Holiday Season

Jacques Tati is frequently mentioned as a comic pioneer, and occasionally as a comic genius. His body of work is relatively small, but has influenced some very well-known comic figures (Terry Jones has recorded enthusiastic DVD introductions for some of Tati’s films, and Rowan Atkinson has acknowledged the significant debt Mr. Bean owes to M. Hulot, Tati’s most famous creation).

I recently saw Les Vacances du M. Hulot, Tati’s second feature and the only non-English-language film in Time Out’s list of the best 100 comedy films.[i] It was a curious experience – I saw it in a cinema where the audience were mostly silent throughout, and yet I didn’t get the impression that people were put out by the film’s failure to coax many laughs. In part this may be because some of the appeal of the film is less about comedy than about something harder to pin down: nostalgia, simplicity, or an acceptance of the vagaries of life and the idiosyncrasies of other people.[ii]

Or the audience may have primarily come to admire the film’s technical accomplishments.[iii] Tati has a superb eye for constructing a scene that develops (or falls apart) to reveal one telling detail. To take one example, the sequence featuring tourists boarding an overcrowded bus (starting at 1.10 here)

culminates in a spare child popping up in the steering wheel, the kind of droll grace note of which Tati is so fond. This meticulous construction of a scene around a single visual detail has been taken up a number of subsequent directors, for instance Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who has used it in films ranging from the rather saccharine (Amélie) to the inventively dark (Delicatessen).[iv]

That said, these kinds of details are charming or at most somewhat amusing, rather than being actually funny. More generally, the film sharply illustrates some of the limitations of the kind of comedy Tati was working with, which might be characterised as gentle slapstick.

The first limitation is that too many of the jokes rely on people behaving extremely stupidly. It is true that a great deal of narrative comedy relies on people making mistakes of one sort or another, but this need not be an issue for the audience (for instance, it may be plausible that from the character’s point of view, what they are doing makes sense). In M. Hulot there is no attempt to explain this behaviour or put it into some sort of context where it can be understood – it is crushingly obvious, and the film is cheapened by including so many set-pieces which rely on it. Other characters are endlessly prone to being distracted by Hulot and spilling their drinks, or mistaking what is plainly a canoe for (presumably) a sea monster (from 0.28 here)

or proving to be the among most inept tennis players the world has ever seen:

A different film could probably get away with scenes like these – a film which was set a few degrees further removed from reality, or one with a wilder feel or looser logic. As a general rule of thumb, the more antic a film, the more stupid behaviour can be funny in it. To complain about an entire marching band walking into a wall

or a fleet of police cars finding new and inventive ways to enter a pileup

would be to miss the point – and the tone – of Animal House or The Blues Brothers. But in M. Hulot, such behaviour feels forced – it jars with the gentle observations of much of the film.

The second drawback of this kind of humour is its rigidity. Again, a great deal of humour relies on fairly rigid conventions and rules, but again this can be moderated or at least disguised, for example by varying the subject-matter or tone of different scenes, or even by subtleties of phrasing and expression. In M. Hulot, the scenes are set up and dispatched practically by clockwork, in a way which quickly becomes irritating: things are always arranged so that Hulot inadvertently upsets the other characters, or they inadvertently upset each other. This means that a sense of the unexpected, so crucial to genuine comic creativity, is missing. The film reminded me of a stand-up relying too heavily on puns – some might be genuinely funny, but if everything is a pun then not only do they tend to become predictable, but the element of contrivance becomes obvious and gets in the way of enjoying the comedy.

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[i] Although it is, to all intents and purposes, a silent film. Nevertheless, it’s the only representative on that list from the non-Anglophone world.

[ii] Roger Ebert has some very perceptive things to say on the matter here. I can’t say I am entirely convinced, but he puts this line of thought very well.

[iii] About which Ebert is again spot on.

[iv] Co-directed by Marc Caro.

In-jokes

(part of the occasional series What is a joke?)

Almost every joke relies on background knowledge, something that the person telling the joke assumes those hearing it already know, and so does not actually state. Indeed, it is often crucial to the success of the joke that this knowledge is left unstated. To include too much information in setting the joke up is either to risk confusing the audience or to lose the element of surprise which the punchline requires. Hence, the classic way to kill a joke is to explain this background knowledge, though of course this fact has become such a staple of comic lore that it is ripe for comic use itself.[i]

A good number of jokes not only assume this background knowledge but exploit it – it is often crucial to a misdirection which is reversed, or in establishing the connection between the setup and the punchline. (For instance, the hoariest of ‘and that was just the teachers!’-style humour relies on our knowing how teachers typically act, in order to undercut this assumption).

