Send in the clowns
Comedy is a representation of common life: its end is to show the faults of particular characters on the stage, to correct the disorder of the people by the fear of ridicule.
– René Rapin
So why are writers of “serious” prose more respected than those who go for the funny?
I know that many have wondered this, but – being guilty too of this probably misplaced value – I’m still looking for a convincing answer.
Why, for example, is P.G. Wodehouse – prolific and ne’er a word out of place – considered a lesser writer than F. Scott Fitzgerald who really only wrote one great book, and who has no sense of humour at all?
Aside from the blithe what-ho and naivety of it all, I suspect part of it has to do with the misconception that writing comedic texts is somehow a perfunctory act – despite the many tortured admissions to the contrary.
Writers of satire get ranked somewhere between the two, hailed for incisive social commentary but still perceived as somewhat limited, and maybe not quite humane enough to cuddle up to.
There is a presumption that those who write about despair, decay and destruction have a deeper understanding of the human condition than those who see life as a farce. I take this as an admission that we’re all more familiar with the dark and dull battle than with giggles and glee – the elation of laughter a welcome but only occasional interruption of the mainstay gloom.
We place more value on the serious because we want to be taken seriously. No matter how pedestrian, we want our daily dramas to have weight.
Of course there are those like Bellow, Kafka, Joyce, Chekhov and early Roth, etc., who manage to combine existential angst and bordering on the burlesque comedy. But it’s interesting how many readers fail to see the humour – preferring them as companions in misery.
And then of course there’s the pervasive archetype of the sad clown. We like that one in particular – a smug reassurance that those who earn their living peddling the funny side are even more miserable than we are.
Alas, alack, and pass the rubber chicken.
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Comment
- Lorne Michaels said it some years ago: “Intellectuals get uncomfortable with the idea of fun.” And who decides what’s important in literature?
There you go.
— Derek Jun 14, 1:58am # - A funny thing happened on my way to this comment thread tonight.
Hey!
I just flew in from Chicago and boy, are my phrases tired!
Yeah!
Take my novel – please!
Yes! Thank you!
I’m not so sure the only choices are simply starkly between dark gloom death and despair, and farce.
Some of my most revered authors are encyclopedically complete that way. Pynchon sure is.
Marquez. Grass. Shakespeare’s got all of it working, even in that bleak Scottish play. Ondaatje’s no clown but there’s stunning beauty mm? Beauty isn’t the opposite of farce is it?
Maybe because farce diminishes beauty, maybe because beauty is what should be at the heart of serious literature, because even though comedy does heal, even though it has a dialectic purpose, it can’t get near the instructive confirmation of genuine witness, that the best writing is, to the beauty of life.
— Juke Moran Jun 14, 4:34am # - “You know Manningham’s story of the burgher’s wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had seen him in Richard III and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate, answered from the capon’s blankets: William the conqueror came before Richard III.”
J.J.
— August Jun 14, 7:16pm # - Didn’t a night on the town in Athens end with a satyr-play, and not the tragedy?
Dying is easy, comedy is hard. It’s true, though. Comedy—real comedy, not the pallative of hyuks—looks effortless while encompassing the totality of human experience and going, “Yeah, this really is absurd sometimes, isn’t it?” What fools we mortals be and all.
But, to disagree with Juke, comedy is not farce. (Farce can be comedy, but not all comedy is farce, blah blah.) A single comic line can cut deeper to the bone than the most gut-wrenching tragedy. And comedy celebrates the beauty of life by recognizing that sometimes it’s just chaotic, silly, dumb and wonderful. To stand in rapt awe of everything is appropriate from time to time, but we still have to live in this world.
As for critical favoritism for the glum seriousness in literature: could it be that their idea of the “truth” is the gritty stuff of life that they themselves prefer to confront only through the page?
— Scott Jun 14, 7:18pm # - Did someone mention Shakespeare’s contemporary, Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote that great ‘Pynchonian’ novel? (Or is it Pynchon writing ‘Cervantesque’ burlesque?)
Highly respected like ‘the serious’, truly enjoyed like the comedians.
— Raf Jun 14, 8:05pm # - I’ve always liked the way Piet Hein put it:
“Taking fun
as simply fun
and earnestness
in earnest
shows how thoroughly
thou none
of the two
discernest.”
— dimmo Jun 15, 1:19am # - Wodehouse is more of a wordsmith and has better writing craft than Fitzgerald. There. I said it. With knobs on.
— Von Riesling Jun 15, 4:57am # - I asked myself the same question for some time and finally I came to the conclusion that drama writers are more respected simply because there are not so much good funny writers. The same thing happens in film, those comedies with no real comedy, you know? They’re just fun for a while, nothing else. Now, Woody Allen, that’s comedy.
— Ana Jun 16, 4:52am # - Much Obliged Gail. Thanks for reminding me. Jeeves always gave me a good laugh.
I prefer comedy btw.
— Ray Jun 17, 4:02am # - But the difference between the comic and tragic is miniscule. I submit:
1) Napoleon, who said that if Phedre sits down (in Racine), the whole thing’s a farce – or similar.
2) Hamlet, with its preposterous storyline: your old man poisoned in the ear by his brother, people wasted behind the arras, nutty girl Ophelia and a marvellously silly punch-up. (I see Ben Stiller as Hamlet and Billy Crystal as Claudius, maybe Stiffler’s Mom as Gertrude.
One step from the sublime to the ridiculous?
— roger Jun 17, 11:13pm # - “Humor is the the wine of this life
mixed with the water of the afterlife.”
—Alsatian artist and poet Jean Arp
— Andy Jun 21, 11:33am # - And with great pain
I perceived
No mention of Twain
— Jack Lobaugh Jul 17, 10:49am #
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