1. Sullivan’s Wisdom
We all know the story, but, like all good fables, we have to remind ourselves of it in times of trouble.
Sullivan is a director of light comedies. His conscience is troubled: how can he waste his time on something as trivial as comedy when Americans are living day in and day out with the Depression? Hunger, exploitation, police brutality – compared to the horrible aspects of day to day life in the late 1930s, his work seems not only unimportant, but a slap in the face to those who are suffering so terribly.
Sullivan decides that he will stop making comedies and make a movie that lays bare the suffering his fellow Americans are going through. His working title is: O Brother, Where Art Thou? He has a problem, though: as a pampered Hollywood director, he has never had to experience the kind of suffering he wants to make movies about. So, Sullivan decides he has to travel across the country to research his film.
At first, his research doesn’t go well. He has a small army of assistants, publicists and various other hangers-on whose job is to keep him happy, contented, producing. Eventually, he has to escape from his entourage in order to see what life is really like. Unfortunately, having been pampered for so long, he is ill-equipped to live in the world outside of Hollywood and, after a series of misadventures, he finds himself in jail, unable to contact anybody who might be able to help get him out.
Jail life is hard. However, one evening a week, the inmates are allowed to watch movies. Sullivan watches them in amazement as they roar with laughter at a silly cartoon. He begins to realize that humor can be a comfort to people in times of affliction. Rather than being trivial, making people laugh may be a real human necessity. Sullivan manages to get out of jail (you didn’t really think it could be otherwise, did you?) and, back in his posh Hollywood home, he rededicates himself to making comedies.
Preston Sturges – the auteur behind Sullivan’s Travels – cannot be accused of promoting mindless escapism. For one thing, he was responsible for some of the sharpest satire of the 1930s and 1940s, including The Great McGinty (a wonderfully smart and funny film about local politics) and Hail the Conquering Hero (a brave film that questions how Americans construct the idea of heroism). For another, although Sullivan is clearly the protagonist of the film, Sturges does portray the poverty and suffering of many Americans at that time with much sympathy.
That having been said, the moral of the film is clear: in times of grief, laughter is not a luxury to be jettisoned, but a necessity to embraced. This is an important lesson for filmmakers in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
2. “Inappropriate” Laughter
“Laughter and cryin’
You know it’s the same release.”
– Joni Mitchell
My father laughs at funerals. He cannot help himself. When laughter is not immediately forthcoming, he will sometimes make a bad joke to get it started.
This is sometimes referred to as “inappropriate laughter,” laughter in social situations which are so serious that people shouldn’t be laughing. While funerals are perhaps an extreme case, we can imagine any number of solemn occasions, often ceremonial in nature, in which laughter might be seen as inappropriate. There are even occasions which, though not solemn, are nonetheless tense enough that laughter seems inappropriate, such as when we are first introduced to people.
To understand why such laughter occurs, and why efforts to curb it are both misguided and, in the final analysis, inhumane, it is necessary to understand what is really going on when we laugh. Smiles and laughter use the same facial muscles as grimacing and crying. Furthermore, when we laugh, endorphins, the human body’s natural painkillers are released into our brains, the same physical reaction we have when we shed tears. It would seem, from a purely physical standpoint, that there is very little to distinguish the acts of laughing and crying.
It seems reasonable to me to suggest, then, that laughter and crying are both evolutionarily evolved responses to stress. Stress, you will recall from the work of Hans Selye and his followers, is a natural reaction to any change in one’s environment, whether that change is positive or negative. The endorphin release calms us down so that we might better assess the new situation which faces us and choose the best course of action. Put a different way, from a physiological perspective, laughter is as legitimate a response to pain as crying.
Although we most often think of laughter occurring when we wouldn’t expect it, a similar process happens with crying. Sometimes, when we are overwhelmed by good news, instead of smiling, we start to tear up. This is not called “inappropriate crying,” of course; usually, we speak, instead, of “tears of joy.”
Given their similarities, it seems odd that such a clear distinction is made between laughing and crying. I would suggest that this is entirely socialized, by which I mean that we learn differences in the meaning of laughter and tears, and pass that understanding of them from one generation to the next. At some point in the past, somebody decided that laughter would be equated with joy and tears would be equated with sorrow, an understanding that we have inherited and which we propagate uncritically. If this were truly the case, then laughter would not be an appropriate response to grief, since it would signal that somebody was taking pleasure in the suffering of others. The evidence of our bodies suggests that this is not the case, however, that laughter is also a physical response to pain. If this is true, then, there is no such thing as “inappropriate” laughter – laughter is always appropriate no matter what the context, and it is socialization that makes us believe otherwise.
