Eric Bentley, "Farce," in The Life of the Drama (Atheneum, 1964), pp. 219-256.
Sections:
- VIOLENCE
- "Aristotle is rejecting the notion that tragedy might reduce us to a quivering jelly of pity and fear, and is formulating an exactly contrary conclusion: tragedy is not only an excitement but a release from excitement."
- SCOFFING AT MARRIAGE
- "The close, warm family is also the seedbed of neurosis, vice, and crime."
- "An art like farce embodies such wishes: wishes to damage the family, to desecrate the household gods."
- COMIC CATHARSIS
- "How does the sense of humor go to work? Its aim is to gratify some of the forbidden wishes."
- JOKES AND THE THEATRE
- "One of the key insights of both Bergson and Freud is that to make jokes is to create a theatre. Bergson says that any witticism, if articulated at all, articulates itself in scenes—which are an inchoate comedy. Freud points out that it takes, not one or two, but three to make a joke. These are the jokester, the butt of the joke, and the listener. The trio is familiar in the form of comedian, straight man, and audience. This trio of vaudeville suggests in turn the ironist, the impostor, and the audience of the traditional comic theatre."
- SWEET AND BITTER SPRINGS
- "Granting that jokes exist which are 'innocent,' Freud goes on to say that it is only the tendentious ones, the jokes with a purpose, which can make people burst out laughing. The innocent jokes don't pack that much of a punch. We do not feel them so keenly. Our need for them is not so great. We crave stronger meat. We want satire. We want ribaldry. Our receiving apparatus is not so sensitive to them. We want to attack and to expose."
- THE DIALECTIC OF FARCE
- "Farce brings together the direct and wild fantasies and the everyday and drab realities. The interplay between the two is the very essence of this art—the farcical dialectic."
- "In farce, we say: 'I'll murder you with my bare hands,' playfully, or with that mixture of the grave and gay which defines the tone as farcical, but in a degree we also have to mean it: by some flicker, at least, in word or act, it must become evident that murderous wishes exist in this world—and at this moment."
- MISCHIEF AS FATE
- "Perhaps every type of dramatic action has to have its inevitability, including the types, such as the comic types, that seem dedicated to the opposite. The heaping up of crazy coincidences in farce creates a world in which the happily fortuitous is inevitable."
- "If there is an equivalent in farce and comedy for pity and fear in melodrama and tragedy, it is sympathy and contempt."
- " Much more is involved in the movement of the story than we commonly realize. Why, for example, do directors of farce always call for tempo, tempo, tempo? . . . . It is a question of the speeding up of human behavior so that it becomes less than human."
- IN THE IMAGE OF THE APE
- "If one tells the story of some farces, one will start talking of young lovers, but if instead of telling the story, one looks at what has remained in one's memory from a farce, one will not find young lovers there but two other characters: the knave and the fool. One will then find that the plot itself hinges less on what the young lovers do than on what the knave does."
- "It is perhaps wrong to speak of knaves and fools separately, for what has most value to farce and comedy is their interrelationship. F. M. Cornford has shown that one of the oldest relationships in the comic drama is that between the ironical man and the impostor. These are the comedian and the straight man, one a knave, the other a fool, the fun resulting from the interaction between the two."
- THE QUINTESSENCE OF THEATRE
- "THE BREATH OF IMAGINARY FREEDOM"
- "If in melodrama fear enjoys itself, in farce hostility enjoys itself."
- "Melodrama and farce are both arts of escape and what they are running away from is not only social problems but all other forms of moral responsibility. They are running away from the conscience and all its creations . . . ."
VIOLENCEI have been speaking about the violence in, and of, melodrama. Farce is perhaps even more notorious for its love of violent images. And since the violence of farce and melodrama is not excluded from comedy and tragedy, it will be well to ask the question: What about violence in art? What does it signify? What does it do to us? Here is the classic statement on the subject:
When we listen to some hero [in Homer or] on the tragic stage moaning over his sorrows in a long tirade, or to a chorus beating their breasts as they chant a lament, you know how the best of us enjoy giving ourselves up to follow the performance with eager sympathy. . . . Few I believe are capable of reflecting that to enter into another's feelings must have an effect on our own: the emotions of pity our sympathy has strengthened will not be easy to restrain when we are suffering ourselves. . . . Does not the same principle apply to humor as well as to pathos? You are doing the same thing if, in listening at a comic performance or in ordinary life to buffooneries which you would be ashamed to indulge in yourself, you thoroughly enjoy them instead of being disgusted with their ribaldry. There is in you an impulse to play the clown, which you have held in restraint from a reasonable fear of being set down a buffoon; but now you have given it rein, and by encouraging its impudence at the theatre you may be unconsciously carried away into playing the comedian in your private life. Similar effects are produced by poetic representation of love and anger and all those desires and feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany our every action. It waters the growth of passions which should be allowed to wither away and sets them up in control, although the goodness and happiness of our lives depend on their being held in subjection.
Thus Plato in the tenth book of The Republic. The question has come up again and again down the centuries, not least in our own age, the age of the most extensive, as well as the most atrocious, violence that the world has ever known. In such an age, it is naturally a matter of concern to the humane that the reading matter of the mass of men (and one should now include the "viewing" matter) has no tendency to wean them from violence but, on the contrary, tends to inure them to it. And one of the glaring moral contradictions of our cultural scene is that protests are made against the presentation of healthy sensuality in good art by people who quietly accept outrageous cruelty in bad art. All this being so, it is not surprising to find a warm-hearted physician like Dr. Fredric Wertham coming out, in his book Seduction of the Innocent, against the violence in our so-called "comic books." And I for one had not realized how ugly and nasty-minded these books are until I read Dr. Wertham's text and examined the illustrations. Comic books are bad art, and bad humanity, and therefore meager and possibly noxious food for the minds of the young—or old.
This much could probably be accepted by any humane person, but Dr. Wertham will not rest his case there. On at least one page he indicates that artistic merit is, as it were, no excuse: the cruelties of Grimm's fairy tales are to be condemned along with those of the "comic books." Here surely we have caught the good doctor regretting that art is serious, for if art did not treat violence, it could not go to the heart of things. Without violence, there would be nothing in the world but goodness, and literature is not mainly about goodness: it is mainly about badness. When, on another page, Dr. Wertham complains of sympathy being thrown to bad characters, we realize that he is placing himself squarely in that Puritan tradition which is hostile to art as such, and whose father is Plato—or part of Plato: the part that would have thrown the poets out of his ideal republic.
