What:
The RTC Research Forum, formerly known as the RTC Brown Bag, is a colloquium series sponsored by the Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture graduate program in the Michigan Tech Department of Humanities. Each month, faculty and students in the program present research on a wide range of topics. The forum offers an opportunity for colleagues and peers to discuss current research, prepare for formal conference presentations, and for students to receive feedback on presentation practices.
Abstract:
The best-known George Grossmith (1847-1912) sang Gilbert and Sullivan’s patter songs and wrote The Diary of a Nobody. His contributions to Victorian performance went far beyond these well-known roles in the performance and print circulation of his comic songs and sketches. Furthermore, his father (1821-1880) and son (1874-1935), also named George Grossmith, each found fame as professional comic performers. Taken together, these three Georges provide a window into the social world of humorous performance from the stage—which the first George rejected—to the lecture hall and back. As they navigated antitheatrical prejudice and maintained a class standing in the upper middle classes, the Grossmiths projected sociable personas. The drawing room and the dressing room blurred as GGIII invited royalty to his dressing room and GGI and II performed “drawing-room entertainments” for the paying public. From Sunday-school rooms to the stage of the Gaiety Theatre to private drawing-rooms, the Grossmiths provided sociable humor.
Who:
Presented by Laura Kasson Fiss, Associate Teaching Professor in Humanities
Dr. Laura Kasson Fiss has an interdisciplinary background in music, literary studies and history of the book. She currently pursues research in both nineteenth-century media and current higher education. One question ties together these strands of research: How can we make exclusive spaces more inclusive?
Victorian Humor
Asking not only “why is this funny” but also “what do you need to know to get this joke,” Fiss provides a window into Victorian media consumption – she even studies the window as a metaphor for the page. Her articles address Victorian humor from Charles Dickens to Lewis Carroll and beyond. Her first book, The Idler’s Club: Humour and Mass Readership from Jerome K. Jerome to P.G. Wodehouse (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), explores the club as a metaphor for literary sociability in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British humor.
Victorian comic song is the focus of Fiss’s second book project, which picks up on her undergraduate research and first publication on Gilbert and Sullivan. This project looks at three generations of comic performers named George Grossmith and through them the role of the comic man on stage, in the drawing room, and in print.
When:
Friday, October 16, 2026
12pm-1pm
Where:
Petersen Library (318), Walker Arts & Humanities Center
All are welcome to attend!