I simply cannot comprehend the idea of comedy as an inferior art form
Seriousness is for the childish
A few years back a friend, knowing my interest in all things comic, gifted me a work of popular non-fiction. As she gave it me she said, ‘Ich schäme mich’, ‘I’m ashamed’, in the way only a German could take a book so seriously.
Anyway, the book, of which I confess I forget the name. I just remember finding its argument so culturally alien as to be almost beyond my limits of comprehension. It asked why why the German-speaking world viewed comedy as an inferior art form, why the Germans put such a premium on the tragic and the poetic over the daft and the dry, and might there be something to be said for being funny after all?
This is the same way that German TV, when it pilfered The Office into their own Stromberg, had to change the David Brent character into a pedant instead a man who above all wanted their staff to find them amusing, as that would never be the heart's desire of a German boss. Respect, dominance and even awe would be much more a German boss’ sort of thing.
You do encounter this mentality in the UK sometimes too, this kind of mood of Very Serious Cultural Criticism, the kind of person who makes a fuss at a party of telling you that they like Stewart Lee or even Fleabag.
That certainly seems to be the mood about in British independent publishing, where a mood of solemnity prevails, with people making a fuss of obscure literary allusions as if they were gags you could open the Hackney Empire with. In this milieu there’s a sort of ambient ‘That’s nice dear’ to saying you’re a comedian, as well as a complete lack of understanding as to how comedy works. Like very serious literary editors who ask if comedians make everything up onstage as they go. Would they ask the same about the opera?
It’s particularly weird in a literary context as the English novel strikes me as above all a comic tradition, never better than in the telling of rollicking boisterous tales, from Gulliver’s Travels through Tom Jones, on to Oliver Twist and Lucky Jim. These are funny books by funny writers. They bring hours of delight. It’s almost as if the contemporary British novelist feels shame at these centuries of silliness, and is adopting this anguished, emo-poetic mode of contemporary writing, almost as if in imagination of what a Very Serious Continental Novel looks like. Which seems to me to neither play to the English novel’s strengths nor innovate new ones.
At a fundamental level, I didn’t understand the thesis of the book I was given. For it always struck me as so blindingly evident that comedy was the hardest thing to do. That if writing good jokes was anything other than an enormous challenge everyone would do it and get rich. Look at what happens when serious actors, with honourable exceptions, try to play comedy!
And I felt comedy was superior not just as a practice, but as an attitude; that a whimsical, amused view of life was much more sensible response to existential vicissitudes than an overweening sense of tragedy, that a devotion to a comic worldview was a manifestation of philosophical pragmatism and, in its own quiet way, a sign of maturity.
We’re often told that unlike, say, the fibonacci sequences of nature, art is incapable of perfection, that ‘out of such crooked timber as humanity no straight thing was ever made’. And yet, is that really true when it comes to comedy? I’d argue that more than more than almost any other art form, a type of perfection is on offer in comedy, due to the criteria for success – be funny and be funny throughout – being so clearly defined.
As an example, I watched ‘Groundhog Day’ recently, a film I’ve seen a good four or five times since its release in 1994. I first saw it with my Dad, an excellent companion to movie-going across those years of burgeoning cinephilia, and to whom I’m eternally grateful for letting me see 15 certificates two or three years ahead of the legal age.
Even as a twelve-year old viewer of ‘Groundhog Day’, I remember thinking to myself ‘Well, that was pretty perfect.’ It says something about the strength of the film and its enduring qualities, that 42-year old me thinks exactly the same.
I pretty much feel like this about all my favourite comedies – ‘Withnail and I’, ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’, ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ – that they have a kind of perfection about them. In the same way a good pop song does exactly what it always does to you after you haven’t heard it in yonks, so a good narrative comedy delights you once again even on the umpteenth watch; in this sense, it seems like there’s something functional about a really good comedy, something about them of the long-enduring domestic appliance. We’ve had that thing, I say, indicating ‘Sullivan’s Travels’, since 1941, and it still works.