The Platonists in this argument disregard the distinction between fact and fantasy. Suppose you saw one man force the head of another through the glass of a street lamp so that the latter will be gassed by the fumes. It sounds like some Nazi atrocity, and Plato would no doubt be indignant at the notion of re-enacting the incident in a work of art. Nonetheless it was re-enacted in Charlie Chaplin's film Easy Street, and in all the years no one has protested. We have all very much enjoyed seeing Mack Swain gassed and Charlie triumphant. And in general—though what we consciously remember from the Chaplin films may be Chaplin's incomparable delicacy, they are for the most part taken up with violent pursuit and violent combat. Here fantasy multiplies movements and blows by a thousand. The villain is a giant whose strength passes the limits of nature. He can bend lamp posts with his bare hands. Since the "little man's" revenges have to be more than proportionate to the provocation (as with Brecht's Pirate Jenny), he can drop a cast-iron stove on the villain's head and ram that head inside a street lamp with the gas turned on.
Another symptom of cruelty is the abstractness of the violence. Prongs of a rake in the backside are received as pin pricks. Bullets seem to pass right through people, sledge-hammer blows to produce only momentary irritation. The speeding up of movement contributes to the abstract effect. So, even more, does the silence proper to the screen of those days, many of the effects being lost when a sound track is superimposed. The cops shoot, but there is no noise. Heavy objects fall, but there is no crash. Gruesome infighting has the air of shadowboxing. All of which signifies that, in farce, as in drama, one is permitted the outrage but spared the consequence. Chaplin's delicacy of style is actually part of the pattern: he parades an air of nonchalance when acting in a manner that, in real life, would land him in Bellevue or Sing Sing.
Though Plato has shown us the importance of thought, and modern psychology has exhibited the power of fantasy, we cannot allow ourselves to be jockeyed into regarding the distinction between thought and act, fantasy and fact, as a sort of minor detail. The person who confuses the two sets of categories is not eccentric, he is insane. Conversely, it is possible for a thinker and fantasist to bank heavily on the sanity of his audience; and this is what Charlie Chaplin or any other farceur emphatically does.
Certainly, teachers and parents have to cope with the fact that in some situations children do not make a clear distinction between fantasy and reality. But they must understand that these situations do not include all the violence in drama and other fiction. Think of the tremendous violence in fairy tales, and ask yourself how many small children have actually tried to duplicate it in real life. Grimm's fairy tales do not seem to justify Dr. Wertham's fears.
For people who can distinguish between fantasy and reality certain indulgences are possible in fantasy which should not be permitted in "real life." Most notably: they can indulge in reckless violence. That extraordinary passage in The Republic was answered by Aristotle, though perhaps not intentionally and certainly not at length. His answer is to be found in the famous phrase about tragedy in The Poetics: "through pity and fear effecting the proper catharsis of these emotions." True, there is a permanent debate about the meaning of the word "catharsis," but all the debaters could agree, I think, on that solid part of the meaning that is relevant here, namely: Aristotle is rejecting the notion that tragedy might reduce us to a quivering jelly of pity and fear, and is formulating an exactly contrary conclusion: tragedy is not only an excitement but a release from excitement. It will not burst the boiler with its steam because it is precisely the safety valve. It is the exactly contrary character of Aristotle's view to Plato's that most powerfully suggests that it might be a deliberate reply. And it is this character that makes it perhaps somewhat polemical, and hard to go all the way with. One feels that the cathartic theory exaggerates. Surely not all this happens to one's emotional system during a performance of Hamlet? But the theory can hardly be rejected in substance unless one wishes to side with Plato, Bishop Bossuet, Dr. Wertham, and the Motion Picture Production Code.
Gilbert Murray has suggested that the idea of catharsis is easier to apply to comedy than to tragedy—easier in the sense that we agree to it more easily. There is already a certain consensus of opinion that some of our psychic violence—what our grandparents called excess animal spirits—can be worked off in laughter. It is generally agreed that a good laugh does us good, and that it does us good as a sort of emotional "work-out."
Impropriety is of the essence. As Murray put it: "Comedy . . . must . . . not be spoilt by any tiresome temperance or prudential considerations of the morrow." And again: "The anarchist and the polygamist, close-prisoned and chained in ordinary life, enjoy their release in comedy." Murray thought of comedy as continuous with orgies and fertility rites. Perhaps his doctrine implies the same error as that of the Platonists: a disregard of the difference between doing and imagining. The image of an orgy that we may get in a work of art should not be equated with the acting out of an orgy in real life; and comedy gives only a faded image of an orgy at that. Still, since the rise of Christianity, even the image of an orgy is a little more than many people bargain for. And there has been war between comedy and established religion down through the ages. The Motion Picture Production Code is but its latest embodiment. We mustn't laugh at a priest, it implies, or religion is in danger.
Above all we must not laugh at the family and its source, the institution of marriage. If crime comics are rampant among the underprivileged young, equally rampant among the overprivileged middle-aged is a literature whose patron saint is Tartuffe. In one of those family magazines that are so moralistic as to be morally nauseating, I came across an article entitled "Don't Let Them Scoff at Marriage" in which the moral crisis of our times was confidently attributed to jokes against marriage. "The gross libel on marriage is the notion," the author wrote, "that the chase, the allure, is the goal. Marriage is seen as a dull aftermath." As a psychologist the writer should have known that even gross libels aren't made without provocation. Or if they are, they don't last for centuries and appeal to the whole human race. Obviously the human race finds more interesting what this man calls a gross libel than what he presents as the truth.
It is true, however, that the joke against marriage could be abolished if the family were the unmixed blessing that many of our contemporaries take it for. The chief of the division of Social Medicine at an important American hospital writes as follows:The family is central to the development of humanity not only for the perpetuation of the race but because the proper psychological development of an individual can only occur within the warm circle of the nuclear family. Social and psychological studies indicate quite clearly that a strong family structure helps to develop and maintain a personality free of dangerous (to self and society) characteristics.And the author draws the conclusion that sexual deviation and juvenile delinquency can be prevented by closer, warmer family relations. "The family that prays together stays together." "Where family life stops delinquency starts."
No doubt there is some truth in all this. Unhappily there is truth in a precisely opposite proposition. The close, warm family is also the seedbed of neurosis, vice, and crime. About the same time as this article appeared, a newspaper picture caught my eye. It showed a beaming public-relations executive with his good-looking wife and three attractive children. They seemed a model American family in a model American home and one could imagine the picture passing in triumph around the public-relations office. The caption underneath, however, reported that the mildest and most candid-looking of the boys had just killed the mother and sister and told the police that he had planned to kill the rest of the family as well. It would be comforting to think that such a shocking event could be declared irrelevant to the experience of normal folk. But it isn't, because normal folk share his wishes though they do not carry them out. An art like farce embodies such wishes: wishes to damage the family, to desecrate the household gods.