The background knowledge is sometimes very general (jokes about the differences between men and women) but it can be much more specific, e.g., limited to knowledge common only to people in a certain social group, profession or nationality. Any joke of this kind is an in-joke: it is intended to be heard by insiders, people who will get the reference or already have the knowledge needed to understand the joke.

One interesting feature of in-jokes is that because they rely on this shared knowledge, they can get a desired response not necessarily by being funny; often, they work as a kind of shared affirmation that the joke-teller and the audience are in the know, that they get the reference or are part of the relevant social group. And yes, this can lead to a certain degree of smugness. But it does raise the question of how an in-joke can actually be funny, as opposed to just amusing those who understand what it’s about.

Here’s an example of an in-joke which is clearly funny: two behaviourists have just finished making love. The first says to the other ‘I know you enjoyed that, but how was it for me?’[ii]

Why is this funny? Well, it’s about sex, which helps; it’s a highbrow riff on a clichéd situation, which is another plus; but basically, it’s funny because it brings out a ridiculous consequence of a particular theory. It presents, in highly exaggerated form, a line of thought which some people have been tempted to follow, and it shows that this line of thought leads to an absurd dead end. In doing this, the joke adds value to the reference: to get the joke, you need to understand what behaviourism is, but in getting it you will also grasp how ridiculous it is (at least in this exaggerated version).

By way of contrast, here’s an example of an in-joke which is undoubtedly clever but not particularly funny: three logicians walk into a bar. The barman asks ‘Does you all want a drink?’ The first logician says ‘I don’t know’. The second says ‘I don’t know’. The third says ‘Yes!’[iii]  

(If you’re not sure what the joke is – and for what it’s worth, it had to be explained to me, which may say something about my aptitude for logic – see below.)[iv] [v]

In fact, I’m not sure if this counts as a joke at all (at least two people who heard it both said the same thing to me). It does follow a well-known jocular format, has the rhythm of a joke (including what looks a lot like a punchline), and relies on the listener making a connection which draws on relevant background knowledge. But what do you get, when you ‘get’ this joke?

It is true that in understanding why the final logician answered as they did, the listener grasps the thought processes behind the first two answers, so there is a leap from the information in the premise to the conclusion; and it is true that in many jokes a similar leap is required to get the punchline. But it is characteristic of jokes that the final piece of information not only throws the rest of the joke in a new light, but reverses or undercuts something (either our understanding of the previous pieces of information, or some assumption which we had been led to make).

I don’t think there is any comic reversal here. (At most, if you didn’t understand why the first two logicians answered as they did, the final answer might have clarified their thinking – but this doesn’t seem like a genuine reversal so much as clearing up something which had seemed confusing or arbitrary.) This a clever connection, and the way you grasp it might be quite like the way you grasp a punchline, but the line itself is more like the answer to a riddle, presented in a joke-shaped format.

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[i] Douglas Walker had a great example of this in his Edinburgh show a couple of years ago.

[ii] This joke is aimed primarily at logical behaviourism – see b.ii here.

[iii] Tip of the hat to Vincent for introducing me to this one.

[iv] Each logician either wants a drink or does not. If the first logician did not want a drink, then she would have known that the answer to the barman’s question was ‘No’ (since in order for the correct answer to be negative, all it takes is for one of the logicians to not want a drink). So because she did not answer ‘No’, she must want a drink. But she does not know if either of her colleagues want a drink, therefore she could not answer ‘Yes’, hence her answering ‘I don’t know’. Same goes (more or less) for the second logician. But the third logician, having heard the answers from the first two, deduces that each of them wants a drink (since if either of them had not wanted a drink, they would have said ‘No’). And since the third logician wants a drink, he knows that the answer to the barman’s question is ‘Yes’. QED.

[v] There’s a further issue here with some background assumptions which the joke requires. Specifically, it only works if each of the logicians knows whether or not they want a drink. If it is possible that they do not know this, then the final logician could not conclude that the other two did want a drink, and so would not be in a position to answer ‘Yes’.

The Satire Paradox

Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast on the satire paradox touches on a number of familiar themes, some of which are handled rather more surely than others.[i]

As Gladwell tells it, the paradox of satire is that because different audience members will bring different assumptions and prejudices to bear on the same material, what one person regards as satire another can regard as a genuine expression of the position being satirised.[ii] Heather LeMarre, an academic who has published on audience reactions to satirists such as Stephen Colbert, emphasises the degree to which in effect we see and hear what we want. To quote from the abstract of a paper she co-authored on Colbert (back when he ‘was’ a rightwing wingnut),

individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert's political ideology […] conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.

On the face of it, this example betrays fairly basic ignorance on the part of conservative viewers,[iii] given that Stephen Colbert (the comedian, not the rightwing wingnut) is quite clear that he does not mean what he says, describing his character as a “well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot”. I don’t have any specific reason to doubt LaMarre’s findings, but I suggest that there is another sense in which satire is often more open to interpretation than it might seem. Indeed, it is quite predictable that this is the case.

