Acting Funny on the Catalan Stage

Writing about Comedy without Laughing

Since this book is concerned with what is comic in performance (although it merges the ideas of humour, laughter, and comedy), it is useful to define the field before venturing an analysis. The following approach, combining detailed somatic description with anatomical accuracy, might help in this context:

Humor may […] derive from the distribution of pain among characters whose buffoonery precludes the viewer’s, reader’s or listener’s identification. To cite a familiar example, Moe raises two fingers in a horizontal V-shape and impels them toward the eye-sockets of Curly, who interposes his upraised hand and catches the V at its apex, thereby inhibiting the fingers from achieving their end. After expressing his satisfaction through the repeated utterance of a laugh-syllable commonly rendered ‘nyuk’, the attention of Curly is diverted by the right hand of Moe as it flutters up to and above eye-level while the audience, though presumably not Curly, hears a high-pitched tweeting sound. While thus distracting Curly with one hand, Moe strikes him sharply in the abdomen with the other, at which the audience, though presumably not Curly, hears a strike upon the tympanum. The final ‘nyuk’ of Curly is thus interrupted so that he may retrieve his forcibly ejected breath, and this new breath’s more gradual expulsion is so operated upon by his larynx as to form the sound commonly rendered ‘ooo’.

There are three and a half more paragraphs along these lines and, of course, such comments do not help at all. Or rather, they help to show us how hard it is to write sensitively about comedy. Their author, Sir Anthony Forte-Bowell, does not exist and neither does the journal in which his comments appeared, Cinema/Not Cinema (although you wish they both ←1 | 2→would). The Coen Brothers are just reminding us through their parody – presented as a preface to the script of The Big Lebowski – that talking about comedy tends to destroy it or create a parallel, sometimes unwitting, comedy of its own.¹ Cage the bird and the song will never sound natural. As Elwyn and Katherine White put it in their classic anthology of American comic writing: ‘Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.’² The philosophical comedian Yves Cusset is blunter: ‘Either you laugh or you wonder why, and the two extremes of the alternative are completely exclusive.’³

When studying comedy it is, therefore, a natural step to underplay anything that can be defined as purely comic. Despite or perhaps because of the number of books and learned journals on humour and comedy, it is difficult to think of so prominent a subject the study of which tends to deny its very essence.⁴ One common approach is to establish comedy as a developing philosophy firmly embedded within history and there are always those who adopt the tactic of arguing that it is as serious and profound as tragedy.⁵ You have only to reverse the equation and imagine justifying the study of tragedy from a completely comic angle to realize the peculiarity of such assertions.

Even within analyses which acknowledge broader definitions, categorizing subgenres of comedy can verge on the potential relegation of ←2 | 3→those styles apparently lower in literary, moral status. Hence discussion of the ‘destructive laughter’ of farce and of its ‘abasement’ of what is human (and humane).⁶ The inevitable need to subdivide the field can just as well be identified as a wish to control a beast constantly threatening to break out of its chains. The animal tamer is there either to restrain laughter as the ridicule of some deficiency or permit it for a limited time as festive, fooling, potentially anarchic rejoicing.⁷

Seen from the perspective of what makes us laugh, one can perceive a similarly lofty remove – that of the policeman or the doctor – in the three principal theories of humour:⁸ (1) the Superiority Theory, encapsulated by Hobbes as the ‘Sudden Glory’ (‘Gloriatio Subita’) of laughter produced by ‘the apprehension of some deformed thing in another’ whereby, in a theatricalized metaphor, those laughing ‘suddenly applaud themselves’;⁹ (2) the Relief or Release Theory according to which laughing, in Freud’s terms, lifts an ‘inhibition’;¹⁰ (3) the Incongruity Theory whereby to laugh we must see something absurd and, as Kant had it, undergo ‘an expectation which is suddenly reduced to nothing’.¹¹ Even a four-word gag, thought through, is ripe for all three approaches: ‘Take my wife – please!’¹² And ←3 | 4→variant explanations can sometimes combine these theories without ever entirely avoiding the implicit notion that, by putting Jack back in his box, he will cease to shock or surprise us.¹³ (Unfortunately, this Introduction is not immune to that notion.)

Comedy and Nation

Needless to say, these views do not automatically seem to lend themselves to rigid definitions of national and linguistic contexts. The ramifications of their formulations are just too general, contradictory or messy. They also tend to rely on an assumed gelotophobia (a fear of being laughed at). More confusing still, under different circumstances, many of the scenarios conceived of as comic could also induce pity or sympathy.

Taking a slightly different approach, a clinical psychologist claims that all humour and all theories of it can be summarized according to polarities. Here are the ‘polarities compared solely by feeling tone’:¹⁴