September 18, 2025 • 20 mins
In this episode I spoke with author Maggie Hennefeld about her latest book "Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema". Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate―or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy?
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Forgotten Hollywood.
I'm your host, Doug Has. If you're tuning in Forgotten
Hollywood for the first time, what we do on this
podcast is take you on a trip down memory lane
and share with you pieces of Hollywood that you may
or may not know about. And today we have a
very special guest with us today, Maggie Henfield Pinnefeld. Oh,
(00:27):
sorry about that, talking about her book Death by Laughter,
Female Hysteria and early Cinema. Maggie, Welcome to Forgotten Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Thank you, Doug, it's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Well, thank you, and really thank you for spending some
time to talk about your book Death by Laughter. And
what we always like to do is kind of start
off by allowing the author to say, in their own words,
what this book is about.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Ooh, it's a tough question. It's a big question. Well,
I guess the most concise way I could summarize it
is that it's a book about the history of women
who allegedly died from laughing too hard. And I mean
there's a little bit more to say beyond that. That's
(01:15):
maybe the tagline did women really die from laughing too hard.
I kind of get into the weeds of these bizarre
obituaries I found in chapter two, But it might be
helpful to give just a very brief origin story about
this project. So I was a postdoctoral fellow of Humor,
(01:36):
Play and Games at the Jackman Humanities Institute in Toronto
about ten years ago, and I was finishing my first monograph,
which came out in twenty eighteen. It's called Specters of
Slapstick and Silent Film Comedians, and it's about the feminist
politics of slapstick comedy and female stars in the slapstick
(01:59):
genre during the Silent era, but very early silent cinema.
We're talking about like the eighteen nineties and nineteen hundred's,
basically pre World War One. And in that book, I
really wanted to have a chapter focus not on comedy itself,
but on women's laughter, right because it sounds like the
(02:19):
early moving picture show sounds like a completely racous space.
You know, people getting up, moving around, laughing hysterically, women's
hat quills blocking the screen. Like it's my lifelong fantasy
to time travel to the early twentieth century Nickelodeon, And
I really wanted to understand what it felt like to
be a female laughing spectator at the motion picture show
(02:42):
at the time. So I was doing various kind of
keyword searches of digital databases trying to find more material
on women's laughter, because this is not something that was
kind of extensively or accurately documented in the early twentieth century.
And that's when I stumbled upon this unbelievably bizarre obituary
(03:03):
mourning the death of a woman who allegedly died from
laughing too hard in nineteen oh seven, and I couldn't
believe it. Obviously, I take these obituaries with a massive
grain of salt, but I started investigating, you know, sleuthing
them out, and I found a few more than a
couple dozen, But by the time the book came out,
(03:25):
I found well over one hundred of these obituaries published
between eighteen seventy and nineteen twenty, but really predominantly around
the turn of the century, around the invention and popular
explosion of early cinema. So that's the kind of I
don't know, that's the origin story and context for the book.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah, and it's probably like anything else, the more you
started digging, the more excited for lack of a bit
of word that you got and the more that you
found out just how I guess where that comes to
my mind is bizarre because you don't think of laughing
yourself to death as a real way to die.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
No, you don't, really. I mean, I opened the introduction
of the book with this bizarre internet advertisement I found
a few years ago offering to ensure stand up comedians
who really kill against the hazard of slaughtering their audience
members with their you know, uproarious wit. But I think
(04:32):
that was basically just clickbait, And to a large extent,
I view these early twentieth century obituaries as like, you know,
the clickbait of yesteryear, because a lot of them were
published in kind of tabloidy local newspapers. And this is
around the time that you know, women are kind of
exploding out of the domestic sphere onto mass culture, joining
(04:57):
the workforce. But also you know, their key consumers in
the department store, you know, and also going to the cinema,
to vaudeville, to the you know, electric carnival. So the
film industry wanted to like wanted women to have a
good time like this is you know what side their
bread was buttered on. But there was a lot of
(05:17):
moral panic and sort of mass anxiety about women just
kind of steamrolling all of these public spaces with their toothy, voluble, uproarious,
hysterical laughter. So I read these obituaries kind of reading
between the lines of them, you know, and their bizarreness
like that they're sort of repressive discourses. They're meant to,
(05:38):
you know, Okay, women, you can have your fun, but
not too much fun tisk right, or else you'll die.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Right. Yeah, they have a little sad tire that was
mixed into that, a little bad town. This one absolutely, Maggie.
