Comic Grace: We Mortal Fools in Movie Comedy [1 ed.] 1443849235, 9781443849234

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Comic Grace

Comic Grace: We Mortal Fools in Movie Comedy

By

James Combs

Comic Grace: We Mortal Fools in Movie Comedy, by James Combs This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by James Combs All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4923-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4923-4

In memory of, and in tribute to, Ernest Callenbach, our guide to Cinetopia and founder of Ecotopia

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments .................................................................................... viii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Comic Grace Chapter One ............................................................................................... 34 The Comic Beauty of Personal Appeal Chapter Two ............................................................................................ 134 Funny Things as Social Nature Chapter Three .......................................................................................... 248 Funny World Conclusion ............................................................................................... 315 The Comedy of Third Nature: Living Fun Bibliographic Notes ................................................................................. 328

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author acknowledges with gratitude the professional assistance and humane patience of Carol Koulikourdi of C-S-P and the admirable skill of Amanda Millar who guided this work to its completion. The author also much appreciates the able help and charming person of Sara, who is in all things invaluable and indispensable. As always, our cat patrol was on duty during the whole enterprise and provided calming feline support.

INTRODUCTION COMIC GRACE

It is tempting to trace the origins of comedy to the brewing of beer. This assertion might seem fanciful, but it is the case that we know something of the connection between the discovery of beer and the establishment of civilization. Those archaeologists and historians interested in imaginative retrospection of the transition from Neolithic cultures of nomadic bands to agricultural settlements and recognizable social habits and beliefs have long thought that the discovery of beer was crucial. At first, however, beer seems not to have been a staple of people's diet, since the process of beer making was lengthy and difficult. Since beer was in a sense a luxury item and produced a euphoric effect, it was reserved for special occasions involving socially important persons and events. In the Natufian culture which flourished in southwest Asia some 12,000 years ago, there is evidence that beer was made and consumed for feast days hosted by the leadership of a tribe for invited guests. The Natufians are of particular interest because they appear to be an intermediate culture bridging the hunting-and-gathering bands of the Neolithic with the newer forms of social organization we associate with settled agricultural life, eventually evolving into the early civilizations such as the Sumerians. The Natufians became adept in the gathering of wild cereals, and eventually learned the arts of domestication, farming, and bread making. At first, then, beer was a scarce resource of such value that it was only consumed in settings of symbolic significance for people who mattered. Those significant occasions were feasts, festive gatherings of eating, drinking, and gift-giving. Beer contributed to the festivity in the physical sense of arousing euphoria, and in the social sense of impressing upon guests as to the care and concern the host had given the occasion, thus “lubricating” the gestures and arrangements which characterized the event and helped perpetuate cultural hierarchies and practices. Beer served the purpose of underscoring the good cheer that such a festive ritual should be imbued with, aiding the conduct of a happy event in the service of salubrious social peace. We might call this process “festive reciprocity,” in that the structured occasion of enjoyment encourages both mirth and

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contentment, propagating good feelings at the moment, good tidings in the reciprocal agreements, and good hopes for the future. The festive coupling of a social group is both ancient and widespread as a ritual format, and demonstrates the uses of designated occasions of fun and fellowship in a sanctioned place and time. In other words, the injunction is simple: let's party, let's deal, and let's get along. A feast of social bonding is only one kind of ritual celebration. We know that the Natufians held elaborate wakes that included mortuary feasts. About 12,000 years ago in a small cave in what is now Israel, the Natufians buried a woman in her midforties who was clearly a person of importance deserving a significant observation of her death. Their celebration seems to have combined the solemnity of mourning with the festivity of a celebration. The ritual burial included eating roasted tortoise meat by her open grave, then putting the tortoise shells under her head and hips and on top and around her. They buried her with objects of magical powers, such as the wings of an eagle, the pelvis of a leopard, and the severed feet of a human. The archaeologists who unearthed this burial site found that this particular woman had a deformed pelvis, giving her a clearly different appearance and likely a limp. They surmise that the attention paid to her death suggests that she was a shaman, a special person thought to be in touch with the spirit world. It is common in ancient societies and tribal cultures to accord supernatural powers and special status to people who have a visible disability or who exhibit unusual behavior. Such a social conception can have positive consequences, such as the toleration and honor accorded people who are homosexuals, or negative outcomes, such as the persecution of old women thought to be witches. The Natufians returned to the shaman's cave (located on a virtually inaccessible escarpment) for other funerary rituals, with the same festive air of feasting and communing with the spirit world. They interred the bodies of other people in communal burial pots, and later opened the graves to remove bones for display in ceremonies. Like the beer fest, they brought ritually important food, such as the difficult to kill wild oxen called the auroch. The auroch was a sacred animal, so consuming auroch meat at a special time and place was likely a festive ritual of fertility. During this liminal period of social transition, ritual festivities were a widespread characteristic of the rhythms of cultural observance. In the movement from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, we see festive rituals dating to 12,000 years ago. The mortuary feasting at the Gobekli Tepe ritual site in Turkey, and indeed near England's Stonehenge, where over 5000 years ago, farmers cooked pigs for a winter solstice festival are but two examples. Thus communal parties, even in the

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presence of sacral places and solemn observances, included more than just a religious service or a funeral observance; while they had a larger purpose, they also included something else these incipient societies found valuable. It was fun. With these early rituals, then, we are taking a long look back at humans much like ourselves who were engaging in activities to which we can all relate. The Natufians and others were gathering to conduct a celebration, an event of both social importance and cultural play. A communal celebration often combines the solemn and sacred with the playful and profane. From what we can tell, the Natufian ritual evidence indicates that they included in their ceremonial life all the dimensions of a full-fledged celebration: a sense of temporal occasion, as in the commemoration of a person's life; an appreciation of social role-playing, emerging in the structured dramatization of social relations during the feast; and the ludenic quality of festivity, furthering human bonds through sharing pleasures and producing the effect of pleasant exhilaration. Themes of temporality, theatricality, and festivity would characterize the ritual life of humankind since. The celebratory capacity of our emergent species is now one of our distinguishing marks. We have long buried our dead and observed seasonal changes with solemn and devout ceremonials. We have given thanks for life, food, and fertility. If that were all there is to humans, however, we would be remembered as a rather grave and dull bunch. We begin to see in these early civilizations, and indeed in Paleolithic art and craft, something truly remarkable: an ability to have fun and participate in festivity. These ancient ancestors of ours display a festive spirit, seeing life as more than a desperate struggle for existence and society as more than a functional unit of divided labor and determinate hierarchy. It is true that these early rituals served vital social purposes and cultural meanings. However, the humans who arranged and conducted them gave them a festive quality, imbuing social occasions with a complex combination of seriosity and frivolity. The human “sense of occasion” allows a social ritual to acquire an aura of play, interweaving the overtone of an important juncture worthy of observation with a concurrent undertone of festal “effervescence.” As symbolic play, an event weighty with grave meaning becomes a time of celebration leavened by the festive air of shared vivacity regardless of the immediate event that prompts the ritual occasion—a harvest, a wedding, or a funeral. People sense they are in the especial province of a time out of time and a place out of place, participating in an extraordinary and in some sense magical engagement. The identity of the celebrants moves from the rational constraints of Homo sapiens and the functional disciplines of

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Homo faber into the playful delights of Homo ludens. In such a way, festive rituals mediate change, offsetting the solemnity and gloom of unwelcome change such as death, and underscoring welcome change such as marriage with glad felicity. In any case, such events are celebrations of social “life-symbols”: we the celebrants live and participate; our society is alive symbolically, so our way of life will live historically. Looking back at the rudiments of these long-ago festive events, we may infer that their lasting importance is that people were learning how to take time and reserve space in order to play. Social occasions have been suffused with conviviality and festivity and mirth, communicating and legitimating the idea that play is an activity worth doing, something valuable in itself. Having fun can be traced to the smile of a baby or to children at play, but as an adult social pursuit, it acquired over time a more elaborate social sensibility. The baby senses that there is something funny about this brave new world into which she or he has been born, and children sense that playing is fun. A primal sense that delight is a pleasurable sensation and that play is an enjoyable pastime gives experiential precedence to those memorable moments in every life and every society. Since play is fun, and makes most of us feel good, it must be good; therefore, let us play! An adult event such as the Natufian festival provides ancient evidence suggesting that people understood quite well the logic and pragmatics of play. For the Natufians, a funeral could be an occasion for a festive celebration; feasts could be occasions for festive reciprocity serving important social purposes. The Natufians also learned, as students of play have long stressed, that play is an aesthetic experience that we enjoy in and of itself. It cannot be reduced to or explained by psychological factors (the baby's curiosity) or sociological forces (the reassertion of hierarchy and obligations). The infant's smile is a vital feeling stimulated by a delightful object in the immediate environment; and, the social feast is a happy time, at best full of good fun and convivial relaxation. Aesthetic play is truly a thing in itself, a privileged moment of euphoric pleasure that can range from a baby's smile at a nursery toy to the sophisticated and good-natured banter of High Table at a British university. The infant and the professoriate share a capacity for enjoyment of their extant world of experiential sensation, evoking a happy smiling response in the child's toys and the Dean's jokes. Such interludes of playfulness interrupt the flow of conscious being and enliven normal human unhappiness with a temporary condition of euphoria, that often groundless but nevertheless cheering elation that emerges in a festive mood and convivial spirit. The Greek term euphoros means “bearing well” and “good ability to endure.” In those

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moments of euphoric sensibility, we experience the “rapture of being alive” through simple diversions and cordial relaxations. These fulgent and lighthearted times rouse our aesthetic appreciation of things, and let us indulge a “positive capability'' that life is not only bearable but also fun. As humans learn of these exultant benefits, the impulse “let's play” is supplemented by the pragmatic rule of play: “Let's relax and enjoy ourselves for the good of it.” Play proceeds under the sign of relaxation. It may have an earnest context and complex circumstances, but as an activity it is just fun. An intrusion that spoils an atmosphere of euphoric pleasantry is usually unwelcome unless it has ceased to be fun. At its most rewarding and lasting level, then, play is an anagogical experience, an event and activity worth doing and remembering because it "lifts up" our lives beyond the literal and moral routines of mundane existence towards heightened and even ecstatic heartiness. Our immediate enjoyment of play lets a baby laugh at a rattle, or allows the Natufians and the university faculty to socialize in the hedonic aura of beer or sherry. Moments of playful fascination with the objects of our environment, the outer world of our sensory experience, from a rattle to storm clouds to a lover's touch, can expand our interest in sensory things to a ludenic enjoyment of amusement and laughter. This is a remarkable ability: humans are able to respond to the world and the things in it as something that strikes them as funny. More than any other species we know, we are able to exercise the capacity to think the world is a funny place, and even more so, that our fellow humans and ourselves are sometimes pretty damn funny. Not only can we learn how to make fun of other people, amazingly, we are able and even willing to make fun of ourselves. It is an enormous step in primate evolution when members of a species acquire the ability not to take themselves too seriously. Our aesthetic “sixth sense” of playfulness lifts us beyond earnest literalism and moral aphorism towards qualitative and self-deprecating mirth. For humans in this comic mode, hell is the impossibility of fun. Since “making fun” is a characteristic human experience, it is also useful to think of funning as anagogical, something done by humankind the player that is outside the conventional and that is in some sense fictional, “make-believe” that is “not really happening.” The “anagogic” of a daydream, a play-toy, or a festive dinner encompasses activities which are metaphorical, shared abstractions from quotidian reality with a logic and proportion all their own. Such experiences occur in a present wherein the logic is ludenic and the action is aesthetic. People actively engaged in an anagogical play-world or play-form are making fun. The infant's individual sense of fun is activated by the fascinating presence of the toy

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dangling over the crib. (It has even been opined that humans have a “play gene,” giving us a built-in sense of the funny and an appreciation of the anagogic of play.) The individual discovery of funning becomes a social actuality with the invention of the play-forms of fun, with celebrations, holidays, games, and processions. Individuals are quite capable of entertaining themselves with their own aesthetic creations, as in the vast realm of daydreaming. Societies are adept at entertaining groups and populaces with socially sanctioned times and places for play, as well as conventions and communicative rules as to what is funny and what is not. The anagogical thus has its own logic and ethos, but is valued and practiced because of its aesthetic euphoria and memorabilia. The anagogical quality of play exalts our existence to a higher plane of being, rewarding us with an ontological element which makes our lives “lighter,” more fun, varied, and vivacious. The emergence of this capacity allows us to recognize and repeat play experiences as something we want to do again and again. Taking part in play gives us the chance to cross a threshold of experience into a variety of delightful anagogical worlds which exist as an alternative or respite from the mundane and serious, to be sure, and functions as frivolity and novelty in a play-world freed of care and even propriety. For many individuals, and in a larger sense for social orders, there may come a moment of self-recognition or social learning that makes life not only lighter and different, but also more knowledgeable. In the dramas of our individual and group lives, there are revelatory “recognition scenes,” similar to the dramatic junction of anagnorisis in the Greek theater, the moment of discovery that moves someone from ignorance to knowledge. A cycle of plays with weighty import, such as The Oresteia, involved tragic recognition and agonizing self-knowledge, but nevertheless evoked playful enjoyment. Their purpose was not only to dramatize the human condition but also to re-enact tribal myths. Their point was to remind us of how passions and plots lead to self-destruction. But their fun, no matter how dreadful, was in the process of watching madness and gloom unfold in highly entertaining theatrical enactment. If these cumulative experiences of playful heights, different and magical realms, and recognitions of ourselves as players and creators of socially joyous playtimes and places add together, with the right circumstances and freedoms, we can discover and enjoy all the wonders of aesthetic gaiety. Both the evolutionary biologists and historians of early human life have reconstructed and speculated about what happened to humans when they moved from scarcity to abundance, from wandering to settling, and from the incessant pain of labor and orderliness to periods of relaxed pleasure and shared funning and relaxing. At the point when some basic

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human needs are met at some minimal level (safety, food, sex and procreation, division of labor), the “higher” needs, actually wants, can be exercised. Studies of birds and humans note that with some peace and plenty comes “relaxed selection” and playfulness, such as in the development of bright plumage and elaborate songs in birds and colorful if non-functional clothes and festive singing and storytelling in humans. Given the individual opportunity and social flexibility to be able to do as you wish, people choose objects of play and converge onto playful occasions. With great cultural variation, people gradually developed not only places to abide and to work but also places to play. Whether genetic or social, human life has been enriched and enlivened by the influx of geniality and frivolity as values and practices, and the legitimation of activities which are expressive and superfluous. Whatever this implies about human nature, we may safely say that a primal and social tension that is old and complex endures, with the forces of serious concern and noble mission aligned with sober purpose and restrained discipline and the forces of lighthearted fun oriented toward relaxed frivolity and joyous euphoria. But if it is correct to assert that people are at their best— happiest, most self-aware, and convivial—in the pleasurable diversions of play, then at least it would be wise for people to pursue ludenic mirth and festive spirit as the attitudinal and behavioral choice of a being who can live in the good graces of happy elation and enjoyment, “bearing well” with a good ability to endure. A merry heart rather than a heavy heart makes for a bearable lightness of being. Montaigne long ago compared the sad Heraclitus, who cried with pity over the condition of humankind, with the happy Democritus, who laughed at our “vain and ridiculous” humanity. He argued that as part of the human estate we should be happy, since our “own peculiar condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.” The well-borne understand something more than they know: our plight is comic, and the comic sense sustains us through the vicissitudes and ineptitudes of living in a barely comprehensible world and uncertain fate by cheerfully and laughingly make the best of a bad show.

The Dramatic Sense of Life We can only imagine what it was like in the centuries before the Golden Age of Athens when Greek villagers in the countryside were exposed to the spectacle of processions of celebrants in a festive mood. They were accustomed to festivals with religious significance, but the Dionysian celebrants were outrageous and irreverent, hardly supplicants or pilgrims in a pietistic mood or humbled before a holy site. They carried or

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sported enormous dildos of the phallus that symbolized their god's commitment to fertility and festivity, and enjoyed themselves much as the revelers rather than the reverential. While the earliest rites may have included human sacrifice, the bloody sacrifice of animals such as goats was certainly part of their orgiastic celebrations. Even more astonishing to local peasants may have been the sight of the maenads, Dionysian women adherents who left home at key times of the year for sacred rites of naked abandon and inebriation. By the time of the maturity of Greek culture, the comus, or processional entertainment in the country, was familiar as a boisterous and bibulous feature of pastoral life, including processions that included invective and insults flung at the likely awestruck and mystified peasantry. The spiritual and physical “enthusiasm” the Dionysians felt, with the god somehow entering and inspiring the believer was both entrancing and enjoyable. They entered a shared state of mystic fire and cathartic passion that intoxicated them with fervent and esoteric assurances and lusty and ecstatic pleasures. In the midst of Apollonian self-regard and ethical moderation was this passion for the primitive, the unbridled, and the anarchic associated with the natural and the physical. Exactly how the boisterous antics of drunken Dionysian revelers in Greek villages and the orgiastic revels of the maenads devouring raw meat and sexing peasant boys evolved into the glories of the Athenian theater at Dionysia is still much disputed and probably irresolvable. Our effort here is comprehension rather than disputation. In the fullness of time, something new and important emerged from the congeries of historical forces and practices, including the introduction of a new and earthy religious movement, the amalgamation of national myth and rite as celebrated in sanctified places and times, and the freedom and honor accorded intellectual talent such as poets and playwrights. What began as a religious festival and earthy “country” festivity became the ritualized occasion and social process of dramatic observance and enactment resulting in the highly consequential invention of theater. What happened in the Athenian festivals of Dionysus combined cultural solemnity with sensual vitality through stories presented in dramatic form for both the edification of cultural memory and the enjoyment of human activity. Perhaps the most important consequence of the advent and development of theater was and is the dramatic representation of human life and what we may call “senses of life.” For theater gave public shape to the feelings we all have of life and meaning to important things as we experience and reflect upon them. When we are faced with apparent inevitabilities which seem to be out of human control—weather, death, war, pestilence—we may feel that such misfortunes can be attributed to some mysterious power

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such as fate, destiny, kismet, or divine justice. When something untoward or inexplicable occurs, we may question whether such an event—the death of a child, the loss of a fortune, a betrayal by a lover—should be deemed “tragic,” to the point that every mass-mediated event of a terrible occurrence is labeled a “tragedy.” Greek theater placed tragedy in the context of myth and history, which were in some ways inseparable. Tragedy wasn't just a horrible event, it was an important story that instructed as to what had to happen for the Athenian society and state to come to pass and prosper, while at the same time delighting audiences with the unfolding dramatic process of complicated actors and actions. What unfolds in The Oresteia celebrates the historical and social procession of moving from dark to light, from savagery to civilization, from raw flesh-eating nature to democratic order. The dramatis personae of The Oresteia, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Cassandra, represent the burden of the mythic past as it prefaces and creates the return to the Apollonian Mean by “suffering into truth” as a blood sacrifice which brings symbolic healing. The Dionysian festival was a rite of spring celebrating the return of fertility and the recreation of our social destination as a force of life and the blessing of Athena. The trilogy ends in triumphant and joyous dancing. Out of the tragic discord comes pacific harmony. In this conception, the tragic sense of life is not a descent into despair and gloom without hope, but rather a procession from nightmare into the dawn of hopeful springtime and divine justice, moving society out of shame and wrong and intrigue and death towards moral life and the advent of peace. Tragedy would subsequently take on many forms and variations, but the larger tragic sense would continue to convey the idea that humankind has to deal with a cosmic mystery, not only forces beyond our understanding and control, but also with a kind of metaphysical logic that dictates the imperatives and inevitabilities of human life in time and society. The Greek experience inspired them to construct imaginative narratives and a sanctified place for their presentation, imbuing theater with both an aura of sacral festivity and secular magic. As their theater developed, new vistas emerged which conveyed many of the elements of what would eventually be termed melodrama., plays of interest because of their treatment of social mystery as it unfolds in the contingencies and negotiations of human social relations. By the time of Euripides, many of the conventions of melodrama were evident, such as the focus on the tangle of personal relations, the perilous uncertainty of outcomes which would be just and right, and good and evil as a property of social resources such as wealth and power as embodied in the personal struggle of

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individuals for such things. If tragedy is imaginative play in which gods and humans embody the pathos of tragic necessity, then melodrama is social play with the ethos of fortuity, fortune rather than fate. While classical tragedy unfolds a cultural tale of agonizing movement from chaos to order, by contrast melodrama presents an open-ended social story of complications devoid of logical destination towards a just world. For the tragedian, the world is fated; in melodramatics, the world is fickle. The tragic world is populated by Homo sapiens, beings imbued and moved by the fallacy of human logos, the delusion of knowledgeable mastery of every nemesis through rational ability. The melodramatic world is peopled by homo faber, social actors who enact the folly of human ethos, the illusion of social effort as the key to social mastery over recalcitrant and perplexing realities. While the denizens of tragedy are creatures of the temporal unfolding of culturologic, the creatures of melodrama are the historical workings of sociologic. Tragic protagonists and antagonists are representative figures in a destinarian drama for reasons and purposes beyond their comprehension or control. Melodramatic figures are typical of a sociodrama which plays out through the conventions and accidents of history and submits them to the whims of time and circumstance. In the former, things have to happen through the logic of dramatic inexorability; in the latter, things do happen in the ethos of social narrative. In both cases, what is important is not so much the kind of story itself but what the stories tell us about the logical and ethical beliefs and practices of the people who tell and watch them. It was the Greek experience, then, that gestated and matured not only into theater but also theatricality, the dramatic senses of life which have so enriched not only cultural life but also has characterized social life. For theater gave us not only mimesis of mythic and realistic life, it also taught people how the dramatic arts apply to actual life. In addition, we learned the aesthetics of histrionic sensibility, which meant not only the imitation of life but also the incorporation of the dramatic into life. We can trace the awareness and performance of histrionics at least to the shamanic rituals of the Paleolithic cave shrines and certainly in the wider context of various religious and political rituals and ceremonials. The earliest clear record we have of such sanctioned events evolving into theater are the Egyptian “Pyramid Texts,” dramas of the dead pharaoh's journey to the underworld, and the Memphite Drama retelling the sacral story of the death and resurrection of the god Osiris, which was also celebrated in the Abydos passion play. The Egyptians are also credited with recording the first joke, inscribed on a roll of papyrus: “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishnets down the

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Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.” But the Greeks gave theater and theatricality not only sacral but also secular status as a mode of expression in the setting and presentation of theatrical plays, and also as a norm for philosophical and rhetorical statement, as with the dialogues of Plato and the rhetoric of Demosthenes. For the Greeks, histrionic sensibility included an element of playfulness: the solemnity of ritual theater was complemented and even superseded by the exercise of enjoyment. A tragedy may present momentous dramas of mythic import, and a melodrama serious themes of social significance, but they were still plays which the auditors were allowed and expected to enjoy. Perhaps it is fair to say that the Greeks not only understood the logos of tragic expression and the ethos of social action, but also further advanced humane perceptivity through the expanded feeling of pathos communal participation in theater aroused. By this time, humans had become capable of public expression of pathos. The burial of the dead with artifacts useful in the next life indicates care for someone whose life the survivors deemed worthy of celebration and indeed future reunion. With the advent of Greek theater, new vistas of pathetic expression are evident in the histrionic representation of feelings and emotions. The experience of suffering in tragedy and melodrama evokes pathos in the depiction of emotions—guilt and shame, love and hate, patriotism and treason—and arouses feelings of compassion and condemnation. But if we identify tragedy as the agonizing playing out of divine and human logic towards an important and inexorable destination, and melodrama as the province of the complex and indeterminate social relations, then the true home for the theatrical celebration of pathos is comedy. Comedy was a later addition to the repertoire of ritual theater at the Dionysian festivals, but rustic comedic celebrations had been around for a long time as the worship of Dionysus spread through the Greek countryside. We can trace the mythic roots of tragedy in the Apollonian representation of an ordered cosmos that always returns to restraint and reason, and the social interest in melodrama in the recurrence of Faustian forces and personages who bring conflict and change to the social ethos. These dramatic habits are characterized by a dimension of human aesthesis, appealing to different dimensions and concerns of the human aesthetic imagination. But they are incomplete: comedy had to be included in the dramatic cycle in order to address the appeal of euphoric sensibility, an aesthetic derived from the impulse to play, the urge to have fun, and the desire to see fun depicted and celebrated in a play. Dionysus was, after all, the god of joy, of high spirits and natural feelings, so he complemented

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reasonability and sociality with festivity, offering a mode of expression which allows ecstasy and excess, the joy of the life force which is creative and fertile, very much of the chthonian earth. The sobriety of Homo sapiens and the seriosity of Homo faber highlighted the need for the instinctive and extra-rational exuberance and cheer of Homo ludens. Comedy completes the dramatic picture: tragedy presents the unfolding logic in the play as revealing eternal and ordained sense; melodrama depicts the ethos, or character, of plots and complications as untangling the subject of social sense; and comedy celebrates the pathos of human passions and desires which constitute the play of nonsense. If tragedy is close to ultimate things, and melodrama to social things, comedy is close to human things, the raw, essential nature of human life termed zoe. Metaphysical considerations and social entanglements are complemented with comic celebration, the lighthearted and ludicrous enjoyment of “the human thing,” what ordinary mortals do that is so very funny. Tragedy may deal with ultimate things in the discontinuity of justice, and melodrama with social things in the discontinuity of concord; but comedy leavens our view of things by reveling in our mortal reality and natural continuity. The Greek theater was a festival with both religious and civic significance, but for its posterity it remains important as a festival of learning. For the Athenians accorded spectacular legitimacy to the playlearning of dramatic make-believe, wherein people could watch and observe the human play-acting of what we are and what we might be, that it is no wonder that theatrical experience was so popular and institutionalized. The plays which were performed gave their auditors a dramatic context to address the great questions that interested the vibrant and. inquisitive society: what is the nature of things? what is the place of humans in the universe? The tragedians examined the question as to whether we are the playthings of sporting gods or bearers of a divine destiny. Melodramatics explored whether we are equal to the forces and antagonisms of society or able to make rough social peace. And the comedians inquired, why are we mortals such damn fools yet able to play things out to happy endings? Tragedy plays with fate, melodrama with folly, but comedy plays with foolery. The auspicious delights of theatricality were complemented with instructions from what the play tells us: we may well be pawns in the mysterious game of the gods, and knights and knaves in the mystifying smoke-and-mirrors of society, but we are also comic creatures of our own earthly cosmos. We may be placed by the gods in cultural destiny, and controlled by social powers for their own interests, but we also enjoy moments of freedom and happiness playing

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out for ordinary mortals in their earthly and temporary existence. If we be mortals, let us rejoice and be of good cheer, enjoying that moment! And if we be fools, let us celebrate our foolishness by laughing at ourselves! Theater since Athens has had a long and varied history, but the fundamental humane relationship between the play enacted and the play attended to has remained largely the same. Theatrical attention involves a kind of vital contact in which actors and audiences transact in a predictable manner, watching the “sight seen” and observing the meanings derived from the theatrical experience. The consequence of this attentive habit and ludenic enlightenment is not only cultural and topical but also mimetic. People who learn from dramatic engagement cultivate and propagate a feel for histrionics and an appreciation of dramatic expression. Like all technologies of communication, dramaturgy and theatricality invoke a “noetic economy,” a way thinking and doing in the world with its own comprehensive logics and active characteristics. Drama patterns things for us so powerfully that it influences not only the structures of our thought but also our actions, to the extent that we find ourselves simulating the responses we have seen and learned from our theatrical experience. This kind of ludenic role taking can extend to an admired relative, a great teacher, a dynamic administrator, and obviously to symbolic leaders in the make-believe world of theater and by extension to popular media such as the motion picture. It seems that people cannot figure things out adequately for themselves in private; they have to see them acted out by actors in histrionic contexts which convey in dramatic form what things to do and the way to do things. In that sense, humans are aesthetic pragmatists, combining the frivolous aesthete who displays a sense of vitalizing fun with the methodical searcher who is both inquisitive and sociable. We all want to inquire about the truths inherent in the tragic sense of life and the social goods possible in the melodramatic sense of life, holding out the possibility of logically arrived at knowledge and the potentiality of ethically realized social achievements. That is not enough: we also want the joy we might feel when we cheer ourselves with the felicity of comic grace.

Comic Grace In the profound and increasingly metaphysical study of physics, scientists seem to have come to the conclusion that time is so illusory that it is non-existent, and thus despite our common-sense daily expectations, there is no next. It may be the case that temporality as we know it is our ultimate fallacy, and that much of nature lives in an eternal now, but as the

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oddball curiosities of the natural order, humans live in a now but somehow remember a then and expect a next. Even with great cultural variation, each of us adheres roughly to a kind of pragmatic rule: if we feel, think, or do things in a certain way, what will be the consequences of our actions? In both the ways we do things and the stories we construct to explain things, we are all dealing with the question of what's next? For the logos of our activities and the mythos of our narratives depend upon our anticipation of “nexts,” how we in fact do things and also how we imagine what it is that we do. Our human experience with time gives us some insight into the various ways that things can play out, and how these alternatives can be storied. It is true that we always live in a present, but that present is mediated by our present memory and use of a past and our unrealized future imagined and shaped by our projection of a future. The uncertainty that our temporal existence burdens us with is surely a motive for both festivals to celebrate the moment and “seize the time” (carpe diem) for our understanding and use, and for dramatic presentations about local and eternal human experience. Drama is after all a medium of expression, and as such allows people to mediate their temporal experience for what it was, what it is, and what it will or could be. Our familiar forms of drama embody and enact these concerns. Tragedy relates what has to be with our sense of justice and time that went into the making of the present. Melodrama confronts us not with what must happen but with what can happen in an unjust and unresolved world. And, comedy gladdens us with what could happen in a world where human possibilities are realized in creating a world of happy potential. Dramatic art can thus deal first with our sense of necessity, then for our sense of contingency, and lastly and most happily with our sense of possibility. In the long history and legacy of human imaginative expression, humans have not been content with the cry of wrong or the sob of despair, but have been made buoyant by the smile of hope. Both scholarship and legend place the Greek comic festival in the rude countryside of Greece as the occasion for uninhibited revels of merrymaking, with singing, dancing, fornicating, and joshing. Comedy apparently flourished in the countryside, always associated with anarchic and erotic excesses, but it probably always existed everywhere in the country of the mind, the primal impulses associated with dreams (both night and day), the times of social release and individual display when festivity has no motive or reason beyond having fun, and the playful exercise of comedic expression such as bantering and partying and flirting. The impulse for funning in human ontology and history stems from the desire to express the “joy of the heart,” both the vital energy of happiness

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and the natural hope for continued good things. Dramatic play becomes one of the prime ways for such animated gaiety to be expressed, so that humane enthusiasm and aspiration becomes the motive force behind the enduring popular appeal of comedy. Tragedy offers ordinary mortals the cold comforts of divine justice, and melodrama the tangled knots of social mysteries, but comedy suggests something more profound and buoyant, the hope for human grace among the ordinary and undeserving. In the extensive pantheon the ancient Greeks imagined and utilized, we now tend to associate the Fates, spinning and weaving the course of human destiny, with tragedy, and the Olympians with melodrama, since their intrigues and schemes are the stuff of social struggles. But we associate the Graces with festive good tidings. They varied in number and had their own sacrifices and mysteries, but were three in number before the entrance to the Acropolis: Euphrosyne, the goddess of good cheer, mirth, and joyful merriment; Aglaia, of beauty, splendor, and charm; and Thalia, of festivity, rich banquet, and the fertile bloom of spring. In later mythology, Thalia became the Muse of comedy, associated with the Dionysian rites and pictured with the comic mask and shepherd's crook, her hair garlanded by flowers, befitting her graceful name meaning “she who brings flowers.” The term “grace” came to be associated with the attributes of the Graces, denoting those things which bring joy, pleasure, and loveliness into the world, including the “blooming life” and good cheer we associate with comedy. In the complicated world of Greek mythology, there were lesser Graces who presided over activities such as play, and indeed, “humbler graces.” The Greeks thought enjoyment and celebration so important that grace was not limited in agency, but rather extended to mortal and animal beings that were not godly or perfect in beauty but rather embodied the diffusion of gracefulness across nature. They included those who embody comic grace, such as children at play, reveling bacchantes with their lusty and full-bodied laughter, and romping fauns. Perhaps it is this “humbler grace” that found its true location in dramatic comedy. For all of the festive occasions and events and ritual forums of civilization's early history, the performance of comedy for popular audiences has been the most enduring and widespread medium that communicates the abiding desire for poetic fare which conveys our sense of the human comedy and the comic hope for happy endings. In many ways, the development of Greek drama reflects Vico's vision of the mythological origins of “poetic wisdom.” The age of the gods wherein law and society are of divine origin and purpose and appointed human actors enact the epic destiny is appropriately the setting of tragedy; the age of

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Introduction

heroes is the proper setting for social actors to confront and best villainy and treachery in melodramas; and the age of the people, full of vernacular language and popular experience, is the appropriate placing for the “democratic” dramatics of comedy. It is no accident, then, that the first great comic dramatist was Aristophanes, who wrote at the height of the Athenian democracy and in the context of the Dionysian festivals, exhibiting the freedom of raucous banter and invective which characterized the ancient komos and was ritualized in the carnivalesque holiday atmosphere of the dramatic competition. Aristophanes (and apparently others in the era of “Old Comedy”) gave voice to several of the great conventions of comedy, not the least of which was critical insult, attacking important figures and political innovations, and even more boldly savaging the endless and fruitless war with Sparta, which was indeed prophetic. Satire, buffoonery, burlesque, farce and virtually all the comic techniques of stage and speech were employed to attack politicians, philosophers, widespread infidelity and lechery, with few limits about who could be a target for comedic “roasting.” There is much peripety in Aristophanic democratic comedy: in one play, women, virtually excluded from social and political participation, occupy the Acropolis, the male seat of power, and collaborate with their Spartan enemy by enlisting their equally irate wives with the Athenian women in a sex strike in order to stop the idiotic (and sexually and domestically disruptive) war. The typical Aristophanic “anti-hero” is anything but aristocratic or heroic, in no way resembling the godlike marble ideal. Rather, he is a democratic fellow, a farmer or artisan who is humble but feisty, earning an honest living but always ready for sex, food, drink, and even pilfering, a poneria or comic rogue. Like ordinary folks in all ages and places, he is mad about something the powerful and haughty are doing, here the endless war, the corrupt politicians, the sophistic teachers, and so on. Virtually no one is spared in Old Comedy: a contemporary comic playwright, Pherecrates, used the sexual metaphor of eating to make sport of Athenian wives' infidelity, in among other things, cunnilingus: “The enjoyment of someone else's wife is just like an hors d'oeuvre—tasty, but a single swallow is enough.” They were bold enough to make fun of the gods and the great myths, including the tragic founding myth of the House of Atreus. A fragment survives of an Aristophanic play which makes outrageous sport of the infanticide and cannibalism in that mythic tale, with a father bemoaning that “'I've dined on my own children's giblets— how can I ever eat roasted pig again?” Even though topical, the Old Comics invent virtually every comic type that survives to this day, including the pompous and boastful general and the lecherous old man. The demystifying and

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irreverent spirit which makes comedy both eternally delightful and relevant is fleshed out in Old Comedy. Even though Old Comedy is superseded by New Comedy, and eventually by all kinds of comedy, the incredulous and liberating philosophy still informs the smiles and laughter that express the human love of comedy and the incipient hope for comic grace, the good and happy next. In the festivity of comedy, the next is now. The immediate experience of comic grace orients the celebrants towards euphoric enchantment through the feast of the senses. The dramatic arts of comedy entrance us with their projection of our enjoyments, allowing us to immerse ourselves and share enactments of funny things which interest and command our attention. At its most immediate and palpable, comedy relates us to our primal passions and deepest desires. Mortal gods may tempt the Fates with their plans and actions, but we know that they are the stuff of myth and the agonistic agents of political destiny, figures of our solemn enjoyment of mythic fulfillment. There is no next for them, for they occupy a world that is timeless, outside of time, as we know it, and act out a folktale that becomes a founding myth. The now of melodrama is the stuff of history, or at least journalism, and the action of the story occurs in a world mired in time, in the onrush of now in an effort to control or understand the unraveling of what might be next. Tragic grace is outside of human control, since the next is preordained by their role in the drama as key players in the procession of mythic narrative. Melodramatic grace is inside the constraints of social control, since the next is always a context of unraveling involving victories and defeats in the mercurial quick of sociologic, stories about the strife of mortal roles— heroes, villains, and fools. The mortal fools of comedy are aware of the inevitability of mythologic and the inconstancy of sociologic, but since they are the stuff of festivity, they revel in a world that is “time out” and beyond mythic fulfillment or social resolution. Comic festivity occurs outside the agency of mythic time. The roles of social time, enacted in a world of mortal fools who celebrate the humbler grace given the graceless in the comic moment, lets us share the gift of enjoying the fact that the world and its people are funny in all the complex senses of the word. The gift of grace comes with learning what the world we conceive means. Tragic grace involves accepting the power of fate; it also includes learning, and sometimes shaping, one's own fate. Melodramatic grace suggests learning something of the social puzzlements which go into the endlessly unfolding array of situations, and of one's role and strategy in weaving one’s way through them. Comic grace emerges by embracing the vital principle of living. Comedy enjoins being debonair with good cheer and good hope and merry

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Introduction

heart, in the spirit of the Graces who embodied love of beauty, charm, and elegance in the celebration of life lived well and heartily in aesthetic gusto. Comic grace, then, differs from tragedy and melodrama in its philosophy of life. The tragic sense of life conceives living as an epic burden born of necessity; the melodramatic mind sees knights and pawns in an interminable contestation; but, the comic perspective views the world as a wondrous place for a song of musement, a delightful carnival of fools in an anarchic but not totally inhospitable world. In the midst of such wondrous foolishness, comedy and comedics counsel us to enjoy the natural grace of those things which make ordinary life worthwhile, seek social grace with good cheer, and entertain good hope that cosmic grace in some sense envelops our lives. Comedy cheers because in that world the impossible becomes possible, the ineluctable becomes eluctable, and in some way, the mortal becomes immortal. Comedy never ceases to please and charm by directing and reminding us of the bearable lightness of being, that the vital principle which comic drama exhibits never fails to stimulate and inspire. Grace is not only a gift, it is also a disposition, the self-aware realization that we are only mortals capable of all the foolery that goes with mortality, beings characterized by ignorance, incapacity, and insensitivity. We are fortunately and happily graced with the acquirable capacity for bemused self-recognition as a comic creature that can view the world with astute capacity, act in the world with generosity and prudence, and wish the world and our species well when we depart. As the term debonair suggests, comic grace enjoins graciousness of attitude and manner, expression and action that is demystifying but understanding, and passions which sustain good will and enjoin good times. Above all, comic grace underscores the merit of a spirit of playfulness, the concept that life can be a grand festival of discoveries and enjoyments if we cultivate the arts of benign happiness and common courtesy. The comic sense of life is then a ludenic posture favoring playful observation of the human comedy and gracious participation in human affairs. Comedy shows us that most people live in the bubble of consoling delusion, and that one must deal with the delusionary with tactful good grace. Being graceful is complemented by the social skill of being humorous, recognizing that many fellow members of society proceed in the solemn grip of illusions learned through socialization, and that such mystification can only be countered by humble and oblique comic deflating. Being graceful and being funny is in the long run complemented by bemused sagacity, living well and free by being blithe. A “blithe spirit” who is both caring and carefree, exercising sympathy for the common

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human plight and love of nature but whose concern is complemented by demystified lusion, seeing things as clearly as possible and hoping to enjoy good things as long as possible and exit laughing. Moreover, since comedy tends to feature increase in happiness and usually happy endings, the comic sensibility counsels that the people who live in accord with the comic philosophy hope for the ascendance of personal and social happiness. Comedy in the theater climaxes with an anastrophe, a turning upwards towards comic harmony signaled by a festive celebration. Comedy in life is less structured and predictable, and not everything is funny. But an attitude of sympathetic risibility allows us to view our fellow mortals as more inane and foolish than vicious and villainous, so even though a comic attitude differentiates one from the earnest and driven, it remains that everyone shares the humbling reality that we are all crooked timbers which cannot be made wholly straight. Comic grace in life does not imply arrogance or contempt, but rather an injunction to be gracious to everyone and graceful in one's actions although exercising prudent wisdom to address and examine things, including, one's self. A stance of shrewd nonchalance is wisely accompanied by illuminating and worldly-wise observation as a participant-observer of the human comedy. The appeal of comic grace as a philosophy of life has been given great impetus by the now old and rich corpus of movie comedy. When we enter the world of movie comedy, we are entering an experience of mutual projection: as the movie unreels, we look for and see the kinetic movement of illuminated things, including humans, on the screen. If what we see appeals to us, our attention persists, we allow ourselves to continue watching, and wanting to know, what is next? Not only does our interest persist, so does our imaginative playfulness. We are enchanted by the spectacle of the moving picture show to the extent that we are often enraptured, forgetting ourselves and the outside world and absorbing ourselves in ludenic and vicarious participation of the unfolding photoplay and later with the imaginative significations which we retain and learn from our movie experience. In the movies, comic grace is represented for us in both the immediate euphoric experience of film comedy and in our cumulative learning of comedic appreciation. Laughter is a song of pleasurable amusement, immediate from viewing the movie and reflective from incorporation into our ludenic and pragmatic learning. Comic grace is then a “state” when we let ourselves loose in the comic mode of enjoyment, but something of a country of the mind when we grasp and utilize the memory of comic education. Perhaps the greatest lesson we learn is that comedy is unlike tragedy, since we are not mortal gods, and

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Introduction

unlike melodrama we are not mortal heroes or villains, but like comedy we are indeed mortal fools. Comic grace is both humbling and ennobling, for we learn something important about the common human condition of our modest and ignorant state which makes us so funny, but also of our common estate of earthly continuity that makes comedy so much a dramatic affirmation of hope. Comedy more than about anything else reminds us that we all share a common fate and endure a common forbearance, but the something more we seek is a common grace. In the comic world, a life acquires a destiny only after it has been lived, and becomes a social fact only after the world has been traversed in real experience. In comedy, the gods are demystified and society is vanquished in the wake of the creative coherence of people at play, affirming human life and liveliness and achieving humane and felicitous grace. In contradistinction to the entropy of tragic fatalism and the inertia of social conformism, comedy recreates the world. As comic play progresses in its dramatic celebration, it invokes the creativity of nature, the sociability of human actors, and the continuity of humankind at its hopeful best. Philosophers and theologians have long thought that the central problem and quest for humanity is the desire and hope for some kind of grace, which helps explain why we imagine grace in godly form and seek depictions of it in human form. Since comic grace offers a special rendition of this deep and abiding desire, we find powerful art forms that exhibit the “laughing animal” in concrete sensuous dramatizations fun to look at and grasp in prehensile wonderment how a happy grace might be realized in our lives. Perhaps no other artistic form of popular enactment can better express the amity of personal grace, the comity of social grace, and the harmony of continuing, and even cosmic, grace than the movies. It has fallen to the medium of motion pictures to perpetuate and propagate this most auspicious and sanguine possibility so deeply and consistently embedded in human aspiration and imagination. For that reason, we have chosen movie comedy as the “data base” for our inquiry, as the most widespread and accessible venue for comedy and the pleasing depiction of comic grace.

The Pragmatics of Movie Comedy Our inquiry has tried to distinguish comedy as something both different and preferable to other dramatic and humanistic forms of thought and action. We saw tragedy as a solemn procession, the aristocratic enactment of metaphysical destinies played out inexorably and in some

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ways incomprehensibly over time. Melodrama involves the working out of a procedure, a problematic set of inductions, usually enacted in “bourgeois theater,” the setting of problems and solutions in the miasma of social puzzles. Comedy is a progression played out through practical wisdom and action by ordinary people and in that sense is “democratic.” With this exercise of “abduction,” operational “logics-in-use” and active hypotheses to guide prudential action towards a favored and graceful teleology, the imagined light of comedic summer, such as a great good place and pastoral respite resembling the banks of Green Willow. The comic hope is for people to overcome being driven or constrained so they are able to choose and free to imagine a carefree and unprecedented world of light. If tragedy is a heavy world of wintry weight, and melodrama a fervent world of autumnal heat, then comedy is a light world of summery warmth. The comedic progression draws us toward the possibility of a heavy heart lifted by the lighthearted luminescence of lovely graciousness, seeing the light of good graces as a worthy delight to seek, and lets us enjoy a state of grace as we enter the light. Rather than working through the painful delusions of tragedy or straining with the topical illusions of melodrama, comedy brings us into the play world of lusion, the ludenic logic of comic fruition and continuation as people discover and move toward a desirable ending imagined as their own creation, a time and place of luminous clarity. And that “luminocracy” is a brave new world that is decidedly not a foretold destiny brought about as a ritual of force nor a determinate social role-set immersed in fraud, but rather an enlightened ritual of freedom, an imaginary fantasy of personable beauty, social good, and cultural truth. The distinction of comedy as both a model for personal and social value and also philosophical inquiry has long been noted and utilized. Comedy, Meredith said, is the most civilized form of art. In that spirit, the critic Kenneth Burke saw comedy as demanding “the maximum of forensic complexity” since it cannot rely upon the “astronomical marvels” of tragedy but instead must shape the plot “from the premises of the informing situation,” dealing with “men in society” rather than “the cosmic man.” Rather than the “superhuman” forces of classical tragedy and the “inhuman” contingencies of “romantic-natural” tales, comedy is “essentially humane.” The “comic corrective” makes people into “observers of themselves, while acting,” offering us the wise grace of humbling self-knowledge, mocking the pretensions and ridiculing the ambitions of us comic creatures. We may, as Santayana noted, imagine ourselves as lyrical beings in an ideal essence that perhaps urges the hopeful desire of romantic resolution, and in temporal finitude tragic

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beings with a common fate we try to defeat, but in our earthly existence we are plainly comic, and in our more lucid moments we will admit it. For it is in such moments of lucid playfulness and radiant observation that we are free enough and festive enough to see the logic of absurdity, the beauty of nonsense, and the good of foolishness. In this topsy-turvy way, then, the comic mythos and philosophy is an important form of humane perspective and knowledge. We may better grasp the power of comedic thinking and doing if we understand it as pragmatic learning. For “pragmatics” (from the root pragma, referring to “act, deed,” “to do”) as both a narrative of human activity and philosophy of human ontology and sociology is very much oriented towards inquiring and acting upon what human beings in their finite empirical existence in fact do and could do. Even with its many variations and permutations, the thrust of comedy is toward humans acting in such a way that they create something new and hopeful and fun. Pragmatism is interested in the objective detachment of scientific method as a mode of inquiry to solve human problems. Those who see the value of the comic perspective recommend “comic detachment” as an amended and humanistic pragmatic mode of inquiry termed “perspectival realism,” uniting the realistic premise of natural and social sciences with awareness of the humane and historical contextualism of the humanities. If we amend the famous “pragmatic rule” of Charles Sanders Peirce to the viewpoint of comic detachment and playful inquiry, what does it tell us about the conduct of human life? Since the “comic corrective” to finding out things and fixing things involves a playful and unpremised approach to inquiry, it begins by undermining the narcissistic delusions of grandiosity and the social illusions of vainglorious seriosity. However, it also accords every kind of inquiry and activity with pragmatic playfulness in the conduct of investigating and changing the things which are the objects of interest. Like any good inquiry, comic pragmatism envisions an earthbound “teleologic,” that the outcome of what is examined and interceded will be good. The truly singular advantage of the comedic perspective is the vital principle that inspires it by understanding the rhythms of natural and social life, the absurdity of “sociologic,” the splendid symmetry of the nonsensical, and the meritorious benefit of foolery. The dialectical combination of practical and crazy wisdom enlivens the rapturous sense of being alive in the interplay of the comic and the cosmic. Comedies expand Vico's premise of verum factum to include not only that the truth is what we make, but also the beautiful is what we create, and the good is what we confer as valuable consequently.

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Comic pragmatism, then, is indeed an old idea given a new and inclusive viewpoint. Seeking and finding what can be done that is prudential requires both practical judgment and curious playfulness. The virtue of comic inquiry is that it brings together those dimensions of human life which are worthwhile, namely beauty, good, and truth. Peirce outlined these dimensions, calling them esthetic goodness, moral goodness, and logical goodness. This nineteenth-century terminology we may view first as aesthesis, both a science of admirable ideals and a humanistic appreciation of the grace of beauty; secondly as ethos, both a science of social conduct and admiration of the grace of the beneficial good; and thirdly as logos, both a science of knowledge and as approbation of the grace of the true. Both the pragmatic and comic quest is to demystify things in order to make their conception clear and thus also clear away the barriers to the realization of beauty, the reformation of society, and the revelation of truth. The cosmic destiny of tragedy places suffering figures in an unfathomable mystery which must work itself out; the social truth of melodrama separates social actors in roles while dealing with the complicated mystifications of extant powers; but the pragmatic adventure of comedy is for ludenic demystification which joins and binds into a new and vital order of umbilical union. The wonder and joy of comedy is that it accords ordinary mortal fools the gift of mercy and eternity, but unlike the logical credo of grace, in comedy that happy acquisition is usually deserved and eternity is bound to the “playful grace” and “laughing with” that Petronius long ago envisioned as the promise of the human Elysian Fields. Comedy throughout its long career has demonstrated that the practical is not the enemy of the true, that the beautiful is appealing because (as Keats wrote) it appears as truth, and that the good is so because it has its uses. The happy conjunction of comedy and pragmatism reminds us that in both life and art it is possible and desirable to envision and dramatize a world that is lovable because it is beautiful (kalos), is habitable because it is good (ethos), and is comprehensible because it is true (logos). Tragedy traditionally ends with the inevitable downturn called the “catastrophe,” but comedy ends with a conceivable upturn termed the “anastrophe,” a hopeful world of sensible practicality and sensate joy in a comic society. The power and endurance of comedy as a dramatic form and as a humanistic vantage suggests that making sense and use of comedy is a worthwhile undertaking. For in comedy we can see a mature but constantly revitalized dramatic art form which recurrently and profoundly speaks to our aesthetic hope of art as a representation of possibility, a forum for social factuality, and an inspiration for the hope of

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Introduction

reasonableness and happiness. As both a dramatic form and a social perspective, then, we can follow the structure of comedy as a site for wonderful entertainment and instructive education. We learn to discern than any good comedy has an identifiable purpose in conception, an unfolding process in enactment, and an important point in conclusion. Too, pragmatic inquiry ideally begins with initiatory conceptualization of a problem, and thus states a purpose for what the inquiry will find out and try to do. At this imaginative stage, concept formation is an aesthetic activity envisioning and planning how and why the inquiry is to be conducted. The directive stage involves the social process of investigation and action which attempts to unfold mysteries and undo tangles emerging from the activity in question. Finally, what has been found out should lead to revelations about something we didn't know or hadn't done before and thus make a point about consequences and interventions. In comedy, the rhythmic movement is from a concept of beauty to analysis of facts, and from conduct of action to a logical conclusion of concerted activity as an outcome of intelligent maturity and emotional vitality. In theater, the dramatic premise and the dramatic exposition leads the play to a dénouement which has a significance and directive beyond the structural and topical dimensions of the play or episode. The purpose of tragedy involves the cathartic aesthesis of seeing tragic beauty represented in dramatic action; the process of tragedy plays out the story which presents the ethos and the ethic of the tale told; and the point, the “moral of the story” is what we have learned and take away from what we have experienced. The point taken is a variant of the pragmatic rule: beyond the tangle of motives and mesh of actions in King Lear, we further and quite sensibly learn that dividing rule and retiring prematurely may well not be a good idea. Similarly, in comedy, the beauty of whom and what is represented (a lovely young couple) and various obstacles and antitheses (a pompous general claiming his bride) exist in the process of unfolding good contending with bad until the uplifting truth emerges. In the united couple, the foiled elders and haughty betters demonstrate the comic principle in that beauty and good and truth are not Platonic essences but rather wondrous delights that ordinary mortals can somehow achieve and enjoy through the “good offices” of comedic action. The comic point can be just as simple as “tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight” (relax, and enjoy the fun) on up to the salubrious (persons from different classes learning to love one another) or the admonitory (stop this idiotic war, you fools, or else no sex!) But comedy always has a point, even if it only points out the pointless, as in absurdist comedy, or blunts down the pointed, as in many comedies of manners. Comedy tends towards an insistent naturalism,

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attempting to avoid the “seductive fallacy” of importing “something more” (such as the deus ex machina contrivance of tragedy), focusing instead on the creative capacities of often decidedly fallible people dealing with a problematic world but buoyed by a comic sense of life. Perhaps the greater point of comedy is that it teaches and reminds us of a vital principle inherited from youth but celebrated by adults in their moments of comic playfulness wherein reality yields to the triumphant revelry of pleasurable and hopeful ludenic experiences. In our comic rebellions against the reality principle, we invoke not only the pleasure principle of comedic enjoyment but also evoke the “fugitive principle” of comic pragmatics, returning to the discipline of the seriously real more buoyant and sanguine and perhaps more willing to entertain fresh thoughts and alternative actions. We may even experience a “comic epiphany,” whereby one has the flashing comprehension of the larger funniness of serious things and the higher meaning of comic nonsense as the wiser sensibility of funning with things. The comic sense of life provokes us into awareness of the severe limits of seriousness and heightens appreciation of the vital truth of critical mirth. Comedy flourishes through awakening our love of the funny truth of our animated nature and directing enjoyment of the disorderly fun of human folly and relishing the panoramic spectacle of the human fool's parade, all foolishness before the gods.

The Cinematics of Movie Comedy We have emphasized that comedy occurs on a festive occasion, most notably in the long tradition of comic theater traceable to the ancient world. Like so many human activities, comedy of this sort moved from something informal and rustic to something formal and urban. The “germ” of comedy exists everywhere in our capacity to think things funny, express something funny, and to seek out and have fun. We can observe comedy in life every day. When something happens on a bus or at work that is strange or incongruous, and someone makes a wisecrack about it, the laughter and snickers and smiles that erupt are a shared festive moment, a small revel and revelation that lightens the day. When a group of people break for lunch or meet for drinks, sometimes such interstices are somber or dispirited; but if someone breaks the mood by venturing, “Have you heard the one...” and tells a joke, then typically everyone brightens and listens to the joke, and if funny and told well, provokes laughter and good feelings. The wisecracker and jokester have on these occasions changed the mood of a group from boredom and solemnity to a moment of euphoric release and convivial exhilaration. In their own small and

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mundane way, such moments of comic expression and shared conviviality are “theatrical events” made funny by someone daring to say, in effect, “this is funny” or “let's play.” By invoking a festive principle, the “actor” can then evoke a comic expression which provokes laughter. Such moments of aesthetic frivolity arouses our sense of imaginative play, our capacity for make-believe and our receptivity for experiencing improvised comic events in everyday life. Theatrical events have persisted and flourished by playing to our capacious fantasy life and our willingness to suspend disbelief and even pay money to witness an enjoyable dramatic spectacle, a “sight seen.” We like to see things acted out, and indeed learn by watching such things given dramatic structure and power. The attentive auditor to a play is seeing the sight, focusing on the action of what may be seen. When we attend a play, we initiate the transaction between auditors and actors as something we want to look at, since the play might well include aesthetically pleasing “knowables,” or potentially things of beauty worth seeing. This initial attention is complemented by mimetically interesting “knowings,” those things done in the story which hold our interest by giving direction to the plot happenings which unfold in the process we attend to as worth watching. If so, we are willing to keep watching until the time of completion, with the play going towards a satisfying climax or resolution which made our observation of the whole thing worth our while and in retrospect offering us “knowns,” conclusive edification which we incorporate into our learning and remembering experience. A play we find enjoyable takes us from initiation, invoking our attention with appeal to aesthesis, looking at and appreciating things of beauty. The play then evokes our interest with appeal to mimesis, or attentively watching things being done in the narrative which are interesting; and finally by provoking our involvement in the movement of the theatrical event through the dynamic of kinesis, whereby things “play out” over time towards a dénouement or conclusion, perhaps even an entelechy, the revealing moment of lusion when the ludenic clarity of aesthetic and dramatic insight lets us know a great truth known only through lusory selfknowledge, knowing ourselves. In comedy, the moment of completion is termed katastasis, with the auditors of the comic event restored to a pleasant and euphoric state of peaceable freedom from worry and festive satisfaction, what we here term comic grace. When the movies came into being in the late nineteenth-century, their popular appeal and technical wizardry were immediately evident, but the question arose as to whether the movies were a new art form. The motion picture did evolve out of other kinds of entertainment, such as magic

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shows, “magic lantern” displays, and spiritualism, all of which conjured up visible and often mobile apparitions for the delight and fright of audiences. But it also became quickly apparent that the movies were different, indeed a superior and innovative means of communication which, with breathtaking speed, became a world-wide phenomenon and lucrative industry. The movies did rely upon and extend from several expressive heritages, but their uniqueness and innovativeness clearly made them something new and exciting. This was especially true of the comic tradition. By the time of the advent of the movies, comedy was located in theatrical forums, in either the “respectable” theater of higher art, specializing in sophisticated comedy such as Shaw or Chekhov, or the popular theater of vaudeville, burlesque, music hall variety shows, and so on. The movies were able to incorporate and even combine all of these traditions and customs, but also invent new comic practices and forms by taking advantage of what we term cinematics, moviemaking which utilized older aesthetic and pragmatic strains but created and refined the distinct and dynamic feature of movie play, or more formally, cinematic ludenics. More than any previous medium, the movies were able to activate and motivate the human “lusory attitude” to attract and encourage large numbers of people into becoming a movie audience and engage in active play. With the aid of shameless and unrelenting showmanship and adroit propaganda, the carnival barkers of the movies found a responsive audience who had found a wonderful place to go and play, a theatrical place and engaging medium which allowed people to converge and select which “moving picture show” they wished to be their agency of play, and with movie comedy, their means of having fun. Cinematic ludenics attracted audiences at first through its visual power of projecting on screens images people had not seen before to augment and intensify its increasing ability to depict stories and concomitantly to portray characters who audiences thought memorable. So the movies became a social habit with their unprecedented ability to depict movement, to bring together images, action and actors, and a narrative into kinetic pictures that move at lightning speed from place to place and time to time, with action going on in a story impelling towards a climax, as we sat still enraptured by an optical illusion, a narrative fiction, and cinematic motion that defied the laws of natural reality. It was, and is, all play, quickly deemed a photoplay. Movie play is in a way a descendant of the ancient “great time,” a time out of time and a place out of place, where mythic things happen and legendary beings appear and extraordinary stories play out. The illusions of light and the delusions of myth are interwoven into the allusive virtuality of the visible and dynamic play-world of the motion

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picture show. Such a world is a “dream mode” that suggests a different and even more important reality that the one in which we have to endure in the slow and finite quotidian “movieless” world. To be sure, the movies are ludus (controlled play) rather than paidia (spontaneous play), in the sense of moviemakers making up a “dream mode” and presenting it for collective viewing rather than the private and idiosyncratic daydreams of individuals entertaining spontaneous fantasies. Movies may well give expression to widespread individual play, but how dreams are rendered into art available and understandable to the viewing public is the crucial process. When people choose attending and participating in controlled play, they are generally seeking some sort of satisfying ludenic experience which fulfills certain criteria characteristic of a lusory attitude. People want some activity that puts them “in play,” so a site of arranged and produced play allows them to take on the role of spectator, and to not only suspend disbelief for a while but also to let someone make belief, such as the make-believe of the movies. The movie promoter's message of “let's play!” drew us into the theater so we may see the picture show; the movie producer's message of “Watch this!” orients us to the succession of images and representations of action that unfold as we watch as the movie “great time” unreel to completion. We subsequently reflect upon and learn from what we have observed, with memorable film moments and movies included in our memory and even behavior. If we decide to engage in movie play, we are initially drawn to the beauty of what we see, a luminescent projection of light at which we look and keep looking, what we may call “persistence of attention.” We decide this is worth seeing and thus our focal point of attention is the luminous play of immense and attractive images up there on the silver screen. Thus, the initial moment of cinematic aesthesis is the beauty (kalos) of the animated projections we see and to which we attend as lovely to look at. This is complemented by the second moment of our chosen experience, cinematic mimesis, when we see that the aesthetic of luminosity is framed by the scenic mimesis of magnification, seeing the play of action and plot and character unfold in an interesting narrative leading to an ending, making us ask, “What’s next?” Our initial sense of “knowable” is concentrated in a narratological pattern of “knowing,” as we watch the play of theatrical doings proceed before our eyes and ears, enlarged and enhanced by the “larger than life” magnitude of beings and things in action and motion. The extraordinary grandeur of the proceedings piques our interest to the extent that we persist in watching the show, what we term the “persistence of interest.” The beauty of the picture show is enveloped by the mimetic treatment of good

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(ethos), the satisfactory “playing out” of an entire story that we enjoy watching as an “imitation of life” in a good tale. The luminous beauty of the iconic personages and scenic arrangements (the mise-en-scène) in a movie is given social life by the interplay of actors and enactments expediting impetus to the ethos of objective factuality and pragmatic activity in an interesting dramatization. If our initial attraction to a moving picture is that we are seeing magic with which we may play, the subsequent appeal is that of beautiful action, mimetic representations using the resources of dramatic and cinematic art to “hold our interest.” Since our mimetic question is, “what's next,” our final question will be, “how does it turn out?” We are then attracted to a movie by the luminescent images and absorbing mimetic experience worth watching, but we also persist to observe the ending, what we may call the “persistence of completion,” our desire for the wholeness or entirety of an experience, including the outcome of a motion picture, to become “knowns.” For the viewer (or reader, or listener) an incomplete story lacks “the sense of an ending”— consummation, destination, resolution, denouement, apocalypse, happyever-after, or whatever. For the movies in particular, this fulfilling desire completes our expectations: we are there to look at the luminous imaging and to watch the mimetic doings, but we also want to observe the “endings.” The power of the movies as a medium is finally complemented by its ability to move things and beings at its own pace in time and placement in space towards some kind of satisfactory completion. As early observers of the new medium of the movies understood, people liked to go to the movies because the movies were going; while we watched, they moved. Movie aesthesis and mimesis was enhanced and enlivened by kinesis, the cinematic capacity to play with time and space in more dynamic ways than any previous medium. Painting and sculpture, elocution and declamation, performance arts and theatrical drama, all have their kinetic dimension. But in the movies, kinetic energy is freed to the extent that time and space lose all their conventional dimensions, so much that we experience movie beauty and movie good in the dynamic context of kinetic “movie truth,” the knowledge we acquire in the completed process of imagistic and dramatic representation emergent in the rhythmic progression of “playtime” at the movies. As an early technology of the movies was aptly named, the movies are kinetoscopic, since our completed and retrospective observation of them is dependent upon ludenic interplay and kinetic development leading to an outcome that moviegoers know in some cinematic sense to be true. The movie “somethings” that can be recalled and recognized as a symbolic creation with meanings pointing to

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or encompassing truths beyond the motion picture itself, even if they are only popular truisms or imaginative fantasies. In any case, a film with a modicum of cinematic virtue can offer attendees a significant play experience and play learning as a moment and memory of grace. There is an apocryphal deathbed story about a famous actor (variously attributed) who in his final hours was asked if dying was difficult. He replied, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.” Comedy is indeed difficult to do and perform and film well. Aristophanes himself bombed with the judges and audiences in Athens at times. Even though comedy originated in a festive spirit inherited from its ancient origins in celebration and carnival, oftentimes enchanting people through the revel and release expected of comic playtime is initially daunting. Captivating an audience in the dramatic enactment of a full-fledged comic play is challenging. Sustaining the entrancing spell to the comic ending and vista is plainly hard to do. Any comedian who has “died” onstage or movie comedy which has “bombed” at the box office is proof positive of the difficulty. For a variety of reasons known but to them, people often resist the leap of abandon that becomes evident in the smile of revelry and the laugh of release, and the sustained willingness to participate in the fun unfolding before them. Those imbued with norms of Apollonian constraints of rationality and morality or missionary zeal of Faustian ambitions requiring seriosity and task may find Dionysian festivity and euphoria inappropriate or threatening. For them too, on the other side of proscenium or screen, comedy is hard. The accessible and inviting medium of the movies, with its organizational and commercial availability, has made it easy for lots of people to find in cinematic experience a way to make the leap of abandon during playtime, enabling people to entertain something of the lusory attitude and happy entrancement of comic grace. It has been our less than graceful discursive effort here to sketch the attributes of movie comedy which contribute to its playful and revelatory funning— the vivid crackle of comic interplay, the animated energy of comic sociality, and the freed time of comic temporality. Cinematic mediacy—the distinctive attributes of the motion picture as a medium—gave impetus to our comic sense of life and also comic expectations: the movies could do comedy so well that we came to expect comic mastery. This suggests that we began to think of movies as the great medium of comedy, and that we saw movie comedy as the latter-day forum for enjoying the dream of comic grace. The enchanted time we spent in the redoubt of the cinematic spell evolved into a social site of special capability and unique virtuosity of the medium, and its magnification of human comedy seemed especially graceful. The early

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audiences who related the movies to magic were enchanted by the beauty of its luminescent grace, the illuminated world and luminary figures which they saw in the light, followed the moving light of animatory play, and knew that the graceful light that gave us insightful and enlightened delight had to be in some way magical. The illuminated view was heightened in the larger view of the magnified grace of the big screen world, wherein we could see the comic spectacle, follow the comedians and the comic story, and relish the big stars performing the big story for our enjoyment. By seeing funny people and funny things happen in this enlarged movie mimesis, we learned that society is a funny place and that consequently a big and generous view of life suggests a comic vista on the nature of things. The appreciation that the world is a funny place full of funny people prepares those who reflect on the meaning of comedy to discover a great truth and adopt a lusory attitude of comic festivity and sagacity. The anagnorisis of the jubilant truth of comedy points to the elevating selfknowledge we can see in the imaginative composition of the movies. Movie comedy is a mnemonic concordance not only of human folly, foibles, and fallacies, but also of human pragmatics, our stubborn ability to survive and make do despite the obstinacy and stupidity of a world that insists on unnecessary difficulties and dreary absurdities to thwart us. Movie comedy not only inspires us with the beauty of luminescent grace, but also heartens us with the enduring truth of continual grace, that somehow human happiness is possible in all desirable ways: the beauty of amity in personal relations, the good of comity in social relations, and the truth of identity in temporal relations. These three ancient and universal human desires are the core values and goals of quest-myths, and make comedy the happiest and most radiant “fable of identity” wherein we can enjoy the triumph or at least endurance of what makes life worth living: living beauty, social good, and providential truth. To the extent that movie comedy has enhanced and enlarged this yearning and questing for comic grace, it has done humankind a great service by perpetuating and invigorating the mirthful revel of the komos and the mythic dream of the Graces for a world of splendid beauty, convivial festivity, and debonair good cheer, perhaps most evident in the comic grace of summer days and happy endings, of which there is no end.

The Master of the Revels In our introduction, we attempted to conceive and convey a skeletal conceptual formulation which would serve both well in discussing and understanding movie comedy, despite the vast and feisty range of comedy

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and the capricious and idiosyncratic nature of moviemaking. Since comedy began with, and still retains some of the features of, raucous and outrageous roving bands of drunken revelers and boisterous wits, academic conceptualization seems so much dry dust compared to the Dionysian heritage of vital and full-bodied mirth and celebration of the comic ritual theater. Since the word komos, meant not only “reveling band” but also “to sing” (aeido), we are reminded that comedy is more akin to song and dance and carnival than scholastic exposition. In his Poetics, Aristotle wrote that comedy is a “representation of laughable people,” which surely must include academicians who try to make rational sense out of the range of absurd and nonsensical sensibility of comedy. However, if one is determined to look foolish, writing about foolishness seems an appropriate way to do it. The author will cast himself in the role of Master of the Revels, guiding us through the wondrous world of movie comedy, not to censor but rather to make sense of all the fun and enjoy the celebration. The substantive chapters ahead will divide into three familiar dimensions of human comedy. The first part of our inquiry will examine the comedy of funny people, those individuals who become involved with each other in the comic search for the beauty of interpersonal grace, the hope for amity emerging from primal desires of attraction, affection, and affiliation, but with the fun coming from the expression of these universal desires in lusting, loving, or liking someone else. The second part will shift the focus to funny things, or what is sometimes called “social comedy,” amusing us through the comic depiction of people representing something of perceived social importance beyond their individual desires by seeking the realization of a value of associative comity. The funny things that happen involve people with not only desires but also interests, acting out the comic drama by resisting or rectifying such things as social differentiation, social distinction, and social dominion. In the movies, this kind of comic complication is usually manifest in questions of social status, wealth, and power, or more simply, who you are, what you are, and where you are in the divisions of the social playground. Finally, we will look at comedies of funny ways, those movies which use comedy as a dramatic forum for expressions of imaginative truths. These more philosophical or profound comedies use comic entanglements or depictions to say something important about human identity, making it understandable through the good offices of comedic dramatizations. These include comedies of absurdity, or nonsense; comedies of insanity, or crazy sense; and comedies of joy, or good sense. Our discursive structure lets us distinguish funny people as those concerned with the beauty of aesthetic goodness between

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beings who know each other; social beings interested in the moral goodness of beings who don't know each other; and curious beings inquisitive about the logical goodness of being itself as a truth. This taxonomy lets us see the unity and diversity and philosophy of comedy as the most delightful and insightful method of looking at our universal human hopes for personal happiness, social justice, and speculative significances. In all these humane motifs, comedy becomes the master trope which allows us the joy of “playing easily in the deep,” forever expressing and perpetuating the vital comedic smile and euphoric comic rhythm, evoking our deep memory of the ancient and earthy celebration of a magical revel in rustic nature and allowing us to re-enact once more our eternal return to things being made anew.