And tragedy is no different in this respect. The Greeks, who invented it, did not do so before they had created the patriarchal family and an ideology to fit it. They seem to have found the supreme virtue in the pious and loyal relation of husband to wife, of child to parent, of sibling to sibling. The subject of tragedy, over and over again, was the violation of such piety. Now what would be the worst conceivable violation of both the marital and filial pieties? Why, the double crime of Oedipus.
An entry in The Oxford Companion to the Theatre reads:The word farce is applied to a full-length play dealing with some absurd situation hingeing generally on extra-marital relations—hence the term bedroom farce. . . .The phrase "some absurd situation hingeing . . . on extra-marital relations" suggests various tragic plots, that of Othello, for example. But what "situation hingeing . . . on extra-marital relations" is not full of absurdities and therefore potentially melodramatic or farcical, tragic or comic, according to the temperament, state of mind, and view of life of the witness? Outrage to family piety is certainly at the heart of farce as we know it—"hence," as our companionable book says, "the term bedroom farce."
It is, of course, Freud who has taught us to find such impieties in tragedy. And one of his early followers, Ludwig Jekels, applied the idea of the Oedipus complex to comedy. If tragedy, he says, shows the son paying for his rebellion against the father, comedy shows the son victorious, the father discomfited. Father and son compete for the possession of the mother, and the son wins. The element of disguise by which this naked fantasy is clothed consists very often in the son's being presented as just some young man who happens along. But many of the disguises for the theme are more elaborate. It seems to me that the modern "triangle" drama might be regarded as one of them: husband, wife, and lover being the disguise for father, mother, and son. If this were so, then the answer to the question why modern playwrights have been obsessed with adultery is that they have not been obsessed with adultery: they have been obsessed with incest. In Bernard Shaw's Candida, Morell, Candida, and Marchbanks would be the mask of a father, mother, and son. (I do not cite the evidence from Bernard Shaw's life that the three characters were indeed father [or foster-father], mother, and son [himself] to the author. That is a matter of origin. More relevant here is the possibility that Morell, Candida, and Marchbanks would still be a father, mother, and son for the unconscious of spectators even if we knew nothing of Shaw's life.) Such is the conversion to late nineteenth-century problem drama of the Oedipus story. In another early Shaw play, Mrs. Warren's Profession, the incest theme shows through, as it already had in two of the most famous plays of Shaw's playwright-father, Henrik Ibsen: namely, Ghosts and Rosmersholm. Yet for contemporaries all three of these plays seemed to be about current social problems exclusively (white slavery, hereditary syphilis, advanced ideas, etc.). For them, the incest theme remained under a veil, and when one notes what that veil was, one may begin to see social realism in a different light. By which I do not mean that the "social" content is always mere camouflage for psychological motifs but only that it can serve as such camouflage vis à vis a given public. The plays I have named are better understood today when audiences recognize the Oedipal theme at once and so take the plays to be what they are: "social" and "psychological" at the same time.
Gilbert Murray has spoken of the "close similarity between Aristotle and Freud," and actually Freud carried the idea of Catharsis further than any Aristotelian commentator had ever dreamt of. In the eighteen-nineties the new therapy escaped being named cathartic instead of psycho-analtyic only by a hair's breadth. For Freud, jokes are fundamentally cathartic: a release, not a stimulant. This is why Freud, unlike our magazine moralists, would "let them scoff at marriage." (He would also know he could never stop them.) It is a sort of open secret, Freud says in his book on jokes, that "marriage is hardly an arrangement to satisfy the sexual demands of the husband," also that this secret is half-kept, half-told, in a million male jokes against marriage. I would add that the supreme form of the marriage joke takes a couple of hours to tell and has a cast of three characters known as le mari, la femme, et l'amant—hence the term bedroom farce." Just as Restoration Comedy was provoked by the Puritans and is forever dedicated to their memory, the farce of adultery throughout our Protestant-bourgeois epoch has been provoked by faithful husbands and will only end when they become unfaithful on principle.
Farce in general offers a special opportunity: shielded by delicious darkness and seated in warm security, we enjoy the privilege of being totally passive while on stage our most treasured unmentionable wishes are fulfilled before our eyes by the most violently active human beings that ever sprang from the human imagination. In that application of the formula which is bedroom farce, we savor the adventure of adultery, ingeniously exaggerated in the highest degree, and all without taking the responsibility or suffering the guilt. Our wives may be with us leading the laughter.
Why do we laugh at jokes? The point of a joke can be explained, but the explanation is not funny. The intellectual content is not the essence. What counts is the experience which we call "getting" the joke or "seeing the point." This experience is a kind of shock, but, whereas shocks in general are unpleasant, this one opens a sluicegate somewhere and brings a sudden spurt or gush of pleasure. Nor is the pleasure of the laugh continuous with the mild amusement that precedes it. A joke is a purling stream most of the way, then suddenly from one of its pools rises up a veritable geyser.
The phenomenon seems less mysterious if we see it as limited to grown human beings, and grown human beings as full of anxiety and guilt. Neither supermen nor babies have a sense of humor. They don't need one. Men and women do because they have inhibited many of their strongest wishes.
How does the sense of humor go to work? Its aim is to gratify some of the forbidden wishes. But what is repressed is repressed. We cannot get at it. Our anxiety and guilt are taking care of that. Only, there are tricks for eluding anxiety and guilt, and the commonest, the least artificial, is the sense of humor. The mildly amusing preliminaries of a joke allay our fears, lower our resistance. The gratification of the forbidden wish is then slipped upon us as a surprise. Before our guilt and anxiety have time to go into action, the forbidden pleasure has been had. A source of pleasure far deeper than those directly available has been tapped. Inhibitions are momentarily lifted, repressed thoughts are admitted into consciousness, and we experience that feeling of power and pleasure, generally called elation. Here is one of the few forms of joy that are readily available. Hence the immense contribution of humor to the survival of the species.
Hence also a paradox. Through the funny, we tap infantile sources of pleasure, we become infants again, finding the intensest satisfaction in the smallest things, the highest ecstasy in the lowest thoughts. And yet infants themselves are without humor. But the paradox is no contradiction, for at bottom no experiences could be further apart than is the momentary return to childhood from the experience of being a child. The actual innocence of infancy is never regained, but as far as pleasure is concerned there is an increment in sheer nostalgia. No little girl can love little-girlhood as Lewis Carroll did. No infant shares the grownup's enjoyment in returning, or seeming to return, to infancy. Humor has a great deal to do with the distance between the infancy returned to and the point from which the return journey is undertaken. In fact the premise that children have no sense of humor, useful at the outset, needs qualification at a later stage of the investigation. Children develop a sense of humor as they move away from primal innocence. They have only to hear a few of the "songs of experience," which are songs of setback, disappointment, and disillusion, and the wholehearted cheerfulness of a baby's smile can give place on the face of a three-year-old to the aggressive smirk or the twisted half-smile of defeat. "Innocence" is whole and single. With "experience" come division and duality—without which there is no humor, no wit, no farce, and no comedy.
