No Politics? Artemus Ward’s Comic Lectures

No Politics? Artemus Ward’s Comic Lectures

Sarah Balkin (University of Melbourne)

• Wednesday 25 March, 4.00-5:30pm
• 4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne

Abstract

The nineteenth-century American comic lecturer Artemus Ward was one of the clearest progenitors of the kind of deadpan we still encounter in stand-up comedy. Ward’s performance style was characterized by gravity and digression. His innovations were style and subjectlessness, and part of his achievement was lecturing successfully to politically polarized audiences. By reflecting on the weak politics of Ward’s emergent deadpan, I ask how his position in the history of what Lauren Berlant calls “underperformed emotion” can help historicize comedy’s weak, flat, and ordinary affects. The way Ward constitutes his audience as the people who get his jokes, I argue, shows the weakly transformative potential of normative comedy.

Sarah Balkin

Sarah Balkin is a Senior Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. She has published widely on comedy, theatre, performance, genre, and literature from the nineteenth century to the present. She is the author of Spectral Characters: Genre and Materiality on the Modern Stage (University of Michigan Press, 2019) and the co-author (with Marc Mierowsky) of Comedy and Controversy: Scripting Public Speech (Cambridge University Press, 2024). In 2025 she guest-edited an issue of Comedy Studies on “The Comic Audience.” Her talk is drawn from her forthcoming book,“Deadpan” and the Nineteenth-Century Emergence of a Comic Style (Cambridge University Press, 2026).