In 1959, after the publication of On the Road helped turn Jack Kerouac and the beat writers into a national phenomenon, Playboy published an article by Kerouac entitled “The Origins of the Beat Generation.” In explaining the beats, Kerouac emphasized an earlier era of American popular culture: “it goes back to those crazy days before World War II when … our fathers wore straw hats like W. C. Fields. It goes back to the completely senseless babble of the Three Stooges, the ravings of the Marx Brothers … to Laurel and Hardy in the Foreign Legion.”Footnote ¹ Such references to the golden age of screen comedy will be familiar to readers of the beats: in On the Road, Kerouac memorably compares Dean Moriarty to both W. C. Fields and Groucho Marx, whilst the index of names in Allen Ginsberg's Collected Poems 1947–1980 contains more listings under “Marx” for Groucho, Harpo, and Chico than it does for Karl. A study of the significance of these references is long overdue, and this partially provides the basis for William Solomon's Slapstick Modernism: Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy Pop.

Solomon defines “slapstick modernism” as a post-World War II trend in American culture, “manifesting itself in literature, (underground) film, and popular music,” which “signalled the coalescence in cultural practice of the artistic experimentation associated with high modernism and the socially disruptive lunacy linked to the comic film genre” (2). Solomon finds this coalescence manifest in countercultural artistic practises extending from the beats of the 1950s to proto-punk bands of the early 1970s. Specifically, Solomon interprets slapstick modernism as comprising a resistance to “urban-industrial modernity” (9), a resistance that has its roots in modernist literature and 1920s–1930s screen comedy. Solomon argues that “what experimental writing and slapstick filmmaking had in common … is that each addressed and hoped to invent methods of handling such pressing matters as the mechanization of bodies and minds and the anxiety-inducing conditions of existence in the city” (9).

Solomon's identification of slapstick filmmaking is broad in its focus, with the book containing readings of the very different comedic approaches of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, and Mack Sennett's post-Keystone productions for the Pathé Exchange company. Meanwhile, Solomon finds literary forebears of slapstick modernism in the poetry of Hart Crane and in the novels of William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Witold Gombrowicz.

The possible musical branches of slapstick modernism receive less attention. Though Iggy Pop is named in the book's title, Solomon's closing discussion of his band, the Stooges, covers only a few pages. Solomon's take on the Stooges follows Lester Bangs's 1970 appraisal, “Of Pop and Pies and Fun,” in which Bangs ironically contrasts Iggy with his mainstream musical contemporaries, “who never make fools of themselves the way that Stooge punk does, what with his clawing at himself, smashing the mike in his chops, jumping into the crowd to wallow around a forest of legs and ankles.”Footnote ² Emphasizing the Stooges’ debt to the chaotic physicality of their cinematic namesakes, Solomon draws on the band's upbringing amidst the motor industry of Detroit to consolidate his thesis of slapstick modernism forming a reaction to capitalist modernity: “did Iggy's spastic gyrations on stage … constitute a comic act of corporeal mimesis motivated by a desire to master the degrading impact of mechanized labor processes?” (203).

The idea of punk-influenced musicians embracing the cartoonish or grotesque is an area that could be covered in further detail, and in a footnote Solomon provides an enticing list of other bands who would fall under the category of slapstick modernism (including the Ramones, Devo, and the Beastie Boys). Punk parallels could further be drawn with an English comic heritage, as with John Lydon's assertion in Julien Temple's Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury (2000) that his band had their roots in a homegrown performance tradition: “what England didn't understand about the Sex Pistols is that we are music hall!”

In working to identify and explain the tendency of “slapstick modernism,” Solomon's book makes a valuable contribution to readings of American writers associated with the postwar counterculture. Further studies will be made of the unexpected ways in which the resonances of classic screen comedy permeate the worldview of cultural heirs to the beat generation. In this light, it is interesting to note that comedy writer and director Larry Charles recently revealed how, in the late 1990s, he was sought as a collaborator by Bob Dylan (leading to their 2003 film Masked and Anonymous).Footnote ³ Initially, Dylan had hoped that Charles could help develop a television show in which Dylan himself would star. The concept? “He wanted to make a slapstick comedy.”