The project aims to look at the uses of comedy to portray the First World War, both during and after. This will include a study of the ways in which comedic representation of the war has changed, the type of audiences targeted and how their reactions have formed representations of the war, and why the war is often avoided as a subject for comedy. The project will include a wide range of sources - films, newspapers, television programmes as well as books and comics. As this will contain a great deal of visual material, I aim to present the study in the form of a website.

I want to investigate the changing nature of comedic representations of the war, as I can already see that there is a huge divergence between the comedy produced during the war (as both civilian and combatant entertainment), and the mediums that follow it. In many respects I feel that the study will deal with changing attitudes to interpreting the First World War as well as the actual comedy aspect, as presenting the War as a subject in this way seems both potentially offensive and extremely subversive. However, my initial objectives will be as follows:

- What kinds of Comedy are created around the subject of the war?

- How have these modes of production changed over the years? Are there any distinct cultural patterns at work in the way that the war is depicted? What are they?

- Why is this?

- Is the War really a topic for humour?

- If so, why are the various aspects of First World War comedy seen as amusing - is there a common theme to the products of the last ninety years or are they exclusively relevant to their time period only?

I will look at the following categories in relation to this -

Literature.

Films.

Political Cartoons/Comics.

From the initial research I have already done, it is clear that there are massive shifts in the way that the war is portrayed through these mediums. I want to find out how these have been effected and why. All three of these categories have been consistently in production since the War and therefore I hope to draw some comparisons between the ways in which they have changed.

Television Programmes

Computer Games

Both of these categories are fairly new, and both provide more modern angle to the representations of the war. However, are these depictions subversive, or do they still conform to set ideas and representations? Have all of these categories combined to reproduce a skewed perception of the war (again, is comedy really a suitable medium for portraying such an important and devastating historical event?)

I feel quite strongly that it is important to investigate a wider range of different mediums as they are outside my major of English; I do not want the study to be exclusively orientated around the literature surrounding the war as it has been covered extensively already. Satirising the war has been regarded as somewhat a taboo subject; certainly until recently it seems to have been "Very bad form/ To mention the War". Initial forays into the library have already shown that there is very little critical writing available on this subject so I am anticipating doing a large amount of original research.

Due to the different mediums I will be investigating, I feel that it is important to represent them as fully in relation to each other as possible. For this reason I have chosen to present the study as a website, as I will be able to compare the different subjects more easily through the more visual nature of webpages. Again, this is something I have not attempted before and I already anticipate that this will be a challenging and stimulating task.

The world wide web is a relatively new area of academic study, but I feel it offers great potential for disscussion and ongoing learning within the project. One of the things I aim to do it to set up and maintain either a message board or a newsgroup via the site, in order that the site reach a more full interactive potential. In this way the study will become more dynamic. It is important whilst doing this that I reach a range of audiences - both academic and layman. Part of the learning objective here will be creating something that is accessible to many different groups of people, so I aim to blend the more seriuos aspects of the study with areas that can be appreciated with little or no previous knowledge on the First World War. This is the sort of thing that is ideally suited to the web, as if the site is signposted properly, it will reach a wide range of people. With a subject as potentially difficult as presenting the war in a humourous way, it will be interesting to see the reactions to the site as disscussed on the messageboards/newsgroup. My learning objectives in this case will be ongoing - hopefully to respond to crticisms or disscussion brought out through this method.

I also feel that the project could be in danger of becoming huge, and losing its direction. As it has not really been studied before to my knowledge, it could be very easy for the study to run away on tangents and not produce any concrete findings. Because of this I feel that one of the primary learning objectives of the project will be retaining clarity and prioritising areas of study over the year. There are a great deal of objectives detailed above, but as I begin to research the project, I hope to eliminate any stragglers and produce a cohesive piece of work.

Provisional Plan for Website Layout.

From the index page, the site will be split into three major categories, covering the different stages of comedy as it progressed and expanded. Very roughly, these stages will group together the war itself, the period after the war and the present day attitudes to comic representations of the war. Each section will be on a separate page or pages, but I aim to add crossing links so that the site can also be looked at in terms of genre. For example, it will be possible to quickly access all of the films studied. All pages will be linked in this way by illustrative "hotspots" so that the will both load quickly and be more easily comprehensible to a layman. As the web provides access to a huge spectrum of people, I think it is important that the site provides a balance between academic study, and something that would be easy to browse without any prior knowledge of the subject. I want to produce something that is clearly understandable as well as being more than a series of academic texts

Each section will then be split in the following ways.

1. Essays.

The site will showcase 4-6 essays of between 1500-2000 words, each covering an aspect or aspects of the project. These will include specific subjects dealing with one film or book for example, critiques and closes readings of individual articles, trench poems or comics, and more broad overviews of genres or comparisons between genres. I aim to write these essays over the year and wish to employ both the techniques learned in my English major studies, but also a more historical and social perspective to make the study more cross-curricular. As introduction and summation to the sites findings I will also include two longer essays dealing with the findings of the study - basically an overview of the study and a conclusion of what has been discovered. I anticipate that this method will satisfy the university requirement that the study should contain at least 8000 words.