During the writing and the research of this book, what
surprised you.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
How much material I found? I mean, this is this
is a long book. It's nine chapters, and I love
to write, and I love to kind of I don't know,
activate my sense of humor while I'm writing, Like this
is not a dry book or at least good Lord,
I hope not. I don't understand people who write about comedy,
you know, with sort of like being counting seriousness, like
(06:22):
I like to, you know, raise a bit of mischief
through my prose. But I kept finding all this material,
And obviously I'm relating the sort of socio political history
of women's laughter to the uh the clinical case studies
about female hysteria, psychoanalytic and neurological studies of female madness
(06:47):
around the kind of mid to late nineteenth century, in
particular investigations of unruly laughter as a symptom of madness
and not hysteria in the colloquial sense, but clinical history area, right,
like women whose laughter was sort of pathologized as demonic
and they were sent to the mental institution as a result.
(07:08):
And one thing I found actually that really surprised me
while I was starting to investigate these obituaries, we used
the phrase hysterical laughter all the time, right, It's just
sort of a euphemism, like it's really fun to laugh hysterically.
That's the goal, right, Like if a comedy fails to
provoke hysterical laughter, then obviously it's a dud. But in
the mid nineteenth century, that was not what the phrase
(07:31):
hysterical laughter meant. It almost always described women's laughter, and
it basically meant to have a nervous breakdown, and it
was caused by mixed feelings, irreconcilable emotions, like ambitious women
women who didn't really have a kind of social outlet
(07:51):
for the kinds of ideas and desires they were experiencing,
would lose their minds. And the thing that triggered that
eruption of madness was hysterical laughter, and it just ravaged
their body and it was and no way associated with
enjoyment or pleasure. So the phrase hysterical laughter didn't take
on those sort of lighthearted connotations really until the end
(08:13):
of the nineteenth century, around the invention of cinema and
women's sort of you know, a widespread entry into all
of these mass leisure spaces, you know, like the carnival,
the moving picture show, vaudeville, the music hall, et cetera.
So I was really intrigued and surprised by that, like
almost you know, cinema became this cathedral for women's laughter,
(08:38):
and that was a big kind of part of its
body politic around you know, the early years.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Yeah, really fascinating that it was kind of originally women's
laughter was basically centered around kind of like a mental
illness breakdown, but it wasn't until later that it kind
of got its justice of being okay, women can laugh
and that doesn't necessarily mean that they're crazy.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
Yeah, I mean I hope not.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
I laugh, we're all in trouble right in that case.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
I mean, some people I think maybe still believe that.
Like in during the first Trump administration, during Jeff Sessions
confirmation hearings, there was a woman, a protester for this
organization called Code Pink, who laughed her name was desre
Ferus during his confirmation hearings and was arrested and faced
like a ten thousand dollars fine and up to a
(09:32):
year in prison for laughing out loud. I mean, during
the witch trials, laughter was evidence of women's demonic possession.
So I don't know, some old beliefs die hard. I
mean the term, the etymology of the term hysteria like
literally comes from the uterus, right like women. It was
believed to be caused by a women's wandering womb due
(09:55):
to disuse, so it especially afflicted spinsters and widows. And
I I really hope that we've you know, like like
we're in a different place now in terms of our
beliefs as a society. But I don't know if that's
the direction I have.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
To agree with you. I'm not sure that I think
the jury is still out on that one, unfortunately, right,
you know here it is twenty twenty five, and and
sometimes I think, like you said earlier, old habits are
hard to die, you know, die hard in terms of that,
but magant like laughter, Yes, absolutely, just kind of shifting
(10:30):
just a little bit. Obviously, your book is also talks
a little bit about the early cinema in terms and
we were talking and that's a little bit later in
the book. Chapter nine is where you kind of really
focus on that. Anything surprised you about the early cinema
with women and laughter?
