TY - JOUR
AU - Andrews,, Hannah
AB - A straitjacketed figure is being wheeled on an upright trolley through a dank corridor lit by flickering fluorescent tubes. A low-angled medium closeup reveals the bottom half of a royal blue skirt, and sensible, black, high-heeled pumps. After the trolley has come to a rest, the porter removes from the figure a full-face mask, reminiscent of the one worn by Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991). But the face revealed is not Hannibal Lecter’s; it is a woman’s. She has a red-lipsticked, thin-lipped mouth, over which a sinister, cool smile plays. She wears pastel blue eyeshadow and tasteful pearl earrings. Her strawberry blonde hair is teased into a tall perm. When she finally speaks, it is in a low, slow voice with a lilting, arhythmical cadence that allows her to emphasize firmly her increasingly strange and fervent antisocialist opinions. Any viewer familiar with the image and voice can see at once that this is supposed to be Margaret Thatcher, yet this is not an accurate impression. The hair is larger, the makeup less subtle than Thatcher’s. The voice’s soft authority is drawn out into a barely comprehensible drawl. The political sentiments voiced in the dialogue constitute a reductio ad absurdum of Thatcher’s well-known social views. This is not an impersonation of Thatcher; it is a caricature. This scene appears in Psychobitches (Sky Arts, 2012–14), a British sketch-comedy programme whose central conceit is that famous historical or mythical women are offered diagnosis and treatment by a contemporary psychiatrist (Rebecca Front). The structure of sketch comedy demands that characters, whether recurring or one-off, should be instantly recognizable; their characteristics made transparent through costuming, makeup and performance. Think, for example, of the schoolgirl character Vicky Pollard (Matt Lucas) from Little Britain (BBC3/BBC1, 2003–07), easily identifiable through her pink tracksuit, high ponytail and permanent scowl. When these characters are portrayals of real people then they become caricatures. Notable televisual examples appear on programmes such as Spitting Image (Central Television, 1984–96) and Dead Ringers (BBC2, 2002–07), where caricature is used to satirical ends to critique agents of contemporary politics or popular culture. This is in keeping with Judith Wechsler’s argument that ‘no artistic effort is as clearly linked to its time as caricature, and no aspect of caricature is as ephemeral as its humor’.1 In this essay, however, I focus on series that are engaged in the caricature of historical figures. Alongside Psychobitches I explore the forms, functions and pleasures of historical caricature in Horrible Histories (CBBC, 2009– ), the television adaptation of the popular nonfiction children’s books,2 and Drunk History (Comedy Central UK, 2015– ), a British version of a US format in which comedians and media figures tell stories from history in an intoxicated state, their words lip-synched by costumed actors playing out the scenes they describe. The production contexts for these series, and thus their positioning for audiences, are quite different. Horrible Histories is produced for CBBC, a BBC digital channel dedicated to school-age children, and therefore endowed with a public service remit and the concomitant pressures to educate as well as to entertain. Although there is an overt address to children, there are also clear overtures towards a more knowing, adult (parental) audience. Psychobitches appeared on the Sky Arts Channel, initially as part of its ‘Playhouse Presents’ strand of one-off television plays, then later as a standalone series. This channel succeeded Artsworld, which was bought out in 2005 by Sky with the explicit aim of ‘changing perceptions’ and targeting what the then managing director of Sky Networks, Dawn Airey, described as ‘discerning’ audiences.3 The aim here was to legitimize the Sky service in the eyes of those with high cultural capital, a mechanism to suit the commercial ambitions of the broadcaster and the putative tastes of this audience. Drunk History also appears on a niche channel, Comedy Central UK, though the address here is to comedy fans more broadly, as evidenced through the shared screen time between the historical re-enactments and footage of increasingly inebriated comedian-storytellers. While the industrial position, audience composition and aims of these programmes may significantly diverge, they share both a mode of representation of historical figures and a disposition towards the telling of history. This is encapsulated in the term ‘caricature’. Caricature is usually understood as a comedic depiction of a real person that has been deliberately distorted to convey through outward appearance a critique of the subject’s personality. In portrait caricature such distortions result in vulgar and abject imagery, but these are distinguished from other grotesques, as Gillian Rhodes notes, by individuation: the perceiver is meant to be able to recognize who is depicted; it is this, alongside purposeful exaggeration, that distinguishes caricature from similar cultural forms.4 Art historian E. H. Gombrich noted that the earliest iteration of portrait caricature coincided with the growth of the pseudoscience of physiognomy – the belief that human character can be determined from analysis of a person’s physical appearance, particularly their facial features. This contributed to the sense that the antimimetic practice of the deliberately distorted portrait could nevertheless have a privileged relationship with ‘truth’. As Gombrich and Ernst Kris summarize, ‘caricature, showing more of the essential, is truer than reality itself’.5 At its beginning, then, one of the central contradictions of caricature emerges: how is it that a clearly distorted portrait can be not only easily recognizable but indeed more effective than a mimetic representation? Cognitive psychologist Rhodes coined the term ‘superportrait’ to account for the paradoxical power of the caricatured image being superior to the veridical portrait in terms of subject recognition.6 Adam Gopnik suggests that the fact that we can recognize not only the subject of the image but also that it is deliberately exaggerated implies that the human mind has ‘knowledge about its own perceptual functioning’. For Gopnik, this is part of the comedy of the caricature: ‘That’s why we find caricatures funny: we recognise that an artist has somehow tapped into the tendency of the mind to exaggerate, generalize and simplify, and has made these tendencies explicit’.7 The comedic value of the caricature is thus dependent on the mental energy of the perceiver. Similarly, Gombrich argued that the ‘beholder’s share’, the active contemplation of the viewer, is especially relevant for the caricature.8 It is crucial that the perceiver possesses a certain basic knowledge to be able to decode the distorted image and understand its critique of its subject. This need for active perception, and the requirement of pre-existing cultural knowledge for it to function, renders the caricature a more complex cultural form than it seems at first glance. In this essay I consider some of the ways in which historical television comedies draw precisely upon caricature’s ability to engage a viewer’s knowledge and agency as part of their effectiveness in constructing popular alternatives to authoritative, narrative history. Caricature, I argue throughout, is in a unique