History of slapstick dissects physical comedy

'I do not have a carefully thought-out theory on exactly what makes people laugh, but the premise of all comedy is a man in trouble,' comedian Jerry Lewis said.

The statement provides Princeton scholar Alan Dale with both title and epigraph for this fine, illuminating history of slapstick comedy in American movies.

Dale gives slapstick its due, treating this lowest form of physical humor as the highly demanding, delicately calibrated art that it is. Jerry Lewis might not be everyone's favorite comedian, but, for Dale, he is a pivotal figure, heir to the great silent clowns - Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd - and to the early masters of verbal slapstick - the Marx Brothers, Preston Sturges - and a kind of father figure for today's slapstick comedians - Eddie Murphy, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler.

Even if one dismisses slapstick as juvenile humor, and rejects any idea of comparing Lewis, Sandler or Carrey to Chaplin, Keaton and the Marx Brothers, still, Dale makes a persuasive case for appreciating slapstick on its own terms, for the energy, discipline and sheer exertion that go into being a great slapstick comedian.

The term slapstick originates with the double paddles used by circus clowns to beat each other, and a principal element in slapstick always has been physical abuse. Critic M. Willson Disher once claimed there are only six kinds of jokes - falls, blows, surprise, knavery, mimicry and stupidity. In slapstick, all that's needed is the fall, and its flipside, the blow. Verbal slapstick adds its own roster of forms: orotundity (a W.C. Fields specialty), puns, slang, outrageous metaphors, double entendres, nonsequiturs, malapropisms, mispronunciations and foreign accents - among others.

Slapstick films offer such blatant pleasures, Dale says, it seems almost unnatural to write a book about them. Yet the real problem in analyzing slapstick is that most writers 'elevate' it by praising it as satire, which is often overstated or wrong, or for its pathos, which is 'to praise a comedy for the moments when it ceases to be comic.'

Looking at slapstick on its own terms, Dale arrives at a persuasive rationale for what has been and remains the most popular and enduring form of film comedy: 'Slapstick doesn't feel profound but rather feels true to our experience very much as we live it.'

Slapstick, even when blended in to other tones of comedy, as in Robert Altman's 'M*A*S*H,' always means the same thing: a response to the frustration of physical existence. The clown suffers in our stead - from delay, frustration, discomfort, humiliation, all of which we laugh at, and laugh harder the worse it gets.

And the laughter stays with us, Dale says. When we drop something, suffer an accident or take a fall, our impulse is to laugh, a response we have learned from watching these films.

'Comedy is a Man in Trouble' is an enjoyable book, plainly written and unpretentious, enlightening even if you haven't seen all these films - and especially so when you have. There were 40,000 reels of comedy produced in the silent era alone, and Dale seems to have seen every one that's survived. His enthusiasm is infectuous, and he makes you want to search out those classics you might have missed - 'The General,' 'The Freshman,' 'The Great Dictator.' He even encourages you to take a second look at comedians such as Lewis and Carrey - who, like all their brethern, persuade us only too well not to take them seriously.

David Walton teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and is the author of the short-story collection 'Evening Out,' winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award.