Speaker 1 (10:49):
I mean, I guess I wouldn't say it surprised me
because I've been studying early cinema and female comedy for
a long time, and I'm a sin of while like
I love nothing more than to you know, go, I'd
probably go to my repertory SCE just three or four
nights a week, and I travel all the time to
archival film festivals and silent film events. I found so
(11:14):
many advertisements in like early film magazines and even the
trade press that really embraced women's laughter as a selling point. So,
you know, films in the early twentieth century were priced
you know, not by the number of minutes, but by
the length of the real So I would find advertisements
for comedies that described them as like four hundred and
(11:36):
twenty five feet of non stop laughter. And laughter wasn't
necessarily gendered. It was kind of universalized. But we know
that women were major, major spectators, like a big part
of you know, the ticket buying audience in the early years,
no less, but when laughter was gendered, it was always
women's laughter, right, like and really weird anecdotes like this
(11:59):
woman left laughed so outrageously at this film the spotted
trousers that you know, her infant who she had brought
to the nickelodeon with her start like burst into tears
because like her baby was like so disturbed by like
its mother's laughter, or like a woman busted her corset
(12:21):
staves in the throes of hysterical laughter. So it was like,
you know, that was the selling point, Like if your
comedy couldn't like tickle women's funny bones, then you might
as well go home and give up.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Which is kind of interesting in a way with that era,
for lack of a better word, that they were still
and how do I want to say this correctly is
women were kind of overlooked except at the same point
they were catered to or marketed to to sell tickets.
(12:55):
Does that make sense.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Yeah, I mean it's totally contradictory. It's like like when
you come to movies, come to the movies, but also
go away, you know, yes, yes, yeah, culture is nothing
if not contradictory. But yeah, also, like I mean, women
laughed a lot at the movies, but there are also
a lot of images of women laughing in early cinema.
(13:17):
And so I co curated the DVD Blu ray set
with Laura Horrack and the Lee Frong and Kainacci, which
might be familiar to some of some of your listeners.
It's called Cinema's First Nasty Women. I actually I was
telling you before the interview. I just got back from
the Denver Silent Film Festival, where I was presenting a
screening called Queens of Destruction. And a lot of these films,
(13:39):
you know, in the very early years when films were
maybe like under four seconds long, like fred Ot Sneeze,
or like Graandma threading her needle, the funny facial was
a really popular genre. So the entirety of the film
and these might have played in a kinetoscope parlor, or
you know, like like just within an assorted reel of comedies,
(13:59):
tricks and actualities. You know, there would be an entire
film just like of a person making like funny zany
facial expressions. And oftentimes those performers were women or men
in drag playing a woman, and those facials quickly became
obsolete once their novelty sort of wore off. But then
we see in the kind of early nineteen hundreds, mid
(14:23):
nineteen oughts, this convention sort of take takes hold that
the film historian Noel Birch has called the emblematic shot,
and the emblematic shot is the convention of opening or
closing a film with a close up or medium close
up of one or multiple of the performers making funny
faces and a direct address of the spectator. So you
(14:45):
might think of the bandit sort of ghoulishly after he
dies at the end of Great Train Robbery reappearing and
you know, like shooting his pistol at the spectator. But
in a lot of the slapstick comedies, you see the
female performer at the end like laughing or like thumbing
her nose or winking, making some of these faces at
(15:05):
the audience. And there are a lot of examples of
these kind of i'll say feminist emblematic shots in Cinema's
First Nasty Women and chapter nine of Death by Laughter,
which you know, there's a certain amount of overlap between
the Nasty Women cannon and the kind of terrain I
explore in the last chapter of the book.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Yeah, and at any point during your research, did you
find that at some point things started to shift for women. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
I mean, and I'm not the first person to come
to this conclusion. I think that women held outsized power
in the early film industry globally, and then you know,
we're really squeezed out of those positions of power after
the war, certainly by the arrival of the talkie, but
(15:58):
really with the kind of of solidification of the Hollywood
industry in the West Coast in the nineteen twenties, when
Hollywood got like major financial backing and capital from Wall
Street and increasingly modeled their own production hierarchies on that
kind of East Coast financial culture. And you know, Karen
(16:20):
Ward mahar has made a similar argument in her book
It's the thesis of the fabulous website, the Women Film
Pioneers Project, which explores and documents how women held multifarious
positions of power throughout the silent eras directors, producers, company managers, editors,
and so on and so forth. So I for readers
(16:41):
not familiar with that resource, I highly recommend checking out
the Women Film Pioneers Project.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
No, I'm actually glad to talk about that up because
i think that is something that gets overlooked, excuse me,
overlooked with women and just how powerful and how important
of a role they played in the early development of cinema.