One of the key insights of both Bergson and Freud is that to make jokes is to create a theatre. Bergson says that any witticism, if articulated at all, articulates itself in scenes—which are an inchoate comedy. Freud points out that it takes, not one or two, but three to make a joke. These are the jokester, the butt of the joke, and the listener. The trio is familiar in the form of comedian, straight man, and audience. This trio of vaudeville suggests in turn the ironist, the impostor, and the audience of the traditional comic theatre.
To say that the jokester needs a butt is only to say that he needs a joke. Does he need even a joke as much as he needs a listener? Let each of us ask himself why, at a given moment, he wishes to tell a joke. It cannot be because one wishes to be amused by it, since jokes are not amusing the second time around, and one cannot tell a joke one has not already heard. (I exclude from consideration any superman who can invent his jokes as he goes along. He is irrelevant here because the subject I am now approaching is the comedian, who certainly does not write his lines as he goes along.) Anyhow, if one's need was to hear the joke one could tell it to oneself. It is inescapable that the need is not for the joke at all: it is for the audience.
Anyone who has known comedians off stage can testify, I think, that they are often men with a need of applause and appreciation that goes beyond even that of other actors. And there is a reason why men with this need—whether they are gifted humorists or not—should seek out the comedian's profession. Only the joke gets from its audience a reaction whose tenor is unmistakable and enthusiastic: laughter. The tragic actor gets no such indication, at the end of his "To be or not to be" speech, that it went over well. He will be pleased if there was silence in the house; even so he may wonder if everyone had gone to sleep. He may wonder whether his feeling that it went well is an illusion. But there is no such thing, as Ramon Fernandez puts it, as an illusion that an audience is laughing. So their laughter is peculiarly attractive to a person who needs an audience reaction every minute or two and needs to be sure that it is highly favorable. On the night when the audience does not laugh, the clown goes out and shoots himself. At least he might as well, since the one thing he has lived for is not forthcoming.
I have suggested that the comedian is the man whose need of applause is the most insistent and mistrustful. An alternative interpretation is that the comedian is the most gifted of compulsive talkers. Every cocktail party entertains many people who will not stop talking so long as they have an audience. The jokester is such a compulsive talker, it could be, who gets away with it because his talk is amusing. The burst of laughter that greets each story is a diploma stating that he has succeeded in not boring his audience. He may now be tempted to tell his stories to larger and larger groups. If he ends up on a stage talking to people he has never met, he is a professional comedian.
That what purport to be studies of comedy often turn out to be only studies of laughter is to be regretted, yet the circumstance faithfully reflects the mentality of the comedian. His wish is to capture and hold captive his audience, and he knows his wish fulfilled only when the audience laughs. Hence, though laughter may be no proper emblem for comedy, it does set the seal on jokes. For this reason entertainment merchants may be forgiven a certain hysteria on the subject, and we should receive more in sorrow than in anger the news that the television people are measuring the duration and volume of laughs with laugh meters.
If philosophers can reduce comic art to laughter, then surely the entrepreneurs can reduce laughter to the noise it makes. But in both cases, the real topic is narrowed down too much. The student of laughter should study the whole curve of which the burst of noise is but the final inch. Before people will burst out laughing they have to be prepared to burst out laughing. The only sure preparation is a particular state of expectation and sensitivity that amounts to a kind of euphoria. It can be more important than the joke itself. A stage of excitement can be reached at which people will laugh at anything. The performer may have to ask himself what they will not laugh at if he is to forestall chaos. He has to watch that the girls don't get the giggles and the ladies the hysterics.
In all this, the theatre stands with the art of telling jokes, not with the art of writing books. We read in solitude; and we think it remarkable if once in a while we laugh out loud. At that it is a single burst of laughter, a self-conscious, if loud, single bark. The rest of the family is sure one did it to attract attention, and asks what's so funny. And very likely one did. But when Cousin Seamus tells us his Irish jokes, we can really let go, and in ten minutes we are as "high" as any whiskey could make us. Such is the psychology of the comedian in the theatre.
In this respect, as in others, the art of farce is but joking turned theatrical—joking fully articulated as theatrical characters and scenes. It is correct to say that its aim is laughter, but this is to say no simple thing. Laughter may signify this or that, and in any case has to be most carefully prepared. Also modulated. Future students of the subject would do well to drop the individual joke and the reasons why it is funny and turn to the question: just how funny is it in particular contexts? It will be found that sometimes it is hardly funny at all, and that other times it is very funny indeed. It is a matter of how the audience was led to the point where the laugh should break out and the fun be proved.
I have been speaking of one burst of laughter with one preparation, and even in so small an event there is plenty to observe. But any farce that lasts more than a minute or two has to make the audience laugh out loud a considerable number of times. This cannot be done by just stringing along the jokes one after the other. The general elation is so much more potent than any particular punch line that one may begin to wonder: what is a joke? As I have said, if one succeeds very well with a first joke, the audience may get into a state of mind where anything seems funny. All one needs is a new turn of events, and a new shriek of laughter will greet it. But this state of mind will not last very long unaided. And it may not be wise to try to sustain it indefinitely lest the result be sheer exhaustion. He who organizes a whole evening of "merriment" must indeed be an organizer. Nothing could be more fatal than to stake all on making a good beginning and then to let events take their course. Which is something any good vaudeville producer always knew; and it is something every author of a farce must have in mind—or, better, in his bones.
A sidelight is provided by something Sir John Gielgud once said about producing The Importance of Being Earnest. It was to the effect that the director must learn to prevent the audience from laughing in too many places. Those who saw Sir John's production of the play will know what he meant. The comic temperature was raised so high, the elation of the audience was so intense, that the performance at many points could hardly continue. Wilde had written dialogue so witty that any line whatever could be the signal for renewed shrieks and whoops. The breakup of the performance—even in shrieks of merriment—is no desirable aim. What the actors had to do was the opposite of "milking" every line for the fun in it. It was to throw away a lot of the fun of individual lines for the sake of more important fun. The aim of Sir John's strategy was not merely the avoidance of riot. It was the fullest enjoyment of the occasion. Spectators are babies, and have no idea what they will like. If one lets them, they will laugh so hard that later on they can only have the hysterics or the sulks. They have to be prevented from doing violence to their own nervous systems. Laughter cannot be regular and sustained. It cannot begin pianissimo and then et gradually louder ad infinitum. Nor can it maintain the same intensity steadily like a factory siren. It is tied to our very limited respiratory and vocal system, not to mention our psychology.
