legendary Léontine, a so-far un-named actress who produced a string of comedies in the early 1910s, to advance a Theory of The Laughing Head. Contrary to followers of David Wark G, close-ups were not his invention and indeed, human faces were a staple of cinema from the start. Scotsman James Williamson’s The Big Swallow (1901) gets his performer up close and digestible with his cameraman – which I’ve seen on 70mm at the BFI’s IMAX - then there was George Albert Smith’s series on Humorous Facial Expressions including Grandma Threading Her Needle (1901) and many more.

 

Gradually the performers and their parts are absorbed into more complex narrative spaces - the diegesis – although women’s faces remained as a close-up priority in many films, almost detached from body and this space as an object of wonder and desire. This is highlighted by the “low hanging fruit” (this is a playful book!) of When Cherries are Ripe (1907) which involves a woman chased up a cherry tree by a “masher” who evades him and is shown in triumphant close-up eating cherries, the most erotically coded fruit.

 

Marie Dressler throttles Charlie as Mabel watches Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914)

This “emblematic shot” was seen less as faces were used to connect more complex narratives – Mabel Normand’s brilliant look to camera deployed to this affect in Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914) as she tries to avoid a drunken tramp. The focus remained on the female face though and you only have to think of the stars of the twenties and beyond to recognise this.

  

What Maggie does in 350 pages of disciplined and tightly referenced writing I can’t hope to summarise in full but what I can tell you is to buy what is certainly one of the books of the year in terms of silent film and the society it fascinated, reflected and helped transform. This is surely a rich new area for historical study and, as Maggie and her contemporaries are proving, there are a lot of connections still to be made.  

 

The book is dedicated to Léontine (whoever you are) and whilst the search for this ground-breaking silent comedian continues we can see for ourselves how potent she and other women were on the Kino Lorber’s Cinema’s First Nasty Women four-disc box set which Maggie helped to compile with others from the Women Film Pioneers Project, Eye Filmmuseum, FIC-Silente, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, and Carleton University. Read the book then watch/rewatch these films; the past is being brought back to life in front of our very eyes and it means more.

 

Author note: Maggie Hennefeld is associate professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is also the author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia, 2018) and co-editor of Unwatchable (2019) and Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (2020).

 

You can order Death by Laughter from all reputable booksellers and direct from the publisher Columbia University Press.

  

Léontine's box of bellowing balloons begin to blow up the patriarchy!

When you’re a boy… The Snowbird (1916), Cinema’s First Nasty Women Box Set

How do I know that you do not lie, all women lie!

 

A couple of years before Nell Shipman and her menagerie made their way to “God’s Country” another, altogether less robust woman was trekking across land and snow to look after the men in her life albeit in the hills of northern California. Mabel Taliaferro was tiny in comparison to sturdy Nell, and she probably also had warm hotel rooms built into her contract, but here she plays almost as feisty as the rich man’s daughter who finds something worth fighting for up in the snowy wastes of Canada.

 

Presented on Disc Four of the Mighty Cinema’s First Nasty Women set, The Snowbird provides something of a cross-dressing companion to Phil for Short the other gender bent feature included in this venture and it follows a similar path in that its heroine does not dress as a man for romantic reasons for the practical purpose of projecting a challenge to male dominance. The fact that she finds a woman-hating man who comes to appreciate her first as a boy is neither here nor there… There’s no Weimar sauciness in this confusion just that the man in question is won over by what she does as a man before realising that she has proved him wrong in his categorical feelings about the “lying, devious, faithless…” group of humanity known as Womankind.

 

It's only money matters my dear, you would not understand…

Mabel Taliaferro and Warren Cook

As in Phil, Lois Wheeler’s Mabel Taliaferro has a nice fool for a father, who needs protecting from himself. Daddy Wheeler (Warren Cook) is living in a big house with a portfolio of businesses but a liquidity issue based on cashflow complications that I wouldn’t want to worry your pretty little heads about let alone mine. Wheeler’s so close to broke that he asks his friend Bruce Mitchell (James Cruze), currently attempting to woo his daughter over a game of tennis, to loan him some money based on his share of some lumber land in Chalet, Quebec.

 

The land is worth twice what Mitchell signed up for and is co-owned with a French-Canadian (aye, aye…) Jean Corteau (Edwin Carewe, who also directs) who has inherited it from his father. It seems a safe bet but when Wheeler heads to see his attorney in Chalet, Magistrate Le Blanc (John Melody), he discovers that a fire has destroyed his copy; only Corteau has a copy and he is not inclined to find it, realising that he can take all of the site which, you’ll have to forgive me, seems very un-Canadian.

 

The plot gets much thicker as Mitchell, rebuffed by Mabel, who likes his tennis but not his amorous intention, declaring the match 40-Love in her favour, sees a way of forcing a tie-break and blackmailing the old man into selling his daughter’s hand in exchange for the debt he can no longer complete.

Edwin Carewe multi-tasks as director and women-hater

Like a wounded snowbird you have fallen from the sky to share my loneliness … here you can stay and be my boy.

 

When the going gets tough, the woman gets going though and Mabel is transformed when travelling up to plead with Corteau, disguising herself as a boy who the odd bachelor decides to take in as his ward, trusting the youth far more than the woman from Paris who, in his youth, had made a fool of him and spurned his advances in front of polite society leaving him to seek bitter isolation among the woods and ice.

 

Mabel aims to steal his copy of the contract but, you wonder, is there anything else she might steal… time will tell, especially as the mean old Mitchell also heads north to protect his ill-gotten gains.

This sparkling restoration comes with an all-new score from Diana Reason, who plays piano and keyboard, Sean Sonderegger on sax and woodwind, Peter Valsamis on drums and Jan Michael Looking Wolf on native American flute. It’s playful and energetic and adds greatly to the viewing experience of a film that balances humour and drama in skilfully interlaced measures.

 

Definitely a wrong-un'... James Cruze

Directed with wit and economy by Carewe, the story is based on a plot credited to Mary Ryder and June Mathis, two of the many women writers working in American film at this point, a situation that was to change dramatically over the next few decades as the studio system rigged opportunity and agenda in favour of men; the facts speaking for themselves in an industry still to reach the same levels of female involvement. Change is happening once again but progression is no longer guaranteed, is it?

 

I’d not seen Mabel Taliaferro before and her stage experience plus an awareness of the cinematic remit sees her put in a delightfully natural performance that makes her character’s transition all the more winning. Character will out indeed, and her Lois is resourceful and steadfast, identifiable and inspirational, just as Philomena was, a new kind of feminine hero just as the times they were indeed changing as the Great War brought women to the forefront of manufacture and other industries not just film where they already contributed in abundance!

 

Mabel Taliaferro 

 

The box set can be ordered direct from Kino Lorber or via all good retailers around the World, it's even available via UK Amazon now. Whilst I suspect you may already have it; I still wouldn’t want you to miss out on one of the key releases of this century.

Granda Pa Trump had a hotel near these frozen wastes in the 1900s and he would have been bowled over by Mabel Taliaferro and her cousins Leontine et al, if only they’d done more stage work in the far North West, perhaps his grandson might have been just a little less of the misogynistic misanthrope he has become with his original coining of the phrase Nasty Woman. Well Junior, these women are not nasty they’re just forceful, funny and smart and if that’s a problem for you… just blow it out your ear!