Assimilating the Feminist Voice in Service Comedies, 1941-1980

Abstract

uring the 1940s and ’50s, Hollywood produced “service” comedies that dramatized the ordinary civilian’s adjustment to military life, a transformation necessary to defeat the Nazis and the Japanese and then to contain the communists. But the transformation was also necessary to maintain the tenets of a conservative, masculinist culture. In the service-comedy genre, reforming a citizen into a soldier through basic training established the fundamental trope of assimilation. For men, this assimilation confirmed their status as contributing citizens. For women, however, especially with films that placed a woman at the narrative center of basic training, the assimilation of the recruit complicated the status of women, especially as feminist voices struggled to emerge from the conservative culture that the military protected. Broadly defined, a “service comedy” is a movie, novel, television show, or other form of popular culture in which humor is derived from the circumstances of life in the military.1 The first use of the term is not clear, though it does start appearing in reviews of military comedies in the 1940s and in the files of the Bureau of Motion Pictures. In tone and character, Hollywood service comedies from the 1940s into the 1960s frequently evoke the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, wherein traditional hierarchies are reversed and authority is undermined, but this inversion obtains only for the duration of the carnival (or movie or television show). These films, in other words, poke fun at the problems and indignities of serving in the military but resolutely avoid poking fun at the institution. The comedy lies in a character’s adjustment to the military, not in the military itself. In terms of plot, the stories in service comedies generally include humorous variations of dramatic military films: combat (Battleground [1949] versus What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? [1966])