Laughing Out Loud Page 8

  1. BocCACCIO, Decameron. Writing in the mid-fourteenth century in Italy, Boccaccio cleverly combined one hundred tales within the frame of seven young women and three young men escaping from the plague that struck Florence in 1348. For two weeks in the countryside these genial youths tell one tale each per day for ten days, all reflecting themes of love, chance and intelligence. While some are pastoral or dramatic, most range from satirical and scatological to romantic comedy, sexual farce and picaresque adventures. Always a pleasure to read, and many could trigger ideas for your scripts!

  2. FRAN4OIS RABELAIS, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Published in several volumes in the mid-sixteenth century in France, Rabelais's freewheeling tales of two giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel, were condemned by the authorities at the time as scandalous but have become classics of comic literature. As the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin has pointed out, Rabelais's work represents perhaps the purest form of carnivalesque literature we have, for Rabelais lived in an area of southern France that still had a very rich tradition of carnival and the spirit of freedom, festivity and fantasy that carnival implies. To read him is to enjoy a master storyteller for whom all appetites are appreciated and celebrated and within whose pages a love of ideas is also reflected. Thus Rabelais ranges from pure farce to serious satire of all phases of French culture, but with the saving virtue of laughter covering and embracing all.

  3. LAURENCE STERNE, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. One of the early English novels, Sterne's anarchistic work has fun breaking all the rules. By novel's end, the title character is barely five years old, a fact that reflects Sterne's freewheeling and almost stream of consciousness approach to fiction as well as the fact that the author died before he completed his hilarious tale. A book that has influenced modern writers from James Joyce on, Tristram Shandy delights for the pure spontaneity of its nonchronological and nonlogical jumps from topic to topic, character to character, and time period to time period. You can't get any further away from the Well-Made Hollywood Script than this, a fact that makes it worth reading from time to time just to remember that we should take no rules as sacred.

  4. JOHN KENNEDY TOOLE, Confederacy of Dunces. This is not only the classic New Orleans novel in a fully carnivalesque tone and manner, but a wonderful gallery of minor characters who represent the diversity of that colorful city on the Mississippi. The main character is Ignatius Reilly, a tub of lard who lives at home with his eccentric mother and who believes in geometry and medieval theology. No plot summary can do justice to Toole's mixture of satire and farce, which has some of the funniest dialogue in American fiction. Anarchy, carnival and, finally, romance of sorts mix in this ensemble comedy that makes you laugh out loud, page after page.

  5. BOHUMIL HRABAL, I Served the King of England. More will be said in chapter 7 about the "Czech touch" in cinema, but that same touch exists in Czech fiction as well: a concern with the simple man and woman in tales that build humor on the absurdity of real life. This short comic picaresque novel follows a simple waiter through his coming of age as man and his loss of innocence in World War II and his sadder but wiser survival in the postwar period. In Hrabal's prose, the horror of the background of war and Communism never destroys the humanizing humor of the characters in the foreground. A valuable lesson for writers of comedy, indeed. It is Hrabal's novel that became the memorable film Closely Watched Trains, which we discuss in chapter 7.

  6. MILAN KUNDERA, Immortality. Kundera has a unique voice in prose, mixing philosophy and politics, sexuality and farce, absurdity and tender nostalgia effortlessly. As a Czech writer who moved to Paris and now writes in French, he is perhaps best known for the novel that became the strongly etched film The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Laughter is central to Kundera's feelings about love, life, politics and everything in between, and for Kundera, laughter is a form both of pleasure and of intellectual positioning. Immortality is playfully about everything from aging to Beethoven, Elvis, CNN news and loves won and lost.

  7. EUDORA WELTY, The Collected Short Stories of Eudora Welty. Welty has such keen insight into character and locale. Her beautifully shaped stories transcend the South, but they succeed in large part because she does so strongly evoke a time and a particular place. The humor comes from the characters and their realistic and believable conflicts, struggles, and contradictions. You might also try her award-winning novel, The Optimist's Daughter.