position to do this, hinging as it does on two central and paradoxical pleasures: distortion and recognition. I first consider some of the ways in which televisual form is used in order to distort the images of the historical figures portrayed, specifically through the use of framing and editing, performance conventions, costuming and makeup, and intertextual referencing. This is compared with the ways in which certain kinds of knowledge are invoked. The ‘recognition’ required of the caricature is examined in relation to the representation of history on television. I make the case for caricature to be added to the pantheon of theorized techniques for the critical historiographical reading typical of postmodern approaches, best exemplified by the work of Linda Hutcheon. Deliberate caricature is an occasional but strikingly visible part of British media culture. It can function televisually in relatively simple ways, drawing purely on the pleasurable recognition of somewhat distorted famous faces. In the gameshow Bigheads (ITV 2017– ), for instance, contestants wear large three-dimensional portrait caricatures over their heads and are always referred to by the presenters and in voiceover commentary by the depicted celebrity’s name. Similar absurd imagery has a notable history in British television comedy – such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC, 1969–74), the work of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, or The Mighty Boosh (BBC3, 2004–07) – where bizarre costuming, makeup and hair combine with a heightened, silly performance style to produce representations that are exaggerations, if not always individuations. As previously indicated, the structure and style of caricature make it a suitable mode for representing real people within sketch comedies, often in parodies, such as the witty spoofs of popular films seen in French and Saunders (BBC, 1987–2007), in which the comedians are transformed into hyperbolic versions of, for example, Bette Davies and Joan Crawford.9 More usually, such caricature is employed in the service of contemporary political satire, whether in extended comic representations of famous people such as The Windsors (Channel 4, 2016– ) – a parody of the British Royal Family – or in sketch-show format, such as Newzoids (ITV, 2015– ).10 It would be inaccurate, however, to suggest that the satirical work of caricature has been limited to commenting on current affairs and contemporary politics, as there exists a parallel tradition of caricaturing historical figures as part of period sitcoms such as Blackadder (BBC, 1983–89) or Let Them Eat Cake (BBC, 1998). In the second half of this essay, I explore how such historical comedies have been read as invitations to look askance at historical figures and to question received historical knowledge, drawing specifically on comedy’s distancing effects to allow for a critical epistemological approach. The distorted recognition function of caricature supports this thesis, since it is predicated on subverting the pre-existing knowledge that the perceiver has of the represented figure. This brief outline of some of the ways in which television light entertainment and comedy have utilized caricature (or similar representational forms) is intended to highlight the lineage of the programmes under scrutiny here, and to indicate how their use of caricature derives not only from the art-historical tradition of the grotesque, exaggerated portrait but also from a specifically televisual legacy. Structural, stylistic and tonal similarities to these programmes are evident in Psychobitches, Drunk History and Horrible Histories. The former’s debt to French and Saunders is apparent in its evocation of the comic potential of unruly women, and particularly in its parodic allusions to popular culture. Indeed, the Psychobitches version of Joan Crawford and Bette Davies clearly echoes Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders’s spoof of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962). The short skits of Horrible Histories parody contemporary popular cultural forms such as advertisements or reality television, as well as dramatizing and satirizing historical themes, often drawing on anachronous humour in a similar way to Monty Python’s historical sequences. These skits are interspersed with brief animations and quizzes familiar from children’s television more broadly, particularly programmes produced with an educational remit. Drunk History draws on two seemingly incompatible televisual conventions: the theatrical performance style of studio-based sitcom, and the mode of re-enactment used in some historical documentaries. Using the conceit of actors lip-synching the dialogue that is provided by the drunk ‘historian’, the historical figures become distorted from their conventional depictions in wider culture and act as caricatures rather than straightforward representations. Of these three programmes, Psychobitches represents the most sustained use of historical caricature, since its structuring joke revolves explicitly around the pleasurable recognition of the famous women depicted and the distortion of their images and stories by their being filtered through the context of contemporary psychoanalysis. The programme is structured as a series of short sketches set in the psychiatrist’s office. Some take place in the waiting room, where unlikely historical bedfellows such as Gracie Fields (Samantha Spiro) and Medusa (Katy Brand) are brought together to interact (in this case, Fields’s cheerful but grating attempt to rally other patients into song results in her being turned to stone by Medusa’s irritated glare). The comic theory of incongruity can explain the effectiveness of these sequences, wherein deviations from expected norms produce the comic sensation.11 But most sketches are set as an intimate conversation – albeit a strange and often unsettling one – between historical figure and therapist. The psychoanalyst is, in comedic terms, the ‘straight man’ (or woman, in this case) to the historical figure, providing the relief of ‘normal’ behaviour and attitudes against which the eccentricities of the caricature can be measured. This is supported by the televisual format of the conversations, presented usually in a combination of medium long two-shots and medium closeup shot/reverse-shots. This structure not only emulates conventional television grammar for presenting interviews, but also allows for jokes to be structured through the therapist’s reactions as well as the comedic caricature. Thus the portrayals of famous women can be recognized as exaggerations of expected norms of human behaviour as well as measured against the expectations set by popular ‘knowledge’ of the historical subject. Horrible Histories takes an accessible, revisionist and democratizing approach to historical knowledge for children. As with the books from which the series grew, the focus tends to be not on history’s ‘great men’ or on teleological storytelling but rather on the quotidian throughout history, particularly as it pertains to matters corporeal or scatological. A good example of this is the recurring feature ‘Stupid Deaths’, which portrays a cheerful Grim Reaper quizzing various historical figures – often but not always well known – on their surprising or disgusting demises. Given the dependence of caricature on individuation, it would seem an uneasy fit with Horrible Histories’ aims, tone and politics. Yet many sketches