In the world of comedy, violent actions can do no harm. No matter how many times Tom the cartoon cat is skewered or burned or blown up during an episode of Tom and Jerry, he has always recovered by the next scene. The same thing can happen to real people: when an escaped convict carries out his threat to break off Laurel and Hardy’s legs and tie them around their necks, the final image of their plight evokes not horror but laughter.

Comic violence also allows the hero to get his own back on his enemies. The comeuppance is all the more satisfying because we can laugh at it, whereas the same events depicted in tragedy instil only feelings of terror. King Pentheus has his limbs torn off by his mother in Euripides’s play The Bacchae, but the effect is definitely not Laurel and Hardy.

The classical era

We can trace the history of violence in comic drama back at least as far as ancient Greece. The main comic writer of the period was Aristophanes, whose works frequently show disasters happening to arrogant and pretentious characters.

In what the dramatist considered his best play, The Clouds (first performed in 423BC), lots of fun is poked at the great philosopher Socrates, who was alive at this time and saw many of these plays. The Clouds ends with the deliberate burning down of his philosophical school, the “Thinkery”.

Plautus and Terence, the two leading comic playwrights of ancient Rome, learned much from the Greek tradition. Plautus’s slaves are always getting beaten before outwitting their spiteful masters. Just as the Roman writer Seneca would later bring the violence in his tragedies out of the wings and on to centre stage, so Plautus made the comic drama highly physical.

His influence on the early comic plays of Shakespeare is clear, as we can see from A Comedy Of Errors, in which identical twin servants sustain numerous blows from their identical twin masters.

Commedia

The violence in Punch and Judy derives from the knockabout comedy of the Italian commedia dell’arte. This in turn has its roots in a type of comic performance known in ancient times as the Atellan farce (because it originated around the town of Atella, near Naples, in the fourth century BC). Although these farces were improvised, they revolved around a group of regular characters in masks, with plenty of slapstick – the split wooden baton with which the actors could noisily but harmlessly attack each other.

The www.punchandjudy.com website focuses on the obvious links between a couple of the Atellan characters and the later figure of the English Mr Punch:

“…ancient terracottas likely to be representations of Mandacus-Dossenus [respectively the glutton and hunchback of the Atellan farces] have the huge hook-nose, pot belly and hump of Mr. Punch. It is likely too that [they] combined wit with stupidity, and comedy with cruelty, much like Punch again.”

Another reason why ancient comic theatre was brutally physical and visual was the rowdiness of the audience. In those days audiences didn’t politely listen to the actors in silence. The plays had to compete for attention with jugglers, tightrope walkers, gladiatorial combats and a host of other circus-style entertainments that might all be going on nearby. Terence complains of seeing the staging of one of his own plays ruined, not once but twice, by the rival attractions of boxing, and rumours that a gladiatorial contest was about to be staged nearby. His play, therefore, needed to be just as violent.

Roman crowds had an insatiable appetite for extravagant displays of violence witnessed in the gladiatorial arena. By the first century AD, criminals due to be executed were dressed up and made to act in dramas, so their impending deaths became the most realistic kind of theatre. 

Pie throwing: the slapstick years

The physical humour of slapstick was the dominant style of comic films during the silent era, because verbal jokes were not possible. Slapstick was picked up by the movies on account of its great popularity in the vaudeville musical theatre of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. This combined songs, comic sketches and recitations.

Where the theatre had relied on the slapstick itself as the weapon of choice, cinema introduced a new and equally deadly innovation: the custard pie!

One of the earliest pioneers of pie-throwing comedy was Mabel Normand. Quite a pin-up of the era, Normand could have made a comfortable living acting in romantic films. She became famous though for a series of short films for Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios, which she was invited to write and direct herself.

Films such as The Ragtime Band and A Muddy Romance (1913 and 1914) created shock waves because it was Normand, and not a man, who was on the receiving end of the pie – courtesy of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.

Tom and Jerry

Cartoons are where we usually witness the most graphically violent action. The MGM studio’s permanently warring cat and mouse, Tom and Jerry, began their career in 1940 with Puss Gets The Boot.

In the first hour of Volume One of the Tom and Jerry DVD Collection – in just one hour – this is what Tom has to go through:

• The unfortunate cat is slapped face-first onto a record turntable where six records are broken on his head.
• He’s hit on the head with a piece of metal pipe, and with a bread roll (which inexplicably shatters). And he hits himself on the head three times too, for good measure. (Then he is slapped three times by an imaginary little cat demon.) He’s also hit with a tomato, four eggs, a banana and a snowball; with a dustbin lid, three lightbulbs, a broom, two glasses and countless champagne corks. He’s hit with one ironing board and gets trapped in another. He’s punched in the face by a boxing glove eight times. Then (in the next scene) once more for luck.
• He has a seltzer bottle squirted in his mouth, and is hit on the head with the handle of an axe (six times), hit with a plank of wood (five times, then four times more), and a rolling-pin (three times).
• A plinth, two flowerpots, three plates and a massive pile of crockery fall on him.
• He runs face-first (and always pretty hard) into a dog, a cat, a metal rubbish bin, a plinth, a table, two doors, a gate and a brass urn. A firework rocket explodes in his face, and he’s tied to another and shot into the sky to explode. His whiskers are plucked, and later (when they’ve reappeared) he finds himself hanging from them (ouch) till one by one they’re all plucked out again.
• His tail is caught in a mousetrap (twice), and he’s made to run across a lawn covered in tacks. A stick of dynamite explodes in his face. And another. And another. And another. (All four within less than 90 seconds.)
• He’s stabbed with a fork a couple of times, also with a hatpin, kicked up the backside (three times, then once more), is scraped across a cheese grater (three times). He’s scalded with the water and steam from a radiator, electrocuted in the Christmas tree lights and punched in the eyeball.

Oh yes, we counted. And this is not to mention all the things that happen to little Jerry (who on at least one occasion is frozen solid; on another, toasted) and to the other miscellaneous cats and dogs. And not to mention either all the things that happen off-camera, with the sounds of unseen crockery shattering and glass breaking and characters yowling in pain.

And it is, of course, hilarious. Hilarious too is the DVD rating, which says – one assumes, quite without irony – “Certificate U – Contains very mild violence”.

Tom and Jerry are faithfully parodied and taken to new extremes in the Itchy & Scratchy cartoons that Bart and Lisa watch in The Simpsons. Here, the violence is taken to grotesque levels, but the kids never fail to find it hilarious, even while their elders are appalled.

“What kind of warped human being would find that funny?” their mother Marge wonders, in an episode in which she successfully lobbies the production company to sanitise the show, only to see ratings plummet. Nobody wants to watch a non-violent cartoon.

Violent death as comic diversion is still going strong in Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s South Park. The unfortunate character Kenny meets a different kind of death in every episode for the first five series of the show.

Marge Simpson’s campaign has many real-life counterparts. The first modern-day attempt to have Punch and Judy banned was in 1947, when Middlesex Council objected to the brutal nature of its storyline as being unsuitable for young children. The ruling was swiftly reversed.

In 1999, a similar attempt was made by the chairwoman of the Arts and Leisure Committee of Colchester Council in Essex. This led to much hilarity and the eventual political isolation of the councillor in question, who found herself portrayed unflatteringly in local Punch professor Adrian Hutson’s show.