Do great comedies share certain characteristics? One crucial commonality is clearly length. With the honourable exception of Toni Erdmann – trust the Germans to make a three-hour comedy which justifies every minute of its runtime – pretty much every great screen comedy tops out at about one hour 40 minutes max. ‘Withnail and I’ is pushing it at 1 hour 47; ‘Life of Brian’ is close to the Platonic ideal at 94. Across a shorter length, scripts can be tightened to a point of unimpeachability, and that has a long-storied tradition too; I wouldn’t say ‘The Comedy of Errors’ is as good as ‘Hamlet’, but it certainly has a lot fewer superfluous scenes.
The same applies to stand-up. If a stand-up set achieves a laugh on every line, some bigger, some larger, but always getting something, what is there really to be improved upon? It is doing what is demanded of it. Perhaps this making of comedy is in effect artisanal, as much a craft as art, but that is only a matter of classification; in the same way as you can make an impeccable lasagna or an unimprovable pair of shoes, so you can make comedy which absolutely serves the purpose you require of it. And judging by the way I still rewatch favourite scenes of ‘Step Brothers’ or ‘Eastbound and Down’ serves that purpose for a good long time.
However, after about an hour twenty of any kind of comic entertainment, audiences have laughed enough, and either want a change of tone or a break. There’s a physical reaction required from a comedy audience which isn’t for other forms, a signal of approval, which is in itself inherently tiring. That doesn’t mean comedy can’t be epic, but it’s mock epic, with a sort of parodic suggestion of a greater scale than is present, a sort of brilliant lighting of what reveals itself to be a matchstick model.
When that need for a change of tone arrives tho, comedy is often able to provide it; think of Richard E Grant in the rain in ‘Withnail and I’, or John Candy’s confession at the end of ‘Planes and Trains and Automobiles’, that shift to the minor key. These moments of melancholy serve to let the audience know that the revels are indeed ended, and that tho the actors hope the break from reality proved a pleasant one, reality is indeed now down to return to their lives. You are left looking, the show cleared away, at Shakespeare’s clown Feste who offers a closing vow of ‘And we’ll strive to please you every day’ and leaves.
Sometimes comedy is attacked for its lack of profundity, for its failure to offer a grand statement, for its contentment to just ‘pass the time’. That is precisely its strength. The wisdom of the comic to revel in the specific and particular over the broad and sweeping. Many people love Paul Thomas Anderson’s film ‘There Will Be Blood’, but I find it painfully overblown, whereas I find his ‘Punchdrunk Love’ (95 minutes) amusing and exact, and while it doesn’t make the former film’s big statements about capitalism and life that’s in part because it considers such statements an invitation to mockery.
Of course, comedy can also be profound, wise and sad, ‘spiced in the wine of sadness’, to quote Bernard Malamud; as we mentioned above, it is relatively easy to end a comedy on the note of the tragic, but almost impossible to imagine the other way round. Can you imagine King Lear culminating in a custard pie fight? Legendary as that would prove, it might prove a confusing tonal shift given what had gone before. Whereas it is entirely natural for ‘Midnight Run’ or ‘Blackadder Goes Forth’ to end on notes of the plaintive, to gradually, after hours of entertainment, take the empties off the tables and put a consoling arm around the spectators.
In the same way, comic actors more frequently give very good serious performances than, with honourable exceptions, the other way round. Because the sadness is part of the comic worldview – why do it otherwise? Yet a tragedy can only end with tragedy, or it disproves its own faith in the inextricableness and inevitability of fate.
Personally, I’ve always had my colours nailed firmly to the comic mast. I have long been the quiet servant of Thalia, the comic music, who, incidentally and ironically given that I currently work in agriculture, was also the muse of the bucolic. Not for me the seriousness of Melponeme, her tragic counterpart; I preferred Thalia, whose name means ‘verdant’ and who carries a trumpet around with her.
In hard times, I reach for comedy to have some sense of the legerté, the joy and yes, the briefness of life and the consolation of laughter offers in face of it. My own family has always abounded in sacrilegious black humour. The highlight of my own existence is making my friends and loved ones laugh; to the extent I have a mission on this earth, I consider it that.
The Roman comic playwright Terence wrote 'I am human, and nothing which is human is alien to me’. Terence: what a great name for a comedy writer. But I love that the quote anchors the comic in the earthy and the real. The comic just always seemed a more grown-up creative response to the strange business of life. I hope that English literature can get through its own regrettable current period of po-faced adolescence and embrace the wisdom of silliness once again.