And then, like you said, Cooley was pushed.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Out, Yeah, pushed out and written out of history and
really kind of ejected from the cannon. And yeah, women
were directors, Like maybe some of your listeners know, Mabel
Norman directed Charlie Chaplin in his day debut screen role
as the Tramp in Mabel's Strange Predicament, though you know,
(17:28):
like Chaplain would deny this reality he was dying day.
Mabel Norman was a prolific director and probably like the
biggest comedy star, like right up there with Chaplain and
Fatty Arbuckle the EasTone Company in the nineteen teens, and
in Yeah, this book and in my first book, Specters
of Slapstick, I look pretty globally at like female slapstick stardom.
(17:51):
There are a lot of really popular French comics series.
One that I'm completely obsessed with was the Leontine series
and its stars this performer who's name we don't know.
She played a character named Leontine. The series produced about
twenty four episodes from nineteen ten to nineteen twelve, and
she's kind of going in age drag. She's like a
circus performer in her twenties who's playing like this miscreant,
(18:14):
demonic tomboy who, like many of the French slapstick clowns
at the time, is incredibly violent, and you know her
parents are always trying to discipline and reform her, and
she just goes around destroying everything. So we include about
a dozen of her films in the Nasty Women's set,
and in the finale of her series, made in early
nineteen twelve, she floods and incinerates her home simultaneously when
(18:38):
she's tasked with babysitting her little brother, who, of course
she loses. So definitely check out Leontine. I like you
know Leontine Owns My Heart also talk about her a
bit in this book, and I think she's also a
bit of a hysteric, like she's totally mad.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Excellent, excellent, Well, Maggie, it's horribly but we're already out
of time for this.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Did that happen?
Speaker 2 (19:03):
I know we could go on and on and talk
about this, but thank you for bringing up the fact
that women played such an important role in early Hollywood.
That is, like you said, been written out of the
history books. A lot of people don't even know that
or have forgotten that, and so it's always a pleasure
(19:24):
to have authors like you want to be able to
remind us of where our roots came from.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Yeah, and I think this book in a way is
kind of a prehistory of women's rise to power in
the early silent film industry. And yeah, I hope it's
called Death by Laughter, Female hysteria and early cinema, and
you know, if nothing else, I hope it's a fun read.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Absolutely, And we also wanted to say thank you to
your publisher at Columbia University Press. They got us a
copy of the book, but you can go out there
to their website or wherever you buy your books and
pick up a copy of Death by Laughter. We only
hit the tip the iceberg on this, but I think
you're going to enjoy it as much as we did.
And Maggie, thank you so much for coming on and
spending some time with us today.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Oh my gosh, it was my pleasure. Thank you so much,
Doug for having.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Me well, Thank you, and thank you for listening to
this episode. For Diving Hollywood, check us out for the
latest episode. We'll talk to you soon.