in the programme focus on specific monarchs, aristocrats or other famous historical figures, performed by the comic actors as an exaggeration of their best-known physical or psychological attributes. This contradiction can be explained through caricature’s repertoire of ‘visual metaphor, personification and allegorical attributes’,12 which has rendered its goal explicitly political. Like satire, the goal of caricature is to weaken through ridicule, to use ironic exaggeration to reveal the follies or vices of the rich and powerful. Andrew Stott reminds us that, for Freud, the pleasure in caricature is derived from its ridiculing of political figures, even when the image itself is unsuccessful, ‘simply because we count rebellion against authority as a merit’.13 In its reduction of the elite to abject corporeal form, and the exaggeration of physical flaws, Horrible Histories’ caricature of the powerful and privileged demonstrates these dissident intentions. Terry Deary, the brand’s creator, explicitly acknowledges iconoclasm as a chief objective, stating, ‘I set out to demythologise the idea of royalty, and the idea of a king dying on a toilet does that’.14 According to the superiority theory of comedy, laughter is produced when the perceiver of a joke feels superiority over its victim. When the figure portrayed is a member of the elite, the hierarchical shift that ensues is a specific pleasure of the caricature. Makeup is used to support this critical embodiment of the historical figure, changing the image of the actor into a grotesque. It often emphasizes facial and bodily features that are socially unacceptable, such as traces of disease or injury, obesity or ugliness. This performs the physiognomic function of caricature – to use the body as a critique of character. For instance, in Horrible Histories and Psychobitches, the makeup for Elizabeth I emphasizes her large nose, pockmarked skin and rotten teeth, even though available portraits of the queen elide these features in their representation of her (and look more like the portrayals in Drunk History, where Elizabeth is played by young, conventionally attractive actors). The use of grotesque makeup for the queen enables these caricatures to act as a corrective to the apparently inaccurate representation of her in the available portraiture, which runs counter to contemporary written accounts in memoirs and ambassadorial dispatches, which describe her quite differently. The distance between the reality of the queen’s abject body and its representation is a source of physiognomic critique, implying her vanity and lack of self-awareness. Horrible Histories dramatizes this through a sketch in which Queen Elizabeth (Martha Howe-Douglas) rejects any portraits of herself that do not match up to her aggrandized self-image of regal beauty. She is horrified by the ‘honest’ image of herself that she sees in a mirror (which she mistakes for a portrait), yet approves of a flattering portrait that she demands be copied by the artist. This short sketch speaks to the central paradox of the caricature, which is the use of distorted imagery to imply a privileged relation between this representation and ‘truth’. These may not be more recognizable images of the queen than the officially sanctioned versions, but they contain a strong claim to be more truthful, echoing Gombrich and Kris’s claim for the superior relation of caricature to reality. Alongside makeup, costuming is a key mode through which the pleasure of distorted recognition is presented televisually. In the case of historical figures, such recognition works best when the caricature draws on a limited portfolio of pre-existing images (or verbal descriptions) that have enjoyed cultural recirculation. The strongest example of this is Henry VIII, whose striking features render him one of the English monarchs whose image is the most accessible. The majority of moving-image representations of the king draw on a limited range of contemporary images, the most important being Hans Holbein’s 1540 portrait. The features here – Henry is large and imposing, has an aggressively masculine stance (legs apart, chest and shoulders thrust forward), a bushy ginger beard and a high hairline, and wears a soft feathered hat and a gold chain – are replicated in most portrayals, and certainly inform the performance of this historical character in these sketch comedies. In each case an overweight actor, or one in body-padding, is used to emphasize Henry’s size, wearing a false red beard, a doublet, tights and furs, outsized jewellery and a feathered hat. The recollection of culturally recirculated images like the Holbein portrait underpins the pleasurable recognition of the distorted version. Since the performed caricature tends to emphasize Henry’s most familiar and easily recognizable attributes, it has a reasonable claim to Rhodes’s superportrait status. Distorted recognition can also entail drawing on pre-existing popular cultural representations. The costuming of Cleopatra in both Horrible Histories and Psychobitches is a useful example here. The interchangeability of actors (in Horrible Histories Cleopatra is portrayed by both Martha Howe-Douglas and Kathryn Drysdale) indicates that the onus is on the costuming to convey ‘Cleopatra-ness’. Though each has minor variations, in all examples the actress wears a large black wig with beaded braids, a snake-figure headdress, a gold dress, and black and blue eye-makeup, in emulation of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963). Costuming is therefore a form of intertextuality and an ironic guarantor of pleasurable recognition, though not of veracity. The costumes in each of these programmes deliberately have a look of the dressing-up box to them, even though the Horrible Histories costume designer Ros Little is reportedly ‘so scrupulous that she always wants to know the precise year in which a sketch is meant to be set, so as not to introduce an inexact ruff or skirt’.15 This report of Little’s fastidiousness can itself be read as an ironic commentary on the standards of accuracy to which the costuming of historical figures in fictional media is often held. Such critiques of ‘inaccuracy’ tend to negate the pleasure of inauthenticity, of play with history, available in the costuming of comedic historical representation, as in my examples. Costuming marks the paradox of the caricature – to be effective it needs to balance mimesis and accuracy with exaggeration and inauthenticity. Performance marks a major pleasure in the televisual caricature. One of Drunk History’s key comedic values is the portrayal of historical figures mouthing contemporary idiom – Henry VIII describing Anne of Cleves as ‘proper fit’, for example. Facial performance is important here, not just because the words are lip-synched but because the use of limited sets means that actors are most frequently framed in medium closeup and closeup. Exaggerations come in the form of more animated expressions than would typically be expected in televisual performance: widened eyes and lips, a greater level of movement in the face or shoulders, and often a deliberately raised eyebrow. This ostensive, presentational performance style is replicated in Psychobitches and Horrible Histories, though in these cases the voice of the actor (as opposed to the nondiegetic voice of the drunk historian) can also be used as part of their portrayal of the historical figure.16 In Psychobitches Frances Barber portrays Elizabeth