by David Phelps
Man is a creature of habit, and the task of the artist is to try to break these habits.”— Jean Renoir
My friend Miriam has graciously asked me for some words on comedy as part of some margin notes to her programming of Artists and Models, maybe, a film I haven't seen beyond the opening 5 minutes of the Walsh version, and Ishtar, a childhood favorite. Research curtailed by a stolen laptop and aimlessness, thoughts tentative as always, whatever follows was written in appreciation of having something to do, and entirely for my benefit in writing it. And possibly one day reading it.
A short-stood theory of comedy, or a type: a logic that makes perfect sense when it never should. Inevitably, as in tragedy, one man's intentions are at odds with the world around him. A man trips on a banana by setting up one logic--a swarthy businessman hoofing down the street--to have it broken by the physical laws of the world conspiring against him unknowingly. And the joke works because the audience expects it as much as the businessman (or Sturges hero), who means to walk like he owns the world and turns out to be its pawn, doesn't.
Likewise, the joke's always on those who try to explain it; the idea of defining comedy is funny. Cary Grant's face in The Awful Truth is, as always in McCarey's domestic picaresques, given ample time to react, and is funny; ascribing logic to him would be illogical except that what's so preposterous about his expressions isn't their total preposterousness, but also their logic--perfectly logical reactions brought to their breaking point. What's really funny is that the audience knows why he looks why he does, as if there could be any reason to look ridiculous. But eventually everything looks ridiculous.
Tati's comedies, like Keaton's and Bresson's (L'Argent a desperately funny film, down to the gangster's hand reaching in frame to slap his girlfriend's centered ass, as they do in movies), are established in mechanical ballets, logical systems that show up sense--and in Playtime, all of civilization with its rules and rulered space--as nonsense. Tati jumps up to grab some restaurant decoration nobody else can reach and gets it by pulling down the ceiling; Buster Keaton, in The General, sets off a cannonball at completely the wrong moment and hits an enemy train anyway as it turns a curve straight into the explosion; the kids in Mon Oncle who lob people into poles just by whistling; a hand in Pickpocket reaching for a purse (or holding it?) only for another hand--the law's--to grab it as it would grab the money; the map by the elevator in Playtime that shows a series of color-coded lines criss-crossed in every direction: What's funny in all these cases is the world going to hell as logically and efficiently as possible.
Pickpocket's ingenious heist-as-waltz is funny because, as a friend puts it, "it doesn't show what's natural but necessary," in typical Bresson style--and because as a waltz, half the dancers don't know they're dancing. The gag where a thief replaces a woman's bag with a newspaper could be out of Chaplin, Bresson's hero, based as it is in one person knowing a total stranger so perfectly in their movements--Bresson's characters, like Chaplin's, are human machines, totally deliberate and expressive in the smallest motions--that their every gesture can be exploited. And the simple motion of a hand reaching in frame and fucking with a girl whose activities in a train station are as much routine as the thieves', indicates an entire thought process of the thief, never articulated, but filmed diagrammatically as a textbook guide. What's funny, beyond an unlikely event shown matter-of-factly as clockwork, is that it exists almost purely as a signifier, not what's natural, but essential: signifying an entire train of thought, signifying a particular event in the Platonic form of a manual guide and operating as smoothly as the tracking shot that follows the bag passed among thieves into one's coat at the back of the line. Signifiers, inevitably, are funny, for being as precise (the connotation of a signifying detail, a cigar or a fanny pack) as they are abstract (standing in for an entire type), as meaningful (a light-switch switched-off in The Smiling Lieutenant signaling sex) as they are reductive (but just sex--Lubitsch, like Bresson, uses such small gestures as language to be decoded).
Lubitsch built an entire form out of the sly innuendo of synecdoche; a slack, sunken fat man with a camera slung to his belly for decoration who plods on-screen in Playtime and stares at the camera like some actual tourist popping by the movie set to see what it's for, is funny, not for doing anything, but for doing nothing--he's a type, precisely a schlub in every wrinkle of his clothes and lumpen face--and a type of schlub that's impossibly funny: swollen and collapsed, inflated and deflated, grandiose and totally pathetic, every schlub and this schlub, who couldn't be anyone else but himself. Tati, who always finds uninteresting people really interesting, clearly likes him for being both unassuming and completely, obliviously distinctive in an anonymous city--another man's intentions unknowingly at odds with the world around him. His costume, with clothes for five more schlubs, says everything anyone could possibly know about him, a fat man whittled down to form.