As for my father, well, he is a Holocaust survivor. His parents (my grandparents on his side) died in a German Concentration Camp; he and some of his family lived in the French countryside, taken in by sympathetic non-Jews, until, after the war, they were part of a small number of Jewish refugees who were allowed into Canada. I think it’s fairly safe to say that he has lived with death every day of his life, a knowledge that would obviously be heightened at funerals. If he can find some release from this in humor, even if some people would consider it inappropriate, I won’t judge him harshly for it, and I defy anybody else to claim the right to do so.
3. Facing the Unfaceable
“We always make fun of the things we fear the most.”
– folk saying
In relation to comics and comedy writers, it is worth noting that those who evoke laughter in others might be causing them a small amount of stress in order to get them to laugh. Perhaps this is related to such phrases, popular among stand-up comedians, as “I killed” or “I blew the audience away.” It may be that the traditional extremity of characters in comedies and/or the absurdity of comic situations may be momentarily stressful to an audience, since they challenge our ideas of what the world is like.
However, successful comedy can produce an endorphin rush disproportionate to the stress it actually causes. Thus, we will come out of a good comedy elated rather than feeling stressed. When this happens, comedy may allow us to confront uncomfortable, even horrific, ideas which, in turn, may make it easier to face them in our real lives.
The history of comedy is littered with successful attempts to face the unfaceable. I would like to offer some of the most representative examples here.
a) Chaos
Rationality is at the core of our belief system. Rationality assumes that the universe is knowable through human logical. Furthermore, our institutions – our schools, Parliaments, medical establishment and so on – are created and maintained along rational lines. It is this rationality which makes our complex society possible; without it, all would be chaos.
In the 1970s, Paddy Chayefsky wrote two searingly brilliant satires of dominant institutions in American society: Network (about television) and The Hospital (about the medical profession). At the centre of each of these stories is a madman, but they are not primarily concerned with issues of personal psychology; instead, the madman puts in motion a story which lays bare the human imperfection at the heart of our supposedly rational institutions.
In Network, the anchor of a nightly news show with poor ratings has a middle of the night emotional breakdown (which he views as a religious revelation) after he has been fired, and goes on the air and simply tells the truth about the world around him. “I just ran out of bullshit,” he says. He immediately becomes a pawn in the battle between old guard journalists who want the news to remain uncontaminated by entertainment values and the network’s ratings hungry programmers. Entertainment wins: the anchor is promoted as “The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves” and surrounded by soothsayers and seers. Well, for as long as his high ratings continue.
In The Hospital, patients are dying under mysterious circumstances. A patient in need of treatment is left on a gurney in the admissions room where he slowly dies, for example. The investigation of the deaths leads the main character to a patient who had a middle of the night episode involving a mystical native American ritual and decided to become an avenging angel for all of the people who had died at the hands of the medical establishment. His method of revenge: putting patients in situations where the neglect of doctors will cause their deaths.
The protagonist of both films is a man going through a mid-life crisis (William Holden in Network; George C. Scott in The Hospital) who is trying to do the right thing. Unfortunately, the logic of the institution within which they work makes doing the right thing next to impossible. The greed of the people who work in network television demands that their shows receive the highest possible ratings, regardless of the social benefit of those shows. Pampered doctors more interested in their portfolios than the wellbeing of their patients and interns and staff who are overworked and underpaid make keeping patients alive in the hospital a monumentally difficult task. The madmen seem like the sanest voices amid the chaos.
As earnest “message” movies (so popular in the 1950s), these films would have been entirely ignored. At the best of times, people need to believe in institutions. Because we are laughing at the absurdity of what happens in the films, the idea that our institutions do not serve us as well as they should can slip in under our defensive radars, and, perhaps, we may give some thought to the social problems exposed by Chayefsky.
b) Meaninglessness
Many people would not consider Waiting for Godot a comedy, but it is worth noting that one of the more celebrated American productions of the work starred two of its most well-known comedians: Steve Martin and Robin Williams. In fact, author Samuel Beckett wanted Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to play the leads in the first English production of the play, but it couldn’t be arranged.
Godot uses a variety of comic devices (in addition to its more obvious literary devices). Boots that don’t fit and a roundelay of hats being exchanged by characters who keep getting somebody else’s headware were staples of silent comedy (you can see the Chaplin/Keaton connection), but the origins of such comic routines can be traced back to vaudeville and beyond.
At the other end of the comic scale, Godot contains wordplay that most people would probably not even recognize as humor. Take the following exchange about the tree on the set, for example:
ESTRAGON: What is it?
VLADIMIR: I don’t know. A willow.
ESTRAGON: Where are the leaves?
VLADIMIR: It must be dead.
ESTRAGON: No more weeping. [1]
This last line is very interesting. On the one hand, it seems to be a reference to the tree (as in: no more weeping willow); on the other hand, it seems to be a reference to the human condition (now that the tree is dead, its suffering has ended). So, the somewhat incomprehensible line is revealed to be…a pun. This sort of wordplay, of which there are other examples in the text, is not as immediately accessible as some of the other humor embedded in the dialogue (such as when the two characters heap abuse on each other, ending with the ultimate insult: “Criiiiitic!”), but it suggests that, at his most serious, Beckett is also at his most slyly comic.
