The Lofty Origins of Slapstick

I don’t know why we enjoy watching other people pretend to beat each other up for a laugh, but we do. Sure, some of us claim to be too intelligent and cultured to find any value in such cheap theatrical antics—at least that’s what we say in public (secretly, though, we just added a stack of Abbott & Costello and Three Stooges classics to our Netflix queue).

That kind of face-slapping, eye-poking physical comedy is known as slapstick, and apparently it’s been around since the beginnings of theater. In Greco-Roman times, padded clowns would take the stage and beat each other. Hilarious. In the commedia dell’arte of sixteenth-century Italy, the stock character Harlequin wielded a paddle made of two wooden slats. Whenever Harlequin paddled someone (preferably on the posterior), the slats met and produced an impressive whacking sound. Hilarious again. In the late nineteenth century, American vaudeville performers were still whacking each other with those paddles. They called the paddles slapsticks, and soon the term was being used to refer to the type of physical comedy that made audiences roar and critics roll their eyes.

True hilarity never dies. Excuse me, I just need to go move something to the top of my queue now.…

(Source: The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories.)