I as aggressive, masculine and coarse, using sexualized language to intimidate the therapist. As with the representations of other royals, overstated working-class accents (Glaswegian in the case of Mary Queen of Scots, Cockney for The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret) are used to subvert the expectations of what British monarchs should sound like, with the contrast between the image of the historical figure and their voice creating comic incongruity. National stereotypes can be used to this end in the caricatured performances, particularly when this aspect of the subject’s identity is central to the sketch’s humour. In Horrible Histories, for instance, Napoleon Bonaparte (Jim Howick) appears on ‘This is Your Reign’, a parody of This is Your Life (BBC/ITV, 1955–2007), in which his strong, silly Italian accent is used to underline the biographical fact (presented to the viewer as surprising) that Napoleon was not French but Corsican. Inauthentic approximations of accents thus become a central feature of the performative style of televisual caricature, adding the important dimension of sound to the visualization of historical figures. In all programmes, but particularly Drunk History, the ventriloquized voice of the historical figure and its ironic contrast with their portrayed image is a key, televisually specific aspect of these caricatures. Alongside vocal performance, the physicality of the actor is important to the creation of caricature. Stature can be used to match certain well-known aspects of the body of the historical figure, such as the famously (but disputably) diminutive Napoleon being portrayed by a relatively short actor in the example above. Here the actor’s body aids the quick recognition of the character, alongside costuming and contextualizing dialogue. In some cases the actor’s physique is important for the exaggeration function of caricature. In Psychobitches, for example, seventy-six-year-old actor Sheila Reid portrays ballerina Margot Fonteyn, whom the psychiatrist attempts to coax into very late retirement (mocking Fonteyn’s unusually extended career). The ageing body is portrayed both visibly, with the wrinkles of Reid’s skin emphasized through makeup and lighting, and on the soundtrack, where the sounds of joints clicking and a malfunctioning hearing aid are clearly audible over the dialogue. At other times, however, the actor’s physical appearance may contradict the body of the figure portrayed, as in Katy Brand’s performance of Diana Dors. Brand’s large body is used to satirize Dors’s star image as a British sex symbol through its comparison with Marilyn Monroe, whom Dors mistakenly believes herself to be. Here the actor’s physicality aids the distorting function of caricature. Nowhere, however, is this use of the actor’s body to create incongruous representations of famous women more apparent than in drag performance. Drag is used in performances that satirize notions of female beauty. In Psychobitches, biblical princess Salome is portrayed by overweight comedian Johnny Vegas, who speaks in his gruff Mancunian accent, with no apparent concession to the fact that the character is a famed beauty. The comedy is drawn from the distance between Vegas’s image and the mythical seductiveness of Salome. A variation on this joke is made in Drunk History, as the story of the famous disjuncture between the portrait of Anne of Cleves and her real appearance is told economically through the choice of an actor who is not conventionally attractive (Tony Way) to portray the queen, underlined by minimal use of makeup and visible facial stubble, designed to deny any marker of femininity. As Ben Poore notes, drag performance in historical comedy is not simply a matter of cheap laughs, but also more troubling in its implications about the ‘proper’ place for power and influence: ‘Men dressing as Queen Victoria not only assign to the monarch a rough, unladylike machismo, but simultaneously take the monarch down the social scale’.17 This applies to other famous and influential women, such as Emmeline Pankhurst, portrayed in Psychobitches by comedian Ted Robbins as a coarse northerner. This caricature of Pankhurst expands on a truth about her – she resided in Manchester’s notorious Moss Side area – and creates incongruity between her origins in this part of the city and her historical importance. The crux of the joke suggests an incompatibility between being a feminist/suffragist and ‘a lady’, and between working-class identity and having any power or influence. In these various examples the actor’s body and voice are used to draw on underlying social stereotypes – of women, the working class, obese or elderly people – for shorthand ironic juxtaposition. Stereotypes share with caricature a reputation for crudeness, oversimplification and representational dishonesty. The terms are used interchangeably and often uncritically, as Steve Neale notes of stereotype, to evaluate negatively portrayals in popular culture that decline to depict the complexities of ‘real’ human lives.18 As Richard Dyer argues, however, drawing on the work of T. E. Perkins, this conception of stereotype underestimates the extent to which a range of social and cultural knowledges must be drawn upon for stereotype to function.19 Stereotypes and caricatures both work, Dyer notes, as a form of ‘short cut’, a means of quick access to a wide range of cultural knowledge, implying more agency on the part of the perceiver than is usually credited in critical analyses of both forms of representation. There is nevertheless a political critique to be made of the use of gendered, national and social stereotypes in such portrayals of historical figures, since there must, for the jokes to work, be a shared underlying assumption that existing hierarchies are neutral and transparent. This undermines any claim of such caricatures to question the status quo; the subversion of the original can have the ironic effect of reinforcing its cultural power. In this sense caricature shares with parody an ambivalent politics, as Linda Hutcheon has argued, ‘as a form of ironic representation, parody is doubly coded in political terms: it both legitimises and subverts that which it parodies’.20 Simon Dentith similarly notes the dual transgressive and conservative nature of parody, inasmuch as it tends to preserve the forms that it attacks through the continued cultural circulation of those forms.21 The paradoxical character of caricature suggests that it performs a similar cultural function. Even while caricature may distort the image of the portrayed figure, it relies upon – and thus extends – pre-existing recognition and knowledge of that figure. Accordingly, as Hutcheon notes of postmodern parody, it is ‘a kind of contesting revision or rereading of the past that both confirms and subverts the power of the representations of history’.22 Given the close familial relation between parody and caricature, it is unsurprising that parody plays an important part in these historical comedies, as seen in Psychobitches’ Thatcher and Davies/Crawford caricatures. Caricature is used as part of parody to lend contemporary resonance to the portrayal of historical figures. Horrible Histories utilizes popular music parody as one means of creating such connections: the four King Georges’ histories are potted into a boy-band ballad; Mary Seacole’s story is told through a pastiche of Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’; Charles