Waiting for Godot is one of the most profound portrayals of the existential understanding of human existence written in the 20th century. Vladimir and Estragon, the main characters, have a deeply-felt knowledge of their own mortality, which gives their most serious efforts an absurd quality. As Beckett has stated in interviews, Godot does not necessarily represent God, but, rather, anything which we value highly and await in our lives. Vladimir and Estragon’s furious activity is meant to cover up the fact that what they are waiting for seems less and less likely to occur.
Like much of Beckett’s work, the play is also about communication. Although exactly in the same boat, Vladimir and Estragon are so wrapped up in their own suffering that they seem only very intermittently capable of empathizing with each other’s pain. Words fail them in this effort; although they are constantly trying to express their suffering, they rarely seem able to listen, much less understand what the other is saying.
The audience can laugh at their antics as they try to fill their empty days. Behind that laughter, we are invited to reflect on the similar – if much less stark – pain we all feel, a pain that is part of being human. As a straight drama, Waiting for Godot would likely be unbearable to watch; as a “tragicomedy,” it displays a tremendous compassion for humanity, a compassion we are invited not only to share, but, perhaps most importantly, to extend to ourselves.
c) Death
Harold is a teenage boy who fakes his own death using a variety of increasingly creative methods in order to get the attention of his mother, who, hip to his game, refuses to give him the satisfaction. Maude is an almost 80 year-old free spirit who openly embraces the new and exciting. They meet because they both have a habit of attending the funerals of people they don’t know. Thus begins Harold and Maude, one of the strangest love stories ever to be made by an American filmmaker.
Harold and Maude constantly refers to death. When Harold’s mother buys him a sports car to help him attract women, for example, he grafts the back of a hearse onto its rear. Yet, for all its references to death, it ultimately affirms life. This is best represented by the scene in which Maude, in one of a series of stolen cars, uproots a tree in the city so that it can be replanted in the countryside.
Harold and Maude is a sort of Buddhist response to the existentialism of Waiting for Godot: while it is deeply aware of the mortality of its characters, it ultimately turns out to be a celebration of the joy that can be found in living from moment to moment, open to the possibility of new life experiences. The United States has, to a great extent, developed a death-denying culture, which would make the early scenes of Harold and Maude very uncomfortable for many people. The undeniable humor of these scenes, however, can help audience members overcome this discomfort, allowing them to stay to get the film’s life-affirming message.
d) Genocide
The Holocaust is one of the monumental tragedies of the 20th century. For the most part, it has not been a subject of humor, and rightly so: the greater the suffering, the more sensitivity the comedian needs to ensure that his or her work alleviates rather than adds to that suffering. A small number of comedies have dealt tangentially with Nazi Germany (Mel Brooks’ The Producers, for example), while an even smaller number have dealt with it directly (Roberto Begnini’s Life is Beautiful).
Perhaps the best comedy to deal with Nazi Germany is Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. In it, Chaplin plays Adenoid Hinkle, a caricature of Adolph Hitler (there is also a caricature of Benito Mussolini played by Jack Oakie). This type of comic characterization of our enemies is common wartime propaganda; newspaper editorial cartoonists are starting to do it with Osama bin Laden, who is suspected of being the mastermind behind the attack on the US. Laughing at those who would oppress us both makes us feel better, and reduces them to impotence.
Chaplin, a much subtler filmmaker than he is often given credit for, is not just an anti-fascist propagandist. There is an astonishing ballet at the heart of The Great Dictator, in which Hinkle bounces a balloon with a map of the world on it in the air. The scene is graceful, beautiful to watch – until the balloon bursts with a disconcertingly loud pop. This scene is an eloquent statement about how attractive power is, but how its pursuit inevitably ends in great destruction.
I would suggest that the somber ending, with a Jewish family dispossessed of its belongings and on the road (literally) to becoming political refugees, is a clear sign of Chaplin’s well known compassion for the suffering of those who are caught up in forces beyond their control. It also contains an important lesson for comedy writers: the more serious one’s subject, the more necessary it is to have empathy for the suffering of one’s characters. Without such empathy, writers often end up making fun of the suffering of others, with dreadful results.
The Great Dictator was made in 1941, before the full extent of the Holocaust was known. Chaplin, who was not Jewish, has said that if he had been aware of the Nazi gas chambers, he would not have been able to make the film. This is completely understandable. Still, one could hope that an artist with his sensitivity would have found a way to make the unimaginable real for audiences.
e) Extinction
A squadron of bombers with nuclear weapons is sent to destroy targets in Russia, even though it has not been ordered to do so by the proper authority. Most of the movie is about an increasingly frantic attempt to stop the bombers from reaching their targets. The efforts don’t succeed, leaving the American President to contemplate what actions to take to ensure the continuation of the human race.
