‘The Manly Art’: The Burlesque Boxing Match in Nineteenth-Century Knockabout Comedy

Abstract

This article maintains that the knockabout comedy of the nineteenth-century circus, music hall and concert saloon constituted a unique form of physical performance, possessing a physical technique distinct from those of both the ballet-pantomime that had preceded and the cinematic ‘rough-house’ and ‘slap-stick’ comedy that succeeded it. The argument focuses on the analysis of a common physical ‘trope’ central to both: the burlesque boxing (or sometimes wrestling) act, which emerges during the 1850s in tandem with the international spread of pugilism itself, and which remained a core motif of popular physical comedy performance from the 1850s until the decline of slapstick in the decade preceding the outbreak of the Second World War.