CHAPTER ONE THE COMIC BEAUTY OF PERSONAL APPEAL

It makes sense to begin our substantive inquiry into the human comedy on film with personal relationships, informed by our awareness that people are funny in all the multivarious meanings of that word. Our specific funniness is no more evident and striking than in what people do in their most intimate negotiations and connections involving primal desires. For in our personal lives, the routines and monotonies of living are relieved and enlivened by our encounters with and bonds to other people who appeal to us. It is likely that the primal scene of the “birth of comedy” long ago in prehistory corresponded with the discovery of and play with aesthetic speech—talk that was not strictly functional or directive but rather experiential. Such speech would, for instance, relate an incident that struck everyone as so funny that it inspired retelling as something comic and the familiar people involved in it as comical. When people developed the ability to understand and appreciate sensory knowledge as qualitative —beautiful or ugly, for example—they could then evaluate experience in imaginative terms and evocative expression. The exercise of primal kalos meant that someone observed and appreciated something as worthy of attention because it was designated as possessing or exemplifying aesthetic goodness or value, and thus was in varying senses beautiful. This attributive quality is evoked by something knowable, such as natural phenomena (sunsets, kittens at play, bird calls), something amenable to knowing, such as viewing Greek tragedy or movie comedy, or a known, such as a mathematical proof or classical sculpture. In any case, there is beauty in the world we can know if we are willing to exercise the emotional dynamic of pathos, evoking our capability for feeling and identification of something or someone in our experience and thus provoking an act of pathetic consummation. This universal human activity is not necessarily a response to suffering or a stimulus for melancholy or sorrow, since romantic love, the birth of children, or the joy of a festive gathering may inspire sympathetic feelings. Pathos is an important element in comedy, since our emotive actions and quest for sympathy are part of the “stuff” of comic stories.

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Since we are beginning with the comic beauty of personal relations as seen in movie comedy, we require awareness of pathos as essential to understanding the popular cinematics of comedic individuality. We will subsequently examine comedies of sociality and then comedies of philosophy, but deem it wise to begin with individuals involved in the interpersonal structures of relations best understood as comic. Funny people do funny things because of the appeal of something or someone they are drawn to in the bright luster of their beauty. So the pathologic here centers on the initiation, complication, and completion of a relationship based in the appeal that at least one person has for someone else. We are examining here one of the most venerable forms of comedy, the proof positive that we are laughable fools when we observe ourselves in the pathetic throes of primal human desire. We are talking here about lust, but not only carnal and lascivious lust wantonly pursued. The corpus of movie comedy alone demonstrates that lust for another is rooted in a variety of appeals, which we have conveniently divided into comedies of primal attraction, comedies of primal affection, and comedies of primal affiliation. The universe of lust—seeking and finding and admiring someone who is characterized as a lustrous (and often lustworthy) beauty—ranges from maudlin sentimentality to profound regard, from one-sided pursuit of pleasure to mutual interest and pleasant delight, from raw sex to deep intimacy. Both a sex object and an admired person may be attributed luster, as physically lustworthy or personally lustrous. Those who have experienced mad lust for someone know that there is a particular bodily grace in the fulfillment of desire, and those who have found someone who embodies social or even spiritual graces may provoke desire, even if unfulfilled or unexpressed. The luminous “glow of light” may emanate different hues and shades of lustrous meaning, but in all cases, we are talking about interpersonal attraction. One need not belabor the socialscientific literature on human attraction to realize that it is not fully understandable but is clearly universal. We are all subjected to the feeling of being drawn toward (or repelled by) something or someone, and most have felt the magnetic sense of ascribing to someone else attributes of charm, allure, dynamism, or whatever aesthetic qualities they seem to possess or convey. Attractiveness in humans is something both objectively observed and subjectively evaluated, and obviously can lead to actions and subsequently consequences, some of them comic. The beauty is found in both in the attraction and the activities that it inspires, but not always culminating in beautiful consequences. In primal erotic relations, an attraction can be rejected or briefly endured, although it is possible for “brief encounters” to be lovely. But beginning at this microcosmic level, it

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is clear that such interpersonal attractions are fun fare for comedy. Just recalling the folkish aphorisms and quips associated with attraction hints at what comics can do with it—opposites attract; there's no fool like an old fool; what does she (he) see in him (her); she is a beauty, but 'tis a pity she's a whore; boy, does he think he's God's gift to women; she had to choose between love and money; he loved her all his life but married another. The range of erotic pathos is inexhaustible, since human passions one for another are unending. Tragic love stories treat true love thwarted and destroyed, and melodramatic love as subject to the vagaries of circumstance and the contingencies of society. But as comedy, the mortal foolery of erotic attraction and sensuous satisfaction motivates the oftendelusional hope for passionate grace among the graceless, which includes a good number of us. Those “taken” with being enamored or smitten by another are subject to delusive fantasies which associate erotic lust with “higher” qualities, as if orgasmic delight incorporates qualities of logic and ethics in the physical act of love. Those who have “fallen in love” are imbued with the graceful beauty of the person who is the protagonist of a billowing world of make-believe, in which we behold what we wish to become, one with our love. But comedy exists to bring humor to beauty, which may deflate our treasured delusions of “true love” or just “great sex” but mature us into a larger appreciation of the beauty of relations freed of juvenile or romantic flights of fancy. The truths of comic grace bring us solidly back to earth, giving attraction a more solid basis for erotic passion to be realized and enjoyed through seeing ourselves as comic figures making fools out of ourselves, but now so aware of ourselves that we can see that making love is also making fun. Comic selfawareness offers us pragmatic lusion of our relationship, allowing us, if we dare to grasp destiny by the forelock and order our state of mind, to transform tentative passion into intimate love. Movie comedy is a great place to start learning how to do that. We shall begin our inquiry into comedies of individuality with study of representative films which are exemplary in their treatment of personal relations based in appeal. Although attraction at this interpersonal level may seem simple, one of the great “lessons” in movie comedy is certainly that attraction is complicated. People become involved with someone else on some basis, but such one-on-one relations are firstly complicated by the personalities and desires of those who are in the relationship, soon to be entangled with other people in the orbit of the new couple, and subsequently by the unfolding of events surrounding the couple. Observers of the history and nature of comedy have long noted that much of the fun of comedy stems from these very complications, and if comedy is to have its

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traditional happy ending in the tradition of festive ritual, these elements of katastasis leading to anagnorisis and thence anastrophe must play out. A good place to start with such comedies of attraction is in the “Golden Age” of Hollywood movie comedy, during the period of “screwball” comedy of the 1930s. As we shall see, coupling based in lust with the lustworthy is both perplexing and involving. And, the complications are compounded when the number of people involved increases the comic permutations.

Comedies of Attraction: Directional Courtship It Happened One Night (1934): The Dance of Mutual Antagonism and Attraction At the primary level of erotic movie comedy, our attention is directed toward the two individuals who are the object of our looking and the subject of our watching. They are foregrounded for us to follow and enjoy. We keep watching them because we are fascinated by how their comic interplay unfolds through their negotiations with each other, and by how their growing relationship moves from suspicion and antipathy towards desire and yearning. Their social and situational complications are evident and must be overcome with the presence of relevant people (his editor, her father) and emergent incidents (lack of money, her being recognized) backgrounded as material for their developing relationship during the agony of their problems and the diversity of their intentions. In their own ways, they are equally graceless, and what they each seek is irreconcilable. But they find it practical to use each other, despite their mutual contempt and plan to abandon each other when they have fully exploited one another. The one thing they share is mutual escape fantasies, the one professional and the other personal, but eventually and against all odds, they will discover comic grace that unites them. If the purpose of personal (and here romantic) comedy is to enjoy the wonder of how people get together at all, and the process of comedy is to get these two together, the point must be that human beings are capable of discovering that they are capable of physical attraction and interpersonal enjoyment, particularly in the discovery of the beauty of each other. We are introduced to these separate and dissimilar beings in their elements. Ellie, the daughter of a plutocratic, well-meaning father is being held against her will on his yacht, after impulsively and defiantly marrying an infamous playboy and fortune hunter (King Westley). The father prevents consummation and holds her to force an annulment. After an argument over her hunger strike protest, Ellie makes a childish scene and

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he slaps her, after which she dives into the water and heads for the Florida shore. The father's hired detectives patrol train and bus stations, but doubt that the aristocratic and snooty Ellie would lower herself to take a night bus. But she does precisely that and manages to elude the detectives to rejoin her husband. We are left to wonder why: Westley is a prototypical desiccated “upper-class twit” who is after her money more than her body. Perhaps she sees him as a weakling she can manipulate so that she can live a life of partying and extramarital affairs without objection. In any case, she is determined to get back to him and we begin to see her as a bit foolhardy but spunky, since she is so completely out of her element but willing to take risks, if for less than a noble cause. Ellie's downscale brush with the rougher proletarian world is further complicated by the fact that she is on the run, away from something she found wanting and towards something she thinks she wants, both of which involve a life of riches and ease. We suspect she does not know what she wants, and in a sense understandable to the “streetwise” has never really lived through all the rough-and-tumble and setbacks and slights that entails. Ellie is about to meet someone who is anything but the man of her dreams in the person of Peter Warne. In the bus station, Peter is on the phone with his boss, a newspaper editor who fired him for drinking on the job. Now off the job, he is still drinking, telling off the former editor as a “gashouse palooka” who runs a “filthy scandal sheet” for the benefit of his pals. The editor has long since hung up, so Peter is engaged in playacting. So, immediately Peter and Ellie share an important act: rebellion against a “father” figure, both fleeing from his command. But towards what is the tantalizing question both face, and is the question that piques our interest in them. For Ellie things go from bad to worse. She has to share a cramped bus seat with Peter; she is robbed of her briefcase; at a stop, she has a leisurely breakfast, expecting the bus to wait for her, but is left stranded. To her surprise, Peter stays behind. He reveals to her that he knows her identity; she tries to bribe him, but he contemptuously berates her as a spoiled brat and condemns her “high horse” society life. At this point, his interest in her is revealed: he telegraphs his newspaper editor that he knows where the “runaway society bride” is. They have now become a self-interested coalition of two, bonded together only by what they hope to gain from using the other. Their mutual contempt is subordinated by their need for each other: she is on the run, and needs help; he is on the make, and needs her for a “scoop.” Both would like, in their own imagined ways, to become on the take, she the free and easy corrupt high life, he the postjournalism good life. We in the audience sense and hope what will happen: their relationship will become romantic, and the fun will be watching the

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comedy of the couple contending and resisting and finally yielding to their Dionysian urges. The comic discovery will be how they find each other to be lustworthy. This discovery will be unveiled in the course of their joint project together, and will take place on a journey. Like any odyssey, there will be many obstacles and challenges. As the bus rolls through the night, Ellie is seated next to a vulgar traveling salesman (a stock figure of popular folklore) who is on the make, at least recognizing she is worthy of his lust. Here the marital pretense begins. Peter poses as Ellie’s husband and makes the salesman change seats. The pretense continues as he rejects her thanks, betrays a hint of jealousy, and expresses quite a bit of possessiveness when he orders her to stop spending money. Then a bridge washes out, so the bus passengers are forced to stay in “autocamp” cabins. Peter registers them as married, and assures her that his only interest in her is as a headline, wanting an “exclusive” or else he'll turn her over to Papa. She is reluctant, so he drapes a blanket over a clothesline between the single beds and calls it the “Wall of Jericho,” saying that unlike Joshua, he has no trumpet. As he starts to undress, she acquiesces and goes to her side of the unscalable wall; with the lights out, he watches the silhouette of her shapely form as she undresses, and then sees her rather sexy undergarments draped on the wall. He asks that she remove them, indicating that indeed he does have a “trumpet.” In the dark, the sexual tension and suppressed lust is electric, which isn't helped when she asks his name. He makes a joke about being the “soft morning breeze that caresses your lovely face,” and then they address each other, half- jokingly, as “Mr. and Mrs. Warne.” In the morning, we see a domestic scene of a “married” couple at breakfast, when detectives hired by her father show up. Peter and Ellie then pretend to be a working-class couple who resent the intrusion and fake a marital quarrel, convincing the detectives they are who and what they claim to be. In ways unknown to them, this play-acting foreshadows exactly what they will be, a married couple. As they congratulate each other on their performance, he jokes that they could become a “two-people stock company,” and she suggests they do a “real hot love story.” On the bus again, the salesman has recognized her, but Peter intervenes by pretending to be a gangster who has kidnapped her and threatens him with a visit from a hit man. They feel it wise to leave the bus and instead trek cross-country. At nightfall he carries her across a stream and they sleep in a haystack (another reference to folklore about country sexuality). This dreamy “green world” hiatus defines them again as a couple who are growing on each other, continued the next morning as he tries to impress her with his prowess at hitchhiking. After failing, she asks to try her luck,

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which he dismisses; she goes to the side of the road and raises her skirt revealing very shapely legs, which immediately succeeds as a tactic. When she takes credit, he retorts that she could have taken off all her clothes and stopped forty cars, betraying both male embarrassment at her shameless resourcefulness and a keen interest in seeing her naked. Yet for all this mutual exploration and shared adventure, it still looks as if they are not going to become a couple. In their next “Wall of Jericho” night, Peter muses in the dark about escaping to a Pacific island with a girl who is “real” and “alive” and will jump in the surf and generally commune with idyllic nature. Ellie then breaches the wall and tearfully tells him she loves him and wants to go with him to this symbolic place away from care and ties (another shared escape fantasy). He is skeptical, so she returns to her bed to cry herself to sleep, but now he believes her although he still plans to exploit her. Peter calls his editor to report an amended scoop, namely that he loves Ellie and she is now going to marry him. But when she awakens, he is gone and she thinks he has abandoned her. This final misunderstanding impels her to call her father and agree to “remarry” Westley, but when Peter returns, he thinks he has been abandoned. Angry, he returns the scoop money to the paper and writes her father, which she thinks is his effort to get the substantial reward money, making her dislike him all the more. Peter shows up at the elaborate “society” wedding, asks the father for a small sum to pay off what she cost him out-of-pocket rather than the big reward. The father presses him as to whether he loves Ellie, which he reluctantly admits. As the wedding proceeds, her escorting father advises the daughter of Peter's character and presence, and at the last moment, she bolts from the altar and joins Peter in a waiting car. They trek to an auto camp, await the annulment, and buy a toy trumpet. When the trumpet arrives, they blow the horn and the Wall of Jericho comes down for the fulfillment of legalized and ecstatic lust, while we are reminded of the orgasmic metaphor of “honking your horn.” The unifying odyssey of Peter and Ellie on face seems a simple tale of two healthy young people getting to know each other and falling in love. But comedy always admits and thrives on complications and diversions, which intensifies the fun and makes the triumph of lusty union all the more delightful. These two are both rebelling against social constraint, and become acquainted and attracted in the course of an adventurous journey. Their joint project gives them a common goal and mutual respect for each other. Their trek takes them away from their urbane haunts and rules into a nether world of play, wherein they have to improvise to make do and get on. In a play world, their grasp of the normal and sensible is challenged, so they must resort to the theatrical and the nonsensical—play-acting to

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effect, using verbal wit and body parts to get what they want, disguise and petty crime and falsification when required, and even uneasy cohabitation with a complete stranger. Their contact with the pastoral world of roads and forests and outdoors in the original Dionysian setting of animal and vegetable nature leaves behind the familiar “sensible” world of civilization to descend into the primal world of physical, and especially erotic, feeling, experiencing the “nonsense” of nature. Such a descent is erotic play with social boundaries breached and personal being transformed. In such a setting, they are reminded of the archetypical lost paradise of innocence and harmony, a place imagined as a mode of human renewal. They share the fantasy of an island of magical beauty apart from the stultifying enclosure of their social existences, which eventually becomes translated into a joint escape into lusting and coupling together; their paradisial island is each other. Their acquaintance with and repulsion towards social nonsense has led them to demystify their habitual ways of living and talking. Now they are engaged in formulating and embracing their own ludenic mystery, nonsense perhaps to their superiors and associates but good sense to them as they explore the joys of discovery and the cultivation of their private garden. The appeal of such a constructed green world of mutual attraction is that it is theirs exclusively, even though we see that they are participating in a primeval fertility rite of courtship and sexual union. People have to talk themselves into fornication and unification through play with expressions, both verbal and gestural, facilitating the pragmatic point of comic ceremonial that brings two people in need of someone else into the circle of celebratory attention and festive spirit and the eventual consequence of comic lusion and resolution. Peter and Ellie discover the beauty of each other as their individual personalities and interests force them into clashes and cooperations but subsequently into aesthetic appreciation of each other. Comedy originated in a feast of life. These two young people learned how to join in the festivity of physical lust and lustworthiness. They learned that more fundamental than the strictures of logos and the responsibilities of ethos is the goat-herd call of pathos, the deep-seated need for sensual expression and primal identity, most commonly observed in two ardent people in the throes of passion, the nonsensical joy of ludenic attraction brought to fulfillment. Peter and Ellie had fun getting to the point of horns blowing, and we had fun watching them get there.

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Some Like It Hot (1959): Lust as a Survival Skill We enjoy comedies of erotic play not only because we are interested in sex but also because we like to see the possibility of lusty sexual appeal coming to fruition even in the unlikeliest of contexts and between the most improbable of couples. Not only is it funny to see people engaging their primal impulses, it is also arresting to watch the unfolding of playfulness, reconnecting people with nature and fertility. We intuitively comprehend the notion that play is necessary for the survival and perpetuation of our species, since without ludenic discourse and playful innovation the negotiation of attraction and ritual of courtship would not be possible. In a paradoxical way, we understand the common sense of comic nonsense, how comedic action and consequences render us human, foolery that brings grace to the graceless and carnality to the lustless. Dionysus, the ancients believed, was not a symbol or agent of sane and decorous order but rather a force of liberating and energizing satisfaction and wonderment that such attractive grace between people makes possible at all. And part of the wonder is that attraction can occur in the strangest and sleaziest of circumstances in which motives move from the undirected or even ulterior to the directed and honest, from exploitative lust wherein at least one party to a relationship of physical attraction has opportunistic motives. Peter wants to use Ellie to revive his flagging career, and Ellie wants to use Peter to defy her father and return to Westley. And naturally, such desires may involve using base appeals or physical attractions to get what you want. But, as all veteran admirers of comedy know, in the process you may get something different than what you thought you wanted. In Some Like It Hot, we are transported to a Chicago “speakeasy” in 1929, when Prohibition made alcohol consumption illegal and thus a province of the business interests of organized crime. In the raucous atmosphere of Dionysian revelers in a secret nightclub room at Mozzarella's Funeral Parlor, we meet two musicians in the band. Joe, a saxophonist, and Jerry, a bass player, support and ogle the scantily clad chorus girls, one of whom Joe hopes to seduce that evening. But the place is raided by the police, and they are suddenly out of work. They go to their agent, but the only jobs available are with an all-girls touring band, Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopaters. Offered an overnight “gig” at a St.Valentine's Day dance, Joe sweet-talks a girlfriend into loaning them her car. When they go to the garage to pick it up, they accidentally witness the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre of Mafia lore, and become a target for assassination by the criminal faction headed by “Spats” Columbo. Their only hope is to flee, so they disguise themselves as women and join the all-girls band on its way to Florida. As “Josephine” and “Daphne,” they

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are admitted to a railroad car full of nubile and barely clad females. Much comedy ensues as they try to restrain themselves from partaking of the “candy store.” They are particularly tempted by the voluptuous and alcoholic lead singer Sugar, who Daphne saves from being fired for drinking, and Josephine learns she has a weakness for saxophone players. When they reach their Florida hotel, they are beset by a phalanx of aged millionaires, all apparently looking for showgirls as mistresses. Sugar admits she is there to find a millionaire to keep her in style, and Daphne meets one of their numbers, a relic and wealthy playboy named Osgood Fielding III. Thus, we have a comic complex of sexual fantasies: Joe wants Sugar and Osgood wants Daphne, while Joe and Jerry try to control their harem fantasies while posing as members of the band in the midst of an inviting display of flesh. This maintains their cover, but Joe realizes he’ll never gain access to Sugar's body unless he appears to have money, so he concocts a scheme to pose as a millionaire. He persuades Jerry (Daphne) to keep Osgood on shore by promising to go out dancing, so that he can take Sugar to Osgood's deserted yacht. Joe fakes a tale of his chronic impotence, which Sugar's libidinal skills overcome, and after a torrid night of lovemaking on the yacht, he and Sugar return to shore. Joe is told by an exultant Jerry (Daphne) that he/she and Osgood are engaged! At this point, Joe realizes that their pretenses have gone over the edge, and that Sugar will discover he is not rich and Osgood will discover that Jerry is not a Daphne. At this point, an external complication occurs with the convening of the “Friends of Italian Opera” at the hotel, which introduces the reappearance of Spats Columbo and a variety of Mafioso, agents of violence rather than carnality. Joe and Jerry plan a quick exit. Joe puts on his millionaire act and calls Sugar to tell her he cannot see her anymore because he has been forced to marry an heiress for business reasons. On the run again, they inadvertently witness another Mafia massacre, this time of Spats and his gang. Sugar is kissed by Josephine and realizes she/he is Joe, and they all flee with Osgood to his yacht and safety. Joe and Sugar are now together to enjoy whatever relationship they develop, and Jerry reveals to Osgood that he is not Daphne or a woman, to which Osgood famously replies, ''Well, nobody's perfect.” The much-married Osgood demonstrates his sexual flexibility and tolerance in recruiting a new mate. Some Like It Hot moves our couples through transformation from a world of cold and violence to a world of heat and sex. And too, they move from exclusion to inclusion, incompletion to completion, and frustration to fulfillment. The two fellows on the run are spared death by inclusion into relationships with two people on the make; if those relationships succeed,

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they have a life together. Frustrated lust finds physical fulfillment, assuming (as we never know in comic endings) how things will play out. Joe and Sugar might well break up after the novelty of their initial lust is spent, and Jerry may not be willing to sustain a homosexual “marriage” to Osgood, or Osgood might move on to yet another liaison. But the fun of sexual comedy is getting two or more people together in the first place, and watching the luster of intense physical craving play out in the eternal human comedy of appetite and pleasure, so what happens after their climactic trip to the bedroom or the altar is indeed another story. For the gist of attraction is the exploratory play of courtship, the human version of the erotic dance so pervasive in the rest of nature (“the birds and the bees”), the natural and ludenical preface to conjoining and mating. In humans, the social and sexual expressions that go into courting are irresistibly funny, since where else besides the lust-driven “light fantastic” of primal attraction do we look and act so comical? Yet our willingness to make fools of ourselves in answering the siren's song and activating our glands leads not only to the satisfaction of natural urges but also to an appreciation of the beauty of it all, that an intimate relationship reciprocated with another is a joyous and even lasting consummation of getting physical. The recurrent comic theme of the raw lust of people on the make for someone else (Joe and Sugar) for purely casual or exploitative sex or sexual bonding between a playboy and “playgirl” for bizarre or exploratory motives (Jerry and Osgood), both perhaps leading to something lasting and beautiful, is so pervasive that we might explain it as a desire for desire to mean something and for lust to acquire over time a splendid luster. The comedy of attraction may be indecorous, but as so often in nature, produces intimacies and felicities that are quite decorous.

The Palm Beach Story (1942): Lust as Conspicuous Leisure Sexual play, casual or otherwise, may be decorous as a form of sophisticated play involving the display of pecuniary and bodily freedom. We have seen, with Peter and Ellie, that lust can flourish among the most tentative of couples, people thrown together in their respective pursuits of different directions, only to find eventually that they want to go in the same direction, trumpets blaring. Their directions converge in their lastminute escape, with the promise of cohabitation of one and marriage (of sorts) of the other. But with a “leisure class” for whom life is largely playtime, lust is for illustrious companions who enjoy the fun of exploring new experiences, including attractive people to whom they are sexually drawn. They may be socially more graceful than our other couples, but

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they are also vitally interested in sensual grace of all kinds for immediate conspicuous consumption. If Peter and Ellie were directed toward enjoying normal sexual experience, and the two couples escaping the Mafia seeking unusual and perhaps temporary experience, by contrast the wealthy of Palm Beach seek peak experiences, the satisfaction of lust for immediate Dionysian ecstasy. Those who are brought into the erotic atmosphere of such a privileged pleasure-dome are faced with the sensation that lust is “catching,” as happens at weddings when members of the party get into a festive and copulative mood, arousing the erotic contagion associated with fertility rituals. In such a sophisticated and libertine estate, life is an endless party without commitments but with plenty of action. If Peter and Ellie found each other in the green world of the road, and the couples in Florida escaped from an underworld, here a couple named Tom and Jerry stumble into a play world wherein the direction of people is decidedly directionless. In this milieu, beauty is appreciated as an expression and gratification of conspicuous leisure, and exploratory sexual play is a mark of both privilege and power. Guests are expected to participate in the voluptuous fun. Like our other couples, Tom and Jerry (their names suggesting the famous contentious cat-and-mouse pair) are on the make and on the move. They live in a fashionable high-rise apartment but are about to be evicted. They aspire to the high life of social success and cultural glamour, but the means to become conspicuous and decorous eludes them. Jerry announces to Tom that she is going to leave him, justifying her decision with the lame excuse that he'll be better off. She plans to travel to Palm Beach, Florida to establish residence for a quick divorce, and in the meantime, to search for a wealthy husband. Tom is inhibited in his desire to achieve something spectacular in the architectural field, specifically the construction of an aerodrome suspended on wires above New York City on which airplanes can land! They are obviously headed in different directions, although the sexual sparks are there (symbolized by stuck zippers only he can unzip). Jerry is aided in her departure by the fortuitous appearance of an elderly, cantankerous gentleman apartment hunting. He is the rich “Weinie King” who impulsively finances her escape, and later funds Tom's trip to Florida so the abandoned husband can satisfy his jealousy and curiosity. On face, Jerry’s train trip would have given Tom much to be jealous about. She is first adopted by a group of drunken wealthy sportsmen (the “Ale and Quail Club”) as a kind of mascot they serenade, and later by the heir to a “robber baron” fortune, a prissy bachelor named J.D. Hackensacker III (a play on J.D. Rockefeller)who is hilariously pennywise but so smitten by the luscious Jerry that he fosters her as well. Since she has lost all her clothes

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by accident, he takes her on an expensive buying spree for a variety of haute couture outfits and throws in a diamond bracelet. Although billionaire Hackensacker is a notorious skinflint (“tipping and private berths are ‘unAmerican’ frivolities”), extravagant decoration of a beautiful female stranger somehow is not, since for all his apparent ineptitude, he lives in a cloistered world of pleasurable diversion, of which Jerry is the latest object of desire. So, costumed and bejeweled, she accompanies him on his yacht as money well spent, since she is an investment of “solid value.” (The yacht is named “Erlking,” a joke on Rockefeller's yacht “Oil King” and name of the evil elf of German mythology who played capricious pranks on people for the wicked fun of it.) When they arrive at the Hackensacker compound in Palm Beach, the sour faced and confused Tom is there to witness Jerry's new alliance and elegance. She quickly emasculates him by introducing him as her brother, giving him the plebian-sounding pseudonym “Captain McGlue.” J.D.'s high society sister and veteran of many liaisons and divorces, Princess Maud Centimillia, is immediately attracted to the strapping Tom/McGlue as eminently conjoinable, asserting the same attitude of proprietary interest in Tom's body as her brother does toward Jerry's. As objects of conspicuous consumption and leisure, Tom and Jerry will temporarily serve as delightful and disposable consumables. The Princess is exclusively a libidinal and ludenical creature, but her interest in lust and beauty is shared by her less vibrant but more romantic brother, to the extent that he arranges for a full orchestra to gather on the lawn so he can serenade Jerry in song. Ironically, as Tom and Jerry listen (and deal with a stuck zipper), their erotic feelings for each other are reignited, and after a night of sparking, they announce to an astonished J.D. and Princess that they are in fact married. Their disappointment over their carnal ambitions towards Tom and Jerry are immediately mitigated when they learn that both of them have identical, twin siblings! The film ends with the astonishing scene of a triple marriage, with Tom and Jerry renewing their vows and J.D. and the Princess marrying their identical twins, apparently on the assumption that if you can't have one radiant body with which to play, another one just like it will do just fine. Comedies of attraction are based in the lustworthy individual relational conduct we associate with sexual foreplay and courting as the human version of nature's fertility and mating dance. Since this involves human choice and circumstance, much of the fun of such comic entanglements revolves around the different strategies and ploys which emerge in the plotting of comic action getting the couple(s) together for a happy ending (of sorts). The single couple (Ellie and Peter) are tentative and even hostile until they discover, with the help of her father, they actually want to go in

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the same direction together. The dual couples at the Florida resort have other agendas too, but discover that they want to be together, first by torrid lovemaking (Osgood and Daphne are left to our imagination) and secondly by the need for sheer survival. Physical need requires being alive to fulfill bodily lust. The multiple couples who unite in Palm Beach are bold rather than tentative, sophisticated rather than unrefined, and perhaps dissolute in their commitments, since at the end all the arranged marriages seem opportunistic and frivolous, with the direction of everyone immersed in the playworld of privilege. The proposed title of this movie was originally “Is Marriage Necessary?” and the coda ending the movie states, “And they lived happily ever after....Or did they?” These films are all classified as romantic comedies, but we see that romance is quite a varied and knotty human endeavor. One of the things that makes romance so funny is that the achievement of comic grace—the desired outcome of such comic stories—is often so graceless. Since lust centers on intense craving for physical pleasure, the pathos of romantic longings can be beautiful at the most elemental levels. Yet, our all-toohuman gracelessness is nurtured in the mortal foolery of physical desire for another, a process in which we make sense of attraction through sensuality, find beauty through the sensitivity we learn towards each other, and in the end find that going with someone you are attracted to in the same direction is quite sensible. Our eventual appreciation of the beauty of it all reveals to us that our willingness and playfulness are indeed essential to the logic of attraction and the human urge towards primal amity. Our lovers reach the stage of comic discovery when they become aware of the poetic and pragmatic logic of where they are going, and find that joint direction to be amiable and desirable. Even the hasty marriages in Palm Beach are based in some sense of individuated enjoyment of each other, and perhaps have some chance of lasting beyond the social “season” if they enact the spirit of Petronius's reminder that “outward looks are not enough, beauty is not common stuff” requiring “playful grace in every act/witty laughter, laughing wit.” If their comic attraction continues to feature playful grace, then their lives will be worth living.

Comedies of Attraction: Conditional Courtship Directional comedy foregrounds the development of the relationship between two incipient lovers. Comedy could not proceed unless there were obstacles and difficulties, but what is funny is the magnetic attraction the two protagonists have towards each other, and how hindrances actually help their relationship play out to the desired conclusion of mutual lust

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satisfied. All the variables of the situations—their personality clashes, class differences, occupations and lifestyles (ranging from heiress to newspaperman to marginal musician to tycoon to “idle rich”)—become background circumstances that highlight the force of willful direction of the parties to the featured lustworthiness and necessity of overcoming the barriers blocking their way towards the bower of bliss. We enjoy attending to comedies of lust not only because of the radiance of the bodies we see enthralled with each other on screen, but also because such human enthrallment is inherently funny. Reproduction may be a specific duty, but copulation is such a compelling passion that humans lose their head and heart and glands in the pursuit and completion of sexual want. When David Hume wrote that reason is, and should be, the slave of the passions, this must include the passion of attraction given articulation through the peculiar reasoning of attentive logic; mutual longing must be satisfied; we want each other, so therefore, let's figure out a way to get together. When Sugar and Joe are lovemaking on the yacht, he is feigning chronic impotence, which she intends to cure; when he admits she is making progress, she exclaims, “Let's throw another log on the fire!,” certainly a statement that captures the beauty of lusty logic. We may distinguish another kind of comedy of attraction, movie stories in which extraneous elements are featured as essential to the completion of sexual unification. For the dénouement of sexual unification to occur, some kind of corollary action is required as a condition of completion: we can get together, but something important must also be done. This gives comedies of attraction a dual plot, in which the adventure, trial, or diversion must be dealt with to make the relationship play out to the desired end. This effort proves something, or revives something, or selects something, but in all cases it is deemed necessary for a satisfactory ending. Oddly, this adjunct to the love story can occur before, during, or after the maturation of the attraction, but in all cases it serves the goal of uniting even the oddest of couples.

The African Queen (1951): The War Bride and Her Brave Soldier We are taken to German East Africa in 1914, and meet a brother and sister team of British Methodist missionaries. They are preaching the Gospel to an uncomprehending congregation of natives when their service is disrupted by the boat whistle announcing the arrival of a riverboat that brings supplies and mail. The “captain” (Charlie Allnut) of this one-man boat (named The African Queen) is an unkempt and gin-soaked denizen of

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the river and wild country, polite enough but completely out of place when they invite him to tea while the brother-minister reads Methodist news from England. They ignore his stomach growling but are alarmed of news that England is at war with Germany. After he leaves, their crude villa is burned by German troops and the minister struck down, from which he never recovers. Allnut returns to see the carnage and bury the deceased, and offers to take her (Rose) along to safety. She is a mature single woman committed to church missions, but immediately we learn she is no delicate “church lady.” When she is told that the lake downstream is patrolled by a well-armed German gunboat (the Louisa), she proposes that they take the African Queen to the lake, construct some makeshift torpedoes, and ram the Louisa. Charlie is flabbergasted and refuses, since such a voyage would be suicidal through rapids, disease or predators, a German fort overlooking the river, and a crazy attack on a big gunboat. But the strongwilled Rose insists, so Charlie does the only thing he knows to do when confronted by a challenging woman, which is to get drunk enough to tell her off. He calls her “a crazy psalm-singing skinny old maid” and passes out. When he awakens, she is in the process of pouring all of his gin into the river. He acquiesces, but still resists the quixotic if patriotic mission (he is Canadian); she doesn't argue, simply reading her book, and eventually he not only assents but even cleans up and shaves. At this point, she brightens up and they begin to develop a grudging respect for each other. As their journey unfolds, Charlie begins to share some of Rose's determination, but only because he is strangely attracted to her and perhaps feels a bit protective of her. They do not fully realize that they have struck a Faustian bargain: their relationship can only endure if they can prove themselves worthy through a trial by fire. This requires the kind of mutual courtship in which the parties to the “contract” persuade each other that they must do something first before their relationship can go any further, although that is very tentative. The object of the mission is well ahead, and so they navigate down the tropical river in the heat and bugs and wildlife ashore. They are in an Edenic setting of thick forests and animal calls and primeval forces, so even with their civilized constraints Dionysian feelings are hard to suppress. We see Rose bathing in the river, and both of them submerge to fix a propeller. When they successfully “shoot” dangerous rapids, he exultantly throws off her bonnet and impulsively kisses her. They are both embarrassed and retreat from each other, but then kiss again and have sex; afterwards, she asks him what his first name is, and they become to each other “Charlie” and “Rosie,” displaying warmth for each other and laughter as he clowns around

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mocking the monkeys on shore. The fun of all this is that these are two mature and different people who are “in love,” acting like a couple of moonstruck adolescents doting on each other, both in the folklorish “no fools like old fools” tradition. The sexual bond between them flourishes in the tropical heat, but their now shared sense of responsibility does too, as they brave gunfire going past the German fort and getting lost in murky waters as the river diverges. They are so mired in muddy backwaters that Charlie has to get into the water to tow, leeches and all, with an air of Sisyphean futility. As they fall on the deck, exhausted and ill, Rose offers a prayer that they be admitted into Heaven for their love. The beauty of their bonding has been tested, and in this futile end she humbly asks her God for personal grace. They failed in their quasi-military mission, but succeeded in turning their impromptu romance into a strong love. The Methodist God apparently heeds Rose and brings torrential rains, lifting the boat onto the lake. They arm the torpedoes and then argue (“our first argument”) about who is to sacrifice themselves in ramming the German warship. Finally, they both go, but the African Queen sinks in another rainstorm. Charlie and then Rosie are rescued by the Germans only to be sentenced to hang, but not before Rose brags about Charlie's technical prowess, and Charlie requests that the ship's captain marry them. The captain complies and in one breath pronounces that they are “man and wife. Proceed with the execution.” However, another fortuitous intervention occurs when the African Queen resurfaces and collides with the German ship, exploding the torpedoes. Charlie and Rosie make their escape, and their marital and sexual escapade is over. The African Queen is a cinematic model of balancing and blending two people on a wartime quest but exploring their serendipitous attraction to each other. The first became a prerequisite for the latter, and even after they consummate and enjoy their sexual tie they doggedly keep on with their deadly mission. Both the tension and isolation of what they set out to do contribute to their emotional attraction to each other, since healthy physical lovemaking is a vivifying and affirming form of play. They are, after all, in the ultimate green world, with teeming and fecund life all around them, and in the interim before they reach their likely lethal destination, they enjoy each other in intimate grace. In an exercise of “life against death,” their amateur heroics are so fraught with danger that they find (and we enjoy watching) their middle-aged and clumsy attraction and momentary joy. Their closeness to nature stirs feelings of natural lust, and the imminence of becoming a casualty of war reinforces the urge to seize the moment. In that sense, the condition of sacrifice they set for themselves is crucial to the unleashing of their passion. It is common for

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wartime to free people up for opportune lusting, and Rosie and Charlie take full advantage of their sudden freedom to enjoy each other in the interlude, the “play time,” before their apocalyptic rendezvous. Yet the condition of their patriotic pragmatism plays into their bonding, without which the relationship might not have aroused the dynamic tension allowing the mutual play of their emotions. In any case, as comic figures Charlie and Rosie are bungling if inadvertently successful saboteurs, but as lovers they make for an oddly charming and endearing couple.

The Awful Truth (1937): Conditional Coupling and Uncoupling and Recoupling The conditions of comic attraction need not always be as spectacular as a wartime adventure. The comic core is always “I want you” but supplemented with the precondition, “Something must be done.” But just what that something is can often be both murky and simple, involving people coming to the realization that Dionysian energy can be overutilized or misdirected and find instead that someone they meet, or already know, is the appropriate object of lust. Auditors of comedy find people struggling with their raging desires funny, particularly when they find a lustworthy partner who might have been on a divergent path bringing about a satisfying happy ending. It is one of the enduring staples of comedic plotting to observe people who think they are smart or sophisticated or irresistible discovering that the proper object of desire is someone quite familiar or unassuming. Thus the condition of selfdiscovery is complemented by the eventual awareness of “other-discovery,” urging the reluctant couple towards the fidelity of desire and the propriety of lust in comic grace. In The Awful Truth, we meet Jerry, a handsome and urbane young man under a sunlamp at his athletic club. Jerry took a separate vacation from his wife Lucy, ostensibly to go to Florida, which he obviously did not, so he is trying to get a “Florida tan” in one afternoon, since he is due home that evening. It becomes clear, as a friend remarks, that he has been engaged in an extra-marital affair and “pulled a fast one on the little wife,” Jerry cynically agreeing that “what wives don't know hurt them.” But in the sophisticated game of “open relationships,” and in this case adultery, turnabout is fair play. When he returns home with a basket of “Florida fruit,” Lucy isn't there, so he revels his accompanying friends with rhetorical flourishes about couples so trusting they can go off on their own, and Lucy should “go out and get some fun for herself now and again.” This marital tolerance is immediately tested when Lucy appears,

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dressed in a sequined evening gown and white fur jacket, accompanied by a suave Frenchman (Armand) in formal dining attire, with an elaborate and exonerative story about attending the “Junior Prom” of a fellow student (he is her voice coach) and their car breaking down in the country, forcing them to spend the night together in a country inn. Jerry's nonchalance is undermined by jealousy, and no doubt his hypocrisy, since he suspects the gander of doing precisely what the goose has been doing. Armand offers to explain, but Lucy quickly thanks him for his gallantry; he fears scandal, and clumsily defends himself as “a great teacher, not a great lover,” whereupon Lucy reveals more than she intends by cracking, “That’s right, Armand. No one could ever accuse you of being a great lover.” She then hems and haws, and counterattacks by noting Jerry's fruit is from California, not Florida, and that he couldn't have gotten a tan, since it was raining in Florida. They both realize their mutual infidelity and begin the process of getting a legal divorce. The rather unashamed enjoyment of extra-marital affairs on their part reveals both lustiness of character and a condition of multiplicity. Both seem to live with an expectation of lusty fulfillment and expect expansive pursuit of multiple partners, so marital prohibitions and restraints interfere with their lives as cosmopolitan voluptuaries. And, they both clearly know this about each other. Lucy meets an Oklahoma oil magnate who is interested in her. When Jerry accidentally intrudes on them, he cracks “I know how I'd feel if I was sitting with a girl and her husband walked in,” to which Lucy sarcastically retorts, “I'll bet you do.” Their frank admission of sexual excess and successive liaisons leads to divorce proceedings and new lovers. Lucy's oil baron meets Jerry's showgirl, stage-named Dixie Belle Lee, with the nightclubbing three watching Dixie perform a lewd song-and-dance about how her “dreams are gone with the wind,” while an air machine repeatedly blows her bouffant over her head, exposing a luscious figure and wearing inviting panties. The impending divorce and new lives now seem all set, with Lucy going to the West with a rawboned provincial and Jerry partying with his showgirl-friend. But they can't stop baiting each other: at one point, the cowboy's society-conscious mother inquires as to whether Lucy’s reputation is intact, referring to her “very handsome” singing coach. Jerry leaps to her defense fingers crossed behind his back, asserting that she was “above suspicion,” but subtly seeding doubt by adding that he never had to ask her where she had been and what she had done, since “I always knew.” Jerry crashes a recital Armand has arranged for Lucy, and when Jerry becomes engaged to a socially prominent “madcap heiress,” Lucy poses as Jerry's sister and shows up at a fancy dinner party his fiancée has arranged in order to

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humiliate him and sabotage his aspirations by pretending she is a drunken floozy and sleazy nightclub performer. Jerry leaves with her, thinking she is drunk and drives her to a mountain cabin, where they will be forced to spend the last night of their marriage, which ends at midnight. At this point, Lucy is having as much fun as Jerry in humiliating each other, and this will be the final emasculation: compared to the stiff-necked heiress and the slutty nightclub performer, Lucy is now a feisty and seductive woman quite willing to display her social irreverence and libidinal energy not for whomever is interested, but rather for the philandering but attractive Jerry, rather than Western oilmen or French dandies. After a series of hilarious misadventures, it becomes clear that she has set Jerry up. She wrecks the car, her aunt is not there, and she has to ride on a police motorcycle, provocatively bouncing up and down, making the siren go off. At the cabin, they are in adjoining rooms where the door latch doesn't work. She dons a sexy satin nightgown and he a long nightshirt. As the Alpine clock with a male-female couple in lederhosen and mountain maid dress come out to announce the time, Jerry's lust for her begins to get the best of him, as he keeps glimpsing her moving seductively on the bed in the adjoining room. They quietly negotiate a new start, with paradoxical talk about things being different but also the same as “that old feeling” for each other is revived and activated. As the clock strikes midnight, they are no longer married but still want each other terribly. Now as an unmarried couple in bed, they can have an extramarital affair with each other rather than with someone else. What we see at the end is the Alpine couple not returning to separate places, but the male following the female into hers. The condition that wrecked their relationship has been superseded by another, replacing multiplicities of lustworthy partners with the unanimity of one. The beauty of their mutual attraction is restored by amending their exercise of sexual freedom to include each other, single people going to bed with each by choice rather than commitment and, one may hope, enjoying every minute of their wicked and unsanctioned carnal lust for each other.

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986): Conditions of Urban Discontent The beauty of the budding relationship between Rosie and Charlie is consummated and tested in the green world and the crucible of wartime heroics. The combination of Dionysian physicality and Faustian mission activated and justified their lusty romance. When Rose exclaims after shooting a rapid, “I never knew that any physical experience could be so stimulating,” she could just as easily have been speaking of orgasmic

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ecstasy. Their quixotic condition could have been a failure, with the two of them dying stuck in the mud, but their true grace is manifest in their physical experience of each other, which in Rose's faith, survives death in wanting to be together in Heaven. Jerry and Lucy, on the other hand, have no profound patriotic or religious convictions, entertaining themselves with world-weary gambols of parties and nightclubs and lusty escapades, living in an erotic condition that takes nothing seriously, including each other. Their final adventure arouses their desire for each other in an act of recoupling, and leaves us with the satisfaction that two people with such strong desire for each other are rightly reunited, if not married. It is also the case that coupling may be complicated by conditions traceable to various discontents not always apparent but hiding latent unhappiness. Among educated urban people, this often leads to comic situations wherein happiness and contentment can only be found through attraction to and alliance with a new sexual partner. This “grass is greener” impulse belies a condition of malcontent with one's life only curable through sexual union with someone who is close by but tantalizingly out of reach. This sets the stage for the comedy of the unattainable woman or man, the comic foolishness of wish fulfillment fantasies about salvation through illicit or at least new sexual attainability. As Hannah and Her Sisters opens, we see the face of a mature and lovely woman named Lee, and hear the voice of a man named Elliot: “God, she's beautiful....She's got the prettiest eyes, and she looks so sexy in that sweater.” We are at a Thanksgiving gathering of family and friends in a New York apartment, a comfortable place occupied by an older couple, with their three daughters and their companions and friends present for the festive occasion. As Lee moves happily through the party greeting people, Elliot continues his unspoken lust for her, desiring to “be alone with her and hold her and kiss her” and tell her “how much I love her,” but then the pleasure principle is intruded upon by the reality principle: “Stop it, you idiot. She's your wife's sister.” The torpid condition of present unhappiness is linked to the imagined condition of future happiness realizable exclusively through a change in copulative and companionate bond. We are to witness the comic travail of variations on the theme of bright and attractive people who would seem to have everything but live with emotional voids and the nagging feeling that “I'm missing something.” We may sympathize with their existential plight but also enjoy their comic, or “seriocomic,” yearnings for meaning through the possibility of erotic attraction. Elliot is married to Hannah, who is devoted to her adopted children, family maintenance, and recently a return to the stage. Elliot feels taken for granted. Hannah’s contentment and success

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also rankles her sisters. Lee lives with Frederick, a misanthropic and isolated artist who treats her like a servant girl. Holly is neurotic, drugaddicted, and drifts from man to man and crisis to crisis, always borrowing money from Hannah. We are in a culture wherein commitments may be made but turn out to be temporary, so we see a merry-go-round of liaisons which may or may not have meaning or go anywhere. Elliot approaches Lee and tells her of his feelings for her; she is surprised but not unwilling, and they begin to meet for sexual enjoyment. Elliot especially is exultant (“What passion today with Lee! She was like a volcano!”). She begins disengaging from her strange artist, who pleads with her to stay, turning out to be more vulnerable and dependent upon her than he would admit. Yet in this whirligig world of people seeking something beautiful as expressed in sex, Lee is just as vulnerable and certainly available, since she consents to a secret affair without conditions. Elliot has come to share the sibling resentment of Hannah's apparent but cold maturity and competence in favor of the renewing passion and enlivening secrecy with the tempting and libidinal Lee. So, as in many affairs, there is a revenge factor in their surreptitious merrymaking, since their partner is not-Hannah and not-Frederick. As we watch their affair unfold, we entertain a sense of comic bemusement: affairs are never secret and rarely redemptive, often ending in disappointment and regret with the realization that a new partner is just sex with someone else. So it is perpetually funny that people should think so. And a bit sad: Holly, the other sister, is even more adrift and insecure, stumbling through failed relationships in both work and play. Indeed, the very term “relationship” suggests the something temporary and superficial, whereby people yield to attraction but retain the kinds of urbane conditions of restlessness and self-absorption which makes for incompletion and great comic irony. Holly's disastrous experiences do not deter her from seeking personal beauty; she even has a date with Mickey, Hannah's ex-husband, who is equally neurotic, but everything goes wrong in a paradigmatic bad date. Mickey struggles not with drugs but with chronic hypochondria and fear of death. When he is misdiagnosed with an incurable illness, he is distraught, and seeks solace in religion and mysticism, but finally is restored to comic sanity by watching the Marx Brothers' antics on screen. He then reads and admires an autobiographical story by Holly, and they become a tentative couple. At a subsequent and final Thanksgiving gathering, we witness the astonishing and delightful scene of lusting couples in a happy and festive moment, for now they are all happily married and reconciled, symbolized by the sisters’ parents, a theatrical couple that fought marital wars for decades but now are serenely content. In a sense,

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the ultimate comic irony is that the sisters all wind up with someone we might not have expected. Holly and Mickey are now married, and the value of marital fidelity and fecundity is well expressed by Holly, who in the last line of the film announces, “I'm pregnant.” The poets write of lusting humans as lunatics with “seething brains” and the fire of the “taste of desire.” This film gives great comedic treatment of how lust complicates the lives of people in a shared culture, since the lure of sexual beauty with just the right person at the moment can wreck lives and break up stable social ties. Lust is lunatic, but its comic grace plays out when it is accompanied by the resolution of conditions which favor relational stability. Rosie and Charlie complement and solidify their newfound attraction through patriotic service. Jerry and Lucy rekindle their bond not in immediate satisfaction of lust, but rather by sabotaging and then salvaging their marriage, climaxing in a lusty extramarital affair with each other. For Hannah and her sisters, their escapades taught them that lust is vivid in its ecstasy, but vividness is not necessarily significance. Orgasmic exchange is fun but not salvation, and rounds of recoupling become inconsequential and pointless. So at the end of the movie, we are left with the amusing thought that these restive people may be deceptively happy, since the next attraction may well swim into view when boredom sets in. “Boy,” Mickey observes at one point, “love is really unpredictable.” Perhaps so, but the next comic round of desperate attempts to unite lust and meaning will resemble the last, in another episodic repetition of the comedy of redemptive lust. Or, since the comic mind favors hopeful and happy resolutions, maybe not. Students of the origins of comedy have long noted that comedic expression in dramatic form originated in Dionysian revelry, the festive song of nature that invoked the fertile process of birth and growth into maturity. In this view, comedy is all about new birth or rebirth, since Dionysian myth recalls the god's initiation into adult society. Comic drama, then, is a theatrical ritual of natural lust evolving into adult social participation: lust brings us into being and connects us to nature, but as social beings we have to grow up sometime, learning to adapt our nature urges to living and making do in the social world. Here we have seen social variations of the theme in which natural lust is conditioned by considerations beyond just having sexual fun. The ecstatic dance of Dionysian play is tempered by mature people with real conditions which impinge on the fun. Charlie and Rosie are already grownups entwined in their mad and fortuitous lovemaking, but their primal attraction is balanced by wartime conditions. Lucy and Jerry are ostensibly young adults, but still entertaining adolescent urges; their Dionysian journey

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towards renewed mutual lust brought their focus back onto each other in lusty reunion. Hannah and her sisters and their consorts are all attractive people sporadically unable to control their attractions, but if their movie ending is truly a beginning, they have matured into relational reliability and sexual relaxation. In all three movies, the urgent attraction of couples (“I want you”) makes them look comically but charmingly silly but also wisely conditioned by the pragmatics of maturity. Rosie and Charlie escape for a life together, Jerry and Lucy reintegrate and maybe remarry, and Holly and Mickey become parents. Since we are all much like them in desirability and sociality, we may wish them all well.

Comedies of Attraction: Courtship and Concealment In movie comedies wherein lust is a central factor and goal, one of the most amusing plot lines involves at least one party to a prospective lustrous association concealing something, so complicating the hoped-for physical pleasure with ulterior motives or enigmatic behavior that it interferes with the advance or completion of delicious passion. The dramatic tension is created not by a search for mutual direction or action that resolves an existing condition, but rather by the introduction of an unknown and thus uncertainty to the comic mix. Lust activated in many people obviously inspires the possibility of erotic fulfillment, but for others lust evokes the element of opportunity, making evaluation of the motives and intentions of people in a potentially lustworthy situation difficult to fathom. Real passion there is, but it is couched in the language of secrecy and the masquerade of deceit. That lust can bloom in such circumstances is a tribute to its consuming power, as well as the credulity people are capable of when faced with both desire for and suspicion of an attractive potential lover. Social philosophers and observers have much discussed secrecy as a notable and even unique human capability, but here we emphasize its comic potential. In comic stories, when at least one party to a situation is hiding something—an ulterior motive, a suspect past, associates who might embarrass—that secret is a complication which modifies behavior and complicates the development of personal ties and obligations, introducing suspicions of bad faith or immoral purposes into the situation. Yet in comedy, it often can serve to make the fun of what happens all the more engaging.

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Trouble in Paradise (1932): A Stranger Comes to Town The movie opens in the elegant and romantic setting of Venice, where we see and hear a gondolier singing an operatic melody; it turns out that his boat is a garbage scow collecting waste. From a balcony, a sophisticated gentleman is planning a sumptuous dining and loving experience with a refined lady. When she arrives, she makes much of her elite friends, “princes and counts and dukes and kings,” and ostentatiously phones one of them, but at the other end of the call we see a lower-class person in a hovel. Gaston and Lilly use the dining rendezvous as an occasion for sexual foreplay, impressing each other with their titles—he is a “baron” and she is a “countess.” The talk turns to jewelry, and becomes a mutual recognition scene when both reveal they have been stealing each other's valuables: she has his wallet, and he has her jeweled brooch, then she produces his watch and in a more blatant erotic move, he displays her garter. His criminal skill arouses her considerable libidinal energy, as she throws herself into his arms and inquires as to who he is; when he replies that he is the master thief who robbed the Bank of Constantinople, she is overcome with admiration for a fellow professional and irresistible sexual conquest, and he endearingly refers to her as “my sweet little pickpocket.” The lights dim, a “Do Not Disturb” sign goes on the door, and the two enjoy their shared lust for illicit sex and money. With Gaston and Lilly, we are in the presence of entrepreneurial criminals who steal from the rich and keep the loot to live well. They are exemplars of the “confidence man (and woman),” parasitical beings that live on the wealth they steal or “con” from credulous rich people by gaining their confidence and eventually access to their holdings. Sex for such suave artists is both pleasurable and practical, since through adroit appeal to the vanity and credulity of the rich they can often obtain both sexual pleasure and fiscal bounty with such ease and nuance their wealthy benefactors are willing to graciously provide both without suspicion, or at least a willingness to be conned. Con artists like Gaston and Lilly are phonies who are masters of “impression management,” thus concealing their true motives with charm and wit and their cynical deceits with style and allure. And they are having fun conning the guileless at the top of society out of their money and out of their clothes. If one meets and woos a rich and lovely woman, coital fun is not only part of the scheme to make her their “mark” but also one of the fringe benefits that comes with their profession. In the process, they may be subtly making fun of gullible people who have more money than sense, but one of the comic oddities of such stories is that often the mark so enjoys the attention and seduction that they tolerate being exploited. Among the illustrious who seek to

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overcome boredom through the use of their money, they often are willing to take their beauty wherever they can get it, if adroitly flattered, entertained, and sexually sated. This makes them fair game for mutual exploitation with a charming funster who promises wicked fun and sexual adventure for a price, as if she were renting him for services rendered. The mark here is Madame Mariette Colet, the rich young widow who has inherited a Parisian perfume factory but finds business a wearisome chore, diverting her from her primary interest of self-indulgence. On one of her habitual shopping sprees, she impulsively buys an expensive diamond-encrusted handbag, which is stolen from her during an evening at the opera. The thief is Gaston, who has descended on Paris with Lilly, and they decide the most advantageous course of action is to return the bag for the reward. Gaston poses as Monsieur LaValle, returning the handbag with a dramatic entrance and flourish, flattering her with his attention to her love letters and choice of lipstick. He maneuvers Madame Colet to her upstairs bedroom and admires the adjoining and now empty secretary's bedroom. He then boldly scolds her for her frivolity in losing her handbag, using the wrong lipstick, and mismanaging her money, the last of which would require a competent secretary to “give you a good spanking,” quickly adding “in a business way, of course.” The lovely Mariette lounges languorously back and says seductively, “You're hired.” Quickly he is running the Colet palace, and has hired Lily as his secretary, plotting to place an enormous amount of cash in the palace home safe. Lily has to restrain herself not to “lift” some of Mariette's jewelry. Her jealousy is roused when Mariette bribes Lily to go home every day at five, obviously to create an opportunity for sexual adventure with Gaston/Lavalle without interruption. Although she has good reason to suspect his concealed motives, he is a valued servant, and his services extend to the satisfaction of her libidinal appetites. Climatic sex is followed by the climatic plunder of Madame's available resources, since here sex is not redemptive, just fun, but the lust for money is redemptive because its possession sustains the fun of the possessor. The astute con man knows when the game is up, and the cover is blown: the jealous Lily robs the Colet safe on her own, but Gaston tells Mariette he did it, and diverts attention by revealing to her that her really big thief is the trusted chairman of the board. Even though Mariette is enamored of Gaston, she recognizes it was all too temporary, and that he belongs with Lily. The content Mariette, quite satisfied with Gaston’s polished attention to both her sexual and financial needs, wishes them well and even gives him a pearl necklace for Lily. As Gaston and Lily escape in a taxi, their habit of larceny as sexual play emerges again, with Lily picking his pocket of the necklace, which she places in

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Mariette's expensive handbag, along with the wad of money he just stole from her and now replaces in her open receptacle, as she exclaims his name in happy ecstasy. For the trio of play-actors performing in this comic masquerade, their three-person attractions are for quite tangible prey, the palpable lust for accessible objects of desire. But what is really comical is how much fun they are having, all enjoying every minute of it. They enjoy much displaying and exploiting a kind of cheerful wickedness, wherein they use each other quite shamelessly for their own amusement and pleasure. Concealment and revelation, trust and betrayal, frankness and evasion, are all part of the fascination with secrecy that is an eternal human interest and staple of sophisticated comedy. The character that the three principals project makes them into personages of artifice and posture. This conceit gives them an allure that the average person does not possess, but in comedy enhances a mere thief and his consort and a bored widow into beings who imagine themselves to be more charming and seductive than their ordinary selves, and thus whose theatrical self-absorption and ephemeral identity makes them delightful fools to watch, especially since they seem to enjoy so much fooling around.

Divorce—Italian Style (1962): The Comic Attraction of the Unattainable Woman The comic lusts of the Parisian sophisticates are both concealed and revealed in their adroit use of phony role-playing in their pursuit of attainable wants. Gaston is in the mythic tradition of the mysterious stranger who comes to town and makes such an impression that he changes things. In the case of the confidence man, he wants to take advantage of unfulfilled wants and tasks, which his lovely mark is willing and eager to allow since she is taking advantage of him. Yet the cynical trio are not impetuous or inflamed with lust, since it is a want which they have every intention of satisfying. But, in other venues and contexts, the comedy of attraction plays out because of unsatisfied lust whose flame can only be quenched by doing something dastardly. If there are personal or social impediments to desire, much “black” comedy stems from the concealed machinations of someone trying to get rid of the extant hindrance in order to attain what hitherto has been unattainable. In Divorce—Italian Style, we meet Fefe, the Baron Cefalu of a petty aristocratic family in the Sicilian town of Agramonte, who by virtue of his social status is unemployable, occupying an apartment in a decaying palace, and walking through town with the affectation of a provincial

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dandy (slicked hair and moustache, white suit, cigarette holder, and sunglasses). Like Madame Colet, he is bored but unlike her he is broke, and worse, trapped not only in an inert social role but also in a marriage to a woman who is so annoying he cannot stand her. By law he cannot divorce her, and by small-town convention it is difficult to have a mistress, so unlike Mariette Colet he hasn't the means or the freedom to have affairs or at least get out of town. His unsatisfied lusts persist into middle age, but his imagination is active. After all, he is (as he reminds us) a descendant of crusaders, and thus of heroic and aristocratic heritage. Unlike Gaston, he is not a stranger but rather all too familiar, and whereas Gaston was plebian but elegant, Fefe is patrician but seedy. Gaston was an unknown whose intentions become known, but Fefe is a known whose intentions are known but to him. Unbeknownst to anyone else, Fefe is in love. But not with his wife. The outstanding comic irony here is that in some ways she (Rosalie) should be considered an excellent wife, constantly waiting on him, admiring him, and wanting sex with him. His problem with her is that she is oppressive—simpering, clinging, and generally nerve-wracking. And she is there, every day, for an endless future of slow torture. Fefe might be able to bear his fate with fortitude and resignation except for the presence of Angela. Fefe is vain enough to fancy himself still desirable to young women and desperate enough to want to believe so. So, he fantasizes about his cousin Angela, who lives in another wing of the family palace but can be seen, coming and going to school, and from the common upstairs toilet in her bedroom. Angela is sixteen, lithe and beautiful, shy and polite. Fefe projects all his pent-up lust and midlife hopes onto her. He can only admire her from afar, at best watching her on hot nights as she moves languorously in her bed. She serves as his teenage Beatrice, an unattainable young and virginal repository of both carnal and companionate desire. Whereas Dante only admired the married Beatrice from afar, and in the tradition of Petrarch only wrote poetry about his unattainable love, Fefe has other ideas. In traditional cultures, there is an often a custom of “honor” killings, within the family if a son or daughter dishonors the family or outside if someone insults or outrages a family member. In Fefe's world, the most common and useful such defense of honor is the “requirement” to kill your spouse if he or she is having an affair with someone else. In this instance, Sicilian law looks kindly on such honorable acts and the punishment of the perpetrator is light. Fefe hits upon the idea of murdering his wife by getting her interested in a former boyfriend (now married with three children), serving a light sentence, and marrying Angela. When Angela vaguely professes her love for him, both the prospect of getting rid of

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Rosalie and gaining access to the lustworthy Angela propels him to action. He hires the boyfriend (Carmelo) to restore a fresco inside the family palace, and gleefully senses their renewed passion for each other, even tape-recording their conversations with a hidden microphone. He expects to catch them in bed, but they run off together; now armed with a gun and an excuse, he tracks them down, only to find that Carmelo's wife has beat him to the punch and murdered her husband, announcing to Fefe that her honor has been avenged, to which he plaintively murmurs, “But what about mine?” He then shoots his wife, serves a light sentence and reads the love letters Angela writes him, returns and marries her. His life now blissful, he takes the bikini-clad Angela boating with a handsome young sailor at the helm; as they recline on the deck and kiss, she furtively caresses the foot of the young helmsman she obviously knows very well. Much of the wondrous comedy here involves all the forms of concealment going on in a small and familiar family and town setting. Everybody seems to be observing everyone else: Fefe is looking at Angela, and then his wife and Carmelo; the townspeople sit around watching people like Fefe parade by; at the movie theater, the men of the town turn out to watch La Dolce Vita; and in the public theater of the law court, where trials such as those exonerating spousal murder go on. Fefe is able to keep his secret plan concealed and get away with murder. And in the ironic moment at the end, Angela certainly has a secret that she conceals from her husband, letting us leave the new couple and the sailor to whatever comic concealments and revelations occur in their future. The fun-seeking trio of Parisian players are essentially, as the term goes for casual sex, fooling around, with both sex and money as the tokens of the game. Here the concealments and disclosures involve somewhat more Machiavellian machinations, as befits the setting, but even the two murders which occur cannot dim the comic preposterousness of the situation and the insane plot which emerges from it. But comedy lets us entertain our own wicked notion, namely that whatever changes from being unattainable to being attainable is often not exclusively attainable by whoever wanted it to be so, and also that when it comes to strategies of concealment, any number can play, including those who conceal something from the concealer. We cannot resist wicked laughter at the two pairs of doomed lovers (Carmelo and Rosalie, Fefe and Angela) who succumbed to the irresistible lure of Eros, in the pathetic human belief that intimate and illicit lust and orgasmic ecstasy are the true paths to interpersonal beauty, in the former case through reuniting, with a lover from one's youth and in the latter through uniting with a lover who allows one to recapture

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lost youth. Comedy is wise enough to allow us forbearance and clemency for all us mortal fools who seek grace in unwise passion.

Charade (1963): Concealment and Certainty Concealments of all kinds include the uncertainty which goes with hidden motives or ulterior actions, what we have termed “confidence.” The merry pranksters of wealthy Paris have every reason to distrust each other, given their motives of thievery aid lechery, but are so enjoying the play that they acquiesce in the mutual exploitations. Since everyone is party to the interplay of confidence and exploitation, their hedonic desires stay at the level of symbolic theatricality. Fefe's wife is too dense to suspect that he is setting her up for murder, but on the other hand he is too vain for it to occur to him that she is quite eager to take a lover and be rid of him. Moreover, he did not see Angela's expressions of desire as a schoolgirl crush that would be easily cured by marital revelation of his frailties and middle-aged torpor and the presence of virile, young alternatives. Concealments are always something of a knowledge game, given the great human resource of secrecy, but in some cases multiple deceptions present such a puzzle one doesn't quite know who to trust. What makes for great comedy is when one party to a budding relationship is clearly lustworthy but not so clearly trustworthy. The original Greek meaning of “enigma” connotes someone who speaks in riddles, from the root world for fable; but we now use the term to refer to not only puzzling speech, but also to a situation that is difficult to understand, as well as someone who is inscrutable or mysterious about who they are and what they do, and thus enigmatic. In Charade, we meet a lovely and refined young woman (Regina, or “Reggie”) at a French ski resort, who confides to a friend that her husband is so mysterious she doesn't know what he does. There she meets Peter, a handsome and charming older man, who seems by contrast to be both attractive and predictable. Reggie returns to Paris to find all her possessions gone, and learns from the police that her husband has been murdered. Peter shows up at her apartment and offers to help, and since she finds him attractive and helpful, she accepts. At the funeral, she is shocked by the appearance of three diverse characters making sure her husband is really dead, one by sticking the corpse with a pin. At the American embassy, a CIA official informs her that these three were part of a wartime commando squad parachuted into France to give a large sum of money to the Resistance, which they then decided to keep and split, but her husband betrayed them and absconded with the money. The official, like the

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thieves, thinks she has the money but doesn’t know it, whereas the thieves think she knows where the money is and will do anything to get her to tell. Reggie is a trusting soul relieved by having a contact she can call at the embassy, and Peter is conveniently on hand when threatened, which the menacing threesome do. Her fear and helplessness make her into a sympathetic victim dependent upon Peter, whom she depends on and adores (“You know what's wrong with you?—absolutely nothing”). Our puzzlement deepens, however, when the apparently reliable Peter seems to be secretly allied with the three thugs, moving from Reggie's hotel room and her confidence to theirs, berating them for their clumsy stupidity. She becomes suspicious as he tries to play both sides to the conflict, and even more puzzling, his name keeps changing to the point she doesn't know who he is and whether to believe him. Her alarm rises to near hysteria when her tormentors are successively murdered, and she even wonders if Peter (or whatever his name is) is the killer. This uncertainty continues nearly to the end, when she discovers that the “macguffin” (what everyone is after) is the stamps on an envelope her husband carried on his escape, rare and valuable stamps worth a fortune. She continues to believe Peter almost in desperation (but also attraction) but doubts continue to surface. In the end, the killer is to meet the CIA agent at night in a deserted public place; the agent turns out to be the last member of the wartime team who killed the others for the stamps, posing as a government operative, but Peter foils him. At last, she returns the stamps to the embassy and Peter (actually Brian) is the true agent and her ally after all. He proposes marriage to her in his office, but only after she returns the stamps. Charade has all the concealments and mysteries of a good thriller, but what makes it comedy is Reggie's comic grace. Throughout all the relentless action and puzzles and fearful moments, she maintains her poise and lucidity through her comic attitude and funny remarks. She is able to remind herself and the audience that this is fun, and she is having fun being in danger and in great personal uncertainty. As the comic center, we see through her that her menacing pursuers are cardboard villains who self-destruct and she even makes fun of her iconic older and wiser lover, reminding him of his age but also his appeal, openly lusting for him and pursuing him. Her ability to wisecrack is irrepressible: at one point, trapped in a phone booth by one of her afflicters who threatens her with lighted matches, Peter appears and asks what she is doing, she remarks, “I'm having a nervous breakdown.” She is also in a funny situation: she has no idea where the money is, but she is confronted with five different men who think she does and may want to kill her to find it. But seeing her captivating attractiveness and quick wit alerts us that she is the worthy

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prize of the story, not the money; she has a sense of defiant fun and erotic energy that are valuable and humane qualities we revere as admirable. Reggie also appeals to us because she practices the popular adage about times of crisis and keeping your wits about you. Her quips and finesse in the face of danger and mystery make us see her as the witty heroine whose sublime pathos is in her ability to overcome suffering through comic irreverence and defiance. In a real sense, her comedic attitude serves her pragmatic interest of trying to make sense of the insensible and also alive not only physically but also to the attractive new man she lusts for but is unsure she can trust. In her virtually alone and precarious situation, comic logic may be the most reliable mode of inquiry and survivability when one has to play out the ugly illogic of a crazy charade.

Comedies of Affection: The Beauty of Love In the immemorial and irresistible activity of human appeal, we open ourselves up to comic treatment as funny people made so by being inexplicably drawn towards other people we find somehow appealing. Shakespeare has Puck say that seeing with fool's eyes lets us discern something in comedy that is beyond human wisdom and explanation. When the fundamental message of attraction— “I want you”—is activated and reciprocated, a variety of responses are possible, given the “human thing” of trying to deal with some very primal drives and pressing social considerations. Long before writing plays and later screenplays about such common and recognizable attractions, people understood and retold innumerable stories about the comedy of human lust, spinning myths, folktales, and fables about the comedy of desire. Erotic desire played out by mortal fools in the grit of its passion is a time-honored subject of comic treatment, so when we go to the movies we are seeing up on the screen contemporary variations of comedic themes, rooted in long traditions of storytelling and even more fundamentally the universal persistence of the agony and beauty of Eros. When we turn to comedies of affection, we are still firmly in Dionysian territory but with the emotional mix slightly altered. The emphasis in comedies of attraction tends toward wanting, with at least one party to a relationship expressing to the other that “you are beautiful” and that your beauty makes me want you. In comedies of affection, the emphasis shifts toward the joint message “we are beautiful” and that shared beauty makes us both love each other. Those attracted to each other are moved by the experience of physical intensity, especially the joy of coition. In affective comedy, that intensity often leads the participants to finally figure out how

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to make the energetics of sex transform into the pragmatics of relational beauty, moving from making love to making love last. It is this stage of the process that is the focus of comedies of affection. For what people are seeking in these kinds of comic dramas is not primarily sex but rather loving attachment, not devoid of sensuality but couched in terms of a lasting relationship of humane courtesy. In comedies of affection, when people express their desire for each other, the common expression is, “I love you,” meaning that we are beautiful in our affection. That joint beauty suggests the basis for making a life rather than just making out. Affectionate comedy emerges for our delight in the same way as the attractive: how do we get both the lustworthy and the lovable together, going in the same direction, dealing with impeding situations, and overcoming complicating barriers? The great comic possibility that keeps us watching is our hope that perhaps the figures we see will get there through the fulfillment of comic grace, and maybe we too can enjoy our own version of grace.

