Laughing Out Loud Read online

  [ 11 Comedy is a way of looking at the universe, more than merely a genre of literature, drama, film or television.

  That is, comedy is a perspective. Another way of stating the same point is to say that nothing is inherently funny or sad, humorous or tragic. It all depends on how you choose to look at it. The story of lovers who face family obstacles in getting together is the formula for romantic comedy, as we shall discuss. But it is also the plot of Shakespeare's tragic Romeo and Juliet and many of the sad headlines in our daily newspapers. Jean Renoir, the French filmmaker, used to say that reality depends on who you are with, the time of day, and the quality of the coffee. Similarly, what is funny to one person may be tragic to the next.

  Long before comedy developed as a genre onstage with Aristophanes, Aesop was telling not just fables but "fable-jokes," such as the following:

  A patient, on being questioned by his doctor about his condition, answered that he had had an unpleasantly heavy sweat. "That's good," said the doctor. The next time he was asked how he was, the patient complained of a shivering-fit that had nearly shaken him to pieces. "That's good too," was the doctor's comment. At a third visit, the doctor inquired once more about the man's symptoms and was told that he had had diarrhea. "Good again," the doctor said and took himself off. When one of the patient's relatives came to see him and asked how he was getting on, "Well, if you want to know," he replied, "I've had so many good symptoms, I'm just about dead."

  MORAL: It often happens that our neighbors not knowing where the shoe pinches us, congratulate us on the very things which we ourselves find hardest to bear.

  (Fables of Aesop, 195)

  Aesop's moral says it all. And what of such a perspective? The fun of Aesop's "joke," of course, is the gap between the patient's and the doctor's perceptions of the same data. Today, there is even mounting scientific evidence that we are born happy or sad. Period. In studying twins over a forty-year period, scientists have shown that "happiness" (and we can substitute "comic perspective") is determined genetically (Adler, 78). This does not mean that those without such genes can't laugh or have happy moments. But the study does suggest that, "like fat, happiness tends to accumulate more or less arbitrarily on some people more than on others" (ibid.).

  Yet the news doesn't stop there: research shows that those with comic perspectives-read: those who laugh a lot-live longer. Accordingly, "Laughing, researchers said, is hearty medicine that boosts the immune system and triggers a flood of pleasure-inducing neuro-chemicals in the brain" (Ricks, 13).

  Considering comedy as a perspective rather than a genre helps us grasp the bigger picture. I am simply suggesting that the comic view is an attitude, an ability to look for that which is funny, incongruous, triumphant, upbeat, positive and, we might add, ironic, sarcastic or even darkly humorous. Thus we start with this overview, from which we can move toward specific areas of the comic, such as jokes, gags, story structure, character and themes.

  [21 Comedy is a form of "play" that embraces fantasy and festivity.

  If comedy is a perspective, it is a wide one that, for instance, contains laughter but may be much more than this. Ludwig Wittgenstein is helpful in pointing out that comedy is a form of "games" (195). This theory of comedy suggests that key to any definition is the awareness on the part of the players (audience or performers and writers) of a nonthreatening zone that has agreed-upon boundaries, so that all involved feel safe, comfortable, receptive. Call this a "comic atmosphere" that a comic work establishes and that we recognize through cues, clues, expectations.

  The larger territory, therefore, is that of games; comedy is one division thereof. Thus the kinship between a Jim Carrey film, a pro football game, an I Love Lucy episode, girls on the playground jumping rope and Mardi Gras in New Orleans or Carnival in Rio. As theoretician Johan Huizinga has so aptly described in his study Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, this comic playfulness has a lot to say about what it means to be human. After all, people laugh, tell jokes, and act out gags, while fish, buffalo, spiders, and even cats do not. More specifically, comedy involves an expression of the twin dimensions of fantasy (or personal imagination) and festivity (which suggests public celebration). Thus comedy involves a crossroads between the individual and the community.

