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’.