Let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Forgotten Hollywood.
I'm your host, Doug Has. If you're tuning in Forgotten
Hollywood for the first time, what we do on this
podcast is take you on a trip down memory lane
and share with you pieces of Hollywood that you may
or may not know about. And today we have a
very special guest with us today, Maggie Henfield Pinnefeld. Oh,
(00:27):
sorry about that, talking about her book Death by Laughter,
Female Hysteria and early Cinema. Maggie, Welcome to Forgotten Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Thank you, Doug, it's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Well, thank you, and really thank you for spending some
time to talk about your book Death by Laughter. And
what we always like to do is kind of start
off by allowing the author to say, in their own words,
what this book is about.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Ooh, it's a tough question. It's a big question. Well,
I guess the most concise way I could summarize it
is that it's a book about the history of women
who allegedly died from laughing too hard. And I mean
there's a little bit more to say beyond that. That's
(01:15):
maybe the tagline did women really die from laughing too hard.
I kind of get into the weeds of these bizarre
obituaries I found in chapter two, But it might be
helpful to give just a very brief origin story about
this project. So I was a postdoctoral fellow of Humor,
(01:36):
Play and Games at the Jackman Humanities Institute in Toronto
about ten years ago, and I was finishing my first monograph,
which came out in twenty eighteen. It's called Specters of
Slapstick and Silent Film Comedians, and it's about the feminist
politics of slapstick comedy and female stars in the slapstick
(01:59):
genre during the Silent era, but very early silent cinema.
We're talking about like the eighteen nineties and nineteen hundred's,
basically pre World War One. And in that book, I
really wanted to have a chapter focus not on comedy itself,
but on women's laughter, right because it sounds like the
(02:19):
early moving picture show sounds like a completely racous space.
You know, people getting up, moving around, laughing hysterically, women's
hat quills blocking the screen. Like it's my lifelong fantasy
to time travel to the early twentieth century Nickelodeon, And
I really wanted to understand what it felt like to
be a female laughing spectator at the motion picture show
(02:42):
at the time. So I was doing various kind of
keyword searches of digital databases trying to find more material
on women's laughter, because this is not something that was
kind of extensively or accurately documented in the early twentieth century.
And that's when I stumbled upon this unbelievably bizarre obituary
(03:03):
mourning the death of a woman who allegedly died from
laughing too hard in nineteen oh seven, and I couldn't
believe it. Obviously, I take these obituaries with a massive
grain of salt, but I started investigating, you know, sleuthing
them out, and I found a few more than a
couple dozen, But by the time the book came out,
(03:25):
I found well over one hundred of these obituaries published
between eighteen seventy and nineteen twenty, but really predominantly around
the turn of the century, around the invention and popular
explosion of early cinema. So that's the kind of I
don't know, that's the origin story and context for the book.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah, and it's probably like anything else, the more you
started digging, the more excited for lack of a bit
of word that you got and the more that you
found out just how I guess where that comes to
my mind is bizarre because you don't think of laughing
yourself to death as a real way to die.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
No, you don't, really. I mean, I opened the introduction
of the book with this bizarre internet advertisement I found
a few years ago offering to ensure stand up comedians
who really kill against the hazard of slaughtering their audience
members with their you know, uproarious wit. But I think
(04:32):
that was basically just clickbait, And to a large extent,
I view these early twentieth century obituaries as like, you know,
the clickbait of yesteryear, because a lot of them were
published in kind of tabloidy local newspapers. And this is
around the time that you know, women are kind of
exploding out of the domestic sphere onto mass culture, joining
(04:57):
the workforce. But also you know, their key consumers in
the department store, you know, and also going to the cinema,
to vaudeville, to the you know, electric carnival. So the
film industry wanted to like wanted women to have a
good time like this is you know what side their
bread was buttered on. But there was a lot of
(05:17):
moral panic and sort of mass anxiety about women just
kind of steamrolling all of these public spaces with their toothy, voluble, uproarious,
hysterical laughter. So I read these obituaries kind of reading
between the lines of them, you know, and their bizarreness
like that they're sort of repressive discourses. They're meant to,
(05:38):
you know, Okay, women, you can have your fun, but
not too much fun tisk right, or else you'll die.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Right. Yeah, they have a little sad tire that was
mixed into that, a little bad town. This one absolutely, Maggie.
