Thoughts on Comedy, Part 1

A subject near and dear to my heart, Comedy.

In this installment on comedy, I wanted to ramble on about is an element of what Henri Bergson classified as the "ABSENCE OF FEELING."

An example of this can be easily seen in Buster Keaton's silent films. Keaton might fall down, get thrown off a roof or generally get thumped around, but it is ultimately humorous because he is NOT seen to be suffering. Our protagonist, Keaton, is apparently unharmed by what has happened, and it is therefore funny. If he had someone shoot him in the butt with a pellet gun (which happened in a film) and we saw him suffering and bleeding and becoming infected, it doesn't quite add to the comic.

Another, more tangentially, case is that of Wile E. Coyote. He gets blown up or falls from great heights or has endless anvils dropped on him, but he always comes out relatively unharmed. If his guts fly everywhere or he has brain damage. . .it just isn't that funny. The fact that there is a sort of absence of feeling makes it possible for the humor to flourish.

That is the physical level. But there is another level to look at. That is the emotional level. If we feel for the character in a play/show/movie it is much harder to laugh at their misfortunes. In these cases we, the viewer, identify with the character on some level and when we see them miss a train, we empathize with them. It becomes an 'us against them' situation. When you eliminate the 'them' of this equation, the humor ceases to exist.

Though that was confusing, let me give an example in one of the greatest tv comedies of all time, MASH.
When the show started we had two main protagonists, Hawkeye and Trapper. They were accompanied by a series of sidekicks, but were essentially the main characters to which we attached ourselves. Then there was the ineffective, yet non-threatening, leadership (Henry Blake) and the dual enemies of Frank Burns/Hotlips and the Army itself.

Frank Burns was the ultimate foil. If something bad happened to him, we laughed. He was a caricature, sure, but we, as viewers, had a certain absence of feeling when it came to him. We had no sympathy for him (or for Hotlips, early on) so if he was slipped a Mickey and tied up or pushed into a ditch, it was 'us' pushing 'them' into a ditch. We laughed.

Now, when we remove the Frank Burns character, the ready-made foil disappears. The funny 'them' ceases to exist, in the show, in any other respect other than the Army itself. The replacement of Burns with Charles Winchester was ineffective, because the character was made to be a fully rounded human character. He had a family, feelings and thoughts that, though not meshing with the kooky doctors, was certainly not obviously worthy of open derision (the silly 'posh' upper crust character, in general, is so outdated that it is not only ineffectual, but actually annoying, see the movie Volunteers.)

So what happened in the show was that, over time, the ABSENCE OF FEELING, in the emotional respect, was eliminated. In it's stead the characters all became the same: angry, outspoken pacifists.

The fact that we couldn't really laugh at BIG misfortunes of the characters, due to us identifying with them on a personal level, created a show where they tried to create humor out of the mineute.

The problem then spiraled out of control as they created stupider characters (Zale and Rizzo, for the love of god!) being played by inferior actors trying to make marginal material funny.

By creating feeling for the characters, we cannot laugh as heartily and are left with, at best, muted giggles.

I believe this is one of the reasons why "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" is such a tepid and humorless movie. (There are some who would disagree, but there isn't a joke in the movie that isn't telegraphed well ahead of time, the acting is too broad and the set up to the jokes is just too damn slow.) In that movie John Candy's character would have been PERFECT if he hadn't, at the end, been shown to be a character deserving of our sympathy. If he was just a pathological annoyance then the scorn we wish to heap on him is justified. But since he has a sad story, any abuse we might direct toward that character now becomes mean-spirited.

Bergson was correct. The ABSENCE OF FEELING creates an environment in which the viewer can both identify with the character on a physical and emotional level without taking pleasure in any pain that character might feel.