Shop Around the Corner (1940): Sentimental Romance and Mundane Regularity With comedies of affection we are in the province of romance, an expansive realm that can include adventure, mystery, horror, and mixed genres such as historical epic, science fiction, and imaginary fantasy. Romantic comedy is likely the most enduring and popular kind of movie romance, often restricting itself to the primary thematic of nurturing and enjoying the love relationship at the center of the drama. Comedies of lust are in a sense about foreplay, how people are attracted and united in physical union, while comedies of love are about people getting together to live as a couple in social union, usually but not always in marriage. Romance in this restricted and formulaic sense is enjoyable for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is funny. The success of romance in its many popular forms—romance novels, soap operas, celebrity gossip and biography—is for many a vicarious experience. People who hope for romance or live their lives devoid of romance, or enjoy perverse pleasure in the romantic travails of famous or fictional characters, project their private feelings onto romantic objects. The eternal popularity of unrequited love, or love cut short by death, or love betrayed by a wicked partner, or unlikely or bizarre love that somehow succeeds—all are fare for popular consumption. It is not uncommon for people to imagine and even arrange their lives as a romance, a personal drama in which love is triumphant, passion and fidelity last, romance never wanes, and marital bliss is eternal.

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Cynics decry the delusionary self-deceptions necessary to sustain belief in the “secular scripture” of romantic love, asserting that beauty is too elusive and fleeting to sustain a fanciful dream of lasting and loving commitment formed and sustained by love. Nevertheless, both the belief in and the practice of finding and nourishing love survives, not only in private fantasy but in forms of expression such as love poetry and romantic comedy. Its endurance is rooted in the human hope not only for good sex (Eros) but also for good tidings (philia), a relationship that lasts because it combines our desire for mutually satisfying passion with our need for a beautiful friendship, two people who want each other but also find each other enjoyable as persons worth living with on a permanent basis. Perhaps at base the great sustaining myth of romantic love is the imagination of people wishing each other well enough to keep romantic grace alive. This ability is so remarkable that it remains a major theme in the popular imagination, including movie comedy. In the movies, those involved in the pursuit of love must go through the comic drama of seeking love, negotiating love, and enjoying love. In Shop Around the Corner, we are transported to movieland Budapest, in particular to a small, privately owned shop that sells leather goods and notions, run by a distracted but not unkind owner (Mr. Matuschek) and populated by a variety of salespersons, all of whom pay proper deference to the boss and hope for a raise or just a job. We are in a setting of urban modernity, wherein the salaried workers are members of “the lonely crowd,” existing in an urban society of labor discipline, mass impersonality, and anxiety stemming from loneliness and uncertainty. Two in particular (Alfred Kralik and Klara Novak) are young adults who are single and unattached to family or culture. At work they present a good front of selfassurance and competency, successfully hiding self-doubts and agonizing isolation. The general overlay of official courtesy extended to customers also prevails within the work force, but there is a constant undercurrent of hostility in remarks they make about each other. This is especially true of Alfred and Klara, who strain the norm of collegial politeness with their barely contained hostility towards each other, apparently for no other reason than they just don't like each other. The great and poignant comic irony here is they do but don't know it. In comedies of attraction, a key moment occurs when the drama reaches the question of how to seize the time, when hesitancy or fear is overcome and someone professes their feelings for another (as the husband does in Hannah and Her Sisters with his wife's sister) or someone intervenes to force the issue (as the father does in It Happened One Night) or any number of similar circumstances and actions which bring the

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comedy to its desired unification and conclusion. This can be episodic, as in the mix of people who come together in Palm Beach Story by contrived accident, or diachronic, in the way the various relationships in Hannah play out pleasingly at the end. This moment of recognition, or kairos (the right time), or whatever turns up can also be a painful and lengthy discovery of the parties to the search for mutual affection, who discover that they are not who and what they think each other are, but rather are someone else they know in a different way. Alfred and Klara know each other in the social context of a ritualistic setting, in the workaday roles of routinized employee expectations. Their petty harping and needling of each other occurs in the tensions of laborious rituals, which seem to arouse their mutual hostility, although we suspect that these antagonisms stem from their confinement in tasks they are paid to do and, as always, that hostility belies the likelihood that they are unconsciously attracted to each other. They know each other in person only as someone “from the shop,” as salaried functionaries defined by what they do in the cyclic present tense of their surface and palpable livelihoods, so they think that's all there is to them, devoid of identity or personality outside their graceless existence. At one point, when Alfred says something to her slightly endearing, she dismisses him as a creature of the shop without merit or interest: she knows if she inquired what she would find, that “instead of a heart, a handbag; instead of a soul, a suitcase; and instead of an intellect, a cigarette lighter—that doesn't work.” The magnificent comic twist is that both of them separately see themselves as having hearts and souls and intellects in a secret life away from work and drudgery. They each have an anonymous “pen pal” they have been writing awhile but have never met, sharing their interests in literature (Tolstoy) and the arts and such good things in an idyllic otherworld of good life and true experience independent of “the shop.” What Klara and Alfred do not know is that their unknown pen pal is in fact each other. They have in effect been conducting dual courtship rituals, one at work and another by mail. In the former case, the Dionysian fertility dance is a primal rite of degradation, insulting and belittling the other as a concealed (even to them) form of flirtation, denoting “stay away” but actually connoting “come on.” In the other, there is a somewhat more Apollonian rite of idyllic romance between two people sharing their ideal rather than profane selves, imagining the other as certainly high-minded and perhaps even highborn. The comic giveaway is that in both courtships, they have a lot to say to each other: their “intellectual” romance consists of long and soulful letters sharing their “higher” interests in the fine arts and nobler things beyond their crass commercial work-lives, and those necessary

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hours at work they irritably communicate much to each other, even though they openly profess to dislike each other. (In one scene, Alfred and Klara decorate a Christmas tree in the shop window, and they communicate by not communicating, barely acknowledging each other's presence, much less their humanity, since there they have none.) But all this prefaces the ancient convention in comedy that suffering and separation may precede and characterize the action, with comedic aesthetics dictating the accompanying logic of the plot, which lets them lighten up, learn about each other, and laughter and love triumph. The hero descends into darkness, and the plot flirts with melodrama or even tragedy, when Mr. Matuschek is told by a private detective that Alfred is having an affair with his wife. After an agonizing meeting in the boss's office, the “father-son” relationship is ruined, and for reasons unknown to Alfred, he is fired. Alfred is thunderstruck and mystified, but finally decides in reaction to meet his pen pal in a restaurant. When it turns out to be Klara, he goes to her table but does not reveal that he is her “beloved,” so she continues to treat him with contempt despite his dismissal. Matuschek learns that it is in fact another employee (the shop dandy) who is having the affair; he attempts suicide but collapses and is sent to a hospital, where Alfred visits him and is restored and promoted to store manager. When he returns as boss, Klara faints in the middle of the store; Alfred visits her at home, bringing a letter from her still unknown pen pal and reassuring her about returning to work. On Christmas Eve, the boss is better, business is good, and everyone gets a bonus. Klara is poised to meet her secret lover, but Alfred lies and says that he had stopped by earlier and is fat, old, and bald, finally putting their practice of baiting each other to good use. She confesses that she hoped he would be young and attractive like Alfred, and then he confesses that he is indeed her secret correspondent. This late recognition scene makes everything clear to Klara, and for the first time she expresses delight. They kiss, and go out together to celebrate the dual festivity of sacred birth and profane rebirth. Klara and Alfred are not frivolous or immature people, and they recurrently display competence and intelligence. Neither one is congenitally disposed to seek satisfaction in lusty adventures, and both are so constrained by norms of respectability that the kind of love they profess to seek is romantic love idealized as a spiritual and sentimental union. If this story were a Tolstoyan tragedy (Anna Karenina is one of their favorites), they would be destined to lead two lives, both unfulfilled, in personal drudgery and loneliness, yearning for one who personifies a romantic ideal of a somewhat disembodied “soul mate.” But the history of comedy teaches us that Thalia is something of an imp, who is not going to let

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incommodities such as Destiny or Fortune stand in the way of comic possibility. This couple is reluctantly brought together despite their inability to obey the usual romantic injunction of carpe diem: when your true love comes along, seize the moment and go for it. As inhibited romantics, they crave romance but resist the embodied facticity of our common comic imperfection. But you can't court a ghost forever, and take yourself too seriously not to live and love as flesh-and-blood humans. In the end, they reach for and attain comic grace, and they do so through comical self -reduction to human-scale people who have abandoned romantic pretensions and embraced romantic love in a real and coupling embrace in which two new lovers eagerly kiss. Now they really have much to talk about.

Moonstruck (1987): When Wrong is Right Alfred and Klara find their mutual direction towards each other and their future together through a rather agonizing comic discovery of who each other really is and what that means to them. They eventually have to descend from an idyllic world of the koma, or comatose dream state they imagine, towards romantic melodrama with its sentimental pretenses and gestures and danger of tragic expectations. Their graceful trance of joy at the end signals their discovery of actuality and the wonder of an actual lover. In a sense, they were in love with the wrong person, although in a different way of the usual convention of moving from the wrong lover to the right one. It is true that reality leaves a lot to the imagination, but the dramatic wonder of comedy is how it manages to combine beauty and factuality, the romantic and the pragmatic, the sensitive and the sensible, Dionysian and Apollonian comity, eros and philia, the dreaming life and the waking life. Yet comedies of affection also remind us that at the core of the dramatic action, and its concomitance in human life, is the possibility and actuality of people loving each other. Tragedies and melodramas of human passion remind us that affection can go terribly wrong and descend into mad jealousies and betrayals typical of the demonics of love. It is the province of comedy to demonstrate that the call of sexual or sociable appeal is not bad nor doomed. Lust can be healthy and satisfactory, love can be achieved and abiding, and as we shall see, like is sometimes enough if affiliation is the desired result. But it is central to human anxiety to see the dramatization of love triumphant, or at least feasible. If we ponder the question, “Is lust necessary,” comedies of lust address that issue; if we ask, “Is love necessary?,” comedies of love treat the feasibility

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of that; and if we wonder, “Can we just get along?,” comedies of affiliation sketch out what it takes to live together all friendly-like. In Moonstruck, we are immediately immersed in a culture and situation wherein one would think love is not only necessary, but is encouraged and essential. For we see a fairly prosperous and peaceful neighborhood of New York City that is largely populated by Italian-Americans, the descendants of immigrants from Italy who have kept much of the cultural heritage alive in this new urban world. The movies have depicted many aspects of Italian life such as the Mafia, street gangs, and sleazy urban display, but fortunately also the romantic and operatic traditions of amore, courtship with Mediterranean passion and expression as exemplified in romantic poetry dating to Dante and Petrarch and updated to accessible and sensual love as sung in the great operas. In the New World old habits persist, when we meet a lovely and nearly forty year old widow named Loretta Castorini, working as a bookkeeper for several small businesses in her Brooklyn Heights neighborhood while living with her parents. She has been seeing a middle-aged man named Johnny Cammareri, who is pleasant and mild-mannered but also rather dense. She admits to her mother that she doesn't love him, to which the worldly-wise mother replies, “Good. When you love them, they drive you crazy, because they know they can,” no doubt with her philandering husband in mind. At a local restaurant, Johnny affects a romantic air, getting down on his knees and producing an engagement ring to propose marriage, to which Loretta agrees on the condition they have a proper church wedding. She is convinced by traditional superstition that her first marriage was cursed because they were married at City Hall. Loretta is in the difficult position common to widows in traditional societies that, despite her beauty and poise there are barriers to remarriage, so a steady if loveless match may have to do. Although the wedding is set, the decidedly unromantic Johnny makes us suspect he is still under his mother's thumb, because he now feels compelled to fly off to Sicily to see his dying mother. He does make Loretta promise to go see his estranged younger brother and invite him to the wedding. She dutifully treks to a local bakery and is escorted downstairs where the brother (Ronnie) stokes the furnace. Ronny is hostile and angry at his brother, whom he blames for the loss of his hand in a bread slicer, resulting in his repulsed fiancée leaving him. Though unspecified, Ronny is probably younger than Loretta, who is confused by him but sympathetic to his plight. She cannot help but notice the stark difference between Johnny and Ronny: the former is unimaginative and laconic; the latter is sensitive and melancholic, a fan of opera but with a big chip on his shoulder. He and Loretta go upstairs to his apartment, listen to Italian

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opera and drink Scotch. He impulsively throws her over his shoulder, and she asks, “Where are you taking me?” “To the bed,” he replies, and she willingly relaxes. At this point, we might expect that Moonstruck will be a comedy of lust, but the story is too suffused with romantic profundity for that. As Puccini and Rossini play in the background, Ronny and Loretta are in that familiar “real drama,” the koma of “falling in love” in a setting and with personalities who are ready for love. Despite the conducive atmosphere for romance, there are obvious pitfalls: she is engaged to dull but eventempered Johnny, and Ronny exudes dangerous Byronic unhappiness. But the dramatic Italianate characterology makes it irresistible: both La Boheme and Americo-Neapolitan ballads set the tone, the moon is conveniently and spectacularly full over Manhattan, and Ronny and Loretta are two people with vitalistic cultural and personal experience who feel unfulfilled and incomplete. Her husband died in a bus accident, his fiancée fled after his accident; she is graying and approaching spinsterhood, he has a wooden hand and is relegated to a furnace room. With the mythic bella luna hovering overhead nightly and the operatic motif playing both on recordings and in their heads, their idyllic world of romance is both sensual and hard-headed, vitalistic and politic. Ronny's personal experience converges with his operatic experience, both of which are tempestuous and contested, romantic and raw, tragic and comic: “Love doesn't make things nice. It ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and break our hearts and love the wrong people and die.” The romantic mythology which informed Italian opera featured passionate love, spurred on by such emotions as outrage and wrong and jealousy. So their idyllic heaven of soaring love is tempered by both melodramatic gestures and tragic consciousness, romanticism combined with existentialism. Thus, as in many operas, if their love is to survive the pitfalls of bad fortune and hostile enmity ending in separation or death, cautionary steps have to be taken. A proper church wedding avoids bad luck and, most troublesome of all, what to do about the absent presence of Johnny, in prayer and mourning at Mamma's deathbed in Sicily. Johnny is an exemplar of that comic staple, the “mamma's boy,” who may be a wealthy suitor, as in The Awful Truth, or the aging and apparently bisexual playboy of Some Like It Hot, who still needs mother's approval of his many wives, or a subservient and obedient child who leaves his gorgeous bride-to-be in Brooklyn for an endless vigil at mother's bedside. In all these cases, there is a connotation that such individuals lack some quality necessary for romantic affection, so

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completely under their mother's thumb that they lack the mature independence or virile masculinity required for an ardent and reliable lover. The new lovers need direction, both in nurturing the affective bond they have discovered and in negotiating through the shoals and quicksands of family. Attending La Boheme reminds them that such sudden romances can end badly, since in that opera the seamstress Mimi dies and her lover, the poet Rodolfo, is left distraught and alone. And, family has a corollary role in providing comedic soap opera: when they go to the opera, Loretta sees her father (Cosmo) with his flashy and fleshy mistress and rebukes him, although she is now sleeping with her fiancé’s brother. So, the new couple-in-making are wise enough to know that they cannot rely upon the adolescent faith of lovers that “things will work out for us because love never fails.” They have to rely upon the great Machiavellian resource of froda, guile and cunning, which necessarily precedes the ordini of comic grace. Their own operatic theater takes place in their familiar territory, but like so much opera, openly expresses their deep need for bonding affection and their hope for theatrical transfiguration so their semi-illicit love affair does not remain secret or private. They costume themselves for a very public appearance at the opera, he in tuxedo and she in a spectacular new dress and coiffure. They are emboldened by the negative example of Loretta's father and his seedy mistress and the positive example of her mother Rose, who is the stalwart family anchor presiding over things in her comfortable kitchen. Rose is frank about everything, reminding her errant husband in a melancholy line worthy of Rossini that “no matter what you do, you're still gonna die.” And, when she dines alone at a local restaurant, she meets a comparably aged professor who is rejected by his student girlfriend, and the lonely man, much taken with her, tries to woo her, but she firmly says, “I can't go home with you, because I know who I am.” The comic opera climaxes when Johnny returns to the Castorini home to find Ronny with Loretta, but pre-empts agonizing confessions of redirected ardor by informing Loretta that he can't marry her because if he does, his mother will die. She throws the engagement ring at him, which Ronny picks up and uses to propose to Loretta. To complete the picture, Rose bluntly tells Cosmo to stop seeing the mistress, and he humbly agrees, “Te amore.” The perplexed Johnny accepts the stunning development of Loretta becoming his sister-in-law rather than wife, and the mood mellows into general reconciliation and good will. Champagne is poured, and the group poses for pictures as a harmonious family. (This may not last, since their hasty romance may founder in marital reality, the mother in Sicily will surely die at some point, and Cosmo may get the “life

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before death” itch for an affair again, but those are other stories.) For the moment, we have the classic inclusive principle ascendant, where comic grace is granted not only to the prime couple who will marry but also to everyone else in the picture who share in the joke and the good tidings. We may enjoy and laugh over this happy moment while it lasts.

The Lady Eve (l941): The Advocacy of the Serpent Although comedies of appeal might seem at first glance to feature human feelings which impel people to want to get together in emotional union, in fact they require the exercise of a great deal of intelligence. Indeed, comedy seems to repeatedly demonstrate that it is a false dichotomy to separate sentimentality and rationality, since the way to the desired happy ending involves not only the arousal of sentiment but also the adroit use of applied and often manipulatory reasoning. One of the human things which makes us funny beings is that we can communicate not only our aesthetic sensibilities but also our intelligible reasonableness, since both are elementary in our making sense and forging both means and ends. Comedy is marvelously eclectic in how people get to where they want to go: Alfred and Klara have to learn how to combine the ideal and the actual, Ronny and Loretta have to wind their way carefully through familial complications. But, in all cases the strategic utilization of both wit and guile makes a key difference, since at least one party to the incipient conjoining takes the initiative and forces the issue. This can be a gradual grasp of rational knowledge, as it does with Alfred and finally Klara, or a sudden spurt of emotive knowledge, as it does with Ronny and Loretta. In comedy, this can get hilariously complicated, as when one person is woefully non-directional and the other person is quite directional but whose original motive is unromantically ulterior but then changes towards romantically ulterior. This is evidenced in the curious case of Charles Poncefort Pike and Jean Harrington/Lady Eve Sidwich. In The Lady Eve, we meet Jean and her father, “Colonel” Harry Harrington and their valet aboard a ritzy ocean liner, traveling first class as members of a distinguished elite but who are in fact a team of confidence artists, experienced in separating wealthy travelers from their money. Unlike Alfred and Klara, who clung to the delusion of perfect love, we are now in the sordid world of criminals who use sex and hope of love as means to an illicit financial end. They quickly learn that Charles Pike is the heir to a brewing fortune, and, as a bachelor scientist who has just spent a year in the Amazon, is clumsy around women and unaware of covert malefactors who would take advantage of his naiveté. He is fair

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game not only for a gentlemanly con man like “Handsome Harry,” but also for his attractive and sexually aggressive daughter who puts the make on him not for sensual but rather for gainful pleasure. (The snake-in-Eden motif is introduced in the credits: he is an ophiologist, who studies snakes and has specimens with him; she first attracts his attention by dropping an apple on his head; he is reading a book entitled “Are Snakes Necessary?”) Jean is not only an ace card sharp, she is also adept at seduction, getting Charlies’ attention in the large dining room of the ship (full of debutantes hoping to meet and woo the wealthy Charlie) by tripping him as he walks by, then berating him for clumsily breaking the heel of her shoe. She insists he accompany her to her stateroom and pick out another pair of shoes and put them on her feet, an act of forcing him into a submissive position (“You'll have to kneel down”) then dangling her shapely legs in his face. Later, in her stateroom, again as the temptress Eve allegedly afraid of a snake, she embraces him in fake fear, tantalizing her hapless Adam unmercifully. This sets him up to be fleeced by the Colonel in a con game at the card table. Yet the snake in the grass strikes again, and Eve tastes the fruit of the affective apple. She begins to fall for the poor sap, and tries to subtly sabotage the cards-and-betting setup arranged by her father, but he still manages to take Charlie for a large sum of money when she's not there. But the comedic and Edenic temptation has been aroused as she falls from professional grace to her father's horror. Charlie is an Adamic innocent, naive where she is experienced, otherworldly (absorbed in research) where she is very this-worldly, trusting where she is an “operator,” rich and respectable where she is poor and transgressive, school smart where she is street smart. The Eve who used sex as a weapon to lure men to their financial doom now has eaten the apple of knowledge, knowing she's in love. But alas, as their romance blooms in the Eden of an ocean cruise, the awful truth emerges not from Yahweh but rather from Muggsey, Charlie's suspicious tough-guy valet, who reveals to him that the Harringtons are notorious gamblers who just want his money. The hurt Charlie breaks off with Jean, whose love for him now turns to contempt. She now wants revenge. She had her father tear up the check Charlie had written for his gambling debt, but now is glad that he “palmed” it, so they did “sting” him after all. Charlie returns home to the palatial family estate in Connecticut, as the Harringtons encounter a professional con artist named Pearly, who is at the moment working the Pike home territory posing as a British Lord. Jean decides to use him to arrange her introduction to society, posing as the titled Lady Eve Sidwich. Pearly gets the Pike family to give a lavish introductory party for the ersatz Lady. Charlie is smitten again, amazed at

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her resemblance to Jean, but insisting that it can't be since she looks too much like her! The clear-eyed Muggsy, always smelling a rat, insists that Eve is Jean. Eve is so successful in this second seduction of Charlie they are married. On their wedding night on a honeymoon train, she exacts her revenge as they prepare for bed by relating to Charlie a quick retrospective on her many past love affairs, which given her past, may not be fictional. Not only does this revelation lower her in Charlie's esteem, but also violates the ancient mytheme of both comedy and romance about female virginity. Charlie impulsively jumps off the train in his pajamas and sues for divorce. The remorseful Jean once again realizes she is in love with Charlie, books passage on the ocean liner Charlie is taking, and trips him again. Thrilled to see Jean again, Charlie confesses that he is married, and she obliquely admits that she is too, omitting that she is married to him. They retire to his cabin for a semi-adulterous tryst, although Muggsy again sees through it: “Positively the same dame.” In an important sense, we have seen “the same dame” in all three of our movies about people seeking affection. For with comedy, women are perhaps more essential and vital than in any other literary or cinematic genre. Certainly in the movies, women can be marginal or subordinate in, say, Westerns or gangster stories, but their centrality to stories of appeal makes them not only the equal of males but really pivotal to the comic resolution of the tale told. A venerable staple of popular myth and literature is the practical wisdom of women, who use “guile and wile” to get what they want, although that doesn't mean that comedy always includes a feminist theme according women social power or political equality. But in comedies of human appeal, the dramatic logic of such narratives tends to combine sentimentality and intelligibility as key attributes to the two protagonists who are trying to find direction towards attainable affection. So there is not always a “gender inversion” in which the female becomes the directive force, although that is what happens with Jean Harrington, who at first exploits and then reciprocates Charlie's longdormant sentiments, as she employs her experience at conning people to woo and use Charlie, pursue and court and then seek revenge and finally reconcile with him as the man she loves. Such comedies have been termed “comedies of liberation,” since they free someone (such as Charlie) from characterological or social rigidities or inhibitions, often by a woman of the world with predatory instincts and motives who ironically is liberated herself by “falling” from graceless cynicism and deception into the role of a rescuing agent whose animatory spirit moves the plot and the happy union from the hilarity of disorder to conclusive order and comic completion. That completion is made all the more satisfying because she

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too is liberated from some kind of extant bondage. Jean, after all, is a career criminal and a social imposter taking advantage of a disorderly world until she gives direction to someone else while at the same time finding it for herself. In our other movies, the move toward liberation is characterized by women actively seeking love, but in the wrong place. Klara is courting a phantom she reads about in his letters, as is Alfred, which he discovers is a phantasm and gently brings her down to earth to the reunification of her common-sensical and competent nature with her yearning for a complementary mate, making her realize she needs a roommate and bedmate and not a soul mate. And Loretta, widowed and mature, discovers that a too convenient and accommodating marriage to a likeable dullard is no substitute for the real thing, risking uncertainty and rejecting stability but wanting the fun of romantic sensuality. All three women display practical wisdom, but their acquired comic experience as things unfold impels them towards the conclusion and relationship that makes them free to love. And that, as comedies of affection so aptly dramatize, is the height of good judgment.

Comedies of Affection: Negotiating Love In comedies of affection, where the dramatic emphasis is on seeking personal direction toward a comedic solution, there are always extrinsic difficulties but the thrust of the story revolves around the principals discovering that they are seeking love, and consequently finding who to love and how to get together with them. It is sometimes suggested that comedy usually requires a “baseline character,” someone who is sane or resolute through all the insane happenings. But in comedies of appeal, this is seldom one person, since attraction and affection are transactional, all about two people getting involved, thus requiring some marriage of emotion and reason before the move to physical or social union can occur. Much comedy emerges from the predicament of people consumed with lust or madly in love, who are so preoccupied with what they seek that often the figure of good sense who helps bring about the desired end is someone else (Ellie's father in It Happened One Night, Loretta's mother in Moonstruck). But as we have seen, they eventually combine the emotive state of being moonstruck with a sensible state of reasoned action. If one of the joys of comedy is that it is delightful learning experience, then enduring all the travail and quandary finally lets everyone gain knowledge, in the case of the lovers self-knowledge and for others knowledge of the comedic power of human appeal. We all need help, no one more so than

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those excited by ardent passion. We are not in the province of “courtly love.” We have also noted that such passion is often complicated by external factors beyond the personalities involved, requiring those who would be together to negotiate their way through social or cultural barriers and circumstances. In some cases, the affectionate couple may have to find their way on their own, but many others they need and use collaborators. But along the way, what they (and we) become aware of is the objective significance of their situation not only in its particulars but more expansively its generality. Whatever complication they must overcome, their comedic activity represents the generally understandable beauty of personal affection and pragmatic foresight, illustrating once again the comic lesson of the potential for affectionate exaltation and the actuality of prudential determination. In their personal search for love, they find and signify beauty and grace.

Singin' in the Rain (1952): The Condition of Organizational Politics People fall in love at work, even in the context of the most unusual kind of work. Here we are retrospected to the year 1928 and located at the Hollywood movie studio of Monumental Pictures, At this point in movie history, all the films produced are silent. The actors have to gesture and declaim without their voices being heard, and dialogue is restricted to short title cards with their expressions designed to move the plot along. The story begins at a gala Hollywood premiere, with stars arriving in limousines to walk through the throngs of gaping fans for an interview with a radio personality. One couple of oft-teamed stars (Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont) arrives, and he curiously does all the talking. Soon we learn two things: Don cannot stand the simple-minded and self-important Lina, and she has a shrieking and annoying voice that for her sake shouldn't be used in public. Since they are a popular movie couple, appearing in romantic costume dramas, the studio propaganda machine regularly feeds the fan magazines with totally fictional tales of their budding off-screen romance, which she is self-deluded into believing, despite his constant message to her that he finds her despicable. Don is willing to play the role of “matinee idol” as a public figure within the temenos, or magic circle, of Hollywood figmentation, but his hilarious retrospective on his “dignified past” and career rise as a child dancing in pool halls, as a youth performing in burlesque and vaudeville, later acting as a stunt man remind him, and us, that he doesn't take himself too

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seriously. Lina on the other hand does, thinking herself an indispensable and talented star in the movieland firmament, although her talent is limited to her silent screen persona, as she will discover, is highly dispensable. For into this public fantasy world to which she has attached her own private fantasies come two related innovations, technological and personal. The movies learn to talk, and Don meets a girl. The movie industry is a curious kind of modern organization, since it combines the tradition of carnival with the production of commodity. Motion pictures evolved in the long run from the ritualized times of fun times and popular theater in both ancient and medieval times and in the short run from various kinds of theatrical performances, such as magic shows and vaudeville and the circus. As play in a liminal setting, movies became a “play-form” that was organized into a lucrative and worldwide industry. In the corporate world of the Hollywood studio, the people involved work at making play, and they are alert to technological opportunities and constantly embroiled in organizational politics. When sound is introduced and it is clear the moviegoing audience is clamoring for it, the movie stars people want to see have to learn how to talk. In fact, some couldn't make the adjustment; in fiction, Lina Lamont has such a dreadful screeching voice, she couldn't either. Not only that, she has a huge ego and is insanely jealous, both attitudes completely unjustified. Don met a girl (Kathy) by accident, leaping into her car to escape a mob of adoring female fans. Kathy introduces herself as a serious actress and belittles movie dramatics. It turns out she is a showgirl. When she pops out of a cake at a studio party, Don laughs at her; furious, she throws a cake at him but hits Lina. Lina's enmity toward Kathy begins with this humiliation but reaches fever pitch when she learns Don and Kathy are courting, and that the studio boss (“R.F.”) plans to make Kathy into a star. Lina also discovers that Kathy has been hired to dub her voice for her first sound picture. Lina confronts R.F. with her contractual stipulations, forcing him to exclude her rival from screen credit and hoping to sabotage her career. Her villainy, however, backfires badly, since she has alienated any trustworthy allies at the studio. The premiere of the new picture is a big success, and the stars—Don and Lina—come out on the stage after the show. The audience urges Lina to sing, so Kathy is placed behind the curtain to “lip-synch” Lina's voice, as she had done throughout the entire picture. Lina-Kathy begins to sing, and offstage Don, R.F. and others see an opportunity to get rid of Lina, so they pull the curtain up to reveal the deception; Lina flees, apparently into well-deserved movie oblivion, and Don points out Kathy as the “real star.” The movie ends with Don and

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Kathy, now firmly together, looking up at a billboard of themselves starring in a movie musical together. Don and Kathy are not only now a successful couple, they are likely to be a successful pairing as stars on the movie screen. They understood and used well organizational politics, adapting to changing technological innovations and consumer demands and displaying the right corporate skills required in the new era of popular sound movies: acting, speaking, singing, and dancing. As in any capitalist organization, those who can't adapt to change or perform the new tasks needed are deemed obsolete and superfluous. Their blooming romance is artfully celebrated in delightful song and dance, but this is complemented with their skills at negotiation which advance their careers. They are not rebels but openly ambitious for advancement in the world of movie fame and fortune, stalled in both romantic and career goals by the impediment of Lina Lamont. Lina, obviously a silent era stage name, is now an organizational liability as an unadaptive and unpopular studio risk, but still has power through her contractual agreements and reputational standing. In comedy, one of the venerable ways of getting rid of such a person is to make them into a grotesque, someone who is deemed strange, startling, or repulsive. (We are reminded of the desiccated society aviator Ellie was engaged to in It Happened One Night, or the arrogant and self-absorbed artist Frederick, Lee's weird companion in Hannah; similarly, in Divorce, Fefe's wife Rosalia is made into a figure who is so oppressively irritating and overbearing that her murder, necessary for the furtherance if the comic plot, is made less onerous to bear.) The ancient “feminine grotesque” dating to Old Comedy takes many forms, including unruly women who are different and feisty and break down old assumptions about women, thus serving a positive function. But Lina Lamont is a negative comic figure whose function is to be the “fall gal” of sorts, the person who stands in the way of both organizational and romantic progress, and thus is given attributes that make her fall from grace a welcome relief and just desert. By making her grotesquely egotistical and vindictive rather than a victim of the system, she becomes essentially dispensable, so like Fefe's wife, has to go. Her demise is made palatable by her dim-witted inability to learn and juvenile feelings about Don and Kathy, both traits that made her her own worst enemy. But as a comic foil, she is something less than demonic or even an evil temptress and rather more a clueless and talentless pretender. Although Lina is a good-looking young woman, she fulfills her comic role by being made to act ugly, justifying her exclusion from the reformed community at the studio, and contrasting with the beauty of the

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now united and central young couple who will enjoy love and honor in the new life they have negotiated.

Breakfast at Tiffany's (l961): The Condition of Urban Economics In these kinds of comic stories, the completion of the movement to romantic grace is only achieved through dealing with some kind of situation or overcoming some sort of impediment. Since romantic comedy is a literary and cinematic form with long-standing expectations, what we read or hear or see is a combination of convention and invention, with traditional and repeatable plots and motifs and character types but with innovations and variations on places and themes, giving new life to old tales. (It has been suggested that there are only two elemental master myths: “A Hero Makes a Journey” and “A Stranger Comes to Town.”) Certainly, in romantic comedy, the universal folktales and popular narratives which inform the perpetuation of the aesthetic and pragmatic composition of comic romantics have a startling long life. Even so shortlived a medium as the movies demonstrates that features evident in movies of the pre-World War I era were inherited from other media, still extant and surprisingly vital today. We have just seen a depiction of an incipient couple impeded by organizational demands and personnel barriers for both career and marriage, which can be seen in early silent films and popular novels. It is also the case that the persistent thematic of impediments which are both individualistic and opportunistic are evident, developing the familiar pattern of people who resist coupling with commitment because of a living habit of independence and also as people who stay alone because career choices demand it. Such are the cases of Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak, neighbors in an apartment building in a fashionable area of New York. Both live alone and are well off, she in designer clothes and he with a closet full of suits and a typewriter. Curiously, neither is employed in an identifiable job: he is a writer but doesn't seem driven, and she sleeps all day and goes out at night. Even though they seem to value their independence as selfemployed and living alone, they really aren't. He is a “kept” young man, sponsored in his writing career by a rich older and married woman nicknamed “2E” who lavishes him with gifts, pays the rent, and expects sex. She is an evening “escort” for rich older men (the censorship code skirts the fact that she is a prostitute or “call girl” by the lateral of them paying her “powder room” money) who expect sex. Further, even though Holly claims to be a free spirit who resists ties and obligations, she is

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actually a poor girl who ran away from home and family to sell herself for money in the big city. She has fits of depression (the “mean reds”) which she alleviates by after-party early morning taxi rides to eat a pastry in front of the Tiffany shop window full of fabulous jewelry. Paul, like Holly, may be selling his body to support himself, but at least she is having fun while his writing career is severely stalled in bonded servitude to his possessive mistress. In her own way, Holly is also quite willing to become a gilded and beautiful possession, actively pursuing super-wealthy or titled gentleman, including a much-married if lackluster playboy named Rusty Trawler and a Brazilian aristocrat named Jose. Like Paul, she is willing to trade sexual favors for enough wealth to do what she wants, in his case to write or in hers to live the high life. As a beautiful young woman and handsome young man, they are quite willing to be used as objects of lust by older and richer people in order to sustain, ironically enough, their own imagined independence. Like many urban people living in both the myth and the architecture of independence, their lives are characterized by solitude. They live in a city of impersonal relations and in separate apartments, meaning that much of their day is spent devoid of communal warmth and personal affection. Holly and Paul project a cosmopolitan persona of autonomy and competence, as either the “swinging” woman of the world or the committed writer struggling to produce great novels. We sense in both cases these are real people struggling to get out of what they claim and how they demean themselves, so we are not surprised when they become friends. When an acquaintance tells Paul that Holly is a “phony, but a real phony,” we begin to find out what is real about her: she has a brother in the army she loves, an orange tabby named “Cat,” and anything but an urbane and liberated past. An older man lurking outside their building, whom “2E” fears is a private detective hired by her husband to follow her, turns out to be Holly's ex-husband, whom she married as a teenager to get out of a foster home. After Holly and Paul persuade him to return to Texas, they get drunk. She vows to marry Rusty, but later sees a newspaper headline announcing his marriage to someone else. Paul receives a letter stating that one of his stories has been accepted for publication, so they celebrate by having a fun day in the city, which includes taking a plastic prize ring in a candy box to Tiffany's, which he has engraved for her. Paul is falling in love with Holly, and is angered when she now decides to marry Jose. She learns that her brother has died, and in dire grief wrecks her apartment. Set to leave for Brazil, she is arrested as an agent of a drug ring operated from the prison where she visited weekly an inmate who paid her to give his associates the “weather report,” a code for drug trafficking. Now that she

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is implicated, Jose breaks off their engagement and returns home. Paul bails her out of jail, and greets her with Cat; in a taxi, she insists she is going to Brazil anyway and impulsively throws Cat out the window in the rain; Paul angrily leaves the cab, returning the plastic ring and telling her to think on her life; she goes after him and they go up an alley to find Cat; when Cat reappears, their union is sealed, as a threesome in love. As their comedic self-understanding matures with their story playing out, Paul and Holly realize both that their assertion of individualism leaves them at last alone and unfulfilled, and that their cynical sale of their bodies also includes their integrity. Without the sponsors of their careers, they were utterly alone in a big city. Holly's relentless frivolity and Paul's ambivalent diffidence begins to ring hollow as they realize their cosmopolitan lifestyles betray a phony grace. In the corrective learning of comedy, however, they can now see themselves as comic figures playing out anesthetic roles as pawns and not knights and princesses. Once they could see that the joke was on them, they came to know the shared sense of their mutual aesthetic beauty, overcoming urbane facades and isolation for the bond of serving each other rather than the bondage of servitude to spoilers. Comic truth is a pragmatic flight from despair, so now as a romantic pair Holly and Paul see the logic of giving freely to each other something that cannot be bought or sold. They now sponsor each other as a runaway couple, “two drifters off to see the world,” as the song goes, made ebullient by the beauty of their affection and the factuality of their maturity. After all, they have already started a family: they have “Cat.”

Love Me Tonight (1932): Negotiating Personal and Social Distance toward Intimacy In our look at representative movies which display and dramatize varieties of human negotiation impeding the flowering of affective sympathy and accord, it seems clear that comedy facilitates the eventual triumph of the love bond by reminding us that human pretense and haughty seriousness are things that we should actually find funny. Our couples—Don and Kathy, Holly and Paul—seem to be in an impossibly pretentious and serious situation from which there is no exit. Happily, comedy has the creative capacity to allow people energized by motives such as mutual appeal to find exits. Social arrangements and enterprises are habitually confining and demanding sets of conditions, so comedy serves the pragmatic function of helping motivated people find their way out and then their way in. Comedy is in that sense both subversive and superversive: the comedic attitude and comic action reveal the impeding

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forces in the situation, and as the lovers become aware of their plight and escape, the barriers are breached and the superversive power of love that cannot be denied becomes delightfully triumphant. Such negotiations remind us that comedy is quite often a struggle between our great human polarities: the fertile and the barren, the animistic and mechanistic, the sensual and the rational, the primal and the social, even the savage and the civilized. No surprise there, given the origins of comedy in fertility rites, and the eternal rediscovery of the comic knowledge which informs the reenactment of the agon, between the old and the new, the past that has outlived its usefulness in the present and the future that beckons a couple who have discovered each other and the festive beauty of which they are now capable. Comedy persists as a major expression of our belief and hope that we can, if we try, enrich reality by introducing the element of possibility. In a deep and prelogical way, comedy says to the happy couple and to all of us, it's time to go out and play! In order to get to that graceful place and state, comedy has to go through all the twists and turns, descents and ascents, moments of darkness and light, entrapments and rescues that dramatists can imagine. Our couples use all their intelligence and effort to avoid the extremes of descent and ascent to get beyond the dramatic obstacles: they just want to continue. Yet the struggle to get there is a ludenic experience too, since they bring into action all the delightful improvisations and ingenuities they can devise to make an end. Their situations are comic daydreams (working in the dream factory of Hollywood, living in a transient dream world as a prostitute and gigolo) and so are the people with whom they must deal (including their adversaries: Lina Lamont is a comedic version of a screeching gorgon, and “2E” an imperious queen, even in one scene dressed in the black and red outfit resembling the witch queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). As an affectionate couple, their desire to continue beyond their present predicament gives credence to the human hope to create a new life beyond their present sordid existence. Everyone is in one way or another “wounded” by an old life, so the comic impulse to move from separation to unification in a new life vibrates and resonates in the depths of the human psyche and heritage. This impulse is readily evident in the first great movie musical, Love Me Tonight. The separations here are not a matter of organizational ethos or urbane decadence but rather social structure, and even more fundamentally between the useful and the useless. Although our selections here illustrate something of the variety of comedic experience, they all share the discovery of a new identity, culminating in a desirable movement into and enjoyment of a fresh and vital life in which, as a re-enactment of

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an ancient and primal rite, Dionysian playing is as important as Apollonian tasking. Yet this indestructible desire for rebirth of some kind in the golden country of a happy future can present us with a dilemma: in Love Me Tonight, as in Palm Beach Story, the idle rich at first glance seem to be the ones freed from the burden of utility and toil and having all the fun, so where's the comic justice in that? The poetic answer to that is to affirm that since comedy is a democratic art, ordinary people are not only allowed but actually encouraged to join in the fun. So in fact the demos may be more willing to play because of their past life of daily toil, and the aristos becoming tolerant and unpretentious. The class contact may even become the catalyst which permits the restrained and status-conscious to cast off their inhibitions and embrace the joys of eroticism and affection. We meet a Parisian tailor in his small and prosperous urban shop, where he (Maurice) has an order for fine clothing befitting aristocrats who need an elaborate wardrobe for the various appearances they must make in high society. Maurice is owed a considerable amount of money from the Viscount Gilbert, a customer who turns out to be a penniless aristocrat. The tailor decides to pursue the Viscount to his chateau for payment. This plot line could have remained a comedy of manners, but quickly the movie reminds us we are situated in a mythical city of romance, celebrated in song and embodied in images of ordinary Parisians starting the day. We see Paris in the early morning dew, church bells chiming, and street noises magically becoming rhythmic, melodic ambient music, such as cobblers driving nails into boot soles to a heartbeat sound. Then we go into Maurice's room as he dresses and sings of the “lovely morning song of Paris.” As the city awakens, Maurice is in his shop with a customer, joyfully singing “Isn't It Romantic?” The wondrous celebration of love is hummed by the customer on the street, then seamlessly passed on by a variety of people—a cab passenger, soldiers on a troop train, a Gypsy boy with violin who hears them as they march to the Gypsy camp outside the chateau, and finally to the Princess Jeannette inside the chateau. The Princess is a young widow of an arranged aristocratic marriage. Her marriage to a much older man was apparently unconsummated , letting her retain the much-treasured virginity of traditional virtue in romance, so she will become the romantic object of Maurice's amours. The music sets the comic stage for the festive comedy of masking and unmasking, with mistaken identity and social differences overcome, and after all the unfolding negotiations which bring two disparate people together. The situation Maurice will find at the chateau is the familiar if dreary confining and dominating structure of a titled family, with the Viscount running up debt but afraid to ask his disapproving and tight-fisted uncle,

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The Duke, for money. Further, the Princess Jeannette is expected to remarry someone of equal royal rank (her late husband was seventy-five, and the two candidates available in Europe are eighty-five and twelve), so she is young, lovely, and hopelessly virginal. Not so particular is the other young woman at the estate, Countess Valentine, whose frank nymphomania extends to practically any man in pants. When the Duke requires medical help, he turns to the Countess and asks, “Could you go for a doctor?” to which she eagerly replies, “Yes! Bring him right in!” Realizing that he requires a disguising imposture to gain admittance to such a haughty bunch, Maurice poses as a Count, gains the Duke's confidence, and delights the guests with his joie de vivre and way with a song, even getting the Duke to sing a bit of “Mimi.” He arouses the suspicion of a suitor of the Princess, so she resists his charm and flirtations by evoking her patrician aloofness and court etiquette to keep him at proper distance. Not so Valentine, since he is the only charming man available, so she immediately eschews aloofness and protocol to lure him into bed. Maurice is by this point infatuated with the unattainable woman, who begins to thaw when the rumor spreads that the “Count” Maurice is in fact a highranking royal prince traveling incognito in search of an appropriate bride. Her latent feelings of appeal are made manifest by this hopeful news, so that she might after all marry someone vivacious and titled and virile to boot. Jeannette has both erotic longings and displays: we see Maurice taking her measurements for a riding costume while she is clad only in a short slip; while riding she sings merrily about “a lay, in the hay”; indeed, the erotic atmosphere is heightened by sights of diaphanous nightgowns and banter about visiting the “Virgin Springs” in the woods . Since Maurice was introduced by the indebted Gilbert as a baron and rumored to be royalty, festivity is called for in the form of a costume ball, which Maurice attends, dressed as a Parisian “Apache.” Maurice and Jeannette proclaim their love for each other in a romantic garden interlude, but his true identity is still unrevealed. The recognition scene occurs when he cannot resist dismissing the seamstress so he can measure and sew Jeannette's new riding habit, reverting to his vocation but obviously enjoying wielding a measuring tape on his half-naked love interest. When Maurice reveals that he is a common tailor, the august company at the chateau is appalled, including Jeannette, so he must leave at once. But in the tradition of the last-minute change of heart and rescue, Jeannette realizes she loves him and rides her fastest horse after his train, finally resorting to standing on the train tracks to make the train stop. The united lovers share the moment of graceful beauty.

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Negotiating love, then, takes many forms and occurs in many settings, but at least in comedies of appeal the action centers on and the resolution depends upon the primary individuals who discover they want to be together as a couple. In different ways, they develop a vision of both unification and liberation that transcends the situation and conditions they are in, and enact a drama of expressive learning and brave decisiveness which creates them as a joined pair of lovers in spite of impediments. Romantic comedy continues to enthrall because it reaffirms not only the possibility of love somehow triumphant, but also because it shows once again the movement of humans fortified by beautiful feelings away from the old and staid and dark and towards the new and vital and luminous. The screen star and the showgirl, the gigolo and the prostitute, the tailor and the princess may all be mortal fools to believe in the art and practice of love, but in their time of grace they are all, like Holly and Paul and Cat in the downpour, singin' in the rain.

Comedies of Affection: Enjoying Love If those who seek affection are at some point struck by the “sudden glory” of love, and those compelled by circumstances to negotiate extraneous matters remain determined to realize the glory of love, then all those who are somehow together “in love” are faced with the fact and challenge of continuity: now that we are together and love each other, how do we manage the continued glory of it all? We have found love, and made an effort to make love happen, so now what? On their wedding nights, do Klara and Alfred, Don and Kathy, and Maurice and Jeannette ask each other, what do we do now? They clearly will think that they know and invoke the ardent promise: no matter what, let us continue! Much traditional romantic comedy ends with a festive and conciliatory occasion, often a wedding feast, asserting the hope that not only will the principals live happily ever after but also that a changed and more playful and joyous society will emerge to spread the good news of grace around. The reform of the social order is brought to light by the luminous example of the lovers—the shop around the corner is now prosperous and content, the Italian family is now unified and settled, and the aristocratic high-born are now more open and cheerful, having been “tailored” by the irrepressible Maurice to move from the pretenses of affectation to the fun of affection. In comedy of this sort, no one has to remain wounded, alone, or cheerless. Yet as we have seen, comedy proceeds and endures by a judicious balance of the ludenic and the pragmatic, combining the appreciation of

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beauty with the realization of the practicable. It is at the point of affective continuity that the comic attitude is most crucial, since couples may lose the thread of grace and become stagnant and hostile, at which time the serious and grim dramas of melodrama and tragedy become relevant. Lust may cool, love may fail, and the playful feelings and clever skills that brought them together fade from view. Seekers and negotiators somehow cease to be enjoyers. It is sometimes the case that deep affection may flourish between people, but the obstacles are too great for even their soaring love to overcome. And, it also happens that two people who love each other against all odds are beset with some event that ends it—war, illness, separation, death. In all cases, the great affection that bonded them does not end but the living relationship does. Thus, the emotive basis of their mutual appeal and the erotic learning that sustained them while it lasted was not enough, nor were the instrumentalist logicalities and activities they undertook sufficient. This does not mean that their unsustainable love was necessarily tragic or melancholic, since in comedy there is usually an existential principle that enjoins the enjoyment of love while it lasts, even if briefly in life but forever in warm and affectionate memory. When one is granted the grace of deep love, the gift may well be too great to pass up despite the risks and consequences.

Shakespeare in Love (1998): Enjoying Immediacy and Immortality We are whisked back to Elizabethan England and see some rather brutal negotiations over theatrical debt between a theatre manager and a moneylender, resolved with a deal over profit sharing for a new comedy with pirates and dogs and swordfights by the young playwright, Will Shakespeare. The difficulty is that Will, of all people, has a severe case of writer's block, and woefully seeks out the advice of a consulting herbalist (with Will stretched out on something like a psychiatrist's couch), and later a pub mate and rival, fellow professional Christopher Marlowe. But, real inspiration comes in the person of young “Thomas Kent,” who auditions for a role in the new play and impresses Will with his recitation of a passage from Shakespeare rather than Marlowe. Kent turns out to be a cross-dressed young woman named Viola de Lesseps, the daughter of a wealthy merchant. Viola yearns to be free of a planned future and wishes to be in the theater, although both ambitions are virtually impossible. She is a spirited and intelligent young woman who loves literature and relishes romance, so soon she and Will engage in a secret and torrid romance. With the aid of her loyal nurse, Viola and Will manage to see each other in

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settings which anticipate the emerging play—an encounter on her balcony, dancing in a ballroom, a night of love together in her bedroom. They are deeply in love, but the “blocking” complications are formidable: he is married with children in Stratford, and she is betrothed to a penniless aristocrat (Wessex) who gives her a title in exchange for money to start tobacco plantations in Virginia. Will is a “penny a page” scribbler who needs money to start his own theatrical company. Disguised as Viola's female servant, he accompanies her to court and goads Wessex into a bet that a play can show “the very truth and nature of love,” something that the philistine and ignoble grandee cannot imagine, even with the prospect of marrying the wondrous Viola. Thus, the play has to be written for both love and money, the consummated love is precluded from continuation, and the comic transformation of society into a place of joyous reconciliation is rendered impossible. So what are two to do? Will and Viola are enjoying an illegitimate and momentary love, so it must be limited to their “own little world” for a very brief “stolen season.” The agonized and thwarted lovers cope by balancing their romantic attraction with realistic actions that help them enjoy the moment and endure the future, They instinctively invoke the principle of carpe diem—enjoy the moment—through their mutual understanding of aesthetic beauty, both in the mutual pleasure of their physical love and in their blithe appreciation of poetical and theatrical expression. The intensity of their great loves for each other and great artistry make them all the more aware of the vivid and disappearing moment of experience that is uniquely theirs. Since they are by circumstances beyond their control forced into an episodic rather than diachronic relationship, their moment of now will have to do, so they reluctantly try to make the best of it while it lasts. They spend their good time making love into a beautiful aesthetic experience that somehow will last their separation. When the world impinges upon lovers, their tendency is to regard this as a moral or social wrong that should be righted or revenged but are often powerless to do anything more than suffer. Indeed, this is often the way it appears in romance or tragedy: Tristan and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere, and many others endure separation and condemnation as we share their sorrow and fate. But Will and Viola are not tragic figures, and such an unfulfilled romance does not have to be a tragedy. Happily, the story is basically a comedy about how a festive couple has momentary fun spellbound with each other, how that festive effervescence inspires a writer to greatness, and how they collaborate to create that grandeur. The comic “blocking” figures here are those impeding not so much the impossible marriage of the lovers but the production of the play. Will's

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precarious status in the theatrical world involves not only writer's block but also money, getting actors without advance pay, soothing thespian egos, and not least of all, avoiding being shut down by the Master of the Revels, the official state censor. The anxiety-ridden producers, the actors dressed to act as women, the Puritan preaching the evils of the theater (from whom Will steals the line “a plague on both your houses” when he passes him in the street), the prostitutes who are the show-biz “groupies” of their day, are all amusing figures impossible to take seriously. So too is Will's “rival,” the self-important fortune hunter Lord Wessex, who is an epitome of the artless and brainless upper-class boor of so much satire. When a service for the murdered Marlowe is held, Viola attends and Will appears, like Banquo's ghost; Wessex, believing Will is Marlowe, is frightened and runs from the apparition, like a peasant panicked in a graveyard. So, the venerable comedy of putting on a play, with all of its pitfalls and pratfalls, applies to what is to become Romeo and Juliet. The comedy of their romance is developed by their relationship paralleling that of the play being written and rehearsed. Thomas Kent plays Juliet in rehearsal, staging both the ballroom and balcony scenes they have already enacted, and indeed Viola has a faithful and discreet nurse who nervously guards the door when they enact their bedroom scene, all of which becomes part of the play. The last is funny not only because of the agitated nurse, but also because despite the romance of the scene, Viola begins to act like a wife, insisting that Will get out of bed and write the scene they will rehearse that day. She is his Muse, relishing not only the forbidden love they are enjoying but also bringing his talent to fruition through her inspiration, and as wife she is supporting her husband's career. The play is ready for performance, but the ever-vigilant Master of the Revels (whose job is to prevent revelry) learns that there is a woman in the cast and orders the Rose playhouse closed; however, an incensed owner of another theater offers his place to the players. Will is to play Romeo, and a boy actor Juliet, but the latter begins the voice change of puberty. The just-wed Viola slips away to see the play, and replaces the boy who was to play Juliet. They are superb together, and the play is a rousing success, but the Master and his troops invade the stage to arrest all, stopped by “the monarch-goddess” intervening as a deus ex machina: Queen Elizabeth has attended the play in disguise, and comes on stage to rebuke the Master and affirm that Thomas Kent is a male. She cannot keep the lovers together, so they must part, but orders Will to write something “more cheerful” to be performed for the queen on Twelfth Night. When the lovers last see each other before she departs for married life in an American colony, he muses that she will always be for him young and

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beautiful and never grow old. She plays his Muse once more, telling him to “write me well.” She has given him the means: he won the bet with Wessex and now can join the Chamberlain's Men. And, she has given him the inspiration: when she departs, he begins to write Twelfth Night, a play about a remarkable young woman who is shipwrecked and disguises herself as a boy, and her name is Viola. Will and Viola gave each other love, the kind of sudden, wild, irresponsible, and doomed love that entrances and consumes the moment of its occurrence. It had to end, but she gave him something else more enduring: Viola gave Will grace, imbuing his life's journey and work with the gift of love for him and his talent, and conferring on him the talents given him by the Three Graces—Beauty, Mirth, and Good Cheer—for him to express in unequaled poetic skill for all time. What the lovers could only enjoy briefly and surreptitiously shared they gave to the world through the “displaced” aesthetic expression (the kalos of harmony, unity, and quality) that stems from intense affectionate experience. The gracious Viola gave Will great love and also direction toward practicality: finish the play, produce the play, get some money, join the new company, write great stuff. She goes off to an uncertain fate, but she has had a great comic and romantic interlude from life's obligations, and he is given a Muse whose call he will continue to hear. Even though fervent and irresistible affection may be cut short by circumstance that makes sustained love only a wistful dream of what-might-have-been, both romantic and comic learning illuminates something important that thoughtful people keep with them, namely that the beauty of love is what you do with it even if the one you love is absent. The memory of one loved brings a romantic smile and comedic laugh, and the subsequent sparkling light of affection and expression in what one says and does: “So long lives this and this gives life to thee” (Sonnet 18).

The Thin Man (1934): Loving Gracefully The enjoyment of romantic love sometimes can't really flourish, and it is also sadly the case that it can end. But happily, it can also continue for a long time, even a lifetime and beyond, in the legacy and memory of extended romance so enjoyed. We find it heartwarming to read an obituary written by someone that is a testimonial of how wonderful life's long voyage had been in the loving company of their spouse or partner. Perhaps it is relatively rare for the “vivid moment” of romantic love to endure over time, but it is so enviable that many others not so lucky are curious to find the key to such abiding happiness. The movies have obliged by various

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depictions of happy couples, although perhaps mostly examining the beginning and ending of romances, looking closely at the negotiations and travails of initial passion and the agonies and failures of love denied or ended. It may be that “normal” affection over time is less dramatic and thus more difficult to portray as a state of inner contentment and outer accord. Yet it is possible to delve into the lives of the happily married, with the primary cinematic ways to look at such couples by observing them sustaining the vital spirit of romance by having fun together. To be sure, those enjoying marital or companionate felicity have to understand and respect each other, and avoid big conflicts or little spites, but the joy of being together requires not only comity but also conviviality, in the joy of intimacy and festivity, all animated with a comic view of life and love and indeed of each other. If couples can share what comical creatures we are with each other, then the light-hearted merriment and good cheer of the Graces become the reigning house deities. All who love are in need of a little grace, and marriage can use a lot of comic grace. Grace certainly characterizes Nora and Nick Charles. Nora epitomizes elegant grace in both bearing and gentility, and Nick evokes the virtue of amused joviality in pursuit of recreative grace. They are both lucky and wise: lucky in the sense that Nora has inherited a fortune from her wealthy family, and wise in that both of them are mature and intelligent enough to know how to enjoy their time and money. Nick was a New York detective famed for his ability to crack puzzling cases, but they both decided to move to San Francisco for a life of leisure and merriment. The movie is framed around a plot that compels Nick to return to sleuthing, but what charms us is the relationship between husband and wife: Nick and Nora enjoy each other and their high life together, sounding like a pair of new and illicit lovers off on a torrid lark. Their newfound erotic and ludenic freedom makes every day a play day and their marriage an aesthetic experience in the sense of practicing the art of marital loving and enjoyable living. This is evident not only in the sexy repartee and witty banter they happily engage in, but also their relaxed and hedonic life, staying in hotel suites, ordering meals from room service, going shopping and frequenting bars. When we first meet them, Nick is in a fancy bar and already half-plastered, instructing the bartender on the proper method of mixing drinks; (it is all about rhythm, the syncopated motion in shaking, “a dry martini, you always shake to waltz time”). Nora enters after a shopping spree with their delightful terrier, and asks how many martinis he's already had as he hands her one. “Six,” he replies, so she promptly orders five more for herself to catch up with his level of imbibing. Nick always seems slightly tipsy, but as an experienced drinker is only as drunk

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as he wants to be, able to reconstruct the logical sequences and motives of people involved in a murder. His manner as a carefree and frivolous drunkard is useful as a kind of “cover” whereby he can inquire and discover things without seeming serious or threatening. He is drawn into solving a case to help out a young woman who is the daughter of an old friend gone missing, attracting reporters asking him questions and being shot at by an intruding gangster. Nick is supported into pursuing the case by the thrill-seeking Nora, who convinces him it would be a lot of fun. Much more than, say, Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe, Nick sees crimesolving as a form of recreation, consistent with their lifestyle of leisure and affability wherein his experience and intelligence are used for a pragmatic purpose but also for the pure hell of it, a kind of Nietzchean “joyful science” that makes solving a murder into a ludenic avocation. Figures such as Nick and Nora have personal features which make them representations of “fun morality” and as “idols of consumption,” and, more precisely, as beings for whom fun is not an obligation but rather a lifestyle, and whose consumptive patterns are exemplary of a hedonic aesthetic, pleasurable funning such as drink and sex and going out with style. They may be the beneficiaries of an exchange economy by inheriting wealth, but now they live the life of people in a gift economy, where the requirements of seriosity and productivity are superseded by frivolity and vacancy, taking the stance that life is too important and brief to take things seriously or do anything that involves drudgery. Life for Nick and Nora is constant recreation and a long vacation as a pair who can enjoy the comic rhythm of a life of relaxed play and inquiry, exemplary by being amused by each other and the world they encounter and investigate when they seek excitement and even court risk to find out something. In this case, they uncover several vital clues, including a decomposed corpse—found by the terrier—and when a subsequent murder occurs, are unconvinced by the police explanation. For Nick and Nora, marriage is a comic relationship held together by their constant ability to be mutually gracious, with that attitude extending to their world, approached with debonair good cheer and comedic jocosity. When they encounter the tough men that Nick “sent up” to prison, he treats them with courtesy, remembers their name, and they respond with fondness rather than hostility. By seeing life with comic awareness of the rhythmic aspects of experience, they can use their ludenic perspective to see social things, including murder, as part of the inadequate and lurid comedy of human folly. In that sense, Nick and Nora are not worthless idlers but rather worldly-wise observers able to see things clearly, even through an alcoholic haze, with their witty and disinterested analysis of the situation. Their version of “qualitative

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immediacy” is to enjoy the moment as one more form of leisure, even intervening in a murder case with an air of elegance and amiability. Nick and Nora arrange for a climactic dinner party they will host, with the still baffled police escorting all the guests, comprising all those who are somehow involved in the murder mystery, no doubt including the murderer. In a sense, the suspects are gathered into the cosmopolitan lifestyle characteristic of the Charles orbit: an elegant dinner party, with cocktails and food courses served by waiters (who are actually police officers) and Nick and Nora dressed to the nines. In this convivial setting, the nervous guests are entertained by the cocktail-sipping Nick as he gleefully but steadily untangles who did what, leading up to the moment when one is about to reveal her secrets when a shot is fired, revealing the identity of the murderer. Not only did Nick and Nora solve a crime, they also exonerated the man initially accused of the murder, freeing the daughter to marry her intended. The movie ends with the newlyweds on the train to San Francisco on their honeymoon, sharing a convivial drink with Nick and Nora, now on their way home. The newlyweds seem to be in no hurry to get to bed, but Nora is, so quickly the fun of the verywedded playmates moves into another night as bedmates in another kind of comic rhythm. Another fictional middle-aged funster, Auntie Mame, said, “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.” Her soul mates Nick and Nora have taken this observation to heart, and like her not entirely as an invocation to “party on,” but rather to enjoy the affection they share, the friends and acquaintances they meet, and do the things they can do. Their enjoyment is perhaps rare and enviable, and they would be the first to admit they are superfluous beings given a great gift, which they share by living well and doing their bit, such as helping out in crimesolving and social conviviality. Nick and Nora exemplify the hope that marital affection and personal gaiety can abide over time if the participants practice the art of loving and living as a meaningful project of civilized cultivation. The basic rhythms of many people's daily lives are often dulled by routine and care, but can be enlivened by the comic rhythm of revitalizing continuity and festivity. Nick and Nora live to the rhythm of romancing, the erotic zest of their affective companionship and the luminous aesthetic of life's grand and precarious comedy which they witness, making their lives and love so much fun. Their comic sense of personal grace is both disarming and insightful, giving their relations with each other and everyone else a modicum of gracious good will and suffusing their practical view of things with ludenic penetration in understanding (for example) who is wicked and who is wronged. Their

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true vocation is practicing the art of living, like the Grace Thalia and Auntie Mame, enjoying the festivity of life's rich and luxurious banquet and the Dionysian blooming of love in Thalia's “wanton mood.”

Harold and Maude (1971): Love's Beginning and End Will and Viola were forced into trying to enjoy as much life and love together as they could muster in a short and confidential moment, having to be content with what they had. Nora and Nick are more fortunate in their circumstances, and can continue their carefree lives as long as their money and health last. The affective principle of appreciative enjoyment of time spent together applies not only to intensive but hindered beginnings and extensive and continually reinvigorated constancy, but also to beautiful love that has to end. The love that people have for each other may never die, but because of circumstances beyond their control, such as mortality, one or more of the beloved may become absent. A lover's death is often the subject matter of tragedy and melodrama, but even with the sadness involved, there is also the leavening power of comedy to frame and mitigate the loss. The widespread comic ritual of the wake is a common way for people to add some comic relief to the death of someone they knew. But sometimes the memory of someone who is beloved because they were such a comic character is enough. In Harold and Maude, we are introduced to a young man named Harold, who is wealthy, healthy, and thoroughly unhappy. He lives in a mansion with his widowed and domineering mother, and apparently doesn't do much of anything except attend funerals of people he doesn't even know. Harold is obsessed with death, and is constantly staging fake suicides, which his mother ignores. She is also repeatedly “fixing him up” by arranging blind dates with girls he has never met, which he promptly subverts by some outrageous act which makes them flee in terror. When his mother throws a fancy dinner party, Harold fakes a suicide in his mother's dressing room by squirting fake blood all over himself and her mirrors. She orders him to a psychiatric counselor, tries to force him to enlist in the Army, and hoping that one of the girls from the dating service will interest him in sex, buys him a sports car, which he promptly modifies into a mini-hearse, driving to his favorite outing, someone's funeral. There he meets a 79-year-old woman named Maude, who is everything he is not: an old woman in love with living while he is consumed by death; while he is bored and incurious, she is spirited and adventurous. She “borrows” cars for riding sprees, poses nude, and collects arty junk. She is old in years but young at heart, while he is young but finished with life before he has lived

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it. They are irresistibly drawn to each other, and she begins to set an example for him on how to live life to the fullest and shares her worldlywise philosophy of daring acts and uncaring independence. He is fascinated and charmed by her cheerful eccentricity, which is everything he is not (as well as his mother, uncle in the Army, and counselor). For Maude, every day is a new day for new fun, including such pursuits as watching building demolitions, picnicking in a metal junkyard, and playing a song on her player piano, after which she gives him a banjo. Harold tells Maude how he enjoyed seeing his mother faint when she thought him dead after a school lab experiment, so he kept faking suicides, and indeed shocks his military uncle with his knowledge of ways to kill. He and Maude fake an incident for the officer's benefit, ending talk of Harold's induction into the Army. His affection for Maude deepens, and one night he gives her a gift inscribed “Harold Loves Maude,” which she throws into the sea so she will always know where it is. They spend an intimate night together, and Harold announces to his horrified mother he wants to marry Maude, so she sends him to a priest to try to talk him out of it. Harold arranges a surprise party for Maude, papering her place with sunflowers, her favorite flower because like people they are all different and special. He wants to propose, but Maude announces that she has taken enough sleeping pills to die by midnight, consistent with her philosophy that eighty is a good age to die. He rushes her to the hospital as he tells her he loves her, which she approves but enjoins him now to “go love some more.” After her death, the grieving Harold drives his hearse to a cliff overlooking the sea, and we see the car careen over the precipice. For a breathless moment, we wonder if Harold has actually killed himself, but then we see him standing on the cliff's edge, plucking the gift banjo and dancing to his music in honor of the life and love he now celebrates as the human force that made him want to live. The comic ironies abound here: Harold's death obsession and fake suicides make him morbidly funny, and Maude’s lively feistiness and determination to enjoy herself make her vivaciously funny, yet in the end it is her real suicide that releases him from his moribund gloom, and her loving example that lets him recapture youth and vitality. She dies not in despair but in completion, passing on her legacy to him; he now can live her kind of comic existence as a creature of vivifying and sprightly grace, moved by her graciousness and his gratitude now to go love some more. The diversity of comedy is only matched by its unity. We have followed the comedic experience of three very different couples, all of whom have great affection for each other and enjoy their loving time together. If mutual affection means both receiving and giving love, there is

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not only a comic experience but also a comic gift. The time lovers have together is memorable, but at least one party to the transaction comes away from it with something more, what we may call comic learning, an enhanced appreciation of intimate engagement and the gift of affective grace that is with you always. The fate of Viola is unknown, but Will has truly loved and his Muse has given him the gift of amusement, of understanding the human comedy and writing about it with incomparable genius. If Will has been given the bounty of creativity, Nick and Nora give each other the daily gift of levity, the air of jocular enjoyment that lets them find each other and the human race as marvelously amusing. The troubled and alienated Harold was given by Maude the gift of amused profundity, the ability not only to see life as a joy to behold and explore but also that the comic existence—having fun for the sheer jubilation of it—has its own kind of humane profundity by reminding us that people are funny and life itself is a funny thing. The conception and conduct of comedy thus includes in its province the human capacity for creativity, the human delight in levity, and the human understanding of profundity. The comedy of affection reminds us that the Graces, or Charities, symbolized a divine influence on the heart and thereby its reflection in life, as personified by our heroines, since Viola displays beauty and creativity, Nora manifests charm and splendor, and Maude epitomizes merryheart and “blooming life” in an eternal springtime, The comic rhythm of romance and love highlights the feminine principle of graceful inspiration and good will that pervades and defines the joy of romantic comedy.

Comedies of Affiliation: Funny People Building Their Nest Human beings share with much of the rest of the living natural world the desire to affiliate with other like beings and place themselves in a location that is familiar and safe. It is a human thing to have and exercise a “nesting instinct” alike in kind with bees, hawks, and bears, although we humans like to think that the desire to build and inhabit our own nest is more a matter of choice rather than instinct. In any case, the effect and result is the same in that affiliation with compatible and familial humans sets in motion the process of wanting a home, making a home, and keeping a home. As funny beings, human affiliation is another distinctive activity that is the stuff of comedies of appeal, since homing union appears universal. The desire to locate with people you like in some place you like is widespread enough to inspire comedic treatment of people trying not only to get together but more formidably to make a home for themselves. The motivational emphasis here is for an affiliative resolution that

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involves resilient continuation of a homestead that is “our place.” If comedies of attraction depict the fun of lusty Eros, and comedies of affection the hilarity of lovable philia, comedies of affiliation want to establish philia as not only the loving companionship of a couple but also as a profound embedding in a familial or communitarian setting of sustained good tidings wherein the key appeal is likeability, and may even approach agape. A lusting couple says to each other, in effect, “You are beautiful;” a loving couple says, “we are beautiful;” and a likeable family or community says, “Life is beautiful.” But such kindred or familial beauty is a dramatic struggle to bring into being and make last, so it lends itself to comedic articulation. There is great fun in watching people who want a home, and those who try to make a home, and finally those who try to run a home. In all cases, the human thing is to hope for amity, residing with likeable people living in a likeable place. Such a hope may originate in erotic attraction and flourish in loving romance, but it can and perhaps should culminate in friendly companionship and reciprocal appreciation located in a secure habitat. Since comedies of appeal deal with primal relations between people, there is a natural and ideal progression of eventual maturation involved, moving us from the youthful physicality of lusting to the adult sociality of bonding to the ripened completion of maturity. But, as comedy reminds us, it isn't easy.

Comedies of Incipient Affiliation The initial stage of affiliation involves, like stories of attraction and affection, at least two people who are seekers. They may want the fun of sex and the funny times of love, but they also yearn for more, what we might call “funniness.” Our aesthetic sense of fun is aroused by the appreciation of erotic beauty; our sense of social fun is whetted by our comedic actions making for some good coming from our bond; but if we truly become affiliated, we may experience a larger sense of fun, in a fun life together, enjoying each other and life by living in and for some truth we have discovered in our lives. The human comedy of appeal lets us explore the range and possibility of experiencing the joyous tangle of physicality as well as the sympathetic accord of mutuality and the settled milieu of cultural symmetry. For a variety of reasons, some people at the initial stage of a relationship really want to be settled. One familiar reason is that they are people that nobody else wants.

