The Menace of Comedy

Watching Force Majeure, I was strongly put in mind of a term which to my knowledge has hardly ever been applied to recent work: the comedy of menace. If this term is heard nowadays, it is usually in relation to theatrical writing in a specific context (Britain in the late 1950s) and in particular to the early work of Harold Pinter.[i] But it strikes me as a precise characterisation of what Ruben Öustlund is up to in his film.

The comedy of menace is perhaps easier to recognise than to define. Francesca Coppa notes that menace “depends on ignorance; the terror of it stems from the vagueness of the threat. We do not know what is happening or why, and the lack of information leads us to fear the worst”. In contrast, black comedy “treats serious themes comedically, without the respect they deserve; it says too much, it says what should not be said”.[ii] That is, it makes it too clear what is really going on.

To this point, I would add that a sense of menace requires not just that characters be under threat, but that the audience empathises with them enough to feel a kind of vulnerability themselves. The effect is very different to seeing a comedy where you know something bad is going to happen to one of the characters, but you feel no empathy with them:

Tomas and Ebba (Johannes Kuhnke & Lisa Loven Kongsli) are taking a holiday with their children in a ski resort. In the face of an unexpectedly violent avalanche, Tomas abandons his wife and children to their fate. The avalanche turns out to be harmless, but Ebba cannot get over this betrayal. The incident and the themes it raises are discussed in three scenes – a dinner with a couple they met at the resort, a dinner with their old friends Fanni and Mats, and a scene between Mats and Fanni – which are masterpieces of tension and awkward comedy.

Awkward or cringe comedy, where the humour is rooted in the social embarrassment felt by the characters, has been a staple of television in particular for years. Where Force Majeure develops the form is in the length of these three scenes, and the naturalistic presentation of the characters before and during them. Larry David and David Brent are well-rounded characters, but we are never in doubt that they are comically deluded about themselves. Neither Tomas nor Ebba are presented as comic prior to the incident with the avalanche – indeed, the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the film could easily pass as a finely-observed drama of bourgeois life. The comedy is introduced slowly and inexorably, with far less plot machinery and a much more drawn-out (in a good way) pay-off than is typical of sitcoms specialising in cringe comedy.

One difference between the comedy of early Pinter and that found in Force Majeure is that the menace in the latter is not that vague. We have a pretty good idea of what’s happening and what will happen, in outline at least – indeed, it is so excruciating precisely because of this. That said, there is still menace afoot, in that we certainly fear the worst, even as it is unfolding before our eyes. This is perhaps the novel element which cringe comedy introduces to the comedy of menace: the sense of vulnerability we feel is heightened not the by the vagueness of the threat, but by its gruesome familiarity.

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[i] The Wikipedia entry on ‘Comedy of Menace’ focuses almost entirely on Pinter’s work, with a brief discussion of the article in Encore by Irving Wardle which popularised the term.

[ii] ‘The Sacred Joke: Comedy and Politics in Pinter’s Early Plays’, in The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter.

Contextual Analysis

While Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed discusses the role played by shame and shaming across contemporary society generally, it is in large part focused on internet firestorms where thousands or hundreds of thousands of strangers anonymously ridicule and abuse supposed miscreants. In some cases, the victims are famous people who have committed some sort of transgression – for instance, the author Jonah Lehrer, who was disgraced after it was revealed that he had made up quotations from Bob Dylan. But non-celebrities can also be swept up in the whirlwind. The examples Ronson discusses by and large centre on jokes which were either misunderstood or interpreted in the most damning way possible. Ronson’s key example is Justine Sacco, who was cyber-lynched for the following tweet in December 2013: 

In each of the firestorms Ronson describes, the joke which sparked the rumpus was taken out of context.[i] This is an obvious diagnosis of why people became so furiously indignant at Sacco’s tweet, and exulted in her demise. But it also suggests certain features about context, and how the internet changes in the context in which humour is produced and, more importantly, received.

Perhaps the most obvious aspect of context is the audience’s personal knowledge of the person telling the joke. If we are acquainted with them, or are with them when they crack wise, we know that they are joking and we will usually have a pretty good idea of the spirit in which their remark is intended. One of the frequently-remarked aspects of internet communication is the degree to which subtleties of tone are lost, so what is intended as ironic (Sacco’s tweet) comes across (to her persecutors) as gleefully mocking those less fortunate than her. This isn’t primarily a matter of anonymity (although this is certainly relevant, particularly when considering the often-hateful nature of much of what passes for internet commentary) – it is primarily a matter of not personally knowing the person telling the joke, rather than not knowing who they are. People who knew Sacco would presumably have known she was joking, even if they might have disapproved. They wouldn’t have taken her to be expressing a racist view, just trying to make a shocking joke.

A second aspect of context is a shared experience or common background knowledge. A huge number of jokes, from cliches about airplane food to political satire, depend on the joke teller and their audience having enough in common to be able to pick up on certain cues and make certain judgements without having to think too hard. This is one of the reasons why so much comedy is relatively parochial – it relies on quite specific references and assumptions, and transplanted to another culture or society, it ceases to function as comedy. Of course, the internet is particularly well suited to bring about such cultural transplantation. But I don’t think this is what happened in the case of Sacco, or the other cases Ronson mentions – or at any rate, what happened is not as simple as a piece of parochial comedy failing to travel well abroad.

