The first thing I noticed about Mr. Bean was how incessantly annoying the laugh track is. I've always been aware of laugh tracks but I think after the first week of this class I will forever be annoyed by them. I thought I knew Mr. Bean. I've never really been very interested in him, but I thought I knew enough about the character. Evidently, I was wrong. I was struck by the almost non-existent dialogue of the show. I had no idea it was purely physical comedy. It reminded me very much of a silent movie, which is why I concentrated on that aspect of Stott's chapter. He writes, "moving pictures were soundless until 1926, forcing humour to be silent and visual" (92). Mr. Bean takes you back to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. His over emphasized physical humour spreads through the entire show. In the first scene, he lays down in fear on the widest high dive in history, then at the sight of the boys in line, swiftly stands up and leans nonchalantly on the rail. Once he does that, he tries to coolly find his way off the board and into the pool, failing miserably. He doesn't say a word during this entire scene, but his body says so much. It, of course, ends with the visual comedy of his swim trunks floating in the water.
Stott continues, in his section about slapstick, that the slapstick comedian is an "awkward...loner, who found [himself] swimming against the tide of modern living. Thrust as innocents into a world that they had never apparently encountered before...." (93). This passage brings to mind both the lunch scene and the stoplight scene. In the stoplight scene, Mr. Bean doesn't seem to realize that by the time he pushes his car past the light, it would be green. He doesn't seem to be a part of the world in which cars stop at stoplights. Just because a biker can bypass it, doesn't mean he can just get out and push his car. He's certainly swimming against the tide of modern living. It's absurd. In the lunch scene, though, is where the passage really comes to light. He not only goes against the tide by not bringing an easily prepared lunch. Mr. Bean seems absolutely out of touch with reality! He's cutting bread with scissors, smashing pepper with a shoe, making tea in a hot water bottle, and (for some reason) putting lettuce in his (used) sock. It doesn't make sense at all. It's inconvenient for Mr. Bean, it's weird to everyone else, and it's just all around impractical. Mr. Bean has apparently never encountered a world in which one makes his lunch before going to the park, or buys it on the way.
I didn't think I would be able to use much of the "Female Body" section of Stott's chapter, but I actually found it applicable from the get-go. It, too, talks about the silent film era. "Women who occupy the roles traditionally considered sacrosanct by men, the romantic partner or the mother, could not be represented as either physical or humorous in slapstick cinema, whereas the old or the unattractive could" (97). Obviously, that's changed little from the silent era to Mr. Bean's time. This woman did not do any of the slapstick, but was rather a victim of Mr. Bean's comedy. She was not represented as humorous at all. She got the comically tiny box of popcorn while Mr. Bean got the comically large and refused to share. She was the victim of his over dramatized "scare tactics." She was laughed at, but not herself humorous. She was, of course, the butt of the joke.
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