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Marty (1955): The Union of the Unlikely and Unwanted In Marty, we meet Marty Piletti, a thirty-four year old butcher who is single and lives with his widowed mother. Marty is burly and unremarkable in appearance but personable and courteous in manner, so even though he is decidedly working-class and in a humble trade, he can be characterized as “gentlemanly.” He is so even though in daily life he is beset by the kind of mild reproaches and humiliations someone in his situation can expect. In the butcher shop where he works, he is scolded by two middle-aged women customers who berate him for not being married, since his siblings are and are having children. His mother proselytizes for him in the stores, asking people if they know of a “nice girl for my boy Marty.” Marty is caught in family pressures and tangles, such as Marty's cousin wanting to complicate their household by having her sister (who lives with him and conflicts with his wife) move in with them. The compliant Marty agrees, perhaps because he wants the cousin help him arrange buying the butcher shop where he works. During dinner, his vigilant mother suggests he go out to the Stardust Ballroom, since she learned from the cousin therein lurk eligible girls (a place “loaded with tomatoes”) for single men to meet. She so nags him that he reveals his deep self-doubt that he is not attractive to women and just doesn't want to get hurt anymore. Even though surrounded by family and friends, Marty is lonely and wants female companionship and marital affiliation, but he doesn’t expect a romance will ever happen and he believes he is doomed to be an old bachelor. Marty is in the fix of those who drift along unaffiliated without a reliable and constant partner: everyone thinks there is something wrong with him, and in various ways let him know. Marty wants in, and wants out: his chances are dimming for marriage, and he feels trapped in the constricting environs of family and neighborhood pals. He lacks direction, exemplified in the seemingly endless ritualized round of daily life, dealing with mother, work, and after work the aimless banter with his male friends. At the local cafe where they hang out at night, the guys usually discuss girls, sports, and the inevitable exemplification of their futile existence: “What do you feel like doing tonight?” This last question prompts the unpromising reply, “I don't know...what do you feel like doing?” Saturday nights especially evoke this directionless existence. When Marty and his friends recall that they went bowling the previous Saturday, didn't like their last dates, and shouldn't just go home for a beer and TV, they conclude with: “We ought to do something.” Marty resists going to the ballroom with an air of resignation, complaining that he is tired of looking, and tired of girls making him feel ugly and unwanted.

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Marty's plight is poignant in that he represents the common fear that we are each unlovable and rejected, and it is funny in that his dejection is badly misplaced, since he is quite lovable—sensitive, polite, responsible— but not attractive in the superficial ways his friends and the available girls so admire. Marty is the serious adult in this comedy, and his pals and the gum-chewing girls are the ludicrous juvenile objects of amusement. At the Stardust Ballroom, Marty gets the usual rejection from a girl in the “stag line,” and then notices a well-dressed young woman who is in the process of being rejected by her blind date, who offers Marty five dollars to take her off his hands. (He describes her as “a dog,” although the friend who set up the date told him that she “wasn't especially attractive but she had a good deal of charm.”) The callow young man was not interested in charm, so he is anxious to get rid of his date, which appalls Marty. His humane instincts and keen perception see that the woman is different in dress and manner, which makes him object, “You can't just walk off on a girl like that.” But, her date indeed abandons her. She (Clara) feels humiliated and goes out onto a balcony. Marty, sensing that she is someone in the same predicament he is accustomed to, goes after her and asks her for a dance. She is crying and he instinctively comforts her as she puts her head on his chest. It is at this point that the chivalrous Marty displays his superior quality as a “gentleman,” someone capable of graciousness and sympathy. While he and Clara dance, he assures her that she is not the unlovely person she has been told she is, and we soon discover, as we did with Marty, that she is not “plain” at all, but an educated schoolteacher who is smart and mannerly like him, and does indeed have a good deal of charm. They both do have something in common, namely their rejection by those who aren't smart or wellmannered, and even though they don't realize it, it occurs to us that these are the two lovely people in this local milieu. At this point, wondrous comic ironies enter the story, since their family and friends find reasons for Marty and Clara not to fulfill their attraction and affection with marital affiliation. Everyone else is self-interested or jealous and petty, so even with the cultural rhetoric that urges single men and women to get married and be happy, they suddenly don't want this unlikely pair to do so. Now that the pair has a dynamic direction in life that fulfills that much-heralded expectation, nobody wants them to do it. In some measure, Marty and Clara are a threat because they are declaring their independence. She assures him that working as a butcher is an honorable profession and that he should buy the shop. Clara reveals that she has a chance for an advanced teaching position outside the city proper, to which he urges her not to be afraid to leave her parents (an injunction

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that also applies to himself). As their relationship tentatively develops, he takes her to meet his mother, who is appalled to learn that Clara doesn't think that parents should live with their married children nor depend on them. Mother and aunt try to sabotage the burgeoning relationship, with aunt assuring mother that schoolteachers (“college girls”) are just “one step up from the street,” and will get Marty to leave them to fend for themselves. Marty’s mother then informs him that he should not bring Clara to the house again, urging him to cultivate some of the “nice Italian girls” in the neighborhood. His buddies attack him for going around with a “dog.” Marty abjectly gives in to group conventions and does not call Clara, despite their plans for a future together. But at the last moment, facing another tedious and empty night, he seems to realize that their degradation of Clara is also a degradation of him, an effort to perpetuate shared unhappiness by trying to keep him in their familiar control, under the thumb of mother and aunt and in the company of his forlorn male cohorts, as hapless and hopeless Marty, a being they can understand and disdain. Since marrying Clara would take him away from their pathetic circle, they have to degrade her as morally unfit and intellectually and socially alien. They are trying to foul the nest before it is made. It is one of the great conventions of comedy for a happy ending to be inclusive, with general rejoicing and good tidings for those who are united in wedlock or the equivalent. But not here: Marty's relatives and acquaintances are comic foils, whose mean-spiritedness and petty possessiveness are after all funny, in their ritualized and parochial assumption that Marty is theirs to own. Marty and Clara's romance reveals their anxious habit of derision towards someone who doesn't conform to local standards of beauty and desirability, and with the guys, their juvenile view of women as either “dogs” or “tomatoes.” There is likely an undercurrent of jealousy and fear in this, for Clara may have a promising career teaching outside of urban neighborhoods and Marty may have a thriving butcher business elsewhere. He would be lost as a meal ticket for his relatives and as a fellow loser for his pals. The ultimate hilarity here is how comic those people are who want to stop the wedding. In the end, Marty rebels, telling his contemporaries that they will always be miserable clowns destined for localized stupidity and lonesome misery. He announces he prefers the good company of Clara and will ask her to marry him when he goes to call her. When his friend Angie follows him, the new Marty turns matchmaker and asks him when he is going to get married. The freshly affiliated Marty is now an advocate of affiliation.

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Raising Arizona (1987): Grace Against All Odds It is a tribute to the flexibility of comedy that it can alter or abandon inherited conventions in order to highlight and further the pragmatic purpose of the genre, getting people who belong together on their way and getting something done in the process. The traditional happy function of comedy makes way not only for a new couple to represent renewal but also for a better world, symbolized by the social festivity at the end in which virtually everyone joins in. But Marty and Clara are not given such a joyous send-off, but rather are very much on their own in overcoming the dull routine of directionless acquaintances and the hostility of familial interests. The underlying bitter reality is fearful dislike of other people’s happiness, especially when those deemed graceless become graceful through affiliation, asserting that “we are beautiful” against the unfestive but grimly comic inhibitors. When grace is often only personal and not “catching,” there is no final festivity, since here we are faced with an entire local culture which is graceless. Comic affiliation becomes for Marty and Clara a way of escaping unhappy confinement and degradation, a movement away from an undesirable society. The subtext of such modern comedies is that if you don't count, or are deemed a loser, you're on your own. But for many in the audience who share or fear such attribution and stigma, that makes their bold move all the sweeter and funnier. We may note this in reference to “Hi” McDunnough, a habitual petty offender who robs convenience stores, but since he is always unarmed, is repeatedly paroled. Every time he is caught and “booked,” he is photographed by a young policewoman named Edwina, or “Ed.” After one incarceration, they romance and get married. Hi gets a legitimate job and Ed continues her police work until she decides to have a baby, but learn to their dismay that she is infertile. The rather dull-witted Hi and desperate Ed cope with their childless gloom by reading about a wealthy couple who have delivered quintuplets. They hit upon the happy if harebrained idea of kidnapping one of the quints, and do so, selecting the one named Nathan, Jr. They reason that since the father (Nathan Arizona) and mother have “more than they can handle” with five infants, it is only fair for them to take one and have “a toddler” of their own. Their fond desire in affiliation was to be a family, and now they are, living in a mobile home in the desert with their new baby. Their reverie in the “suburban starter home” (complete with discount store lawn furniture and tacky exurban interior) is interrupted by the arrival of two of Hi's prison friends, who have escaped and have sought refuge at Hi's new home. Ed is not happy with this, since these two are rude reminders of Hi's former disgrace and a threat to their newfound

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marital grace. She acquiesces on condition that they stay only briefly, although they immediately become suspicious about the baby, since the kidnapping and reward are in the news. By this point, we are enjoying the wacky comedics of the story, even though it involves kidnapping, illicit parenting, harboring escaped criminals, and bounty hunting. Marty and Clara were both smart enough to know their joint direction and what it takes to form a normal married life. Hi and Ed are charmingly clueless, so gracing us with their dreams of respectability and normality that they become sympathetic despite their inadequacy as parents. Indeed, almost everyone is endearingly dopey, despite the outrageous things they do: Hi's supervisor at work drops by with his wife and proposes they “swing” with a wife swap, which enrages Hi. He later runs an errand to a convenience store to get diapers and reverts to his old instinct of holding up the store, leading to a wild chase by a murderous clerk, rabid dogs, and gun-happy policemen through alleys, stores, gardens, and houses. Meanwhile, the two escapees prove to be reprehensible characters who lounge about eating cereal and watching TV but advise Ed to certainly breastfeed, warning that neglect of such rearing practices is why “we ended up in prison.” Everyone is absurdly nefarious: Hi's supervisor figures out that the baby is the missing kidnap and threatens to blackmail him; the fugitives overhear, tie up Hi and take the baby for the reward, but also revert to old form and rob a bank in town, after which the two dolts leave the baby on the road in his car seat. They rush back, since they have become attached to the smiling baby and even purchase a popular childcare book (the “owner's manual”), but the bank clerk had placed a dye canister in with the money and it explodes. The aggrieved and wealthy father of Nathan, Jr. becomes frustrated by the efforts of both police and hired detectives in finding his son, at which point he is visited by an intimidating and fearsome biker clothed in a military mufti outfit complete with attached hand grenades. He offers to find the child for a large sum; the father refuses, so the demonic biker disappears to find the boy on his own and sell him on the black market. He traces the child to Hi and Ed, and arrives at the bank where junior was left in the road, securing him to his bike. Hi intervenes, but as usual is no match for the situation and is brutally beaten by the expert on violence; he is pushed away to be killed, and instinctively puts his hands up, revealing that in the struggle he accidently pulled the pin on an attached grenade; the biker frantically tries to throw the grenade but is blown up. Ed and Hi decide to return Nathan, Jr. to his parents, only to be discovered by the father, to whom they explain they just wanted to have a family. The

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relieved magnate is sympathetic and lets them go, urging them never to give up on having a family. Raising Arizona is a more fantastic and nonsensical tale than Marty, but shares with it the presence of difficulties in establishing a stable and lasting affiliation. Hi and Ed are very flawed people, but despite their failings their hearts are in the right place, making them both comic (to be laughed at) and sympathetic (to be laughed with). As an incipient family, they struggle like Marty and Clara to create a life free of intervening forces (relatives and guys for Marty, prison pals for Hi) so that they make and reside in a familial habitat. Hi and Ed felt that they had to take action in order to create and master the challenge of homemaking; we identify with their plight all the more because of their human limits and essential harmlessness. As a pair of innocents at home who want the good thing of a family and the beauty of a child, they are blessed with a sense of grace, although a bit deficient in graceful methodology. Yet like all those who seek affiliation, Hi and Ed try their best to complement their shared sense of direction in order to find and secure a location befitting the benign purpose of established continuity. They share something else with Marty and Clara: in comedy, there is a recurrent and heartening inclusive thematic, the “least of mine” principle. Both couples are not heroic or aristocratic, not physically beautiful nor socially elegant, and both are unwanted and unheralded by the world and deemed unbecoming and unworthy. But as comic seekers after the completion of the universal human dream of a personal gift of grace located in their place of grace, they demonstrate and exemplify our hope that even the least graceful amongst us—an unhandsome but personable butcher and schoolteacher and a marginal couple living a humble existence in a trailer can realize the comic happiness ending as much as the elegant couples of romance. Comedy originated in the free-spirited celebration of the joy of life open to everyone, celebrating the fact that we all share the common nature of comic appreciation and capacity. Even the least still do, in the humble lives and spare hovels of the meek and obscure. A distinction can be made between two competing and differing visions of that human “common nature.” On the one hand, there is the tragic and melodramatic strain that sees us as self-destructive and doomed creatures for whom the goal of life is death and our lives comprised of forces of decompositions. This “catabolic” vision is countered by the assertion that the goal of life is living and our pragmatic and aesthetic purposes and sensibilities direct us toward composition, whereby both intelligence and sentiment orient us towards the realization and enjoyment of creativity and ability and continuity. The “anabolic” imagination

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embraces facts (amor fati) as the basis for practical action, but loves creative inspiration and improvisation (amor fabula). Comedy speaks to this deep human desire, for a life letting in a happier future than the mundane and contentious present, and lets us see ordinary people not unlike most of us, through the good offices of comedic logic somehow make it there. We like to think that Marty and Clara and Hi and Ed will be so blessed with the beauty of familial similitude, the good of domestic plenitude, and the truth of affiliative verisimilitude. It is this comic consummation that we so devoutly wish, so laughable an ideal that we cannot help but hope it can be. In that way, comedy is the aesthetic and pragmatic attitude that is the humane antipathy to catabolic visions of human and cosmic decomposition and death. In the comic imagination, life is forever being revived and renewed onward in the eternal return of the vital and ever funny human comedy. With that in mind, we can understand Hi's dream at the end of Raising Arizona, where everything plays out in their favor: his visitors voluntarily return to prison, and Hi and Ed are left in peace; their temporary son, Nathan, Jr., grows up to become a high school football star and receives a football as a Christmas present from a “loving couple who wish to remain anonymous”; looking further into the future, we see a fulfilled and elderly Hi and Ed presiding over a festive holiday dinner surrounded by numerous children and grandchildren in a familial celebration of continuing affiliation. In this kind of imagined komos, those who like and live in a secure place and in felicitous relations persist in that expanded present where domestic life is a pleasure to be there always.

Prizzi's Honor (1985): To Compose or To Decompose? We have seen that personal appeal flourishes under the sign of comedy, but also that the sight of appeal in flower activates the counterforces consisting of those who have some objection to people being drawn to each other. Those who object have their reasons and interests, but usually their attempts at impeding or complicating the lovers' progress toward consummation can misdirect things only temporarily, and as an integral part of the fun. It is possible in comedy for these forces to actually at times undermine the incipient relationship, so much so that they prevail in preventing or reorienting the affiliation to enjoy any continuity. Often this is because the protagonists—the couple who are affiliating—in a sense undermine themselves so much that the usual outcome of affiliative continuation never flourishes and indeed fails. This kind of comedy is funny in the darker senses of the humorous and ridiculous absurdity

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expressing ironic or even demonic turns and twists in the story. Traditionally in comedy there appear figures that move things towards irony, wherein incongruities develop between what people say and what they do, perhaps because of imposture (the alazon) or even stemming from the conventions and situations in which they find themselves, ironically facing incompatible demands and dishonest cross-purposes which make compatible and honest affiliation impossible. Even with the ironic and wickedly happy ending such comedies dictate, it makes for deliciously wry fun watching the convoluted process which gets us there. In Prizzi's Honor, we are introduced to one Charlie Partanna, who we quickly see is born into and expected to be part of an Italian-American extended family that is not only a location of blood ties but is also a thriving business, although we quickly see that it is a criminal band led by Mafioso. We are in the environs of the Prizzi crime family into which Charlie was born, and see Charlie christened as the Don's godson, as a youth in Scout uniform given a gift of his first set of brass knuckles, and then initiated into the “family” with a blood oath. As an adult, he is an experienced and responsible member of the organization, imbued with their code of honor and trusted with enforcement, which includes extralegal assassination. Charlie has no moral qualms about ordering murders, and is quite comfortable with the cynical corruption the Prizzi enterprise entails. In the opening scene at an elaborate church wedding involving the Prizzis, the church is full of guests, including rows of uniformed police officers, and indeed Charlie arrives at the reception chauffeured in a police car. However, Charlie has one characterological frailty, namely women. He was expected to marry his cousin, Maerose Prizzi, but broke off the engagement, causing the embittered Maerose to stray. She subsequently “dishonored” herself, presumably for casual sex with men outside the family and cultural circle (when she appears at the wedding, her father calls her a “whore”). So the threat and ignominy of exile is foregrounded at the wedding when Charlie scans the gathering and spots a beautiful and chic blonde sitting with angelic innocence in the choir loft. For all he knows, she could be an airline stewardess or TV game-show hostess. He dances with her at the reception, and is much enthralled; she (Irene) is cool and urbane and decidedly “un-ethnic,” lacking the local accent and slang of the decidedly ethnic Maerose. He wants to know more about her: she says she is a “tax consultant” but quickly disappears, so he investigates. Later that day there is an assassination by an unknown “hit man” hired by the Prizzis, and the killer turns out to be Irene, who is an experienced professional killer brought in from California to do the job with complete anonymity. This news makes

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Charlie all the more impressed with Irene, since she is not only lovely but is also talented and indeed in his own line of work, so he can appreciate the degree of skill involved in conducting a successful murder. As a competent enforcer, Charlie has found another motive for pursuing Irene, since clearly someone so personally lovely and professionally gifted has dual attractive qualities. Charlie's life has been so structured and sheltered that he is less than perceptive in such matters, so he turns to the woman he jilted, Maerose, for advice. The wily Maerose, versed in Prizzi Machiavellianism, advises him to court her, since if they marry, he and his new wife will have their professional interests in common. She likely senses that this proposed affiliation is a breach too far, and sees Charlie as both an old love interest and new agent for her restoration to grace in the “shame culture” of traditional cultural strictures. In any case, Charlie impulsively flies off to California to see Irene, and gushes that he loves her (and distinguishes that from being “in love,” since he read in a magazine that “in love” involves hormonal secretions which emit attractive smells, and something about reciprocal feedback, so “who needs it?”) Irene reciprocates, and Charlie is engulfed in irresponsible romantic sentiment, wanting to remember everything about this tender moment of disclosure and surrender, to the tune of mariachi music. This scene of declarations of romantic love is followed by one of pure lust, with trails of clothes hastily shed and the lovers thrashing about in bed in wild bodily exchange of hormonal secretions. They are quickly married, and since Irene is an experienced professional, at first she could be trusted as a functional member of the family. She takes on her new wifely and work roles eagerly, and then suggests that she help Charlie in a kidnapping job the Don has ordered. He reluctantly agrees, and they work well as a team. Irene poses as a mother holding a baby while waiting for an elevator; their target, a crooked banker, and his bodyguard emerge to take the same elevator; she pitches the baby toward the bodyguard, who pulls his gun rather than catch the infant (a doll), and she quickly kills him; Charlie emerges to subdue the banker, but then a stranger, a woman on the wrong floor, comes out of the elevator and witnesses the scene, so Irene kills her. They escape with their prisoner, and she expresses shock that the bodyguard was so callous that he didn’t try to catch the baby. At this point, the ironic complications of their personal and familial affiliation begin to emerge. The dead woman turns out to be a police captain's wife, and her death has brought about a breakdown of the political “understanding” between organized crime and the police forces for mutual toleration enabled by financial considerations and social cooperation. This mistake was a breach of “contract” that brings about

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police actions against the crime families, for which the others blame the Prizzis and thus threatens the outbreak of an inter-familial cycle of warfare (power plays to take over someone else's territory and interests, revenge killings, and so on), deemed bad for everyone. This is only the beginning of Charlie and Irene’s marital travail. After the accidental murder, the Don's son Dominic, Maerose's father, calls on Irene to ask her to kill Charlie; he holds a grudge against Charlie for his daughter's exile, compounded by Maerose’s lie that Charlie had raped her (“you should see the size of him”). Maerose then gets pictures of Irene proving she was involved in a casino robbery and murder that cost the Prizzis money and reputation, showing them to the Don. The Don then tells Charlie that because of Irene's betrayals and mistakes, he must kill her not only for revenge, but, more importantly, for the more practical reason that she now constitutes a mortal threat to family interests. During all this, Charlie is terribly conflicted, since he is still infatuated, and so apparently is she, although she is more circumspect. Charlie is comically effusive (he rages at her, “If you were anyone else I would blow you away!”), still preferring to believe her version of things, and considering her idea to leave the Prizzis and flee to Hong Kong. He muses that without her he would be alone, but the Don tells him that he will be even more alone if he leaves the family: “We are your blood.” Poor Charlie is now faced with a choice about his new wife: “do I stay married to her and love her or do I kill her?” Irene is nobody's fool and is well versed in the machinations typical of a crime family. She tells Charlie about the “hit” on him ordered by Dominic. Charlie’s mounting suspicions involve him in a potential counter-plot and much cognitive dissonance, none of which sets well with Irene, for complex reasons involving money and her own developing plans. He is still urged to move up the family hierarchy if he will “ice” Irene; she immediately senses he is now on the family side and is lying to her. She secretly packs and books a flight to Hong Kong; they meet in Los Angeles, ostensibly for lovemaking; she dresses in a negligee in the bathroom while he gets into bed; she emerges with a pistol and silencer, and on entering the bedroom tries to kill him and misses, but he skillfully throws a dagger which impales her throat. Charlie returns to his native environs and calls Maerose, who eagerly awaits him, restoring both her and him to a place of honor in the family. It might be urged that Prizzi's Honor is really in the province of crime melodrama or movie popular tragedy (film noir). It is true that mad love thwarted by forces outside the control of the lovers could be soap opera or a tragic love story, but here we are amused by an ironic world of comedic figures that do demonic things. In various complementary ways, the movie

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is a satire of the criminal world taking itself seriously, killing each other off in an agenda of genocide. It is also a parody of normal human emotions and institutions, ranging from the demonic parody of marriage seen with Charlie and Irene to the parody of organizations loyal to absolute leaders who here are merely sinister and silly (the Don is always asking guests, with whom he has evil intentions, to “have a cookie”). The film also makes fun of the institution of capitalism, of which such a crime group bent on profit at any cost is such a revealing inversion. It is also a burlesque, a tongue-in-cheek caricature of the more ponderous “godfather” movies about organized crime that sees them as somehow superior in virtue and efficiency so we in the normal world should admire and emulate them. The sardonic inflection and playful wit that runs through the story reduces such self-important and idealized characters to their proper status as ludicrous thugs living in a reduced and isolated subworld. Charlie and Irene may see themselves as great lovers and cunning warriors, but they set themselves up for their own inevitable destruction as both lovers and warriors, the former being murdered by her husband after she tries to murder him, ending their warrior careers and dooming him to a life of servitude (and perhaps prison or assassination himself) in the petty confines of a closed society. It is funny to contrast them with Marty and Clara and Hi and Ed, two couples that met comic obstacles and conditions but who were not to be denied the flowering of their incipient love. These couples had to deal with agents of dishonesty, but in the end they were honest with each other and against all odds brought their incipient desire to be together to the practice of mutual affiliation. With Charlie and Irene, we are in a world of different rules and expectations which are self-destructive to any incipient love, a world of alazons (imposters) and eirons (dissemblers), featuring deceptive practices which both of them practice habitually, but which are destructive of the kind of trust and hope crucial to incipient couplings. The other couples had plenty of imposture and pretense to deal with, which made their associates and relatives comic, but not they themselves were honest and true; Charlie and Irene in the final analysis are lesser figures because they cannot see beyond their own comic flaws, dooming their very real yen for each other by preferring their familial (Charlie) and professional (Irene) roles and skills and thus relegating them to loveless non-affiliation and ignominious death. So the way the other two comedies play out, the joke was on Marty's forlorn pals and selfish relatives, and Hi's prison pals and the bounty hunter; here, alas, with Charlie and Irene, the ironic and mocking joke is on them.

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Comedies of Located Affiliation We left our previous couples at that initial stage of appeal wherein they have permanent affiliation in mind, seeing the shared beauty of each other and imagining the shared future in which life is beautiful. Comedy posits a surprising variety and depth of obstacles in their path to permanence, and although most of the time we enjoy seeing them make it through to lasting amity, it is also the case that we are amused by the perversity and obstinacy that goes into the comedy of affiliative failure. Often, as with the case of Charlie and Irene, they are not fully committed to affiliation, so rather than wanting above all else to be together somewhere, part of them wants to be elsewhere, thus courting disaster. Now we will turn to the next stage of affiliation, the comedy of actually finding a location and setting up housekeeping and homemaking. Recall that Marty and Clara and Hi and Ed were not quite there yet, but Hi can dream about a proper and festive home with lots of family around. These couples exercise joint direction, but what they need is location. (Recall that Clara objects to family living with them, as she understands the need for privacy and independence, something Charlie couldn't break away from.) Affiliative couples typically don't want a situation; they want to be situated. The movies convey the great myth of coupling, which is a great life of our own, as well as the accompanying metaphor, a good place of our own. Since comedy is a democratic art, that good place can be either humble or grand, varying with the degree of living and loving that goes on there. So, a hovel can be a place of grace, and a palace a place of gracelessness, appealing to the widespread suspicion that the rich and powerful inhabitants of mansions and pleasuredomes are not happy or wise. Much of the fun of comedies of affiliation involves not only finding the right partner but the right place to nest and nestle, and not necessarily in the most palatial of locations, but certainly the most habitable.

My Man Godfrey (1936): Of Manors and Dumps We are introduced to an appalling image of the Great Depression of the 1930s, an urban city dump with great piles of steaming trash overlooking the skyline of affluence, giving the inhabitants of the dump—homeless men living in makeshift shacks—a spectacular view of someone else's wealth. This would seem to be a rough and irredeemable worldly estate into which these unfortunate people have fallen, so they are astonished when limousines drive up and elegantly dressed people get out and descend into the demimonde of the dispossessed and homeless. Two

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competing sisters (Cornelia and Irene Bullock), both dressed in glittering satin gowns, deign to approach one of the “hobos” named Godfrey, and Cornelia offers him five dollars to go with her to a party at an upscale hotel as her trophy from a “scavenger hunt,” a sport in which the rich hunt for the most representative “forgotten man.” Godfrey is appalled by the snooty Cornelia but charmed by the feisty and flaky Irene, who seems to have no comprehension of the gap between them or what brought her to such a high state and Godfrey and the others to such a low state. Who forgot them? The well-spoken and curious Godfrey agrees to go with Irene, so off they speed to the gowned and tuxedoed plutocratic gathering in an elegant hotel ballroom, with other “hunters” bringing in their prey. We see an absurd scene of fatuous and asinine acquisition that is a wondrous parody of capitalistic accumulation and exploitation that goes a long way in explaining how depressions and deprivations happen. Irene is delighted when Godfrey “wins” and is asked to deliver a little speech, apparently expected to express his gratitude. Instead, he says he came because he wanted to help the “young lady,” but also because he wished to see “how a bunch of empty-headed nitwits conducted themselves” and so having seen looks forward to returning to “a society of really important people.” He tries to leave, but the fascinated Irene offers him a job as the family butler, which he accepts, assuring her mother that even though he has no references, “people that take in stray cats say they make the best pets.” Godfrey is outfitted and goes immediately to work, soon discovering that he is working for a thoroughly dysfunctional family. The mother is hopelessly daffy, even supporting a live-in protégé, a young man who is supposed to be a great artist but seems to confine his creativity to constantly eating and doing gorilla imitations. Cornelia is wild, extravagant, and constantly in trouble with the police over partying and pranking. Irene is equally indulgent, but apparently her indulgences are more directly libidinal; she unabashedly regards Godfrey as her “pet,” openly pining for him and making herself readily available. (When Irene impulsively wants to hire him, she asks him, “Do you buttle?,” and tells the maid, “I'd like to sew his buttons on sometime, when they come off.” At another point, she clutches and kisses him, and later she fakes a breakdown so he puts her in a cold shower, from which she leaps, squealing orgiastically, “Godfrey loves me!”). In comedy, such natural and naive lust cannot be forever contained and avoided, despite Godfrey's deferential and proper demeanor and mysterious past (how can anyone so sophisticated and articulate be a mere butler?) Predictably, and in ancient comic tradition, Godfrey is not an undeserving bum, but a disguised member of a distinguished upper-

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crust family who was a great success but had a bad love affair and alcoholic bout, becoming a roaming and anonymous tramp. He is recognized by an old aristocratic friend and begs him to keep his secret, since he enjoys being a butler and working at something useful (“the only difference between a derelict and a man is a job”). This deception and isolation obviously cannot last, since he is too coolly appealing and Irene is too hotly wanting. As the story evolves, their movement toward each other becomes inevitable, despite the usual familial obstacles. Sister Cordelia, bitter and rebuffed by Godfrey, plants a valuable pearl necklace in Godfrey's room and accuses him of theft; when the necklace cannot be found, the suspicious father sends the sisters off to Europe. Godfrey uses the hidden necklace to make investments that recoup Mr. Bullock’s nearly bankrupt fortune and finance a nightclub employing his fellow derelicts at “The Dump.” He tells the grateful Bullock family, returns the necklace to the contrite Cornelia, and leaves to run the nightclub. At this point, the movie could have ended as a funny Depression-era tale about class divisions, the silliness and worthlessness of the rich, and the superior virtue of the oppressed. But here comic profundity is in play. Godfrey lived in an improvised and temporary place that was the last refuge of people destroyed and abandoned by economic forces, and despite their communal feelings of identification was hardly a home but rather a shared refuge from social dislocation and neglect. Yet the Bullock mansion is more of a madhouse than a home, where the corruptions of wealth and idleness have turned them toward comical vanity and willfulness. The mansion and the shack town lack the features which go into comic affiliation and homemaking, a place to live and love enlivened and grounded in mutually shared fun. In the end, Irene decides she wants her man and their own home for such fun. She treks to the Dump to see high society nightclubbing in the former place of despair (and thus employing the formerly desperate) and seeks out Godfrey. She is there to get married and set up housekeeping, and the astonished Godfrey capitulates without too much objection, since Irene is both lovely and feisty and also mad for him. She brings her liveliness to their new home in a new place where everyone can have a new start, and create a brave new world that has such people in it!

Muriel's Wedding (1995): Locating a Partner The homeless Godfrey and the equally homeless Irene locate a home in a most unlikely place, but since they are both starting anew this place is theirs to make into a home. They are now no longer in the shanty or the

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palace but rather are acting out their own joint story in their own location. With Godfrey and Irene, their pairing is erotically desirable and logically practical, so what they need is a locale featuring an ethos, where the place they will dwell in has “character” conducive to both them and the setting where they will abide. For if the purpose of comedy is to delight and amuse us by the funny people and things in the story, the point of this subgenre of comedy is to get these two people together in an “accustomed place,” a habitat befitting the affiliative ethos of these partnering, even if it is an office apartment over a nightclub built on a city dump. If, as the familiar aphorism goes, “home is where the heart is,” then permanent affiliation and “our place” become essential for the natural dénouement that such comedies enjoin. And, as Godfrey and Irene exemplify, it doesn't have to be much. In Muriel's Wedding, we meet a young woman named Muriel Heslop, who lives with her family in their house located in Porpoise Spit, a small coastal town in Australia. The Heslops give new meaning to the term “dysfunctional family”: the father is a provincial politician noteworthy for sleazy deals and small-time corruption; the mother is treated by him (and her children) as a lifeless domestic; their children live aimlessly at home, sulking and staring at the TV all day. Nobody seems to do anything. Muriel at least had enough energy to fail secretarial school. She does seem to have some spirit, however misdirected. At a wedding, she catches the bouquet thrown by the bride, while wearing a loud and garish leopard-skin dress, which is noticed by another wedding guest, an employee of the clothing store where she had shoplifted it, requiring her father to keep her out of jail by treating the police to a free case of beer. Muriel is a comical figure in several senses of the term: she is hefty and clumsy, she is disingenuous and does dumb things, and she is regarded by her flashier, prettier women contemporaries with contempt, who ridicule her appearance, cracking when she catches the bouquet, “Throw it again—you'll never get married.” Such abuse makes Muriel retreat into her own fantasy world of insipid rock music and dreams of her perfect wedding day with a handsome groom (a day she longs for but obviously fears that, as her family and friends cruelly assure her, will never come). Hoping for some excitement, she “borrows” a blank check from her forlorn mother and essentially steals money from her family to finance a trip to a resort island, painfully but hopefully aware that this is where her desirable but contemptuous and promiscuous “friends” go to party and pick up guys. Muriel has met a fellow female outcast, a nonconformist named Rhonda, and they bond immediately (the single Rhonda asks her, “Are you married?”) as friends and conspirators. Rhonda is free-spirited and smart,

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but also possessive towards Muriel (she tells the leader of the snobbish girl gang that torments Muriel, “I'm not alone, I'm with Muriel”). At the resort, there is a talent contest, which Rhonda and Muriel to everyone's surprise win with a rousing rendition of a favorite song, gazing longingly at each other and singing lines about “knowing my fate is to be with you.” Rather than go home to face parental wrath, the two friends move to the city. As their relationship develops, we the audience are curious as to what is unfolding between them. Although we want to know, the film is canny enough to leave their status ambiguous, since they themselves may not fully grasp what they feel and want. They certainly want to be intimate friends, but whether that intimacy is reciprocal affection characteristic of friendship or includes erotic expression is unclear and perhaps either their private business or irrelevant for comic treatment. The point is that comedy brings these two together in loving affiliation and completion. Comedy, as always, puts us to the test since so much of what happens along the way seems unfunny or oddly funny. Muriel’s unloved mother kills herself, which in the aftermath is exploited by her faithless spouse as some kind of noble gesture and scoffed at by his mistress as patronizingly pathetic. Muriel's awareness of the perils of heterosexual relations is heightened not only by this event, but also by recurrently seeing her local girl's group either bragging or fighting about marital infidelity. She returns to Rhonda, at one point telling her that since they met her “life is good,” quoting a popular song she likes. Still, she fantasizes about a perfect wedding and browses through bridal shops. Rhonda is indiscriminately sexually active, at one point servicing several sailors in one evening at her place. Muriel is less experienced, and her one attempt at sex with a boy is sidetracked when her potential lover unzips a beanbag chair rather than her trousers. Muriel ultimately gets a perfect wedding, when she is paired (in an arranged marriage) with a handsome young athlete who needs a passport to compete in the Olympics. Rhonda has learned she has cancer, and soon is confined to a wheelchair, shattered not only by her illness but also by the fact that Muriel has left her for a man. Muriel’s wedding is characterized by her giggles and squeaks, while the indifferent groom is puzzled and appalled. In comic terms, this is obviously not a marriage at all nor is it one that can last. After this last heterosexual failure, Muriel is now bitterly well versed in the varieties of relational failure, returning to Porpoise Spit for the mother's funeral but pointedly going to Rhonda's family home where she is being treated as a pitiful invalid by a mother and sister (one of the bad girls club, now enjoying Rhonda's incarceration and humiliation). Rhonda glares at her, since she feels betrayed by being jilted for the vacant athlete. Muriel is on a rescue mission to save the woman she

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loves and who loves her, and will not be denied. When Rhonda asks her, “What makes you think I'd go anywhere with you?” Muriel replies, “because I'm your friend” (with emphasis on “friend”). She rolls Rhonda out to the car, with the hysterical sister shouting, “But I'm beautiful!” (emphasis on “I'm”). In the car, Rhonda and Muriel look deeply at each other without words, then bid the town and family and perhaps heterosexual constraints behind for a life together in the city. Their life together may take many forms, and as always in comedy, the happy ending does not necessarily promise cakes and ale, rose gardens, or a happy-ever-after. Although at first Rhonda seemed the aggressive and independent one who was strong and tough, her illness and dependence rendered her pitiful in a soppy family way, but what she really needed was pathos in the sense of sympathy and caring from someone who would share and understand her suffering. Muriel's feelings for her deepen because of her own bitterly pathetic experience with family and friends, including the horrors of heterosexual exploitation. Muriel has moved toward a degree of emotional maturity, now understanding the limits of her local life and the delusions of her dreams of an elaborate wedding, as if that guaranteed happiness when it was likely more an act of revenge against those who had humiliated her. Muriel and Rhonda are now sobered by experience and are capable of feeling and commitment, especially towards each other as two people who discovered they belong together. They have moved out, moved on, and moved in. Their struggle was not so much locating a place as locating a partner, but now they have each other and they are beautiful together.

Roman Holiday (1953): The Unlocated and Unaffiliated Godfrey and Irene located and made a home on “neutral ground” of sorts, away from her palace and his shanty in their own place above the nightclub which they can call home. Muriel and Rhonda have located each other, so any place away from their families and town will do as a home if they are together. But sometimes, locating a home and locating a partner run up against impossibilities, not the least of which is that prior locations such as country of origin and prior affiliations such as profession conspire to keep people apart. Potential partners may locate each other but find that there is no possible home wherein they can locate and dwell in peace. Impossible love can make for sharp and poignant comedy, since a “brief encounter” may be all that is feasible and allowable, leaving the separated lovers to ponder forever what might have been.

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We meet the elegant and youthful Princess Anne, the as yet unwed heir to a European crown of an unspecified country, employed in that job so many of royal lineage are relegated to: the goodwill tour. Anne is well trained in saying the right things about trade and peace at press conferences and in public speeches, and maintains a full schedule of appearances to various foreign capitals. When in Rome, she completes a day of such events, perhaps evoking in us the feelings of envy toward someone so poised and charming touring all the capitals of Europe and seeing all the wonderful sights. She exemplifies the fantasy that so many ordinary people entertain about wishing they were a prince or princess living in a palace with servants, having parties, wearing fancy clothes, and living the high life most people can only imagine. Far from enjoying her royal lifestyle, Anne is exhausted and bored by the daily schedule imposed on her by her ever-present and vigilant staff. She has been reduced to a palace functionary, a royal marionette put on display by her tyrannical assistants. She may be addressed as “Your Grace” but she is robbed of any grace as a regal victim of “the tyranny of the help.” This is immediately evidenced at the end of her first day in Rome when she is so overwhelmed that she rebels against her strenuous schedule in hysterics and is subdued by a sedative administered by her staff physician. She will now be knocked out for the night, and in the morning the staff will prop her up for another day of good will. Anne has other ideas. Before the sedative takes full effect, she manages to sneak out of the embassy compound and into the Eternal City. One might think her simply drunk and homeless, as she soon goes to sleep out in the open. An American male sees her, and apparently without ulterior motive tries to help her (asking for an address, she mumbles that she lives in the Coliseum) and lifts her into a cab. Not knowing what to do, he takes her to his apartment so she can (he thinks) “sleep it off”. A comic scene occurs when she tries to undress but groggily admits she has never been alone with a man (another hint of the tyranny she has had to endure) while trying to don his pajamas; he goes out for coffee and returns to find her curled up on his bed, but gallantly rolls her onto a separate couch. The next morning, the American wakes up late and hustles to work; it turns out that he (Joe) is a reporter for an international news syndicate and was scheduled to interview the Princess that morning. He lies to his editor that he had already conducted the interview, but the irritated editor shows him the news story about her sudden “illness” that required the cancellation of all her appointments. Joe's embarrassment is overcome when he sees the picture of Anne and recognizes her as the woman asleep in his apartment. Like many reporters in previous eras, Joe lives marginally and is

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perpetually broke, so he now sees her as a potential journalistic coup; he persuades the editor to pay him a large sum if he can produce an exclusive and in-depth interview with the Princess. Hustling back to the apartment, he finds her awakened and draws her a bath, leaving to call a free-lance photographer friend to take surreptitious pictures of her to accompany the big story. Joe doesn't reveal to “Anya” (as she calls herself) that he is a reporter, and offers to show her around Rome, creating photo opportunities and great material for his story of “what she's really like.” Anya politely refuses Joe's offer, but “borrows” a small amount of money from him and strikes out on her own. He trails her at a distance, and is much amused and touched, since for the first time in her life she is free and unaccompanied and making her own decisions. Her first big decision is to go into a barbershop and get her long hair cut into a fashionable bob. The flirtatious barber invites her to a barge dance on the Tiber that evening and she accepts. Anya buys a gelato and at the Trevi fountain “accidently” comes across Joe. She now claims to be a runaway schoolgirl whose only desire before returning to school is to have a day out in Rome having fun. She and Joe light out on a Vespa, joined by the photographer, clued now to the journalistic deception, furtively taking pictures of the Princess with a miniature camera, including her smoking her first cigarette. She even takes a wild and dangerous joyride on the motor scooter which gets them arrested, but when Joe informs the police they are on their way to get married (a first hint of attraction) they bow to the priority of romance and release them. When they visit a statuary called the “Mouth of Truth,” a marble face which legend claims bites off the hands of liars, Joe puts his hand in and she screams when it appears to be missing (up his sleeve). This reminds us that he is indeed playing with her. Still, they are having great fun and obviously falling in love with each other. She still is mum about who she is, but tells Joe about her longtime dream of living a normal life. At the moment, she is longing to prolong the fun, so she asks to be taken to the barge dance in the evening in the spectacular setting close to the landmark Castel St. Angelo, where she and Joe enjoy a romantic dance together. While they dance, the barber cuts in, so Joe and fellow journalist revert to role and envision the news value of a story with photos entitled “The Princess and the Barber.” At that moment, we move from the comedy of mutual deception to the farce of a raid by police agents from her homeland worthy of the Keystone Kops, with Ann joining in the melee by smashing a policeman over the head with a guitar. In order to escape, Anya and Joe jump into the river and escape to his apartment, pausing for a romantic embrace and kiss. At the apartment, Ann hears a radio report of the distress her illness has caused the people

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back in her country. She tells Joe she must leave, but does not reveal her identify. He reminds himself of who she is, and dutifully, if reluctantly, drops her off close to the embassy where they share a last kiss. She returns to the embassy and her life as a Princess. The story could have ended here, but it continues with complex and edifying comic poignancy. When she returns to her distressed staff, they think things will return to business as usual with them running the show and telling her what to do. Ann however will have none of it: she is transformed, matured, and dutiful, and refuses to be bullied and ordered about; she is now firmly in charge and gives them orders. Joe's editor comes to his apartment wanting the big story he was to get, but Joe lies to him that he doesn't have one, and prevents the photographer from showing him the photos. The next day, Princess Ann has returned to regal bearing and role, and holds a press conference where she gives the usual bland answers. She sees Joe and the photographer in the audience, and asserts herself again by breaking protocol to personally greet some of the members of the press. She descends from the dais and makes her way to Joe, now realizing that he is a journalist who could have exploited her but did not. The photographer gives her the “commemorative” pictures he had taken of her Rome adventure. Now with tears welling in her eyes, she tells Joe how much she enjoyed her visit and encounter with him in both wistful and diplomatic terms. She then leaves with her staff to her responsibilities and life as a now responsible royal personage. Joe lingers in the great and ornate hall after everyone has left, silently pondering and probably aching, but he too accepts the impossibility of a future with Ann and the inevitability of her departure from his life. She may soon be a Queen and marry a suitable royal consort, but he knows as does she what they both have missed. If Godfrey and Irene started a life together when they located a home that was theirs, and Muriel and Rhonda got a life when they located each other as a partner, then Joe and Ann ran up against the biggest hurdle of all, their inability to locate a life together. Godfrey and Irene found an ethos in a new place and new home; Muriel and Rhonda found pathos in their common human sympathy and plight together; but Ann and Joe could not discover and enact a logos, a “logical place and partnership” that would make sense. Unable to locate a life together, they had to abandon their developing love for each other and return to their respective lives in different worlds. It is a nice comic touch that Joe thought the Princess was a stray like him, a roving reporter who hangs his hat wherever a story or job takes him; in a sense, she is, since a palace is no more a home than a bachelor apartment of an itinerant journalist in an alien country. Sometimes

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comic logic seems cruel yet is part of the human comedy, with love blooming in a romantic holiday and fling but which cannot last in a world which does not always welcome lovers, and so the delicious fun of loving can only pass into sweet memory.

Comedies of Continuing Affiliation: Homemaking and Homewrecking We have seen comedies of affiliation in which people getting together want a home, and other people who get together find a home. The comic fun is watching them locate each other and then locate a place to enjoy each other. We also saw the comedies in which complications either subvert or prevent the conventional completion of the generic story: Charlie and Irene are headed for a subversive ending, although it is wry fun and for Charlie reintegrative; and Joe and Ann are prevented by protocol and station from open and lasting affiliation. Charlie is finally located back into the Family, Joe located back into journalism, Ann relocated in royal servitude, and Irene unlocated. The couples who succeeded all had enough good grace to make the relationship work, but Charlie and Irene at last didn't trust each other and used each other, and in a sense Joe was also exploiting Ann but gracefully chose not to use the story. In both cases, they could not locate a life together to the exclusion and supercession of other considerations. We are reminded of the resolve of Marty and Muriel, having found the right partner becoming determined to affiliate with them in a home of their own. Now we must turn to the final variation of comic affiliation, the comedy of how to protect and perpetuate the home you have against all sorts of encroachments and threats to its continuation. Once affiliation and location are established, all sorts of things can come unhinged. Comedy offers us wondrous imaginings of how a comfortable home can be infringed, what kinds of alternative homes we can envision, and how over-reaching on maintaining homes can be disastrous.

The Big Lebowski (1998): Abiding Despite Home Invaders and Homewreckers We are introduced by a voice-over narrator (“The Stranger”) to one Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, whom he describes as one of the laziest men in Los Angeles, placing him high on the list of the laziest men in the world, but that he is also a “man for his place and time.” The Dude (as he calls himself) is a scruffy and disheveled man of uncertain age who

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apparently is unemployed but somehow manages to live a hand-to-mouth existence without committing crimes. He lives quietly in his shabby apartment among pick-up furniture and wears a motley combination of clothes, consisting largely of bathrobes, flip-flops, and second-hand shorts and shirts. His days consist largely of drinking White Russians and going bowling with a small group of friends. He does appear to have been a student activist in his youth, signing an important reform manifesto and prosecuted as one of a famous group of radicals. Now he has abandoned reform politics, and indeed much of anything normally expected of such a person—a career, family, plans and ambitions, leaving a legacy, even women and a family. The Dude is passive but not dispirited; he just wants to be left alone in peace and live a quiet life. In that sense, he is a homebody with a small “family” of friends and quite content with just maintaining his home life and privacy. This man wants his own place and his own time as his to live in and spend, at base just to be left alone. His pop-Taoist motto is “take it easy.” But it is essential for comedy to proceed that he cannot be left in peace. Returning to his humble abode, he is attacked by two men who demand money, maintaining that his wife said he would pay it. They search the apartment and one of them urinates on his rug, but the dimwitted intruders finally conclude he is the wrong man and leave. After this distressing incident, the Dude gravitates to his hangout, the local bowling alley, where he discusses with his friends Walter and Donny what to do about the violated rug. Walter, an aggressive war veteran, informs him that there is in town another Jeffrey Lebowski, who is a millionaire with an extravagant “trophy wife.” The Dude goes to the Lebowski mansion seeking recompense for his ruined rug, and is eventually ushered into the presence of a wheelchair-bound older man who is a renowned philanthropist but not personally gracious, since he accuses the Dude of looking for a handout and decries nonconformist “hippies” and layabouts. The Dude realizes he is wasting his time with such a contemptuous moneyman, but as he leaves the mansion, he tells the Big Lebowski's aide that the rich man told him he could have any rug in the house. As a rug is loaded in his car, the Dude comes across Bunny, the Big's young trophy, who flirts with him but characteristically he is not interested, returning to his beloved bowling alley. By this point, we are beginning to discern that the Dude's character is remarkably, almost preternaturally, serene, seemingly drifting through life without concerns or hopes. Yet he does not seem disillusioned particularly, even though his past activities and subsequent history might so dictate. He seems rather to have transcended politics and other important issues and

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choices and cares for a life of withdrawal, although not contemplation or faith. His philosophy is simply pragmatic, making do one day at a time, and his hope is not to grow in wisdom or belief but rather to get through the day unscathed. Students of drama have observed that dramatic structures (plot, character, crisis and dénouement) display rhythmic movements and actions, including ascent and descent, conflict and cooperation, reasons and emotions. Yet the Dude seems immune from such rhythms, or at least seems to possess his own independent and relaxed rhythm which frees him from reactive or intense expressions (unlike his friend Walter, who is always exploding in rage or doing impulsive things). In a sense, the Dude is the ultimately located individual, at ease with himself and the world, affiliated with a small circle of “family” and committed only to a “normal” life free of rhythmic cycles or changes. His only hope when there are these occasional disturbances is that soon this too shall pass and he can return to normal and unperturbed life. But first he has to traverse the current disturbance. The Big Lebowski's aide calls him and says his boss wants to see him, but assures him that the rug is not the issue. The rich Lebowski is distraught because his young wife has been kidnapped for a large ransom. The Dude sympathizes, and the old man hires him as the courier for the money drop-off. He is given the money and a portable phone to take to the exchange, and decides to take Walter with him. The overzealous Walter immediately changes all the plans, arguing they should give the kidnappers a bag full of his underwear and keep the money, thinking that Bunny staged the kidnapping herself to get some money for her big debts. At the exchange place, Walter's intervention results in a mad comic episode, but the kidnappers do take the underwear bag. The Dude fears that Bunny will now be killed, but Walter urges a return to normality: “Fuck it, Dude, let's go bowling.” At the bowling alley, his car goes missing, along with the ransom money. Unfolding events test his equanimity: Big Lebowski's daughter has broken into his apartment and has taken the rug, claiming it was a gift her father had no right to give away; she tries to seduce him and also make him part of her scheme to get the ransom money back from Bunny for her “charity” to finance a porn movie she is making, starring Bunny. Her father then forces the Dude into his limo and accuses him of stealing the money, and shows him a severed toe he was sent by the kidnappers. The complications compound, and move us firmly into the theater of the absurd, including a visit to a TV writer in an iron lung with a teenage son who stole the car, Walter in a rage wrecking the wrong car, the Dude being drugged, mumbling, “All the Dude ever wanted was his rug back” because it “tied

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the room together”. The local police beat him and order him out of town, and on returning to his abode he finds it wrecked; the daughter is there and tells him to make love to her and he finally complies, after which she confesses she wants his baby but does not want to see him socially. The Dude figures out that her father faked the kidnapping, and ongoing to the mansion to see Bunny he discovers she had left town without telling anyone, giving her broke husband the chance to raid the charity and get the money, setting up the Dude (a “deadbeat”) to take the blame for the missing money. The “kidnappers” (self -described “nihilists”) burn the Dude's car and still want the money, but Dude and his two friends beat them up. Donny has a heart attack and dies; the two surviving friends put his ashes in a coffee can, which they cast towards the ocean, but the breeze blows the ashes all over the Dude. Then, they go bowling. At the bowling alley, the narrating Stranger sits down at the bar next to the Dude and asks how he's been doing lately, to which he laconically replies, “Oh, you know, strikes and gutters, ups and downs”; when he leaves, the Stranger advises the Dude to take it easy, but “I know you will”; the Dude replies, “Yeah. Well, the Dude abides,” which evokes from the Stranger a message addressed to the audience: “I don't know about you, but I take comfort in that,” and lets us in on the secret that there is a little Lebowski on the way, so that the Dude is out there taking it easy for all us sinners. That last quasi-theological note applies a messianic mission to the most unmessianic of people, and perhaps is the last ironic twist in a parody of a literary and cinematic genre, the private detective solving a crime on his own (in particular here, The Big Sleep). And, in his own way, the laid-back and amiable Dude, lacking all of the tough-guy and shrewd analytical skills of the private dick like Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe, does indeed finally figure out what is going on and who is what. But here everything is out of kilter: our generic expectations are all skewed, including the kidnapped wife (who actually isn't), the cuckolded and crafty millionaire (who is both broke and dopey), the sadistic enforcers (who turn out to be stereotypical “German nihilists” easily bested), and of course the antiheroic and unkempt Dude, who is in no real sense a disinterested inquirer doggedly and for reasons of his own after the truth but rather an uninterested and uninquisitive bystander who is mildly upset that someone urinated on his favorite rug. The Dude simply waits to be private and undetected, but is thrown into a cast of characters and situations aptly termed a “comedy of the grotesque” in which he by comparison seems quite sane and civil (if not ever completely sober). If there is a messianic quality to the Dude, it is his placid and unruffled equanimity when forced to deal with an insane and uncivilized world that impinges upon his

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commitment to quiet serenity. He inhabits a place and a time ripe for savage parody, a world populated with money-mad plutocrats and spoiled trophy wives and bohemian daughters and self-described nihilists and crazed gun-waving war veterans, all caricatures so bizarre and startling that they do indeed make the Dude seem quite normal and maybe even a bit blessed. The Stranger expects the Dude to keep on keeping house and enjoying his small pleasures and going bowling and being with a few friends and generally abiding, enduring without impatience, continuing without complaining, accepting without objection, and always taking it easy. That simple agenda is an affiliation in home-making characterized by its own singular comic grace.

Mon Oncle (1958): Alternative Ways to Affiliate The Dude leads a settled life of comic affiliations, but has to deal with the vicissitudes of those who would unsettle him. Indeed, all those things from his past that are unsettling—politics, social movements, community involvement—have been abandoned as irresolvable, so the alternative is simplicity, the quiet life as the good life. Complexity is uneasy and unfathomable, so a life of ease makes domestic affiliation something that is fathomable. Yet we know that many people are attracted to complexity. Living simply is regarded in some quarters as a sign of poverty, or unfashionability, or inability to accept innovation, and indeed anything that demonstrates a preference for modest living. There is always something comical about people's inability or refusal to understand that we are not in control of the things we attend to if we don't fully understand them, or that beautiful affiliations have a wondrous simplicity about them, even if they are something like the crazy wisdom of the Dude. Early on, the movie comedians of the silent era discovered that audiences love to laugh at people dealing with technology—electrified houses, assembly lines, and moving or flying vehicles. We all tend to share a feeling of mystification about technology and indeed technique itself, since we don't fully understand how technological “marvels” work and don't fully trust people who invent and understand technique. We're not altogether sure that our lives have been improved by new things in our world and the control of our lives by those who introduce and implement such things. We fear the “technological fix” that reduces what we do and how we live to merely a matter of more technology and the technicians who run the world through their superior “know-how” and expertise, sensing that such fixes and fixers may ruin the world by fooling around with things, from Dr. Frankenstein to Dr. Strangelove. The deepest fear is that our tools will take

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control of us, that we will become machines or automatons at the mercy of the techno-monsters we have created. In that horrific way, all our human affiliations, including running a home life with warm feelings and lasting relations, would be undermined by these new complexities which crowd and define the way we live. The contrast between affiliative simplicity and complexity in a technologically organized world has been comically explored by French filmmaker Jacques Tati, who in a series of films has made great satirical fun of our technological obsessions and pretensions. In Mon Oncle, we meet his alter ego, Monsieur Hulot, a tall and gangly fellow perpetually clothed in trenchcoat and fedora and smoking a pipe. He lives in a modern city with all its bustle and gadgetry, a technological society in both ubiquitous apparati and organizational pace. But M. Hulot is of this world but not in it; he is a curious observer but appears to take little part in its operation, since he moves at a leisurely gait and relaxed gracefulness. He shares with the Dude the preference for living quietly and simply, and also seemingly able to get by without doing much of anything that might be considered gainful or useful. Judging by the pace of his walk and his day, we can tell that he too adheres to the personal philosophy of taking it easy. But while the Dude's equanimity is upset by interruptions, M. Hulot is unflappable in the face of latter-day social impediments. Both are quietliving men with simple needs and an agreeable location; but in Dude's case, the world will not leave him alone, and in M. Hulot's, the world is so organized as to constantly invent idiotic obstacles or create exercises in futility. The Dude copes by staying slightly “high” and hanging out at home or the bowling alley; M. Hulot copes by adopting a bearable and light grace of being that allows him to traverse the barriers and traps of modern existence. M. Hulot abides in harmless and unpretentious good will towards the world he encounters as a whimsical and marginal observer. If the world of the Dude is one that evokes a comedy of amused parody of city life that is ridiculous and feeble even if intrusive and savage, then the world of M. Hulot is by contrast a comedy of bemused satire about city life that is in fact lifeless and superficial, even if pretentious and regimented. In both cases, our hope lies in misfits. When we first see M. Hulot, we realize that he is ill-fitted in more ways than one; he is lanky and ungainly, always dressed in an old raincoat and hat, a bow tie, and pants too short so we can see his striped socks. He is an oddity in a world bent on conformity, but his odd gestures are so gentlemanly and kind that he is immediately endearing. He lives in a location with charming people who know each other in an old, settled neighborhood of vintage Paris and in a top-floor room in an apartment

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building of stacked floors accessible only by stairs, another symbolic structure of pre-modern life. We see a woman in a negligee on the stairs, and he politely turns his back until she passes; we hear a bird singing outside his window, and he figures out that if the window is opened at a certain angle, the sunlight will reflect on the bird's nest and inspire it to sing, so he wedges it so to aid the bird in singing a great deal. He ventures out into his local neighborhood of the local bakery and farm produce truck and local people doing chores or sitting around the square playing chess and people watching. Like M. Hulot, they are not rich or sophisticated, so in modern terms they are hopelessly out of date, and in a sense that status frees them from the obsessions of wealth and technological acquisition. As M. Hulot ventures out into the modern and unneighborly city, we see all sorts of things that are up to date. The imagery moves from local simplicity to cosmopolitan complexity as we see traffic, both human and automotive, all moving in predetermined and regimented columns and rows towards office buildings and parking lots. Hulot's locality is being superseded by impersonality, people alone in their cars all solemnly driving to work stations characterized by organizational tasks requiring technology and labor discipline and then returning to their abodes after work again trapped in cars and then into houses befitted with technological gadgetry. M. Hulot's sister, Madame Arpel, is married to a wealthy plastics tycoon who approaches the Big Lebowski in dyspeptic fulminations. The symbolic centerpiece of modern life is their gated “mini-mansion” in a fashionable Parisian suburb that is in itself a hideous satirical comedy of modern technologic gone mad. In their house, everything is automatic: if they push a button to open the gate, this activates a fountain featuring an aluminum fish that spouts a stream of water. The yard is virtually devoid of grass or plants, but does have a series of rock paths that lead in no direction. The kitchen has plenty of gadgets but is sterile and almost uninhabitable, unlike a local bakery or bistro back in Hulotville. The furniture is functionally designed, which means it is uncomfortable to sit on or put food on. The Arpels are “geared” to this existence so much that they are fair game for satirical treatment, ranging from their dress gear, the standard issue business suit for him and the consumerist pastel dresses and high heels that click everywhere for her. Their environment dictates their inhibitions and hectic anxieties. As we might expect, such characters find M. Hulot annoying and even offensive. Not only does he manage to eke out an existence devoid of what they have achieved, but their son Gerard likes M. Hulot and enjoys his company. The Arpels view him as a bad role model for the son since he has no job or wife and is alienating their son from them. There is probably

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an undercurrent of envy here, since he is happy and carefree without money, and they aren't; he is unmarried and unburdened and they are wed but very burdened; and they may suspect that their son adores “my uncle” for his easygoing and avuncular relationship with him, taking him away from that dreadfully unlivable house and allowing him to run free and pull pranks with his friends. (There is a parallel story that speaks to free play: a pack of dogs that are joined by the Arpel's pet dog for frisky canine fun.) In order to reform the errant M. Hulot into conformity, the Arpels decide he needs “an objective,” in the form of a job accompanied by a wife. A job is arranged for him at a local company, so the clumsy and unwitting M. Hulot obliges to go there for an interview, venturing into the sterile glass and rectilinear environs, but not before he inadvertently steps into some wet white paint in the waiting room; he takes off his shoe and keeps putting it on the desk and chair until it's dry; when the personnel director arrives she immediately sees a line of white footprints, ending the interview. M. Arpel then gives him a job in his own plastics factory, entrusting M. Hulot with a machine that exudes plastic, but the bored Hulot goes to sleep and the machine runs amuck. Madame Arpel arranges a garden party on their miniscule patio, an effort of matchmaking M. Hulot with her neighbor (a woman whose prize possession is a garden so small that her expensive garden tractor is the same size). Naturally, this becomes a disaster as well, with everyone trying to sit on unsittable chairs at a tiny table and attempting awkward conversation while annoying domestic disasters occur, most spectacularly the underground water hose to the centerpiece rising fish is punctured, so the fish terrorizes their “yard” with uncontrollably spewing water. In the end, a job in the suburbs is arranged for M. Hulot, and the father and son by accident start playing an improvised game Hulot invented for them, actually enjoying it together and finally laughing, as M. Hulot would have wished. The little game and having simple fun symbolizes what Gerard found so appealing in his uncle, and we are left with a glimmer of hope that the Arpels may transcend their tightly wound technological existence. Perhaps Gerard in particular may discover the locations he saw with his uncle, not only the neighborhood of friends and shops and singing birds but also the location of personhood happily disorganized and unfit for regimented and geometrical modernity. We may expect that M. Hulot's new job will end and he will be back in his garret and locale again soon. But we may also expect that Gerard will learn the affiliative logic of M. Hulot's sense of location. Perhaps (like the dogs) he is learning that the modern ethos is unlocated or dislocated, and that an alternative logos—a logic of discovery of self and place—will relocate him into being a lot

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more like mon oncle and less like his parents and thus abandon a lifeless location for one that is full of life. Organized fitness leads one into a kind of death in life, where the structured environment of modern ethos is graceless and the logical antipathy of something more unstructured and devoid of “objective.” Graceful simplicity and amiable independence doesn't build houses like the Arpels or factories and skyscrapers that produce yet more things, but it does make life more vivid and fun, making the objective logic of ambition and concern and possession seem all the more foolish. Like the boys and the dogs, it would behoove us to let the serious make foolish things and the rest of us follow M. Hulot in becoming wise fools.

The Captain's Paradise (1953): A Bridge, or Rather a Bride, Too Far The Dude and M. Hulot no doubt can be regarded, as the Big Lebowski and the Arpels do, as unmeritorious people devoid of the rational merit that makes for success in the modern meritocracy, evidenced by their totally unmeritorious abodes in small apartments in remote and downscale neighborhoods. They indeed lack the heroic qualities and crisis mentality required for advancement and advantage in the organizational society. They are rightly regarded as misfits, since they do not see the ostentatious beauty of the domiciles housing the Big Lebowski and the Arpels, or the truth of their espousal of accumulative justice, nor the good of accompanying displays of power and status. By contrast, the worlds of the Dude and M. Hulot are antiheroic and unapocalyptic, but located in places of human affiliation. The Dude “hangs out” with a small group of intimates, and M. Hulot with the boys and neighbors. The only women we see are the Dude having sex with the Big's artist daughter, but all she wants is his seed; and the concierge's young daughter flirts with M. Hulot, but he is older and shy. Their livelihood is living without much direction and hopefully without undue interruption or impediment. Their respective nemesis tries to interfere by giving them directions, but their orientation is towards restoring themselves to lack of design. The Big Lebowski has a designed life with mansion and staff and new wife, and the Arpels have designed their lives around the latest technology and products. By contrast, the Dude and M. Hulot believe that the designed life is not worth living. Here much of the comedy of affiliation stems from the conflict of those committed to design and those who prefer to be undesigned, as symbolized by the contrast of chosen locations. The former are funny because they tend toward overdesign, accustomed not only to telling other people how

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to live but also what to do. The Big thinks the Little Lebowski is a discredit to the name, and the Arpels think M. Hulot a disgrace to the family. But overdesign can lead to comic self-destruction, undermining the best-laid plans: trophy wives can start fooling around, and domestic gadgetry can go awry. And sometimes one's overdesigned plans so perfectly established can turn out not to be an impregnable stronghold but rather a bridge to somewhere or something else. In some highly comic cases, such plans can be a bridge too far. We now introduce Captain Henry St. James, an English sea captain who runs a ferryboat (The Golden Fleece) across the Mediterranean from British Gibraltar to Spanish Morocco. When we first see him, he is standing in a prison courtyard facing a firing squad, about to be executed. His Uncle Lawrence is there, and asks Henry's first officer Ricco what happened to bring him to this shocking end. Ricco is a great admirer of Henry and tells his story. Henry is an experienced seaman entrusted with an important trade and traffic route, speaking several languages and dealing with the vagaries of sea weather and local problems with naval aplomb. For security reasons, the multinational crew is not given shore leave when they dock in Gibraltar, but when they dock in Morocco the crew disperses to their own homes or to the bistros and brothels. Thus, the good captain has layovers in both ports and seems to enjoy his job thoroughly. During the voyage across the sea, the boat is full of many kinds of people, but the Captain has a rule during meals: the captain's table only seats male companions, so women are excluded from his company. He enjoys chatting and eating with diplomats, explorers, scientists, and clergymen, but not women. He is mum about his private life, but is charming company for his passengers and respected by his crew as a responsible and reliable naval officer in the best British tradition. So how did he come to this sorry end? Since the captain divides his time between two locations, he hit upon a happy idea. In Gibraltar, he wants to live in that location as a British captain who comes home from sea to a home of domestic respectability and quiet predictability. The captain home from the sea has a very domestic British wife (Maud) who greets him from the kitchen with her apron on, pipe and slippers waiting, and dinner in the oven. For their third anniversary, he gives her a vacuum cleaner. One might think that his separation from women at sea is not so much chauvinism as a barrier against temptation, remaining faithful to his dutiful and homey wife. His routine at home is tidy and predictable, interrupted only by such outings as going to a concert, going “beddy-bye” every night at ten o'clock. The captain is home from the sea safe and sound in the warmth of domestic tranquility. Yet this highly routinized life and

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location—marriage to the perfect captain's wife in a comfortable cottage— is complemented by another life, and another wife (Nita). When the good captain disembarks in North Africa, he separates from passengers and crew during their stay over with his other wife (Nita), who could not be more different from Maud. Nita is a tempestuous Mediterranean, voluptuous and sensual: we first see her coming out of the shower rather than the kitchen. Their relationship is full of dancing in nightclubs, drinking champagne, going on moonlight swims, and plenty of passionate sex. The captain is a bigamist, and even makes the argument that “the perfect wife” requires two complementary women whose attributes play out to be unitary perfection, the Apollonian balance and calm of Maud and the Dionysian ecstasy and vivacity of Nita. This is his divisive and limited view of his two women, and women in general, but for him it is the most advantageous use of two locations and the people who are located there. Once we are introduced to this designed situation, we know that the comic complications are likely to stress and break the imposition of someone's perfection on someone else. The Dude successfully dealt with interruptions and M. Hulot with impediments; but here the captain has created his vision of a designed life which depends upon role and personality restrictions on his “dream girls,” and thus in time bound to become an impossibility when they descend to earth to become a person, or somehow find out about each other. They inhabit his locations and are expected to also display the habits which he expects, so when they might try to be something other than what he wants, Captain Henry has comic complications on his hand for badly overreaching. Since his two blissful locations are maintained by a deception, Henry's improbable balancing act takes us into the realm of farce. The women who are his complementary playthings are both enamored by Henry, but since he defines their affiliative life they have no life of their own and are expected never to change. But both Maud and Nita are restless, and by accident Henry mistakenly gives them the wrong gifts at a key moment of comic complication: Maud is given a bikini intended for Nita, and Nita is given an apron intended for Maud. Maud sees the skimpy bathing suit as an invitation for them to have more fun and enjoy a more lively time dancing and drinking and sexing. Nita sees the apron as an invitation to stay home and cook and enjoy domesticity. Henry resists, discouraging Maud from “stepping out” and telling Nita that cooking will ruin her figure. His chief officer Ricco begins to figure it out, since he sees Maud's picture in the captain's cabin on the way back to Gibraltar and Nita's picture there on the way to North Africa. Henry tells Ricco his secret, which makes him think the captain a “genius” for harboring two wives in

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separate ports, a variation on the old sailor myth of “a girl in every port” (we may even see a sexual reference in a ship named for “golden fleece”). Ricco is called into action when Maud impulsively decides to fly to the African port and surprise Henry. She goes shopping, and lo and behold, encounters Nita by chance in the marketplace, and Nita advises her on bazaar shopping; they become friendly and talk about their husband(s), not knowing that they are one and the same. Ricco and Henry in desperation call the police to arrest and deport Maud before she and Nita realize they are married to the same man. The situation compounds as Henry fears he is losing control: Nita wants Henry to meet her new friend, who turns out to be Maud, so he runs away before Maud can see him; the puzzled Maud comes to Henry's ship, and Ricco quickly changes Nita's picture in Henry's cabin to Maud's. The sensual atmosphere of North Africa affects Maud, and she wants to have fun, so much so that they make love in his cabin and she gets pregnant. At this moment Henry convinces her that Morocco is too dangerous a place for her, and she returns to Gibraltar. To his horror, Henry goes to his and Nita's place to find that she has on an apron and has cooked him a big meal; confused, he mistakenly calls her “Maud” and runs out; Nita discovers him in a bar getting drunk, so she promises not to cook anymore. Maud delivers the twins conceived in their tropical interlude, but they jointly decide to send them to live and go to school in England. (We should expect Henry to be happy with shunting the kids off to their uncle and public school, but not Maud, a clue that she is more assertive.) In a gesture of domestic recompense, Henry gives Maud a sewing machine, another symbol of hopeful return to static domesticity. It doesn't take: Henry comes home to meet a man (Bob) whom she goes out with to drink gin and dance; next trip, he comes in to find a housekeeper and discover Maud is leaving him for good for Bob so she can have fun and “stay up late.” Returning to Nita, his life totally falls apart: an engine explodes on The Golden Fleece, and he finds that Nita too is leaving him for another man; her lover and Nita quarrel, and in a rage she shoots him. Although we now recognize Henry as a rake and a “bounder,” he gallantly takes the blame for the killing to spare Nita. The movie ends where it began, with our charming if overreaching bigamist facing a firing squad. In the final moment, he pulls one last trick: when the squad fires, they shoot the officer instead of Henry who bribed them to kill him instead. That rascal Henry remains a consistent rogue, tempering his gallant gesture with a plan of escape, perhaps to love again, although not the same women. The subject of farce is often the ridiculous depravity of humankind, although a tale like this is not condemnatory but rather funny. There is

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plenty of pathos to go around these various pathetic figures, to be sure: Maud just wants to have fun, and Nina just wants to run a household, but neither wants to be “type-cast” in the narrow way Henry insists upon. The two households Henry pays for and visits are not locations of affiliation but rather of imaginary use, like a museum or movie set, a harem fantasy of two kinds of women who occupy a rest home and a playhouse, fulfilling the male dichotomy of women into two types (virgin-whore, wife-mistress, domestic servant-slave girl), but devoid of reciprocity and adaptability. The women move on to become something more than what he strictly wants, perhaps even towards free and happy affiliation in a location of their choosing. We leave the surviving Henry in an alien country both womanless and jobless, but since he is something of a cagey fox he may endure. At the moment, we may wonder if he understands what he did wrong, seeing the great comical flaw that makes him pathetic after all: he was unlocated, living out an unsustainable impossibility that proved him to be not a “genius” but rather a fool and leading to his dislocation. He is not so much depraved as he is ridiculous, but certainly incapable of affiliation and likely affection, although as a rakish fox, he is not without attraction. Perhaps the Dude and M. Hulot are more akin to the hedgehog, who “knows one big thing,” which is to establish location and affiliation and try to make do in that environment. Henry may live as a fox who “knows many things” but never settles or bonds. In that way, the Dude and M. Hulot may be less clever but in fact live a comic existence a lot closer to paradise.