What happened here concerned background knowledge of a quite specific kind: it included the understanding that conventions for joking exist, and that people who are making jokes should not be held to other standards (similarly, understanding what people say often requires knowing that they have said something metaphorical, and that what they have said should not – indeed, must not – be understood literally). At least some of the responses to Sacco’s tweet which Ronson quotes (e.g., ‘Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!’) seem to have overlooked or deliberately ignored the fact that she was making a joke.[ii] A related convention is that certain people, in certain circumstances, are licenced to say things which would otherwise offend. Sacco acknowledged that part of the problem was that she was not perceived as benefiting from this convention: “Unfortunately, I am not a character on South Park, or a comedian, so I had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform”.

The conventions governing when someone is joking, and when it is appropriate to joke, have not disappeared with the coming of the internet – arguably, they have not changed at all. What has changed is the degree of complicity or shared knowledge between a person tweeting a joke and the potential audience of strangers, who may neither share this knowledge nor be terribly interested in its relevance. Not only do people online not know you – worse still, they might not even know whether or not you are joking.

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[i] As Ronson put it concerning another case, a photo taken by a woman as part of a running joke of pictures disobeying signs, “shorn of this context, her picture appeared to be a joke not about a sign but about the war dead”.

[ii] Without knowing more about the respondents in question, it’s impossible to be sure. But the response quoted in the main text certainly seems to be accusing her, not of making a tasteless joke, but of making a non-jocular statement predicated on a factual inaccuracy. Put another way: if one felt that Sacco was making a tasteless joke, it would seem peculiar to respond by pointing out that white people can also be victims of AIDS.

Offensive Charm

(Note: this post contains a couple of jokes which are offensive (and one which might be construed as such – see below for further details). Obviously I don’t endorse the thinking behind said jokes.)

Rape jokes – I know, they’re so 2012 – are back in the news after Ray Badran’s unpleasant encounter with a protester at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Apart from its specific details, this incident raises some general questions: when are jokes offensive? Can offensive jokes be funny? Is it ever legitimate to laugh at such a joke?

The category of ‘offensive jokes’ isn’t a particularly clear-cut one. Here is Badran’s, as quoted verbatim by ABC:

If you've been to a comedy night before then you might know that there's a bit of an unspoken rule in comedy right... gay people can tell jokes about being gay... black people can tell jokes about being black... so I don't know if you can tell, just from looking at me, but I... can... tell rape jokes.[i]

This is our old friend, metacomedy: this isn’t so much a joke about rape (although the punchline is meant to imply that Badran is himself a rapist) but about rape jokes, and more generally about the comic convention that members of a minority group can tell jokes about that group which would otherwise be unacceptable. That said, Badran has chosen to use the r-word, presumably deliberately. This might be a piece of metacomedy, but its intended effect is one of shock.

This joke is edgy, and it might reasonably be said that a comedian who uses edgy material can hardly complain if some audience members find it a little too close to the bone. But not all comedy which might be classed as edgy is offensive, at least not beyond the fairly trivial sense that some people might be inclined to take offense at it. Badran’s joke doesn’t work on the assumption that rape is ever ok, or that rape isn’t something we should be concerned about. A joke which carried such a message would be offensive, in the sense that it would be predicated on repugnant values. Someone may object that Badran’s joke makes light of the real trauma suffered by victims of rape, and that this is what makes it offensive. But there is an important difference, in my opinion, between a joke about rape or one which refers to that topic without minimising the seriousness of the crime, and one which does.[ii]

It doesn’t follow from this that Badran’s joke is not objectionable. It might be better if comedians were not so quick to reach for rape gags to make all matter of points. On the other hand, jokes with shock value are an important weapon in the arsenal of comedians (quite why is itself an interesting question – but it seems to be a fact that people, or enough of them at any rate, appreciate jokes intended to shock them). There is no straightforward answer to this question, because there is no straightforward way of deciding when a point is best made in a shocking fashion, or when a comedian is reaching for shock in lieu of inspiration.

If Badran’s joke is not offensive, that leaves another question: can a joke predicated on distasteful assumptions about people ever be enjoyable, even if one does not share the assumptions? Here is an example from an unlikely source, President Sebastian Pinera of Chile, who was quoted as telling guests at a conference the following:

Do you know what the difference between a politician and a lady is? When a politician says ‘Yes’, he means ‘maybe’, when he says ‘maybe’ he means ‘No’, and if he says ‘No’, he’s not a politician. When a lady says ‘No’ she means ‘maybe’, when she says ‘maybe’ she means ‘Yes’, and if she says ‘Yes’, she’s not a lady.

There’s no doubt that this is a sexist joke: it is predicated on tiresome stereotypes of female behaviour and (worse than that) an extremely worrying view of female consent (you’ll notice there is no way for the ‘lady’ to say ‘No’ and to mean it). But I would suggest that it is a joke which can be enjoyed even by those who do not share these views. For one thing, it is genuinely well constructed without being horribly contrived; for another, it is a joke which very obviously is comparing stereotypes, and so can work as a comment on them rather than just endorsing them. To enjoy this joke, you must be familiar with the stereotypes and accept them for the sake of the joke (a sort of jocular suspension of disbelief), but the very archness of the comparison allows you to step back from them as soon as the joke is finished.

Post scriptum: the best piece on l'affaire Badran (apart from the above, of course), is by Greg Larsen, who runs the night where the whole debacle took place.

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[i] The joke was reported in a shorter version in other outlets: “So you know how gay people can make jokes about being gay, and black people can make jokes about being black, well I can make jokes about rape.”

[ii] For examples of rape jokes which are, to my mind, genuinely offensive (and fully intended as such), click here. To take one example from there, ‘9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape’ only works as a joke on the jocular assumption that the enjoyment of the rapists is to be treated as in some way on a level with the suffering of the victim. In saying this, I am not overlooking the fact that this is a joke, and that the person telling it will not (or at least need not) accept that assumption. But that assumption is still required for the joke to work.