A Working History of Slapstick

Maltings cinema
Friday 28 18.00

Howard Matthew is London-based artist who works with performance and video. He has a highly flexible approach to his practice and has collaborated with poets and architects, amongst other professionals. His practice also extends to community and outreach projects where he has worked with a broad cross-section of groups, from primary education to adults with learning disabilities

His goal is to make work that is accessible to a wide variety of people and that is driven first and foremost by context and location, whether for a city-wide project or a devised work with a group of non-performers.

Slapstick is a classic form of physical comedy, which has a tradition dating back to the Renaissance and beyond, but which came into its own in the days before movies had sound. The films of the 1910s and ‘20s emphasised visual comedic effects, from the familiar banana skins and custard pies to much more sophisticated techniques. Slapstick comedians are nearer to acrobats and stuntmen than clowns, and the genre holds a fascinating tension between acts of extreme violence that are nonetheless clearly intended to induce laughter in the audience, and has obvious links not only to cartoons, but also to modern video games.

Slapstick is still very much part of our visual vocabulary, with modern comedians like Rowan Atkinson reinventing the tradition in the footsteps of Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy.

Performance artist Howard Matthew’s Working History of Slapstick is a lecture with screening in A to Z form, with specific references to early US silent cinema between 1910 and 1930.