If a laugh meter could measure the merit of a show, then the ideal show would be one that elicited a single uninterrupted peal of laughter which lasted from eight thirty till eleven o'clock. It would therefore consist of a play which not only could not proceed but could not begin. Actually, there is no ratio between enjoyment and the duration of audible laughter. But too little laughter is better than too much. If no comedy, however great, could make people laugh all the time, there could be a great comedy that never made them laugh at all.
How often, incidentally, does one really listen to laughter? It is quite an ugly sound. How often has one looked at people while they do it? It is not a pretty sight. And how little laughter there is on stage in a good theatre! The place for laughter is the auditorium. Perhaps one reason is that in the auditorium one does not have to see it. One sees the actors. They laugh seldom, and chiefly for negative effects. Only the other day I opened a magazine and came upon a most expressive laugh on the face of an actor. The caption told me that it was Gustav Gruendgens—as Mephistopheles.
Freud distinguishes two kinds of jokes, one which is innocent and harmless, and one which has a purpose, a tendency, an end in view. He distinguishes in turn two kinds of purpose: to destroy and to expose—to smash and to strip. Destructive jokes fall under such headings as sarcasm, scandal, and satire, denuding jokes under such headings as obscenity, bawdry, ribaldry.
I think the only startling thing about this classification is that it places obscenity side by side with satire. If we agree, we may take another step by observing that there is destructive force also in the joke that exposes. It is hostile either to the thing exposed or to the audience watching the exposure or both. Modifying Freud's formulation, I conclude that both the satiric and the obscene come under the heading of aggression.
We have, then, aggressive jokes and nonaggressive jokes. Everyone, in fact, assumes no less, and quite widespread in our middle-class culture is a preference for the nonaggressive joke. Are we not a Christian civilization? I myself was brought up on a little hymn that went:Teach us delight in simple thingsIt seemed a reasonable enough demand to make, especially since, at the time, I was not aware that mirth ever had bitter springs. I certainly did not know that the author of that very hymn was a man of inordinate pugnacity. (It is by Kipling.)
And mirth that has no bitter springs.
Some people want their jokes pleasant and harmless, and some people want their farces pleasant and harmless. Indeed it is common to interpret farce as precisely the pleasant treatment of what would otherwise have been an unpleasant subject. Here is the great theatre critic of nineteenth-century France—Sarcey—discussing the greatest farceur of nineteenth-century France:I had often complained that they bored us constantly with this question of adultery, which nowadays is the subject of three quarters of the plays. Why, I asked, take pleasure in painting its dark and sad sides, enlarging on the dreadful consequences which it brings with it in reality? Our fathers took the thing more lightheartedly in the theatre and even called adultery by a name which awoke in the mind only ideas of the ridiculous and a sprightly lightheartedness. . . . Chance brought it about that I met Labiche. "I was very struck," he said to me, "with your observations on adultery and on what could derive from it . . . for farce . . . I agree . . ." I had almost forgotten this conversation when I saw the title posted outside the Palais Royal. . . . It was my play: it was adultery treated lightheartedly. . . .Anglo-Saxon opinion has been against admitting such subjects as adultery into the nonserious drama at all, and yet there is one English critic who, before Sarcey, had carried Sarcey's argument yet further. This is Charles Lamb in his once-famous essay on Restoration Comedy. In substance, though this is not his vocabulary, he argues that the subject matter of Restoration comedy becomes palatable if we regard the finished product as farce rather than satire. For this is to judge leniently as in play, not harshly as one would have to in real life.I could never connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairy land . . . . . The Fainalls and the Mirabells, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere, do not offend my moral sense . . . . . They break through no laws, or conscientious restraints. They know of none. They have got out of Christendom into the land—what shall I call it?—of cuckoldry—the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is.Now both Sarcey and Lamb are saying things that are undeniably true. If adultery in the drama is becoming a solemn bore, then certainly it would be fun to try the farceur's approach. If parents are becoming solemn bores in suggesting that a Restoration comedy might have an inordinate and immoral influence on their daughters, then certainly it is good to remind them of the distinction between art and life, fiction and fact. But the real question is the significance of the gaiety Sarcey speaks of, and of what Lamb calls the sports of a witty fancy, his Utopia of gallantry, his land of cuckoldry. Both critics assume that they have closed the discussion once they have invoked the twin spirits of gaiety and fantasy. Yet that is where the real discussion begins, and that is where Freud takes it up in his monograph on jokes. Granting that jokes exist which are "innocent," Freud goes on to say that it is only the tendentious ones, the jokes with a purpose, which can make people burst out laughing. The innocent jokes don't pack that much of a punch. We do not feel them so keenly. Our need for them is not so great. We crave stronger meat. We want satire. We want ribaldry. Our receiving apparatus is not so sensitive to them. We want to attack and to expose.
To say that only the joke with a purpose can actually arouse laughter is tantamount to saying that only this type of joking is of much use in the theatre of Farce. And it seems to me that if farces are examined they will be found to contain very little "harmless" joking and very much that is "tendentious." Without aggression farce cannot function. The effects we call "farcical" dissolve and disappear.
What happens in farces? In one of Noel Coward's, a man slaps his mother-in-law's face and she falls in a swoon. Farce is the only form of art in which such an incident could normally occur.
No one ever denied that W. C. Fields' films were aggressive. Audiences became so conscious of the aggressions that they started staying away from Fields' pictures. In Charlie Chaplin's case, they said they liked him because he was less violent. He seemed less violent because he put the violence in the other characters. The violence was done to him, not by him, and masochistic farce always seems more gentlemanlike than sadistic. But the Tramp of Chaplin is not exclusively masochistic. He is also a sadist. One remembers what happens in The Kid when Charlie finds himself literally holding the baby. By all means, he is going to become a charming and sentimental foster-father, but as he sits there with his feet in the gutter he notices an open drain, and he has almost thrown the baby down it before sentiment comes again into its own. It is by touches like that—and never by sentiment alone—that Chaplin has shown himself a great comic.Teach us delight in complex things:
Mirth has both sweet and bitter springs.
To the simple all things are simple. Yet farce can seem a simple thing, not only to the simple-minded but even to those who recognize its depth. Farce is simple, on this view, because it goes right "at" things. You knock your mother-in-law down, and no beating about the bush. One can wonder, certainly, if this is not the absolutely direct, unmediated vision, without that duality of mask and face, symbol and object, which characterizes the rest of dramatic literature.
A second way in which farce may seem simple is in its acceptance of the everyday appearances and of everyday interpretations of those appearances. It does not present the empurpled and enlarged images of melodrama. No, farce can use the ordinary unenlarged environment and ordinary down-at-heel men of the street. The trouble is that farce is simple in both these ways at once, thereby failing to be simple at all. Farce brings together the direct and wild fantasies and the everyday and drab realities. The interplay between the two is the very essence of this art—the farcical dialectic.