During the writing and the research of this book, what
surprised you.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
How much material I found? I mean, this is this
is a long book. It's nine chapters, and I love
to write, and I love to kind of I don't know,
activate my sense of humor while I'm writing, Like this
is not a dry book or at least good Lord,
I hope not. I don't understand people who write about comedy,
you know, with sort of like being counting seriousness, like
(06:22):
I like to, you know, raise a bit of mischief
through my prose. But I kept finding all this material,
And obviously I'm relating the sort of socio political history
of women's laughter to the uh the clinical case studies
about female hysteria, psychoanalytic and neurological studies of female madness
(06:47):
around the kind of mid to late nineteenth century, in
particular investigations of unruly laughter as a symptom of madness
and not hysteria in the colloquial sense, but clinical history area, right,
like women whose laughter was sort of pathologized as demonic
and they were sent to the mental institution as a result.
(07:08):
And one thing I found actually that really surprised me
while I was starting to investigate these obituaries, we used
the phrase hysterical laughter all the time, right, It's just
sort of a euphemism, like it's really fun to laugh hysterically.
That's the goal, right, Like if a comedy fails to
provoke hysterical laughter, then obviously it's a dud. But in
the mid nineteenth century, that was not what the phrase
(07:31):
hysterical laughter meant. It almost always described women's laughter, and
it basically meant to have a nervous breakdown, and it
was caused by mixed feelings, irreconcilable emotions, like ambitious women
women who didn't really have a kind of social outlet
(07:51):
for the kinds of ideas and desires they were experiencing,
would lose their minds. And the thing that triggered that
eruption of madness was hysterical laughter, and it just ravaged
their body and it was and no way associated with
enjoyment or pleasure. So the phrase hysterical laughter didn't take
on those sort of lighthearted connotations really until the end
(08:13):
of the nineteenth century, around the invention of cinema and
women's sort of you know, a widespread entry into all
of these mass leisure spaces, you know, like the carnival,
the moving picture show, vaudeville, the music hall, et cetera.
So I was really intrigued and surprised by that, like
almost you know, cinema became this cathedral for women's laughter,
(08:38):
and that was a big kind of part of its
body politic around you know, the early years.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Yeah, really fascinating that it was kind of originally women's
laughter was basically centered around kind of like a mental
illness breakdown, but it wasn't until later that it kind
of got its justice of being okay, women can laugh
and that doesn't necessarily mean that they're crazy.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
Yeah, I mean I hope not.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
I laugh, we're all in trouble right in that case.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
I mean, some people I think maybe still believe that.
Like in during the first Trump administration, during Jeff Sessions
confirmation hearings, there was a woman, a protester for this
organization called Code Pink, who laughed her name was desre
Ferus during his confirmation hearings and was arrested and faced
like a ten thousand dollars fine and up to a
(09:32):
year in prison for laughing out loud. I mean, during
the witch trials, laughter was evidence of women's demonic possession.
So I don't know, some old beliefs die hard. I
mean the term, the etymology of the term hysteria like
literally comes from the uterus, right like women. It was
believed to be caused by a women's wandering womb due
(09:55):
to disuse, so it especially afflicted spinsters and widows. And
I I really hope that we've you know, like like
we're in a different place now in terms of our
beliefs as a society. But I don't know if that's
the direction I have.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
To agree with you. I'm not sure that I think
the jury is still out on that one, unfortunately, right,
you know here it is twenty twenty five, and and
sometimes I think, like you said earlier, old habits are
hard to die, you know, die hard in terms of that,
but magant like laughter, Yes, absolutely, just kind of shifting
(10:30):
just a little bit. Obviously, your book is also talks
a little bit about the early cinema in terms and
we were talking and that's a little bit later in
the book. Chapter nine is where you kind of really
focus on that. Anything surprised you about the early cinema
with women and laughter?