Dickens’s biography is summarized in the style of The Smiths, with Dickens recast as Morrissey. Facts of the difficult early life of Dickens are alluded to in the song, which pastiches ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’. For a viewer with enough familiarity with the miserablist style of both Dickens and Morrissey, the conflation of these two figures combines pleasurable recognition with irony. Intertextual referencing in historical comedy establishes humorous relationships between present and past, granting the ‘levity that gives us the freedom to move backward and forward in time and to transcend barriers between eras’.23 Such freedom is invoked too in the caricatured performance of historical figures. The combination of costuming, makeup, performance style, editing structure and intertextual referencing lends these caricatures their televisual specificity. In each case, though, they draw upon (or help to construct) knowledge of the portrayed historical figure. Whether the culturally circulated knowledge of the figure will be re-asserted or undermined in the caricature depends upon the extent to which the pleasure is drawn from recognition or distortion. But in all cases the active contemplation of the viewer is relied upon to create the ironic connections between what is known of the ‘real’ figure and their exaggerated portrayal. The use of intertextual referencing described above as part of the pleasure and function of historical caricatures suggests strongly the requirement of some pre-existing knowledge on the part of the viewer for distorted recognition to function, and certainly for caricature to achieve the status of Rhodes’s superportrait. However, particularly in the case of Horrible Histories’ child viewers, it is problematic to assume that such knowledge will be shared universally. Indeed, as Dustin Griffin notes of satire, ‘even when a satirist appears to “refer” to historical events or persons, the reader does not always make the identification’.24 There is an ever-present threat in the caricature of non- or mis-recognition. Horrible Histories’ use of popular music parody, mentioned above, leads us to question the extent to which a child viewer of the 2010s can be expected to have sufficient knowledge of the music of the 1980s for the Morrissey allusion to work for them. Surprisingly, then, executive producer Richard Bradley has stated that the writing team ‘realise[d] that it had to be written 100% for children and not have knowing references aimed only at adults’.25 His use of the term ‘knowing’ is noteworthy in this context, as it is used pejoratively to refer to a kind of self-satisfied mode of reception, in which the viewer’s intelligence is flattered by multiple layers of intertextual referencing. Hutcheon uses the term more positively to describe the viewer of media adaptations: The term ‘knowing’ suggests being savvy and street-smart, as well as knowledgable, and undercuts some of the elitist associations of the other terms [learned or competent] in favor of a more democratizing kind of straightforward awareness of the adaptation’s enriching, palimpsestic doubleness.26 She argues that adaptations are experienced differently by knowing and unknowing audiences, that experiencing adaptations as an adaptation allows the adapted (source) text to ‘oscillate in our memories with what we are experiencing’.27 Though Hutcheon’s work on adaptations specifically discounts parody and pastiche (and we could say, by extension, caricature), her concept of the ‘knowing’ audience can be used to discuss the distorted recognition of the caricature. ‘Knowing’ here has a double meaning: not only is this an epistemological issue, it is also one of disposition, an expected stance of critical distance from the material viewed. Both senses of knowing will be considered in the following discussion of televisual caricature as part of the repertoire of postmodern historical representation. The knowing viewer, in terms of an expected disposition of detachment and scepticism, is addressed in a number of ways in each programme. These can be structural devices that are commonplace in both comedy and postmodern media. In Drunk History, the actors lip-synching the lines of the drunk comedian frequently break the fourth wall, looking to camera and sharing with the viewer a moment of silent judgement of the drunken narrator. This is a literal ‘knowing look’, a shared moment that erases any possible trace of a willing suspension of disbelief in favour of looking askance, with the sideways view so crucial to the sketches’ comedic function. A similar device is used in Horrible Histories, where characters will often break from the sketch to comment to camera about what is taking place. The historical caricature is also used sometimes to present quiz questions to the viewer in a form of direct address. This halts any illusion of temporal specificity, fixing the historical figure firmly in the televisual context and once again performing that anachronistic function typical of self-aware historical comedy. In Psychobitches this knowing gaze is implemented often. In one very short sketch, for example, Princess Diana (Jack Whitehall) arrives at the door to the therapist’s office, her eyes cast downward in the manner made famous from her television interview with Martin Bashir. The therapist looks at her watch, quizzically, then back at Diana, who says only two words: ‘Too soon?’ Of course this is a metacommentary on the media discourse around Diana; her posthumous sanctification has rendered her an apparently unfit figure – thus far – for caricature. The sketch depends on knowledge of this historical and medial context for the functioning of the joke, as well as the shared disposition (of sceptical distance) towards the cult of Diana. Caricatures depend more than other form of representation on Gombrich’s ‘beholder’s share’, the activity of the perceiver that draws on the sum of their cultural knowledge. This recognition function is implicated in the effectiveness of the caricature, since, as Gombrich and Kris note, it ‘reveals its true sense to us only if we can compare it with the sitter, and thus appreciate the witty play of “like in unlike”’.28 A caricature works as a superportait only for viewers who have some degree of familiarity with the original figure being portrayed, requiring a level of collusion between perceiver and image producer. Hutcheon acknowledges the threat of ‘elitism’ and ‘lack of access’ in (postmodern) parody, precisely the kind of potential exclusion forced by the lack of recognition of the subject of caricature. She notes that this ‘is the complicity ofpostmodern parody – its inscribing as well as undermining of that which it parodies – that is central to its ability to be understood’.29 Although, as outlined above, all of the texts considered here are positioned in relation to niche audiences in complex ways, the televisual medium demands a level of transparency that tends to work against such an address to a ‘closed’ reading group.30 To this end, framing devices are utilized to facilitate recognition in each programme, drawing on television’s specific stylistic possibilities and conventions to convey necessary contextualization for the short sketch. Psychobitches employs two strategies for providing sufficient contextualizion of its subjects to enable their recognition. The first is the simple use of brief closeups of the psychotherapist’s diary to announce the subject