If behind the gaiety of farce lurks a certain gravity, it is equally true that behind the gravity lurks a great deal of gaiety. Farce can certainly present a grave appearance. Those unsmiling actors again!—or rather the unsmiling down-at-heel roles which farce offers them. Here is a point of decisive importance in performance. The amateur actor misses it, and tries to act the gaiety. The professional knows he must act the gravity and trust that the author has injected gaiety into his plot and dialogue.
Actually, to press the analysis a step further, the surface of farce is grave and gay at the same time. The gay antics of Harlequin are conducted with poker-faced gravity. Both the gaiety and the gravity are visible and are part of the style. If we go on to speak of a contrast in farce between mask and face, symbol and thing symbolized, appearance and reality, this will not be a contrast in styles but a contrast between either the gravity or the gaiety on the surface and whatever lies beneath. What do the gravity and gaiety have in common? Orderliness and mildness. What lies beneath the surface, on the other hand, is disorderly and violent. It is a double dialectic. On the surface, the contrast of gay and grave, then, secondly, the contrast of surface and beneath-the-surface. The second is a larger and even more dynamic contrast.
What farce does with this larger contrast is best seen by comparison with what comedy does. Comedy makes much of appearances: it specializes, indeed, in the keeping up of appearances. Unmasking in comedy will characteristically be the unmasking of a single character in a climactic scene—like that of Tartuffe. In farce, unmasking occurs all along. The favorite action of the farceur is to shatter the appearances, his favorite effect being the shock to the audience of his doing so. Bring on stage a farcical comic like Harpo Marx, and all appearances are in jeopardy. For him, all coverings exist to be stripped off, all breakables to be broken. It would be a mistake to bring him into a drawing-room comedy: he would dismantle the drawing room.
If what farce offers is the interaction of violence and something else, it follows that violence by itself is not the essence of farce. The violence of Chaplin is dramatized by a context of great gentleness. The violence of Harpo Marx is offset by something equally important to his roles: his perfectly serious performances on that most delicate of instruments, the harp.
A common mistake is to think that Charlie's and Harpo's effects are softened by the gentleness and delicacy, as if the aim were to reach a compromise between violence and sobriety. But compromises are for life, not art. The purpose of this gentleness and delicacy is to heighten, not lower, the effect of the violence, and vice versa. Dramatic art in general is an art of extremes, and farce is, as it were, an extreme case of the extreme. Farce characteristically promotes and exploits the widest possible contrasts between tone and content, surface and substance, and the minute one of the two elements in the dialectic is not present in its extreme or pure form, there is likely to be a weakening of the drama. This could be exemplified by Noel Coward's little play in which, while an extreme lightness of tone is achieved, punches are pulled (more or less literally) where a straight left to the jaw was just what was needed. In farce, we say: "I'll murder you with my bare hands," playfully, or with that mixture of the grave and gay which defines the tone as farcical, but in a degree we also have to mean it: by some flicker, at least, in word or act, it must become evident that murderous wishes exist in this world—and at this moment. If they exist in Noel Coward, he was too genteel to let his public know it. In our theatre, talents such as his drift away from farce without encountering real comedy, landing in that worst of both worlds, the sentimental "light comedy" of the West End and Broadway.
If it is dangerous to attempt a compromise between the two conflicting opposites of a dialectic, it is disastrous to accept one and forget the other. Sheer aggression is just oppressive, as many motion-picture cartoons illustrate. Sheer flippancy is just boring, as most "light comedy" illustrates. The dialectical relation is one of active conflict and development. A dialogue has to be established between the aggression and the flippancy, between hostility and lightness of heart.
Every form of drama has its rendezvous with madness. If drama shows extreme situations, the extreme situation for human beings—short of death—is the point where our sanity gives out. In a very famous scene Ibsen has shown this point reached on stage; and Racine's Andromache had ended in much the same way as Ibsen's Ghosts.
Our colloquial use and abuse of words is always full of meaning, and what we mean when we say of some non-theatrical phenomenon, "It's a farce," or "It's absolutely farcical," throws light back on the theatrical phenomenon. We mean: farce is absurd; but not only that, farce is a veritable structure of absurdities. Here the operative word is structure, for normally we think of absurdities as amorphous. It is only in such a syndrome as paranoia that we find reason in the madness: the absurdities which we would be inclined to call stupid are connected in a way we cannot but consider the reverse of stupid. There is an ingenious and complex set of interrelationships.
I was speaking in the previous chapter of the long arm of coincidence in melodrama. It is an arm that does not get any shorter in farce. In both cases there is an acknowledgment of absurdity—and in both cases, a counterclaim to a kind of sense. A paranoiac finds a structure in coincidences, which is to say that to him they are not coincidences. The playwright incorporates coincidences in a structure, which is to say that they will not be coincidences to his audience. The melodramatist creates a sense of fatality, and, in the light of that sense, apparent coincidence reveals itself as part of a baleful pattern. And do not imagine, as William Archer did, that the tragic writer is any different. Think, rather, how the Oedipus of Sophocles has spent a lifetime just happening to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and meeting the wrong person there. Farce differs from the other genres in that its use of coincidence is accepted. People have such a low opinion of farce that they don't mind admitting it uses such a low device.
What do the coincidences of farce amount to? Not surely to a sense of fate, and yet certainly to a sense of something that might be called fate if only the word has less melancholy associations. In farce chance ceases to seem chance, and mischief has method in its madness. One final effect of farce is that mischief, fun, misrule seem an equivalent of fate, a force not ourselves making, neither for righteousness nor for catastrophe, but for aggression without risk.
Perhaps every type of dramatic action has to have its inevitability, including the types, such as the comic types, that seem dedicated to the opposite. The heaping up of crazy coincidences in farce creates a world in which the happily fortuitous is inevitable. And so, in a Feydeau play, the careful plan for the husband to be absent when the lover arrives is a gilt-edged guarantee that he will turn up.
What is usually said about surprises in farcical plots has to be qualified. On the surface of our minds we are surprised; but somewhere deeper down we knew all along. The convention itself creates certain expectations without which we would not have paid the price of admission. The expectation may go back before the first scene of the play to the rubric "A Farce" in the program or before that to the name "Feydeau" in the advertisements.
I have suggested that the characteristic melodramatic situations and plots derive directly from more or less paranoid fantasies—generally the fantasy of innocence surrounded by malevolence. Pity and fear are certainly aroused and possibly "abreacted"—worked through and worked off. If there is an equivalent in farce and comedy for pity and fear in melodrama and tragedy, it is sympathy and contempt. As pity is the weaker side of melodrama, sympathy is the weaker side of farce. It usually amounts to little more than mild fellow feeling with the hero and heroine. Charlie Chaplin, as an exception, was able to make more of it because he was not a juvenile lead but a character man. The character he chose—that of the Tramp—was such as to make the audience's sympathy play a very large part in the proceedings.