Conclusion In our discussion of movie comedy, it seemed logical to start with funny people featured in those kinds of comedy which foreground and develop the relationships between people at a personal level. This is the level of human action we term “First Nature,” since observation and interpretation examine the primary processes of individuals in a variety of anecdotal situations. As individual human beings, we can each be described as anecdotes and the conduct of our lives as anecdotal. Every event or affair can be sketched out, everything that happens to us can be translated into a story, everyone has a tale to tell about themselves, every life has a narrative in retrospect, and everyone can entertain the notion that life is funny. Here we certainly have seen funny people doing funny things resulting in funny outcomes and consequences. Some of the characters and their actions are funny in the full sense of the term, producing not only

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laughter and good cheer but also reflection on the quizzical fact that people are funny. In looking at comedies of First Nature, we are in the province of that murky territory known as human nature. Our thought was that if we proceeded to examine the “stuff” of what people in comedies actually do, we may advance not only our understanding of the nature of comedy but also of human nature itself. This led us to focus our attention on comedies of personal appeal, and as one might expect, we came across an astonishing array of characters in a wide variety of situations doing things that relate to the pursuit of appealing people with sometimes happy and sometimes uncertain or bewildering outcomes. Such a delightful and interesting array of humanity makes the observer strain for adequate metaphors. We are looking at the “human barnyard,” a raucous populace seeking fulfillment with someone else who appeals to them; or perhaps we are seeing a comic menagerie, a wondrous collection of varied and unusual people comprising the universe of funny people the movies have shown us; or more cinematically, pictures at an exhibition, moving pictures we can follow as comical people and funny events unfold in a photoplay. In any case, the movie comedies we watch and enjoy are a cinematic extension of the great heritage of comic drama since ancient times, originating in a festive celebration of life and renewal, developed through the realization, or “bringing forth,” of a comic plot leading to a dénouement, and inspiring by its completion human learning through ruminating and musing about what this tells us about ourselves. Through comedy, we see human nature provoked by needs and wants, human action evoked through the enactment of plans and desires, and human experience invoked in reflection on what we have just seen and its incorporation into our fund of comic knowledge. By trying to make sense of movie comedy, we mold the stuff of comedy into identifiable patterns and categories which recur in familiar form but with wide leeway as to content. Comedies of personal appeal are common enough, but they participate in the larger universe of interactive patterns of behavior, whereby persons feel motives and become creative in initiating action, are motivated into action and counter-action and reaction in their personal quest for coherence with another, and are moved to establish continuity with that significant other. Although comedy often has uncertain and incomplete outcomes and consequences as a dramatic form, perhaps we enjoy it so much because it shows ordinary people guessing right when they act upon surmise and things play out towards a happy ending in which human hopes are fulfilled. Those who have thought about and written on comedy tend to agree that to enjoy comedy you must know about and appreciate the world of common human

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experience, realize that you can expect and be astonished by what people do that makes them look and act funny, but nevertheless believe that good cheer and happy outcomes are possible. Since we are all human, one of the joys and treats of life is to witness and study the human comedy in which we all have our own part to play. So what we see when we watch a movie comedy is persons trying to move from feeling bad to feeling good, finding ways to meet and keep other people to share good feelings with and for. Comedies about personal affairs convey to us the humane thought that after all we commonly want life to be appealing and want to be with people whom we find appealing. The conduct we witness in personal comedy is on a human scale: people come to see the beauty of appeal, which animates them in their quest; they realize the good of it, which motivates deeds done in order to realize their good thing and they come to appreciate the truth of their own thing, which is theirs to enjoy and endure. At the level of personal appeal where humans live and hope, comic beauty is enlivened, comic good is situated, and comic truth abides in convivial people dwelling in the joy of comic grace. The dictates and impulses we derive from First Nature orient and impel us into actions and activities characteristic of funny beings who are so understandably laughable that we have been laughing at ourselves for thousands of years, and now delightfully magnified up on movie screens for us to enjoy the fun of ourselves.

CHAPTER TWO FUNNY THINGS AS SOCIAL NATURE

In the first chapter, we directed attention to comedies of personal relationships, which we termed comedic dramas of “First Nature,” since they stem from primal desires (largely Eros) and are expressed through passions (largely pathos). Although these primary processes of motive and action are evident in virtually every kind of comedy, in the movies we have examined the “personal stuff” of the photoplay is paramount in the celebratory revel of physical vitality, what we might call “luminescent grace.” The point of the story here is the discovery, realization, and appreciation of human appeal, bringing two or more people together in a mutually enjoyable bond of luminous beauty in their lives. As we have stressed, such comic expressions of “human nature” serve a pragmatic purpose, because the fulfillment of human needs and wants channels and satisfies primal desires and further enhances physical vitality. As we shall see now, such activities are great fun both for the participants in human appeal and for the observers of the comedy of appeal in forums such as the movies, but they blend, sometimes subtly and at others blatantly, into “social stuff or what is generally labeled “social comedy.” In all the personal comedies we looked at, the people we met are all “members of society.” Such a commonplace observation of the obvious is evident throughout: our principals trying to overcome obstacles in their personal quest have to deal with family and friends, governments and police, churches and economies and other hierarchies, indeed in one way or another the whole range of social “things” in our lives. In personal comedy, all those social things—patterns of action, many of which are persistent and powerful forces in our lives—are present, but not omnipresent, background rather than foreground, of less concern and interest than what is unfolding between the principal protagonists of the comic story. In social comedy, however, we are more aware of the evocative power and importance of social things, and indeed their foregrounding is a vehicle of making fun of society through the “funny things” we are aware of in the story. Social things—habits, organizations, mores and folkways—are usually “second nature” to us, our “world-takenfor-granted,” so much so that we are not often aware of our sociability, the

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language we speak, the roles we play, the ways our lives are organized for us, the social problems we either address or ignore. Comedy is one of the more agreeable ways in which we become aware of our social being, and by extension how funny society is. It is not always pleasant for us to realize just how funny a thing society is, but comedy permits us to make fun of the way we do things often without undue rancor or upset. It is often said by social critics that if you want to criticize society, make fun of it or otherwise people will think you a subversive or lunatic. Comedy lightens self-criticism by poking fun at the things we do and the way we live, usually by asserting or assuming that we are not evil but reminding us that we are not perfect. Thus, social comedy can include and develop the familiar conventions of comedy but also include the presence and the problem of social factors as part of the foreground complications, and by so doing represent society as the “social things” that are there for us to see and understand. We may recall that the “dynamic direction” of personal comedy was towards anabolic composition, fulfilled in the paradigmatic happy ending of people living together in a condition of particular and genial grace, at best maximizing vigorous liveliness and enriching intimate well-being. But with social comedy, we are in the context of the societal “surround,” wherein questions of well-being are intertwined with the quest for the magnified grace of social comity and vitality. The aesthetics of beauty between people is still important but occurs in the narrative foreground of the value of social good, with the pathos of personal luminescence complemented by the ethos of social magnification. Here comic pragmatism addresses not only the sympathetics of how to get appealing people together, but also the matter of the pragmatics of how to magnify appealing relations as a social habit and practice. This is funny business: not only are people funny beings, but as members of society, they do funny things. As people are doing things in society, they are aware of their “social self” (roles, obligations, rules) and the reality of social facts, those extant configurations and expectations which color and direct social action. These facts involve us all in quests for some comprehension and appreciation of social good, those traits of character and custom which should be practiced as habitual second nature. Social comedy has great fun with, and often makes great fun of, these prevailing social goods, since human nature and human society may conflict as people learn how to circumvent or subvert social goods for private vices. In such comedies, people are capable of achieving some form of social grace, but we will also see people who embrace some form of social gracelessness, making for delightful comic situations. Social actors define social good in different

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ways ranging from altruistic and magnanimous other-regarding to selfish and mean-spirited self-regarding. The stuff of social comedy revolves around the funny things that people value and the funnier things they are willing to do to get those things they desire. Social comedy does not shrink from the interplay of human nature in both its generous and base dimensions, but rather celebrates how that interplay makes for the magnified animation of vital and resilient social goods. The comic revel here is about the joyous and eternal recreation of our social second nature through the comically flawed but wondrously recuperative first nature of mortals forever rediscovering just how to make society go. In virtually every society, there appears in one form or another some familiar patterns they share in common. These patterns serve common social functions for pragmatic purposes, such as direction and coordination of effort, division of labor and leisure, and honor for glorious deeds and distinguished reputation of those deserving of praise and reward. If those functions are periodically infused with revitalizing influences (comic relief such as court jesting, elite self-deflating by joking about oneself and inviting comedic satire, and allowing a vigorous comedic criticism), there is a good chance that such an “open system” may invite and embrace renewal of an anabolic social composition. If, however, such sources of ludenic remedy are excluded, a “closed” system” may so inhibit vital influences that playful innovation and comic pragmatism disappear, furthering the danger of catabolic decomposition. The “aesthetic pragmatism” of anabolic composition is crucial for social vivacity and human conviviality, and essential for the perpetuation of a good society. Much socially aware comedy emerges in the wake of conflicts stemming from such “life against death” divisiveness. These conflicts originate in the “first nature” of human motives but find expression in the socially significant organizations designed to administer important functions, but also in lesser and looser settings as well. In any social setting, people are motivated to participate and celebrate social values as manifest in community institutions and initiatives, furthering and enjoying the direction of society towards safety. Too, by relishing similar feelings toward efforts at optimal differentiation, we may produce a useful division of labor and measure of plenty distributed and shared fairly. Thirdly, we may further social order by respecting the allocation of prestige and status as honor justly rewarded for social service and achievement. But our pesky human motives impel people to twist the obligatory rules of social direction in order to dominate, using the office of a directive role in order to exercise might as a selfish expression of telling other people what to do and whom to obey. In addition, the helpful differentiation of roles and

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functions in society can be perverted into discriminatory and prejudicial divisions that create inequality and deprivation based on such motives as greed (I deserve to accumulate and keep much more than you), beyond all social reason. And, distinction can be sought and displayed not for deserved honorifics but rather recognition sought and flaunted out of vanity (Look at me!). By so doing, direction becomes domination, with obligatory rules transformed into obedience; differentiation becomes discrimination, governed by exclusionary rules motivated by possession (wealth, position, class) and distinction becomes ostentatious display motivated by vanity. The social “good of it” becomes the province of might (powerful dominating), means (wealth discriminating), and manner (luminaries demanding attention), which creates social tensions and agitations against the high and mighty, the highly ranked, and the highly celebrated. Since those who assert and abuse their power, place, and prestige are after funny people doing funny things, they are critical “stuff” for the conduct of social comedy. In this chapter, we will examine some representative movie comedies which treat the kinds of social questions and excitations arising in the course of social events. The interplay of our first nature with the social facts of our second nature is wondrous grist for the comic imagination, and the movies have not disappointed us. We will first examine comedies of domination, the ways in which various kinds of power are exercised with comic results. This will divide into three sections: political power, economic and technological power, and status power as manifest in important forms of social communication. Then we will discuss comedies of differentiation, the interplay of those who would turn useful divisions of social functionality into “exclusionary rules,” discriminating between those who are thought fit to be included and those thought so unfit that they must be excluded. So we will examine movie comedies that highlight the fact of hierarchies of social power and what is so funny about them. In addition, we will examine movies which center on vanities, the assertion of “pride and prejudice” in the display of self-esteem and self-love. We look at the comic consequences of social enterprises featuring the activities of people with professional credentials or social prestige who become involved in comedic tangles beyond their control. We will conclude with comedies of distinction, wherein there is something distinctive at question, including the conduct of action in institutions such as school, sports, and religion; comic struggles involving gender relations in their various forms; and also specific cultures which locate people in distinct identities, such as ethnic or racial, aesthetic, and scientific.

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Investigation of these various kinds and settings of social comedy gives us an idea of the range and the depth of comedies which feature society as a key factuality and social well-being as dramatic quest which can only be dealt with and achieved through social action. The pragmatic ethos of social good is always problematic, given the eternal dialectic of primal first nature's earthy calls and societal second nature's connections and junctions, Since societies organize themselves with some definition of good, they almost certainly create a body of mythic and ideological knowledge, giving super-structural credence to the idyllic quest for magnified social grace, and also a corresponding fabric of “counterknowledge” which describes a diabolic counter-quest as demonic alternative. In the ironic course of time and circumstance, the quest for a social good may become condemned as ineffectual or even evil risking our descent into the demonic, and what was formerly deemed impractical or evil comes to be seen as a paragon of social goodness. In some measure, the tensions between the affirmation and realization of social ideals and the negation and machination of self-seeking “realists” is the occasion and juncture of much comic interplay, indeed often “pushing the envelope” of what people consider funny. For social issues and conflicts typically involve questions of social values and appropriate action, including matters of life and death, freedom and obligation, peace and war, indeed anything which agitates people into social (and anti-social) action. Comedy's take on matters of social domination brings us into the realm of people trying to exercise power, sometimes not very well and with various unintended consequences for the political ethos at stake. Even though these stakes are very high, they are nevertheless very funny. Political orders in conflict with each other are often caught in power traps; political governments are occasionally subject to the hidden agenda of a cabal organized by a power combine; and governing bodies are sometimes revealed to be a power charade, sustained by the propagated communication of confidence. In the social arena of domination, we are often exposed to raw and contentious human nature, in this case political nature in action, directing our attention to “serious” matters. Critics ancient and modern have maintained that comics and comedy should not make fun of power and the powerful, sometimes because of their nobility, which makes them above criticism, and at others because of their seriosity, which makes them too solemn and their mighty acts too momentous for comic critique. The Aristophanic retort is that these are all the more reasons to make great fun of the great, who are merely pompous and self-important, and of greatness, wherein hierarchies use the attitude of seriousness to bring suffering

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through war and oppression, undermine the social contract through secret deceptions and manipulations, and stage parades and spectacles as an exalted and righteous display of the mighty expecting our obedience and subservience. With comedies that address social features such as domination, we see the operation of “bisociation,” wherein making fun of important people and big doings produces comic explosions because of the clash of humor with a social frame of reference that is inhabited by people who don't think they're funny doing things they think we should take seriously. The people who run things in organizations of domination can understand the distinction between the idyllic (Us) and the demonic (Them) but have more difficulty grasping comic funning about Edenic pretensions about Us and satanic imputations about Them. Rulers often have a learned incapacity to see beyond the imaginary pathos which sustains conflict, unable to understand why such a close-minded practice draws them to the use of force. So, as the comics always ask, what could be funnier than people in power risking and even seeking so much destruction, including one's own?

Comedies of Domination: Funny Political Things One, Two, Three: The Comedy of Irreconcilable Stalemate In various kinds of social inquiry—game theory, small-group dynamics, and transactional analysis—observers have recurrently noted and studied the behavioral pattern of human impasse, the various ways in which people in interaction reach a deadlock or standoff of some kind, in all cases involving no way out that is allowable or easy that everyone can agree upon. A married couple, for instance, may be held together by their mutual contempt for each other, with every day a repeat of the “I'm not happy unless you're miserable” game, both unable to let go since it gives them perverse pleasure to see the other suffer over what they say and do to the other, a marital version of “misery loves company.” Although the motives and stakes are much higher and more complex than in small groups, nevertheless the same behavioral principle obtains in political life. One can point to such melancholy examples as World War I, a conflict that stalemated rather quickly but for various and stubborn reasons no one would let go, so the carnage went on until everyone was exhausted and broke, a truce was called to no one's satisfaction, and war broke out again in twenty years. And, by extension, after the Second World War, the victors emerged as a coalition but immediately began to squabble and position themselves, leading quickly to various near-violent episodes,

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rearmament and strategic plans, settling into a stalemate on the continent of the two previous wars along lines controlled by the competing victors, with the symbolic flashpoint being the divided capital of the defeated enemy. The good feelings and mutual respect of the winning coalition suddenly is transformed into the ill will of enmity, both sides portraying themselves as an idyllic and superior state and society and the other as the embodiment of demonic power. Since both parties to the mutual misery possessed highly destructive weaponry, all-out war would be selfdestructive for everyone and their competing definition of the perfect political ethos. So things settled into a tense but hopeless “Cold War” which no one could win or lose, but no one dared leave the game, so the dangerous and expensive non-war dragged on and on. In One, Two, Three, we are transported to the heart of the matter, Berlin, and meet the executive of an American soft-drink company, one Mac MacNamara. He would like to be the head of company operations in London, so to this end he is trying to break through the barrier of the “Iron Curtain” to introduce Coca-Cola into Eastern Europe and even the land of the arch-foe, the Soviet Union. Even with these large personal and economic ambitions, Mac is beset by a variety of irritations such as the annoying heel-clicking subservience of the German office assistants (a comic hangover from the Nazi regime), and his boss back in the American South who is sending his daughter Scarlett to Berlin with the expectation that Mac will host his romantic and libidinal teenager. Scarlett stays much longer than expected, and finally announces she loves and has married a young German, who to Mac's horror turns out to be a dedicated Communist from East Germany who is not shy about telling Mac of his contempt for the West and capitalism, and is taking Scarlett to live in the Soviet Union. When Mac learns that Scarlett's parents are to arrive in Berlin the next day, he devises a plan to get rid of the young man (Otto) in the best tradition of political sabotage. He attaches a balloon with anticommunist slogans on the exhaust of his motorbike and plants a cuckoo clock that plays “Yankee Doodle Dandy” wrapped in the Wall Street Journal in the bike pouch. When stopped by the police at the East Berlin gate, Otto is suspected of being an American spy and is tortured by being forced to listen to an American rock ‘n’ roll song repeatedly. Just when Mac thought his problem was resolved, he learns that Scarlett is pregnant, so in desperation he deals with Communist bureaucrats, offering to trade them his secretary for Otto. She does a provocative dance on a tabletop in a rundown East Berlin hotel, where a portrait of Khrushchev falls off to reveal a picture of Stalin. He succeeds in achieving the exchange. Mac's only hope now is to remake the retrieved Otto into a good capitalist and

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aristocrat, so he arranges both a new wardrobe (he shouts at the reluctant Red, “Put your pants on, Spartacus!”) and a phony pedigree. Otto begins to like this new corruption and takes on the air of a thoroughly acquisitive and entitled anti-communist (confirming Mac's cynical remark when asked if everyone is corrupt, to which he replies that he doesn't know everyone). By the time Scarlett's parents arrive, Otto has been transformed into another being, thoroughly acceptable as the son-in-law of the wealthy family. Indeed, the father is so impressed that he announces Otto will be the head of Western European Operations, and Mac will return to Atlanta for a cushy job, much to the delight of his wife and children, all of whom are treated to a Coke in celebration, but the bottle Mac gets turns out to be a rival soft drink, Pepsi. Perhaps it is fitting to begin discussion of comedies of associative relations with one set in the antagonistic “brink” of a sustained and seemingly irreconcilable conflict threatening to end in mutual fratricide. The sustained stalemate does not evoke relaxation, but quite the contrary, enjoins ever more ardent attempts at subversion and separation. Indeed, the political context invokes a kind of resignation, since both “sides” to the crisis have reasons to perpetuate what might seem to be an intolerable situation. Everyone has assigned roles to play in predictable manner as acting caricatures. So in turn we see the offensive and mercenary capitalist determined to colonize the Communist world with his product and translates all problems as soluble by money, since everyone can be bought; the defeated and compliant German “hosts,” ranging from his disciplined and subservient office staff, the victor's trophy, his blonde secretarymistress (whom he eventually displays and trades to the Red commissars in exchange for Otto), and the stolid and thoroughly corruptible commissars and police in East Germany, living in squalid subservience to their own foreign “owner,” the Russians. Caricatures are ludicrous distortions to be sure, but here they fit a setting and situation that is itself ludicrously distorted and magnified as a grotesque travesty easily satirized as a comedic circus and cartoon. And neither side is spared. The Reds are obviously willing to be bribed and seduced, by “buying” the luscious secretary just like any other desirable Western commodity, and abandon ideological tenets and political scruples. The corporate boss Mac exemplifies the comic image of the capitalist as gangster and the American rich as blowhards used to getting their way. And, the unlikely young couple, who are respectively caricatures of the insane systemic conflict, she a personification of Western consumerism and popular taste (which, ironically, went a long way in subverting Communist ideals through the lure of things that brought pleasure) and innocent teenage recklessness, he

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a scruffy and belligerent ideologue who turns out to be just as malleable and selfish as everyone else, easily transformed into everything he was not. The idiotic situation of the Cold War is not only a “contained” conflict, it is also a time and place where the preponderance of force has stultified and undermined not only conventional wisdom but also conventional morality, since virtue is abandoned as inconvenient and corruption is the prevailing ethos. Since pragmatic solutions are beyond the scope of the power trap, then “quick fixes” and “greased palms” become the ethical norm. The political pathos is such that everyone is subjected to a kind of comic existence approaching bathos and certainly devoid of grace. This gracelessness is not so much the fault of the characters as it is a graceless setting, wherein ideology is a sham, both women and men are commodities for sale, a proud people are reduced to servants and retainers of their occupiers, and seduction is the only efficient means available. Otto may have seduced the capitalist girl as a blow for communism, but then he is just as easily seduced by the sensual lure of Western plenty and position. In the long run, the political contradictions that make the Cold War so dangerous and hilarious are undermined by both exhaustion and generational change, first with the Soviet bloc and then eventually with the eclipse of American hegemony. In some odd sense, the force that triumphed was popular culture, symbolized here by the universality not of ideology or history but rather mass desires and interests. The domination of powers and ideologies come and go but small pleasures such as Coca-Cola and youthful sex seem to transcend all boundaries and brinks.

The President's Analyst (1967): The Comedy of Cabal Comedies of domination set in a constrained and entrapped location and situation are so suffused with suppression of action and the accompanying repression of feeling that they invite acts of comic desperation. The Coke executive is desperate to get out of Berlin and get promoted; his wife is desperate to get him away from his German mistress and return home; the boss's daughter is desperate to fall in love, preferably with someone totally unacceptable to her parents; her lover is desperate to make a statement by violating and possessing capitalist property in the form of a wealthy magnate's daughter; the Communist officials are desperate to hang on to their shabby conquest by perpetuating the conflict. Everyone shares a willingness to break out of the stultifying constraints dictated by the power trap and find ways to do so that defy the imposed roles (e.g., getting pregnant, sabotaging the lover, remaking the lover,

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offering and taking a beautiful bribe) in order to do something forbidden or circumvent the system. Comic relief also includes initiatives that manage to use or misuse the norms of an inert system for human purposes, relieving imposed domination by the actions of the indomitable. In that sense, the various funny activities of the people involved demonstrate the futility of the effort to sustain domination of a time and place by enforced inertia. Comic vitality ensures that life goes on and moves on, reminding us that domination itself is a big joke, since after all we may ask the dominators the pragmatic question: what good is it? The same question may be addressed to systems of domestic domination that affect to rule in a “normal” manner. As critical inquirers have often found, ruling normality may conceal hidden agendas and darker purposes that people in power don't want the ruled to know nor do many among the ruled actually want to know. Governing elites often include coalitions of interests within and without the government who form cabals of power designed to realize some (often nefarious) goal without anybody outside the circle of intrigue knowing about it. Yet intrigue, like inertia, has a way of being both discovered and circumvented. The political ethos of normal domination invokes an aura of secrecy, which in reaction begets suspicion among those not “in the know”; and as secretive activities are conducted, people who do suspect that something untoward is occurring develop a sense of persecution and even paranoia. So rather than rule through fear by the perpetuation of crisis, a ruling cabal rules through ignorance by attempting the promulgation of the combine; rather than risking the ire of the uninitiated many, they want to keep the conspiratorial curtain drawn. The great comic flaw of such combines is knowledge, with people outside the know finding out something of what is going on, enough to conclude that their rulers are either inept or evil but most certainly insane. Rather than the comedic situation of a sustained stalemate over a war that nobody can win, we have the ridiculous predicament of a cabal within a government that nobody can keep hidden. Or can they? In The President's Analyst, we encounter Dr. Sidney Schaefer, a psychiatrist interviewing a patient named Don Masters, who turns out to be an agent for the Central Enquiries Agency (CEA) who has vetted the doctor during his analysis. The Agency chose Schaefer to be the secret psychiatrist for the President, as a privileged confidant with whom the man of power can share his thoughts and emotions. There are difficulties: for one, the good doctor has to be on call at all times to cater to the President's busy and hectic work life, and even more frustrating, since all this must be secret, he cannot talk to anyone about what the Chief Executive tells him. He is installed in a house in exclusive Georgetown and has access to the

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White House through a secret tunnel. At first, he is exultant and fascinated by the trappings of power and access to the mighty, but soon is troubled and then overwhelmed by what he learns in his private sessions with his “patient.” Schaefer is also aware that his presence and admittance is opposed by Henry Lux, the diminutive but powerful head of the Federal Bureau of Regulation (FBR), a governmental rival to the CEA. Lux's antipathy involves not only suspicion of access to intelligence by a private citizen, but also cultural: the doctor is a bachelor and liberal-minded, which offends Lux (modeled on J. Edgar Hoover, a lifelong bachelor and moral conservative), and he opposes Schaefer's new girlfriend living and sleeping with him on government time and money (it turns out she is a CEA agent who tapes his conversations with her, including his talk in his sleep). Dr. Schaefer has lucked into the psychiatric case of the century, but his knowledge of what his patient says is also the ultimate “macguffin,” the thing that everybody wants most in this insane world of spy-vs.-spy. The interested foreign powers range from the Russians to the Canadians (!), all anxious to get hold of Schaefer's presidential secrets. Schaefer is unwittingly up against not only the domestic national Combine, which rules through superior knowledge (“intelligence”) and its ironic antimony in a democratic State, popular ignorance; but since that State is a world power, his sudden access to the presidential psyche is a vital source of strategic knowledge to all the other conspiratorial forces afoot, both foreign and domestic (the FBR is finally ordered to kill him). Indeed, unbeknownst to virtually everyone is a hidden sinister power that is watching and listening to everyone. As a professional psychiatrist, Dr. Schaefer is acutely aware that the presiding executive of the State is badly overburdened, but he is also discovering that his patient presides over an insane system of power. Schaefer is also realizing that he is now part of that system, to the extent that he sees hidden motives and plots against him and the State everywhere, having paranoid reactions in restaurants and other public places where he imagines everyone is listening or trying to kill him or kidnap him. He has entered a world in which you can't trust anyone, including yourself. Understanding that he is now a character in a black comedy of domination, he does the only rational thing by deciding to get the hell out of this madhouse and go “on the lam.” He escapes from the White House by joining a group of visiting tourists and befriending a family who seem hospitable on the pretext that the President wants him to visit typical American families to find out their concerns. However, he discovers that this family (named Quantrill, reminding us of the infamous vigilante band in the Civil War era) claims to support the President as

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political “liberals,” but is armed with an arsenal of weapons to defend against neighboring “fascists” who “ought to be gassed.” The doctor learns much about the diffusion of the principles of domination when these liberals go out to eat “Chink” at a Chinese restaurant, and are beset by international assassins out to kill the doctor, who the Quantrills dispose of by the wife kick-boxing them and the husband blasting them with a powerful handgun. Now he knows that he is highly dispensable, so in the street melee he hops into a “hippie” microbus where he meets the “Old Wrangler,” the head of the group who have decided that the “straight” world of domination is “nowhere” and thus they pursue the antiEstablishment life, including the free love practiced by a nubile young woman named “Snow White,” who Schaefer eventually makes love to in an idyllic summery field while various assassins are foiled in trying to kill him. Eventually he is kidnapped by the Canadian Secret Service posing as a Beatles-like pop music group and saved from assassination by the FBR by a KGB agent named Kropotkin. He is a close friend of CEA agent Masters and wants to spirit the doctor away to Russia, assuring the doctor the place is friendly, since the two rival powers are more alike each other all the time (giving credence to the suspicion that the Cold War conflict we saw in Berlin was something of a phony co-production). But the psychiatrist is learning how to play the game, and tantalizes Kropotkin by revealing insights into his psychic makeup and past, so much so that he wants to continue therapy with the doctor and returns with him to the U.S. At this point, the practice of political domination seems an absurdist game of various government agents acting on behalf of their governments or agencies by targeting the doctor. Yet there is a more comically sinister force at work that no one notices. Throughout, we have seen service trucks marked simply “TPC.” Recurrently, telephones don't work or it is impossible to get through the operator maze. Kropotkin even remarks that as a Soviet spy, he has been all over the world and everywhere he goes people hate the phone company (“even Bedouins hate the phone company and they don't even have phones”). At one point, the doctor is trying to use the phone in a phone booth on a country road, when a large TPC truck pulls up and lifts the booth and Schaefer into the vehicle. He is transported, booth and all, into the surrealistic setting of TPC headquarters, where he is allowed to speak through the booth phone to an official of TPC, The Phone Company. He laconically informs Schaefer that the corporation needs his help as the President's analyst in a project they want to implement. He is initially astonished and mystified (doubletaking in disbelief, “The Phone Company?!”), and then horrified as the TPC official shows him a corporate cartoon that narrates in cute graphics

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what they have in mind. The narrator explains “the fun, the ease” of a TPC brain implant named the Cerebrum Communicator (CC), a microchip that can communicate wirelessly with every CC in the world if one just thinks of another's number; the CC instantly calls and connects, thus eliminating the need for TPC's massive infrastructure and payroll. Schaefer responds with psychiatric jargon to the effect this is all insane megalomania on the part of the corporation, which his interlocutor ignores, again insisting that he blackmail the President into authorizing such an innovation, since of course everyone will have to be assigned their own personal number. At this point, the joint Soviet-American commando unit of Kropotkin and Masters shoot their way in, free Schaefer and give him a machine gun, which he gleefully uses to massacre the TPC security unit. They then discover that the corporate shill is in fact an automaton with an electronic plug attached to his ankle. They escape, and the corporate plot is foiled. Or is it? In the end, we see Dr. Schaefer at Christmastime, with “Joy to the World” ringing in the happy season and happy ending, for he has been reunited with his nubile girlfriend and his new friends Kropotkin and Masters at a celebratory reunion. As they enjoy their sense of relief and resolution, we are aware that there is another unseen audience to their private gathering, as we see a corps of identically-suited TPC automatons, all hooked up to ankle plugs, watching Schaefer and friends with detached interest and approval. In that moment, we realize that the implacable and unseen corporation has won by introducing a more sophisticated and subtle form of control. The rude methods of political conflict represented by the spies—surveillance by stalking, intimidation and torture, threat and assassination—are now being superseded by insidious and hidden forms of corporate control through propaganda and public relations messages. These more subtle methods suggest compliance and consumption and implore regimentation and subordination without self-awareness, perpetuating the ascendant super-ordination of “rational” organizations armed not with weapons but rather with a combination of Orwellian control of knowledge and Huxleyan control of emotion. This new technique enhances a closed system ruling isolated and pacified subordinate populations, the Combine morphing into the Matrix. If an irreconcilable conflict such as that located in divided Berlin represents the gracelessness of political division, the hidden agenda of corporate cabal as envisioned in the ambitions of TPC highlights the gracelessness of political subversion. These movies make great sport of two modern versions of ancient social and political methods, force and fraud. In the former instance, the comic grotesque is manifest in the fact that force has been met by counter-force yet the stalemate is restored and

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continued no matter what; and in the latter, hidden and pernicious fraud brings confusion as to who's behind the idiocy and what's going on that we don't know. So, no wonder human motives are evident as comic desperation in the former and comic perplexity in the latter. In both cases, the very alive people coping with political smoke and mirrors are faced with major manifestations of mystification, the mystery of the unfathomable tension and uncertain outcome of the Cold War and the mystery of the unknown plans of secretive corporations. From the point of individuals caught in the crucible of such social “big doings,” the cynical utilization of force and fraud seems nonsensical, but to large organizational hierarchies such as the State and Corporation, it makes a “higher” sense that seems in ordinary life to be nonsensical but for them serves a vested interest expanding their power. Comedy flourishes when people have to deal with “socio-logic” that for ordinary morality or purposes appears illogical as exercises in futility or reaches for control that are pathological. In such a social world, comic grace resides in people rather than organizations, realized to the extent that human beings can figure out how to stymie or undermine the inhuman and superhuman deadliness or dreariness of those who would rule us. In that way, comedy serves a humanely subversive function against domination. Comedy takes the socially monstrous and inconceivable and renders it as preposterous in conception and trivial in comparison with living beings.

The Wizard of Oz (1939): Penetrating the Palace From the perspective of the comic imagination, organized forms of social domination tend to be depicted as funny, no matter how threatening or outrageous they might be. The exercise of force and counter-force might seem to the serious-minded as not something that is an apt subject for frivolity and superfluity one associates with playful expression, yet comedies of domination make great sport of the haughty pretensions of power. Wise laughter is provoked by the spectacle of conflict that is not only hopelessly stalemated but capable of mutually devastating destruction. Too, what could be more comical than a megalomaniacal reach for overweening power by something as innocuous as the phone company (or for that matter, banking and financing firms)? One, Two, Three and The President’s Analyst illustrate that the organized distribution and exercise of power, either by the use of force or the deceptive and secretive extension of power through artifice, is essentially a closed system. Comedy depicts how people caught in the trap of such dominative powers can find openings or “cracks” in the system in order to let them escape and

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flourish elsewhere. Figures as diverse as Mac and Otto and Dr. Schaefer and Kropotkin demonstrate their abilities at divergent thinking (how do we get out of this mess?) and pragmatic disengagement through playful adaptation (joining the decadent capitalists or hippie rebels). A good bit of social comedy in fact plays out as a drama involving on the one hand associations (the State, the big corporation) attempting to control or circumvent individuals, whose interests lie by contrast in the pursuit of sociability, relationships and habits which evolve in the interstices of labile and selective preferences that are not necessarily institutionally approved or organizationally sound. Certainly, in comedies of domination, heroic striving is an activity sanctioned by the governing body, although such affectation comes out as comic parody (the diminutive but Napoleonic Henry Lux of the FBR.) or comic buffoonery (the Communist bureaucrats of Berlin). Indeed, organizational activities in more general terms appear comical (the corporate dream of conquering the Communist world not by arms but rather by Coke, the corporate automatons with their “happy face” smiles and benevolent air hoping to conquer our brains through an implant). The antiheroic figures we identify with may be agents of some kind of social power (soft drinks, psychiatry) but they wind up as sympathetic figures because of their adaptability (seeing the situated as malleable) and practicality (mastering a situation), demonstrating that comic figures have their uses as agents of contradistinction from the situated “way things are” as defined by dominant associations. Their pragmatic skill is adroit manipulation of the situation for the sake of worthwhile social relations that furthers the comic good of the way things ought to be. And in so doing, they not only advance some desirable humane state, however temporary (the Cold War continues, corporate machinations go on) but also remind us that the vain and futile power assertions and arrangements of those who rule is but foolishness before the gods. We have seen an example of the comedy of conflict and the comedy of cabal as something that can be understood and even utilized as a social complication that can be overcome. There is a third form of dominative practice that is familiar enough, which we shall call the charade of power. This is the method of ruling which relies not so much on force or fraud but rather on fantasy, exercising power through orchestrating popular imagination and expectations to the extent that one can rule through opinion. If, for example, a ruling elite can communicate that they are powerful and legitimate and thus should rule, or that they are benevolent and wise, or that they are godlike and should be held in awe as able to work miracles, know mysteries, and hold semi-divine authority, they

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should remain in the august palace at the capital city. So if a ruler is held in awe because of successfully communicating a reputation that evokes reverence and respect or provokes fear and dread, she or he may continue to enjoy a tenure of good graces with their subjects. The grave danger for “palace politics” is the possibility that the magic show is seen through, the stage illusion collapses, and everyone sees that the emperor-magician has no clothes, and it was all a trick. In The Wizard of Oz, a girl who lives with her aunt and uncle on a remote farm in tornado country tries to run away from home to save her dog, but instead is lifted by the storm and transported “over the rainbow” to a colorful and strange land. She lands in a province of the Land of Oz called Munchkinland, and acquires magical slippers desired by a witch because of their great power, furthering her goal of being the ascendant magician in Oz. A good witch advises the girl (Dorothy) to follow the “yellow brick road” to the capital and consult the great and powerful Wizard for his help in returning her to her farm home. The mention of the Wizard evokes awe in the Munchkins, who revere him although he is very mysterious. Dorothy sets out to “petition the government for a redress of grievances,” and along the way acquires allies who need the Wizard's help too: a Tin Man who cuts wood but lacks a heart, a Scarecrow who lacks a brain, and a Cowardly Lion who lacks courage. The adventurous foursome reach the Emerald City but are at first refused admittance into his august presence. When they finally gain access, they are greeted by a terrifying and gigantic apparition of a large head with a booming voice speaking out of fire and brimstone, identifying itself as the great Oz and demanding to know what they want. The Old Testament figure then humiliates them all to the point that the Lion faints. Dorothy rebukes Oz, who thunders that he has every intention of granting their request, but they must prove themselves through performing a “small” task, actually the dangerous mission of bringing him the Wicked Witches' broom. After much travail and danger, they do bring Oz the broom, but he demurs and tells them to come back tomorrow after he's given the matter some thought. When Dorothy objects, the Wizard insists and the vocal thunder gets louder; her little dog then pulls back a curtain and we see an ordinary-looking man pulling levers and speaking into a microphone, creating the gigantic illusion of a godlike figure speaking from a heavenly perch. When Dorothy accuses him of being a humbug and a bad man, the now-exposed Wizard humbly submits that he is actually a very good man, but just a very bad wizard. He may not be much of a wizard, but he does demonstrate that he has some wisdom. Unable to work miracles, he substitutes with symbolic rewards: instead of a brain, he gives the Scarecrow a diploma;

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instead of a heart, he gives the Tin Man a testimonial; and instead of courage, he gives the Lion a medal for valor. He then offers to take Dorothy home in the balloon that brought him to Oz and his wizardry, since the people thought on his arrival from the heavens that he must have god-like powers. Now unmasked, he cagily figures that this is a politic time to leave anyway, so he bids goodbye to the Ozians and his newly institutionalized and honored successors, the now officially recognized bearers of State intelligence, benevolence, and the lion of defense. The balloonist-charlatan takes off without Dorothy, but the Good Witch informs her she has the power to go home just by wishing it so, and she awakens in her farmhouse, vowing never to leave again since there's no place like home. Home is certainly a long way from the forbidden city of Oz's palace, complete with the long and empty marble halls and massive doors characteristic of Kremlin-like structures of enclosed power so beloved of the world's tyrants but feared and avoided by ordinary people. Like the Grand Inquisitor, his Wizardry depends on the majestic aura that emanates from his magnified personage and mysterious powers, deriving his personal authority from the awe that his public image invokes and the exalted repute of his ability to work miracles for the benefit of his subjects. It has been argued by scholars of historical anthropology and paleontology that the first kings were magicians, so Oz—the showman-carnival balloonist turned conjuror and wonder-worker—is simply in that great tradition. He avoids conflict with his rival powers, the Witches of parochial regions, and indeed enlists Dorothy and her allies to do his dirty work in disarming one of the Witches, thus lessening the chances of a cabal against him leading to a coup. Yet his strength resides in what potent qualities people attribute to him, like a tribal god who lives and rules in an ancient ziggurat (or modern Forbidden City). Such personages rule by combining the inflation of reputation palace secrecy evokes among people who confuse remoteness and inaccessibility with power and capability in the public exhibition of pageantry and parade elevating the powerful as the glorified and venerable center of dramatic spectacle. Comic exposure serves the purpose of reminding us that a charade is based in fantasy projected onto public figures, so in a sense wizards and kings and emperors are our creation, creatures we make up and they willingly play along. Here political domination is a shadow play and magic show, and we should all be grateful when little dogs pull back the curtain and let us see the humbug pulling the levers and blowing smoke in all his inglorious triviality.

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Comedies of political domination certainly tell us much about the social nature of power, not only in the variety of Machiavellian strategies and struggles people utilize in order to seek and hold power but also the extent and depth to which power seeking is a very funny human folly best understood through the good graces of comic counter-folly. Political people pursuing a dangerously lethal conflict or plotting a secret coup or running a government agency or grooming and displaying a public image usually do not like to made fun of, since that immediately threatens to deflate their plans and conceits. Running military and ideological warfare or plotting a cabal to affect governmental policy or propagating an awesome public image is serious business not to be trifled with, so comic treatments may reveal that warriors and conspirators and pretenders are defending the indefensible and plotting insanity or puffing up their image and thus must be opposed or suppressed. Forms of social domination are the perfect foil for the comic imagination, and although comic funning may not be able to end Cold Wars or unmask cabals or deflate princely pretensions, comic insanity is at least a sensible response to the dominative insanities of which it makes such great sport.

Comedies of Domination: Funning in the Techno-Economy A second kind of social domination is distinct from, although closely interrelated with, politics, so much so that the phrase “political economy” has been coined to describe how politics and economics continually transact. Another descriptive term is relevant here: technique, referring to the increased sophistication and prolific use of the forms of organizational and mechanical means which characterize modern life in both work and play. The movies, after all, are a prime example of the development and distribution of commercial films using the coordination of devices and skills to make movies and studio and theatrical organizations getting films produced and shown. Since the modern industrial and organizational revolutions, prosperity and complexity have increased many fold, but the pace and expectations of modem life have taken a toll in anxiety and frustration. Although innovations in economic power and socially sanctioned techniques are deemed a social good, this is counterbalanced with the realization that such changes have wrought social bad. The bad things that are consequences of the “techno-economy” stem from the new forms of domination that make great demands on people and introduce changes in life that are unwelcome. The critics of the new economic order pointed to the regimentation of work forces that essentially made workers

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into slaves who were part of an organizational system that used them as part of the machinery of production. Too, the charm of rustic and rural life was often disturbed by the introduction of modern forms of organization such as techniques to extract fossil fuels from the earth that destroyed natural beauty and the balance of nature. And finally, the realities of modern economic life often meant that people were expendable, so mass unemployment and other social maladies could suddenly appear without warning, leaving individuals and communities destitute and abandoned. The concentration of wealth and skill at the top of big organizations produced enough social bad as to breed resentment and resistance, a social division and often calamity that persists in the present.

A Nous La Liberté (1931): The Comedy of Regimentation and Liberation The tension, indeed often enough the contradiction, between freedom and subjection is ancient and perhaps insolubly rooted in First Nature. It is most evident and consequential when it arises out of Second Nature in social practice involving the large-scale coordination and direction of populations in some directed social enterprise. The rise of public education, for example, involved the creation of educational systems and curricula to bring enlightenment and skill to children, but also required the use of coercion and discipline in order to facilitate teaching and learning. It was argued by social and school officials that the loss of freedom by students was necessary to free them from ignorance and penury. But critics (not to mention students) often felt that school reflected and enhanced the great modern tendency toward mechanization, turning education into rote learning of official doctrines about obedience and work discipline. In that way, school didn't educate students for the enjoyment of freedom but rather indoctrinated them into the requirements imposed by the political powers who wanted compliant citizens and the economic powers who wanted reliable workers. In those cases, it is no wonder that students often thought of school as something akin to prison, a place of mechanistic and mindless work and confinement rather than play and exuberance. The external social agenda and the internal ritualized routine features regimentation as a mechanism to advance an assembly of socialized beings who resemble each other in thought and action rather than a lively student body of feisty individuals. From the point of view of stringent social authorities, such an agenda satisfies a norm of systemic perfection, with the students learning to know and do what is required of them to become acceptable and even maybe successful. It is no wonder, then, that such a

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social institution should invite both informal and formal comedic treatment. Across both time and space, there is a body of comic stories and folktales which include stern principals, old-maidish librarians, blustery coaches, lecherous professors, snooty cliques of rich kids, “dumb jock” athletes, “nerdy” genius science majors, and so on down to the present endless array of teenage comedies. Comedies about School are merely one recognizable example of how comedies of domination depict the eternal social tension between freedom and regimentation, the animated desires of the idiosyncratic individual pitted against the expectations for conformity and even uniformity by social structures armed with authoritative and technical power. Here the exercise of social power is reductive rather than expansive, suppressing the animated and distinctive qualities of individuals in a kind of “Pygmalion project” to restrict themselves to forced roles and obey demanded rules. Thus, comedies of regimentation tend to be about rebellion or at least evasion, how astonishingly funny the attempts to destroy humanity and individuality are, since they after all portray selfdestruction not only for the prisoner but also for the jailer. Such comedies are important because they give playful life to the great contradiction in social ethos between human variability and organizational predictability. They serve a pragmatic utility for audiences: if society is indeed conceived and organized as a prison, how do we change that or escape. Where are the exits? In A Nous la Liberté, we meet two prisoners, Emile and Louis, who are cellmates in a French prison. Their lives are strictly regimented: they wear dull and numbered prison uniforms, are surrounded by guards and the days are spent in the same endless boring routine of work and mealtimes and confinement in their cells at night. The work is repetitive assembly-line construction of toy horses, with the labor divided up into simple tasks, the prisoners marching in and out of cells and the mess hall arranged in the same way as the work tables. One of the few convivial outlets is when they burst into song to vent feelings; otherwise, their lives are a grim matter of labor discipline. Their only hope is for eventual release or immediate escape, and Louis and Emile try the latter, with Louis successfully escaping but Emile failing. In the street, Louis runs into a speeding cyclist, who is dazed; the escapee, who has stripped off his prison garb down to his underwear, commandeers the bicycle and rides furiously to escape the prison guards. It turns out that the cyclist was in a bike race so quickly Louis comes upon a throng at the finish line who cheer him as the winner of the race. At first puzzled by the acclaim, it gives him a new identity and facilitates his escape.

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We move forward in time to see a greatly changed Louis, who found “honest work” as a sales clerk but eventually worked his way up to become an entrepreneur, the owner and manager of a company that makes phonographic equipment. Back in prison, Emile has passively accepted his fate of confined drudgery but an opportunity avails itself and he does escape. On the outside, he meets and is attracted to a lovely young woman, whom he follows to a huge factory complex where she works. In good comic Second Nature, this turns out to be the phonograph factory headed by Louis; as a comic innocent, Emile is unwittingly put on the company payroll. Louis and Emile are a perfect comic pair: Louis is cunning and daring, faking a robbery after he wins the race so he can make off with the shop owner's money, giving him the means to dress properly for work. Emile is slow-witted and accepting, but something always turns up, for when he escapes and is sleeping in fields, singing “the shadow of prison has given way to the sun,” he is arrested for being a vagabond and put in jail, making him so despondent he tries to hang himself, but the rope gives way, allowing him to escape again. At the factory, Emile is taken to the employment department, and we start to grasp the movie's great comic twist; there the prospective workers have to listen to a recording instructing them on how to be measured, weighed, and fingerprinted. Quickly Emile is working on an assembly line similar to his prison work, but distracted by the pretty girl he had met, loses concentration and creates a breakdown of labor discipline and smooth production of phonographs. He tries to talk to the girl, but is stopped by a guard at the foot of a grand staircase, when Louis emerges from his executive office and notices his friend, but seems to either not recognize him or merely pretends not to know him. In any case, he takes Emile into his office and accuses him of an extortion demand; they scuffle, and Louis cleans a slight wound inflicted upon Emile, both now recalling their prison break and embracing and singing in happy reunion. The appearance of his old friend reminds Louis of his wicked but carefree past and his prison record, but threatens his status with his new respectable friends. Emile is invited to a dinner party at Louis's bourgeois mansion, where the old disrespectable friends drink, reminisce, and make fun of the haughty and hypocritical dinner guests, as well as his wife Maud and her gigolo, who in return express contempt for their current lightheartedness and their now exposed lurid and lower-order past. For them, Louis may be rich but he is not meritorious, since he was once a criminal and is now a fugitive; also, he now reminds the respectable of the causal link between criminality and prosperity, another uncomfortable example of the observation that behind every great man and fortune lurks a crime.

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Louis is indeed quite aware that he has organized his factory on the prison model, and runs the workday and production process with the same ruthlessness in attaching workers to the machinery of dehumanizing technology. Indeed, he is planning to open a new factory that will increase productivity and thus his fortune even further. At this point, Louis seems in the mold of the “captain of industry,” the driven “robber baron” who cares for little more than entrepreneurial success at the expense of everything else. But the appearance of Emile, and the memory of the playful life, not to mention the departure of his wife Maud (and likely the association of her society friends), gives Louis new ideas. This is enhanced when he is recognized by an ex-prisoner he served time with, and on returning home discovers his servants tied up, encountering former inmates who are now a gang and threatening to expose him unless he pays them. This all becomes farce: Louis traps the gang in a room, and puts all his accumulated cash in a suitcase. As he hides from the police, another ex-con steals the suitcase; Louis pursues the thief and Emile inadvertently lets the trapped gang loose. Louis is pursuing the one thief while Emile is hoping to catch up with him to escape both the guards and the gang; when the thief and the gangsters are caught, they again tell the police that Louis is an escapee but are not believed and taken away to jail. The ethos of the life and social ties that Louis has forged are now at risk, and the reappearance of Emile has likely reawakened his memory of the mindless servitude and toil of prison under the watchful eye of a warden (not unlike himself now) and his troop of warders. With his society connections gone, his status and even freedom threatened, and perhaps a realization that the initial energy of his entrepreneurial skills exhausted, what does one do now? At the opening ceremony of the new phonograph factory, Louis makes a speech on the subject of productive vitality and utility, as if factory work was both fun and lucrative for those who work there. Afterwards, a chorus sings, “Hail to happiness,” and we see a completely automatic phonograph assembly line with no assemblers start mechanically assembling phonographs. Does this now mean that the employees at his factories are now out of work because of automation? At this point, as another speaker begins to extol work, Louis notices the police and realizes they have come for him. He makes concluding and surprising valedictory remarks announcing that he is giving the factory and all of its profits to his faithful workers, who deserve such gain for all their honest toil over the years. He announces that fate has another road for him to tread. At this moment, one of those wonderful comic “accidents” occur when the suitcase full of his money opens with the money blowing around the gathered crowd of top-hatted notables. Soon bills are swirling

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everywhere, so the gathered gentlemen grow restless and long to spring into action trying to pursue the thing that they value most in the world. Louis's business finale ends in a precipitate Dionysian revel in search not for free sex but for the scatter of free money, and quickly the dignified men of property jump into a gleeful and frantic competition for more filthy lucre. On this occasion, free money is not worked for or extorted but just picked up in free-for-all competition, capitalism reduced to its primal state of brute force. In the last scenes, we see the new factory humming along in the production of phonographs but the few workers there are merely attendants sitting around playing cards. Most of the new owners of the factory idle at a festively decorated Green Willow stream, dancing and flirting and enjoying themselves as music and song about happiness and leisure play in a beneficent industrial paradise that benefits everyone as work evolves into play. Louis and Emile are now tramps walking along a country road, singing about “happiness for us” so merrily that people throw coins for them. A limousine carrying rich people goes by and Louis looks back at it longingly, but the comic fool Emile kicks him and they laugh and continue their journey, freely and spiritedly singing as they tramp along treasuring only a summer day in the country and enjoying themselves immensely and carelessly. In comedies of techno-economic domination, the “social good” of rational organizations armed with technocratic skill and economic purpose is countered by human individuality and obstinacy, resisting the regimented demands of labor discipline and resenting the boredom and weariness, it entails. Here the resemblance of a prison and a factory is heightened by the extent people are dwarfed by their setting, with both prisoners and workers forced to remain stationary (on an assembly line) or move in militaristic geometric formations (marching to and from work), in an outsized and officious Art Deco setting that connotes controlled and directed behavior. Such a dehumanized and mechanized setting is here subjected to a perspective of comical demonics, organizational exploitation that is framed by its creators for entrepreneurial control and productive efficiency, but cannot totally succeed because of the human thing, animate needs and wants and indeed a sense of the comic that cannot be stamped out by regimentation. The only outlets for aesthetic rebellion are in private expression such as banter, jokes, and song, or on the outside dreams of love, but in all cases pathetic yearnings for freedom. The ironic slogan “Work means liberty” is an injunction common to all modem organizations (and for that matter, most ideologies) but is the voice of the regime and not the regimented.

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The comic view at the end is that liberty is celebration, living the comic existence freed from both care and fear that Louis and Emile choose to enjoy tramping the roads. There is also a vision of social comedy, where people as a whole change from serious-minded to fun-oriented, from work to play, living in what is called a “gift economy.” In such a different social world, machines and a minimal work force run things without the necessity of disciplined labor and the domination of entrepreneurial hierarchies and the ancillary and parasitic bureaucratic and rentier classes. The kind of comic rebellion going on here is not about who benefits from work nor who owns the work, it's about how to move from busy-ness to idleness, escaping regimentation and embracing liberation. In this kind of apolitical anarchism, anarchic rebellion is an act of changing from the daily practice of making things to the lifelong pragmatic of personal good in making a free and happy life. Such a decision changes human life from mechanistic social regimentation in an imperatively coordinated organization to one of animated self-regulation, moving away from the artificial rhythms of productive good to the natural rhythms of aesthetic good in the free play of the vital and convivial life. The movement is from complexity to simplicity, from orderliness to disorder, from hierarchy to equality, from work to play, from the performance principle to the pleasure principle, from the stationary routine of the organization to the ambulatory ramble of the road. The futility of effort is rejected for the fertility of exploration, replacing the question of how do I make a living with how do I make a life? Human beings are able to pose questions about themselves, and if they rediscover the poverty of the organized social world and the plenty of the lively natural world, they can enjoy the comic grace of the truly rich world of sensation in which they can choose to live, out in nature singing the body electric.

Local Hero (1983): The Comedy of Expansion and Location In a social world of organizational expansion and environmental exploitation, we have moved beyond the entrepreneurial domain of production, wherein an owner directs workers to make things such as phonograph machines, and towards the dominion of large and complex organizations. With the invention of the internal combustion engine, fossil fuels such as coal and oil became a valuable and useful commodity, requiring a large organizational complex to find, process, and distribute their product. In an era of “global reach,” both imperial states and international corporations possess the communicational and logistical capacity to intervene in far-flung areas of interest or resources and indeed

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exercise a degree of domination over political affairs or human and natural assets. Such powerful organizations deem a location—a locale where the native inhabitants live—as a place potentially ripe for their exploitation, even if the locals object and resist. Local political opposition to such alien incursions can range from non-violent resistance to armed rebellion, oftentimes successfully. But opposition to economic incursion is sometimes muddled by cooptation and cooperation on the part of the locals, who may see financial benefit and economic growth accruing from such cosmopolitan wealth and innovation locating in their region. Or at least that is the “pitch,” the lure that breaks down local suspicion and opposition. Locals have reason to know that such corporate interests often enough exploit local labor, ruin the local environment, and then leave, making people in other unused places conflicted as to the wisdom of agreeing to such a change in their way of life. Local Hero opens in that quintessential center of international oil companies, Houston, Texas. We meet Mac MacIntyre, a young and ambitious executive working for Knox Oil and Gas, at a meeting where everyone in the room must whisper, because Felix Happer, the chair of the board, is snoozing. The executives learn that the company wants to acquire a coastal fishing village in Scotland named Ferness, raze it, and build an oil refinery in its place. Happer picks Mac, in part because his name sounds Scottish although his origins are Hungarian, to travel there and finalize the arrangements. To Mac's astonishment, Happer instructs him to watch the night sky, especially around the constellation Virgo, and report to him immediately if he sees any unusual stellar activity. Mac is unhappy with the assignment: he is a workaholic wedded to the glass-and-steel environment of the corporate headquarters, living in a high-rise apartment overlooking the synthetic lights of a large and bustling city. The plasticity of such a habitat and the relationships that accompany it seem to agree with him, although he is very alone, enduring failed relationships with women and friends. He gripes that he would prefer to close the deal via long-distance communications, but as a loyal corporate employee, he reluctantly flies to Scotland. In the alchemy of comic grace, Mac's journey is one away from plasticity and alienation and towards animated self-discovery and an enlightened sense of gracefulness. His assignment dislocates him from his usual work habits out of a high-rise office, but it is still a perfunctory ritual of business domination, namely meeting and dealing with strangers that the corporation wants to “do business” with and thus getting them to agree to something they might not otherwise do. But as always in comedy, things begin to happen and the travel task becomes more than routine

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work, as if by magic. He meets the local Knox representative (Danny) and learns that the company plans to replace Ferness with the refinery, essentially bribing all the locals to sell and leave. En route to Ferness, Mac and Danny's car hits a rabbit during a foggy night; they think the rabbit dead, but after stopping for a nap in the fog, they awaken to find the rabbit sitting in the back seat. They reach the picturesque little village of Ferness and are charmed by its beautiful locale, but they soon are aware that this is not “Brigadoon,” for the locals are a varied and contentious lot, certainly not the frugal and clannish Celts of popular romance. The place and the people do seem to be something drawn from a dream, but a confused one: every time Mac and Danny come out of the local inn, a lone motorcyclist roars down the main street and nearly hits them; they are mystified by an omnipresent infant who seems to have no parents; they meet a black African named MacPherson, who tends an all-white congregation; meet a punk-rock groupie with multi-colored hair but apparently no group to groupie with. Most of all, there is Gordon, the feisty and mercurial innkeeper, who is also the town's accountant and amateur investor, managing the portfolio of a Russian fishing trawler captain who drops by to visit. Mac knew that rural Scotland would be different from Houston, and he is taken with the beauty of the place, but puzzled and even appalled by the behavior of the local people. If he expected them to be charming and colorful beings of sentimental pastoral, he was mistaken, since they are diverse as individuals and unsentimental as a group. This is made clear as he discovers that far from being married to the place they want to sell and get out, feigning reluctance in order to (they hope) pressure the corporation to offer them an inflated price. Mac's journey of discovery not only involves appreciation of the beauty of nature and local life but also the astonishing variety of human nature in even the most seemingly graceful of places, since to his astonishment their appreciation of life there is not as appealing as enough wealth to leave and live in the city. But the magical spell is counterbalanced by the fact that the people whom Mac and Danny thought would have a lot to lose are quite willing to see their beautiful locale destroyed. We are now faced with the question of not only how you want to live your life but also where you want to live it. And yet the comic principle of serendipity—the situational mix of accident and improvisation—finds a way out of the dilemma pitting beauty and factuality. Mac obeys Happer's request to go out at night and observe the aurora borealis, a lovely contrast to the manmade lights he is used to, and reports this to Happer, who is so thrilled that he decides to come there to see for himself. Danny had befriended and romances the beautiful (and aptly named) Marina, who is a marine biologist and avid swimmer, and

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contributes to the mystery of the locale when she and Danny are embracing; he kisses her knee and notices to his astonishment that she has webbed feet, like a mermaid! Marina represents the value of aesthetic grace, with both her natural beauty and her environmental passion for the place and the joy of nature, which gives the aura of a kind of aquatic muse. She expresses her conviction that the oil company plans to build a research center there, and even though erroneous has a kind of natural prescience to it. Her charm has wrought a change in Danny, who starts out as a “company man” in looks and attitude, but under her sensual guidance becomes a kind of beachcomber embracing not only her but also more generally natural being. Mac admires Gordon's way of combining practicality and sensuality, drunkenly saying to him after ogling his desirable wife, “I'd make a good Gordon, Gordon,” and musing about himself and Gordon trading existences, revealing a growing dissatisfaction with his organizational life. Mac is not the only one faced with the comic tension (and choice) between rational calculation and self-interest on the one hand and romantic sensuality and beauty on the other. Happer, after all, has lived an adult life of corporate oil exploration but entertains a boyish fascination with stellar bodies. So we are ripe for some sort of comic anagnorisis, which is given impetus in the person of Ben Knox, an old and poor beach-dweller who lives in a shoreline shack handmade out of driftwood. He would be seemingly unimportant in this drama of high corporate stakes, but it turns out that he owns the beach area where the refinery is supposed to be built, having inherited it by ancient royal grant. Mac tries to lure him into selling, even so far as offering him the inducement of any other beach in the world, but he is adamantine and intractable, asserting his proprietary and traditional interest: “Who'd look after the beach then? It would go to pieces in a short matter of time.” In the world of corporate domination featuring acquisition and expansion, this impasse is a “land and resource” dispute between a local holdout and a cosmopolitan force used to getting its way. The wondrous comic complication is that his fellow Fernessians think him crazy and worse, an impediment for their imagined future life of ease and pleasure. In mythic-fairy tale terms, however, old Ben is a sage figure, a homespun philosopher who is not possessive in the sense of neither acquisitive greed common to corporations nor personal greed common to the townspeople, but, rather a pre-modern traditional sort of possessiveness of the “commons,” a natural and local possession which should be preserved because it belongs to everyone. In a world pervaded by “possessive corporatism” and “possessive individualism,” the idea of a common possession is lost on those for whom the beach is an exploitable space or a

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salable asset. Ben is asserting both an aesthetic value of natural beauty and a social value of common good, but is opposed by the values of acquisitive utility producing private wealth and shares of that wealth for the right to produce the commodity of oil. At this point, the conflict is coming to a head, since Mac and Danny love the place and its people and are under the spell of the aquatic goddess Marina and thus now hesitant about its destruction, comically evidenced by drunken heartfelt talks and long walks on the beach musing about nature and life and what it all means. Things are about to turn ugly when some of the more insistent locals show up to confront Ben, but at this moment Happer materializes, mistaking what could become a mob as a welcoming committee. Mac clues the boss about the situation, so Happer decides to negotiate with Ben himself, which seems to placate the irate citizenry. The billionaire enters Ben's ramshackle hovel, and they get along famously, apparently sharing naturalistic and cosmologic interests. Happer emerges and makes a Solomonic decision, opting for the refinery to be built on derricks out at sea and further help the local economy by building an astronomical observatory in Ferness. His ego is further stroked by Danny mentioning Marina's hope for an oceanographic research center, suggesting that it should be named the “Happer Institute.” Much pleased with his political acumen and institutional immortality, Happer orders Mac home to Houston to implement his wise plan. Danny runs to the beach to tell the swimming Marina, and they are now a couple. Mac returns to his forlorn city apartment and life of lonely artifice and routine. The film ends with the empty phone booth in Ferness as the telephone rings and rings, but unanswered.

Up In The Air (2009): The Comedy of Divestment and Disintegration We have seen comedy in play in settings of industrial regimentation and corporate expansion, and for those of serious mind the triumph of a satisfactory comic resolution may well strain credulity. If life is real and life is earnest, then such outcomes as a factory owner ceding control of his production and profit to his workers, and for a big corporation to agree to such an environmentally sensitive compromise, certainly seems remote or impossible. But comedy is an expression of specific and generic possibility, the off-chance that out of the improvised rough-and-tumble of human affairs, something happy and hopeful may emerge. Economic domination and technological spoilage are after all an expression of the sin of greed, perhaps the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins. But like all evil, it is oftentimes best resisted or altered by the play of comic impiety making

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sport and sacrilege of the nonsense of avarice and the folly of folly. Spiritual or ideological warfare against the evils of human and natural destruction may be less effective than the knowledge discovered and recognized in comic anagnorisis, forever reviving our humane reassurance that the inhuman strictures and procedures of power can be altered and redirected by the comic force of serendipity and the reflective influence of sagacity. Now we may grant that the creation and operation of organized technique and incorporated coordination have merits, but also admit that they have demerits. Factories of production and corporations of expansion create wealth, but also illth. They produce commodities, but also incommodities, and use materials and employees with utility, but also often render them as superfluities. Expanded productive capacity and the accompanying and necessary “culture of consumption” have been with us for a long time, so with recent developments such as downsizing, outsourcing, and underemployment, economists and philosophers have speculated about the “end of business civilization” and the creation of widespread superfluity, which ironically (and comically) destroys the very system that created its own irrelevance. This is why the curious practice of disinvestment seems to be causally linked with the disintegration of business civilization and eventually the culture of consumption, for this abandons the social function of business enterprise and the social utility of investment, providing shared prosperity and gainful employment. But with the destruction of productive companies and labor, we may be witnessing the beginnings of a period of decadence in which distributive justice is superseded by accumulative justice as the economic system devolves into a plunder economy bent on exploitative and socially destructive amassing of wealth. In such a disintegrating system of domination, facilitators are required to divest employees and reduce labor costs, so dominative elites hire firms that specialize in descending on offices and factories to fire people and shut down facilities. At this point in historical development, the system has not only become dysfunctional but also ludicrous. In Up in the Air, we meet Ryan Bingham, a handsome and wellappointed man whose unenviable job is to fly around the country on behalf of his employer, Career Transition Counseling, which translated means CTC is hired to descend on workplaces and, in his words, fire people on behalf of the local bosses “who don't have the balls to sack their own employees.” So we immediately see him “counseling” the people he fires, doing his job by sitting down face-to-face with those designated as superfluous, keeping his cool and his sympathetic game face as they react in different ways, sad and weepy, incredulous and angry, bitter and

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defeated. Ryan lets them down gently, with the consolation prize of a packet of advice on transitioning to another career and future opportunities, giving them a crumb of false hope. And then he flies away, moving on to his next massacre. In other contexts, he might seem more heroic, such as the lone gunfighter of Westerns hired to clean up the wild frontier town, or the hitman for the Mafia, who is not heroic but has a kind of sinister apneal. But here, Ryan is merely a functionary, doing somebody else's dirty work, to be sure, but unheroic and unaggressive. He is a loner and is workmanlike, a creature of neat and simple habits and indeed a competent employee. Ryan is essentially a civil and polite person, yet in his day job of deeming people superfluous in order to perpetuate a system of domination, he is in fact a social descendant of the gunman or assassin, since he liquidates people deemed burdens or hindrances to the aims of the hierarchy. He doesn't kill them physically, but he “fires” them, and for many of them who identify their existence with their job and career, they might as well be dead. Like any efficient and rational killer, Ryan understands fully what he is doing: “We take people at their most fragile and we set them adrift.” And he lives the solitary and secretive life we associate with such “human resource specialists,” traveling constantly and lightly, and living his brief periods in his spare apartment with the barest of necessities. He is up in the air in more ways than one, since he is tethered to no one on earth and seems to live only for his work, which is booming in a period of economic crisis necessitating systematic and ruthless disinvestment of the “real” economy of making things and employing workers. Despite his commitment to routine and anonymity on the road and at home, Ryan does descend to earth on occasion. But even then his distance is evident: he gives a speech to a convening group in a nondescript hotel on motivation, in a way extolling the virtues of his barren life, asking them to think how uncomplicated their lives would be if they divested possessions and relations. “Imagine waking up tomorrow with nothing: it's kind of exhilarating, isn't it?” he asks, but the audience is not so sure. His recurrent expression of existential ruthlessness (in another speech, he urges the wisdom of abandoning stable human connections; “The slower we move, the faster we die...we're sharks, we have to keep moving”) is leavened by the fact that he does have some human ties and temptations. He has sisters, one of whom is about to marry, and since they don't have the wherewithal to travel, wants him to receive a life-size cutout of bride and groom and take a picture of the cutout with the Luxor pyramid hotel in Las Vegas, as if they were there. He meets a woman (Alex) in a hotel bar who is another frequent flyer on the road a great deal, and they discern

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each other as kindred spirits—smart professionals, content with the rituals and routines of traveling executive life, and open to the casual sex of a “friend with benefits” in arranged trysts on the road. An even more immediate complication in his well-ordered life materializes in the appearance at work of Natalie, a recent and eager college graduate who has hit upon the idea of firing all the people they are assigned to eradicate over the Internet, thus eliminating the costly travel budget. Ryan, who professes a philosophy of impersonality, is appalled by this suggestion as too impersonal, although he doesn't mention a selfish interest in maintaining his nomadic lifestyle, on-the-road sex, and his beloved travel miles accumulation (his only goal in life appears to be chalking up ten million miles in the air). Natalie is inexperienced and clumsy, but Ryan does try to show her the folly of Internet firing and takes her on the road with him to show her how to fire people properly. She does learn, but is appalled both by what they do to people and by how he lives in a “cocoon of selfbanishment.” He and Alex attend his sister's wedding and have some warm and nostalgic moments, and he has clearly developed feelings for her, so much so he flies to Chicago and shows up at her address, and is shocked when he learns she has a husband and children. She calls him later, complaining that he could have ruined her “real life” and that he is just a “parenthesis.” Ryan now knows where he stands with Alex and how parenthetical his life is, made worse by Natalie's enthusiasm for the call centers she is creating, with “termination engineers” sitting in cubicles firing people they see on a computer screen. Ryan's disgust with the total technocratic impersonality of this procedure goes public when he makes a scheduled motivational speech, but can't do it and walks out. On a flight, the flight attendant announces that Ryan has now flown ten million miles, and the chief pilot congratulates him, asking him where he's from, to which he replies, “I'm from here.” In his office, he calculates how many free air miles he has accumulated, and arranges to transfer enough miles for his sister and new husband to fly around the world free. He learns that one of the people they fired at the call center has committed suicide, and that in response Natalie quit immediately; we see her interviewing for a new job, and learn that Ryan has written her a glowing letter of recommendation. In the end, we see Ryan dutifully returning to the road, as CTC has returned to face-to-face career transitioning, so he is back to the nowhere he belongs, the “from here” of the airport and airliner. We hear him ponder as he looks out over the vast country below, populated by people returning home at night to comingle and sleep in a respite from the social world of savage business. He is at home as a transitory light in the sky, “my wingtip passing over” the lives of those down below.