This is a description of Dr. Strangelove, of course. But it is also a description of a film called Fail Safe, which was released around the same time. I have often thought a comparison of Strangelove, a comedy, and Fail Safe, a drama, would illuminate many of the differences and similarities between the two forms of narrative. This is not the place for such an analysis, but I would like to make one or two points about the films.
While Fail Safe is a traditional (and somewhat pedestrian) suspense story, director Stanley Kubrick uses a wide variety of comic devices in Strangelove which make it much more complex. After the bomb has fallen, giving humanity a matter of months before the world is covered in a lethal shroud of nuclear radiation, the American President contemplates building a series of underground mine shafts to keep the human race, and especially its American component, alive. One of his generals advocates taking weapons into the shafts in the case that the Russians might invade American space, leading to a “mine shaft gap!”
This is a parody of the rhetoric of the Cold War (think: “missile gap”), as, indeed, is much of the dialogue of the film. More importantly, the language represents a frame of mind, a militaristic way of looking at the world, which Kubrick suggests would follow us into the caves after we have made the surface of the planet uninhabitable. The military precision of the language makes what the characters are saying funny; the thought behind the language is the same old aggression that humanity has felt since we first came out of caves.
The scene in which Major Kong rides the nuclear bomb to ground zero is both hilarious (the way he whoops like he’s riding a bronco) and horrifying (because we know it may signal the end of the world). The scene is also quite sexual: the bomb between Kong’s legs is a phallic symbol, while his whooping can be read as a form of sexual ecstasy. This is a continuation of a theme that starts during the opening credits, where the refueling of a bomber in mid-air takes on sexual connotations, and is touched on throughout the film: a nuclear explosion is the biggest sexual release a military man can hope for. Because of the way it confronts and combines two social taboos, sex and death, Strangelove can be a very uncomfortable experience for some people; however, it is made eminently watchable by its combination of absurd situations and exaggerated characters.
Most of us would like to think that after we die, the world will go on, perhaps so that others can build upon the things we have created, perhaps for the sake of our children. Dr. Strangelove – made at the height of Cold War tensions, when nuclear annihilation of the planet seemed a very real possibility – argues that this is not necessarily the case. Laughing at the absurd posturing of the military men and politicians which could lead to the extinction of life on the planet makes it easier for us to deal with the possibility. Perhaps more importantly, in looking the nuclear threat squarely in the eye, it becomes possible to act in ways which would reduce it.
It is a testament to the power of humor in the face of ultimate horror that, while Dr. Strangelove is well known and widely admired, Fail Safe is relatively obscure.
4) The Death of Irony
In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, many pundits declared that irony was dead. In fact, there were more articles about the death of irony than there were about the squelching of dissent, which suggests that we take humor far more seriously than freedom of speech (or perhaps that the fact that some subjects were no longer open for public discussion was, itself, one of the subjects that wasn’t open for public discussion).
Now, I don’t much care for the easy irony of late night talk show hosts and others who wink at the audience at the same time as they tell their jokes, as if to say, “Hey, I know I’m risking being a little offensive, but it’s all in good fun, so please don’t hold it against me.” The truth is that, while their humor is often based on current events, it almost never challenges the mass opinion of those events; it is, in fact, as dangerous to the social consensus as plaid jello. At the best of times, apologizing for one’s jokes is cowardly; when the jokes themselves aren’t especially risque or dangerous, it becomes smarmy pandering.
As you can imagine, I wouldn’t miss this type of humor if it disappeared from the face of the earth. Unfortunately, those who proclaimed the death of irony were not limiting their analysis to this form, but seemed to be saying that humor itself was dead, that the attack was so dreadful that Americans would never be able to laugh again.
History is against such interpretations. We’ve had humor based on World War I (O, What a Lovely War), World War II (Catch 22), the Korean War (M*A*S*H) and even an imaginary nuclear apocalypse (Dr. Strangelove). The cycle of event and humorous reaction to the event has sped up thanks to electronic media, culminating in jokes circulating on the Internet hours after a traumatic event such as the death of Lady Diana Spencer.
If, as I have argued, humor really is an understandable human response to suffering, we should be encouraging more of it, not lamenting that it is dead. Some people find certain forms of laughter “inappropriate.” I would argue that it is in those situations when laughter seems the least appropriate that we need it the most. Rather than withdraw from the genre, screenwriters need to redouble their efforts to create funnier films.
Irony is dead. Long live irony.
Notes
1) Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot. In I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader. New York: Grove Press, 1992. 376
This article first appeared in Creative Screenwriting, Volume 9, Number 2, March/April 2002.