The Seriousness in Comedic Dissent
"Comedy, we have to admit, was never one of the most honoured of the Muses. She was in her origin, short of slaughter, the loudest expression of the little civilization of men" (15). So says Victorian-era English poet and novelist George Meredith. Comedy acts as a cultural indicator, as an elevation from stress, a dissenting force from authority, a method of ridicule, a way to highlight an issue and a vulgar expression of personal urges. Comedy, while having very many applications, can be used to incite important change during very dire and trying circumstances. It is because we exist in a world that is filed with strife and hardship that we need a seriously comedic response. All life ends in death- that is to say that there are no lasting actions in this world for a living being and that all struggle is just that, struggle. It is to this challenge that the true comic tries to address through the meeting of polar opposites as seen by the mixture of the always-laughing playboy and the never-laughing killjoy. Howard Jacobson, comic novelist and winner of the prestigious Man Booker prize explains during an interview called "The Return of the Wry" that the birth of comedy is the very same as the birth of tragedy. He explains that we enjoy things because they are invariably linked to their demise. If we (mortal men and women) were locked in a state of constant suspension from suffering, there would be nothing to rejoice and that would be an intolerable experience, somewhat akin to limbo. Therefore, to be successful in meeting these challenges, we must employ a kind of serious comedy that both aims to accomplish a goal and simultaneously ridicules itself and the situation with a dissenting merriment.
As mentioned before, it is because we deal with difficult problems that we must laugh at them. In "Laughing All the Way to Freedom?: Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy and Democracy in South Africa", author Julia Katherine Seirlis tells a narrative of the struggles of South Africa during a period of racial separation known as apartheid, and the effects on stand-up comedians. Under apartheid, a comedian or any person critical of the government was jailed and/or beaten. Nelson Mandela, a comedian in his own right that laughs in the face of adversity, was part of "the struggle" which ended apartheid and started a new era of democracy in South Africa. Even in a democratic South Africa, it is still a very dangerous place to live. It is from this danger that South African comedians feel they have a right and an obligation to laugh about their situations. Comedian John Vlismas mocks the total lack of danger in Australia:
"Australians have no natural predators. Nothing. I went to a game park and said, 'Show me a vicious beast. In my country, we have savage monsters: rhinos, buffalos, PAGAD. Vicious. Dangerous. I want to see a flatulent fanged foaming at the mouth'- and he showed me a wombat. This isn't a beast. I've got Nigerian friends. A wombat is not a beast. It looks like a Care Bear came home drunk and pomped a slipper."
It's a point to note that PAGAD stands for People Against Guns And Drugs- a popular satiric reference to gangsters who use guns and drugs. This kind of humor is a total deviation from the seriousness of tragedy. During the interview with Howard Jacobson, he explains that when God casts Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, it symbolizes the basic tragic plot line, which is a fall from grace. Just as in many Greek tragedies a person or number of people aspire to rise above the toils and suffering of their low lives and end up having quite horrific things happen to them. In Howard's example, Adam and Eve are tempted by the fruit of Knowledge and because of this, they are cast out of the perfect garden. Comedy, contrastingly, is an acceptance of the world as it is and comedy often expresses this acceptance in it's vulgarity and body humor.
Harry Levin is an emeritus professor of literature at Harvard University. In his essay "Playboys and Killjoys: An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Comedy" he asserts that the character of the killjoy is "the figure who seeks to block sex, youth, ... in general to arrest life's self-renewing autonomies. He is the potentially frightening but, in comedy, always futile agent of repressive authority, sterile formalism and legalism" (51). The playboy, the antithesis to the killjoy, is youthful, highly sexual (with emphasis on recreation over procreation), and celebrates folly, bodily functions and other sorts of "pointless" recreation. Levin and Jacobson simultaneously point out that neither by themselves are capable of understanding true comedy. It follows then, based on Jacobson's argument that comedy shares a source with tragedy, that neither the playboy or the killjoy could properly understand tragedy either. As Jacobson draws the comparison between living in the Garden of Eden and an intolerable life (similar to limbo without anything positive or negative about the world they live in), it would seem that a true comic must temper comedy with tragedy. Levin makes an important note that "The propensity towards ridicule seems to have been at it's strongest among the satirists in the Age of Reason" (50). This seems to be a strong support for the need of balance between reason and absurdity, that when one becomes prevalent, the other naturally rises to suppress it, to seek a natural harmony and to correct the system. Often, when the ruling favor is tipped towards rationality and structure, the laws that are enacted actually give power to dissent. A prime example of this is in "On the Uses of Obscenity in Live Stand-Up Comedy" by Susan Seizer. She asserts that the ban of foul language by the FCC changes certain language into a transgressive act, giving it power "in direct proportion to the extent to which they are cordoned off as taboo" (210). True and proper comedians, as outlined in this essay, must use both forces in balance while retaining both within themselves. Levin explains this balance where one side "generates satire, the latter alliance tends towards romance. Comedy is compounded of the interaction of the two, varying in its emphasis from one mode to the other" (96).
We see, then, that comedy, proper comedy and not the playboy lightheartedness, as it's explained previously, doesn't aim to merely entertain or make light of the situation. Quite contrary, it seeks to address the dire and possibly life threatening circumstance with a balance of spritely wit and hard-nosed determinism. George Meredith sums up this balance by saying that "Genuine humor and true wit, require a sound and capacious mind, which is always a grave one" (15). It is with both of these tools that we, each of us true comedians, have the possibility to laugh at death and overcome overwhelming adversity. For without both, you have neither and are destitute in an unbearable world. Simply, to utilize merely foolishness or merely sternness would mean unsuccessful attempts towards one's aspirations. Levin highlights true comedy further with "The most protean aspect of comedy is its potentiality for transcending itself, for responding to the conditions of tragedy by laughing in the darkness" (132). The transcending properties of comedy are due to the "gestalten" nature of utilizing polar opposites towards a single goal. Gestalt is a German word that basically means the shape or figure of the whole with the important note that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The representation of the playboy mixed with the killjoy produces something that is beyond either of them individually. This is because individually neither is functional while both together are the near-definition of what it means to be functional. All things said and considered, in order to face off any great challenge of overwhelming proportions, we must meet, within ourselves, a balance of these two factors. Harry Levin called the combination the "Comic Spirit", which could almost be read as Cosmic Spirit because in the world of Nature as well as the work of man, there must be a balance of polar opposites. Cold and warm, up and down, black and white: none of these properties are capable of existing by themselves- none are functional alone and that would be the larger significance. This is a concept that is followed much farther than that of the South African comedian or the 17th Century English page. Without one, we can't have the other because each opposite is part of the same balance that all other life is held in, and that is truly something to laugh about in the dark.
Jacobson, Howard. "Return of the Wry"
Sydney Writers Festival 2011: Web, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Levin, Harry. "Playboys and Killjoys: An Essay to the Theory and Practice of Comedy." New York: Oxford UP 1987. Print.
Meredith, George. "An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit." The Pennsylvania State University 2003. Web.
Seirlis, Julia Katherine. "Laughing All The Way To Freedom?: Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy And Democracy In South Africa."
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 24.4 (2011): 513-530. Academic Search Premier. Web.
Seizer, Susan. "On the Uses of Obscenity in Live Stand-Up Comedy."
Anthropological Quarterly 84.1 2011. 209-234. Academic Search Premier. web.