Satire works by presenting an exaggerated version of its target, inflating some of its distinctive features beyond their usual proportions. The exaggeration is intended to make the target look ridiculous (or more obviously ridiculous), but the exaggerated version can also be taken as an outsized celebration of just these features. What’s more, people can take it this way even if they are aware that the exaggerated version is intended to look ridiculous. In other words, they can embrace the exaggerated presentation of the target while simply ignoring the satirical intent. Hence hand-wringing articles on The Wolf of Wall Street being celebrated by the very bankers it targets. Hence also Al Murray’s response to critics who accuse his audience of being too keen on his often ignorant and bigoted Pub Landlord character: “I think the people who are sympathetic to him may well be enjoying laughing at themselves, which is a thing people are allowed to do as well.”[iv] After all, people who enjoy Woody Allen’s films very often share the views and sensibilities he mocks, and very often are well aware of this. If this is possible for left-leaning cultural elites, it is surely possible for boorish bankers or UKIP voters as well.

Gladwell’s other main point concerns what seems to be one of the results of the satire paradox: more often than not, satire is intended to bring about some kind of change but fails to do so. One of his examples is Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney: 

a broad satire of lower-middle-class mores in the Thatcher years which ended up being co-opted by its targets and failing to make any difference.[v]  Gladwell goes on to raise questions about the effectiveness and even appropriateness of satire more generally.

One problem with this line of criticism is that Gladwell relies on a rather rigid view of the aims of the satirist, as when he suggests “Satire works best when the satirist has the courage not just to go for the joke”. This assumes that the primary aim of satire is political and at most secondarily about comedy. But why should we assume this? It might be that some satire is in effect political commentary or protest through the medium of humour, but there are other examples that are better characterised as humour directed at political targets.[vi]

The limitations of Gladwell’s view are exposed in his criticism of Tina Fey’s spoofs of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live.

He tells us that “SNL brought Tina Fey in to skewer Palin out of a sense of outrage that someone this unqualified was running for higher office”. But it is highly questionable if a sense of outrage was the primary motive for this decision. For a commercial comedy show the imperative is to produce something which gets attention and viewers. No doubt the liberals who make SNL dearly wanted to take Palin down a peg or two, but that wasn’t the reason they wrote those sketches, still less why Palin herself appeared on the show.

A more general issue here is how satire, on Gladwell’s view, is supposed to ‘work’. If the satirist has the courage to not go for the joke, what are they going for, and what constitutes success in their endeavour? An obvious answer is: to bring about political change, by challenging established ideas and changing people’s minds. As Gladwell correctly points out, satire often fails to achieve anything like this. But this line of criticism is in danger of stacking the deck, by tasking satirists with a responsibility out of all proportion to their influence. Satire is for the most part an ineffectual form of protest, but as Bob Mankoff drily responded, “for the most part, even protest is an ineffectual form of protest”. 

Gladwell suggests “real satire […] uses a comic pretence to land a massive blow” – but a blow to what end? His own example of ‘real satire’ is the Israeli left-wing sketch show Eretz Nehederet (A Wonderful Country). But more than a decade’s worth of ‘massive blows’ from Eretz Nehederet have accompanied a steady rightward drift in Israeli public opinion.

This doesn’t mean that satire has no effect: it just doesn’t, by and large, tend to change people’s minds. It is hard to believe that a supporter of consumer capitalism would come to a radically different opinion after seeing Loadsamoney. I suggest that when satire has a political effect, it tends to do so in other ways: it can form or consolidate our opinions on someone, or provide people with a prism through which a general sense of distaste or unease can be focused. Gladwell does not discuss this kind of effect, but considering it allows for a very different take on some of the examples he considers. For instance, SNL’s send-up of Palin is not particularly vicious as satire goes, but it undoubtedly had an effect in cementing the public’s view of her: as Gladwell himself admits, it can be hard to remember the difference between what was said by the real Palin and by her SNL facsimile. On the other hand, while Eretz Nehederet has not been particularly successful at winning over Israelis who do not share the liberal-left outlook of its creators, it may be a very appropriate vehicle for expressing the frustrations of those who do. Satire engages with political targets, but it has more ways of doing so than Gladwell acknowledges.

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[i] Despite what I go on to say, the podcast is well worth a listen.

[ii] This is a familiar enough phenomenon to have a name: Poe’s Law.

[iii] Or it suggests they have adopted a complex and subtle view according to which ‘Stephen Colbert’ the rightwing wingnut is a ‘creation’ of ‘Stephen Colbert’ the left-wing comedian who is himself the creation of a person called ‘Stephen Colbert’ whose own views are more in line with the first of these creations than the second. This sounds rather too complex and subtle to be very plausible, but perhaps as left-wing liberal elitist I would be expected to say that.

