Divine Comedy, Spirited Laughter

Here is my paper in response to the recent City of Angels film festival:



I believe it was Mel Brooks who said that, "I cut my finger, that’s tragedy. A man walks
into an open sewer and dies, that’s comedy." Comedy is the inverting of our expectations. Comedy is tragedy plus time. Comedy is no one thing and everything, just so long as it’s funny. And just about everything can be made funny, when looked at from the right point of view. These are some of the things that I was reminded of at this year’s film festival. It’s good to be occasionally reminded of the power of comedy, because it has the potential to be the most subversive of film genres. One is more apt to let things slide if they are being made to laugh than if they are just being made to watch. So as Christians, we must ask ourselves, what makes us laugh? What makes God laugh (or does He laugh at all)? What are the Divine possibilities of comedy? After all, I suppose it’s important.

"Here’s the Treasury report, sir. I hope you’ll find it clear."
"Clear? Huh. Why a four-year-old child could understand this report." He turns to his secretary, "Run out and find me a four-year-old child, I can’t make head or tail of it."

If God doesn’t laugh at the Marx brothers, then He doesn’t laugh at all. Duck Soup, in my humble opinion, laugh for laugh may be the funniest movie ever made, with the exception of Airplane!, of course. Comedy has always tended towards the anarchic, but the Marx’s take it to its logical end – utter chaos, and comic brilliance, where everything that can happen, does (and then some). The comedy of this film lies in slapstick and satire, however we’re often so overwhelmed by the level and quantity of the slapstick, that the satire is almost missed. Groucho endlessly throws out his puns and one-liners, Chico provides the foil to Groucho, and Harpo stands there innocently until he honks his horn, cuts off your tie, or places his leg in your hands. But beyond the sight gags and verbal wit, the film takes aim at governments, institutions, war, and politics all in under seventy minutes. Why is it important? Why is it funny? I think both questions can be answered in the fact that the film emphasizes human weaknesses and fallibilities such as our pride. It takes the craziness of the world we know and exaggerates it to comic proportions, creating a world that reflects our own, and one that we may even secretly think is our own. The Marx brothers have a way of inverting logical responses to situations which makes it funny. But it’s also funny because when we sit down and think about it, we realize that really they respond just the way that we do, but they take joy in exposing our irrationalities -- or even our humanness.

"...The other important joke for me is one that’s usually attributed to Groucho Marx, but I think it appears originally in Freud’s ‘Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious,’ and it goes like this. I’m paraphrasing, ‘I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.’ That’s the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women."

Woody Allen is perhaps the most consistent and personal of American filmmakers. After a while, you just start laughing before the joke is even delivered, because you know it’s coming and it’s going to be funny. But unlike the Marx brothers, the comedy of Woody Allen has an edge of sadness. If the Marx brothers were low brow, then Woody Allen is high brow. Where the Marx brothers will be funny and raise your spirits for the day, Woody Allen might leave you down, though you’ll probably laugh a good deal on your way there. He is the disappointed atheist, and much of his humor comes in the face of an empty universe and the disappointments of relationships. He laughs, and we along with him, because it is better to laugh than to cry. He recognizes imperfections, his above all, and makes us laugh at them, while never allowing us to forget what they really are. His is the comedy of reality, or reality as he sees it. It’s funny, to be sure, but I don’t think God laughs during a Woody Allen movie. I think He cries, because Allen is so close to the truth, but just can’t grab onto it. I do, however, think that it is appropriate for us to laugh, because while we may recognize that he doesn’t have the whole story right, he does have a lot of it right, and he is unusually insightful into the human condition. Annie Hall in particular has a way of exposing truths about life and relationships that we all think, but rarely are able to express (need I mention Marshall McLuhan?). Like Chaplin, he has a way of blending pathos and comedy in just the right doses so that we recognize and experience the sad and the disappointments, but not at the expense of the joy and the humor.

The comedians of the silent era almost certainly had it tougher than comedians today because they had to rely exclusively on pantomime and physical comedy. In many ways, Buster Keaton may have been the real master of his form. In The General, as with his other films, he is able to maintain his stoic demeanor in the face of some amazing stunts. For Keaton, there was no cinematic trickery to his acrobatics. They are primarily filmed in long shots so that the audience can see that they’re real. But as he barrels from one absurd situation to another, we begin to recognize that physical comedy reminds us that we don’t have control of the outside world. As eager as we may be to hold onto things, sometimes we just can’t, and Keaton finds the humor of that reality. His film isn’t profound, but it is memorable and even life affirming, by pointing out the goodness despite the absurdity of the situations. Panelist Ron Austin pointed out that according to Plato, comedy is the gap between the real and the ideal, or if you prefer, between ourselves and God. It becomes funny when we start taking ourselves too seriously, and Buster Keaton never took himself too seriously. The comedy that will last and span the ages is not performed with bitterness or with a mean spirit, but with compassion and love for humanity. I think God can laugh with that.

"Boy would I like to see you give some old harpie the three in one!"
"Don’t be vulgar, Jane. Let us be crooked, but never common."

Of all the various forms of comedy, satire is probably the most critically respected, and Preston Sturges the finest satirist to make a film. The Lady Eve is a screwball comedy which comes with its conventions, but it is also a satire of relationships, stereotypes, and the American aristocracy. The film has been called a metaphor for the fall which is evident by the title, the opening credits, and the motif of snakes. Plato’s gap theory also comes into play here as Henry Fonda’s character is continuously searching for his "ideal" woman. The problem, Sturges points out, is that we are all only human – the bad one’s probably aren’t as bad as we think and the good ones not as good. There are no ideal people, only real ones. As Monica Ganas wrote in her essay of the film, "In this film, people can only become good people when they are forgiven for being bad people." Sounds like a pretty accurate view of the relationship between God and man. The comedy of Preston Sturges pokes fun at our phony "window dressings" and gets right to the heart of the matter. His delight is revealing the flaws of society, and we laugh all the harder because more often than not, we recognize that it’s true.

The world of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro is the theatre of the absurd. The world of Delicatessen is a world exaggerated by fish eye lenses, quirky characters, unusual settings, and elaborate production design. It is a post-apocalyptic world that was described as a parody Inferno (Dante’s not Argento’s). In this surrealist dark comedy that’s part Bunuel and more than a little Terry Gilliam, the horror of the situation is offset by its sense of humor. The comedy of this film relieves what might otherwise be an unbearable existence. It’s probably not by accident that the hero of the film is a clown who has a way of bringing joy to a chaotic and deteriorating world. He is the optimist in a world seemingly without hope, reminding us that humor can keep us going in the darkest of times.

Over the course of the festival, a recurring theme maintains that laughter is a grace. Comedy, humor, and laughter may not only be a means to an end, but may be ends in themselves. There are many different types of comedy and many different uses for it. Through it all, I think that God does laugh, and even if He doesn’t, then I think we should. Comedy is about absurdity, joy, sorrow, flaws, faults, inconsistencies, and ultimately truth. We laugh because it’s funny and we laugh because it’s true. We are imperfect people in an imperfect world, and nothing reminds us of this more clearly and entertainingly than a good comedy. Comedy may indeed be Divine and the deepest laughter should be an outpouring of our spirit.