  8. will IHIMAERA, Bulibasha, King of the Gypsies. A moving and often joyous and hilarious tale of Maori sheep-shearing families on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand during the 1950s. Ihimaera's novel is a coming-ofage tale of a young Maori who loves James Dean, Elvis and his Maori culture, especially his earth-mother-like grandmother, who becomes a truly triumphant figure in an often cruelly patriarchal society. Much of the humor is not only that of character but that of the cultural clashes between Maoris, New Zealand whites and American pop culture.

  I traveled with a circus beginning when I was very young so I never went to school. But I learned the three most important things in life from working in the circus: how to put up and take down a tent, how to make people laugh and cry, and how to collect money.

  Director George Sidney

  Fact: too much of film and television comedy that does not work, or doesn't work as well as it should, is lacking in a solid sense of physical or visual comedy. Paying not only homage but close attention to the techniques and actual accomplishments of the great silent comedians teaches us a lot about writing comedy. Simple translation: let silent comedy help you sharpen your eyes to the nonverbal world of comedy available to you.

  Note that I distinguish between physical and visual humor. By physical I mean what an actor is able to do with his or her body and physical objects. Visual comedy is the larger arena, including humor that could, for instance, emerge from the mere framing of a shot.

  In Sherlock Jr., we laugh at Keaton's agile gymnastics, balancing on the handlebars of a driverless speeding motorcycle: physical comedy of daring proportions. Yet in the famous cyclone scene in Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), in which Keaton stands still as the whole front wall of a house falls, missing him by inches because he stands exactly where the doorway falls, we have visual comedy, for the laughter is not generated by Keaton the performer but by the camera's capturing of an event.

  This chapter is dedicated to what writers of comedy can learn from physical and visual humor. We are especially concerned with Hollywood silent comedy and its roots in the American vaudeville tradition, as well as its much older sources in the Italian commedia dell'arte. We will also cast an eye and ear in the direction of the vaudeville-styled sound comedy as practiced by the Marx Brothers.

  Commedia dell'Arte and Moliere

  Along with Shakespeare, Moliere (1622-1673) remains one of the most enduring creators of stage comedy in Europe. And his art and craft owe much to the Italian commedia dell'arte, practiced throughout Europe from roughly 1550 to 1750. During his twelve years of performances around Europe with his wandering troupe of actors, for instance, he at one point shared a theater used by the great Italian actor of the commedia, Fiorelli, who was the creator of one of the most memorable farcical characters, Scaramouche (Moliere, ix).

  In the commedia tradition, comedy became a series of stock characters or caricatures, and the performances were given on makeshift stages, often in marketplaces, without written texts. Thus, these comedies were half improvisation and half echoes of the set routines, gags and jokes audiences expected. Comic historian Mel Gordon captures the commedia's significance well: "Commedia troupes developed large audiences composed of all social classes.... The most popular entertainments of the first part of the twentieth century-motion picture comedy, both silent and sound, and radio comedy-seem closely related to Commedia. Indeed it is hard to conjure images of the Commedia without seeing Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Bert Lahr, the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, or Laurel and Hardy" (3).

  Consider the importance of t
his enduring comic form. The bottom line, of course, was physical farce, pure and simple. That is, lots of "lower-body" humor, sexual and scatological; lots of set jokes and fast comic exchanges; and only a bare skeleton of a plot on which to hang the humor. Buster Keaton was, knowingly or not, echoing the structure of commedia when he explained that film comedies were "Gags, gags, more gags and a little bit of plot" (Horton, Buster Keaton's "Sherlock Jr.," 12). Commedia audiences gained pleasure from two directions, watching old scenes and familiar stock characters but also laughing and appreciating the improv and variations on a joke or gag or scene the actors were able to pull off.

  Lazzi (lazzo in the singular) is the term given for the comic routines that were drawn upon during a commedia performance. The exact definition has been given several ways, but Mel Gordon, who has collected many of them, likes the following: "something foolish, witty or metaphorical in word or action" (4). In fact, lazzi collections break down into various categories of jokes and gags, which can be consulted much like "cheat books" in music: there are acrobatic and mimic lazzi, comic violence lazzi, food lazzi, illogical lazzi, props lazzi, sexual and scatological lazzi, social-class lazzi, stupidity lazzi, word play lazzi, stage/life duality lazzi, and transformation lazzi.