Speaker 1 (10:49):
I mean, I guess I wouldn't say it surprised me
because I've been studying early cinema and female comedy for
a long time, and I'm a sin of while like
I love nothing more than to you know, go, I'd
probably go to my repertory SCE just three or four
nights a week, and I travel all the time to
archival film festivals and silent film events. I found so
(11:14):
many advertisements in like early film magazines and even the
trade press that really embraced women's laughter as a selling point. So,
you know, films in the early twentieth century were priced
you know, not by the number of minutes, but by
the length of the real So I would find advertisements
for comedies that described them as like four hundred and
(11:36):
twenty five feet of non stop laughter. And laughter wasn't
necessarily gendered. It was kind of universalized. But we know
that women were major, major spectators, like a big part
of you know, the ticket buying audience in the early years,
no less, but when laughter was gendered, it was always
women's laughter, right, like and really weird anecdotes like this
(11:59):
woman left laughed so outrageously at this film the spotted
trousers that you know, her infant who she had brought
to the nickelodeon with her start like burst into tears
because like her baby was like so disturbed by like
its mother's laughter, or like a woman busted her corset
(12:21):
staves in the throes of hysterical laughter. So it was like,
you know, that was the selling point, Like if your
comedy couldn't like tickle women's funny bones, then you might
as well go home and give up.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Which is kind of interesting in a way with that era,
for lack of a better word, that they were still
and how do I want to say this correctly is
women were kind of overlooked except at the same point
they were catered to or marketed to to sell tickets.
(12:55):
Does that make sense.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Yeah, I mean it's totally contradictory. It's like like when
you come to movies, come to the movies, but also
go away, you know, yes, yes, yeah, culture is nothing
if not contradictory. But yeah, also, like I mean, women
laughed a lot at the movies, but there are also
a lot of images of women laughing in early cinema.
(13:17):
And so I co curated the DVD Blu ray set
with Laura Horrack and the Lee Frong and Kainacci, which
might be familiar to some of some of your listeners.
It's called Cinema's First Nasty Women. I actually I was
telling you before the interview. I just got back from
the Denver Silent Film Festival, where I was presenting a
screening called Queens of Destruction. And a lot of these films,
(13:39):
you know, in the very early years when films were
maybe like under four seconds long, like fred Ot Sneeze,
or like Graandma threading her needle, the funny facial was
a really popular genre. So the entirety of the film
and these might have played in a kinetoscope parlor, or
you know, like like just within an assorted reel of comedies,
(13:59):
tricks and actualities. You know, there would be an entire
film just like of a person making like funny zany
facial expressions. And oftentimes those performers were women or men
in drag playing a woman, and those facials quickly became
obsolete once their novelty sort of wore off. But then
we see in the kind of early nineteen hundreds, mid
(14:23):
nineteen oughts, this convention sort of take takes hold that
the film historian Noel Birch has called the emblematic shot,
and the emblematic shot is the convention of opening or
closing a film with a close up or medium close
up of one or multiple of the performers making funny
faces and a direct address of the spectator. So you
(14:45):
might think of the bandit sort of ghoulishly after he
dies at the end of Great Train Robbery reappearing and
you know, like shooting his pistol at the spectator. But
in a lot of the slapstick comedies, you see the
female performer at the end like laughing or like thumbing
her nose or winking, making some of these faces at
(15:05):
the audience. And there are a lot of examples of
these kind of i'll say feminist emblematic shots in Cinema's
First Nasty Women and chapter nine of Death by Laughter,
which you know, there's a certain amount of overlap between
the Nasty Women cannon and the kind of terrain I
explore in the last chapter of the book.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Yeah, and at any point during your research, did you
find that at some point things started to shift for women. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
I mean, and I'm not the first person to come
to this conclusion. I think that women held outsized power
in the early film industry globally, and then you know,
we're really squeezed out of those positions of power after
the war, certainly by the arrival of the talkie, but
(15:58):
really with the kind of of solidification of the Hollywood
industry in the West Coast in the nineteen twenties, when
Hollywood got like major financial backing and capital from Wall
Street and increasingly modeled their own production hierarchies on that
kind of East Coast financial culture. And you know, Karen
(16:20):
Ward mahar has made a similar argument in her book
It's the thesis of the fabulous website, the Women Film
Pioneers Project, which explores and documents how women held multifarious
positions of power throughout the silent eras directors, producers, company managers, editors,
and so on and so forth. So I for readers
(16:41):
not familiar with that resource, I highly recommend checking out
the Women Film Pioneers Project.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
No, I'm actually glad to talk about that up because
i think that is something that gets overlooked, excuse me,
overlooked with women and just how powerful and how important
of a role they played in the early development of cinema.
