Introduction: Victorian Comedy and Laughter—Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent

Abstract

Laughter is under-determined in twentieth and twenty-first-century critical accounts of Victorian culture. While the turn to affect and the rise of performance studies has done something to redress this imbalance, finding a common disciplinary language has historically proven problematic. Focusing on the practices of Victorian middlebrow literary reviewers, and also descriptive accounts of critics watching stage comedians, I argue that terms like ‘wit’, ‘humour’, ‘fancy’ and ‘incongruity’ may appear static—even recondite—but they are nonetheless important markers of changing subjectivity, and are dynamically shifting in the period. Considering particularly the rise of the joke from the 1850s onwards, the chapter also introduces a new cultural figure: the jokeur, the professional or semi-professional joke-writer, less visible than the flâneur, but increasingly significant.