  Two examples. Call the first "Lazzo of Being Brained": "Scaramouche hits Arlecchino [another clownish figure] so hard on the head that Arlecchino's brains begin to spurt out. Afraid that he will lose his intelligence, Arlecchino sits and feasts on his brains" (Gordon, 23). This is true comic surrealism, embracing the childhood pleasure of playing and joking with food.

  Next, a lazzo of comic violence: "Arlecchino disguised as a dentist fools Pantalone into thinking that his rotten teeth are causing his noxious breath. Using oversized or ridiculous tools, the Doctor [Arlecchino] extracts two or more good teeth from Pantalone's mouth" (Gordon, 14). Think how much of comedy is disguise, violence in comic form, trickery, or exaggeration. All are welded humorously in this set routine.

  The commedia's (and, as we shall see, Moliere's) message to us is that "originality" in humor, satire and plain old farce does not mean that your material is new, but that it is a new variation on some golden comic nuggets, well tried but always ready for recirculation.

  Consider Moliere's "originality" as an example. Take The Miser (L'Avare) in particular. Like Menander, Moliere centers his comic darts on a "killjoy" old man. Instead of a grouch, he is a skinflint in his sixties. Following all the formulas of Greek and Roman romantic comedy, there is a complex weaving of plots as the Miser, Harpagon, and his son, Cleante, are in love with the same damsel, Marianne. Meanwhile, there is a parallel set of young lovers, scheming servants, gobetweens, additional parents, and a Mae West-like female "playboy," Frosine, described simply as "an adventuress" (Moliere, iio).

  There is really nothing new at all in this set-up. And in execution we detect Moliere's clever use of various lazzi and conventions, including disguises, sudden reversals, tricksters tricked, and more. Moliere's genius lies in how well he plays and amplifies these stock figures and patterns.

  Frosine well illustrates how masterful Moliere was in shaping a comic character. She tries to vamp the Miser out of some money while at the same time trying to fulfill her role as a go-between. Earlier she has confided to another scamp how she works:

  LA FLECHE: Why, Frosine! What are you doing here?

  FROSINE: Following my usual occupation-acting as go-between making myself useful to people and picking up what I can from such small abilities as I possess. You have to live on your wits in this world, you know, and those of us who have no other resources must rely on scheming and hard work.

  (Moliere, 133)

  Thus when the Miser walks onstage, we see Frosine ply her trade, trying to convince him that the young woman in question prefers older men-the older the better- over youth.

  We have suggested how Shakespeare was able to turn such farce into a form of comedy with emotional resonance. Moliere's talent was to celebrate the comic without bitterness, and without trying to change the world through laughter or explore the darker regions of the human heart. John Wood has written that Moliere "shows men through their foibles, vain, gullible, self-obsessed, and it is his achievement that under the impact of laughter, by the solvent of comedy, we experience the moment of truth, feel the compulsion of reason, share his compassion for common humanity" (Moliere, xv).

  Vaudeville and the Marx Brothers

  For Americans, the long-popular tradition of vaudeville provides us with the kind of comic experience represented by commedia dell'arte, and indeed by some of the elements of Aristophanes' anarchistic comedy. The same may be said for variety show entertainment as it appeared in many countries, including France and England ("pantomime"), and as it continues today in countries such as Greece ("epitheorisis").

  Like the commedia, the vaudeville tradition involved constant travel; appeal to a mass audience; a mixture of farce, music and witty dialogue; and set characters, situations and acts. Most important, vaudeville, like the commedia, was performance-based and thus a comedian-centered comic form. As director George Sidney suggests in the opening quotation, working a live audience in a circus or on a regular vaudeville stage meant learning to make them laugh and cry. That depended on having a wealth of material to draw on and a polished "act" to hang your work on.