of the ensuing sequence, an efficient means of setting up expectations drawn from cultural associations with the famous subject that are to be undermined or exaggerated in the caricature. The second strategy is to use the therapist’s dialogue to provide key details of the ‘patient’s’ biography, usually framed vaguely within a therapeutic discourse that draws attention to their parentage, childhood or traumatic experiences. The therapy setting of Psychobitches suggests that superficial ‘knowledge’ about a subject is inferior to the internal ‘truths’ of a psyche, in a mirror of the role of the caricature in externalizing such ‘truths’. The therapist in the programme is endowed with a privileged relation to truth, both historical and psychological, since she sees clearly the facts about her ‘patients’ that they are unable or unwilling to see themselves. This both aids recognition of the caricatured figure and sets up the punchline for jokes. It is particularly useful when the subject may not be especially well known, as in a sketch about Hildegaard von Bingen (Michelle Gomez). The therapist outlines the reasons why the mediaeval composer, polymath and nun, who was passed over for sainthood by the Catholic Church for nearly 800 years, may have some unresolved anger. This rather lengthy summary of Bingen’s biography is delivered in a series of shots of the therapist and reverse-shots of Bingen, in which she calmly listens, poised and upright, to the litany of her achievements, a reversal of the programme’s regular joke structure outlined above. This prepares the punchline, the answer to the question of how she feels about the Church, to which Gomez sings beatifically, in the plainsong style of Bingen’s compositions, ‘Fuck them’. The dialogue sets the behaviour of the subject as incongruous with the expectations of the historical figure. Horrible Histories uses an onscreen graphic that explicitly confirms or denies the truth claims of the sketches that are being performed. A puppet rat called Rattus Rattus appears during sketches with a sign telling the viewer that what they see is ‘true’, and occasionally also admits that the performed actions are simply ‘silly’. Rattus Rattus is also used to link different sketches in short segments, during which he directly addresses the camera, delivering snippets of factual information such as dates or brief descriptions of historical events or people. Like Psychobitches’ therapist, Rattus Rattus has a privileged relationship with truth and is used as the arbiter for the audience between exaggeration and reality. He remediates the voice of the author in the original children’s books, which encouraged readers to take a sceptical view of historical knowledge and to consider historical subjects with empathy as well as critical distance. The use of a puppet rat to perform this role in the series is significant inasmuch as it reduces the reliance on an omniscient ‘narrator’ or the imposing figure of the (white male) historian. Drunk History’s structuring joke – that inebriated comedians are in ‘charge’ of the historical story under scrutiny – itself provides a context in which historical figures are likely to be exaggerated in the narration. The programme therefore begins with a text and voiceover disclaimer (by comedian Jimmy Carr), which asks the viewer to apply discretion in terms of their acceptance of the historical ‘knowledge’ that will be imparted throughout: ‘The following stories are all based on genuine historical events. However, the comedians telling the stories are drunk, so the facts may have been embellished.’ The effect of this disclaimer is not only to discredit the voices of the ‘historians’ on the programme, but also to warn that the re-enactments should be viewed critically. This draws on and undermines a familiar convention from factual television that in the normal context would be used to gain the viewer’s trust. Undermining this trust pact in the context of Drunk History is a means of enhancing the comedy, as well as demonstrating that the portrayals of real people in the programme will be exaggerations rather than truthful or mimetic impersonations, and should accordingly be questioned. The programme mimics the underlying syntax of television history programmes in John Corner’s ‘commentary’, ‘presenter’ and ‘re-enactment’ modes.31 Apart from linking segments voiced by Carr, the voice of the ‘historian(s)’ is the only dialogue heard on the soundtrack, an echo of the authoritative ‘commentary’ delivered in history documentary. The show’s narrative structure oscillates between the previously mentioned lip-synched re-enactments and shots of the ‘historian’ at repose in a softly-lit study, piles of books and desks visible in the background in a mise-en-scene that mirrors the kinds of settings commonly chosen for presenter-led histories. Caricatured performances in the re-enactments are thus complemented by the structure of the series, which borrows the grammar of television history programming in order to undermine it parodically. Among historians and media professionals there exists considerable anxiety about historical programming, particularly its ability to retain accuracy and nuance in its presentation for the medium, as Steve Anderson notes: There is remarkable consensus among both historians and media critics regarding television’s unsuitability for the construction of history […] TV, so the argument goes, can produce no lasting sense of history; at worst it actually impedes viewers’ ability to receive, process, or remember information about the past.32 Erin Bell and Ann Gray suggest the source of much of this consensus is that television’s assumed entertainment role tends to militate against the kinds of history storytelling of which historians would generally approve. At the same time, however, historians have recognized the potential of television as an instrument for the dissemination and promotion of historical ideas, and ‘are keen for people to be more engaged by television history programming as a route into a broader interest in, and critical appreciation of, the past’.33 Such critical understanding may not be best served by the kinds of strongly authored, personality-led documentaries that currently dominate history programming on British television, since, as Bell and Gray argue, these offer a particularly ‘closed’ way of telling.34 In their play with not just history itself but the way in which history is mediated for television, these historical comedies offer an antidote to such closure. Historical caricature thus not only diminishes the power of the historical figure through abject and grotesque representation, it also undermines the authority of the conventional means by which contemporary television viewers receive historical information. Comedy’s often theorized function of contained subversion is utilized to call into question the typical modes by which historical storytelling is delivered on television. As Barbara Korte and Doris Lechner note, one of the effects of historical comedy is to encourage a critical view of historiography, to offer the audience an opportunity to look askance at hegemonic historical narrative.35 Marcia Landy describes this as ‘counter-official historicizing’.36 Not only are alternative (fictional) historical stories being offered, but turning the comedic lens on historical events suggests that the narrativization of history should be questioned. Historical comedy and caricature, then, share the