Signifiers, and types, pigeonholing standard personalities and philosophies into preposterous patterns of dress and comportment--carrying the logic of a man's beliefs to totally illogical ends--leave, at the same time, everything to the viewer's imagination to anticipate ridiculous scenes. Standard schools of comedy say that comedy is surprise--but, as when Keaton's train track leaves a train nowhere to go but its own doom, comedy forces viewers to expect the absolute absurd.
One smartass hillbilly jig--
Thought it was happy every after
When it all begun
Wife askin' if I loved her
And if I'd seen the films of Bergman
--isn't enough without a tradition:
Loved women, booze, and cows
And skippin' to the loo
Yes everything was happy
Till I read Albert Camus
What's funny isn't even a hick bomb defuser--deflected expectations, irony and hypocrisy, Rita Hayworth made to make out with a turtle by virtue of rear projection, in both senses--as Marxist farmers--confirming hopes that art and theory be applied to life.
You may say that art ain't real
When yar out there with yar corn
But try not having a hard-on
When yar watchin' hardcore porn
A man falls on a banana peel and his basic intention of walking is countermined by colder intentions of the universe. But Tex Avery cartoons are funny in reverse--the characters' intentions made physically manifest at the cost of every physical law. In Avery, the logic that makes perfect sense barring habitual expectations can be internal--a wolf's phallic contortions, or a prison-suit's lines jumping off the prisoner--as in Rubens, a glance carrying physical properties (a spot-light in King-Size Canary); or structural--Northwest Hounded Police's impossible premise setting the internal logic of the film that Droopy, like God but boreder, will appear wherever a wolf goes, as grandma does in Red Hot Riding Hood. But the logic can also be purely graphic--the long shots of an erected canon in Blitz Wolf and an endless free-fall in Heckling Hare making tedium of grandiosity and terror--a wolf running off the celluloid frame, or around a title car into the forest and back in Swing Shift Cinderella--a cat piling two blocks on top of each other in rapid succession to scale a window ledge; or musical, as in Deputy Droopy, in which every hoot and holler is nearly precipitated by the soundtrack.
Played-at anarchists like Bruce Conner, the Marx Brothers, Howard Hawks, and Frank Tashlin--Hobbesians--speculate unbridled instinct as apocalyptic freedom from codes of decency and reason and, in Tashlin's case, society's branding human roles like soup cans (the ending of The Disorderly Orderly)--while Hawks famously takes his dramas to see how these codes can be implemented and obeyed. Kubrick finds instinct and reason equally proposterous for taking the guise of the other. The funniest characters are always the most moral and the least, because anybody can recognize themselves in either; Tati's target's reason; Avery's is instinct.
Dialectics and distinctions are essential to comedy; Avery as much as Tati is the master of the type, whittled down to form just so. The ultimate joke of Avery's masterpiece Little Rural Riding Hood is that after all the preposterous oppositions--the innocent fairy tale with a bunch of hick actors who just want to get laid; the hick wolf lead then sent to a nightclub metropolis where sex is in the air, and air only, as the debonair innuendo of curling mustaches and sinuous legs; the sinuous legs of the rather titular chanteuse matched with the hick in overalls trying to keep his eyeballs in his head, leaping erect in every direction, and pummeling himself in the head with a sledgehammer as if to keep from going crazy by going insane--the ultimate joke's that all these dialectics, all these internal logics brought to preposterous, and completely understandable, conclusions, all just offer two forms of expressing the same sensations. Fear and desire are expressed in identical foot-stomping hoots of rage (the wolf in Red Hot Riding Hood looking the same chasing skirt as he does running from her sexpot grandma); the chanteuse's snaking dance and the hick's bent-metal responses both meaning sex; the urban wolf's violent and nonchalant safeguarding of his cousin more or less the same as his cousin's self-directed rages that lead him to need safeguarding; the urban wolf being one expression of pure sex, wrapped in leather and mink, as the rural wolf's another, wrapped in nothing: and all these characters being parodies of parodic stereotypes, and complete celebrations of them. What's funniest in Little Rural Riding Hood, as in Shakespeare's sex comedies, is that it's impossible not to sympathize with any of the idiots on display, not for their ridiculously precise and precisely ridiculous forms, but for the fact that they've all got their all-too familiar reasons.