Innocence is probably as important to farce as to melodrama. We are as firmly identified with it. The difference is that whereas in melodrama we recoil from the enemy in fear, in farce we retaliate. If melodrama generally depends for its power on the degree of fear it can arouse, farce depends on the degree of aggression. "The comedian," says Sidney Tarachow, "is a hostile sharpshooter loudly proclaiming his own innocence." In this respect, the writer of farces is a comedian. The hostility, like the terror of melodramas, is so unqualified by any sense of justice or truth, that it creates forms that resemble sick fantasies. The closed structure of the Well Made Play as used by Georges Feydeau suggests a closed mental system, a world of its own lit by its own lurid and unnatural sun. If we were not laughing so hard, we would find such worlds terrifying. Their workings are as perilous as acrobatics. One touch, we feel, and the whole thing might go spinning into space. A Feydeau play has points in common with a highly elaborated and crazy delusion.
The masters of French farce in the nineteenth century used incredibly elaborate plots, and it is often said of their plays that they are "all plot." Here we have another aspect of the madness of farce. Human life in this art form is horribly attenuated. Life is a kind of universal milling around, a rushing from bedroom to bedroom driven by demons more dreadful than sensuality. The kind of farce which is said to be "all plot" is often much more than ingenious, it is maniacal. When one saw the actors of the Montreal Thèâtre du nouveau monde giving positively spastic movements to Molière's farce characters, one said to oneself: after all there is something spastic about farce generally. Dryden says: "The persons and actions of a farce are all unnatural and their manners false."
Much more is involved in the movement of the story than we commonly realize. Why, for example, do directors of farce always call for tempo, tempo, tempo? It is not just because they admire business efficiency, nor is there anything to the common belief of theatre people that fast is always better than slow. It is a question of the speeding up of human behavior so that it becomes less than human. Bergson might say this was one of the ways in which human behavior becomes funny by resembling the working of high-speed machines. The speeding up of movement in the typical silent-movie farces had a definite psychological and moral effect, namely, of making actions seem abstract and automatic when in life they would be concrete and subject to free will. It is a conception that bristles with menace.
Conversely, to think of a good farcical pattern of action is to think of a good pretext for rapid movement. The chase was the pride and glory of the Keystone Cops. The plot of An Italian Straw Hat is one long pretext for flight and pursuit. So is the plot of that homely English imitation of French farce, Charley's Aunt.
The farceur is a heretic: he does not believe that man was made in God's image. What are the principal images of men in farce and what do they amount to?
If one tells the story of some farces, one will start talking of young lovers, but if instead of telling the story, one looks at what has remained in one's memory from a farce, one will not find young lovers there but two other characters: the knave and the fool. One will then find that the plot itself hinges less on what the young lovers do than on what the knave does. The knave in farce is the equivalent of the villain in melodrama. "Passions spin the plot." If the passion that spins the melodramatic plot is sheer wickedness, the passion that spins the farcical plot is that younger brother of wickedness, the spirit of mischief. Shakespeare's Puck could be the knave of a farce. He is not deep or purposive enough to be a villain. He is a trouble-maker by accident and even by nature but not always by design and never with intent to do serious damage. He is a prankster—like Harlequin.
If mischief becomes a sort of comic equivalent of fate, it is usually through the Puck, the Harlequin, the Brighella, the Scapin, the Figaro that it does so. In its simpler forms, the idea of a prankster is desperately primitive, and even in Shakespeare the pranks hover on the brink of the abysmally unfunny. (What, for example, is so fascinating about the gulling of Malvolio in Twelfth Night? If we didn't know the name of the author, we would dismiss it as tiresome.) On the other hand, modern names and interesting ideas should not hide from us the fact that, for example, Signor Laudisi in Pirandello's Right You Are is the same old prankster in sophisticated disguise.
If knaves are more influential. fools are more numerous. How many fools are there to each knave of one's acquaintance? The Romans seem to have thought the normal ratio is three to one. Their Atellan Farces had four type characters: the Blockhead, the Braggart, the Silly Old Man, and the Trickster. Only the last is a knave. The others are three different kinds of fool: the moron, defeated before he starts; the braggart, defeating himself as he goes along; and the man who has recently become a fool through senility and can remember the gay days when he was a knave and heard the chimes at midnight.
It is perhaps wrong to speak of knaves and fools separately, for what has most value to farce and comedy is their interrelationship. F. M. Cornford has shown that one of the oldest relationships in the comic drama is that between the ironical man and the impostor. These are the comedian and the straight man, one a knave, the other a fool, the fun resulting from the interaction between the two. If we say that the farcical image of man is the image of a human couple, that couple will not be the jeune premier and the ingénue but the knave and the fool, the ironist and the impostor, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Jack Tanner and Octavius Robinson.
To this polarity, add a paradox. In the last analysis the knave, too, is a fool. Farce and comedy are forever demonstrating that the knave's ingenuities get him nowhere. The cleverness which seems to be capability proves in the end a rhetorical or gymnastic flourish.
The farceur does not show man as a little lower than the angels but as hardly higher than the apes. He shows us man in the mass, in the rough, in the raw, in anything but fine individual flower. If Mr. Auden is right in saying that "art can have but one subject; man as a conscious unique person," then farce is not an art. The Oxford Companion seems to regret that the characters of farce are stupid. But they are deliberate monuments to stupidity, disturbing reminders that God has lavished stupidity on the human race with His own unrivaled prodigality.
I have mentioned some points, and they are many, where farce and tragedy meet, but here we find them at the poles. Pascal called man a thinking reed. The metaphor embraces two characteristics: intellect and weakness. If farce shows man to be deficient in intellect, it does not show him deficient in strength or reluctant to use it. Man, says farce, may or may not be one of the more intelligent animals, he is certainly an animal, and not one of the least violent either. He may dedicate what little intelligence he possesses precisely to violence, to plotting violence, or to dreaming violence. (Mona Lisa's smile might mean that she was plotting murder, but is more likely to signify that she was dreaming murders she would never plot.)
"A Mad World, My Masters!" A play with a cast of fools tells us that it is a world of fools we live in. If that is not a tragic image, it is not, on the other hand, an image which the tragic poets would find beneath them. I take from what is perhaps the greatest of tragedies these words:When we are born we cry that we are comeWhat wisdom can there be without a poignant sense of wisdom's opposite, which is folly?
To this great stage of fools.
When we talk of Charlie Chaplin are we talking of acting or the thing acted? Nearly all discussions of him pass imperceptibly from the one topic to the other, and this is as it should be. Meyerhold said: "The idea of the actor's art, based on the worship of the mask, gesture, and movement is inseparably linked with the idea of farce."