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We have seen the comic flight from regimentation by Emile and Louis, who come to see the freedom of tramping the road preferable to the systematized work of the factory and even the stultifying prosperity flowing from ownership. They learn a new kind of knowledge, the logos of personal liberty which frees them from disciplinary and dreary locations, and instead locates them on the open road and in nature. We have also seen Mac and Danny make the comic discovery of a humanscale location and spectacular natural setting, and come to see the beauty of such a distinguishing ethos rather than the dulling ugliness of the corporate setting and the destructiveness of corporate ambitions, for Mac and Danny a new and better way of life. In both cases, those freed from domination come alive, with a new way of thinking on the one hand, and a new way of associating on the other. But Ryan Bingham has to live and work in the decadent context of a system of domination gone awry and in grave decline, and thus becomes a wretched and strange player in the grotesque comedy of things falling apart in an economy of mere anarchy. For Emile and Louis and Mac and Danny, the comic play offers them a way out; for Ryan, there is no exit. At this stage of development, Ryan cannot seem to imagine a mode of or path to freedom. The principals here are all figures of comic pathos, since they are constricted as personalities and committed to an artificial life of rootless being and inflicted suffering. Ryan meets a woman he thinks he might establish a lasting relationship with, but she has deceived him, and like his distant family, reminds him that he is a marginal character in their lives. The company he works for is a symptomatic technocratic “service” industry that serves the purpose of dismantling the primary reason an economic system exists, namely to provide employment and distribute wealth in order that the goods produced and services rendered may be affordable and available. The only exception is Natalie, who wisely flees rather than continue to be part of this suicidal insanity of liquidating everything—nature, prosperity, and humanity. So it may be fair to say that the system of domination we are studying may have reached the stage of irredeemable decline, since the kind of comedy it inspires involves no one coming alive as a person and creates no social ethos that is widely useful or morally defensible amidst these grimly funny if mordant conditions of economic ugliness. Aristotle thought that comedy was the province of the ludicrous, a story that evinces derisive laughter and scorn through the narration of social incongruity and absurdity (the Greek root suggests abusive play). The regimentation of factory workers and expansion of corporate power through local destruction were both senseless, but some recognition of and realization of grace

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brought about the transfer of the factory to the workers and the preservation of the village. Here, despite everyone's wry sense that what they are doing is a hopeless enterprise that reforms or saves nothing, they are pathetic figures inhabiting a bizarre and deadening grotesquerie, which resembles in comedic form the grotto or cave paintings of old that distorted the natural into absurd caricature and fanciful distortion. The abusive players we enjoy inheres in the inescapable systemic forces they inadvertently serve that are themselves vicious, but people like Ryan ironically are not vicious people but plod on and serve the system (and like Ryan and Alex, take their pleasures) in the unearthly and unsociable comedy of gracelessness. The movie ends on a note of ongoing perpetuity, but we may come away from it with a comic smile: greed is likely the most social and by extension the most political of the Seven Deadly Sins, and thus the most consequential. Perhaps the comic cycle we have just examined gives us reason to smile, since devolution into destructiveness— personal, social, and natural—cannot endure, and the future may witness comedies of systemic supersession, with the old order being replaced by barter and gift economies, and we will look back on Up in the Air as wryly prescient.

Comedies of Domination: Status Fun Among the Communicators We are accustomed to thinking of domination sites and aggregations in society as populated by people who exercise a great deal of power in the Emerald Cities of the world, or possess and work for those who have and use a great deal of wealth. It is also the case that domination sites can be peopled with those who possess the power of communicating to large audiences who seek enlightenment and entertainment. Their power derives from their personal ability and institutional access in shaping and presenting attractive messages in story form which attract enough interest and acclaim to be memorable and profitable. Thus, they have a special kind of power by virtue of their ability to illuminate things people like to attend to, so in that sense they either are or sponsor others who are luminaries. We tend to believe that people who are talented or skilled at illuminative communications possess some kind of special magic, likely traceable back to the ancient magic of the shamans and holy orators. In that enduring conception, the people who put on shows, make movies, and tell us the news are imbued with the aura and mantle of shamanic powers and mellifluous voices, making worlds come alive for us through putting on plays we enjoy attending, watching motion pictures as a visual treat, and

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holding our interest by telling us what's happening now. We continue to believe that those who those possessing the faculty of theatricality, both in writing and directing plays and in acting in them, should be accorded a luminous status above and beyond ordinary mortals. Similarly, we are fascinated and amused by those involved in the ensemble production of motion pictures, including directors who acquire the status of auteur as a creative force. And we are impressed with and often in awe of those who coordinate and present news, seeing those who gather and organize those stories and messages deemed newsworthy as masters of placing and communicating the gist of unfolding events in informative and entertaining formats accessible to the interested. Those communicators we see in television news in particular are accorded an aptitude for the concise brevity of their story items and the acute perspicacity of the images they present and narrate. Although TV news obviously incorporates motifs and skills from the theater and the movies, it is something both more and different from those sources. If putting on a play features the use of stagecraft, and the production of a movie garners a team proficient in the cinematic arts and crafts, both print and television news require organized abilities specific to news making. Out of all three events and persons and processes going on in the world of now, only a few are selected and communicated to an audience as news. Like the theater and movies, news puts its constructed message and narrative in a ritualized format that attracts and sustains interest, but the news is made up not of fictional but rather of real things, yet like fictions those real things are framed with narrative logos, social ethos, and human pathos. A news program will typically include a hierarchical assortment of items, given a brief and pointed story line, associated with some familiar sort of social relevance, and accorded human interest as something we can relate to in our own lives. So news items of differing importance and consequence, such as an impending national election or a family murder, may share common narratological features, such as whether the candidate and a kidnapped child's mother are lying. In all cases, communicators in large media organizations (theatrical companies, movie studios, and TV networks) are identifiable as members of dominative complexes by their power over communication, and thus a suitable subject of the comedy that flows from their efforts.

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Twentieth Century (1934): The Stage Comedy of the Imperious Impresario In many ways, the status hierarchies we associate with social communications are organized in the styles seen in techno-economic enterprises, stemming from the inspiration and leadership of a single entrepreneur, expanding from a corporate metropolis to remote venues and complex organizations, and beset by the confusions and corruptions of temporal change and decline. And like techno-economies, the possibility and even the inevitability of comedy are certainly there. We may begin then with that most ancient and universal form of entertainment, putting on a show. Theater can range from ritual sacrifices to flea circuses, high tragedy to street theater, grand opera to striptease shows, but in all cases, it involves the aesthetic sensibility and technical skill we refer to as stagecraft. In the theater, the boss of the dramatic enterprise is paralleled by the impresario in opera and conductor of orchestral productions by the director in the playhouse (and indeed the movie-house and the news studio), the person who commands both the artistic and the mechanics of playmaking from the first reading to closing night. There is a long tradition in various theatrical circles for the director to be a singular dominating figure, often temperamental and demanding and imperious. He or she embodies and instills the dynamic logos of the play by grasping the dramatic essence of the play to be performed and conveying inspiration and motivation to the performers. In Twentieth Century, we descend upon an empty theater on Broadway, where the first rehearsal reading of a new play is taking place, with the cast and theatrical staff assembled around the imposing personage of Oscar Jaffe, an established and mature director of considerable stature in this theatrical center. Jaffe has a reputation as someone with a gigantic ego and explosive temper, but when we first see him, he is all conciliatory and helpful. This does not last, and quickly he is summarily firing staff people (“the iron door is closed!” he shouts) and badgering the cast. Singled out for abuse is his new “discovery,” a lingerie model of considerable beauty named Mildred Plotka, whom he has given the stage name of Lily Garland and coached her on stage acting. In rehearsal, however, she is hesitant and hushed, unable to scream well enough to reach the imagined audience in the back row, so unbeknownst to her, he produces a hatpin and jabs it into her well-proportioned posterior, producing not only a proper scream but also some motivational arousal. Oscar is the driving and, in some measure, the demonic force that like the prototypical tycoon, combines his dramatic knowledge of what makes theater play well with a kind of Nietzschean

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will to power expressed in histrionic manner that is alternatively condemnatory, animated, and self-deprecating. In short, Oscar is a shameless ham. As a less sinister Svengali of the theater, he makes “Lily Garland” into a talented thespian, but in the process, she is also made into his “protégée” (which translates out of movie-euphemism into mistress). On opening night, Lily is acclaimed for her performance and is now a “star” with a bright future in the theater. Oscar appears at her dressing room, all contrite and humble in her now exalted presence, bidding her farewell and murmuring he will gracefully give her to the theatrical world that adores her, since a true star like her can belong to no one man, so he must nobly withdraw from her life. The new Lily, still a bit dazzled and overwhelmed by her transformation and still both naive and insecure, falls for Oscar's phony-gracious act, tearfully begging him to stay with her and throwing herself into his arms; with a smile that is both triumphant and lascivious, Oscar closes her dressing-room door so they can be alone. Over the next three years, the professional union of Oscar and Lily results in a play every year that is a resounding success. Lily now lives in, and Oscar revolves around, a sumptuous penthouse apartment basking in her newfound fame. However, their personal relationship has reached a crisis point, with the recurrently enraged star resolving to leave him but with her resolve always undermined by his histrionic responses, such as faking a suicide attempt that makes her collapse in tears. Despite her desire to be free of her stage-door tyrant, she still has feelings for him, again falling for his repentant line of promising to be less possessive and controlling, and in a sense becoming the audience for his repeated performance in which the auditor (she) willingly suspends disbelief. (One of the delicious treats of comedy is the extent to which people versed in a skill and perspective such as the dramatic arts can be repeatedly “suckered” by an adroit confidence game, even if they have every reason to know that the rhetoric is spurious and the claimant a fraud.) Naturally, Oscar's vow is immediately broken when he secretly hires a private detective to put Lily under surveillance to watch her every move, even including likely illegal intrusions such as reading her mail and tapping her telephone. When Lily discovers this, she has now had enough and leaves him and New York for Hollywood. Oscar goes into first an emotional and then a professional tailspin, producing plays that are spectacular flops, climaxing in a disastrous production in Chicago that has his creditors in pursuit of him. With the police looking for him, Oscar disguises himself as an emblematic Southern gentleman and boards the Twentieth Century, a train that goes cross-country. And, in one of those comic coincidences that are not coincidental, Lily and her society boyfriend board the train at a later stop.

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In an enclosed space such as a theatrical stage or a passenger train, a complex comic drama involving thespians is a “natural.” Oscar and his aides discover that Lily and boyfriend George are on board, and learn that she has become as much of a temperamental and demanding celebrity as he. Oscar is incensed that she is romantically involved with a “boy,” plotting to break them up. She wants to elope with George, but Oscar tells him he is her former lover and he storms off the train. Oscar now hopes to get Lily back personally, but also professionally to earn the money to save the Jaffe Theater by producing a new play with Lilly starring in it. Oscar meets two Oberammergau actors with impressive beards and hits upon the idea of producing the Passion Play on Broadway, and tries to woo Lily with the lure of playing the greatest role in history, that of Mary Magdalene. She is both angry and incredulous, informing him she is going to New York to sign a contract with his arch-rival producer. A nice little man who goes around putting up “Repent Now” signs all over the train writes Oscar a huge check, which buoys his hopes until it is discovered the nice man has been writing everyone worthless checks. But Lily and Oscar are now reunited by the fervor of their histrionic arguments, and indeed Oscar fakes another suicide when the check-writer and Oscar struggle over a gun, slightly wounding Oscar but giving him the opportunity to play at dying. This stage gesture convinces the once again gullible Lily into believing his demise is imminent, deceiving her into agreeing to sign a contract with him as a loving gesture towards a dying man, since the play will never be produced and the contract will be buried with him. This culminating fraudulence makes a tearful Lily sign, and Oscar then makes a miraculous recovery. The film ends with Lily back in tow at the first rehearsal of her new play directed by Oscar, marking the stage with chalk lines and with their turbulent relationship starting another round. Although the relationship between Oscar and Mildred-Lily is not exactly that of an entrepreneur and an employee, there certainly is an element of domination-subordination, with both professional and physical expectations on the part of employer-lover and indeed a variety of both subtle and not-so-subtle forms of coercion and persuasion to keep his protégée-mistress-star actor in his commanding orbit. But here Svengali's Trilby rather likes her new opulent and glamorous life as a Broadway luminary, and she is not hypnotized and indeed quite capable of rebellion and fleeing for another life. She matures as an actor and a person, and learns to be suspicious of him but is still willing to fall for his histrionic acts in emotional moments, such as his imminent “death.” In the end, when she returns to act for him and be with him, they appear bound together not only by affection for each other and enjoyment of contention

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with each other. They are now both comic creatures of the theater, and their beings are suffused with the shared knowledge of theatricality, with extends beyond the proscenium into their public spats and private romances. The essence of theater is putting on a show, so even though they are decidedly not kids anymore, they are clearly stage-struck, actors in the ongoing drama of their lives together, onstage and backstage and offstage. The dramatic logic of their theatrical orientation reminds them that theater is a ritual, with structures and roles and performances, and in comedy makes them part of the ritualized fun. However and wherever they act, their beings are permeated with theatrical grace, making them an irrepressible couple constantly performing and dominating the theatrical world because they are such great fun to watch.

Day for Night (1973): The Comedy of Moviemakers Making a Movie about Moviemaking We noted that a familiar organizational process is the transformation of a single entrepreneurship stemming from a dynamic individual into a corporate enterprise, or for that matter, any kind of complex organization which requires the coordination and division of skills and effort. This can easily become the setting for the comedy of trying to get diverse humans to behave in a way that achieves a rational goal. The metaphor that such a task is like herding cats is apt, for one of the emblematic scenes in this movie involves a movie crew on location shooting a scene that features a cat who is supposed to lap milk out of a bowl; the crew waits anxiously with cameras rolling, klieg lights blazing, sound microphones on, and director awaiting action; however, even with all this cajoling, the cat adamantly refuses to drink the milk. And so it is with making movies, as the actual director of this film has every reason to know, since he makes this movie with a long and distinguished career behind him and indeed plays the director of the film who is making a film in this film. In the history of the movies, there have been a few directors who were tyrannical or inspirational enough to be able to herd cats (and actors and crews and studio executives and so on) successfully. But moviemaking is a collaborative enterprise that requires skill at the task of coordination and cooperation of diverse crafts and talents, and as we see, a plethora of egos, psyches, pathologies, and maladies. Getting all the cats to drink the milk is usually a matter of rhetorical persuasion rather than dictatorship, with various rhetorical strategies, such as coaxing, flattering, beguiling, calming, and so on, to the point that the coalition builds into something of a team that actually completes the movie. The director in the movie quips,

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“Shooting a movie is like a stagecoach trip; at first you hope for a nice ride, then you just hope to reach your destination.” Here the corporate leader is something of a mediator and first among equals, at once a politician, psychologist, and even philosopher, building a bridge here and stroking an ego there, dealing with both emotional problems and technical difficulties (in one scene, we see him fretting over just the right angle to shoot a close-up of his beautiful new star). We are given glimpses of “backstage,” such as how they shoot a second-floor window shot without benefit of a building, and indeed the French title of the film, La Nuit Americaine, refers to the cinematic “magic trick” associated with Hollywood productions, where cinema-photographers learned how to make a scene shot in daytime appear to occur at night through the use of filters. Much of the travail with the personnel and care given to technique is amusing enough, but in the context of the movie they are making, “Meet Pamela,” a trite melodrama of mediocre budget and prospects, all the angst and meticulousness is touchingly funny. All this is for a movie that will be eminently forgettable? Well, this is the locus of why the movie about making “Meet Pamela” is such grand comedy. The comedic process of making the movie is much better than the banal film they are making, but for a variety of reasons they are all there in southern France willing to make it. Despite all their personal difficulties and the privations of making do away from home, they all like making a movie even of dubious worth. Like the tightrope walker who said that true life is on the high wire, virtually everyone involved here likes being on the set. After a few minutes of watching the director (Ferrand) attempt to cope with people and problems, we might conclude they all just love suffering. Immediately we see a scene being shot repeatedly; the prop cars are not right and will have to be repainted; and Ferrand is beset by endless questions from the crew and actors. He ruefully remarks that a movie director, rather than being a flamboyant and tyrannical Oscar Jaffe, is not a grandiloquent maestro bur rather more like a combination of foreman on a work site and a chaplain administering to various woes, as “someone who's asked questions all the time, someone who knows the answers.” After a day of petty problems and helpful interventions, the director sits down in a movie room to watch the first day's “rushes,” but learns that a power failure at the processing lab destroyed them, so the opening scene will have to be reshot at considerable expense, since it involved 150 extras. Subsequently, we meet the actors and crew, including a famous and aging actress dependent on alcohol who flubs her lines and walks into doors; another who is pregnant but has an ironclad contract; a third who is recovering from a nervous breakdown and

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shows up on the set with her new husband, a much older doctor; a handsome leading man who is having an affair with a script girl; a mature matinee idol coming to grips with his homosexuality; an English stuntman who runs off with the script girl to London. The studio investors worry about the fragility of their young and fragile star (Julie) and everincreasing costs, and everyone wants to be paid. The comic point becomes clear enough: moviemaking itself is often grander comedy than the product put up on the screen. We can also see how comedies about movie production differ from comedies about stagecraft. Staging a play occurs in an enclosed place and involves relatively fewer people, making it possible for a fierce autocrat to both dominate and improvise as things go along. But movie production has larger scope in both settings (e.g., different locations) and number involved, and thus calls for a different rhetorical and directorial style, such as Ferrand's persuasive appeal to group ethos. The directorial foreman tries to build a coalition of skills and talents and divide and coordinate labor to produce a result; the chaplain tries to sooth emotions and inspire healing among his or her charges and bring about rational behavior. So Ferrand tries to fix things, even mundane technical problems, and to movie things, getting all the actor-cats moving in the same direction towards the milk saucer. What backstage comedies and moviemaking comedies share in common is that the mysterious process of putting on a play and making a movie is a natural comedy. Lay people have always suspected that theatrical people and movie people were a bit crazy and that what they do is wacky and funny, so these films give us helpful evidence that this is so. There is one omnipresent character in this film that is not part of the movie team but is only there to spy on her husband, and she obviously is both fascinated and appalled by the various movie types and movie culture, delivering her puzzlement by asking the rhetorical question, “What is this profession where everyone sleeps with everyone else?” What, indeed? The feline metaphor is apt: cats are impossible to herd, and certainly are not going to make posing for a scene easy, but they do like to be petted. Even with their different stylistic and dramatic differences, we see in these two films many common configurations in these familiar forms of communicative domination. By witnessing stagecraft in process gave as a glimpse of how playwriting and playacting stemmed from the theatrical logos, working with a play interpreted by an impresario and enacted by actors in the enclosed area of the stage, and that the animate and rhetorical habits of theatricality pervade and motivate those who identify with the theater in their personal lives. There is much of this in moviemaking, to be sure, but modified by the sense of a shared social ethos that makes for a

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movie culture that is worldwide and highly popular (it is common in movies about the theater for theatrical people to decry those who abandon its restricted domain for the vulgar swamps or Hollywood). In both domination sites, however, there is the understandable and highly comic confusion between reality and fiction that gives artists and indeed those associated with the artistry their attitude of special status or at least difference. In the case of the theater, the sensibility is that of cultural superiority, giving preponderant figures such as Oscar an assertion of preeminence, stemming in some measure from their participation in and knowledge of an ancient and honorable art form. In the case of Ferrand, there is the sense of being a small part of a new and magnified popular art form that at least entertains large audiences and at best contributes to the shared social experience of the movies. (Ferrand is reading books about the great film directors and has a dream about his boyhood prank of stealing glossy movie “stills” from Parisian theaters.). In both cases, their confusions about fictional life make for wondrous comedy, with the pretensions about the theater supporting delusions of grandeur (the play they are beginning to rehearse at the opening is a hackneyed period melodrama about family jealousies and murder in a mansion of the Old Confederacy), and the techniques and trivialities of the movie set are a revelation that demystifies the illusions of screen magic. Yet both sites are imbued with their distinctive affirmation of grace, and rightly so, for we all appreciate their willingness to try and put on a show, and enjoy seeing their often-graceless struggle in doing so, for who else on earth but show people would go to the trouble of waiting patiently for a kitten to drink the milk?

Broadcast News (1987): The Comedy of the News Show One of the enduring delights about comedies of domination is that it gives us, the dominated, an amusing look at those who have certain kinds of social power we don't have. When we see what people with political or economic power actually do, we learn not only that they do very human things (and in that sense are very much like us) and that they also do very funny things (and again, are much like us). Some movie comedy contributes to a form of pragmatic humanism wherein we learn that, yes, the rich are different from the rest of us because they have more money, and too the powerful have more power, and the famous have more fame, but they are similar to us in both their folly and their grace. We saw that those who are masters of stagecraft and successes at stage acting are not necessarily nice and honest and faithful, but their offstage and backstage gracelessness in

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some mysterious comic way contributes to their joint dynamic as a theatrical couple adroit in direction and talented in performance, resulting in the theatrical representation of beauty. The comic tension between gracelessness and grace is also evident in movie production, where the broad collection of actors and technicians all display personal or professional difficulties but are attached enough to the ethos of movie culture that they somehow form a coalition that produces a movie as well as they can make it, which in itself is an expression of grace. The comedies of aesthetic expression here remind us that the common clay of humanity is the material of which plays and movies are made, including all our disorderliness, ambiguity, and divergences, yet our capacity for playfulness somehow creates something of stage-worthy beauty and cinematic good. Comedy at last readily celebrates human effort in all its comedic gestation and fabrication. When we come to that area of social domination associated with journalistic communication, we are in the territory of a somewhat different kind of communicative aesthetic, involving the immediate reportage of news, a secondary analysis of current events and processes, and a tertiary interpretation and speculation of the meaning and importance of what has happened or is passing, involving the judgments of those termed “pundits.” Ostensibly, the journalistic profession is not as much interested in beauty or good as it is in truth, since they are the mediators who express the truth of what's happening in those forums collectively termed “the media,” the organized mediums interposed between us and the world of those things and happenings defined as newsworthy, as in “Here's the news.” More recently the history of journalistic newsgathering and news reporting has seen the supersession of print journalism by electronic (radio) and visual (newsreels and TV) journalism. Although all forms of journalism clothe news reporting in rhetorical and ideological garb, nevertheless the institutional norm of “objective” and “investigative” journalism has persisted. With the dominance of news reporting located in that domestic appliance, television, these older norms were besieged by entertainment values (“infotainment”) and consequently the disappearance of hard news and the ascendance of “human interest” stories featuring the coverage of sensational incidents involving some awful event affecting ordinary people and also trivial coverage focusing on entertainment and celebrity. With these kinds of trends and considerations, the TV newsroom becomes a natural comic site pitting those committed to the old values of reporting and the ascendance of those interested in careers and ratings and corporate approval.

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We see a network affiliate newsroom in Washington at precisely the historical moment the tension and transition of TV news is at issue and changing. We meet an energetic young woman named Jane Craig, who is a news writer and producer at the capital bureau, smart and ambitious and excellent at what she does; she is also passionate about journalistic ideals and ethics and does not suffer fools well. She barks out orders and prances around the newsroom like a preying cat, and makes things go on time and effectively in the frantic pace and split-second timing required by the operational deadlines and TV principle of “no dead time.” Jane is not made of steel, however, as we see when some job or show is finished, as she sits alone in her office and has a good cry; she also seems to have little personal life, even though she is attractive and vulnerable (when one of the corporate producers jokingly but sarcastically asks her if it feels good to be smarter than everyone else, she glumly replies, “No, it's awful”). Her commitment to journalistic norms of intelligent news-making and professional standards and boundaries drive her toward something approaching passionate selflessness in what she does as a public service, and functionally is a serious “workaholic.” She seems to live and work by the sincere credo that news is truth, and truth be told. When she meets a male newcomer to the bureau (Tom Grunick), she is both repelled and attracted. He is a former sportscaster who is handsome and sexy and unburdened, admitting frankly he doesn't follow current events much, is ill-educated, and hates to read, so from the point of view of the Powers That Be in the News Division, is a perfect news anchor in the increasingly visual and sensational medium of television. Tom is unabashedly New TV: news is not truth but beauty, something that a beautiful personage like he can communicate in a telegenic and entertaining manner. If Jane is selfless, Tom is self-serving, since his success helps advance his reputation and standing so that one becomes essential and indispensable. Television news is not information processing, it is popular theater requiring an able and cool actor to talk to audiences through the domestic appliance into their living rooms. Tom advises the clumsy but intelligent Aaron, who is about to do a weekend news-reading fill-in bit, to be assured and calm and speak to the audience out there in conversational tones and simple explanations, limit a story to a single and graspable story line, and look neat by sitting on your coattails to keep the jacket free of rumples and creases, and remember, “You're selling them this idea of you. You're saying, 'Trust me, I'm credible'.” Aaron is the intellectual soul mate of Jane and in love with her, but she resists. In a puckish comic twist, she is physically attracted to Tom, whom she insults for being dimwitted and rages at for crossing ethical lines (such as on-air

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fake tears in a story about date rapes), but is impressed when he successfully does a bulletin about an international incident involving a hostile power. She is even a bit flabbergasted when he excitedly kneels before her as she sits in her office chair, rocking her back and forth, telling her that when she fed him cues into his earpiece during the bulletin, “What a feeling having you inside my head…indescribable.…There was like, a rhythm we got into….It was like great sex.” But as so often in “workplace” comedies, and indeed like the theatrical and movie people we met above, such super-competent professionals are comically incompetent at personal relations, sometimes overcautious and oblique like Aaron, or overconfident and obvious like Tom, or overcommitted and occupational like Jane. As their comic dance around each other goes on but goes nowhere, they are witnessing the transformation of their medium from one committed to intelligent informing and analyzing to one of showbiz values featuring soft news and human interest. This process renders TV news into a marginal irrelevance, symbolized by the many reporters and staff who are being fired at the affiliate and the revealing reaction of an industry audience that Jane addresses in a keynote speech extolling the virtues of hard news and ethical standards, which they not only dismiss but ignore, responding instead to the visual treat of a diverting domino setup. The media hierarchy is both mentally and financially prepared for news programming that renders everything reported as show business, shifting without a qualm from norms of authenticity and accuracy to fakery and dramaturgy. When Aaron and colleagues are chatting about journalistic ethics, he poses the question of allowing cameras to record for the news an execution, even shooting footage of the person being executed; his friends all assent easily, so Aaron cracks, “Nothing like wrestling with a moral dilemma, is there?” In the end, we are left with the comic irony of dual pathologies, with the triumph of the media principle of ornamental falsehood and with the personal principle of ornamental achievement, both of which are very funny and vital to workplace comedy. The former is the outcome of the organizational and moral struggle over the nature of news, ending with the ascendance of news as pathos, in particular the pathetic fallacy. The TV news version of the pathetic fallacy involves the projection of human feelings onto newsworthy events, injecting sentiments and emotions into what used to be objective phenomena journalists would examine and report in expository prose. But TV news evolved into something of a popular humanity rather than a journalistic science, with all the falseness, hypocrisy, and bad faith of maudlin poetry, but appealing because of the tug on sympathies which phony melodramatics can provoke when people are given emotive and exploitative impressions of current events and

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social life. That industry development is reflected in the outcome of the personal struggles and lifelines of our three principal characters. Jane bravely does not succumb to the traditional fate of women in the workroom of romantic comedy (falling in love and getting married), defiantly remaining single and fighting the good if losing fight for journalistic standards. Aaron is doing investigative journalism in a local outlet in a liberal city. Tom, as we might expect, is a rising star at network. They meet and are still friends in the end, but remain isolates, all in one way or other comic creatures of a corrupted form of dominant communication that may well be dying. They are still able to evoke our sympathies for their comic plight as, respectively, the moralist, the ironist, and the careerist, all laboring in the hothouse atmosphere of a media culture that they try in their own way to make pragmatic sense of and live with, each understanding in their own way the disorderly nature of communicative dominance and the inane nonsense that is the governing motif of what they communicate, which are largely so fallacious as to be comically pathetic. Comedies of domination are funny to us for many reasons, but at the center of our enjoyment of such comedy is likely the sense that ultimately what is funny about domination is the dominator’s belief in the legitimacy and efficacy of dominating. On reflection, we might conclude that there is something hilarious in the assertions of a right to rule, right to acquire, and right to communicate. Comedy's subversive capacity includes making fun of such conceits, and the conceited people who claim the privilege. Dominative figures are almost always unintentionally funny, for they see themselves as both very important and very serious persons for whom their presence and the world are to be taken seriously, but because they so assert themselves before us, they become for us all the more laughable. We saw representative movies from the political world, reminding us that politics is less than beautiful and is often quite ugly, leading us once again to conclude ruefully how badly the world is ruled. The comic corollary of that conclusion is that humans are, and should be, ungovernable. We also peered at movies from the economic world, and noted that regimentation, expansion, and termination produce more bad than good, but found comic hope in those who walked away from assembling, destroying, and firing to find some kind of free and better way. We can only infer how badly wealth is used, and note also that humans are not only ungovernable, they are also unreliable as instruments of labor. By looking at a communication site, we may finally judge that truth, like beauty and good, is not a product of organized and motivated communications of reliable and important fact. So we must laughingly note how badly communications are disseminated, since in both war and peace truth is the first casualty. The comic corollary

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to that practice is that humans are uneducable, so whether they will know the truth and be freed by it is as problematic as to whether they will believe untruths of preposterous magnitudes. Since hierarchies of social domination appear to be universal and inevitable, at least comedy can make us laugh at the hapless folks who would try to make us do and believe what they want, and in so doing makes the unbearable and overbearing bearable.

Social Comedy: Comedies of Differentiation We maintained above that movie comedies which foreground the social dimension of human experience allow us to observe and learn much of the larger and outward context people have to contend with in their social roles and situations. Sociologists have long known that societies organize and conduct themselves along certain patterns of action and norms of behavior, all of which place and direct people in “life-situations” wherein they have to live with and make do. Social comedy lets us see the relationships between their social lives and personal lives. Much of the fun here is watching the interplay of what they have to do and put up with relative to what they would like to do and in what ways they come alive. The recurrent tension between mechanistic social discipline and animated self-realization is fare for comedic play, with various people ranging from factory owners to ace TV reporters actually walking away from the social routine, and folks ranging from corporate functionaries who travel around firing employees to work-obsessed TV producers staying on the job to do the bidding of the systems. Although movie comedies tend not to have an ideological agenda, they do feature humanistic considerations and social concerns, reminding us that much of what people in social organizations do to each other is preposterous, silly, or stupid. Comedies find human things such as cold wars, environmental destruction, and forced unemployment as ludicrous and inane but not unexpected, since practices like social domination have consequences which are both abject and laughable. It is often said that to examine what entertains us is to examine us as human beings doing human things, so we both enjoy social comedy because it entertains us as funny and we learn from it because it is so incisive. We can now look at movies that are funny and incisive examinations of social differentiation, those persistent and important configurations which feature and further those ways in which groups of people figure out how to be different, differ from other people on various things, and display and enforce their differences. Social differentiation is not isomorphic with

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social domination, since differences may be exercised by people who are quite powerless, such as those who are regarded and self-regarded as deviants or undesirables, ranging from those of different sexual orientations or racial and ethnic identities to untouchables and others stigmatized as unclean or diseased in mind and body. On the other hand, differentiation may characterize groupings that are quite powerful, such as those with aristocratic pretensions or official positions. People whom are powerful tend to exercise obligatory rules, using organizational position to tell other people what to do; people who want to be regarded as socially different appeal to and use exclusionary rules, which define us as different from them, quite often staging or implying a social standing of superiority. The assertion is that “we” are not only different, but also better in some asserted important way from “them.” In movie comedy, such social declarations or claims are expressed and enforced through varying practices and strategies, some blatant and rude and others subtle and polite. But as we study the array of social comedies, some patterns appear to persist: the assertion of social hierarchies, the display of cultural vanities, and the conduct of organized enterprises. The exclusionary rules of social hierarchy are exercised through modes of selfisolation, resistance to intrusion by outsiders, and by control of mobility into the charmed circle, recruiting only those who insinuate themselves as worthy of entry. The exhibition of cultural vanities highlights some kind of social characteristic that is deemed to display some shared qualitative value and differentiating excellence. This can be done, alternatively, by asserting the social worth of persons of beautiful attributes and allure, for instance by adorning themselves in fine and fashionable raiment, such as designer clothes; or by participation in some sort of event in which a social good is affirmed, such as competition for some sort of award that honors an important value or trait; and lastly, through the respect and deference visited on personages of merit who embody some distinctive social truth and thus deserve enduring repute and recognition. The comedy of organized enterprises covers a multitude of sins, since the comic mind relishes any kind of social effort, grand or petty, that takes a comedic turn, such as the hilarious acts of official incompetence, the failure of the bestlaid schemes, legitimate or criminal, and even the successful evasion of consequences by someone adept at “confidence games.” We will look at the comedy of crime, of the planned “caper,” and the confidence gamers in action. The impulse towards social differentiation is in all cases a search for a state of grace that is imputed and defined by the classification of being different and therefore special. People prefer to be up rather than down, in rather than out, and known rather than unknown. So their efforts

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to be upscale, a part of a special or elite group, or stand out rather than be a mere face in the crowd becomes a major and widespread social activity that is ripe meat for comic attention and ridicule. Perhaps the desire for some kind of social grace is so deep and wide that we humans are willing to risk being made fun of in order to be thought of as like a mortal god or considered a mortal hero rather than the mortal fools of the pedestrian and rude graceless world. The comic corrective lets one see through the will to power implicit in the assertions of magnificent grace among those who would dominate, and the will to discriminate announced by those who would segregate in a separate and self-important luminescent grace. The humbler mortals of comic grace make fun of the gods and sport of the heroes in their mirthful irreverence and disorderly mockery.

The Comedy of Social Hierarchies The Exterminating Angel (1962): The Beauty of Isolation It is a common practice for differentiating groups to find some place apart from the unwanted or uninitiated for them to be together. In its most extreme form, cults and other deviant groups will find somewhere to live together segregated from the larger and inferior society. The more familiar form of self-differentiation may be seen in the wide array of groups associated with some distinctive identity, such as class, status, ethnicity, region, gender, and so on. Identification with some specific group makes people feel special, part of something that includes shared values, pastimes, and comradeship. It is also common for people to take part in more informal groupings, “get-togethers” which become habitual and somewhat fluid but nevertheless have rules and rituals. One of the most familiar is the dinner party, a social event usually by invitation and often scheduled as an important occasion, so appropriate attire and manners are expected and the guests are often selected for their wit and charm or even their prestige in some community. In select communities and institutions, such events are highly ritualized and arranged to reassert the hierarchical structure. The practice of the dinner party is a “devout observance” both convivial and structural, much cultivated among aristocratic and bourgeois circles. In virtually all cases, such events are characterized by the presence of patina, all those symbols of class and states which announces who is what and displays objects which communicate who we are and why we are here. The dinner party may well be enjoyable, but it is “serious” fun that is designed to make us feel good about ourselves in our group identity and reaffirm as we go on that we are singular and exceptional. That such a

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social practice could be characterized by pretense and sycophancy and snobbery is clearly evident and thus tempting material for wicked comedy. In The Exterminating Angel, we are invited to an elaborate dinner party in a mansion on Providence Street, to be held after the guests attend the opera. The dinner is hosted by a couple of high social standing (named Nobile), and they conduct all of the sacral ceremonials associated with the “pecuniary standards of taste.” We quickly sense that we are watching a comedy of manners, although it becomes clear that the expected protocols make the movie more of a comedy of unmannerly behavior, since we see how polite etiquette collapses when things unexpectedly go awry and leave the highly polished and tamed guests adrift on an unmannerly sea. These are people of class, dressed in tuxedos and gowns and emboldened by a sense of entitlement and exclusiveness, present at this gathering because they belong there among other persons of quality with the same right to conspicuous leisure and consumption. But such a highly structured and predictable affair is troubled by niggling things which are inexplicable. Something isn't right and proper. The house servants begin to leave, the twenty guests are left with a truncated dinner and then adjourn to the music room for drinks and smokes and a piano sonata played by one of the guests. After these social rituals are completed, ordinarily the guests would make their appreciations and leave-takings and go home. Instead, they remove their jackets and loosen their gowns and settle in on couches, chairs, and even the floor. As the night passes and dawn arrives the hosts wonder why no one has left, since the servants are all gone and none of the usual deliveries have arrived, and even more puzzling the guests seem to be gripped by some kind of dispirited inertness that prevents them from leaving through the completely accessible exits. With their ritual expectations disturbed, they seem incapable of action. And another strange corollary develops, as people outside gather around the mansion they too are incapable of changing their place or entering the mansion. The selfincarcerated guests inside are thus left to their own devices, soon consuming what little water and food is left and as days pass the niceties of civilized manners and gracious deportment deteriorate as the “thin veneer” of civilization disappears. What we witness with both amusement and horror is the transformation of the group ethos from the genteel social graces of serious fun associated with class rituals to the funny seriousness of a graceless descent into a kind of state of nature manifest in the music room. People accustomed to being waited on and catered to are suddenly on their own, as they become hungry and hysterical and suspicious of each other. And their inexplicable confinement continues, to the weird extent that even though there is

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running water in the kitchen they can't or won't go in there, so they break through their room's walls to open water pipes. In surrealistic fashion, there is a herd of sheep in the house, which they slaughter for food, and indeed the animals are offered up as a sacrifice to an obscure god to which they pay obeisance. They find a closet containing expensive ceramic urns and use them for defecation and urination. Couples discover corners in the room where they can fornicate, and two lovers kill themselves, so the survivors stack their bodies in a closet. There are arguments and quarrels, including a paranoid fantasy accusing the host of holding them captive with some kind of occult power and obscene plan and demanding his sacrificial death. A crazed woman has hallucinations and invokes the power of black magic and the demons of hell. Indeed, this is a demonic vision, an inferno of comic pandemonium from which there is no exit. The comic vision here is all about what happens to people in selfimposed isolation when they begin to act funny in their insulated and disjunctive condition. They entered the room complacently relishing the differentiating pretense that they are beautiful people who deserve to be there with other people equally beautiful, but once stuck with each other their ugly desperation and self-regard reveals itself in panic-stricken and mean-spirited irrationality and morbidity (“Why don't you kill me?” a frantic woman on her deathbed wails, and others think of ways to kill themselves). The isolation they experience is not only entrapment in the room, it is also the isolation of dead souls who are not large enough to be tragic or deep enough to be melodramatic but are certainly petty enough to be comic. In the end, someone notices that by some chance they are all in the positions they were in when the improvident entrapment began, so they begin to reconstruct what was said and done as the party began and discover that with their social order and hierarchy restored, they are now free to leave. Outside, they are greeted by their servants and the police, and decide to give thanks for their release by attending a church service. But when the service is over, they and the clergy are trapped again in the church. Then in a final surrealistic touch they exit altogether by disappearing, and we see street riots and police retaliation, and a herd of sheep entering the church to the sound of gunfire outside. The events in the mansion on Providence Road may not seem providential in the sense of reasonable and auspicious, but they can be linked to the providential “exterminating angel” of the Bible (2 Samuel), who was the “angel that destroys the people” as an agent of divine wrath. Whatever role such an angel is supposed to play, the people in the mansion seem quite capable of self-destruction. From the point of view of comic sociology, their descent into antisocial behavior is not mysterious at all. Such group maladies can

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be seen in isolated groups that experience some kind of entrapment and deprivation, such as in concentration camps, stranded ships, and abandoned colonies, so the reversion to barbarism here is not unique. The sophisticates of the film are beset by anomie, wherein norms and standards of social behavior deteriorate into anxiety, disorientation, and paranoia. They don't suffer from listless ennui, since they are quite active, but they may well suffer from “groupthink,” a common shared malady in isolated groups who begin to imagine and act upon some kind of conjured delusion independent of common sense and reality-testing. The internal dynamics of the group convinced them they couldn't leave, but then with that assumption they further isolate themselves from each other through “selfthink,” private delusions about themselves and each other in a kind of Hobbesian “war of each against all.” This is all quite surreal in itself, and lends itself to depiction as a “comedy of entropy” in which their world is oddly and inexplicably “decentered,” wherein the social center in the music room cannot hold and mere anarchy is visited upon them as their so well-ordered lives are exterminated by the merciless and avenging angels of their natures. In the hands of a comic surrealist, they are prime suspects for comic destruction of everything they signify in their isolated social differentiation. The people unable and unwilling to leave the mansion are selfenclosed in an antinomian inferno, participating in the decrease in socially ordered arrangements and habits and the increase in disorderly and antisocial behavior and the estranging unpredictability and unavailability of human energy. We watch this deterioration with the perverse fascination of disaster films, reminded that society as a construction by and of humans is more precarious than we like to believe, and that anarchic chaos can trap even the most cosmopolitan and genteel of people in a nihilistic snare in which hell is other people. We are also made aware that for people who value and practice some variety of social differentiation separating them from the larger society may direct them into surreal situations with invisible social lines that cannot be crossed. This can make what they do in isolation seem to them to be perfectly natural and rational, but to outsiders appear to be quite unnatural and insane, crazy acts of people self-incarcerated in their own created surrealistic fantasy. Here the antic play of persons of beauty and class is seriously funny in their pathos of entitled confusion and panic as their phony operatic affectations evaporate and they become laughable and pathetic creatures with all too common animal needs and vulgar selfish wants, so their only differentiating trait is complete gracelessness.

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Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1939): The Good of Intrusion The dressy and classy people in the music room found that there was no way out. It is also a differentiating practice among those of social position to arrange things so that there is no way in. Controlling who is allowed in obviously serves the purpose of defining and separating the included and the excluded on whatever social lines are deemed at stake— elite/mass, men/women, patrician/peasant, native/foreign. Whatever social line is drawn, there are always rules, formal and informal, as to who is included in and who is excluded out, and indeed corresponding rules about rites of passage as to how one goes about gaining access or acceptance and conversely losing access through rejection and expulsion. Those inside the system are able to enjoy some version of social grace, and often live in unspoken fear and loathing of a fall from grace. Virtually every type of exclusive social hierarchy is characterized and stabilized by systematic classifications which regulate who is admitted, advanced, rewarded, and rejected. Armies, churches, universities, fraternal organizations, political parties, you name it—they are organized and function on the basis of and furtherance of some kind of purpose, and thus have a point to their existence, which is communicated in often very pointed ways to those both inside and outside the system. Since such an organized effort involves the expenditure of positive effort and direction of concentrated energy, there are abiding concerns of failed effort and misdirection of energy that will threaten the point of their enduring advance. This is often symbolized by the appearance of intruders who will upset or threaten the conserved and dependable routines and rituals the “insiders” are used to and rely upon, including values and practices irreverent or curious outsiders may regard as insane or corrupt. There are reasons why “elite mobility” is often so carefully regulated and even resisted, not the least of which is that new or alien arrivals may become intruders who question and investigate things. Thus, elites with power want to preserve their isolation by resisting intrusion into their symbolic sphere of influence, or at least manipulating the intruder for their own conniving schemes. Such situations and conflicts are obviously ready-made for comedies of differentiation, aiming derision at entrenched and grasping elites at the top and finding sympathy for those outsiders who represent good social values. These values are embodied in the persons of such types as the streetwise city reporter and the rustic holy innocent who are more cunning than those who would exploit them cynically and greedily, demonstrating the comic principle that the exploiters are not near as smart as they think they are. In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, we meet Longfellow Deeds, a quiet-living young man who runs a tallow factory works in the remote hamlet of

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Mandrake Falls, Vermont. Deeds is a popular and solid citizen of his little town, and he is part of the local harmony and color, living alone and apparently celibate, cared for by his housekeeper, taking part in rustic life by playing the tuba, arranging a park bazaar to raise money for a new fire engine, and writing verse for greeting cards (in the spirit, if not the level, of his namesake). His social life is not complemented by family life, since his parents died in a snowstorm and he is unmarried. But is he is quite content with the bucolic and unsophisticated existence in his locality, as the town sign says, “Welcome to Mandrake Falls/Where the scenery enthralls/Where no hardship befalls.” But the imp of comedy is about to send Deeds on a strange adventure where an unexpected kind of hardship is to befall him, for his only relative, an uncle he has never met, wrecks his car in Italy, and leaves Longfellow a vast fortune. His uncle's urbane and duplicitous attorney (Cedar) arrives in Mandrake Falls to inform Deeds of his good fortune, but not inform him of his embezzling practices unbeknownst to the now deceased uncle nor his intentions to gain control of the fortune from this country bumpkin. We are immediately in the comic province of one of the most venerable of comedic conflicts and even mythemes, the difference between a populist “heartland” ethos and elitist cosmopolitan refinement, the former honest and friendly and egalitarian and the latter dishonest and unfriendly and ostentatious. The comic conceit is traditionally that the “city slickers” think they are smarter than the “rubes” and thus easy to manipulate, but the native wisdom and peasant cunning of the provincials outwits the sophisticates in the end, in an exercise in comic peripety whereby we see ordinary and unpretentious common folk triumph over the forces of arrogance and greed. It is also traditional that this metropolitan duplicity be embodied in social roles that symbolize the suspect ethos, usually lawyers and bankers, the “shysters” and the “banksters.” These specific roles typify the enforcement of vertical differentiation through control of the rules (the law) and the resources (the wealth). If the elite isolated in the music room dramatize the pathos of social differentiation, the cosmopolitan elite that meet and mock Deeds show us the ethical underside of those professions that would control intrusions in order to maintain jurisdiction of the legalities and concentration of wealth. Such staple mismatches in the David-and-Goliath tradition make for comic identification, with the audience exercising populist feelings for the outclassed intruder and the democratic ethos he or she embodies, in particular the ''natural” folk wisdom and virtue he brings from the soil to the sidewalk, proving to be nobody's fool and eventually outsmarting the wise guys. When Cedar and his well-appointed colleagues come to the

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Deeds home, they regard him as an oddball and childish romantic, for he plays the tuba, cares naught for the vast fortune that he has inherited (“I don't need it!”), and isn't married, as the housekeeper says, because he has ''foolish notions about saving a lady in distress.” It is also clear that Cedar and company find the country town to be distasteful, including the friendliness, the easy camaraderie, and the quick hospitality, with instant offers of food and conversation. One of Cedar's entourage (Cobb) is assigned to be a “buffer” for Deeds in the city, since rich people do need someone to “keep the crowds away” as the “world is full of pests” and also full of newspapers, so “one must know when to seek publicity and when to avoid it.” During this admonition, the alleged simpleton Deeds is composing a cute poem about Cobb. In New York, Longfellow is housed in the ornate and lifeless mansion he has inherited, while the city he is visiting is depicted as either impersonal or scheming, a long way from his fertile and friendly town, which gives him a big send-off at the train station (“Gosh, I got a lotta friends”). New York seems both infertile and unfriendly, and he risks being overwhelmed by the transformation that the schemers plot, with his household staff of valets and butlers attending to his every need and tailors outfitting him for a new wardrobe, while Cedar offers him “helpful” advice as to the management of his estate and Cobb admonishes him about the people who will make claims on his time and money. The real pests turn out not to be ordinary people looking for a “handout” but elite figures that turn out to be the predators. At this point, our hero is in grave danger of being fooled into becoming like them, attired in the appropriate clothes and expected to behave as a gentleman of means and position, such as acting as chairman of the board of the city opera company and donating money to keep them afloat. But Deeds retains his sense of himself as differentiated from cosmopolite jackals and snobs, and shrewdly refuses to submit to their claims and expectations. A society pomposity grandly named Madame Pomponi heads the opera board by requesting $100,000 to cover its seasonal losses, which he refuses, maintaining, as practical local people would agree, they're doing something wrong, likely presenting “the wrong kind of show.” He correctly rebuffs fortune-hunters as frauds, and most importantly, he refuses to give Cedar power of attorney over his new estate, setting up the attempt to strip him of his fortune altogether. Deeds is taken in by his romantic fantasy of saving a damsel in distress, when he sees a ragged young woman faint on the street, and he comes to her rescue. She calls herself “Mary Dawson,” but she is in fact ace reporter “Babe” Bennett, posing as a destitute person to appeal to his heroic ideal in order to “scoop” rival newspapers on an “inside” story of

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the mysterious provincial who now possesses a major fortune. Babe is thoroughly a woman immersed in the ethos of the city, a wisecracking, cynical reporter looking for a sensational story to further her career and reputation. She sees Deeds as a guileless “mark” ripe for press exploitation and another feather in her yellow-journalistic cap. They go to a restaurant that is a hangout of Manhattan literati, and she introduces him to a table of half-drunken novelists and poets as another fellow poet. Deeds innocently expresses his familiarity with and admiration for their poetry, and they reciprocate by baiting him into reciting one of his. When he realizes they are sneering at him, he “flattens” two of them, but befriends the third, who takes him out on the town for a drunken binge, something Deeds is not used to, so he does foolish things, such as feeding doughnuts to a horse and stripping to his underwear, eventually escorted home by the police. The next day, Deeds' misadventures appear in Babe's paper, headlined “The Cinderella Man” but with no byline. He is in love with Babe, and she is conflicted terribly, since she is charmed by him but still wants “good copy” about him. (She looks at him in wonderment when he realizes a lifelong desire to visit Grant's Tomb, where he is moved by patriotic sentiment about the “farm boy” who becomes a victorious general and President.) As the amusing articles about him continue to appear, Deeds becomes a celebrated laughingstock of the city, making urban people feel smugly superior to this rural if rich stumblebum. But as the society types continue to display their self-importance and exclusiveness, Deeds rebels, throwing Madame Pomponi and her stuffed-shirt class out during a charity reception, and rushing to propose to Babe by writing her a poem. At this point, she melts and is completely on his side, quits her job at the now sympathetic paper, and wants to marry him, but still can't bring herself to tell him that she wrote the stories. But Cobb does, so the disillusioned Deeds thinks that maybe urban nihilism has bested him and prepares to return to Mandrake Falls forlorn and loveless. The intruder will go home. But the intrusion cannot end in failure, so comic complication and dénouement are called for. Deeds is about to leave when a starving and disheveled farmer breaks into his mansion and brandishes a gun, ranting about how super-wealthy classes don't care about the poor and dispossessed, as evidenced by the vast expenditures of high society “leisure class” play, then drops the gun and breaks down in spasms of despondent sobs. Deeds rallies himself out of his own despair by remembering his own altruistic village values of everyone taking care of everyone else, making a remarkable decision; since this wealth was given freely to him by someone he did not know, he will give it away to deserving people he doesn't know, who will put it to good use. He

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announces a plan to use his wealth to fund small farmers who are in desperate need of “seed money” to buy what they need to fund a new start on unused farmland. Such an act of social generosity is so unthinkable to Cedar and his cohorts that they see an opening: giving such a fortune away to wretched farmers at the bottom of the social scale that anyone who does it must be insane, so they plot to have Deeds institutionalized. At the insanity hearing, Cedar is in his element, using the rhetorical skills and courtroom tricks that make movie lawyers such reprehensible villains. As Cedar displays his mastery of the legal rules, Deeds sits silently by, apparently defeated and resigned to institutionalization. At the moment commitment seems imminent, Babe loudly protests that he won't defend himself because he has been so hurt by the “city slickers,” and admits that she loves him. Her editor, Cobb, and the farmers urge Deeds to speak, and he finally does, pointing out that everyone has eccentricities, but that doesn't mean they're insane. Cedar had produced two elderly sisters from Mandrake Falls to support his insanity charge, and they maintained that Deeds was “pixilated,” an archaic term for someone who acts oddly, like a pixie, but Deeds gently gets them to reveal that they are a bit dotty when they say that everyone there is pixilated except them. Then Deeds argues, correctly, that this is all of a scheme by Cedar to keep money he doesn't need and keep it from those who do need it. To everyone's delight, he then socks Cedar in the jaw, the judge declares him “the sanest man who ever walked into this courtroom,” and the courtroom spectators carry Deeds out of the court in a populist victory for justice and mercy. Babe is left alone in the courtroom, dejectedly thinking Deeds has gone forever and she will be never be forgiven; then he quietly returns and embraces her and they leave together. We saw that the people self-isolated in the music room thought they were beautiful until they descended into an inferno of ugliness, believing that there is no way out to escape from each other. Mr. Deeds discovers that there is no way in, and indeed after his comic experience with the “room at the top,” he began to wonder why anyone in their right mind would want in. Because he wants to do good with his windfall, and indeed just because of who he is, he is submitted and condemned to a purgatorial treatment by social elites, tabloid newspapers, and white-collar criminals. The social scientists who study ''the circulation of elites” and “social mobility” and the economists who examine “pecuniary emulation” and “conspicuous leisure and consumption” are usually interested in social verticality, who's up and who's down and how does one move up and why do others move down, such as the socialites and professionals at the top here, and the farmers at the bottom. In a wryly-comic way, Deeds is

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reluctantly entering sideways, leaving a folkish Gemeinschaft for the urban Gesellschaft, from an integral and local community to confront a disintegrated and urban society with clearer class distinctions and exclusionary rules. He espouses a pragmatic ethos of open society and democratic beneficence, so accumulated wealth is a dispensable resource with inherent usefulness only if, like fertilizer, it is spread around enough to do the most social good. Social closure both here and elsewhere means hoarding what there is to get, including wealth, prestige, and controlled inclusion, notably present in by-invitation and formal-dress receptions, wealth hidden in bank vaults, and evasive schemes hatched in the private chambers of law firms. Their presumptive self-presentation as smarter and superior to the common run of humanity makes them all the more comic for us to watch, especially when they are taken down a notch. Comic pleasures certainly include our fun in watching the mighty humbled and the humble “mighted.” And that pleasure extends to seeing the cynical defeated by the sincere and the deceptive overcome by the honest and the acquisitive bested by the generous. The union of the urbane and tough Babe and the rural and gentle Longfellow allows us the comic satisfaction that all sorts of social differentiations can be overcome when we get things to play out in a happily satisfactory ending, in which the coalition of the inconspicuous best the highly conspicuous, and the differentiated overcome the differentiators.

Being There (1979): The Truth of Insinuation In comedies of social differentiation, it is a common theme for social elites who believe they are specially and exclusively endowed with some kind of grace to lose it, as in the music room, or exposed as never having it, as in the courtroom. In the former case, their collective isolation brings out their shared self-delusion; in the latter, their class insulation makes them confident that intrusions can be managed or repelled, so that intruders will be unable to fathom hidden agendas and “business as usual,” thus unable to see that their self-exclusion from society makes their secretive intentions obvious to those informed by common sense and shrewd observation. The stage is set for elites to take the comedic fall when they are self-deluded or self-regarding and cannot see how silly or stupid they actually appear to others who do not share their exclusionary fantasies. They become the object of the perfect comic squelch, quelled or subdued by either self-destruction or social degradation. Those who claim special status assert some superior form of intelligence and demeanor that identifies their state of grace, but what makes them so funny is that their

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exclusionary way of life insures their ignorance of common social knowledge. Such knowledge stems from familiarity with the prevalent ethos outside the mansions and offices and palaces in the streets and towns where people live the common life, such as enjoying going to the movies to make fun of the high and mighty. We enjoy watching them destroy themselves, seeing the upscale snobs bested by common outsiders, and we like to see them being “gulled.” Those at the top of social hierarchies are prone to think of themselves as too wise and experienced to be deceived or duped. Gullibility is a feature and failing of lesser beings and orders, thus deemed “the people,” who are easily deceived and cheated, often enough by those at the top of the heap. What elites do not understand is that the very features we have seen above predisposes them to be “taken in” by someone who says or does things they find impressive or congenial. Both their insularity and isolation permits someone from the outside to appeal to their credulity, stemming from their ignorance of the outside world or misperception of the person who they find imposing or stirring. One does not even have to be a weird holy man like Rasputin or an ingratiating toady like Uriah Heep to delude and impose upon powerful or well-placed people who should know better. In comedic fact, so much depends upon the seemly and decorous observation of the proprieties which govern the social graces. In Being There we meet a middle-aged man simply named Chance, who lives in the townhouse compound of a very wealthy benefactor in the capital city. Chance was discovered on the doorstep as a baby and was taken in, given a place to live, hand-me-down clothes, and a job tending the garden inside the urban estate. He has lived there all his life, without benefit of education or contact with the outside world, and is either simple-minded or simply uneducated, described by the cook as “a little boy.” When his benefactor dies, he is visited by attorneys charged with settling the estate, so Chance shows them his wardrobe of expensive suits given to him by the “Old Man,” and his large television set. Television is his sole source of worldly contact and in a way his educator on how to speak and act and recognize something about who is important and how things work in the world outside his sheltered existence. But now he must leave, and since that was the only life he knew, he packs his suitcase and, wearing an expensive suit and coat, wanders the streets. He is obviously an odd creature, now a stranger in a city that is anything but paradise; he is also hardly a holy innocent, since the categories of holiness and evildoing and innocence and guilt are lost on him. He literally does not know what to do or where to go, so when he encounters some young tough street kids, he does not know how to react to them, and they are equally puzzled by

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him; when they get a bit threatening, he takes out his television remote and tries to turn them off, as if they were television characters. As evening nears, he comes across a television shop and sees himself on TV, captured by a shop camera; at that moment he is struck by a limousine owned by a wealthy and well-connected business tycoon named Rand. The limousine stops, and Mr. Rand's wife gets out, concerned that this obviously well to do and distinguished gentleman has been hurt. She gets him into the car, insisting that he come back to their estate to recuperate from his injury. Their home turns out to be a fabulous Gilded Age mansion, and Mr. Rand an influential personage in the higher circles of business and government. Chance is offered alcohol (his first drink, which he chokes on) and the ministrations of Rand’s personal physician (we learn that Rand has an incurable disease). The Rands mistake Chance as fellow upper-class gentry judging from his overall appearance, so this initial superficial impression guides their prejudgment. When asked his name, he says “Chance the Gardener,” which they translate as “Chauncey Gardiner,” conforming to their expectations; when asked how he wound up on the street, he tells them about the attorneys shutting the house down after the death of the “Old Man,” which they interpret as business losses after the demise of his senior business partner, grumbling that the troubles were caused by “kid lawyers” from the government interfering in high finance. Assuming then that Chance is a man of means and standing, Rand takes him under his protection as friend and confidant. At this point, Chance seems blessed, first adopted by a wealthy patron and now supported by a rich tycoon. Chance is soon to be championed by Rand and others as not only “one of them,” but also as someone of uncommon and unsullied wisdom at the level of sage advice. The President comes to the estate to visit his friends the Rands, and is introduced to the mysterious but preternaturally confident and placid Mr. Gardiner. While discussing the current state of the economy and governance with “Chauncey” (Chance reciprocates by addressing the President by his first name and using the elite gesture of enfolding his handshake in both hands), he asks Chance his opinion about these weighty matters. Since Chance actually knows nothing outside of the garden, he replies by using the horticultural cycle as the metaphor for wisdom knowledge told in parables. “First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again....In a garden, growth has its season...as long as the roots are not severed, all is well, and all will be well in the garden.” Rand is much pleased with this display of aphoristic allegory, and the President is at first puzzled and then impressed by this direct and sagacious analysis, remarking that he wished this kind of assured intelligence was prevalent

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among the members of Congress. With endorsements like these, it is no wonder that Chance quickly becomes a media celebrity and elite advisor, repeating his range of inscrutable Zen-like pronouncements which would be taken as vapid and silly coming from an ordinary person but as articulated from someone of his stature and knowledge are regarded as high comprehension and deep insight. Chance becomes famous, much lionized in the press and sought after by elite society, and indeed acquires widespread popularity in polls which gauge approval of his “simple brand of wisdom.” Gossip among elite circles, at cocktail parties and the like, constructs an invented personage for him, with one person noting that rumor has it he “holds degrees in medicine as well as law.” Mr. Rand's wife Eve is attracted to this strange intruder, resulting in a hilarious seduction scene in which he obviously has no idea what to do. Her dying husband, who has come to depend on Chance in his last days, encourages Eve to equally rely upon him afterwards, suggesting that Chance will marry into the estate. Rand's doctor has suspicions about Chance, and even takes his fingerprints and makes inquiries, finding to his astonishment that there is no record of him anywhere, thus wondering if he is just a simple-minded gardener, but demurs, since Chance brings Rand peace of mind and Eve a new friend, and appears to have no ulterior motives. Thus, the now indispensable and admired Chauncey Gardiner is written into Rand's will and perhaps even his family. At the funeral, while the President gives a boring eulogy, the pallbearer-board of directors members whisper among themselves about who might succeed the current unpopular President droning on, and agree that Gardiner would be a great choice. The funeral concluding, Chance walks through the vast gardens and woods of the Rand estate and comes across a small lake. He walks out into the lake, dips his umbrella for depth, and continues on, walking on water. We see Rand's favorite adage, “Life is a state of mind” in the background. We saw that comedies of social hierarchy are especially funny when those hierarchical figures in dominant or exalted social positions look down upon or cannot clearly see the larger society and the people who inhabit it. Those people self-enclosed in the music room found there was no way out, and thus could not command the help of the servants or the police. Those who controlled the vast fortune they were misappropriating obviously resented and tried to frustrate the intrusion of Deeds, attempting to enforce the rule of no way in. The aptly named Chance chances across a way in without even trying or meeting resistance, insinuating himself to people of plenty and place by simply showing up and being there. Elites are recurrently in the social position of misperceiving things, believing

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they cannot leave their delusional trap, thinking that Deeds is an easily fooled and defeated rustic, and perhaps most astounding of all, projecting their own class-based expectations onto an amiable simpleton. The truly comic aspect of Chance's career is that he doesn't insinuate himself towards them, rather the Rands and their elite cohorts insinuate Chance towards themselves, illustrating that one can achieve significant social grace without really trying. Chance is so empty himself that he becomes a kind of Pygmalion figure into which they can project characteristics and talents that they admire in ideal personages. By the end, he is a vessel of truth that can walk on the water of elite circles advising and even leading them into an economic and political paradise. For them, he embodies sure and certain secular hopes elevated into sacral analogies which he bespeaks with confident and certain hope of prosperity and power everlasting in a poem of amazing grace, how sweet the sound. As a treasured figure of ideological differentiation, he is valuable for elevating a class ideology into a mythological first principle that governs both gardens and stock markets in the holiness of growth. In an odd modern way, Chance is a descendant of the ancient rhapsode, the dramatic artist who recited the old myths for the benefit of new audiences. The “state of mind” that defines elite life is shared by those servants of the realm who intimate to each other the fable of Chance's mysterious and obscure origins, the legend of his infallible truths, and the saga of preordained grace and now ascension to magnified radiance and rhapsody. For those of us on the outside who can only watch and wonder, what could be funnier than those deemed very smart and privy to inside information so witlessly exercising their credulous will to believe perhaps to put to rest their own deepest doubts and fears, just like the rest of us.

The Comedy of Cultural Vanities When we examine social differentiation, we often associate hierarchies and the beneficiaries of hierarchical position as exercising and enjoying pride of place. Being well placed makes people feel good about themselves and careful about perpetuating and protecting their place in the sun. We usually connect pride of place with power, the social position that encourages the powerful to believe that those who want access to them are envious, and thus not to be trusted or even admitted into their graceful presence. Outsiders like Deeds or Chance are either a threat or a promise, with the former exposing false pride and the latter affirming the bedrock wisdom of the proud. Pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and perhaps the one most amenable to the comic field of view and appreciation. For

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one thing, people situated in a privileged place may be anxiety-ridden and even guilty about their superior status, so they may repel, resist or repulse those who suspect them of wrongdoing or incompetence but welcome and reward those who articulate or animate core myths and modes of place in acceptable fashion. In those social sites of cultural vanities, different habits and rules may apply, emphasizing pride of person and focusing attention on personal characteristics which someone is willing to feature and display as an attractive form of socially desirable traits and marks which typify a definition of personal grace. One of the more prevalent expressions of personal grace is the exhibition of beauty, in the current valued form of bodily shape and in the stylish attire of contemporary fashion, in clothing as well as other accompanying objects of cultural vanity. Virtually all societies condone and encourage grooming rituals that are deemed essential for the proper display of beauty, and clothing in particular is a crucial means of decorous expression. Possessions with that kind of evocative power become highly valued as a social want, since stylish clothing is a key mode of both metaphoric and dramatic communication in society. Fashionable clothing serves as a metaphor of personal standing in the social structure and as a means of social performance in the courtly play of cultural ostentation (or, in reverse, the display of personal rebellion through “anti-fashionable” fashion, such as hippie or farming clothes). It is no wonder, then, that a vast and lucrative industry has arisen and flourished making, anticipating, and marketing what is or will be fashionable to wear.