effect of using ridicule to critique, question or undermine both those in power and the underlying structures that support the wielding of that power. Horrible Histories as a whole media text is predicated on encouraging critical historiographical reading in the child reader: A noteworthy feature of the series is its recognition of the disputed nature of historical knowledge. Readers are alerted to the fact that the past can be interpreted in different ways – something which historical documentaries often fail to do.37 Indeed, often the entire purpose of sketches in the series is to remind the viewer of how certain histories become distorted and then privileged through diachronic cultural circulation. In one such skit, the ghost of Richard III (Jim Howick) appears before William Shakespeare (Matthew Baynton) to repudiate the factual inaccuracies through which the play defames him. He begins by disputing the famous physical traits of the Shakespearean king – the limp, the hunchback and the withered arm. Shakespeare admits to constructing a physiognomical caricature of the king, arguing that these are symbolic and that Richard was ‘evil’. Richard’s ghost wields historic fact to counter the ‘evidence’ Shakespeare offers to support his characterization, such as Richard’s supposed murder of the Duke of Somerset, who in fact died when Richard was just three years old. This is supported by onscreen overlaid signs, assuring the viewer that ‘The Ghost is Right’. Through such sketches the series points to the ways in which historical knowledge can be distorted through fictionalization and caricature, though it stops short of explicitly acknowledging the irony of this attitude in a programme that does precisely that. In other words, the programme both addresses and works to produce the kind of detached or ‘knowing’ viewer previously discussed. Moving-image historical representation also has its part to play in this distortion of historical knowledge. As Korte and Lechner argue, comedic histories on film and television have a formational effect on the public’s memory, and can shape perceptions of historical actors in much the same way as Gombrich argued that caricatures can reshape perception of a caricature’s ‘victim’, ‘because his picture is linked inseparably in our minds with the caricature we have seen. We have been taught by the artist to see him anew, to see him as a ridiculous creature.’38 Televised caricature here engages in the contradictory construction of what Anderson calls ‘popular memory’, the culturally shared sense of history that includes both official and ‘counter-official’ histories.39 For example, Horrible Histories’ Elizabeth I – bad-tempered, spoiled and childlike – borrows extensively from Miranda Richardson’s mercurial portrayal of ‘Queenie’ in Blackadder. Rather than returning to the ‘official’ historical record of Elizabeth’s temperament – which the programme explicitly reiterates is unreliable – Horrible Histories uses a shorthand intertextual reference to relate the portrayal to the most accessible comedic performance of her in popular memory. This lends some credence to John Corner’s argument that ‘keeping popular factual accounts, and popular interpretation, entirely free of the densely imagined fictions that now inform and misinform our sense of the past has always been impossible’.40 However, as Jerome de Groot has noted, there is no universal acceptance of the popular memory paradigm within historiographical study. Some historians have viewed the televisual caricatures found in Blackadder negatively, perceiving them to have perpetuated popular myths about historical figures such as Field Marshal Haig. De Groot writes that ‘The show was being used as evidence in a historiographical debate, demonstrating the increasing influence of popular culture on historiography’.41 The negative view here is tantamount to an anti-postmodern stance, opposed to the ‘gleefully postmodern’ historical television comedies including Horrible Histories and Psychobitches on which, as James Leggott notes, Blackadder is a clear influence.42 The programmes under scrutiny here may indeed be seen as the kinds of ‘de-totalizing’ representations that Hutcheon considers typical of postmodern history: ‘different from the unitary, closed, evolutionary narratives of historiography as we have traditionally known it’.43 The sketch format of these series insists that they focus on the episodic (or even micro-episodic) events from history rather than the long-form historical narrative; thus they work against the kind of teleological historical narrative familiar from more conventional historical programming (and broader traditional historical discourse). Consider the therapist’s waiting room in Psychobitches, or the Grim Reaper’s queue of corpses in Horrible Histories’ ‘Stupid Deaths’ sketches, where figures from across time and space are given a context in which they are brought together against the logic of history. The comedic representation of such figures through caricature enables these representations to function within a sketch comedy – we need only recognize who they are to see that they do not belong together, and to revel in their ironic juxtaposition. Caricature is little discussed as a mode of postmodern representation, but it shares with forms like parody and satire the ambivalent oscillation between conservatism and transgression, the ability to re-assert as well as undermine pre-existing knowledge, and the pleasure of distorted recognition. When used in the context of historical television comedy, performed caricature operates in complex ways to amuse a knowing viewer. I began this essay by positing that the central pleasure available in the (televisual) historical caricature is that of ‘distorted recognition’. Tracing a path that first analyses the form and function of the ‘distortion’, through costuming, performance style, dialogue and other televisual markers, I turned to the broader meaning of the ‘recognition’ function through a consideration of the role of cultural knowledge and a critical stance addressed by these performed caricatures. The pleasure of recognition, which flatters the historical and cultural knowledge of the viewer, is combined with the dissident action of distortion, which speaks to a ‘knowing’ disposition, a critical historiographical approach that permits a delight in ironic or contrapuntal juxtapositions across time. The role of the caricature here is aligned with its traditional function of satirizing the elite. Refiguring history’s most powerful figures in the forms of popular culture, exaggerating their physical and psychological weaknesses, and recasting their flaws in contemporary language, each programme offers a form of disempowering critique. The historical caricature also acts as a historiographical metacommentary. As Steve Anderson has noted of popular memory, this disempowerment extends to the ‘official histories’ sanctioned by historians: Rather than simply learning new ways to forget, TV viewers may be acquiring a much more specialized and useful ability – to navigate and even remember their own past with creativity and meaning – even if it goes ‘against the design’ of historians.44 As distorted portrayals of the figures from the past, televisual caricatures add to the stock of representations of history and require this navigational ability of their viewers. They demand a knowing look, a scepticism about the ways in which history is told, and a delight