If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the world is provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated. Melodrama belongs to the words and to the spectacle; the actor must be able to speak and make a handsome or monstrous part of the tableau. Farce concentrates itself in the actor's body, and dialogue in farce is, so to speak, the activity of the vocal cords and the cerebral cortex. Consider the figures in Jacques Callot's engravings, Dances of Naples (Balli di Sfessania). One cannot imagine them performing melodramas. They have always been considered the very incarnation of commedia dell'arte; and obviously they are the incarnation of farce. One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce. In its pride it would call itself commedia. But we do not hear of tragedia dell'arte. And so I am reversing Meyerhold's dictum and saying: the idea of farce is inseparably linked with the idea of the actor's art, the arte of commedia dell'arte. The theatre of farce is the theatre of the human body but of that body in a state as far from the natural as the voice of Chaliapin is from my voice or yours. It is a theatre in which, though the marionettes are men, the men are supermarionettes. It is the theatre of the surrealist body.
The entertainments of the commedia dell'arte were Atellan Farces raised to a higher power. The fools are no longer limited to three kinds, nor the knaves to one. There is a complete human menagerie.
The celebrated types of the commedia have deeper roots than social manners or even society itself. In Callot's Dances the animal origin of the characters is clear. It has been suggested that Callot may not be giving an accurate portrait of the commedia, but it is likely that any deviation came from knowledge and intuition as to what the commedia in essence was. Aristophanes' birds represent a sophisticated use of animal fable, which could not have been sophisticated from the beginning. The characters of comedy come in time to stand for the human in the most restricted sense, the human cut off from Nature. But originally they represented human nature as part of Nature-in-general, human life as part of all life. Conversely, external nature was not external: the general forces of life were to be found in the human figures. If on the tragic side, gods merge with heroes, on the comic side the knaves and fools merge with the lower orders of spirits, as they are still doing in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest.
The commedia dell'arte petered out in the eighteenth century. The nearest thing we can see to it today is a type of theatre that is not influenced by it: the so-called Peking Opera. But there is a vestige of the commedia in the theatre of Eduardo de Filippo in Naples, and there have been convincing attempts to reconstruct entertainments in commedia style by the Piccolo Teatro di Milano.
Charlie Chaplin's silent comedies are not merely vehicles for the greatest comedian of the twentieth century, they are masterpieces of farce. And there are dozens of them. No one at the time realized what they were worth, and only, I believe, the Cinemathèque in Paris has made a systematic attempt to preserve them. Even now, if these works are spoken of as art, it is the art of film that is meant. The idea of a masterpiece of farce seems an unacceptable proposition, perhaps even to Mr. Chaplin himself, who in later life has aimed at forms with higher standing—not with uniformly happy results.
That the era of great farce in the motion picture runs from about 1912 to about 1927 seems to many a result of mechanical accident. The motion picture camera had just been invented, the sound track had not yet been combined with it: farce was happily suited to the silent screen. It is true that certain aspects of farce could be developed on the screen far beyond the possibilities of the stage. The screen could obviously do much more with the traditional chase and pursuit. Trick photography opened up new territory for zany behavior. Even pantomime changed. The old mimes delighted to work with imaginary props. Part of their art was to do without the actual objects. On the screen, objects—from the automobile to the alarm clock—became a vast new subject matter for farce and gave us what was in many ways a new kind of farce.
But the flowering of an art form could never be mainly the result of a mechanical invention. It happened that the invention was made toward the end of an era of great farce, one of the few. "In our day," said Nietzsche in 1870, "only the farce and the ballet may be said to thrive." He was right, but no one seems to know it. To the extent that the history of Victorian theatre and drama is taught at all in the schools, the word has been that before Shaw and Wilde there were only some shadowy and austere figures like Bulwer Lytton and Tom Robertson. That is misleading because the real glory of the Victorian stage lay in the farce, the extravaganza, and the comic opera. The great names are Gilbert and Sullivan, and the young Pinero.
As for France, there is the same contrast between what one is told and the actual situation. One is told of the serious thesis drama of the younger Dumas and Augier, drama that has seemed dated since around 1900. But there is French theatre of 1860 that is still fresh today, notably the operettas of Offenbach and the farces of Labiche. In the wake of these two geniuses of light theatre came Georges Feydeau, possibly the greatest writer of farce of any country at any time. He has not had worthy successors. The era of modern farce ended with his death in 1921—which was almost exactly the time when Chaplin began to give farce up.
Chaplin's farces, then, mark not the beginning of an era, but the end of one. The movie-makers did not follow in his footsteps. And though the farcical bits were the best parts of the later Chaplin pictures, they were only parts—of satire, of tragicomedy, of drama of ideas.
There is a special niche for the pictures that the Marx Brothers made in the thirties and for those of W. C. Fields in the same period and a little later. But whereas the early Chaplin films had been a pure triumph, both the Marx Brothers and Fields had an uphill battle to fight with the times. The age of phony seriousness was upon us. There was too much aggression in Chaplin, in Fields, in the Marx Brothers for the age of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Norman Vincent Peale, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
"THE BREATH OF IMAGINARY FREEDOM"
While defining melodrama as savage and infantile, I have sought also to defend it as an amusing and thrilling emanation of a natural self which we do well not to disown. And I follow Aristotle, rather than Plato, on the question of violence in art, concluding that melodrama, far from tending to make Hitlers of us, affords us, insofar as it has any effect at all, a healthy release, a modest catharsis. Much the same can be said of farce, except that the principal motor of farce is not the impulse to flee (or Fear), but the impulse to attack (or Hostility). In music, says Nietzsche, the passions enjoy themselves. If in melodrama fear enjoys itself, in farce hostility enjoys itself.
A generation ago people used to talk against the idea of art as escape—they had in mind escape from social problems. Melodrama and farce are both arts of escape and what they are running away from is not only social problems but all other forms of moral responsibility. They are running away from the conscience and all its creations, as at the orgies that the classical scholars have sometimes talked about. Charles Lamb called Restoration Comedies "those Saturnalia of two or three brief hours," and again we can apply Lamb's words to farce:I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience-not to live always in the precincts of the law-courts—but now and then, for a dreamwhile or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions&nbs;. . . . I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of imaginary freedom."Not to live always in the precincts of the law-courts." To escape the law courts, to escape the tyranny of society and public opinion, to escape also the law courts of the mind and the tyranny of the judge within each breast, the inner conscience-this sounds like an admirable prescription for the pursuit of pleasure. Then why and how do these law courts and these tyrannies get into dramatic literature? Is plain pleasure not the aim of literature? Or is there another and higher pleasure to be found "in the precincts of the law-courts," both kinds of law courts?