  We have as a root for the word "comedy" the Greek komos, suggesting a rather drunken "chorus" of fellows singing or crying out satirical insults to others, often dressed as various animals during the festival of Dionysus, the god of wine, tragedy, and comedy. Inventive fantasy is needed to come up with creative insults, and the whole event is "festive" in its celebration of wine, community, and shared dances and meals.

  In other words, comedy has much in common, in origin and in practice, with the spirit of carnival. Key to both is not just festivity and public and personal renewal and reaffirmation of the community, but the sense of total freedom from the normal rules of society and culture-a freedom that was originally sanctioned in European culture by the Catholic and Orthodox churches as part of the year's structure. The Russian linguist and literary theoretician Mikhail Bakhtin has well expressed how carnival laughter creates a world within its own boundaries that is "universal, democratic, and free" (66). Thus his term "carnivalesque."

  Beyond the actual practice of carnival in the streets, therefore, Bakhtin's term is useful for writers who wish to internalize the carnivalesque in their own writing. The spirit of game-playing and carnival allows for the freedom to turn the world as we know it upside down and inside out without fear of punishment, pain, or consequence.

  [31 Comedy and tragedy are near cousins whose paths often cross.

  Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief? That is, hot ice, and wondrous strange snow. How shall we find the concord of this discord?

  Theseus in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

  Comedy is pain.

  George Roy Hill

  James Thurber, in his preface to Groucho Marx's autobiography, Groucho and Me, notes that while Groucho was fond of saying, "Even trouble has its funny side," he felt that Groucho also understood "the troublesome side of fun" (io). Consider also Sling Blade (1996): every audience I've watched it with has laughed throughout the film at the many moments of surprisingly dark comedy. And yet there is no way to speak of this film as a comedy in any traditional sense. What does this suggest about laughter and the very serious? The same goes for that heartbreaking, laugh-evoking true story from Australia, Shine (1996), about a brilliant young pianist's mental breakdown and subsequent partial recovery and final romantic and personal triumph. Tears and laughter mix in this Oscar-winning film.

  At the end of Plato's Symposium, Socrates and Aristophanes are the only ones at this famous drinking-party discussion who are still awake and sober enough to be speaking. They are considering how similar comedy and tragedy are in origin, and indeed in social function, when Aristophanes finally nods off and Socrates, Plato tells us, showers and goes about his day's work.

  Certainly Socrates is correct in a number of respects. Samuel Beckett said it well when he noted, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness." In actual origin, as we have noted, both comedy and tragedy began as celebrations during the feast of Dionysus. Both make use of a chorus and each is performed for the community, using song and dance as well as performance. And yet we cannot mistake the differences. As one classical scholar notes about ancient Greek comedy and tragedy on the stage in Athens, "to a considerable degree fifth-century tragedy and comedy help to define each other by their opposition and their reluctance to overlap" (Tapin, ii).

  We can draw a simple graph of performed (stage, film, television) comedy, with farce at the most lighthearted end of the scale and mixed drama-comedies or comic dramas at the other end of the spectrum:

  Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber (1994) live up to the title; this is a no-brainer farce that asks nothing of our emotions or involvement beyond laughter. Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels (1941), on the other hand, as w
e shall explain, wants you to laugh and pause to take in an emotional moment as the protagonist and his girlfriend pass through the camps of the homeless. And an Oscarwinning film such as Kolya (1996, Czech Republic) strikes almost in the middle, as we shall discuss, aiming for both tears and laughter in the same story, while Samuel Beckett's "absurdist" humor in Waiting for Godot raises clowns and the influence of silent comedy to a metaphysical level.

  Furthermore, what are we to make of our opening image: Chaplin walking away, alone, with his back to us? He is, after all, alone, and comedy celebrates the embrace, the continuity of the community of two or more together. Technically, I think, you could argue that Chaplin's films that end this way are dramas in overall effect, laced generously with comedy. Furthermore, Chaplin's close-ups, with his sad, puppy-dog eyes, are definitely meant to pull on the heart strings rather than evoke our laughter.