The Devil Wears Prada (2006): You Are What You Wear Even If You Look Funny In The Devil Wears Prada, Andy, a young woman fresh out of journalism school, feels fortunate to have been selected as personal assistant to the editor of the prestigious fashion magazine Runway. The editor is Miranda Priestly, a legendary figure in the fashion industry. Miranda's name conveys several qualities. It suggests nobility—Miranda in Latin means “worthy of admiration” and is similar to mirandous, or miraculous; Priestly suggests the possession of consecrated knowledge. Andy is aware of Miranda's reputation as an imperious tyrant who makes impossible and demands and does humiliating things to her help, but is told if she lasts a year she has an important reference for the journalistic career to which she aspires. Andy is clumsy and inexperienced and, worse, dresses down in slapdash student clothes that are the antithesis of fashionable. The senior assistant (Emily) is very fashion-conscious and

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contemptuous of the awkward new girl, as are the other initiates in the office. Andy is befriended by the magazine's male art director (Nigel), who interests her in stylistic clothes and appearance, and so she begins to dress and act like the other fashionistas in the office. In a sense, she is changing what she values, which is a life of free-spirited love (she has a boyfriend and they live in a ramshackle apartment) and youthful fun, and hopefully investigative journalism, usually not an upscale value or career. She continues to fumble through her job, failing to get Miranda home when she calls during a storm over New York. Even though this was impossible, Miranda tells her she is more disappointed in her than any previous assistant. But, Andy is abandoning her personal independence for the new job, as well as her new fashionable appearance in adjusting to the fashion culture. The great comic irony becomes clear: Andy is naturally very beautiful without any help from attire and cosmetics, but she is going along to get along. Miranda notices this, and gives her the crucial task of delivering “the Book,” the rough copy of the next magazine edition, to her townhouse; she is urged by Emily to be “invisible,” like a servant in a palace, but Miranda's daughters trick her into going upstairs, and she sees Miranda in an argument with her husband. So she has to be punished by the office despot: Miranda orders her to get her daughters copies of a forthcoming and highly prized novel, and to Miranda's surprise, with the help of a writer acquaintance, she manages to get copies. Miranda, who uses her staff ruthlessly (usually with a dismissive “that's all”), is impressed. Now Andy is completely subordinate to Miranda's will and whim, losing her boyfriend, who upsets her by accusing her of now becoming like those people in the fashion world she had previously held in such contempt. We agree and she senses that he is right, so now the comic conflict is set: since Andy is the sympathetic youth almost entirely in the grip of a devilish master now clothed in the vogue costumes of the Prada hell, can she be ever be pulled from the everlasting fire of the vacuous and meaningless fashion void? Throughout her descent, she retains a modicum of sense that this is all rather silly: early on, Miranda and cohorts are fretting over the proper dimensions of a belt in relation to what is fashionable and salable this season. Andy snorts in disdain, leaving unsaid, “Big deal,” inspiring Miranda to mentor her on the importance of fashion, which we subsequently learn is the only life Miranda has and thus has little use for those who are not as dedicated to her calling as she. Andy is further drawn into this world of contrived and luxuriant beauty by being trusted with crucial tasks, including accompanying Miranda to a society benefit as the loyal aide reminding her of the names of important people who are approaching, thereby maintaining the phony facade of polite friendliness appropriate in

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such circles. Andy then discovers a Machiavellian plot to replace Miranda and warns her, discovers Miranda already knew of the plot but is grateful, paying Andy the patronizing and involving compliment that she sees some of herself in Andy. Andy is repulsed, and what was beginning to seem glamorous in New York and Paris now seems sordid and exploitative. She leaves Miranda's limousine in disgust, refuses to answer calls, and throws her cell phone in a fountain. As the movie progresses, Miranda, the dominant figure in the hieratic scale of the fashion firm and world, slowly diminishes into someone who is more pathetic than powerful, since she sells beauty but is not beautiful as a person. We begin to see Miranda as a huckster who convinces the anxious that wanting fashionable things to wear gives you their evocative power of sociogenic magic, equating beauty with exterior adornment that is deemed enviable and lovely because it is an up-to-date social differentiation. Much of the amusement here is how much Miranda and the others in the industry take all this so seriously, when in fact it is merely creating wants which are marketed as needs, as if luxury items ward off aging and death, and make you socially prominent and in vogue. On the other hand, Andy has matured and outgrown such silliness, and has been offered a job as a newspaper reporter. In referring Andy for the job, Miranda informed her editor that Andy was a big disappointment, but if they didn't hire her they were crazy. Earlier, it appeared that Andy was undergoing a rite of passage into the way of life of the fashion world, adopting their clothes and values and lifestyle, but at the crucial moment she finds that world to be unsympathetic and incredulous, and summarily rejects it, to the point of giving all the fashionable clothes she has acquired to Emily, who is still a functionary in the Runway world. Miranda had “dressed her down” many times, and now Andy by choice dresses down at work as a reporter in comfortable but thoroughly unfashionable street clothing appropriate to the vast unfashionable world outside of haute couture. Andy goes through a kind of reverse rite of passage, by rejecting their life and clothes and returning to a worthwhile profession in a life not committed to the advancement of narcissistic self-love.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006): The Pride of Social Display as Child’s Play Even though the organized industry of fashion makes and markets what is deemed fashionable to wear (and by extension, where to be and what to do), there is always some personal variability as to whose clothes to wear, given the persistence of personal choices, such as how daring or

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youthful or avant-garde one tries to appear. As Andy found, working in the fashion industry and wearing acceptable clothing affects a person's own identity, so by rejecting the clothes she in her way moved towards an identity she felt more comfortable with. Andy's social intuition is quite pragmatic (as we saw in her assistance to Miranda), but her moral intuition values self-esteem higher than self-display, so her return to journalism allows her to exercise her considerable critical acumen. To be sure, journalism is not altogether pervaded by altruistic selflessness nor devoid of its own kind of cultural vanity (e.g., celebrity pundits), but for Andy and many others, at least it has a degree of social utility notably lacking in the fashion industry. We share with Andy her amusement that all this is much ado about nothing, and suspect like her that if she stayed in a world dedicated to egotistic pride of person, she would recurrently ask herself that age-old question concerning the comedy of self: Is that all there is? Such questions arise in all social sites of cultural vanity where the ethos of differentiation is characterized by the display of a definition of social good as manifest in personal worth. Justly or not, the fashion industry has the reputation of catering to those who are, and want to be, well off and wish to display their personal pride by wearing and showing the right things. (The fashion industry is recurrently embarrassed by accusations of the exploitation of cheap labor in making expensive clothes, and bedeviled by animal rights activists who object to the slaughter of animals for fur coats.) Yet, in certain contexts of cultural vanity which justifies itself by valuing and teaching social norms useful for “correct” social adjustment and harmony, similar criticisms have been leveled. Any kind of enterprise devoted to the display of certain kinds of social standards and models will likely find that people object, including that widespread and highly publicized ritual exhibition, the beauty contest. Since the great majority of such events appear to feature the display of young women, feminists and moralists have targeted such pageants as demeaning to women and inspiring male lusts. The women who participate may be ambitious (or merely vain) but are reduced to using their beauty and charm in appealing to superficial considerations in order to gain social rewards. For beauty contests are couched in terms which justify the parade of attractive young women as highlighting and teaching social values of competition balanced by congeniality. Critics often point out that the competition is often fierce, that the contestant's sponsors expend much effort and money promoting their charge, and that the only value really important and propagated is using physical beauty in the service of winning. Crudely put, pretty girls get ahead by using their bodies for social advantage. (Beauty pageants include talent competitions and other

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corollary features, but the swimsuit competition is crucial.) Even more controversial is the child beauty pageant, in which little girls of various pre-pubescent ages compete for prizes, usually culminating in the top prize awarded to the winner as an infantile version of adult competitions with titles such as “Little Miss Sunshine” for children. In all cases, these kinds of contests combine emphasis on feminine beauty and charm with the ambition to win through adroit self-presentation, so what is being rewarded is not only “best-looking” but also “best-performing.” But specifically in the case of child pageants, we are seeing evocation of “anticipatory socialization,” wherein children learn values and goals which they are enjoined to seek as female adults—learning to be pretty, seeking and winning competitions for socially sanctioned rewards appropriate for the feminine, and indeed femininity itself, in the guise and role of the “princess” myth. Despite all the attacks on beauty pageants as highly selective criteria of differentiation (since most can't be or don't want to be a princess) and child pageants as a grotesque misuse of children by imposing adult sexual categories on pre-sexual youths, this form and industry of cultural vanity continues to flourish. Little Miss Sunshine centers on the Hoover family, which charitably can be described as idiosyncratic, with everyone characterized by their individual quirk, ranging from the father (Richard), who is an antic motivational speaker espousing his own “Nine Steps to Success” which so far has failed to motivate anyone, to his wife Sheryl, who is desperately trying to keep a motley family together. Sheryl has just picked up her brother Frank at the hospital, where he has just been released after a suicide attempt, brought about because his homosexual companion left him for an academic rival, made all the more galling because Frank is a recognized Proust scholar and his rival is another prestigious Proust scholar. The younger generation includes Dwayne, a sullen and silent teenager who reads Nietzsche but hopes to become an Air Force pilot, and Olive, a precocious seven year old who is obsessed with child pageants and indeed has just won second place in a regional pageant contest close to home. When we first see her, we see a pleasant but not strikingly beautiful girl wearing huge plastic glasses, watching and studying a child pageant on TV at the moment the winner is crowned and acclaimed. Despite her physical limitations, her ambition is to win a pageant and thus enjoy cultural certification as someone who has been differentiated as outstanding and praiseworthy in an illusory dream-state of grace independent of her eccentric family. The grandfather (Edwin) has been dismissed from a retirement home for sleeping with some of the other retirees and using heroin (his philosophy is resolutely hedonistic, telling Dwayne that you're

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crazy to do “smack” while young but crazy not to when you’re old). Edwin is helpful to Olive, spending long hours teaching her a dance routine she can use in upcoming pageants. This highly individualistic grouping would seem to have little in common and no joint purpose, but this begins to change when they learn that Olive has been awarded first place in her last contest because of a forfeit, and thus she is eligible to compete in the prestigious “Little Miss Sunshine” pageant. Olive is overjoyed, and after some argumentative and expressive behavior they all pile into a venerable Volkswagen microbus and head out to Los Angeles on an adventurous road trip. The adventure, of which the road trip is a recently motorized version, has always been an extensive journey or meandering, but more importantly is an intensive voyage of self-exploration and self-knowledge. In the enclosed space of the microbus, as well as the arduous trip through the desert, much comes out: we learn that Grandpa Edwin was thrown out of the retirement home for selling heroin, and that Richard's hopeful book deal (and thus opportunity for motivational industry success) has been stymied. Frank accidentally comes across his ex-lover in a convenience store, and suffers another humiliation. Everyone is so self-absorbed that only the silent Dwayne notices that they had stranded Olive at a gas station, and when they stop at a motel, Sheryl and Richard have an explosive argument about his failed career, moving him to travel to the town where his book partner lives, only to face rejection again. At this point, the family seems to have reached the point of a collection of pathologies which will forever separate them in private dysfunctions, but the comic muse turns things around, however shocking or subversive they may seem, through a series of revelations and incidents. While the others argue and sulk, Grandpa is coaching Olive, who confesses she doesn't feel like a beauty queen and is scared about the big event the following day; he assures her that she is a beautiful person and thus will “blow 'em outta the water” and hugs her. The next morning, she discovers that Grandpa won't awaken, and they rush him to the hospital, where he is pronounced dead of a heroin overdose. The legal paperwork threatens their chances of getting Olive to the pageant, so they smuggle the body out of the hospital and rush on, even as the car has more and more defective parts. A state policeman pulls them over and almost discovers the body, but is distracted by Grandpa's collection of pornography, and lets them go when they offer to give him the smut. Dwayne is given an eye test for fun by Olive, and discovers he is colorblind, ruining his dream of becoming a pilot, inducing a fit of screaming rage and insults but the gentle Olive hugs him and he calms.

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The road trip ends when they enter the Los Angeles freeway maze, able to see the hotel where the contest is being held, but can't figure out how where to exit, just as tantalizingly elusive as the childish dream that brought them there. They get there late, and have to deal with officious functionaries who first refuse Olive’s participation, but finally relent. The family begins to see the garish reality of child beauty pageants: parents and friends cheering their entry, affected women officials presiding over the glittering event, entertainment media coverage, and most of all, the appearance of the contestants, little girls wearing adult makeup and fake tanner and glittering suggestive outfits more appropriate for a Las Vegas chorus line. Dwayne and Frank are so disgusted by this exhibition of seven-year-old glamour queens that they walk outside, where the nowspeaking Dwayne expresses his youthful frustration with life, prompting Frank to try to help by quoting Proust's thought that it is your suffering and not your happiness that defines your personal being. In the comic world, there is recognition of real and often unavoidable suffering (such as death) but also of absurd suffering, brought about by wanting or doing something that after all makes no sense to want or do, although you may have to suffer through it in order to understand the comic ethos you have stumbled into and the comic truth of leaving and transcending the trivial and the preposterous. Olive, like her father and in different ways the others in the family, came to value a success ethic, in her case one associated with the value of winning and the cultural value of mimicking adult models of beautiful display. Her parents sense that she will not fit, but the mother insists on letting “Olive be Olive.” Olive mounts the stage in suit and top hat, dedicates her number to grandpa, who taught her, and goes into a daring and suggestive strip-tease burlesque act; the audience is restless and discomfited, likely sensing that Olive is just taking the talent contest to its logical conclusion. A huffy pageant official orders her removed from the stage, but the delighted Richard, sensing the fun arising from the hypocritical objection to Olive's routine, joins in, and quickly the rest of the family jumps onstage and enthusiastically complete the erotic routine with her. The pageant officials insist that the family never bring Olive to another pageant, and they heartily agree, returning to their microbus and cheerfully head home, now a family. The Hoover family's road trip and encounter with the bourgeois grotesquerie of the child pageant was purgatorial in the purgative sense in that every one of them gained something by losing something, elusive and illusory dreams of success of one kind or another, ranging from motivating to piloting to writing to contesting. Their individual disasters and disappointments act as a pretext to their shared comic experience, realizing

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that their individual concerns are not as important as their shared affection, and when they join in Olive's dance, their pent-up Dionysian joy overflows in their erotic burlesque of the sham monstrosity of the child pageant industry, obviously making fun of the desexualized sexuality implicit in the adulterated children. Like Andy, they discover the vapid cultural vanity that informs the industry, and also that the enterprise is dominated by Very Serious People who try to imbue the meaningless with meaning. As a group, the Hoover family had something of a purifying cathartic experience that was for them all restorative, so they could leave the stultifying and self-important (and aptly named) exhibition hall with the comic realization that wanting something doesn't mean it is worth it anything. Social comedies about cultural vanity often seem to feature realizations on the part of individual or group protagonists that they are in some sort of comedic cloud cuckoo land that is bizarre or fantastic, and that the dysfunction is inherent in the social enterprise and not in them. Comic realizations make for pragmatic decisions and individual and or familial self-respect and even the knowledge that grace is not something that is awarded, but is something that is discovered. Like Andy, Olive wanted to be different by becoming a part of another world that seemed exciting and rewarding in which she could flourish, but both found only false hopes and false gods. And both came to this realization when they came to see that these ''lands of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new” were actually rather ignoble and covetous comedies that were not better, only different. Comic understanding is a pragmatic strategy for survival and maturity. Andy differed from the precepts of the fashion spectacle by becoming amused at the fashion difference and thus decided to forge her own individual difference independent of the fatuous difference of the runway. So she became a runaway, as did the Hoovers. Once confronted with the hypocritical and even disgraceful difference of child exploitation, they do their familial dance and run away back home to their respective differences. A new bond unites them in their individuality, celebrating idiosyncratic and even eccentric differences rather than the sordid conformist difference of the pageant. Comedy is notoriously antiauthoritarian, so the rejection of Miranda's rule and the pageant official rules was an act of comic disobedience by people whose learning may stimulate them toward lives of mature insurgency and feisty grace.

Sunset Boulevard (1950): The Pride of Cinematic Display If Andy could discover the pathos of the fashion industry and the Hoover family the ethos of the child contest industry, then such discoveries

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become prefaces to the comic truths about cultural vanity. The logos of vanity includes not only knowledge of what is being demanded and privileged by such practices as adorning yourself with the latest fashions and participating in events which feature attention to physical suppleness and proportionality, but also knowing what cultural process is involved in making a particular human being into a luminary, a singular and identifiable “radiant body” which invites attention and interest, often to the point of vicarious engagement. This process involves the attribution of qualities to someone differentiated on some sort of popular hieratic scale as outstanding and special but also in some curious way knowable. Those qualities are variously labeled as charisma, aura, patina, icon, image, and suchlike, all conveying the classification of someone as a personage worthy of being idolized, in the broad sense of transforming a person into a “collective representation” or luminous typification who is different from the rest of us and thus worthy of social knowledge. An idolized figure such as a celebrity is a special creature of our making and fashioning, coming into existence and continuing to exist by our imaginative whim and notice, thus appearing by our conjuring and disappearing like ghosts at dawn by our inattention. The social luminary is a product of our knowledge of someone is who is known for being well known. Central to the knowledgeable transaction is a variant of cultural vanity, in which we creature figures of play out of our amusement with vainglory and pretense and they attempt to act out our expectations through their publicized enactments of idolatrous vanity. Luminaries live for us as creatures of legitimate exhibitionism in the social theater of luminosity, but it is we, the auditors, who seek and see the light and when that light fails, we seek illumination elsewhere in another spotlight. Yet those who have once been in the spotlight may continue to feel that their star still shines bright and will someday glow once again. Sunset Boulevard opens with police cars rushing into a driveway with sirens going, and we see them joining police and press reporters and cameramen on the landscaped grounds of a palatial, if a bit shabby and run-down, mansion with a prestigious Hollywood address. As the outside lights up and cameras flash, we see the body of a young man floating in the pool. The dead man (Joe Gillis) is the narrator, making us realize that we are at the end of the story and now (in flashback) he is going to tell us how he wound up in the pool. Only recently Joe was a struggling screenwriter working on routine movies and before that a journalist on a Midwestern newspaper. As we first meet him, he is broke and about to have his car repossessed, and is forced to beg a few friends for a loan; with no luck, he is driving home when the car repossessors see him and give

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chase, but he eludes them by pulling into a mansion driveway and parking in an old garage with an ancient car parked in it. The humor then immediately turns dark when he is seen and summoned by a formally dressed servant with a shaved head and thick German accent, mistaking Gillis for an undertaker who has been called to prepare a deceased pet chimpanzee for burial. Gillis explains that he is a screenwriter, which attracts the attention of the elegant if older lady of this strange house, who tells him to stay and look at a movie script she has been working on. Gillis is impressed by the ornate if old-fashioned trappings of the mansion and after glancing at a large portrait on the wall, realizes that this is the home of a famous movie star of the silent era, Norma Desmond. She is pleased that he recognizes her, but recoils when he says, “You used to be big.” “I am big,” she retorts, “It's the movies that got small.” To which Gillis wryly cracks, “I knew there was something wrong with them.” As their relationship and the plot unfolds, it is Gillis's comic sensibility as expressed in both the story and the voice-over commentary that points to the twisted comedy of it all—the grotesque setting of the decayed mansion, the delusional world of Norma, his self-loathing and bemusement, and the sardonic view of Hollywood and the stars. Norman and the butler (Max) and her old friends from the silent film days (the “waxworks,” he calls them) are comic in Joe Gillis's eyes, but he also realizes that he is a comic figure in a different way, a laconic stooge who allows himself to play the fool as her plaything. Joe reads the script and realizes that it is a vehicle for her return to the screen, cynically calculating that she is not only too old to play the part (Salome) and that it will never be produced or filled, but he needs the money, so he tells her it needs work and he will do it, although he lies that he is an expensive talent. He even agrees to stay at the mansion, since she's paying and soon she is buying him a new wardrobe of suits and fine gifts such as a gold cigarette case. Joe is beholden to her, and she is dominative and clinging, so soon they are watching her old movies together and she arranges a New Year's Eve party just for the two of them, a gesture typical of her romantic heyday in the movies of the 1920s. He becomes a gigolo, a young man “kept” by a rich older woman in need of reaffirmation that she is still attractive, yet he is also beguiled by her theatricality, living in the histrionic world of a silent movie star as if she were still the center of the Hollywood world cinematic universe. He is aware that she is now a caricature of her former self, so her knowledge of herself and the world is through the delusional lens of youthful movie acclaim and celebrity renown, which in her mind transfigures her as a bright star that glows forever in the movie firmament. Past, present, and

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future collapse and join together in her world: she plays bridge with silent movie stars, does a pantomime of Chaplin for him, works feverishly on her Salome script, and is sure that DeMille, the great silent director still working, will direct her new film and many more. She exists in the logos of true stardom (she asks Joe to minimize talk in the script, since in the old days they didn't need talk: “We had faces then”), living in the insane logic of a futile purpose. If Andy's experience in the fashion world was a rehearsal in which she tries out a role in what she comes to see as a pathetic triviality, and the Hoover family trains for and performs in a ritual ethos of child pageant travesty, then we wonder if and when Joe Gillis will free himself from this mad gothic gloom featuring a forgotten screen star acting out her own private myth of immortality, a celestial body at the center of the movie universe. Joe becomes restless and sneaks out of the mansion, dropping in on a friend in his age group, who is having a party with younger people who are sociable and having fun. He meets his friend’s girl (Betty), only to find that she is a script reader at a movie studio, and indeed had turned down a screenplay he had submitted. He is irked by the rejection, but he likes her and she encourages him to develop a part of the script that she liked. They meet at night at the studio to work together on his screenplay, and discover they are attracted to each other. As is often the case in film noir, Joe now has a way out of the demonic comedy of the Desmond manor with an attractive figure who is a normal alterative waiting for him. But he keeps his life with Norma a secret, until his patron’s jealousy prompts her to call Betty and tell the truth. Joe invites Betty to the mansion and explains in his comically cynical manner the nature of “the simple set-up: an older woman who is well-to-do and a younger man who is not doing too well.” The forgiving Betty pleads with him to leave but he defends himself with twisted pragmatism: “Look, sweetie, be practical. I've got a good deal here.” Joe thus passes on a way out, consistently seeing himself as a comic figure acting out a role in a movie unreeling in Norma's madhouse, and continues to play the part. His friends on the outside think him foolish (he shows up at the party in a tuxedo Norma had bought him), and even though Betty knows his “arrangement” she continues to love him and work on his script with him. But he is under Norma's spell, in a sense just like Max, who reveals to Joe that he discovered Norma as a teenage talent and directed all her early films and indeed was her first husband, returning to her after two other husbands to become her house servant, even feeding her delusionary stardom by writing reams of fan mail to her from nonexistent admirers. Joe tells Max that they together are not “helping her any, feeding her lies” but the protective Max asserts that she never will.

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The exit is further closed when Joe impulsively calls the mansion and tells Max to pack his bags, but on returning discovers that Norma, in an operatic gesture worth of the silent screen, has slit her wrists. Joe chides her, but she says she did it out of love, and he can only crack, “It would have made attractive headlines—great star kills herself for unknown writer,” to which she reaffirms her self-image in a line worthy of a silent title card, “Great stars have great price.” We begin to wonder if what sustains the devotion of her two comic devotees, Joe and Max, is her convinced self-knowledge of a differentiated status that is so unapproachable that it justifies her personal sense of cultural vanity. That sense is fed when she travels in her ancient touring car to the studio where she worked, and is greeted by her former director and even for a moment is spotlighted by the lighting workmen in the rafters above a movie set. She sees this as a preface for her comeback and resurrection of what she believes she is, when in fact all they wanted was to inquire if they could rent her old car for a movie. When Joe finally resolves to leave, the ending returns us to the conventions of nineteenth-century melodrama and Italian opera that are so suffused with sentimental bathos and romantic gestures typical of that seriocomic style. Norman beseeches him not to leave because she can no longer live without him, and he angrily and cruelly reveals what her guarded self should not know, that there will be no restorative comeback, urging her to “Wake up. The audience left twenty years ago.” When he begins to leave, in contradistinction Max pronounces that “Madame is the greatest star of them all,” and Norma repeats that differentiating mantra, “I'm a star...I'm the greatest star of them all,” and thus in her mad logic from the top of the starry firmament, she reasons that “no one ever leaves a star. That's what makes one a star.” When Joe will not stop outside, she shoots him and he falls into the pool. The police and press arrive and mingle, as a gossip columnist tries to coax Norma down from her bedroom. Since there are newsreel cameras and strobe lights set up, Max hits upon the idea of mimicking a movie “take,” commandeering one of the cameras and asking, “Are you ready, Norma,” for that scene to be shot on the staircase of the palace. She bestirs, and in the grandest silent-star histrionic manner, descends the stairs as Salome, stopping at the bottom because she's “too happy” and vowing now to make one movie after another since “this is my life,” relishing her complete immersion in cinematic logic. “There's nothing else—just us—and the cameras,” and with a sweeping look around the movie theater, “and those wonderful people out there in the dark.” She is now their light illuminating movie truth for those who

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live in darkness, and she is ready, moving towards the camera, and us, announcing “All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.” One of the great motifs in comedies of differentiation is disenchantment, often involving someone who is an outsider or alien who enters what they are led to believe is an enchanted world of special and charmed grace, but which turns out to be comic because the newcomer begins to see what is going on there as unimportant and overdone and thus funny in its pretentious gracelessness. Andy and Olive's family leave their lands of enchantment, returning to pragmatic lives which offer some kind of hopeful enhancement, as a journalist or just a gawky kid (although not as a test pilot). Norma has by contrast incorporated the enchanted forest of Hollywood into the dreamscape of her person and persona, so the only enhancement she can envision is a return to making pictures, since life is on the set and would reaffirm her self-regard and deluded sense that no one, including the audience, can leave a star. Norma is a figure of pathos and parody, to be sure, but she is also comic as perhaps the ultimate manifestation of cultural vanity. Her insistent grace persists by being twice removed from the world of brute life and social participation, since as a star she lives within her mythic self which is an eternal nova in the movie heaven. She doesn't realize, since as they do in the worlds of fashion and beauty, that a star is an object of the prevailing mode of expression, which in her heyday was histrionic and majestic but over time the stylistics and caprices of star power changes by the whim of those people in the dark. Norma’s only audience at last for her celestial body is herself, whom she idolizes, and in her last performance, as Joe said, she was “still waving proudly to a parade which had long since passed her by.” Compared to the anxious people of the fashion industry and the prissy functionaries of the child pageant, she does indeed convey the haughty pride of stature and grace that one expects of a true star. In all cases, the display of cultural vanity requires a high degree of immodesty, but unlike models and beauty contestants, Norma has much for which to be immodest about.

Organized Enterprises: The Pride of Deed, Legal or Not Social comedies which direct attention to differentiations include the wide variety of things people do together in an effort to accomplish something. They are moved to do so because of there is a valuable object they want, and plan deeds in order to bring that objective to fruition. Such enterprises become comic when and if something goes amiss, such as ineptitude or miscommunication on the part of the participants, so the objective sought becomes more elusive than thought or turns out to be

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valueless, or barriers and diversions that were unexpected appear, and so on. Anything a group of humans set out to do has the potential for comic mishap, and since most of us share the same human maladies of trying and failing, wanting things we find out are not worth it, and the like, we can identify with the comic creatures and situations we enjoy watching en the movie screen. People obsessed by pride of deed often wind up seeking objectives that are grist for great comedy, since their version of social differentiation emphasizes pride of place and person less and pursuing pride of doing or getting something more. Oftentimes in the movies, this involves doing something that is illegal or at least skirts propriety, which makes the comic complications all the funnier. Three venerable subjects in this vein are the con (the confidence game or con artistry), the caper (a group effort to get something that doesn't belong to them), and the crime (especially the sophisticated crime, such as jewel thievery). Here we both enjoy criminal competence (outwitting the police) and incompetence (gangs that can't steal straight) and authoritative difficulties (such as police incompetence). Both the comedy of pulling something off and bungling something badly are equally funny, appealing variously to our amusement at the clever and attractive succeeding at something that outwits authorities and pomposities; or, conversely, enjoyment of those who almost get away with something but for that old comedic imp, the unexpected or inadvertent unforeseen complication, that foils the best-laid plans. People seeking to be different or get something that makes them different often find, in best comic fashion, that the difference sought makes no difference, or by trying to be something they are not, become different in ways they did not anticipate.

How to Steal a Million (1966): The Comic Complexities of the Con When we see comedies featuring confidence men and women and watch a “con game” unfold, we are in the province of comic ambiguity, since what is being done is duplicitous in trying to fool someone else into believing and doing something they might not otherwise do. Con artistry is a wry comedy of selling people something they become convinced they want and must have through the use of rhetorical smoke and mirrors. The confidence man is adept at the art of making belief in other people by lying to them about how he or she are going to make their lives different and in consequence better. We are amused by and may even root for an adept gamesperson, shape-shifter, role player, trickster, swindler, and so on, and in comedy especially enjoy their fraudulences and hoaxes when

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they “fleece” someone who richly deserves it and may not even know they have been “had.” We don't think it is funny if someone swindles workingclass retirees out of their pensions. However, it is funny when swindlers talk the very wealthy or smart people out of money, since they should know better. We enjoy seeing them disgraced by artistic separation of the one thing they value most. And, it is even funnier if the con artist is an elegant rogue who is not so much a mercenary as a funster who enjoys his calling. The title, How to Steal a Million, suggests a playful premise: we are going to look at the comic pragmatics of sophisticated deception. The movie opens in a spacious Parisian mansion full of art objects at night, when we see a young man sneaking around in the dark and finally examining a particular painting. The lights come on, and a young woman in a negligee armed with an ancient dueling pistol descends the stairs. The handsome man (Simon) confesses he is a “high society” burglar, and has their painting he was admiring tucked under his arm. The lovely woman (Nicole) is nervous and accidentally shoots him, grazing his arm she takes him into the kitchen to treat his slight wound, and they begin to like each other; and even though Simon has just tried to rob her of something valuable, she suggests that she drive him home. Her hospitality is not just erotic, for she is guarding a family secret, so if she reported him to the police, the subsequent investigation might reveal that her father, (Charles Bonnet), a highly successful and well-reputed connoisseur of art, is someone who loves art so much that he makes almost undetectable copies of the great works. Charles is in truth an eminent art forger, and indeed at the moment he has lent his most prized possession, the Cellini “Venus,” to a Parisian museum. Charles is much pleased with himself because of the fanfare about the statue, cheerfully signing the legal documents a museum official brings, too late realizing that he has signed a document authorizing a mandatory authenticity inspection by experts. Thus Charles and Nicole are threatened with exposure, prosecution, and incarceration, his reputation ruined and their opulent lifestyle (including her Jaguar and Givenchy clothes) lost. So what to do? Since Nicole knows both an art forger and an art thief, the obvious solution is to use her considerable charm to enlist the latter in the service of the former. We are here in the comic domain of stylistic pathos, since Nicole loves both her father and her new man (and they love her back), and sees no reason why those emotive ties should not be utilized in order to preserve family, further her love interest, and keep her in designer clothes. Her sympathetic feelings for them both makes her both admire and utilize their respective pathologies, criminal art forgery and art

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thievery, for the pragmatic purposes of affluence and noninterference by investigators. Time is essential, however, so she rather easily convinces her rogue thief to break into the museum and steal the Cellini fake back before the examiners realize it is indeed phony. Small matter, since the museum is guarded by a watchful staff of sentinels, who spend much of their time playing cards and taking swigs out of hidden brandy bottles. However, there is an alarm system, so if the Cellini is moved the bells go off and the French gendarmes arrive. Simon and Nicole “case the joint” (Simon enjoys lapsing into crime-movie tough talk: “What's the score, baby?”) and he hits upon a plan to free “Venus” from her captivity. Rather than an elaborate plan to rob priceless objects from museums and palaces, what Simon proposes is simplicity itself. They will visit the museum, sneak into a cleaning materials storage closet at closing time, and bide their time. In the closet, Simon reveals he knew about the Cellini forgery and her motive, revealing his true motive by kissing her; hours pass, and we presume they passed the time in lovemaking. When they emerge, he uses boomerangs to activate the “electric eye” beam that sets off the alarm; the police come, check, and leave. Simon does it again, and again the police find no foul play, and worse, the uproar is interfering with the sleep of an important official who lives nearby, so they deactivate the alarm, thinking it defective, and not wishing to upset sleeping authority. As dawn nears, a female cleaning crew, armed with mops and buckets, enters to work before opening time, and Nicole, dressed in work clothes, joins them to mop and scrub. The thieves manage to get the Cellini in her bucket, replace it with the crew's brandy bottle, and when the guards finally notice it is gone, manage to slip out a side door that Simon had scouted out, posing as a higher bureaucrat on an inspection tour. While all this is going on, an American man of property materializes, emboldened by money to buy great art and much interested in possessing the art form of Nicole. Simon reveals to the Bonnets that he is actually a private detective, a specialist in art fraud only posing as a thief to gain access to suspected fake art works. Since he is now virtually a member of the family, he will not reveal the family secret to the authorities, providing Charles abandon his career as a forger. He promises, and they solve the problem of the Cellini by selling it to the gullible American, who spirits out it out of the country on his private jet, pleased mightily but not knowing it is fake. With those problems solved, Simon and Nicole drive off into Paris and presumably marriage, leaving the Bonnet mansion; as they leave, a limousine with a Latin American art collector arrives, who is apparently as credulous as the American plutocrat, expressing interest in Mr. Bonnet's Van Gogh. Father Bonnet cannot resist, since he knows the

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painting is thoroughly fraudulent, arousing Bonnet's enthusiastic praise of this great work which he can only consider selling at a great price. The Bonnet art industry is back in action. Nicole is fortunate to have two lovable rogues in her life (do we actually believe Simon is a private detective and not an art thief?), although she may have to exercise much sympathetic magic in order to keep her two men with major aesthetic pathologies, both of which involve such appreciation of art that they can't keep copying it and stealing it, out of trouble. Certainly a comedy of confidence as a social enterprise reminds us how much of social discourse and exchange depends upon some degree of credulity, and often misplaced trust in those who would gain and use our confidence in them. We enjoy seeing those who are masters of the game as they create and present themselves as trustworthy and watch them as they play roles and make belief and bestow gifts upon those who have faith in them (the American millionaire is happy with his Cellini). The confidence man appeals to a variety of human sympathies, including the desire to differentiate oneself with something that is yours exclusively to enjoy as an object of beauty, even if it is a forged Van Gogh.

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951): The Comic Connivance of the Caper The success of a confidence enterprise depends upon the appeal the con artist makes in appeal to the emotive or irrational sympathies of those deemed susceptible to temptation. An art forger like Mr. Bonnet may indeed think of himself as an artist and his copies as contributions to art, but he sells them anyway. His customers are excessively wealthy, but their willingness to pay a high price only underscores their appreciation of the aesthetic beauty of the art objects they acquire. The transaction is ripe with comic ambiguity, since the art “dealer” is not without aesthetic discrimination and the rich buyer is driven by art appreciation, although complemented by the moneyed belief that the purchase of such objects as a Bellini or Van Gogh accords a person with social grace that the mere possession of financial resources by itself does not. (This helps explain the puzzling habit of the rich resisting higher rewards and benefits for their employees and the society at large but spending greatly on acquiring collections of art and museum bearing their name, so the public may see them but reminded that in a way the objects on display are still their property.) For ordinary mortals in the middle or bottom of society, however, wealth in itself is quite valuable, since it is the one thing of which they can be sure they don't have enough. When we read about how

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the rich live, especially about the wealthy at play in the pleasure-domes of the world, we tend to react with a degree of censure but also with feelings of envy. So many people have moments of crass greed, wherein they can imagine ways of getting enough money to escape their limited and routine existence and instead live the high life. For them, wealth is in itself a social good, so good that in their wickedest thoughts, they can think of illegal ways of acquiring it and getting away with both the crime and the money. But just how? A famous bank robber who kept robbing banks was once asked why it did it, and he replied because that's where the money is. So it helps to feed popular fantasies about instant wealth if you work for a bank. In The Lavender Hill Mob, we meet a timid and reliable bank clerk who has been working for the “Bank of London,” which moviegoers will identify as the Bank of England. For twenty years, he has been the clerk in charge of gold bullion delivered to and from the bank vaults where the gold bars are stored safely. In the heyday of the “gold standard,” nations and banks (especially national banks) acquired gold as a wealth reserve and instrument for the calculation of currency value. Now gold as a symbolic good has an ancient mythical heritage that still resonates as a valuable and beautiful object of wealth, but since it is heavy and cumbersome, transporting it legally requires the effort of a team of trained employees, and spiriting it away illegally is difficult. However, in the case of our bank clerk (Henry Holland) making a miniscule salary and living in mundane housing, over the years he has entertained himself by thinking of ways one might successfully steal and sell enough gold for a former bank clerk to live on comfortably in some foreign resort clime. Such a small operation is referred to as a “caper,” since it usually involves amateurs or small-time criminals acting as a kind of itinerant commando unit pulling off such a heist almost as a trick or even practical joke, connoting the frivolity and gambol of the operation. So in the movies, the thieves may bring it off but subsequently run into difficulties or divisions which undermine the success of the job or during the actual theft run into unforeseen troubles which negate their completion. Such films are comedies of temptation yielded to and sought with a considered if amateurish strategy but usually thwarted by some intervening person or event. They are also comedies of organizational vulnerability, showing us what we've always suspected, that those important social establishments which are sequestered and guarded are actually not as safe and impenetrable as they pretend to be (museums included). Their susceptibility is even more amusing when they are tricked or outsmarted by rank

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amateurs running on luck as much as skill, and even funnier when it is one of their own. Henry Holland is a trusted and taken-for-granted civil servant whose service is barely appreciated and badly underpaid. Little do his employers know that the meek Mr. Holland aspires to the status of a criminal mastermind, since he is especially solicitous about the details and procedures of proper bank transfer of bullion, and watchful of cars that he suspects might be following the bank van full of gold, with him inside on the lookout. He reckons that only someone like himself who is both ordinary and trustworthy could pull off a perfect crime as an “inside job,” since his superiors, closeted in their claustrophobic boardrooms and bureaucratic mentality, likely could not conceive a humble and submissive drone like him having the imagination and daring to rob the bank of England. But since unlikelihood is primal stuff for comedy, this makes “the mob” consisting of the unsuspected all the more delicious. Holland's problem, as he sees it, is not so much acquiring the gold bullion as much as what to do with it once it is acquired. The black market in England would be too risky, so it would be better to somehow transport it abroad and sell it there. His problem is solved when a new boarder (Pendlebury) moves into the cheap boarding house in Lavender Hill where Holland has long lived. Pendlebury runs a small foundry that makes presents and souvenirs, including cheap metal knick-knacks, such as miniature Eiffel Towers he ships to a kiosk nearby the Tower in Paris. Holland hits upon the happy idea of melting the stolen bullion into the miniature Towers, paint them over, and ship them there for the kiosk owner to hold until the “mob” arrives. Pendlebury immediately enlists his services in the enterprise, noting that they were certain of success because they are “both honest men.” The two honest men do calculate that they are going to require the assistance of some dishonest men to bring off the actual robbery, so they recruit two petty criminals to help them. The mob manages the actual crime well enough, aided by Holland, who plays his part well as the outraged and abused loyal employee wronged by dastardly thieves, even to the extent of mussing and beating himself up a bit to make it look as if he were “worked over.” With the gold now in their possession, they proceed to melt it down, shape the gold into ingots, and then paint and ship miniatures of the Eiffel Tower. Our unlikely master criminals—now giddy with success and their wicked criminal illegality, styling themselves as “Al” and “'Dutch,” as if they needed underworld aliases—have perhaps a million pounds at their disposal, entertaining visions of a differentiated life beyond their wildest dreams and imagining that no further complications

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could arise. Alas, the woman who runs the Tower kiosk misunderstands their directions and opens one of the boxes for sale, selling six of them to a group of schoolgirls on holiday. Since the girls were British, Al and Dutch then frantically try to get to the Channel ferry in time to retrieve the souvenirs, but run into one of the predictable barriers of comedy, the customs officials. Back in England, they find the addresses of the schoolgirls and buy them back with some money and a flimsy excuse, but one girl refuses, saying she is going to give it to a friend, who turns out to be a policeman. The worm has turned on comic improbability here, because the “copper” is indeed given the gift, and has it with him when he attends a police college seminar on methods. Al and Dutch arrive there, only to discover that a police inspector investigating the robbery is curious about the miniature, and wants it tested. Our two desperate thieves snatch it and lead the police on a car chase through London, now having stolen a police car, eluding them for awhile by giving out false information. Finally Pendlebury is captured, but Holland escapes to Rio. The first scene of the movie shows him sitting at ease in a Latin American bar, and now in the last he is still conversing about his exploits. It turns out he only got away with the six gold towers acquired from the schoolgirls, and is now out of money, since he only had enough “to keep me for one year in the style to which I was unaccustomed.” His interlocutor and he then leave, with Holland handcuffed to him, a British policeman who has traced him to there and is now returning him to England. We noted that a “caper” suggests something frivolous, as in an antic leap or frisky gambol done at great risk. There was both foresight and planning on the part of our mob, but their grasp of the ethos of the enterprise is both limited to the techniques of seizure of the stolen property and then its camouflage and transmission to a safe site. They did not anticipate the inevitable chance element in any enterprise, such as the kiosk owner's misreading of their instructions, or the comic happenstance of an investigator looking at the schoolgirl's gift. We have seen enough serious melodramas of professionals conducting a caper that goes wrong, so in comedy we can expect the “luck of the amateur” to not hold as they lose control of the situation and panic, frivolity turning to farce very quickly—chasing the schoolgirls, grabbing evidence, car chases, fleeing precipitously. Perhaps the great fun of a comedic failed caper is that we share the impulse of disregarded and unremarkable people in daring to do something outrageous in order to acquire a goodly share of that social good so jealously guarded by the possessing classes, money. In farce, we are asked to accept certain improbabilities, so our enjoyment stems not from the virtually certain failure of the “mob,” but seeing them discover

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the thrill of finally in their mundane lives attempting and doing something extraordinary and so clever they almost get away with it. By contrast, Simon and the Bonnets are professionals more adept at calculating risk and reward involved in social stealth and acquisition and disposal, but we do like Holland and Pendlebury because they are having the time of their lives, and understand the dare.

A Shot in the Dark (1964): The Comedy of Able Crime and Inept Detection Comedies of social enterprise seem to reveal to us delightful varieties of comic ineptitude, some of which stems from people being so enraptured by the object sought or thrilled by the adventure undertaken that their judgment is impaired. The American millionaire is so taken with the beauty of the Cellini Venus that he cannot suspect that it is a fake, and the Lavender Hill mob so pleased with the audacity of their acquisition of a much-desired social good that they are blind to something going amiss. Aesthetic passion and social miscommunication become barriers or errors of comic limitation. We also saw official ineptitude, including the guards and police charged with guarding the priceless art at the museum and the bankers charged with the safe transportation of pricey gold bullion by a method a lowly bank clerk figured out how to easily intercept and snatch the loot. But in Shot in the Dark, comic ineptitude among officialdom reaches its bungling epitome in the French detective Inspector Jacques Clouseau. Clouseau is a parody of the literary convention featuring the rational detective, either public or private, who through the use of evidentiary analysis and logical ratiocination is able to solve the most puzzling and unfathomable crimes. Sherlock Holmes was the great English-speaking model of such rational inquiry, and in its Frenchspeaking variation, figures such as Inspector Maigret and Hercule Poirot come to mind. Poirot in particular speaks a broken but intelligible English, and uses the method of Cartesian French logic in order to discover the truth of the matter in question. Clouseau speaks a kind of Pepe La Pew French (“A beump on zee head”). His language and logic are garbled (“You shot him in a rit of fealous jage!”). He espouses an off-kilter existentialism that would make Sartre and Camus wince (“I believe everything...and I believe nothing”) and an off-center world-view (he walks into a garden wall and gravely admonishes, “I suggest you have your architect investigated”). He is thus perfect in the parodic role of the paragon of rational detection turned on its head, repeatedly exemplified by Clouseau's repeated and sometimes disastrous pratfalls, making his

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superior, Inspector Dreyfus, muse, “Give me ten men like Clouseau and I could destroy the world.” The masters of social detection were differentiated from the rest of us by their adroit use of logos—factual data, denotative reasoning, the merger of theoretical and pragmatic analysis in determining who did it. Clouseau is differentiated by his mastery of anti-logic that boggles everyone else's mind but not his own confident inner density. In the case at hand, Clouseau's professional incompetence impels him to ignore the obvious conclusion as to what happened and forge on, seeking the unobvious truth that must be out there. A murder has been committed at the country home of a French patrician, M. Ballon, and although Dreyfus is ready to make an arrest, Clouseau arrives to object. The victim is Ballon's chauffeur, who has been having an affair with the gorgeous housemaid Maria, found with the body holding a smoking gun and the corpse at her feet. But Clouseau is convinced of her innocence, so much so that as the murders keep on happening with her suspect, he keeps releasing her, much to the dismay of Dreyfus, who removes him from the case and arrests Maria. Mysteriously, the next day Dreyfus learns that unknown persons of influence have interfered with the Ministry of Justice, desiring Clouseau back on the case (we immediately suspect because of his extraordinary incapability). He returns and immediately releases Maria, and very soon we find her again with another dead body, this time the gardener. Again she is released, but Clouseau does follow her, into a nudist colony where they must disrobe, and lo and behold finds her with another murder victim, the Ballon's first maid. By this point, the arrest and release/dismissal and reassignment cycle turns once again, and this time Clouseau actually takes Maria out to nightclubs. Unbeknownst to him, someone is stalking Clouseau, and in the course of the evening four innocent people are killed by getting in the way of unsuccessful attempts to assassinate the oblivious Inspector. Throughout all this madness, the gloriously bumbling Clouseau manages to keep falling into ponds, knocking people out with doors and other objects, pocketing lit cigarette lighters, and displaying a gift for always being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Worse, he is always drawing the wrong conclusions, to the quiet dismay of his police assistant, Hercule LaJoy, who Clouseau repeatedly asks to examine the evidence and express an inference, but is always reprimanded by Clouseau for making the logical and evident conclusion. In addition, Clouseau also manages to get himself, a police officer, repeatedly arrested by uniformed police (three times posing doing something without a license and once more for public nudity). Clouseau's boss Dreyfus is driven to distraction by his hapless detective, developing a twitch, accidentally cutting off his thumb and stabbing himself with a

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letter-opener. Finally, we have the traditional penultimate scene where the investigator gathers all the suspects together in the Ballon mansion, wherein they begin to accuse one another until the lights go out; when the lights come back on, we find that the six survivors (including M. Ballon) were all guilty of murder, with each one of them having killed one of the earlier victim and the manservant extorting the rest. As a group they have fled in Clouseau's car, which has been wired by Dreyfus, who turns out to be the stalker trying to kill Clouseau, and so the fleeing group is blown up by a bomb. It turns out that Clouseau's insistent illogic is after all serendipitously correct, providing a wondrous comic coda to the inverted parody of super-logicality as an investigative weapon. A Shot in the Dark takes full advantage of the ancient movie and stage comedy rudiment, the sight gag. Clouseau's logical ineptitude is accompanied by and underscored by his physical and social ineptitude. And it is a delicious comic irony that his remarkable inabilities leads to the identification and punishment of the guilty, in the aftermath of the ritual recognition scene in which investigative authorities such as M. Poirot or Nick Charles preside over the reconstruction and revelation of the crime and the criminals. Clouseau inverts the debonair and percipient bearing and wit of the intellectual inquirer and in so doing makes such impressive powers seem absurd, since he blunders his own way towards the truth of the matter, and indeed prevents the lovely and innocent Maria from wrongly taking the blame. Comedic farce relies on mistaken identities and unlikely coincidences in getting to a resolution, so while everyone else either suspects or wants to place the guilt on Maria, the irrational and smitten Clouseau refuses to admit her guilt, and rightly so as it turns out. And in comedy as in life, coincidences are never exactly by coincidence, so Maria being at the guilty place was likely a set-up and Clouseau being in the wrong place eventually reveals secrets (Dreyfus keeps asking himself, “What if Clouseau is right?”). As a social enterprise, the skilled purpose of the police investigator is to uncover the hidden truth, but what differentiates Clouseau from that ideal is that the confusion he creates leads the guilty to begin to accuse each other, revealing the extent of the guilt by their own admission, and not even a confession at that. In the conduct of social investigation, the pragmatic rule is getting to the truth of things of importance, and if the clumsy and wrong-headed incompetence of the investigator produces the correct result, it just proves that doing the wrong thing and using the worse logic may somehow just make things play out to the right ending. Human desire for and activity in pursuit of differentiation thrusts people into circumstances over which they may have only limited control,

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making their conceived social enterprises more precarious and threatened with mishap or disaster. But it is a distinct characteristic of comedy that while things are undertaken and subsequently things do happen, the fact that things don't work out doesn't mean that they don't play out. If the telos of tragedy is justice, and melodrama works toward social morality, the ludenic outcome of comedy is a humbling and wiser grace when we survey how things played out. It is perhaps not just that M. Bonnet continues to sell phony works of great art to wealthy suckers, but it is wise that Nicole and Simon leave him to his own devices and go off to enjoy something more valuable (each other). But there is some comic justice in seeing the arrogant wealthy—people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing—seeking expensive grace by owning priceless things which are in fact valueless. Similarly, the Lavender Hill pair may have overreached and miscalculated, but their moment of wicked deviance and immense wealth gave them a sense of worth not measurable by ingots of gold but rather by the deed done, giving them a brief differentiating state of grace by notoriety rather than their usual anonymity. In comedy, we can thus appreciate many kinds of acts if they are funny, including the graceless gracefulness of Clouseau, since after all his breathtaking ineptitude—his “shots in the dark”—helped things to play out to a satisfactory comic ending. In this way, comedy informs our wisdom about the human condition, including our efforts at differentiation, reminding us of our limits in comic humbling and our hopes, however vain and pointless, in comic ennobling. The people we like in comedy—Nicole and Simon, Holland, even Clouseau—differentiate themselves through the diversity of grace which encompasses lovers, liars, and fools as representatives of our comic existence.

Comedies of Distinction: Modes of Becoming Notable, Celebrated, or Outstanding We observed that comedies of domination feature obligatory rules backed by some kind of might, social power used by dominative groups to set them apart and above other members of society. Too, comedies of differentiation highlight exclusionary rules backed by some form of means, such as guarding art and gold and mansions. Comedies of distinction feature luminary rules backed by some ways of social status manners, patterns of identifying who is to be regarded as worthy of prestige and thus distinct from the commonly unknown many in society. Social distinction does not necessarily involve the use of power, although sometimes forms of persuasion such as publicity become important, nor does it always

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involve the employment or quest for class ascent, although that may accompany achievement or fame. Some people become distinct almost by accident, while others want it very much. Much of the fun in comedies of distinction stems from the common social fact that luminary rules are often very fluid, so all sorts of puzzling modes of fame and renown can come into play .Distinguished scholars may suddenly become celebrities, recluses may become famous for being inaccessible, ordinary people who, because of some mannerism or malady, may become a well-known “star” overnight, and so on. Social luminaries often are temporary in their moment with the spotlight on them, but the very fact that societies elevate people to such a distinct status suggests that prestige is just as important to us as power or prejudice, and indeed may be seen as a way for people without might or means to break through or get around barriers that would otherwise be impenetrable. In this way, social distinction revolves around the attribution or assertion of a distinct manner, some sort of style or idiosyncrasy that makes an individual peculiarly outstanding. People who become distinct are identifiable not so much for whom they are or what they've done but rather how they did it. Actors and athletes, soldiers and professors, indeed virtually every social role may be enacted adequately by people of intellect and skill, but distinction is reserved for those few who are deemed to be distinctive and even in some cases distinguished. A distinguished professor, an elder statesman in government, a learned jurist likely have a career of achievement behind them but they also must display appropriate deportment and distinct mannerisms unique to them personally in order to be regarded as distinctive in the sense of eminence. In many areas of social distinction, however, the quality deemed important may be elegance, fame, notoriety, or whatever defines a person as distinctly interesting, although likely ephemeral and fleeting. And sometimes, in the great carnival of social play with personalities who happen to swim into view, it can be a nobody that suddenly becomes a somebody, transforming a non-entity into an entity for the delectation of a mass public eager for new excitements. So fame, like greatness, is sometimes thrust upon people.

Comedies of Individual Distinction: Becoming a Standout, One Way or Another Nothing Sacred (1937): Dying to See New York The opening title introduces us to New York, identified as a place “Where the Slickers and Know-It-Alls peddle gold bricks to each

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other...And where Truth, crushed to earthy, rises again more phony than a glass eye....” At the center of this citadel of social fraudulence is the media culture, specifically registered in the constant jungle drumbeat of the city newspapers, a highly competitive and thus sensationalistic industry dominated by “yellow journalism,” trying to outdo each other in lurid stories appealing to popular tastes and whims. The movie opens at a gala event celebrating and dedicating an expensive art institute funded by an Oriental potentate entitled the “Sultan of Marzipan,” who in full fauxHollywood regalia rises and blesses the event and its rapt audience of city dignitaries. The event is sponsored by a newspaper, the Morning Star, with an eye on increased circulation, so at the head table is reporter Wally Cook, who has discovered and promoted the African nobleman and his generous scheme. At the moment of benediction, in the rear of the hall, we see an African-American woman and her children with a policeman, to whom she points out the Sultan, “That's him.” The Sultan is exposed as a fraud, and the newspaper is embarrassingly implicated in a major scam, which does not please Wally's editor, Oliver, so Wally is relegated to the basement of the paper at a desk in the middle of their “morgue” files and records, writing obituaries. In order to redeem himself and get out of exile, Wally proposes to Oliver to let him pursue the “human interest” story of a New England girl named Hazel Flagg, who according to preliminary press reports is dying of an accidental dose of radiation poisoning. Oliver grasps the pathos inherent of a beautiful young woman living in the virtuous garden of rural bliss suddenly struck down by the mysterious and satanic power of atomic radiation (which she actually contracted at the local radium watch factory). So Wally is dispensed to Warsaw, Vermont, expecting to find a charming and friendly small town nestled in the farm and forest land, bur discovers instead that everyone is surly and unfriendly until they are bribed, so the simple and honest pastoral folk turn out to be every bit as discourteous and grasping as city dwellers. He finally gets to the house of Hazel's doctor, the constantly drunk Dr. Downer, but not before the doctor discloses to Hazel that he had misdiagnosed her condition and she is not going to die at all. Wally meets the lovely and relieved Hazel, and informs her that his newspaper wants to sponsor her on a valedictory tour of New York City, before her imminent farewell and departure (with the journalistic proviso that the Morning Star gets her exclusive and heart-wringing story). Although both she and the doctor know the truth, the temptation is too great, so she agrees, as does her accompanying doctor. In New York, the paper has promoted Hazel into a figure of distinction, a brave young girl facing death with courage and dignity, now

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on her last-wish tour of the metropolitan wonderland, which is now at her feet. Hazel receives a ticker-tape parade and the “key to the city” awarded by the mayor. She and her doctor are wined and dined, most spectacularly at a nightclub fete in her honor, complete with a floorshow of great heroines of history, consisting of virtually undraped showgirls on horseback simulating heroines like Lady Godiva and Pocahontas. In bed with a hangover, Hazel is serenaded by a troop of Girl Scouts and suchlike, but begins to have self-doubts about the deception and fears of its eventual discovery. Things come to a head when the paper hires a team of European doctors for a newsworthy expert examination in hope for a “miracle cure.” The doctors discover her healthy condition, and she confesses to Wally her fraud. But how to resolve this, since by now there are plans for a state funeral with the governor and Senators and so forth in attendance, as well as many thousands of mourners? Wally and Oliver concoct a scheme for a faked suicide with Hazel actually writing a suicide note expressing heartfelt thanks to the city for all the hoopla for her send-off. She jumps in the river but arranges for Downer to rescue her, but he is as usual inebriated, so Wally jumps in after her, thinking she is serious, but he can't swim so she rescues him. Wally, Oliver, and the state officials do think that a fake suicide is a good idea for all concerned, so Hazel disappears, the newspaper prints her pathetic suicide note, and the public mourning lets people have a good cry before they move on to the next media-made obsession. Hazel and Wally (accompanied by the still plastered Dr. Downer) sail incognito to the tropics. Hazel's flirtation with macabre distinction is over and now she can enjoy the blissful life of quiet indistinctiveness.

The King of Comedy (1983): To Be Is To Be on Television It can be argued that Hazel Flagg is no starry-eyed small village girl awed by the bewildering world of the big city, but rather is as shrewd as the other villagers back home. When she sees a main chance she risks it rather than pass up a free trip and momentary adulation, then skips out when the jig is up. The fun of sentimental pathos and staged bathos reposes in the supposedly tough-minded and cynical urbanites, including the suave Wally, who becomes the tender-minded romantic falling in love with a dying girl. In any case, the public career of Hazel Flagg demonstrates one of the ways a person can achieve renown without talent, but also that short of dying such distinction carries with it the baggage of embarrassing imposture and quick banishment. But the desire for distinction is for many people irresistible, especially in societies that divide the populace into a

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few who are Somebodies and the many who are Nobodies, so in consequence there are nobodies who try to become somebody by getting people's attention and thereby validating their existence. There are “oneshot wonders” like Hazel, who do their thing and then get out of town while the getting is good, but for dreamers who fancy they have talent or at least somehow deserve access to the world of somebodies, the prize is to become a mass-mediated celebrity whose distinction inheres in the fact of a public existence in which they are recognized and esteemed. The nobodies walk in darkness, but as luminaries the somebodies stride forward in broad sunlit uplands. The basic desire and motive here is for a public existence of distinction, a social status in which one's distinctiveness is celebrated and elevated as worthy and good. The emphasis on social distinction exists most prominently in a social ethos of status anxiety and moral norms of indistinct mediocrity through mass culture. Perhaps everyone likes to think of himself or herself as having distinctive qualities and would like to be recognized as someone special, but only a few among the indistinguishable many act upon it. The King of Comedy opens with a mob scene outside a major television network, where fanatics (“fans”) mill around waiting to see a celebrity and perhaps even get an autograph. They go wild when a famous late-night television host (Jerry Langford) emerges, trying to get to his limousine unscathed. The crowd gets crazier, with people shouting and crawling over each other to see or touch Jerry, a somebody who is important to them, because he is on television as the host and star of a major late-night comedy show, the Jerry Langford Show. For his fans (and indeed a larger public that recognizes him), Jerry is an “intimate stranger,” someone they know on sight and believe they somehow know as a person, admirable and enviable as someone talented and charming. For the nobodies, Jerry occupies and enhances a social state of grace unreachable for them, but that separate zone of distinction and Jerry's distinctive existence does not make him a stranger or strange. Quite the contrary, his fans like to think they are on intimate terms with him, although what they are enamored with is an idealized and projected media character who is a creature of the ethos of the television medium and industry. “Jerry Langford” only exists in the distinct context of media personage. Trying to get to his limousine, the actual Jerry is momentarily trapped by the crush of fans around him, and is rescued by a young man who bulls a path for them into the car, only to find that one of Jerry's stalkers (Masha) has hidden in the back seat. He pulls Masha out and pushes Jerry in, then jumps in beside him and slams the door. They young man (Rupert Pupkin) reveals that he is himself a comedian and admirer, wanting to be on his

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show. Jerry is tired and peeved, but hears him out, appealing to the “you have to start out at the bottom and work your way up” showbiz mythology, but agrees to hear a monologue tape, ending with the dismissive “Call my office,” connoting to us that he has just gotten rid of another annoying and overzealous fan. But we discover that Rupert is an obsessive, and like the heroine of a Trollope novel, takes Jerry's dismissal as a proposal of marriage, with Jerry now Rupert's friend and mentor. We learn that Rupert has no show-biz experience, only ambitions, and lives a marginal existence, living in a working-class urban neighborhood with his mother and working during the day as a messenger boy (even though he is thirty-four). His dream is to become a funny-man, a somebody who makes people laugh and appears on television and hobnobs with celebrities, becoming a somebody that people recognize as a significant persona and talent. Rupert's private existence isn't much, so in his basement he has constructed a fantasy world placing him in the center of the celebrity ethos he seeks. He has built a TV talk-show set, with Rupert dressed in stand-up comic garb, surrounded by cardboard cutouts of Jerry and a famous celebrity, backed by wallpaper of a laughing studio audience and accompanied by a tape of a laugh track, simulating response to his jokes and quips. In another fantasy sequence, Rupert imagines he is having lunch with Jerry at a fashionable restaurant, and Jerry seriously exclaims, “Six weeks! That's all I'm asking,” needing a break from the nightly grind of the show and imploring Rupert to fill in; Rupert responds as he imagines show-biz celebrities would (which he has seen on TV) by kissing Jerry on the forehead and crying out, “I love this guy!.” In this subjective world, Rupert is an equal of Jerry and the other distinctive celebrated entities of Olympian fame, so with this “break” he will now deservedly share the state of grace denied him as a non-entity. Rupert’s efforts at penetration are unsuccessful. He goes to Jerry's office operation at the network skyscraper, and is politely rebuffed by an aide experienced in that task. He even shows up at Jerry's country home and meets still more irritated rejection. So he and the equally deranged stalker Masha concoct a plan to kidnap Jerry and force the network executives to put Rupert on the show for a stand-up routine. Jerry is taped up and left in the care of the adoring Masha, while Rupert arranges for an exchange: Jerry will be released once Rupert has had his broadcast shot. Jerry convinces Masha that he wants her, so she lets him loose; he slaps her and she runs out and down the street in her underwear; Jerry then walks by a shop and sees Rupert on TV, being introduced as “the king of comedy.” Rupert delivers a monologue that is typically mildly funny, in the manner of such late-night fare, and announces to the audience, “Better .

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to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime.” Rupert goes to prison, but in the ironic coda, we see a news story about his imminent release and how he has become a famous figure. Now he possesses a public existence as recorded in his best-selling autobiography, a manager booking his public appearances, and finally a studio audience awaiting his postincarceration debut, a voice urging “Welcome for Rupert Pupkin, ladies and gentlemen!,” with Rupert appearing to great applause. If this is not another fantasy, Rupert has now achieved a kind of notorious celebrity in a media ethos wherein outrageous acts such as kidnapping are rewarded because of our thirst for exciting entertainment as substitutes and surrogates for our own mundane and unexciting lives. The real comedy here is the celebrity process itself, which elevates and celebrates new public entities who are basically trivialities and temporaries, even a talentless interloper like Rupert. He is funny for the simple reason that he demonstrates not only our desperate need for ever-new somebodies, no matter how facile or transgressing, and the extent that vicarious distinction, no matter how shallow or sham, has invaded and engrossed our concept of social significance.

Hail the Conquering Hero (I944): Trying to be a Hero In the comic quest for distinction, individuals so moved find it necessary to use deceptions for their adventures into some social space where they can gain or demand attention. In this effort, they need help: Hazel finds it in a city newspaper eager for an exploitative melodramatic story of premature death, Rupert seeks a mentor and sponsor in Jerry, and failing that uses him for a contrived show-biz debut. In Hazel's case, her distinction is believed to be random bad luck, but is the kind that the hucksters of the city enjoy using as a momentary fad to wring cheap emotions out of the many that enjoy a good cry. On the other hand, Rupert may be a freak, but he is desperately trying to exploit the hucksters to become a known name and perhaps a marketable commodity as a figure of legitimate notoriety. The city fathers and media sponsors think it is politic to render Hazel indistinct to the point of invisibility. Rupert, however, has rendered himself visible; his strange entry through a back door makes him oddly distinct as someone who has aped the sleazy manner of the TVnightclub comic and exposed the ruthless tactics that we suspected accompanies the cutthroat world of mediated fame. Hazel makes a graceful exit and gains a life with her love, maybe in the tropics, and the graceless private person Rupert makes a graceful debut he arranges for

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himself in order to crown himself the king of comedy, and perhaps now even a public personality who is a known, if lurid, quality. The comic career of Hazel and Rupert is only possible through the cooperation of the masses of people who find them of interest, variously named the mass public, the lonely crowd, the great unwashed, the rabble, hoi polloi, and so on in various deprecatory terms, but having the collective power to create and destroy those who would be distinctive. It is a common human practice among people of all ranks and classes to believe in grace, and specifically here in the distinctive grace of people they wish to elevate to that status. Hazel's faked suicide and Rupert's forced entry were deemed necessary to sustain our faith in the varieties of human grace, so that Hazel can be forever enshrined as gallant and brave, sparing her adoring public her long and painful death struggle. Rupert can be forever reputed as a celebrity, however strange and infelicitous, since in that realm of social distinction having no talent is no barrier to participation. That will to believe exists down to local communities, especially intense when it is attributed to local individuals who have performed some kind of heroic deed of social value and cultural esteem, in particular heroism in warfare. In Hail the Conquering Hero, we are transported to the last year of World War II, and see a dejected and lonesome young soldier sitting by himself in a bar in San Francisco nursing a beer. A group of uniformed Marines comes in, displaying their combat ribbons and tales of Guadalcanal. They are broke, so the young soldier (named Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith) buys them copious rounds of drinks, and shares with them his woes. It turns out that Woodrow was born the same day his father was killed in combat in World War I, then awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor (to boot, his grandfather wore his Civil War uniform the rest of his life after his service), and worse, his mother keeps a shrine in their home honoring his father's heroism. In consequence, Woodrow is heir to a familial heritage of military service and sacrifice, and now during wartime he is expected to enlist and do his duty. Indeed, his home town of Oakridge has a statue of a great military hero, one General Zabriski, although admittedly no one in town can identify him or what made him heroic. And the leader of the Marines he meets, Sergeant Heffelfinger, who coincidentally served with Woodrow's father, has been branded a hero ever since but is equally not sure why as it fades from memory, admitting “I've told it so different so many times.” Thus, we are deep into the social and temporal context of heroic expectations and demands, in the emotional climate of war fever and anxiety, wherein populaces are quite willing to believe in heroism without benefit of substantiation. This

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attribution practice is another extension of assured credibility enjoyed by Hazel and Rupert. The New Yorkers exercised no doubts about the reality and fatality of Hazel's illness, since it was hyped in the newspapers and thus acquired the authority of print, and once Rupert was on TV and billed as the king of comedy, even though he had gotten there by subterfuge, nevertheless by being on TV he somehow now belonged there. So like the urbane mass public ready for a “sob-sister” fad to weep over, and latenight TV audiences willing to be amused by a freakish intruder into TV video land, the citizens of Oakridge are eager for a fresh and admirable favorite, one of their own who has earned heroic distinction. Alas, the logical choice for heroic endeavor and accomplishment would be Woodrow Truesmith, but he cannot return home as a Lafayette or Pershing. He did dutifully join the Marines, but developed a chronic case of hay fever and was deemed unfit for combat duty and discharged after a month. Too humiliated and embarrassed to return home devoid of duty and medals, he instead worked in a shipyard, writing to his mother that he was overseas in the Pacific theater and concocting vague stories of valor. The half-inebriated and sympathetic Marines convince him to return home, with them accompanying him as a kind of legitimating Praetorian Guard. One of the Marines goes ahead and calls Woodrow's mother, telling her that he is returning from Guadalcanal for medical reasons. The long distance call is garbled, so she (and the local operator) hear the reason not as hay fever but rather jungle fever, a more exotic and heroic ailment within the bounds of military expectation and exemption. Like Hazel, he quickly becomes something of an unwitting imposter, for the town quickly learns of his imminent arrival and prepares for a hero's welcome. To his surprise and mortification, Woodrow is greeted at the train station by virtually the entire town, four marching bands, and the mayor present to award him the key to the city, amidst general acclaim and glorification (he confides to the Marines, “I'm a haunted man for the rest of my life”). At a civic church service, Woodrow is hesitant and confused, but Sergeant Heffelfinger's praise legitimates him as a bona fide Marine hero. The rewards associated with hero worship accrue: the local reverend praises the hero and announces that the town will assume the mortgage on his mother's house; the civic leaders plan to build a monument to honor him and his father; and, some prominent citizens, dissatisfied with the incumbent Mayor, proclaim and nominate Woodrow for that high office. They declare that his distinction will encourage the townspeople to “transcend their own lives and interests,” and besides both his honesty and popularity somehow transfers to him having a “natural flair for politics.” To top off his heroic return and reward, Woodrow encounters Libby, the

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“girl he left behind.” She is now engaged to the mayor's handsome and vacuous son, who is a “4-F” rejected for military service, and thus in wartime suspected of being a draft evader. With Woodrow's return Libby is again interested, but hurt when he seems to reject her by telling her he is pleased by her choice and will not interfere (he likely senses that if the truth came out, he would be regarded as no better than the 4-F). Woodrow is in a difficult comic “pickle,” since (like Hazel) he figures that the deception cannot last and knows that all of the community outpouring of praise will be followed by a sense of disappointment and betrayal. As a straightforward and simple fellow, he decides to confess as to how his initial deception led to the Marine-led triumphant return home. Woodrow is not the stuff of dying heroines or “kings of comedy,” so he will disclose all before this goes any further and leave town for good. The townsfolk are stunned, but as Woodrow packs to catch the train, Sergeant Heffelfinger gives the locals a quasi-military motivational lecture praising Woodrow for true courage by telling the truth when he knew the consequences of deprecation and ostracism. In one of those wonderful changes of mind which permeate comedy, the townsfolk on reflection move from a logos of communal knowledge to a logos of pragmatic knowledge, changing from regard for martial virtue in favor of civilian virtue, since bravery and bellicosity is a virtue, but at home, what we need is honesty and humility. Not only is Woodrow restored to communal grace, he is now enlisted in their service by a request that he offer himself as a mayoral candidate. In their own ways, Hazel and Rupert utilized some guile; Woodrow by contrast triumphs by being guileless. Woodrow does share with them a soaring moment of distinctive grace, however fleeting, each afterwards occupying some more humble realm (Hazel wed and in blissful exile in the tropics, Rupert exiled to his mother's basement, or if lucky as a game show host or suchlike on TV, and Woodrow, now reunited with Libby, as a mayor and prominent local citizen). Comic distinction has an aftermath, and perhaps our heroes demonstrate that the “after-time” is the true period of grace, since comic learning has led to the realization of the difference between being what you are and becoming something you aren't, being distinct or becoming distinctive.

Comedies of Social Distinction: Institutional Places of Distinctiveness Individual oriented comedies of distinction highlight the idiosyncratic activities of people who, for various reasons and accidents, find themselves the object of or in pursuit of social distinction. They are deemed a

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repository of, or seeker of, some conception of social beauty, good, or truth. In other movies, that social quest is complemented by the presence of a social institution, some established and continuous organization which is designed to advance important social values and to which individuals have to adapt. In varying ways, institutions are socially regarded as serious business. Schools and churches, for example, educate students and propagate religious faith and morals. They also promote unserious activities such as sports and entertainment, which attendants and moralists take very seriously, the former when they're trying to have fun and the latter when they are appalled by people having fun. The comic reversal of social seriosity is irresistible, since the more people take some organized social activity earnestly or resolutely the more likely they become material for comical squelches and put-downs. So schools and churches have always been fair game for comedians, as has sports, since anything regarded by society as important can be shown from the comic perspective to be unimportant, since social solemnity is always funny.

Bull Durham (1988): The Comedy of Minor Distinction Organized sports, of all kinds at and at all levels, occupies a special niche in the estimation of both those who play the game or contest and those who watch and follow sporting events and seasons. Sports for many is a social area characterized by enjoyable activity to which we attribute values like heroism, victory, teamwork, winning and losing with grace, and so on, and qualities of mythic significance such as underdogs winning against all odds, seasoned players making one last try, and callow youths being mentored by seasoned veterans into heroic careers. Sports offer us a theater of endeavor displaying both beauty (kalos, aesthetic value in the harmony and relations which unfold in the sporting event) and sublime pathos (the suffering, or agon, in the game and triumph or failure in the heroic effort, appealing to our human sympathies and imaginations). From the comic perspective, the social fact that we imbue sports with so much significance inspires the amused observer to reflect that such gravity needs to be lightened up with risibility. From the point of view of both players and fans, a sport like baseball (or football, tennis, track and field, gymnastics, or chess and poker) is centered on the penultimate valuation of and quest for distinction, both personal and collective. As lived in the grit of and vicissitudes of its mundane realization, devoid of outlandish attributions, sport has great comic beauty. We hear and meet Annie, a baseball enthusiast who might qualify as a “camp follower,” as narrator and sensual mentor for the local

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team in Durham, a minor league franchise consisting largely of young hopefuls dreaming of enough distinction here to make it into the major leagues, where national acclaim and large salaries might await them. First, they have to pay their purgatorial dues with low pay, playing and living in provincial towns, traveling around on team buses, and living in cheap hotels. But they make do: one religious player finds a congenial local church, others hang out together, there is an easily available sports groupie, and then there is Annie. She is a bit older than the players and an established local, but loves baseball to the point of maintaining a worshipful semi-Catholic shrine to the sport in her home, and seeing metaphysical significance in the game (there are the same number of beads on a rosary, she observes, as there are stitches on a baseball). Every spring, as the team disembarks from the bus to train in Durham, she looks over the prospects for her “draft pick,” the one she will select as her chosen lover, like a corrupt queen looking over her new royal guard. She likes a legendary minor league veteran named “Crash” Davis, but he is her age and distant, so she chooses a dim-witted young pitcher, “Nuke” LaLoosh. Nuke is undisciplined but has great potential for stardom. Annie introduces him to her worshipful shrine and sponsorship (including tying him down to her bed in a candle-lit bedroom and reading to him Whitman's “I Sing the Body Electric”). Yet her knowledge about baseball is quite deep and shrewd. She is not shy about giving her new trainee advice on how to pitch, including her suggestion to wear her black garter belt under his uniform around his left leg. He later solemnly explains to a teammate that the garter belt, allows him to “keep one side of my brain occupied when I'm on the mound, thus keeping the other side slightly off-center, which is where it should be for artists and players.” Annie, a community college English teacher, is quite serious about the “Church of Baseball,” an institution sporting a metaphysic superior to theologies espoused by denominations.” She says,.”. (T)here's no guilt in baseball, and it's never boring...which makes it like sex” and boasts that there has “never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn't have the best year of his career,” teaching an important philosophical point, that lovemaking and playmaking both require that “you just relax and concentrate.” Nuke has athletic talent, and is a challenge as a pitcher with a “million dollar arm and a five cent brain,” but as Annie observes, it is her mission to guide him towards his destiny, since after all “the world is made for people with who are not cursed with self-awareness.” The veteran Annie is also attracted to the veteran Crash, who is as smart and observant as she is. He is reluctant to try out for the position of her lover; probing, she asks him what he believes in, and he elucidates a litany of both sensual (“the

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small of a woman's back”) and intellectual beliefs (“Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone”). Annie is a volunteer in the tutelage of Nuke, but Crash has been brought in specifically as coach to instill in the prospect some major league skills and maturity. When Nuke refuses his advice, Crash retaliates, so when Nuke “shakes off” Crash's catcher signals as to what pitch to throw a batter, Crash then tells whoever is batting exactly what Nuke is going to throw. Nuke eventually matures as a pitcher and is called up to the majors, “The Show” as Crash calls it and which he never made, although he is now the minor league home run champion. Crash is released by the organization, essentially ending his function as mentor and career of minor distinction. Like Annie, he is an outsider on the fringe of the game (he introduced himself to Nuke as “the player to be named later,” referring to newspaper releases of multi-player trades in which he gets thrown in). She is an adjunct teacher, so their personal and preferential pathos are synchronic; when a minor league managerial opening comes up, Crash decides to take it and her with him. The beauty of the game they love and their social and erotic sympathies are as distinctive as they can hope for, as the raw youth goes off to greater glory in major distinction, but the seasoned experience of Crash and Annie together is a more distinctive achievement.