  As every film history testifies, almost all of the silent film comedy stars, from Keaton and Chaplin to Fatty Arbuckle and beyond, honed their skills through years of performance on the vaudeville circuit. But not just the silent comedians: the early sound comedians including Mae West, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Bob Hope, Milton Berle, the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields learned in vaudeville as well. Henry Jenkins has explained how vaudeville came into being towards the end of the nineteenth century, as "saloon" male entertainment was transformed into a milder, less raw form of showmanship aimed at attracting the whole family. Nine hundred theaters were dedicated to vaudeville alone in 19oo (Jenkins, 44). The vaudeville entertainers had to go for the immediate laugh, given that they would have to make the most of the fifteen or twenty minutes allotted them onstage. This led to an anarchistic approach quite different from that of the "regular" stage. As one Variety critic wrote in 19o6 about vaudeville actors, "It is his business to do and to do quickly everything which an actor on the regular stage is taught and schooled to avoid" (63).

  Add up all of these elements and, as in the commedia, we have a form of comedy-both visual and verbal-that falls on the anarchistic side of the scale. Throw in the fact that cinema itself was more closely tied to vaudeville than to legitimate theater in its origins, and we see the importance of the anarchistic to early cinema. In fact, short films were often shown as an "act" in many stage shows, thus beginning a deeply intermingled relationship between the two entertainment media.

  The Marx Brothers-Groucho, Harpo and Chico (and Zeppo and Gummo, to a much smaller extent)-spelled joyful comic chaos whenever they hit the screen in a remarkable series of nutty films that still seem as fresh as when they were made, including Horse Feathers (1932), Duck Soup (1933), The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930), and two made with Irving Thalberg, A Night at the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937). We could also discuss W. C. Fields, Mae West and others, but we will concentrate on the Brothers because they were a team, an anarchistic force but with distinct individual identities. I hope this chapter, together with the first two chapters, has helped us view them in a very long tradition, going all the way back to the commedia and beyond.

  Groucho makes it clear in his autobiography that their comedy grew out of their own lives. They grew up in a poor New York family with a beautiful mother from a small town in Germany and a father from France who was a generally unsuccessful tailor-"He was the only tailor I ever heard of who refused to use a tape measure" (20). Also living with them were his mother's parents, who spoke no English but had been entertainers. The grandmother was a harpist, which explains how Harpo got started even without
music lessons. Only Chico was able to finish grammar school, as the others began work at an early age. Add to all of this the need to move frequently to avoid bill collectors, along with the visits of many relatives who were themselves characters, and you have the sense of an ongoing carnival tinged with the tension of poverty.

  But with their mother's hard work and drive, they became an act. They played for more than ten years as one of vaudeville's most successful acts, eventually breaking into Broadway and thus "legitimate" laughter in I'll Say She Is! in the early 192os, and moving from there to Hollywood in 1929 after the crash and after Groucho lost much of the money he had earned from Broadway.

  Long before the first cameras began to roll on them, then, they were famous for this anarchistic and irreverent humor. Indeed, much of what we have said about Aristophanic comedy is true for the Marx Brothers and other vaudevillians turned film comedians during the early days of sound comedy. Duck Soup, with its disrespect for any coherent plot, is like Aristophanes' best works, unified only loosely by its central theme or concept: Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho), the Prime Minister of Freedonia, declares war on Sylvania just for the hell of it. Satire, festivity and pure comic fantasy cross paths with rapid speed, and besides both visual and verbal humor, we have those lyrical moments when Harpo plays the harp and all laughter stops, as in a vaudeville show but also in the same vein as the lyrical moments in Aristophanes' ancient comedies.

  The gags and one-liners bubble endlessly out of this freewheeling satire of war (another Aristophanic echo!). But just as memorable is the classic commedia visual work, especially the famous "mirror scene," in which Groucho's every move is exactly duplicated in a doorway. Such timing and craft goes far beyond simplistic slapstick. Besides being really funny, the scene leaves us with a sense of wonder too: how did they do it?!