2. Gallery/Visual Media.

As I have stated, presenting the study as a website is an exceptional opportunity to showcase a much larger range of visual representation than a written study would do. The essays will obviously include some illustration, but I feel very strongly that using the website merely for text would be a waste of the resources on offer. To this end I also intend to present several galleries with brief explanatory text which will incorporate satirical cartooning, more recent comic book representations, screenshots from films and television programmes, and possibly some animation or trench music.

3. "War is Hell".

As part of my previous study on comic books and the First World War, I liased with comic book artist Jude Melling to produce a brief closing page for the extended essay. He has again agreed to illustrate a comic strip to be included as part of the site. This will try to focus on some of the more immediate results of the project and create a product that again emphasises the more accessible nature of both the web and contemporary interpretations of the war to the general public. It will be interesting to see in this case if researching this subject can in fact produce something that it genuinely humorous, and if so, how?

4. Bibliography.

The site will contain a separate page detailing the books, sites and media used in constructing the site. Each essay will have only a very short bibliography at it's close with a link to the larger list included. I anticipate by compartmentalising this area that this can be used by other web users as a resource, but non- academic users will not have to plough through large lists of books and other refernences to find what they want. Again this is one of the considerable advantages of presenting the study in a more interactive capacity.

5. Message board.

In many ways I feel this is the most important part of the site, as the responses will provide a strong indicator of whether the site is achieving its objectives. This will contain disscusion and reactions to the site by other web users (see above)

1. Data sources.

- I will be visiting the Imperial War Museum, and the Music Hall Society to investigate primary evidence from during the war.

- I am trying to arrange access to the BBC archives, although both Blackadder and the Fast Show are available on sell-through video.

- I will be making use of local and university libraries.

- I am on several military booksellers mailing lists which have been extremely useful in the past for providing references and secondary sources.

- I will be using the internet to find additional information and to get ideas about presenting the website.

2. Webspace.

- I am in the process of liasing with John Russell in CCS and the Computer Service to set up an area to present the site.

One of the reasons I have chosen the website as the final product of the study is that otherwise I can foresee an immense amount of expenditure on photocopying, particularly the fact that colour will probably be necessary for many examples. I anticipate that the website will significantly reduce these overheads.

Although I do not currently own a PC, I will probably be acquiring one in the next couple of months with my student loan. Various friends have also offered me access to their machines, scanners etc, and I will also be using the university PC’s on a regular basis.

Dr George Walter has agreed to be my tutor for the academic side of the project.

John Russell has provisionally agreed to support the creation of the website subject to approval of this document.

I will spend the summer holiday period doing the main bulk of primary research at the Imperial War Museum etc. I am going to start by looking at the comedy of the Great War as chronologically as possible, moving onwards to the post-war years and later the present. his seems the best way to build up an understanding of however comic humour has developed over the years. By the autumn term I hope to be able to expand upon this in a more critical and theoretical direction. Over the summer I will also be subscribing to a free website to start to teach myself the basic HTML skills I will need to create the site. As getting access from the Computer Service/CCS will take some time, this site will give me a valuable opportunity to experiment and discover areas in which I may need assistance before I start on the site proper.The rest of this term and the next will be spent doing additional research as required, and the summer term will be spent collating and presenting the information on the website.

Ways of Seeing - Berger. Penguin Books.

Comedy in Literature and Drama - R.G. Nelson

The Great War and Modern Memory - Paul Fussell, Oxford Univ. Press, 1976.

A War Imagined - Samuel Hynes, Bodley Head 1991.

Voices from the Great War - Peter Vanissart, Pimlico, 1995.

World War One - Martin Gilbert, 1990.

Goodbye to All That - R.Graves Penguin Books 2ed. 1967.

Mr Punch’s History of the Great War, Cassell, 1920.

HTML for Dummies, Microprose Press, 1999.

The Wipers Times - @ the Imperial War Museum

The Collected Punch - @ the Imperial War Museum

The Comics Journal (ongoing)

Charley’s War in BattleAction. Fleetway/DC Thompson Press 1978-86 and also Titan Books, 1986.

Comics/Comix and Graphic Novels - R.Sabin, Phiadon Press, 1997.

Comics and Sequential Art - Will Eisner

The Collected Works of Jude Melling. Carenin Press, 1999.

Blackadder Goes Forth, BBC TV. 1985.

The Fast Show BBC TV 1996-8

The Films of Charlie Chaplin 1914-17

Duck Soup, The Marx Brothers. 1919?

Oh! What A Lovely War! Prod. R. Attenborough,

I will be using these sites both for source material and for ideas as to how to present the website when finished.

www.worldwar1/com (links page)

www.mcs.com/~mikei/tgws/ (the Great War society)

www.iwm.org.uk (Imperial War museum)

www.speel.demon.co.uk/other/impwar.htm (I.W.M Gallery)

I have been allocated a website at www.geocities.com/CollegePark/4825 . This is the site I will be experimenting on over the summer.

Knights of the Sky - Microprose

Cannon Fodder - Shiny Entertainment

Metal Slug