Went to the Steedman talk at the Institute of Historical Research a couple of days back. Absorbing, quirky. About a late-eighteenth century poet named Elizabeth Hands, a domestic servant who published a volume of verse in 1789 that was very, very widely read, and written - Steedman argued - with subversive and parodic intent, taking apart the cultural pretensions of the provincial gentry and bourgeoisie of Warwickshire. Steedman used Hands' poetry (I still can't get over the name. A domestic servant named Hands? And a poet, to boot? The possibilities that conjures up...) to open out wider questions of working-class poetry, the question of why poetry and not prose, the importance of the kitchen as a space from and in which writing could emerge....and other issues.

One of the themes that appears from her new work - and explicitly so from her talk - is a concern with the comic. She described her trajectory over the last twenty years as a move from a 'melodramatic' form of historical writing to a 'comic' form. It's an intriguing thought. One moment during the talk stood out. She was reading out Hands' poetry to us, then she paused, looked around at the audience, and said, 'I'm worried that none of you are laughing.'

I've discovered a fellow Steedman admirer, Rob, on the blogosphere - hurray! - and he thinks this might be a new way of dealing with questions of suffering and injustice - in a mode that chooses to optimistically celebrate the capacities of everyday resistance (he thinks this connects with Certeau's claims), rather than underscore the measure of pain and loss that was experienced.

I think Rob's right, and I think this connects with a tension that has been threading through the writing of radical social history ever since Thompson. Is the recovery of the 'experience' of the oppressed and suffering a means of articulating the ways in which they suffered, or the ways in which they resisted, in so many ways, their exploitation? I don't personally see that there should be a contradiction, but yes, different choices of emphasis do end up framing the same histories differently. I do think this ethical tension marks Steedman's work, and the intensities of affect that shape her prose. To recover the work of a servant woman who mocked the pretensions of her social superiors, and did so in a poetic form that was considered their property, is something that is evidently a historical joke Steedman revels in - which doesn't make her project any less serious or committed.

But the comic form is important to her also, I think, because it allows her to make connections that a historical reconstruction based on more orthodox narrative causalities wouldn't. 'The joke' of Archive Fever, in her description of it, is something that clearly preoccupies her. She is able to make, through pretty sound historical connections, claims that appear absurd, but do a lot of the work in her argument. For instance - Michelet breathed the dust of the archives. This killed him. Michelet was killed by History, by the Archive. These are poetic connections, these are also, in their own way, comic - or maybe tragicomic - connections. Dust is a book that is anchored in, moves along the rails of, connections of this sort. And compels us to ask questions about the limits we sometimes place on historical analysis when we refuse recourse to the non-literal causality, the analogical connection, the strange and uncanny resonances and hidden threads that draw apparently unconnected things together.

The comic, actually, is something I've been thinking about lately, though - thankfully - in less academic terms. I've been watching so much excellent comedy, made across generations - the Marx brothers, Spike Milligan, Blackadder, Goodness Gracious Me, and above all, of course, Monty Python. And lately, Eddie Izzard. And it's struck me, lately, what a demanding form the comic is. Naturally, it isn't just about being funny. Nor, necessarily, is comedy 'light' - I feel more bruised, often, after a series of Python sketches than I do after a film by Bergman. To work, it seems to me, comedy has to respect absolutely nothing - no sentiments, no sacred cows, no communities, no individuals. Everything has to be, in some form, a source of laughter. (which doesn't, of course, make all kinds of laughter equally acceptable ethically). This is what makes it such a great form - what I love about Goodness Gracious Me, for instance, is that in its observation of the hypocrisies and absurdities by which many sorts of white Britishers and British South Asians shape themselves, it refuses to spare or respect anybody - Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, reactionaries, radicals, men, women, children. I really think it makes it the most democratic of forms - if only we could substitute 'everybody deserves to be laughed at' for 'everybody deserves respect', we might have a less dull and saccharine version of multiculturalism. But it's also such an incredibly demanding job. The minute you let the piss-taking stop, the minute you display an attitude that's less than irreverent, less than offensive to any pieties, the comic effect fails. (Ever wondered why each scene in a Marx brothers movies that doesn't feature the three clowns fails so miserably? It isn't just that they're great actors...the point is that things begin appearing less absurd at those moments, which is why they fail.) Tragedy, by contrast, can be relieved of its mission at so many points - it's a much more relenting form, it's able to slacken tension without necessarily losing the point. Comedy can't do that.

History, too, fails if it chooses to 'respect' anything or anyone. Of course historians have their heroes and admirations and faiths, even - but in its own way, it's a discipline that crumbles when you make the demand that it should respect 'sentiments' or 'cultures'. It's a vexed issue in India - we had, in Maharashtra, a ban imposed on a book that was accused of not sufficiently respecting Shivaji, and the Hindutva rewriting of school textbooks when the BJP was in power was based on the rhetoric that the older textbooks were 'disrespectful' of certain sacred cows (including, quite literally, sacred cows!). If you make that demand of history, you kill it. Perhaps this is the commitment that binds, by analogy, both history and the comic? And perhaps this is why we can try and create moments, through the writing of history, when absurdities and ironies are made visible?