in rebellion. Television sketch shows use caricature to perform the job of critical historiography, subverting the received wisdoms of historical narrativization to produce a more questioning or cynical stance. Caricature, therefore, should stand alongside parody, satire and intertextuality as a recognized feature of postmodern historiography – as another mode of historical ‘de-totalizing’, in Hutcheon’s terms. Like parody, caricature is a form with a longer history into which models such as the television sketch shows discussed here should be situated. The televisual specificity of the caricatures under examination, though, should not be underestimated. That television is a place where historical caricature can thrive should not be surprising, since, as historians and television scholars have agreed, it is an ambivalent medium for the dissemination of historical knowledge. However, neither should it be a cause for alarm, since television caricature reveals that this problematic medium is able to transmit critical historiography in a manner that may appease the fears of historians who lament television’s propensity to produce ‘passive’ viewers. Tristram Hunt is one such historian, who has argued of Horrible Histories that there are ‘more sophisticated, populist ways of getting people involved in history than this’.45 Yet as I have argued, the performed caricature is a sophisticated, populist method of historical representation on television, one that ironically draws on a vault of historical knowledge from ‘official’ and ‘counter-official’ historiographies – and, of course, on the ability to discriminate between them. Footnotes 1 Judith Wechsler ‘The issue of caricature’, Art Journal, vol. 43, no. 4 (1983), p. 318. 2 The Horrible Histories book series was created by Terry Deary in 1993, with the last volume published in 2013. 3 Owen Gibson, ‘Sky buys out arts channel’, The Guardian, 20 June 2005, <https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/jun/20/broadcasting.uknews> accessed 13 February 2019. 4 Gillian Rhodes, Superportraits: Caricatures and Recognition (Hove: Psychology Press, 1996), pp. 13–14. 5 E. H. Gombrich and Ernst Kris, ‘The principles of caricature’, British Journal of Medical Psychology, vol. 17 (1938), pp. 320–21. 6 Rhodes, Superportraits. 7 Adam Gopnik, ‘High and low: caricature, primitivism and the cubist portrait’, Art Journal, vol. 43, no. 4 (1983), p. 373. 8 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (6th edn) (London: Phaidon, 2002). 9 Parody, here as elsewhere in this essay, refers to what Simon Dentith defines as a ‘cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice’. Dentith, Parody (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 9. 10 Satire, here as elsewhere in the essay, refers to what Stephen Wagg defines as the ‘ridicule of prevailing vices and their perpetrators’, a tradition in British culture that has taken the monarchy and eminent statespeople as its targets. Wagg, ‘“You’ve never had it so silly”: the politics of British satirical comedy from Beyond the Fringe to Spitting Image ’, in Dominic Strinati and Stephen Wagg (eds), Come on Down? Popular Media Culture in Postwar Britain (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 255. 11 See Andrew Stott, Comedy (London: Routledge, 2004). 12 Wechsler, ‘The issue of caricature’, p. 317. 13 Stott, Comedy, p. 92. 14 Quoted in Margaret Scanlon, ‘History beyond the academy: humour and horror in children’s history books’, New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship, vol 16, no. 2 (2011), p. 82. 15 Richard Preston, ‘Horrible Histories: 20 years of entertaining children’, The Daily Telegraph, 21 February 2013, <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9857326/Horrible-Histories-20-years-of-entertaining-children.html> accessed 13 February 2019. 16 James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). 17 Benjamin Poore, ‘Reclaiming the Dame: cross-dressing as Queen Victoria in British theatre and television comedy’, Comedy Studies, vol. 3, no. 2 (2012), p. 179. 18 Steve Neale, ‘The same old story: stereotypes and difference’, in Manuel Alvarado, Edward Buscombe and Richard Collins (eds), The Screen Education Reader: Cinema, Television, Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 41–47. 19 Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images (London: Routledge, 2002). 20 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 97. 21 Dentith, Parody. 22 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, p. 91. 23 Hannu Salmi, ‘Introduction: the mad history of the world’, in Salmi (ed.), Historical Comedy on Screen (Bristol: Intellect, 2011), p. 29. 24 Dustin H. Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: KT: University of Kentucky Press, 1991), p. 121. 25 Leo Hickman, ‘How Horrible Histories became a huge hit’, The Guardian, 17 March 2011, <https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/mar/17/horrible-histories-huge-hit> accessed 13 January 2019. 26 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (2nd edn) (London: Routledge, 2013) p. 120. 27 Ibid. 28 E. H. Gombrich and E. Kris, Caricature (Harmondsworth: King Penguin, 1940), p. 13. 29 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 101. 30 Simon Dentith uses this term to describe the social contexts in which parody has traditionally thrived, such as educational or religious institutions. 31 John Corner, ‘“Once upon a time …”: visual design and documentary openings’, in Ann Gray and Erin Bell (eds), Televising History: Mediating the Past in Postwar Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 13–27. 32 Steve Anderson ‘Loafing in the garden of knowledge: history TV and popular memory’, Film and History, vol. 30, no. 1 (2000), p. 15. 33 Erin Bell and Ann Gray, ‘History on television: charisma, narrative and knowledge’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 10, no. 1 (2007), p. 127. 34 Ibid., p. 129. 35 Barbara Korte and Doris Lechner, ‘History and humour: charting the field’, in Korte and Lechner (eds), History and Humour: British and American Perspectives (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013), pp. 8–9. 36 Marcia Landy, ‘Comedy and counter history’, in Salmi (ed.) Historical Comedy on Screen, p. 197. 37 Scanlon, ‘History beyond the academy’, p. 89. 38 Gombrich and Kris, Caricature, p. 13. 39 Anderson ‘Loafing in the garden of knowledge’, p. 16. 40 John Corner, ‘Backwards looks: mediating the past’, Media Culture and Society, vol. 28, no. 3 (2006), p. 466. 41 Jerome de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (2nd edn) (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 171. 42 James Leggott, ‘“It’s not clever, it’s not funny, and it’s not period”: costume comedy and British television’, in James Leggott and Julie Taddeo (eds), Upstairs and Downstairs: British Costume Drama from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). 43 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, p. 63. 44 Anderson ‘Loafing in the garden of knowledge’, p. 22. 45 Qtd in Hickman, ‘How Horrible Histories became a huge hit’. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Distorted recognition: the pleasures and uses of televisual historical caricature
JF - Screen
DO - 10.1093/screen/hjz005
DA - 2019-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/distorted-recognition-the-pleasures-and-uses-of-televisual-historical-6ITdLzdw0Z
SP - 280
VL - 60
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -