Laughing Out Loud Page 6
[ 10] Comedy from the bringing together of three disparate directions: Create a story from three photos.
This one is common to creative writing class exercises: given three random narrative elements, you must combine them into a story. In the same spirit, find three photos and come up with a comic plot, romantic or anarchistic or both! For example, I have these in front of me:
The first is of two old New Orleans jazz musicians, the Humphrey Brothers-both now deceased-who reportedly played music together around the world but who in their last years never spoke to each other and never even would agree to ride together in the same car. The second, also from New Orleans, is of an unusual Mardi Gras costume: four young people in a penis costume, urinating. And the third is an Associated Press photo of a fight breaking out in the Ukrainian parliament during a discussion on violence at a local parade.
What feature comedy can you think of weaving together these three "ideas," realizing you do not have to be literal about combining the Ukraine and New Orleans? The elements to play with are two old musicians, four young folk in a penis costume, and politicians fistfighting in the government hall during a debate on what to do about violence! What can you do?
I actually saw the penis costume and heard the old musicians years ago. I have not done a script exactly on these three shots, but nearly. Mine started with the costume, as a "what if." What if the four people inside were actually two young couples who had been through good times and bad and this costume became a kind of catharsis for them. And what if their paths crossed with some corrupt New South politicians, with the costume and a political rally literally coming together, and what if the subplot was connected to some great old musicians, the last of their generation. Although I've collected many option checks on the script, the "penis costume" finally proved too, well, Aristophanic for American producers!
Try the same exercise with other photos, or with three different pieces from the newspaper of three varying ideas that are floating around in your head.
[ 111 Adapt the following television miniseries for your own times in your own area or country.
I've worked happily with one of the former Yugoslavia's most interesting directors of television and film, Srdjan Karanovic. In the 198os he made a ten-part series for Yugoslav television that is still very popular in reruns. The concept was the following: a series about the i96os with each one-hour episode set in a different year, starting with 1960 and ending with 1969. The series has as its main figure a fellow who at the beginning is just a teen hanging out with friends, listening to music, learning about girls. At the series' end he is twenty-six, recently married, with a steady job and a member of the Communist Party.
But there is more. Each episode has a major theme tied into the main character's life. One show is centered on rock-and-roll, another on girls, and so forth. His gang of four or five best friends is important too, as each of them goes through changes. The young protagonist's voiceover narration holds all together.
Finally, five minutes of documentary montage concludes each episode, as the protagonist says, for instance, "That was the year the Beatles appeared in America, and Tito visited Egypt, and...." The list continued, mixing nostalgia and history with the personal, "fictional" input of the main character.
Think of your own "decade" series. Who would you follow for ten years, and who would his or her friends be? How would you comically show both your protagonist's changes and those of your country? What theme could you give to each episode? And what five-minute "real" nostalgia montage could you add at the end?
[12] The grown-up children's film: Come up with characters and a plot for a children's film in the vein of Babe or The White Balloon.
The focus here is on realizing what an important part of the comic spectrum comedy for children has become, and yet how many of these films underestimate children's intelligence and thus succeed in losing both adult audiences and many children as well. Of course, this exercise also asks you to become a child again and enjoy yourself in doing so. You might very well head to the public library or the local bookstores and take a look at some of the truly imaginative offerings in the children's section. Then see what you would come up with using either fantasy or a realistic approach.
Trygaeus in Aristophanes' Peace
Helena in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
The history of comedy as a genre has traditionally been the history of stage comedy, from Aristophanes to Shakespeare and Moliere and through to the twentieth century, including vaudeville, puppet shows, the circus, and our recent additions to performance-based laughter: cinema and television. Of course, there is also the tradition of literary humor and comedy in short stories and, later, in novels, from Boccaccio and Chaucer down to Henry Fielding, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, Joseph Heller, Milan Kundera, and beyond, which we will discuss briefly at the end of the chapter. But in general, comedy in fiction embraces elements of the two traditions we will outline here, with one important difference: because they are not performance based, they are even freer to blur boundaries and include elements of other areas.
Stage and screen comedy can be seen as following two important roads: anarchistic and romantic. The goal of this chapter is to help you as a writer better understand to what degree the comedies you wish to write fall into one or the other of these major divisions or, as is often the case, to what degree your comedies will be a mixture of the two.
All that we will discuss can be seen as leaning more strongly into one camp or the other, though very few comedies are purely or exclusively one form or the other. As we shall see, anarchistic comedy is associated with Aristophanes and continues all the way down to the Marx Brothers, Monty Python, Saturday Night Live, and even the Muppet movies. And romantic comedy appears first with Menander in ancient Greece, continues through the Roman playwrights and on to Shakespeare and Moliere, and comes down to us as the dominant form of American film comedy since the 1930s.
Anarchistic Comedy: Aristophanes
Come at once to supper, And bring your pitcher, and your supper chest, The priest of Bacchus sends to fetch you thither. And do be quick: you keep the supper waiting.
Aristophanes, Acharnians
Aristophanes joyfully shouts to writers and actors over two thousand four hundred years of laughter to say, "Try anything and everything. And besides having fun and evoking laughter, make'em think as well."
The world has never seen a more freewheeling and carnivalesque form of comedy than that of Aristophanes. Elements of his accomplishment shine forth hilariously in W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, John Belushi's no-holds-barred performances in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) and The Blues Brothers (1980), all the Monty Python films, and on down to that off-the-wall, laid-back independent comedy Slacker (1991), the loopy Wayne's World, and even Waking Ned Devine (1998). But no one has worked with as much total freedom and such a broad and varied range of the comic since Aristophanes' works rocked the ancient theaters of Greece.
Let me add that Aristophanes still packs them in on a summer night in the ancient theaters of Greece. I'm talking about up to fourteen thousand spectators at a crack, the kind of audience we Americans equate with sports events and rock concerts. For Aristophanes is a big green light for directors, actors, choreographers, and set designers to set off a number of unexploded mimes! Yale University once performed The Frogs in a swimming pool, for instance. One production of Peace I attended in Athens, building on the fact that the ancient choruses would have had leather phalluses attached to strings to raise and lower when needed, presented Trygaeus at the "climax" of the play with a six-foot plastic phallus that he strapped on before enjoying Peace. It is very difficult to capture the exhilaration one feels after a well-done production of Aristophanes. All the more reason why, as writers, we can learn much from the master of "old comedy."
His comedy can be called "anarchistic" or anarchic in the sense the term has been used by critics and scholars such as Henry Jenkins, S
teve Seidman, Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik, for in these comedies the structure revolves around a single individual, a simple person with whom the audience can thus identify, who comes up with a "crazy" idea and, after a number of obstacles, succeeds in bringing about a glorious change in his or her culture, which is finally celebrated in a festive ending of dance, song, wine, and food. Lysistrata (411 B.c.) is perhaps his best-known work, certainly in the United States. It revolves around a woman, Lysistrata, who has the nutty idea to end war by organizing all of the women of Greece to go on a sex strike. She succeeds, and Athens and her warring enemy, Sparta, enjoy a new world of making love, not war, more than two thousand years before the phrase became a slogan for the anti-Vietnam War movement. In Peace (421 B.c.) an Athenian farmer, Trygaeus (his name means "reaper of the harvest"), hatches the idea of ending the war with Sparta by conducting an individual peace with Zeus himself. He accomplishes this by flying on a large dung beetle that manages to fart its way to Olympus, where not only is the treaty concluded but Zeus throws in his long-hidden daughter, Peace, as Trygaeus' bride-to-be as well. The ending is pure festivity-and sexuality, as the chorus of farmers enjoy the goddess Peace in the first example of group sex in Western drama.
Aristophanes' brand of comedy is anarchistic because the main protagonist makes absolutely no compromises. He or she not only "gets away with it" but changes the whole order of a culture or society in the process. This is a comedy of total wish fulfillment and of equal doses of personal fantasy (the crazy idea) and festivity (the celebration of the victory of that idea). In Freudian terms, we could say such comedy is delightful because it is pre-Oedipal; that is, it represents the fulfillment of a child before he or she learns that growing up has to do with making compromises and not getting everything we want when we want it. This is the stuff of, for instance, the Marx Brothers' best features: whether their crazy idea is running an imaginary country (Duck Soup) or university (Horse Feathers) or taking over (A Night at the Opera), we know they will get what they want with glorious comic chaos reigning supreme.
The main elements in his work are, more specifically, (1) flights of lyrical poetry, (2) strong political satire and literary parody, and (3) farcical and even slapstick use of physical comedy. Take The Birds (414 B.c.), for instance. The main character, Peithetaerus, and his sidekick, Euelpides, act out the fanciful idea of starting a new country in the sky. After much confusion and confrontation with gods and imposters from the world of men, "Cloudcuckooland" is established and celebrated. Burlesque opportunities abound, as a chorus of brightly plumed birds can dance, fly, fight, have sex, fart, and shit, much to the pleasure of the audience. But direct satire of leading politicians of the day is also hurled about, and other passages include some of the best lyrical lines in all of ancient poetry:
(The Complete Plays, 255)
Throughout this book we will use "anarchistic comedy" to describe the work of those comedians and writers who carry out nonromantic, wildly imaginative and often surreal flights of fancy, satire and parody similar to Peithetaerus's efforts to create Cloudcuckooland, actions which show little regard for character development and plot construction.
Taking a closer look, we can notice further characteristics of comic craft that are exhibited in Aristophanes' ageless and still eagerly performed comedies that can be of use to us as writers as well.
1. Aristophanes' plays are organized by theme and central comic metaphor rather than by plot. Let us consider his earliest surviving play, The Acharnians (425 B.c.), written when he was barely twenty. The main character is an Athenian citizen, Dicaeopolis (the name means "righteous citizen"), who wants the Peloponnesian War to end. As in Peace and Lysistrata, the protagonist forms his own plan of action, since the diplomats and leaders are doing nothing. Thus an individual peace is arranged.
Yet while such a turning point would be the climax of a "well-written" Hollywood comedy, this major action occurs very early on, leaving the rest of the play for comic debates and farcical stage business, and finally for grand festivity in celebration of Dicaeopolis' self-concluded peace treaties. In short, there is almost no plot at all. The same can be said for each of Aristophanes' plays. As we shall see in the next chapter, this episodic, almost nonnarrative approach to comedy is partially reflected in the United States and other countries in a popular vaudeville-style tradition of skits, acts, music, and dance. Thus, looking across the Atlantic at the Monty Python group, we see films such as The Meaning of Life, The Life of Brian, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail as comedies owing more to the British stage pantomime tradition than to narrative or dramatic theater. "Anarchistic" has to do with the form as well as the character/ story itself.
2. Aristophanes' characters are types rather than fully rounded or developed figures. In fact, we cannot talk about any real sense of Aristotelian character change from start to finish in these comedies. Dicaeopolis is the same strongwilled Athenian in the end as he was in the beginning. The change is in Athenian society itself, for it has come around to his point of view.
3. Aristophanes' comedies contain a parabasis, a section when a chorus member steps forward to speak seriously about Aristophanes' own intentions in his comedy. As mentioned in the introduction, comedy often acknowledges the audience's presence. And in Aristophanes' plays, the audience is never safe from insults, physical comic attack, finger-pointing, and at times a sharing of confidences. But while television stand-up is like the stand-up tradition in clubs, dependent on a close working of the audience, and in movies we have those moments of direct address to the audience like the asides in Wayne's World, we no longer have extended speeches from the author to the audience, as in this segment of the parabasis from The Acharnians:
(The Complete Plays, 33)
4. Structurally, each play contains several agons-verbal duals-which the main protagonist wins because of his or her skills with logic and words. We get "agony" from the original term for "contest," agon. The number of such verbal confrontations varies, but in lieu of any strong plot, these battles of wit fuel the laughter and further the main protagonist's fight for his or her idea. In The Birds, for instance, there are a series of such contests as a variety of freeloaders attempt to break into Cloudcuckooland but are beaten down by Peithetaerus each time, only to be finally accepted in one festive dance at the conclusion. We can see in these comic agons the forerunners of lickety-split crackling dialogue that has characterized so much of vaudeville and American sound comedy. And as in Aristophanes' battles of words, so in any television sitcom or film comedy dialogue, somebody always comes out the winner!
5. Aristophanes was able to fully draw upon surreal comic fantasy and carnivalesque festivity. Simply imagine the sheer pleasure of seeing a chorus of twenty-four frogs onstage in The Frogs, or choruses of wasps in The Wasps or birds in The Birds. Comedy turns the everyday world upside down and inside out, and Aristophanes' plays do so with particular gusto. As noted above, in part Aristophanes can carry this off because he is not worried about character or plot development. We can think of his anarchistic comedy as a comic spectacle with a thematic punch line-which was, more often than not, "Peace at any cost is better than war."
6. Aristophanic laughter occurred as Athens was being destroyed by its grinding war with Sparta. These comedies were not just "entertainment." As writers, we should consider the implications. At no time during the Vietnam War, for instance, did we have a strong anarchistic comedy that made fun of U.S. policy in Vietnam directly. Yes, we can say that Arthur Penn's Little Big Man with its black humor about Custer's Last Stand dealt metaphorically with Vietnam. But no one in Hollywood attempted comedy and political commentary head-on in a popular film. Robert Altman's M*A*S*H is definitely anarchistic and full of dark comic insight into the Vietnam War, but once more, the commentary is distanced, as the action in this war comedy takes place during the Korean War.
Yet Aristophanes' work is also a lesson to us in that the state paid him to create works of strong criticism of its polic
ies. Anarchistic comedy was, therefore, seen as something cathartic and good for all.
All this ended, of course, when Athens went down to defeat in the war and such freedom of speech was curbed. As one scholar notes, "As soon as Athenians were shorn of their liberties, the plays of this type became quite impossible" (Matthews, 89).
The road was then open, as we shall see, for a more conservative form of comedy: romance.
A wrap: what practical influence can Aristophanes have for writers of comedy today?
Simple. Dare to be different, to take chances, to let your imagination come up with its wildest comic pleasures. Animation has proven a fertile ground for the complete realization of fantasy and festivity. Early shorts featuring Popeye, Betty Boop, and others, together with the fine animation traditions of Eastern Europe, especially the Zagreb School from the former Yugoslavia, took up the challenge of breaking boundaries, exploring imaginative realities with zesty and often thoughtful humor. As practiced by Disney and others, however, the feature animated film has almost always been structured under a "romantic" approach to comedy, with farcical and anarchistic elements on the edges.
But Aristophanes' call for total comedy is sometimes headed in fruitful ways: consider Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite, with its ancient Greek chorus that unexpectedly turns our attention to a New York story and then blurs the borders of ancient drama and New York romantic comedy, as choral figures appear throughout the film.
Aristophanes' lyrical voice also instructs us that we should not be afraid to turn away from laughter to open up spaces in a comedy for lyrical or quieter moments. Comedy is large enough and durable enough to embrace these strands and allow us to return to laughter and farce and festivity afterwards.