  One further example of the crossing of the dramatic ("tragic") and comic. Consider the ending of Forrest Gump (1994): Gump sits alone by the roadside as his son has just left for school. Director Robert Zemeckis knows, of course, exactly the effect he wants: a Chaplin ending with a twist. Like Chaplin, Gump is literally alone at the end; the twist is that he is not alone in the larger personal sense, because he has a son whom he will be with again after school and because the mysterious and magical feather that descended on him at the beginning has returned here at the end, hinting at some greater force that appears to bless Forrest's life. At this point where the serious and the comic cross, the exact meaning is felt rather than stated, for as the late great New York Times critic Walter Kerr has explained, "Tragedy surprises and then eludes us: comedy, like the poor, can be found at the doorstep every day" (125).

  This is also the place to acknowledge how "nervous laughter" is the result of these seemingly opposite paths of the tragic and comic crossing. There was holocaust humor made by the victims themselves, and the recent Bosnian war produced numerous popular jokes as well. The well-deserved popularity of Life Is Beautiful is another case in point. Haven't we all laughed first at a "sick" joke and then said, "That's not funny," to be answered with the question "Then why did you laugh out loud?"

  But the crossing of the serious and the comic can at times be absolutely thigh-slappingly funny. One of my favorite Northern Exposure episodes is "Slow Dance," written by Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, in which we learn that another one of Maggie's boyfriends has died suddenly ("tragically") after being hit by a falling satellite. This leads to an absurd discussion as Maurice, Chris and Ed realize that the funeral will be difficult since Rick, the deceased, is literally fused with the satellite. The festive and very comic conclusion is that they hold an opencasket funeral anyway, with the corpse /satellite sticking out of the coffin with its odd spikes visible to all.

  Finally, what finer cultural expression of how the tragic and comic or sacred and profane cross paths than a New Orleans jazz funeral? I have lived in New Orleans for twenty years and observed at least that many jazz funerals, and the "game" is always the same: solemn music and a slow march to the burial, and then joyful upbeat celebration music once the body is in the ground and the spirit is released as the funeral party dances home. New Orleans singer Kermit Ruffins captures this duality playfully in his song "The Undertaker Man":

  Simply to pronounce the word "comedy" creates an expectation of laughing out loud. And yet no comedy ever written or performed consists of nonstop laughter from start to finish. The degree to which you wish to blend the worlds of the comic and the emotional is yours to choose, having to do with your overall concept of what you wish to create for yourself and your audience.

  Put the twin visions together once more, and comic scholar Wylie Sypher has some wise words to say about the importance of comedy:

  There is a comic road to wisdom, as well as a tragic road. There is a comic as well as a tragic control of life. And the comic control may be more usable, more relevant to the human condition in all its normalcy and confusion, its many un-reconciled directions. It tells us that man is a giddy thing, yet does not despair of men. The comic perspective comes only when we take a double view: that is, a human view, of ourselves, a perspective of incongruity. Then we take part in the ancient rite that is a Debate and a Carnival, a Sacrifice and a Feast.

  (Comedy, 21)

  [41 Comedy is seldom "pure."

  This point follows in part from the previous observation. The main suggestion here, however, is that you must be sure of the concept, tone, and structure of your comedy so that you do not mislead your audience or yourself. Parody, for instance, is one of the most difficult comic acts to maintain, as literary scholar Linda Hutcheon has explored in her study. Cervantes began Don Quixote as a comic parody of the romantic tradition, but we know what extreme pathos he created in this aging warrior who could be a knight only in his dreams and who breaks our hearts in the final pages, as he is forced to face the crushing reality of his life.

  Put another way, comedy is often quite ambiguous. Look once more at the reaction to Forrest Gump, for instance. Many liberals liked it as a satire of a multitude of American values, and yet many middle American conservatives saw it as some kind of reaffirmation of their worldview. That both groups found pleasure and laughter in Forrest's odyssey through sixties America is testimony to the ability of comedy to have its ludic cake and eat it too.

