I found this text when I was working on some Commedia research for my clowns class with McCoy. This book by Louise Peacock examines at length the nature and effects of slapstick violence as a comedic device, citing commedia as the first fully-realized location of slapstick, and examining its practice from the Renaissance through the present. Peacock stresses that two of the basic elements of slapstick are the creation of a sense of unreality and the quality of transgressing social norms. Many of the elements of commedia, from the absurd nature of the physical comedy to the stylized masks of the performers contribute to the sense of the unreal, and Peacock says that this allows us to suspend empathy and make judgments about whether or not characters are deserving of pain. Also, she tells us that slapstick is transgressive in that it allows us to vicariously enjoy a form of childlike rebellion against authority and societal rules that habitually constrain us. This kind of performance, then, is framed within an attitude that temporarily suspends commitment to the social order and asks audiences to judge the relative worth of the figures who are subjected to pain.