Bringing the Laughter Home: Comic Stereographs in the Early 20th Century

Recorded at the Chau Chak Wing Museum on Thursday 3 August 2023.
Has humour changed in the last 100 years? Find out in this panel discussion.
The existence of stereographs speaks of a world in which visual images were relatively scarce in the homes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among them, some obviously comic scenes stand out like a beacon, familiar yet distant to us today. As simple-technology devices, stereographs were readily and cheaply available for the domestic market. They created excitement and laughter that could be shared with family and friends in the same way that our modern technologies do now. But where did this material come from, what does it reference and how was it interpreted back then?
Expert panellists from the Australasian Humour Studies Network will discuss these fascinating questions, linking the stereographs with contemporary hand-drawn illustrations and cartoons in Australian weekly magazines, with famous figures and scenes from the music-hall and burlesque stage, and probing the Americanization of Australian popular culture - a process still continuing today.
About the speakers
Robert Phiddian is Professor of English at Flinders University. He studies and writes about political satire, particularly the satire in Australian political cartoons and in 18th century writers like Jonathan Swift. He has been the Ross Steele AM Fellow at the State Library of NSW, and is presently working on a history of Australian editorial cartooning (contracted to Melbourne University Publishing). Robert is a member of the Australasian Humour Studies Network Review Panel.
Dr Will Visconti coordinates the Italian Major at the University of Technology, Sydney. An expert on music hall and burlesque, his first book was Beyond the Moulin Rouge: The Life & Legacy of La Goulue (2022, University of Virginia Press). Forthcoming publications include “The Monstrousness of Mae West” in Post-Moral Humour in a World of New Gods and Old Monsters (Tampere University Press), “The Myth of the Moulin Rouge” (in Routledge’s History of Paris since 1789) and, with Matthew Kaiser, four edited volumes on 19th century humour and comedy (Routledge’s Historical Resources series).
Dr Mark Rolfe is an honorary lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales where he taught for many years. He researches and publishes on Australian and American politics, satire, rhetoric, populism and the process of Americanisation. His publications appear in The Conversation and the Sydney Morning Herald as well as in academic presses and he is co-editing a book on post-morality and humour (with Benjamin Nickl, Tampere University Press). Mark is a member of the Australasian Humour Studies Network Board.
Dr Jessica Milner Davis FRSN is an honorary research associate at The University of Sydney and at Brunel University’s Centre for Comedy Studies Research. A member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, she has twice served as president of the International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS). Her many books deal with farce, satire, the European comic tradition and cross-cultural studies of humour in Australia, the UK, Japan and China. Jessica co-ordinates the Australasian Humour Studies Network.