  Being more specific, we can agree with Woody Allen that it's very hard to be funny for more than 89 minutes. A three-hour comedy? Can you name one? Thus, in your writing, length is certainly an important factor to keep in mind. Don't let your comic muse break down.

  [5] Comedy involves a playful and imaginative tension between the constructed and the discovered, between the "made" and the "found."

  Or we could say that comedy walks a tightrope between suspense (the expected) and surprise (the unknown). Wit and gags are carefully set up. On the other hand, much laughter is evoked when we simply see or discover what we did not expect.

  Wit and jokes (verbal humor) and gags (visual humor) both work as forms of suspense, as the listener or viewer tries to "figure out" what the punch line or "punch image" will be. Hopefully, the audience is surprised at the results, producing laughter and, in swift retrospect, an awareness of how "clever" the author or actor has been.

  We can be even more specific about how most gags and jokes work. Take one of Rosanne's old jokes that suggests her refreshing ability to turn social cliches inside out: "We found a form of birth control that really works. Every night before we go to bed we spend an hour with our kids." And we laugh (or groan!). But how and why? The noted scholar Arthur Koestler has explained that what occurs in this and every joke or gag is the joining of "two or more independent and selfcontained logical chains" that create a "flash" (release) of emotional tension when brought together (30). Call the first line "Logic A" and the second "Logic B." Laughter is produced by the flash between the two as we bring the two logics together in our minds. This means, of course, that a new logic-Logic C-is created in the mind or eye of the listener or viewer (unless the joke or gag is missed). What is the flash, or Logic C? Simply our awareness that these two logics do not go together in our "everyday" experience, in which birth control suggests condoms, pills and willful abstinence, while being with your children is seen as a positive "family value." The gap between the two throws each into a new perspective in a flash. Put simply, laughter leaps across our awareness of the incongruity produced.

  Gags work the same way visually. In the Coen brothers' Fargo (1996) we laugh as soon as we see police officer Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) in uniform, so pregnant that we feel she may give birth in the patrol car while on duty. In this case, Logic A-a police officer-and Logic B-a very maternal figureare joined in the same image so that we "get it" immediately. But of course gags are just as often in two or more parts, as in a joke structure. In Sherlock Jr., Buster Keaton is a movie theater projectionist who falls asleep; his dreaming "ghost" tries to walk into the film he is pr
ojecting. Keaton generates a lot of out-loud laughter as he becomes a comic victim to cinematic editing. Each frame becomes a visual gag, as Keaton starts to dive into a surging sea only to have it cut to a snow bank; then when he tries to lean against a tree we cut to a field so that he falls over, and so on. The point is that we enjoy Keaton's clever riffing on a basic gag-human being as victim of film editing-without consciously taking in how much work it took to "construct" this humor.

  The "found" in comedy works quite differently. Here the incongruity that produces laughter comes from our discovery rather than careful construction. Proof? Start with the daily newspaper. Is it possible for any newspaper not to have news that is hilarious? I have one item in front of me about a woman in Zagreb, who looked out of her second-floor window, saw a bull terrier attacking her pet poodle in the garden, jumped from her window, and (though she broke her left ankle in the fall) managed to bite the terrier's throat, thus rescuing her beloved poodle. Yes, real life is stranger than fiction; all the more reason to take the time to read and watch the world around you carefully for the unexploded mimes everywhere.

  Another example: The White Balloon (1995, Iran) is the simplest of tales: a seven-year-old girl in Teheran sets out to buy a goldfish. That's it. The gentle and sometimes hilarious humor in this comedy comes from her travels through the streets of the city, teeming with life in a carnival of diversity and absurdity. At this point the comic and the real or documentary often cross. Rather than "constructed" humor, what we enjoy is watching the various characters she walks by or comes into contact with on the street, as we sense the gap or incongruity between their lives and this intense little girl on a goldfish mission. Incongruity is again at the heart of our laughter, but it is an incongruity based on our discovery of what is ludicrous before our eyes.