In comedy, everyone's got their reducto ad absurdum reasons; Wallace Stevens' "the civillest of odours" with which a girl hopes to win an evil giant's heart, is funny for nailing poetry's reasons as beauty and decency (fairness vs. fairness) and meaning as not only florid impossibilities, but irreconcilable florid impossibilities; the old rush poster proclaiming "Still a virgin? JOIN SAE" is funny for offering all the same frat-reasons in exactly the wrongest way.
Jerry Lewis, by any of these standards, doesn't qualify as funny, but something else: installation art? Where funny people have their logic and reasons, Lewis has almost none, except to act exactly the opposite as he should. The opening of The Ladies Man finds Jerry running in fright from gorgeous women trying to seduce him, the joke being that everyone's acting nonsensically for no real reason, or perhaps that Lewis likes any excuse, even a film he's making, to get beautiful girls to chase him down. What follows is a series of nonsequiturs and, as usual, deliberate inconsistencies and incongruities, from goon-Jerry to cherub-Jerry, scenes of inexplicable embarrassments and even more inexplicable wish-fulfillments (a typical pattern for his films). Where the Looney Toons animators, including Tashlin, make a mockery of their form by showing characters who live in painted frames and montages, Lewis' best gags (as director) don't so much break the fourth wall as establish it: the repeated joke in The Bellboy of rituals performed impossibly fast between a cut to somewhere else; the dollhouse in The Ladies Man; the microphone gag in the same film that leaves a crown of angry sycophants yelling silently at the camera; the final joke in The Pansy that he's Jerry Lewis and didn't get hurt and is standing in a film set for The Pansy; the casual tracking shot down to a free-range airplane's lower deck where an ancient army is rowing through the air in Cracking Up--all these gags work not by insisting on viewer complicity by revealing it, as in Avery, but in insisting on a strict division (which Avery always crossed) between the real world and the inexplicable one on-screen. As parodies, they play like parodies of the modern condition, a man caged and stranded for an audience and struggling to express himself when there's nothing but physical laws to express--if that--a la Beckett or Francis Bacon.
Which is Jerry's genius--the most expressive man in history never able to express himself, flailing to a patient camera and patient admirers in the room around him as they wait--as in Laurel and Hardy's Big Business--for him to finish a performance piece without end. In his way, Lewis is closer to contemporary Tsai-Ming Liang than any other filmmaker, their films both about people in closed spaces trying to find anything, hallucinated or real, any way, to connect to in ritual. The closest corrollary for the long shot of Jerry trying to fit a man's hat on his head is the almost identical shot in Tsai's new Visage of a model blinking and waiting as make-up's applied to her (rather titular) face.
Obviously, I haven't seen many Jerry Lewis movies.
Not very funny, but somehow great comedy despite everything--as if Lear's fool got a play of his own with the Lear family congratulating him between monologues--Lewis speaks sentences like Charlie Parker plays melodies--only Shakespeare could probably weave such webs of total nonsense from the simplest prompts. The real butt of Jerry's joke definitely isn't Jerry, but normality, never seen, except, perhaps, in the peasant-faced lovers he struggles to impress long after they've hinted he's their one true love.
Lancelot du Lac will never be funny, but in the right mood, it's perfectly comic: a parade of clashing armor, deadly skirmishes fought by knight-suits with only a colored flag to suggest an entire personality. The comedy is humanity having to express itself (the noblest aims and basest jealousies) so inhumanely on every level. Inevitably, the comic view is cosmic: being able to abstract familiar things to types and patterns and blatant inconsistencies. Renoir's and Lubitsch's and Ophuls' films are just as despairing as Bresson's, maybe more so because the jokes don't alleviate the despair. Orson Welles, who over and over posited the artist's work as a comedian's--hijacks and hijinks--went out insisting on parody as the highest form of art--or the only form of art. Pound called himself a satirist (taking a beat from Dante); Joyce said he just wanted readers to find Ulysses "damn funny." Silence, exile, and punning. Metempsychosis: and one thing, punned, is everything else. There aren't dialectics and distinctions but those people invent on farms and cities. Probably everything's funny, among, and usually with, other qualities.
David Felt, Victoria, Canada, Aug. 2009.
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