And then, like you said, Cooley was pushed.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Out, Yeah, pushed out and written out of history and
really kind of ejected from the cannon. And yeah, women
were directors, Like maybe some of your listeners know, Mabel
Norman directed Charlie Chaplin in his day debut screen role
as the Tramp in Mabel's Strange Predicament, though you know,
(17:28):
like Chaplain would deny this reality he was dying day.
Mabel Norman was a prolific director and probably like the
biggest comedy star, like right up there with Chaplain and
Fatty Arbuckle the EasTone Company in the nineteen teens, and
in Yeah, this book and in my first book, Specters
of Slapstick, I look pretty globally at like female slapstick stardom.
(17:51):
There are a lot of really popular French comics series.
One that I'm completely obsessed with was the Leontine series
and its stars this performer who's name we don't know.
She played a character named Leontine. The series produced about
twenty four episodes from nineteen ten to nineteen twelve, and
she's kind of going in age drag. She's like a
circus performer in her twenties who's playing like this miscreant,
(18:14):
demonic tomboy who, like many of the French slapstick clowns
at the time, is incredibly violent, and you know her
parents are always trying to discipline and reform her, and
she just goes around destroying everything. So we include about
a dozen of her films in the Nasty Women's set,
and in the finale of her series, made in early
nineteen twelve, she floods and incinerates her home simultaneously when
(18:38):
she's tasked with babysitting her little brother, who, of course
she loses. So definitely check out Leontine. I like you
know Leontine Owns My Heart also talk about her a
bit in this book, and I think she's also a
bit of a hysteric, like she's totally mad.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Excellent, excellent, Well, Maggie, it's horribly but we're already out
of time for this.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Did that happen?
Speaker 2 (19:03):
I know we could go on and on and talk
about this, but thank you for bringing up the fact
that women played such an important role in early Hollywood.
That is, like you said, been written out of the
history books. A lot of people don't even know that
or have forgotten that, and so it's always a pleasure
(19:24):
to have authors like you want to be able to
remind us of where our roots came from.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Yeah, and I think this book in a way is
kind of a prehistory of women's rise to power in
the early silent film industry. And yeah, I hope it's
called Death by Laughter, Female hysteria and early cinema, and
you know, if nothing else, I hope it's a fun read.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Absolutely, And we also wanted to say thank you to
your publisher at Columbia University Press. They got us a
copy of the book, but you can go out there
to their website or wherever you buy your books and
pick up a copy of Death by Laughter. We only
hit the tip the iceberg on this, but I think
you're going to enjoy it as much as we did.
And Maggie, thank you so much for coming on and
spending some time with us today.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Oh my gosh, it was my pleasure. Thank you so much,
Doug for having.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Me well, Thank you, and thank you for listening to
this episode. For Diving Hollywood, check us out for the
latest episode. We'll talk to you soon.
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