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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
July 2021 41
But don’t make our mistake of analysing it
who are better than the average and comedy men who
are worse. That all seems a stretch and not much of a
recipe for a belly laugh.
The 20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson
shared this view of the corrective purpose of laughter;
specifically, he felt, laughter is intended to return the
comic character to conformity with his society, whose
logic and conventions were rejected when “he slackens
in the attention that is due to life”. Even less persuasively
he said that tragedy is concerned with individuals,
especially perhaps important individuals, and comedy
with classes.
The English essayist William Hazlitt, claimed in ‘On
Wit and Humour’ that “Man is the only animal that
laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck
with the dierence between what things are, and what
they ought to be”. Humour, he said, is “describing the
ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by
comparing or contrasting it with something else]”. Again
it’s hardly a recipe for when it is moral and tasteful to
regard something as worth a laugh.
Such distinctions persist into more
modern and sophisticated treatments
of the subject. Sigmund Freud, in ‘Wit
and its Relation to the Unconscious’
(1905), said that wit is made, but
humour is found. Laughter, according
to Freud, is prompted by “actions that
appear immoderate and inappropriate,
at excessive expenditures of energy:
it expresses a pleasurable sense of
the superiority felt on such occasions”.
A cousin of smugness then. Not such
a modern concept.
T
here are as many strains of comedy as there
are strategies to make someone laugh.
Common characteristics of comedy include:
pointed deployment of language, varying
from vernacular speech to puns and
wordplay; addressing taboo subjects,; and use of
incongruence and striking juxtaposition. Sometimes
comedies rely on physical, slapstick, sexual, latrine or
crude humour: low comedy. Others rely on social
commentary, unlikely situations, and language: high
comedy. There are dozens of subgenres which often
share strategies, including the use of stock characters
and mistaken identity plots.
The Canadian critic Northrop Fry saw the seasons,
starting with the Spring, as the basis for the four genres
of comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony/satire.
Western humour theory begins
with Plato, who attributed to Socrates
the crude view that the essence of the
ridiculous is an ignorance in the weak,
who are thus unable to retaliate when
ridiculed.
Later Aristotle, in his ‘Poetics’,
proclaimed that an ugliness that does
not disgust is fundamental to humour.
He wrote, depressingly, that comedy
originated in phallic songs and that,
like tragedy, it began in improvisation.
Tragedy, he ordained, features men
Comedy: keep it subtle
and egalitarian
By Michael Smith
Socrtes
MEDIA
42 July 2021
The striking feature of modern art, according to the
German novelist Thomas Mann, was that it no longer
acknowledged the separation of tragic and comic or the
dramatic classifications of tragedy and comedy but saw
life as tragicomedy. Let’s upgrade this to accept that the
best comedy, certainly political comedy in a world of
suering and doom, incorporates elements of tragedy.
Ricky Gervais, who wrote ‘The Oce’ and other less
successful modern satires, takes many risks with his
comedy: he believes comedy is “to get us through stu,
and I deal in taboo subjects because I want to take the
audience to a place it hasn’t been before, even for a split
second. Most oence comes from when people mistake
the subject of a joke with the actual target”.
According to John Cleese, of ‘Monty Python, the Life
of Brian’ etc: “Political correctness started out as a good
idea, which is, ‘Let’s not be mean to people’, and I’m in
favour of that despite my age…The main thing is to try
to be kind. But that then becomes a sort of indulgence
of the most oversensitive people in your culture, the
people who are most easily upset”. But nobody serious
argues the standard should be subjective. The standard
should be what a reasonable person would thing
oensive to the most vulnerable in society. Speaking on
BBC Radio 4, he went on: “From the point of creativity,
if you have to keep thinking which words you can use
and which you can’t, then that will stifle creativity. The
main thing is to realise that words depend on their
context. Very literal-minded people think a word is a
word but it isn’t”. He is right that words may indeed have
non-literal significance but again, where appropriate,
that is also precisely the significance for which their
oensiveness should be assessed. It is a straw man
argument.
Rowan Atkinson, who acted Mr Bean and Blackadder,
was recently asked whether Comedy should only kick
up. Like Cleese, Atkinson has long been a bellicose
reactionary: “What if there’s someone extremely smug,
arrogant, aggressive, self-satisfied, who happens to be
below in society? They’re not all in houses of parliament
or in monarchies. There are lots of extremely smug and
self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower
down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a
proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes
about absolutely anything”.
But smug people lower down in society will always be
framed. If they are framed as smug satirising them will
be ethical; if they are, however, framed as being “lower
down” there is a certainty the eect will be ugly.
Of course Comedy is the handmaid of subtlety and the
handling of sensitivities like this is at the heart of the
art.
In his recent book, ‘Ha! The science of when we laugh
and why’, neuroscientist Scott Weems reviews a welter
of academic studies, including those that have used
scanning to show which parts of the brain respond when
we encounter something funny. In the book, he posits a
theory: essentially, that humour is a form of
psychological processing, a coping mechanism that
helps people to deal with complex and contradictory
messages, a “response to conflict and confusion in our
brain”.
This, in part, he says, is why we laugh in response to
dark, confusing or tragic events that, on the face of it,
shouldn’t be funny at all.
In ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, Stephen
Dedalus artfully defines pity and terror:
“Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the
presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human
suerings and unites it with the suerer. Terror is the
feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of
whatsoever is grave and constant in human suerings
and unites it with the secret cause”. Perhaps a good
definition of humour is “the feeling which arrests the
mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and
constant in human flourishing and unites it with the
secret cause”.
Slapstick has little enough to do with a secret cause
for human aairs and on that basis the worthiest
humour is risk-taking and esoteric, finding common
ground between comedian, audience, and that secret
cause — being Fate, God or whatever.
Blunderbuss comedy that fails to recognise that there
is a secret cause tends not to edify, or to fall flat.
Anyway, as a good egalitarian, for me comedy, if it is
political, must also meet a minimum threshold. it must
aict the comfortable or comfort the aicted. There are
no good jokes at the expense of the vulnerable.
So, the best humour is esoteric and egalitarian.
On that basis: No to Les Dawson and Mrs Brown’s
Boys, to Gervais’ later speculative comedy assaults; big
question marks over those with political taints like Louis
CK and Woody Allen.
Yes to the likes of The Thick of It, Ali G, the Oce,
Monty Python, Seinfeld, Father Ted and, at their best,
Apres March and Callan’s Kicks.
And No to the Comedic value of analysing Comedy.
Rown Atkinson s Blck Adder.
Après Mtch
Of course Comedy
is the handmaid
of subtlety and
the handling of
sensitivities like
this is at the heart
of the art
