Laughing historically: John Nash, Jonathan Blewitt and Jollity in the Victorian music hall

Abstract

The careers of Jonathan Blewitt and Jolly John Nash spanned the development and consolidation of the Victorian music hall and their provocations of audience laughter by laughing themselves provide case studies for understanding the role of laughter in the material and cultural contexts of that development. Beginning with an examination of Blewitt’s originary ‘laughing song’ The Merry Little Grey Fat Man (1843) and its sources in the theatres of the earlier nineteenth century, the essay traces Nash’s self-consciously historicised development of its ‘laughing comedy’ through his personification of cultural values of jolliness and merriment. While retaining a fascination with the eruptive comedy of Blewitt’s song, it argues, Nash negotiated the changing environments of the new entertainment industry through his presentation of a performed laughter that was variously radically innovative, politically conservative and attuned to the later music hall’s self-representation as a nostalgically-imbued national ‘tradition’.

Keywords:

• Laughter
• music hall
• John Nash
• laughing comedy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simon Featherstone

Simon Featherstone (unaffiliated) is the author of Englishness: Twentieth-Century Popular Culture and the Forming of English Identity and essays and book chapters about British music hall and variety theatre of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, blackface minstrelsy and popular film.