[iv] As opposed to those, most famously Stewart Lee, who charged that Murray’s popularity meant that he attracted a following of people who missed his satirical point.

[v] And yes, it has aged rather badly.

[vi] Of course, comedy with no political or social target would presumably not be satirical at all, but this isn’t Gladwell’s point: he is discussing when satire works or does not work, not the difference between satire and non-satirical forms of comedy.

The Engaged Intellect

In voicing the suspicion that stand-up is an anti-intellectual artform, Brian Logan seems to have overlooked some larger and more interesting themes. In particular, he is working with a severely constrained notion of how intellectual themes might feature in comedy. The ‘intellectual’ aspects of comedy which he considers are confined to highbrow references, e.g., lines adapted from Philip Larkin or musings on Walt Whitman. Witness Liam Williams, musing “I do enjoy having a magpie approach to high literature, [to splicing] high culture into standup. I like the effect that creates, having something very poetic next to a joke about wanking.”

Logan has a point in criticising the cultural cringe whereby some comedians feel the need to apologise, even half in jest, for dropping erudite names or using even vaguely highfalutin’ terms. But there is a reverse side to this, one with which any observer of recent comedy will be familiar: comedians using unexpected (often highbrow) references to get a laugh. Sometimes such a reference can be deployed in a genuinely amusing manner,[i] but often it is used as flattery: the audience understand the reference and by laughing are, in effect, applauding their own knowledge. Indeed, the fact that references sometimes get a reaction of this sort itself indicates a different kind of cultural cringe: stand-up audiences by and large don’t expect to hear Sophocles or Degas or de Beauvoir mentioned at a stand-up gig, and are pathetically grateful when it occurs. There is a difference between clever comedy and comedy which merely sounds clever, and highbrow references frequently blur this distinction, either wittingly on the part of the comedian or not.[ii]

The other point is that the intellectual element in comedy should not be confined to, or even particularly concerned with, erudite references. In any other kind of art or entertainment, the intellectual aspect of a work concerns either the form itself (e.g., challenging conventions and expectations concerning works of that kind) or the content of the work (expressing or engaging with complex ideas). For instance, in the theatre intellectual concerns might find expression in a political or social themes, or in experiments with theatrical form. A playwright who drops impressive-sounding names or ideas into the dialogue if anything risks reducing the nuance and complexity of genuine intellectual engagement to something little more than dinner-party badinage. And what goes for the playwright goes double for the benighted stand-up. This challenge – to give ideas and theories their due while also being funny – is the real issue facing the comedian who would be an intellectual.

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[i] The godfather of this comic trope is probably Woody Allen, and when his references work they are either witty in addition to the reference (as in the famous joke about cheating in a philosophy exam), or they work as a kind of shorthand to illustrate a cultural outlook at which Allen is poking fun.

[ii] To illustrate this difference, think of a comedian such as Demetri Martin whose jokes are as cleverly constructed as anyone’s, but who rarely hangs a joke on a recherché reference.

Top 10 comedy films – an alternative list

No. 8 – Fargo

After a brief two-year interlude, the alternative list of comedy film classics resumes.[i]

Number 8 is not a straight comedy, and not one of the Coen Brothers films routinely celebrated as their best comic work, but as someone who’s never been convinced by either The Big Lebowski or Raising Arizona I’m plumping for Fargo, a film which I enjoyed more than either of those and which does more interesting things with comedy.

One reason to nominate Fargo is its influence on subsequent films and in particular television series (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, the Fargo series). It pioneered a mix of comedy and often violent drama, where the tone of the comic scenes differs only minimally from the more serious and sometime shocking moments.

The other striking feature is the range of comic devices it uses. Chief among these are the Minnesota nice accent 

and the increasingly brutal range of misfortunes which befall Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi, in the quintessential Steve Buscemi role), from dealing with an uncommunicative partner in crime and an overly-officious car park attendant to beatings, being shot  and worse.

The most interesting comic feature of the film is Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand). She is the hero and clearly the smartest person on show, but at same time she’s an innocent, a hick and in some respects a comic figure. It wouldn’t be quite fair to say that the film makes fun of her, but it has fun with her good-naturedness, and with the fact that she outwits every other character, no matter how cynical they may be. This is most clearly demonstrated in the lecture she delivers to Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare):

  

There are no funny lines in this scene, and Marge’s homily does not come across as ridiculous: everything she says is correct, and true to her vision of the world. It just sounds funny when delivered to a man she had a short while ago found stuffing his former accomplice into a wood chipper. By placing her homespun wisdom in that context, but in no other way undermining it, the Coen Brothers manage to have their cake and eat it too.

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[i] An alternative to the Guardian’s list from a few years back.