Horse Feathers (1932): Institutional Comedic Unlearning The institutional setting of sports is ostensibly a social site for play, whereby groups of people may enjoy the diversions and leisure time associated with watching and playing sports. As we have seen, one of the truly funny things about sports is how seriously it is taken, in both the players hope for distinction as individuals and teams, and the corollary vicarious interest and excitement by fans whose passions and sympathies are aroused and focused on the heroics and triumphs of their favorites. The pathos of sporting events and seasons is complemented by the display of beauty that imbues what happens on the “field of dreams” with aesthetic goodness. And, in such an institutional setting, we see different kinds of distinction emerge, such as the likely career path of Nuke but the less likely personal maturity, contrasted with the personal distinction of Crash and Annie as a team. Perhaps in a setting of aesthetic play stressing passion and beauty we should expect some forms of Dionysian liveliness and bodily enjoyment for players on and off the field. However, in institutional settings charged with Apollonian moral goodness, the emphasis and expectation is for social responsibility and sobriety in the furtherance of social goods such as education. Since the ethos of schools at

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all levels and types is learning, school systems are organized around tutelage in proper social behavior as a mature adult and the acquisition of erudite knowledge deemed socially important and useful, so what they do should be taken seriously and even reverently. In “higher education” in particular, honorific distinction is awarded to those who excel in the subjects the university has to offer and dignity is accorded to those on the faculty and around the campus that have mastered subjects in the arts and sciences and are thus praised as distinguished scholars. Naturally, as the comics would say, this includes football. In Horse Feathers, we are witness to one of the most solemn ceremonies of institutions of higher learning, the ritual installation of a new president in an auditorium filled with students and the stage with bearded and solemn faculty in cap-and-gown academic regalia. The retiring president introduces his successor, whom we see with his morning coat off at the side of the stage, shaving. President-elect Quincy Adams Wagstaff relents and comes to the podium, but is warned there is no smoking as he puffs on a cigar; when asked again to throw away the cigar, he refuses on the grounds that the faculty should not be seen diving for a cigar. His acceptance speech is a masterpiece of non-sequiturs, nonsensical parody of overblown academic rhetoric, first insulting the old president (“I thought my razor was dull until I heard this speech”) and then the student body (“as I look over your eager faces, I can readily understand why this college is flat on its back”). Then rather provide a “brief outline” of his soaring plans for the school, he affronts the old president again (“Why don't you go home to your wife? I'll tell you what, I'll go home to your wife and, outside of the improvement, she'll never know the difference.”) President Wagstaff responds to the question of how he will treat trustee recommendations by singing, “I don't know what they have to say/It makes no difference anyway/Whatever it is, I'm against it.” He then reveals the actual reason he wanted to become president of Huxley, “to get my son out of it”; his son has been in school for twelve years, majoring in girls and speakeasies. Indeed, at the ceremony the son has a pretty “coed” sitting on his lap, to whom his father requests, “Young lady, would you mind getting up so I can see the son rise?” then addresses the son, “So, doing your homework in school, eh?” We are in the comic grip here of the inimitable Marx Brothers, for whom all social distinctions are ripe for not only deconstruction but also destruction, through both verbal and active undermining of an institutional setting in which they impose chaos on order. Their anarchic and even surrealistic “trashing” of such settings (the state, medicine, the opera, housing developments, department stores, and so on), through puns, ribald jokes, double entendres, insults and quips is

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complemented by actual inversion or disruption of normal social conduct and expectations in a relentless subversion of a place that has become boringly ritualized and quietly corrupted. (The term “horse feathers” originated on the frontier when split boards were used on buildings as ad hoc irregular covering, suggesting a badly constructed and irregular edifice, and evolved later in wartime and urban settings as a politer substitute for the derogatory conclusion, “horseshit”). Huxley College, like all such institutions, is supposed to further the achievement of scholastic achievement and scholarly distinction. But, like many kinds of institutions, this primary and overt function has long been superseded in importance by extra-curricular activities which are distinctive fun, namely sex, drinking, and sports, young Wagstaff's majors. President Wagstaff learns from him that he is not only rising with coeds but also with that institutional stalwart, the “college widow,” a youngish single woman who lives close to campus, often has ties to unsavory local characters such as bootleggers, but is an “educator” in that such promiscuous women conduct private tutoring of undergraduate boys in elementary sexuality. It turns out his father went to three colleges in twelve years and “fooled around” with three college widows, so naturally he wants to meet Huxley's own. He also understands the pragmatic problem with Huxley, which is that it has had a new president every year for a long time and in that time has never defeated its rival, Darwin College, in football. Thus, the central institutional problem is that the school has “neglected football for education.” His “scholarly” son tells him that two great football players hang out at a local speakeasy, but thinks it would be undignified for a college president to go to such a place, and in addition, it isn't right for a college to buy football players. The president vows to “nip that in the bud” and heads off to the bar. So the distinctive institutional life lessons espoused by the new president is the traditional ones of the true, beautiful, and good, only adapted to contemporary circumstances for the truth of hedonistic fun, the beauty of compliant coeds and college widows, and the good of fixing football games. What follows is a complicated farce over hiring players to defeat Huxley or Darwin, involving gamblers, the college widow, a bootlegger (Chico) and a mute dog catcher (Harpo), and stealing signals in order to bet on a sure thing. The President gains admission to the speakeasy but mistakenly signs up the two misfits rather than the husky athletes; Chico and Harpo wind up kidnapping themselves rather than the athletes. They saw through the floor, commandeer a street-sweeper's horse-drawn cart, and enter the stadium like Ben-Hur. The Big Game is in doubt, so this

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requires some creative circumvention of the rules, reducing the game to anarchic slapstick. President Groucho comes out of the stands to give the opposing team a pep talk, and then tackles them when they are about to score, but Chico and Harpo score by dropping banana peels to slip up the defenders, bringing about a Huxley victory. To cap all the flaunting of institutional decorum and rules, the three Marx brothers all marry Connie, the college widow, introducing polygamy as an outrageously funny alternative to the traditional ending of comedy. This Marxist intrusion into the hallowed halls of ivy introduces some badly needed liveliness and irreverence into an institution grown stale through ritualized scholasticism. The Marx Brothers do to school what Crash and Annie bring to baseball, singing the body electric (Groucho turns a biology class into a lesson in sensuality), and mocking the ivory tower pretense of worldly indifference, when in fact a winning football team and coeducational courtship is more important in the pursuit of academic distinction. The “natural selection” suggested by schools named for Darwin and Huxley (Darwin's chief disciple) reminds us that popular distinction, in such manifestations as tribal cheering of our athletic teams and personal “fooling around” in sexual play, is more basically natural and easier to select than intellectual distinction. Comedic usurpers such as the Marx Brothers show us how funny it is for academic good to try and compete with more primal goods as they coexist on a college campus, with their comic knowledge that in life's boxing match, Dionysius knocks out Apollo in the first round.

Heaven Can Wait (I943): Religious Truth and Comic Fate The comic examination of institutional life allows us a perspective by comic incongruity as to how people make do and get on with life in various social contexts. Comedic incredulity lets us see organized sports as a social exercise of sub-rational silliness, and something like baseball as a child's game played and enjoyed by adults reverting to the pleasures of childhood. Nuke is a child who will play well but likely never grow up, but Crash and Annie are experienced and wise enough to use the game but not remain in a state of puerile infatuation. Similarly, organized education may be a place of irrational madness, with the futile mission of educating the uneducable and uninterested, and can only be properly understood through the criticism of extra-rational madness through comic incongruity exercised by the enlivening intervention of distinctive comics who disrupt the deadening force of academic routine. In the order of increasing social seriousness, we now turn to supra-rational hallucination, the belief in worlds and destinies beyond mortal life on earth found in belief systems

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and religious faiths which posit occult powers and metaphysical essences beyond our empirical and ephemeral lives. Whatever the truth of philosophical and theological musing and reasoning, conceptions of the supernatural and afterlife and earthly religious life has always been a major subject for comic skepticism but also comic ridicule of our errant and faulty life on earth. In Heaven Can Wait, we meet a recently deceased man of social distinction, one Henry Van Cleve, walking down an ornate staircase towards a being he addresses as “His Excellency.” We learn that he has arrived in Hell, since Henry believes that his misspent life does not qualify him to spend eternity in Heaven, the “better place” above, now just wanting to get his application approved. His Excellency appears to be The Devil, in the usual guise of a sophisticated gentleman, who confesses that he is not familiar enough with Henry's case to render swift justice and admittance, so Henry agrees to tell the master of the demonic realm his life story. (We get a foretaste when an intrusive woman recognizes Henry, and she turns out to be an old flame.) So Henry begins his autobiography, hoping that his life was inadequate enough for him to talk himself into eternal damnation, so we expect him to emphasize his dissolute unworthiness. He seems to sum up his reflective self-knowledge by ruefully remarking, “I can safely say that my whole life was one continuous misdemeanor.” Although that might not seem felonious enough to merit permanent residence in Hell, Henry makes his case anyway, and we quickly learn that his recurrent and irresistible misdemeanor was women. He was born into “new wealth” in Old New York, was doted on by his mother and grandmother, and encouraged to live the idle and pleasurable life by his rich and decadent grandfather. Early on, he developed a healthy interest in young women, and never forgot the childhood lesson he learned from his girlfriend when he gave her a beetle, and she sweetly asks for another beetle; he realized then that “if you want to win a girl, you have to have lots of beetles.” Growing up in the “Gay Nineties,” and becoming used to every luxury and a life of indolence, Henry's private education centered on winning girls, receiving expert instruction from a French maid hired to tutor him in her language. This private tutorial included not only nouns and verbs but also the vocabulary of pleasure; this included champagne and romance, climaxing on his fifteenth birthday with an exhausted hangover, after which his amused grandfather whisks the ardent teacher out of the house, her course of study now completed. He grows into young maturity as a bland and cheerful idler devoid of both burning ambitions and crippling pathologies, but his lack of self-awareness and interest in the world women apparently find charming and unthreatening,

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so he spends his time frequenting cabarets and escorting lovely showgirls. The easy life of a boyish bachelor playboy persists until age twenty-six, when he happens to meet a stunningly beautiful young woman in a bookstore, interested in a book entitled “How To Make Your Husband Happy” (with an enticing picture of a woman winking a come-hither look on the cover). Later, it turns out that she (Martha) is betrothed to Henry's drearily stiff-necked cousin Albert, who is her first suitor but only marrying him rather than chance remaining a spinster in her philistine family's mansion in the Midwest, built on their meatpacking fortune. Henry and Martha fall in love and elope, scandalizing everyone and her parents disown her. They seem reasonably happy, but after ten years, his continued philandering caused her to leave him and reconcile with her parents, but he follows her and she forgives him. By the time he is fifty, she is happy that he is now solidly middle-aged and no longer a youthful libertine, but on their silver anniversary he learns that she is terminally ill, and they dance their last dance together. As a widower, he returns to his old pattern of seeking the companionship of lovely women, although now as a jaded voluptuary. On his seventieth birthday, his lifetime of excess brings him to the end, wherein he dreams of dancing with a beautiful blonde and imbibing oceans of whisky and soda. When he awakens, his night nurse is a beautiful blonde taking his temperature, which makes his departure happy. At his interview with His Excellency, Henry's patient host is unimpressed by his credentials, informing him that their underworld establishment does have its standards so they do not cater to “his class of people.” Consequently Henry should apply to the “other place,” where someone special (Martha) is waiting for him and who will plead his case, although he may have to settle for “a small room vacant in the annex.” His Excellency is hinting to Henry that he is not a man of distinction, and certainly not a distinctive enough evildoer to warrant entry into the distinguished class of people of notable wickedness and iniquity who populate the elite lower region. Henry's devilish companion implies that his entry into Heaven will require someone virtuous enough to do special pleading for his case, and even then he will be shunted off to a lesser place out of the way of the truly good where he will not be such an embarrassment. Henry was not a bad man nor was he a good man; he was merely indistinctive, devoid of the most evil vices and the noblest virtues. His life seems to have only the comic meaning that he made many women temporarily happy through lovemaking and monetary regards, but otherwise he is a man without qualities. His biography is filled with recurrent departure of those around him, including Martha, but these losses

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did not cause him undue agony nor imbue him with a sense of the transience and thus the importance of life. Henry's lack of personal awareness is complemented by his lack of historical awareness, since the great upheavals in the world of the first half of the twentieth century pass unnoticed by him. Although Henry's story is firmly grounded in the institutions of family and class, the passage of time and the disappearance of people gives his life a transcendental dimension that in the end can only be aptly judged by religious authorities from transcendent realms of being. Henry was blessed with wealth and good health and a forgiving wife and sexual satisfactions, but we may think him only lucky because he seems to have never developed a comic understanding of himself and his life rather than just “continuous misdemeanors” that don't even rise to the level of sin. So for religious authorities such as His Excellency, Henry is a difficult case to adequately judge, and in consequence he rightly refers him to an even higher judge and court. Henry is not exactly an Everyman, but he shares with most of us the characteristic of indistinctiveness. Crash is an athlete of minor distinction and Annie a local hanger-on, but the two share a sense of the comedy of life and sports and their limits and opportunities and thus a share of comic grace. The Marx Brothers give us a fresh perspective on the institution of higher education, bringing school back to earth for what really matters to its clientele. In both these cases, the principal critics of the institution see it playfully as social places that shouldn't be taken too seriously. On the other hand, Henry for all his advantages and pleasures never seems to be having very much fun, so perhaps on that basis alone he has to be judged in the highest court. Henry will have to face that court with the fact that in his story he is the comic figure, not so much innocent as he is placid and artless almost to the point of sleepwalking through what the prosecution might charge is a highly pleasurable and inconstant life. One of the reasons for the existence of religious institutions is the human sense of sin, stemming from our experience with tragic choices and melodramatic agonies. Henry has little of that sense, although he does think he belongs in Hell but unlike Crash and Groucho, he cannot see the comedy in his life of misdemeanors. The principle of the comic pragmatic teaches us that comedy does things: Crash and Annie train Nuke and now have a life of their own, and Groucho and friends shake up the stodgy university college, win the Big Game, and marry the college widow. Henry's comic life can only be fully appreciated and evaluated by religious institutions because he was untouched by the categories of good and evil and thus was altogether just funny, yet not funny enough to understand the grand comedy of human social life, including his own. His is a difficult case to judge, because

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unlike Crash, Annie, and Wagstaff, he does not even earn the merit of comic grace.

Comedies of Symbolic Distinction: Cultural Gatherings of Distinctiveness The flexible term “culture” is used by social scientists and students of the humanities alike to apply to a variety of human contexts, ranging from Amazonian tribes to urban intellectual sites to religious cults. Cultures vast and small, inclusive or exclusive, tolerant or demanding all can be identified by some defining characteristic which sets them apart from other groups. Cultures, like institutions, tend to be more enduring, although perhaps less organized and legitimated but often less established and functional, like school and sports, or sacral and spiritual, like religion. Both institutions and cultures can range from specific (educating students) or vague (propagating faith and salvation), and from grounded (ethnic identity, denominational affiliation) to ethereal (religion, art), and from exclusive to inclusive (fraternities, nationalities). Cultures are often less easy to identity as to some clear social function: cultures of artists and writers share an aesthetic interest and orientation, valuing their respect for talent but remain so fiercely independent and committed to their projects that cooperation or even courtesy may be difficult to expect. But then even a larger and well-known culture, such as a nationalistic identity, still may erect barriers to outsiders and do things in ways those outsiders find puzzling to fathom. Small work groups brought together for a skilled task out bring to it backgrounds that mesh because of their regard and veneration for what they are trying to accomplish, thus sharing a cultural intermingling of vocation and knowledge. Such working groups are funny when something or someone intervenes to bring them together, impose themselves into their lives, or upset their schedules and safety.

Impromptu (1991): The Comic Romance of Aesthetic Grace Comics and comedy have always found much delightful fare in those of an aesthetic bent, mocking the furious excesses and fancies of artists and writers and all those who listen to a different drummer. Creative people come in all varieties, and not all just artists starving in a garret or writers sitting around bistros (one great modern poet was an insurance executive). But enough fit the stereotype, likely as heirs to the Romantic movement, in which figures such as Rousseau and the Romantic poets and all those who affected by “Byronic unhappiness” revolt against social

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convention in dress, lifestyle, and modes of expression and value the pathos of individual sentiment and strong and noble passions, even if selfdestructive and antisocial. In the wake of the Romantic movement, the popular comic image of aesthete cultures is that they be, well, romantic, so the popular media and comedic outlets such as movie comedy can enjoy catering to our imagination of artists at work and play. In the opening scene of Impromptu, a young girl (Aurora) sits alone in the woods, praying to the spirits of the woods, imploring them to give her knowledge of the “meaning of life” and to find that “perfect, perfect love.” The young woman, growing up in France in the early nineteenth century, is coming of age in the midst of the Romantic movement, marries an older and aristocratic baron above her class, has two children but after awhile leaves him to pursue an independent life as a lover and writer. Aurora writes under the named “George Sand” and becomes a well-known novelist and Parisian character, dresses in masculine clothes (including trousers), smokes cheroots, and openly has affairs with various men, conjoining with and then casting them off with ease. Sand's machofeminist drag pose conceals her girlish desire for perfect love, aroused again when she learns that the great Polish composer and pianist Chopin is in Paris, and in best romantic spirit, professes to be in love with him even before she has met him, just by listening to his music. She is told that Chopin is sickly and shy and even effeminate, so she must continue to act like a man as if pursuing a woman, but is warned that by wooing him brazenly she risks damaging his precarious health. We are here in the province of romantic love as the Romantics conceived it, favoring immediate and fulfilled passions of great intensity, since such soaring love, even if with unfortunate or deadly consequences, is consistent with the life of aesthetic distinction. Grace is achieved in the immediate expression of one's personality and emotive aestheticism, even if your carnal cravings kill your lover off. Sand is undaunted in her pursuit, even with her spurned former lovers barking at her heels, giving us clear suggestions as to her prodigious aesthetic and athletic capacities. Sand confesses her desire for Chopin to a friend (Marie), the mistress of Franz Liszt, who intrigues to sabotage any amorous relationship between George and Chopin. She entertains designs of her own on Chopin (even to the point of purloining a love letter written by Sand to the melancholy Pole and signing her own name to it) and lying to Chopin that Sand only wants him to win a boastful bet. When Sand learns of this, it is explained by another friend that Marie “doesn't want you to have a better composer than she has,” certainly an unusual form of “one-upmanship.” Sand had given the letter to Marie to pass on to Chopin, and when she realizes that Marie

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had purported it to be written by her, she goes to Chopin with one of her novels, reciting the passage that was the basis of her love letter. Chopin is moved and enthralled, playing a composition of his for her as she lays prostrate on the floor under the piano in romantic bliss, clearly someone who can abandon herself to aesthetic as well as physical orgasms. By this point, we are aware of the fuller romantic meaning of the term “impromptu,” as not only a musical term referring to an improvisational piece of music written for a solo instrument, to be performed on impulse in a loosely interpreted extemporaneous way, here applicable to romantic love and free expression and a way of life wherein readiness is all. However, living under the sway of strong and irresistible passions also evokes destructive reactions such as resentment and jealousy leading to grandiose gestures and destructive acts. One of Sand's jealous ex-lovers, the poet de Musset, challenges Chopin to a duel, which he inadvisably agrees to; they meet on the field of honor with seconds and Sand in attendance. They draw pistols and pace off, but then Chopin faints; with de Musset still menacingly pointing his pistol, Sand picks up Chopin's pistol and shoots the outraged poet, wounding him. When he wonders why, she says, “It was easy. You're a menace to the future of art.” (Sand was hard on discarded lovers: when another reject protests that she promised to love him, she quips, “I didn't promise to succeed.”) Much of the overwrought action occurs at the French countryside chateau of the Duchess d'Antan, a noblewoman whose social aspirations, as was the temper of the times, was not to associate with the higher nobility but rather with the noble artists who embody the aesthetic rank. So she gathers them together as estate guests for a fortnight, including not only Chopin and Liszt and de Musset but also the artist Delacroix. The Duchess has artistic ambitions and seeks the counsel of Delacroix, who proceeds to seduce her, to her perplexity and flattery. Her hospitality is repaid not only by the intriguing and fornicating, but also by the performance of a small play written by de Musset that satirizes the aristocracy and demeans the hostess. The great aesthetes are neither amicable guests or very nice to each other (Liszt refers to Chopin as “the Polish corpse” and Sand is referred to as “that graveyard”; de Musset wants to kill Chopin, and Marie tries to sabotage Sand and Chopin to further her ambition to be the mistress of another greater composer). Impromptu offers us a comedy of romantic distinction, grandiosely acted out by some of the very aesthetes who were important in the development of the Romantic Movement and ideal. Since that ideal extolled the virtue of solitary self-regarding and individual independence and expressiveness, in which everything in the world is in a way a

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projection of one's Self, so ultimately romance is with one's Self. (Sand says of herself, “I am not full of virtues and noble qualities. I love, that is all. But I love strongly, exclusively, and steadfastly,” at least whomever she loves at the moment.) The Romantics apparently could be as unworldly as Chopin or as earthy as Sand, but their expansive egos all belie not only aesthetic sublimity but also childish self-absorption. Their sense of their own unique artistic distinction makes them great fun to watch, as they strut and fret and plot and write great music and novels. It is easy to see them as comic ancestors of subsequent nonconformists, such as the Beats, hipsters, and artistic rebels everywhere. It is true there are darker forces at work in Dionysian rebellion, in anarchic self-assertion and destruction and egoistic sociopathy. Here, however, we see their fascinating comic side, geniuses of aesthetic grace exalting themselves and exasperating everyone else.

The Quiet Man (1952): The Comic Romance of Ethnic Grace Perhaps it is a bit too easy to make fun of the aesthetically inclined, since the rest of us who are aesthetically challenged are less talented and usually less narcissistic. But the romance of selfhood is not confined to small and select groups but also appears in much larger social contexts wherever an identity of distinctiveness appears and persists as important and pervasive. It seems to be the case that comedy thrives in distinctive social settings of all sizes and kinds, making the comic approach to things both ineradicable and salutary as an expression of the human condition. In both cultures that value distinction and distinctive cultures that value their identifiable distinctiveness, those sorts of social identities are choice material for comedy. In the former case, groupings such as the aesthetes celebrating their self-distinction are funny, and in the latter case, larger groups, such as those who identify with an a particular ethnicity, are distinctively funny. Ethnic groups can be subjected to prejudicial stereotyping because of some identifying characteristic, such as race, religion, national origin, regional identity, and so on, all of which appear in the roughhouses of comedy, such as vaudeville and music halls of old, persisting into movie comedy of earlier eras. One staple of such comic forums was the “stage Irishman,” usually depicted as a rough and drunken fellow with a thick brogue and uncertain intellect, deemed funny as a typical denizen of the Ould Sod or the new cities of America. Yet this depiction was complemented by the image of romantic Ireland, a nostalgic and sentimental vision of a pre-modern and charmingly rural and pastoral place of human scale and locales with rooted values and practices. Here

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we are in the realm of cultural myth, imagining a place that persists into the modern industrial and urban era as a respite of idyllic stability and even peace. The quiet man of the title is Sean Thornton, an Irish-American prizefighter, who travels to 1920s Ireland in search of his ancestral home, a farm near the village of Innisfree. We are in a period of Irish history when things are comparatively settled, after the Easter Rising of 1916 and the ''Time of Troubles” and in the post-revolutionary peace of the new Irish Free State. Many visitors to Ireland at this time saw the place as poor and backward by modern standards, but nevertheless hospitable and sociable, and quite memorable as a cultural setting that was remarkably distinctive. We learn, and the quiet man doesn't tell, that he has a grim secret: as a heavyweight boxer, he once accidentally killed another fighter in a match, quit the ring, and vowed never to fight anyone again. Sean has sweet memories of his father's stories about Innisfree, so he hopes to buy the family farm and live there in peace. On the way there, he catches a glimpse of a beautiful red-haired young woman herding sheep, and is captivated by the beauty of the area and the Celtic girl he saw as part of the cultural landscape. Even though this is the place of his family origin, Sean is still an outsider, as he quickly learns, running into the barriers of local customs and clannishness, defining him as someone who is “not from around here” and “not one of us” immediately. Too, there are curious relationships that he does not quickly fathom, such as the cordial tolerance of the local Irish Catholic priest and the Anglican Reverend. Even more puzzling is the bond between the wealthy widow Tillane, who owns the Thornton farm, and Will Danaher, a loud and aggressive local who wants to buy the farm also (and we learn, wants to marry the widow). As comic luck has it, he is the protective older brother of Mary Kate, the sheepherding girl Sean fancies. Will's presumption about the property and her annoys Mrs. Tillane, so to spite him she sells the farm to Sean, infuriating Will. So Sean goes to the farm cottage, he finds Mary Kate cleaning inside, and they kiss passionately, beginning their romance. In a more socially mobile and freewheeling society such as Sean is used to in America, there would likely be few really difficult impediments to a union between him and Mary Kate, but Innisfree is a tradition-bound community, so even though his roots are there and he is of Irish heritage, he is nevertheless a stranger. But communal distinctions are often quite demanding, so Sean has to demonstrate that he is serious about becoming a part of the community, proving that he is both authentic and competent, that he accepts what the communal life requires and thus is one of us, and also that he willing to do whatever is necessary and proper to confirm his

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worthiness. In a sense, Sean is being subjected to an initiation rite he must endure to become a full member of the tribe. He learns that Mary Kate expects a customary long and ritualized courtship before marriage, and thus employs the services of the local “shaughran” as matchmaker to supervise and insure that they “observe all the proprieties.” Innisfree is heir to the ancient customs of ''the green world” (so evident in ancient and Renaissance “festive comedy”) wherein local people live close to nature and are much aware of the elemental forces of nature, including sexual passion, but also are bound by inherited custom, which helps to tame and check impassioned natural urges. Mary Kate embodies these conflicting forces, as a tempestuous and passionate woman who is nevertheless beholden to custom as enforced by her brother, in the tradition of marriage as a kinship alliance negotiated between two local families. The marriage of nature and culture is deemed essential to communal peace and order, so there is much comedy in Mary Kate's personal disappointment when her brother adamantly refuses the match, and much confusion on the part of Sean about her insistence on getting familial approval and her rightful dowry, without which she would be a woman without distinction within the community as an isolated person who defied tradition. Thus we are in a wonderful comic quandary, since we want these two people to get together, and know that the solution lies in Sean showing the community his distinctive abilities as an authentic Irishman able to love and fight for his woman. Sean is helped by divine intervention in the person of two clergymen who have befriended him and want to bring marital union about, the Protestant reverend and the Catholic priest of the town. They break a commandment by lying to Will that Sean is now courting the widow Tillane, so Will agrees to allow Sean to court Mary Kate hoping this will return him to Mrs. Tillane's good graces. The courtship proceeds over a decent interval, and they are married, but the happy occasion is marred by Will, who has learned he was duped, and now refuses to give Mary Kate her rightful dowry, in itself a major violation of custom that does deny her communal distinction. Sean refused to fight for the dowry, still haunted by the ring death he caused, but Mary Kate sees this as either cowardice or husbandly dereliction of duty, and refuses to sleep with him. She is counseled by the clergy and relents but still feels less than a proper wife, leaves him, and goes to the train station to leave town. Sean's temper is roused, and he takes her from the train and marches her cross-country back to her brother's estate, much to the delight of an attending crowd, who love such village revels and hope for a donnybrook between Sean and Will, in the communal tradition of ludenic violence among friends, and neighbors.

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Advised by the Anglican minister of the importance for their future for his willingness to fight for her, now his pent-up resentments and frustrations come out. Sean drags her to Will's estate and demands the dowry, or otherwise the marriage is off; Will, now shamed in front of the whole community, gives him the money, which he takes to a coal-fired threshing machine, where Mary Kate opens the furnace door and he throws the money in. Mary Kate, supremely happy, announces that his supper will be ready, striding through the crowd as a reintegrated member of the community and married lady going to their home. Much of the fun for modern audiences not used to these kinds of cultural distinctions is the reversion in cultural time and custom deemed necessary for marital adjustment and local assent. We are alerted to this when Kate lapses into Gaelic speech rather than English, especially in her confession to the priest. The comedy takes place in the context of cultural ritual, so when Sean drags Kate to settle the dowry we are witnessing an ancient ritual ceremony familiar to rural Ireland, when the bridal party in mock scuffle “dragged home the bride.” Similarly, after the dowry money is burned, the cultural expectation is that the animosity between conflicting parties be settled in the “saturnalian release” of a fight, which is not a freefor-all but rather a boxing match supervised by the town matchmaker, who urges observation of the rules of boxing and allows betting on the match by the attending townspeople (with him acting as bookmaker). So Sean and Will move through the village fighting, cheered on by the crowd, stop for a beer at the local pub and confess they like each other, continue fighting until Will is flattened, then go home drunk and happy, and the three of them—Sean, Will, and Mary Kate—sit down to the culmination of the festivities, the communal meal. In the end, the matchmaker is supervising the courtship of Mrs. Tillane and Will, insistent that they observe the proprieties. In this way, the festive spirit of misrule and return to rule in the observation of cultural proprieties resolves conflict, returning the cultural community to both its festive and proper distinctions, and letting us enjoy the enduring cultural memory of the graceful green world which never existed but always does exist in comic celebration.

Ball of Fire (1942): The Comic Romance of Intellectual Grace We maintained that the comic romance of self unfolds its consequences in social groupings which value the assertion and expression of self, such as among aesthetic achievers who see self-development as essential but have to live in a society in which other people, including fellow aesthetes, may well see such a preoccupation to be very funny if not weird. But one

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of the venerable motifs of romance is the long and adventurous search or journey, so with the aesthetically talented that quest is both inward and outward, the search for and expression of the aesthetic self. Another familiar story in the romance of the stranger, someone who arrives in a place, and makes things change or resolve some situation, in all cases making a difference. Usually the stranger has to come to understand the local ethos, and in the process of changing society discovers his social self. And in many cases, the romantic quest can be both inward and outward, combining (for example) an intellectual search for knowledge, such as the collective search for various truths to comprise the logos of an encyclopedia but at the same time discovering some knowledge about both the harsh and enticing realities of an external social ethos which they happen to encounter. In such a comic situation, we are in contact with persons of intellect but not necessarily “streetwise” social skills and also persons who have no “book-wise” knowledge but fancy themselves to be worldly-wise with pragmatic survival skills. In movie comedy, there are all kinds of social distinctions at stake and differing ideas as to what constitutes social grace in comedic conflict. In Ball of Fire, we immediately encounter a group of men sequestered in a mansion owned by a foundation dedicated to knowledge, who for nine years have been toiling for nine years putting together an encyclopedia which includes all the various kinds of knowledge these diverse scholars possess. They live in a kind of blissful state of academic grace, familiar with books and learning and each other, goaded by their curiosity to continue their inward journey towards complete knowledge of their respective subjects, happily free of the noisome bother and rude bluster of the common life. As always in comedy, the social world has ways of obtruding and intruding, first by the prim Miss Totten, the financial officer of the foundation which funds the project, since she is not pleased that it is nowhere near completion, threatening to withdraw her support. The academicians are appalled by this prospect, and display their grasp of social cunning by urging the lanky and attractive leader of the group, Professor Bertram Potts, a distinguished linguist, to flirt with Miss Tollen, and his flattery makes her agree to keep the project going. The second outsider who appears is the local garbage man, who knows the professors and asks for their help in answering some radio quiz show questions. Potts is doing the encyclopedic article on “slang” and is much intrigued by the “lingo” of the garbage man's street speech, realizing that slang is a dynamic form of talk and his article is out of date. He decides he needs to do “field research”' on the subject, so he ventures out into the city and eavesdrops on people engaged in everyday banter, hitting upon the idea of

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holding a slang seminar to which he will invite selected people. Potts is much taken with the vernacular speech of one “Sugarpuss” O'Shea, an attractive tough-gal nightclub singer who is a font of fascinating vulgarities, such as her telling him to “shove in your clutch” when he shows up at her club dressing room, refusing his invitation. However, Sugarpuss is the “moll” or girl friend of a gangster called Joe Lilac, who is suspected of a gangland murder so the prosecutors have a subpoena to question her about the crime. Lilac's henchmen want to hide her in a bleak warehouse, but she has a better idea: taking refuge in the mansion full of harmless professors until it is safe to get out of town. So the scantily clad and sexy Sugarpuss becomes the stranger in the academic town, scandalizing the housekeeper but pleasing the “high-brows” with her sensual argot, such as the kissing them “yum-yum.” Her deception and hideout works for a few days but Lilac, fearing arrest, decides to marry her so she can't d testify against him, arranging for her to meet him in an adjoining state. But Sugarpuss is slowly falling for Potts and charmed by the gentle professoriate, although still beholden to Lilac; since she calls Lilac “Daddy” (as in “sugar daddy,” since he gives he a huge diamond ring), the naive Potts thinks he is her father, and asks him if her can marry her; Lilac goes along with this misconception, for he sees this as a way of getting her safely across the border and his wife. So the academicians and Sugarpuss set out of New Jersey, and there Potts thinks he has been deceived, even though Sugarpuss has kissed him ardently and told him she is “just plain wacky” for him, accepting his engagement ring. Lilac slugs Potts, and the latter and his colleagues return to the city, with him much forlorn. The scholarly command of logos has its resources, since Sugarpuss has sent Potts the huge diamond Lilac gave her rather than the modest one Potts had given her, signaling to the professors that she actually loves Potts. Alas, she is in Lilac's clutches, who even though he knows she loves Potts, forces her to marry him by threatening her beloved faculty friends by sending his gunmen to the mansion and, while on the phone to Lilac, holding them at gunpoint and willing to open fire on them if she doesn't marry Lilac. But the hostages outwit the gunmen by surreptitiously shining a magnified light on a heavy portrait on the wall above them, causing the rope to burn and fall on them. They then discover the captured thugs are ticklish, and tickle one until he reveals where Sugarpuss and Lilac are. Their garbage man friend uses his truck to race to that location, whereupon Potts uses his learned boxing skills to best Lilac and then throw him into the garbage truck. Spared a fate worse than death, Sugarpuss rewards her heroic linguist turned rescuer with a “yum-yum” kiss.

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It perhaps can be regarded as a contradiction in terms to talk about a “romance of academic truth,” since the gentle and learned dons , for all their intellect, are intrigued and intimidated by the rough world of licentious singers and underworld mistresses and ill-bred urban gangsters is alien to the life of inquiry. But the life of logos is not completely helpless when confronted with cynical calculation and brute force. Sugarpuss is after all attracted to Potts because not only he is handsome but also because he is a gentleman and intelligent, two features in a man she is not used to. She also much likes the other professors, a kind of “Seven Dwarfs” to her less than Snow White, but who they see as lovable if fallen woman, for them a whore they can transform into a princess through a hearty “yum-yum” non-virginal kiss. They also prove themselves equal to overcoming the violent because their adversaries are so dumb, easily overcome by a trick or bested in a fight by someone learned in boxing. So Sugarpuss is redeemed by academic grace, and brings feisty liveliness into the role of a professor's wife. Perhaps now the gathered intelligentsia can get beyond “Slang” in the encyclopedia and finally make it to “zygote.”

The Varieties of Social Comic Experience When we reflect on the corpus of social comedy as projected on film for our pleasure, we should remind ourselves on the ancient origins of comedy in the Dionysian movement in Greece which culminated in the comedy of Aristophanes and others. Dionysus was the god not only of natural feeling enhanced by intoxication of the spirit (and spirits) but also of domestication (of not only grapes but also other rural and pastoral goods) and, notoriously, of celebration (of fertility and sensuality and all high spirits, including Thalia, the grace of comedy). It was our informing and organized thought that the story (or perhaps, “metastory”) of social comedy is the search for and discovery of grace, those good feelings and relations and endings that humans irresistibly yearn for. In our movie comedies, we saw people with natural emotions and desires (pathos) performing social acts which stemmed from the excited and even euphoric intoxication of passions. But the beauty of wild nature is expressed in the context of, and attention to, social considerations, with people engaging in transactional relations in and social situations over time, with an eye to some defined good of social activity. Thus the natural passions are initiated and instantiated by socially relevant contexts (ethos) patterned and ritualized but also infused with enlivening comic spirit. And, wild nature and social nature are complemented by festive nature, the

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realization of a temporary actuality (logos), that the wine of life is not only intoxicating and socializing but also sweetening, the comic philosophy of festive and debonair amiability and conviviality. The Dionysian subversion informs our comic comedic understanding of life in society and involves us playing our way through the realities of social facts and situations, wherein comic intrusions and alterations allow us to unravel social seams, make margins fluid, and dissolve barriers throughout society. The festive spirit of comic play brings the world and us the grace to appreciate beauty, pursue good, and celebrate truth, not as a solemn revelation but rather as a joyful revel relishing life's feast with a merry heart and good tidings.

CHAPTER THREE FUNNY WORLD

In Chapter One, we organized and discussed movie comedies that foreground personal relationships as a revel of First Nature, small numbers of people animated by natural desires and sympathies characteristic of the pathos native and familiar to the human species, and thus a grand subject for our common specific hope for personal grace and the comedic quest we have to live through to get where we want to be. In Chapter Two, we examined comedies which include and stress the presence and power of society, making social comedy into an identifiable type of drama featuring the “contextual determinacy” of human quests for grace, a process which amends and adjusts human desires to a social ethos. This sets the unfolding of stories into the matrix of “socialites” wherein the personalities involved must play things out. We pointed out that the great recurrence that seems to be integral to comedic completion is a principle of pragmatic efficacy, that for all the personal peculiarities and social perplexities people encounter, the traditional and typical dramatic completion in comedy is the rejection or disappearance of older forms of control or bondage and the accession of a younger and revitalizing generation who exercise and expedite relations and associations which promise pragmatic freedom and social renascence. These chapters gave us some grasp of the range and pattern of movie comedy, but did not complete the picture, for our comic story is still a story without an end. In Chapter Three, we will end our inquiry by following movie comedy one step further, towards a comedy of self-knowledge. In our perspective, the study of personal comedy requires a kind of rough comic anthropology, the knowledge we intuitively share with others of our species as to how and why people are funny and what about that funniness we like to see projected onto movie screens. In addition, an intelligent look at social comedy is much aided by use of a kind of comic sociology, some awareness of how a social ethos affects people and how comic situations emerge because of the realities of social life. Now we want to turn to what we can boldly call a comic philosophy, knowledge available to us through our experience with movie logos, what movie comedy tells us what we can learn about ourselves as funny creatures and the funny ways the world

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inheres in the nature of things. For even though there is a strain of thought (in Plato and Aristotle, for openers) that sees the comic perspective and experience as less than exalted and noble, we have already seen much evidence that comic beings can have an important kind of aesthetic beauty, utilize their own version of moral virtue in defining social good, and understand the depth of comic truth. Humans are able to pose questions to ourselves about ourselves, and certainly some big and related questions are why is there is fun in the first place, why do we find ourselves and others to be so funny, and why is the world at large so awfully funny? Historical anthropologists think our acquired ability to play goes a long way towards forming our ability to make and use common sense in understanding and living in the outer world of sensation and “playing” the inner world of imagination. Sociologists have also studied much how “playing society” teaches us the arts of using our social sense, and how much our ludenic and dramatic sensibilities do for us as social players and actors. We also know the extent to which cognitive and logical play goes into exploiting our intellect and general mental abilities, including understanding distinctions such as what is funny and what is not (and when), distinguishing sense from nonsense, and relevant here, why we understand comic logic and what comic knowledge teaches us about ourselves and the world. There is an ancient thought about comedy expressing the idea that comic wit speaks to us with a depth of understanding about ourselves and the world that we can only grasp and “see” through (as Puck says) fool's eyes. Comedy thus offers humans a unique kind of humane knowledge in specific understanding of human nature and society from the shared viewpoint of comic beings. We share with our fellow comic creatures the condition of being graceless mortals in search of grace by some sort and definition, whether personal, social, or universal, and commonly find it funny that we are graceless and that grace eludes and bewilders us. The Dionysian movement observed this human predicament not with humble resignation but rather with vital celebration (the revel and procession) and protestation (the invective and jocularity) that gave expression to naturalistic passions (including phallic) and social criticism (savaging rulers and snobs and warriors), and in their infamous rites, the paradoxical union of the very human and the mystic divine, of fertility and creativity but also savagery and bacchanalia. This complex of expressive impulses and mythemes were the inspirational and historical basis of Dionysian epiphany in the birth and conduct of Old Comedy leading up to Aristophanes, but more broadly gave impetus to the comic attitude and even a comic philosophy, in the spirit of Nietzsche's gaya scienza, playful inquiry into the nature of homo ludens and ludenic truth, inquiry that is at

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once detached and skeptical and engaged and sympathetic. Here comedy is the inquisitive redoubt mode, the formidable dramatic to which our Dionysian aesthetic returns, the comedic aesthetic which defines the form and mimetic structure and kinetic movement of human actions and social entanglements. The origins of comedy in improvised and disorderly revels that arose during country celebrations of the vintage harvest, accompanied by celebratory joshing and imbibing, clues us to the elemental feature of comedy, its irreverent questioning and outrageous and coarse jesting which made fun of everything from the tragic choruses to reigning orthodoxies. In its Athenian heyday, comedy was free to “imitate life,” holding up an incredulous and skeptical mirror to the life of the polis, directing extemporaneous and boisterous wit at everything from Socratic philosophizing to the insanity of protracted war with Sparta. The opportunity and ability to make fun of ourselves in public is an important way for people to become students of themselves and for a society to observe itself, allowing us to kid ourselves through playful inquiry that lets us see ourselves not only as others see us but as we see ourselves. Self-analysis is an uncomfortable endeavor. When placed in the context of comic understanding, we become aware of our own foolish comic being. We may experience the comic nature of things as revelatory and salutary. Such selfunderstanding is consistent with the notion that comedy is a drama of maturation and relaxation, with the former moving us away from the complication and frustrations of an older and sillier situation and towards our completion as grown-ups in mature and renewed order, with the latter changing us from an unhappy and overly serious persons and situations into people and places with happy endings and festive people in an amused and recreated atmosphere. In such a comic transformation, we see ourselves exercising comic truth, moving from ironclad absolutist knowns to tentative and tacit knowings, pursuing comic good by eschewing routine for revelry, and valuing comic beauty by abandoning the gloom of plight for the smile of delight. Comic sensibility begins and ends with ourselves, allowing us to live lives of sublime ridiculousness and enjoy our logically illogical view of combined affirmation and subversion in the comic “perspective by incongruity.” Such humane and humbling self-awareness permits us to recognize our own finitude and fallibility and forgive a lot and regret little, leading us into the grace of our own private katastasis, freeing us to see ourselves and the world with good cheer and worldlywise hope. The comic being seeks and finds pleasant sights, furthering the pragmatic process of encouraging those ontological traits and social habits that make life pleasant although recognizing that some things that are

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funny are not altogether pleasant. In this way, as the “laughing animal” at our most mature, perhaps we can understand and enjoy the fact that there is likely nothing funnier than self-observation, in all its pleasantness and unpleasantness. This wondrous kind of comic impiety is not confined to personal experience, but has also appeared in mediums such as the movies, which in its brief history has become confident enough and tolerant enough to entertain both the industry and us by making fun of itself as a medium. Even in the early days of silent movies, movie-makers were making fun of each other and also of genres (such as the Western) on screen. As the movie culture developed a history and a culture, it became safe and even profitable to play with movie life in its various aspects and also to “push the envelope” by making more daring and outrageous movie comedies. We will begin, in the spirit we have established, by examining the funny ways moviemakers have made fun of movies by looking at movie selfparody, poking fun of moviemaking, of movie genres, and movie auteurs making fun of themselves. Secondly, we will examine some venturesome ways moviemakers dared to have fun by making innovative and unusual comedies. Lastly, we will take a philosophical leap into the ways movies have shown us what we will call “living fun,” how people having fun by living out funny ways should inspire us to live out some fun ourselves. All in all, these movies give us a sense that some moviemakers are willing to become students of themselves and what they do, and thus advance learning about what the movies can show and what they can teach. When the movies reached the stage in the previous century that they began to take themselves seriously as an art, they were in grave danger of selfcongratulatory stagnation and solemnity, with the industry making the same kinds of predictable movies over and over and the vital and funny films of yore catalogued and ignored in university film studies departments and film art theaters celebrating for the interested few the heritage of a now dead form of art. Fortunately, there have always been moviemakers who perpetuated cinematic vitality by not taking themselves too seriously, renewing their commitment to making fun by directing movies making fun of what they do as funny in itself and worthy of self-parody. A major source of revitalizing grace can be found in self-casting oneself as a comic figure, and by extension portraying what one does as a comedic enterprise made graceful by taking it down a peg as something less than heroic or glamorous, and by reminding ourselves that for even the gifted and admired grace is undeserved.

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Making Fun: Self-Parody as Comic Self-Abuse In Greek Old Comedy, the comic dramatist was virtually free to make fun at will, engaging in satire and invective directed at very real and important people in the community, utilizing the devices of dramatic pretense and sportive jocularity as a “cover” for a subversive attack on some prevailing hypocrisy and failing policy. In dramatic terms, anything went: buffoonery, satire, burlesque, sight gags, earthy humor, licentious allusions and props (the priapus, naked girls), caricature, and so on. However, in movies that make fun of the movies, we have in mind the films made by moviemakers making fun of themselves, rather than comic dramatists making fun of Athenian politicians. So here we are in the province of self-parody, in that parabolic circle wherein people who know themselves and the movies use the medium of the movies to make fun of themselves and the movies in the “satirical poem” (paroidia) of a fictional film about non-fictional people and places they are familiar with—stars, studios, directors, and so on. In many cases, such a self-imposed “imitation of movie life” takes a daring and even wicked sense of humor and sometimes even a modicum of revenge and sabotage, maybe even a bit of self-loathing for being part of “movieland” insanity. In all cases, seeing moviemakers parody themselves is great fun for audiences who enjoy much being let in on the gag.

Bombshell (1933): The Comic Pathos of Stardom In Bombshell, we are transported to a Golden Age of moviemaking, the era of classical Hollywood in the 1930s, when the “Dream Factories” of the dominant movie studios reigned over the corporate system of movie production and distribution, extending control over every stage of the process and employing a vast array of talented people, from technicians to directors to actors. The “contract players” at the studios were an odd kind of indentured servant, in the sense that they had little control over what parts they were cast and movies assigned, and also such little control over their own lives that they had to allow the studio publicity departments to concoct sensational or “human interest” stories about them that gave them completely phony private lives. These concocted lives varied according to studio conceptions: sometimes they were depicted as average people living a quite normal home life, thus sharing common values and pastimes, but in other cases they were depicted as living the high life of parties and glamorous and multiple escorts and ocean cruises, a leisure class of fame and fortune living out popular fantasies about stardom. Although she is a

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star and lives in a palatial Hollywood mansion, Lola Burns (known in the press as the “Blonde Bombshell”) hardly seems at leisure or very fortunate. Lola's day begins at six a.m. with the irritated star unable to get her staff to bring her breakfast. In quick succession, there is the shamelessly intrusive person of “Space” Hanlon, the publicity agent assigned to get Lola in the papers and magazines, no matter how outrageous or degrading the lie. Then there is the studio arranged early-morning interviews, having to deal with her alcoholic father and gambling brother living there and spending her money, and also dealing with a personal assistant who holds her in contempt. Since her sponging family has borrowed all her cars, she has to call the studio for a ride to work. Arriving there, she learns that she will have to delay shooting her new film, since the industry censors object to a scene of her taking a barrel bath in the tropics in her last film. It is here that the cinematic line between the fiction on screen and the facts of a movie career and person and her actual last film intersect, to our delight. For the actor playing Lola is Jean Harlow, in life billed as a blonde bombshell (with naturally platinum hair, we are told), and her co-star in the previous movie, Red Dust, was the very real Clark Gable; and that movie was directed by Victor Fleming, now directing this movie, who was the lover (well, one of them) of Clara Bow, the silent star on whom this movie is loosely based. The actual Jean Harlow resembles Lola in many ways, complete with an irresponsible and dependent family, various lovers that included directors and continental aristocrats, and even a desire to live a “normal” life rather than the studio and fan expectations that she live a life of glamour and excitement beyond the means of most people. Both the real and the fictional Jean/Lola are subject to the culture of artifice in which they abide, and realize that if they are to continue being a star and working in the movie industry, there is no choice. From the opening scene on, then, we realize that we are seeing native Hollywoodians making fun of themselves and indeed the movie process, the system in which movies are made and the requirements expected of moviemakers, especially the stars who are cast in a “starring role” both onscreen and off. We noted that Greek Old Comedy was a form of ritual abuse in which legitimated riotous and even vicious fun making aimed at the contemporary local practices and people ruling Athens. Here we have something of the same kind of comedy going on, but now including the people who are in the movies and make the movies making fun of the medium. This is in the same mirthful spirit as the Dionysian revel making fun of the powers that be and inherent in such modern occasions as the “roast,” wherein acquaintances make sportive fun of their friendly “target”

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through belittling jokes and anecdotes and often more general vulgarity aimed at political or sexual targets. A modern diversion is popular and vicarious entertainment through media reportage of celebrity revels, real or imagined, through gossip about their play-lives in the pleasure-domes of Hollywood and other centers of privileged leisure, as well as watching such media events as celebrity roasts, wherein the rich and famous poke fun at one another. Her fans envy Lola not only as a featured attraction onscreen but for their fantasized imaginings about her off-screen life, not realizing that she lives in a kind of satin and marble and art deco prison, or perhaps more accurately a zoo, in which she is displayed as a sex and money object to everyone in her circle (the sponging family, her various lovers, the “movieland” press, the studio and the fans), all viewing her as an objective ideal with some utility for them. For the studio she is an object to sell, so even though she may have aspirations as a thespian, she is typecast in torrid comedies with lots of bathtub and bedroom scenes, suggestive dialogue (“I do play rather experienced women in my movies”), scanty costumes (a wardrobe instruction at the studio orders her to “wear the white dress without the brassiere”), and strong hints about her sex life (her longtime maid pointedly reminds her, “Don't scald me with your steam, woman—I knows where the bodies are buried”). Everyone is interested in her private life, although for different reasons: the studio to both exploit and shield her reputation, her lovers to conjoin with a beautiful celebrity, and with the status, as well as the beauty, that entitles the press and her publicity agent to invade her non-existent privacy. Her life in the Hollywood zoo is aided and abetted by her publicist Space, whose zeal in maximizing whatever lurid publicity about her is complemented by his lust for her, so studio interest in keeping her as a single sex symbol is furthered by his intrigues in foiling her other lovers and sabotaging her rebellious ideas about marriage and motherhood outside of captivity. Space arranges for her aristocratic suitor Hugo to be arrested for immigration violations outside a nightclub, and as he innocently denies complicity in the arrest, she knows otherwise when she sees newspaper headlines about Hugo and realizes Space had tipped them off. She demands Space be fired, but he shows up at her mansion, announcing he was quitting but as one last noble gesture has brought a reporter from a staid women’s magazine and then leaves. During the interview, Lola assumes the guise of a respectable lady, so much so that the matronly interviewer suggests she might be happier and more fulfilled as a mother, so Lola ponders adopting a baby (at which point she gazes wistfully upward at a velvet painting of a mare and foal). Lola informs director and suitor Brogan she wants to marry Hugo and

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have babies, which he diverts by recommending that she adopt a baby from the local orphanage on a one-month trial basis, and she heartily agrees. She brings home a baby boy, and rumors circulate among the press hounds eager for any star sleaze that Lola is pregnant out of wedlock. To abort adoption, pregnancy, or marriage, Space arranges for a gaggle of reporters, Hugo and his lawyer, and Lola's ghastly relatives to descend on her place at precisely the moment she is trying to look respectable and maternal to the two orphanage ladies detailed there to discern her motherly suitability. Naturally, the home invasion brings disaster, as Hugo and Brogan fight, the drunken family blunders in (her brother's strumpet girlfriend greets the ladies with, “Hey I'm getting sober! Aren't you?”), Lola realizes that Space's hand is evident here, and in a rage drops out of sight. We next we see her in hiding at a desert resort and spa, vowing that she is through with pictures. There, as if by chance, she meets and is courted by a handsome and sophisticated Boston “blue blood” (Gifford Middleton) who professes to be ignorant of the movies and glad she is not part of that vulgar industry. Gifford disarms her with florid sweet nothings (“Your hair is like a field of silver daisies”), and she accepts his proposal. Preparing to meet his proper Bostonian parents, her disreputable family “happens” to show up, and a child asks Lola for her autograph, revealing her cover; shocked, shocked that she is “that actress” of scandalous reputation, the Middletons leave in a moralistic huff. Defeated, Lola tells Space she is dutifully returning to the movies, finally learning that the Middletons are professional actors hired by Space to disabuse her of living a normal life. Confessing his love for her, Space has to endure her wrath but also (he hopes) inspire her love, even at the end when he admits that he hired someone to stalk her posing as her husband for more publicity. In the end we expect, and perhaps hope, these two will get together, maybe because we think they richly deserve each other, or more likely in the irrepressible logic of comedy, they are good together and good for each other. Lola's efforts at becoming “normal” are at best half-hearted and at worst impulsive, so Space undermining her sudden desire to become a mother or marry an aristocrat keeps her star power and movieland status intact, and her flight into the desert seeking anonymity easy enough for an astute publicity agent to undo. Space is a latter-day variation to the ancient comic role of the poneria, or comic rogue, although not an uninhibited rustic but rather an urbane opportunist and careerist, combining career and lust in the form of Lola on his agenda. When she finally sees the attraction of him, it is not only reciprocated affection but also a move towards good sense, in that as an alliance of opportunists playing in the insane gardens of Hollywood they can somehow survive the pace and pathos of the movie

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life, using her beauty and his cunning to perpetuate her starry caricature and his behind-the-scenes propaganda powers in a winning combination. Their joint realization is that they are both self-parodies, she an ordinary girl whom somehow the camera likes and the fans adore and he a glib manipulator of images and untruths in the service of luminous fantasies. The beginning of wisdom in such a culture of artifice is that they have to live a fictive and public existence, with her star life furthered as an aesthetic projection. Lola is a creature of that ephemeral existence of stardom in an entertainment medium in which the studio has invested heavily and the popular press and by extension movie fans depend, so if like politicians and athletes her moment of fame is inescapably temporary, she might as well enjoy the ride. Indeed, an element of their self-parody is their cheerful cynicism, since they are not real or even unreal in their movie life but rather something like “abreal” (“ab-” meaning from, away, off), living in and being seen in a world apart from and away from ordinary reality, and actually somewhat “off” as a way of life. The press and public can enjoy movie “abreality” while all the while knowing that it is created for the recreational purpose of providing masses of people the imaginative maps of Dreamland. Even when the movie people make fun of themselves, we see the comedy of self-ridicule as one more delightful dimension of the Land of Dreams.

The Player (1992): The Comic Ethos of Movie Society A star allowing herself to play a parody of her screen persona is a privileged moment of comic reflexivity, although likely compounding the popular mythology which gives moviemaking and movie cultures their exalted and celebrated status. It is also possible for someone to make fun of the movies as an organizational and institutional entity, especially at the stage of temporal development when organizational decadence and institutional decay has become evident. Lola and Space “came to their senses” when they discovered each other and the fact that they were the beneficiaries of a vibrant and flourishing media industry that both used and rewarded them, and thus wisely decided to become a team with reciprocating talents and affections. Their comic logic was to exercising the rough pragmatic rule of the “educated guess”: this is the best we can do under the circumstances, and besides (as an apocryphal politician remarked), we saw our opportunities and took them. Their moment will pass, but they can enjoy the “Tinseltown” grace as long as it lasts, which for both and the Hollywood “genius of the system” wasn't very long. (Alas, Jean Harlow died suddenly a few years later at age twenty-six.)

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In The Player, we begin by witnessing a “guided tour” of a Hollywood movie studio many decades later, when it resembles the studio system of the 1930s only in the fact that it still makes movies. In many ways, the latter-day movie studios are similar to the other large conglomerates of late capitalism, in that they have long since passed the stage of organizational simplicity and dynamism, and now are so profit-oriented but also fearfully timid that they make movies that repeat and combine old themes and genres but avoid the risks of creativity and innovation and instead rely on the formulaic and familiar. This movie is directed by the famed director Robert Altman, who established a reputation of making creative and innovative films, but after awhile, the new corporate moguls of Hollywood found his maverick style and irreverent subjects to be inconvenient and antithetical to the interests of an executive class that has no interest in nor understanding of the movies. In response, Altman could have made a valedictory movie with Marxist or deconstructive undertones attacking the pathos of a media system devoid of vitality and afraid of maturity, or one pointing to the lack of aesthetic truth in anything produced there, in comparison to, say, French cinema. He wisely chose, as someone who knows the compromised and commodified ethos of the place, to let us see them for what they are and what little worthwhile they do. We get an immediate sense of the absence of reflexivity and the presence of insularity as the camera tracks through the studio grounds. In various offices, we see well-dressed youngish people listening to screenwriters making a “pitch” for a movie idea (by one account, the executive decides to take only twelve out of 50,000 submissions a year). But what is astonishingly funny is what the supplicant who requested a hearing is proposing as a viable motion picture: “It's Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman” or an art-film director (Alan Rudolph) selling a project “not unlike Ghost meets Manchurian Candidate,” or the actual author of the Graduate screenplay (Buck Henry) pitching The Graduate, Part II in which “Mr. Robinson has a stroke.” (Altman had enough prestige and contacts to convince dozens of Hollywood “names” to do cameo appearances, giving us an eerie if authentic look at the stars having lunches and socializing at gatherings just like normal people, but also a sense of their status as ornamental figures of luminous familiarity and also of their curious uselessness in an industry drained of vigor and confidence.) Altman's comic tour of Hollywood doesn't have to impose much, as he just lets the moviemakers go through their foolishness, and thus play out their own self-parody. He invites us to tour the zoo, and after awhile, we cannot resist asking the obvious question: Are moviemakers really that awful?

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Altman could like respond with a guffaw, “Well, just look at the movies they make.” At the center of this comedy of self-imposed error is one Griffin Mill, who seems altogether typical of the callow and self-assured people who seem to predominant in new industries such as computers and cable television, and became evident in the New Hollywood, displacing the older and cozier industry ethos and even abandoned notable figures (directors like Altman and Billy Wilder). The fact that they changed the movie business for the worst and produced soulless and puerile films was for them of no moment; what was and is important resides in their own careers and the accompanying rewards and pleasures which they have come to expect. Still, there is a price to be had in such a Machiavellian environment: you can be replaced, as Griffin Mill is acutely aware, whose status as an executive deciding what movies will go into production is now on sinking sand after “green-lighting” some high-profile and expensive flops. His organizational paranoia is compounded by two other developments: first, the appearance of a hotshot new executive who is rumored to being groomed for advancement, and thus Griffin for demotion or dismissal; and second, the recurrent arrival in the mail of anonymous and threatening postcards purportedly from a rejected and thus disgruntled screenwriter who threatens him with bodily harm. So Griffin has to devise a plan to somehow divert or destroy the new executive (Larry Levy) and also find out who is sending the postcards and deal with that. In the latter case, Griffin surmises that the culprit is a writer named David Kahane, so he lurks around his place, phones and glimpses his stunning girlfriend, and discovers that David has gone to a classic film showing. Griffin meets up with him, David gets drunk and denies sending the cards, and their animosity escalates into violence in the parking lot, ending with David killed accidentally. Griffin frantically makes the death look like a fatal mugging and flees. Griffin returns to work and tries to act normally, but attends David's funeral and begins to evince an interest in the girlfriend (June); subsequently, the police interview and suspect him, but then he receives another postcard, meaning that David didn't send them. A solution to his second problem presents itself when two screenwriters propose a movie entitled Habeas Corpus, which is something of a serious “social problem” films (the unjust legal system and capital punishment), ending with the wrongful execution of an innocent woman, featuring no major stars and ending badly (thus violating Griffin's list of criteria he deems essential “elements” necessary for a successful film: suspense, laughter, violence, heart, nudity, and above all, a happy ending). Since this movie has none of that, he contrives to lure Levy into producing the film,

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which will be a disaster in preview, and then Griffin can ride to the rescue, suggest some changes that will make it a hit, and thus undermine Levy and bolster his own position. No matter that the “product”—the movie—would be corrupted and sanitized, as meaningless as the hugs and handshakes with the ubiquitous stars who hang around as and as tasteless as the mineral water Griffin constantly drinks. Altman manages to include many privileged moments which indicate how much the studio system is a mockery and the principals who run it well-dressed and highly-paid ciphers; at a meeting with his peers, Griffin breaks the habit of talking shop by cracking, “We're all intelligent people; we must have other things to discuss,” which inspires not intelligent conversation out of the movie studio box but rather embarrassed silence and then titters. Such moments of self-awareness are rare and quickly repressed, but Altman lets us observe the daily round of pitches and production, power lunches and celebrity parties, even the truly bizarre sideshows (Levy goes to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings because so many of his colleagues attend, since that's where the deals are being cut). The players in the Hollywood parody are comic figures so immersed in themselves and convinced of the importance of what they do that they cannot see that the decayed conventions of their product have become severely anesthetic and badly repetitious. The variously attributed definition of insanity, which is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results, applies here, and Altman make great comic fun of it in all its insane redundancy and superficiality. By extension, Altman does not spare us, the movie audience, since after all we are players in this cultural-industrial process, paying money to watch the movies they make for us. So perhaps we still expect all of Griffin's “elements” to be there to amuse and console us, so we want Habeas Corpus to have all that and the expected happy ending. It certainly worked for Griffin: a year later, Habeas Corpus has indeed been a flop in preview, Levy is no longer a threat, and Griffin is now head of the studio. Not only that, he has married June, who is expecting his baby. The studio newer players now watch the revised movie, which in the end has a prominent movie star led into the gas chamber and the gas released, when suddenly another movie star, brandishing a reprieve, comes to the rescue by breaking the glass of the closed chamber and carrying the condemned to safety, making for a happy ending and box office profits. At the end, Griffin gets a phone pitch from the writer who reveals himself to be the postcard writer; the writer then cunningly then says his movie idea is about a studio executive who kills a writer and manages to get away with it. Without missing a beat, Griffin sees this immediately as both blackmail

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and the solution to the other threat in his now idyllic life, so he offers the writer a peacemaking deal. The title of the movie is to be “The Player.” Griffin agrees to produce the movie under duress, to be sure, but he is astute enough to realize that the story, as it turned out, has all the crucial elements he requires, including his own personal happy ending.

The Stunt Man (1980): The Comic Logos of Movie Reality So far the comic self-examinations of movie life have allowed us an amusing look at how people cope within a social system that many outsiders must regard as a hedonistic and luxurious Dreamland populated by famous and beautiful people engaged in an extremely lucrative and exciting enterprise and exemplifying a modern leisure class independent of plutocratic crudities and aristocratic pretense. Our look at “backstage” reveals a personal and professional life much less romantic and lyrical than our “fan-mag” fantasies propagate and more comical, to the point of farce and thus quite amenable to movie parody. The principals in the two movies we have focused on (Lola and Space, Griffin and June) are familiar “insiders” of the social system with which they have to contend and survive as best they can. As their stories unfold, we gather that they have “grown up” a bit during their experiences (including fleeing in panic, sabotaging relationships and planting false news, killing someone and covering up the crime, setting up a colleague to fail, and most of all, attending to their careers in the movie industry). So by coming to understanding something about oneself as a comic character in an improvisational theater of social action (namely, starring in or making movies), these bright and talented people acquire enough self-reflexivity and -futurity to “get the joke.” So if Lola continues as a star and Griffin an as an executive, they will likely develop the habit of “role distance” wherein they can take on the role assigned to them in this comic world of moviemaking that expects people to become “play beings” acting like stars and moguls. In this way, a comic view of self and society becomes a survival skill, allowing Lola and Griffin to “play-act” in La-La Land but retain some measure of sanitizing distance from the mad frolic of movie culture. People who are perceptive are adroit at cultivating a “mediated self” useful in the practical aesthetic of social performance for doing what needs to be done to propagate star power, perpetuate studio power, and also further the Faustian aspirations of directorial power in the person of a mad genius hell-bent on making a movie, among other things. In The Stunt Man, we meet a young and scruffy man playing a pinball machine in a local diner, and we immediately recognize him as a sullen

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and hostile war veteran with some bad memories and a postwar past as a drifter and fugitive. Police arrive looking for him, and he is quickly on the run again, escaping the police by running through thick woods. He emerges onto a bridge, where he is astonished to see an antique German limousine speeding towards him; he deftly leaps cut of the way, and hurls a chunk of metal at the open car and waits breathlessly for it to turn and take another swipe at him, but realizes that car and driver have gone off the bridge into the water. As he peers at the water, he realizes he is being observed from above by a stern and displeased figure as if he were a godlike being who has descended from heaven to judge erring mortals. He (Cameron) realizes that he has stumbled into a movie production, shooting an action sequence involving a speeding World War I vintage touring car, and that the mortal god condemning him is a megalomaniac and flamboyant movie director (Eli Cross), so the unpardonable sin that Cameron has committed is that he has interfered with an elaborately planned and staged shot, one essential to the imperious director's cinematic vision and purpose. Cross is also quite manipulative and used to getting his way, so he offers Cameron a deal: he will give Cameron (who he dubs ''Lucky”) sanctuary and anonymity if he agrees to take the place of the now lost stunt man and take the risks that the monomaniac Cross demands. The imperious director is so obsessed to get his great work finished that he doesn't want a police investigation to shut down production, and Lucky resembles the dead stuntman enough to insure continuity, but perhaps most of all, Cross enjoys having a new toy to play with, a captive who he can use like a puppet. (Lucky soon realizes that Cross is putting him at life-threatening risk and learns that Cross almost got a helicopter pilot killed during the fatal shoot by insisting he keep flying in risky circumstances.) Cross enjoys Lucky's combat-vet paranoia and courage, so with the director on his “killer crane,” what emerges is a comedy about Lucky's perceptions (and by extension, ours) and the movie reality that Cross creates, acting as a kind of deus ex machina of the movie-made world Lucky now has to occupy and survive in, and juggling truth and reality and illusion at will as he puts his new stuntman through his paces (“If God could do the tricks that we can do, He'd be a happy man,” Cross pontificates to one of his peers). Like Lucky, we become immersed in the absurd surreality of the movie director's grand vision and invocative powers (as the movie rushes to completion, sitting on his swooping crane, Cross commands, “I therefore order that no camera shall jam and that no cloud shall pass before the sun”). Lucky becomes infatuated with the movie's female lead (Nina), even though he learns she had an affair with Cross on rebound from a liaison with the film's male lead, and with her

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realizes that, like any god, the directorial divinity can be cruel and capricious towards these mere mortals in his charge. When Nina's parents visit the set, Cross arranges for them to see some scenes with Nina in them, and deliberately includes a nude sex scene; professing to be mortified, Cross nevertheless lets the scene run for the shocked parents. The next day, Nina is to shoot a scene in which she is supposed to cry; Cross informs her that her parents saw the scene, which indeed does evoke tears, exactly what the director wanted. For both Lucky and Nina, Cross's movie-mania has moved from pragmatic manipulation to demonic control, so now bonded they plot a joint escape, only to find that Cross has sealed the set with local police so no one can leave. The movie climaxes with Lucky having to do a difficult stunt, indeed the same stunt which he had disrupted, driving the only copy of the wrecked vintage car off a bridge, so it can only be shot once without interruptions. Lucky is convinced Cross wants to kill him, but as this is their chance to escape, Nina hides in the trunk; the scene begins prematurely as Lucky panics, and just as he thinks they have escaped, a charge Cross has planted blows out a tire and the car does indeed go into the water; he swims to rescue Nina, but then sees her standing next to Cross on the bridge! On the bank, Cross descends on his heavenly crane and tries to convince Lucky of his good intentions, then tries to pay him less for the stunt; Lucky is enraged but Cross just laughs and flies off in another swooping vehicle, a helicopter, to his next movie location. The Stunt Man completes our picture of moviemakers making fun of moviemaking by reminding us that we are observing movie people engaged in comic self-observation, giving us their version of what is funny about living as a movie star, working in a studio, and making a movie dominated by an overwrought and maniacal director flying around like a monotheistic god tormenting the jobs of the cast and crew. One of the features of parody is that very often the parodist has a complicated lovehate relationship with the object of ridicule, so we get to share and enjoy both the parodist's comedic wrath and ridicule of what is being observed, as well as the experiential bond she or he may have with their subject, in this case the movies. Self-parody is a heightened and reflective form of self-knowledge, so perhaps this is how people who are involved in such a demanding and crazy way of life find their own forms of comic grace. Lola/Jean Harlow can survive and prosper as a movie star emboldened by her ability to make fun of herself and all those around her; Griffin has a chance of doing well in the hothouse atmosphere of studio politics armed with the awareness of organizational insanity; and perhaps even Nina and Lucky will realize that they too are “hooked” on the mad pursuit of

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making a movie at great cost to life and limb. Parody lets Lola/Jean see the comic pathos of her unusual situation as star who must endure the frantic pace and requirements of stardom, including the fact that she is the delusional object of interest and adoration of movie fans. Griffin is acutely aware that his job as the selector and producer of social illusions is a matter of cynically packaging and selling popular art for mass consumption and remuneration, in the movieland tradition of “dreams for sale,” so perhaps such self-parody will offer some consolation as only comic leavening can do. And perhaps Nina and Lucky will make peace with the devil-director when they are lured into the next movie that their charismatic guru will conjure up to torment them, now knowledgeable about the movie world fact that movies made may be made by mortal gods (such as Cross) and mortal heroes (such as stunt men doing dangerous things) but requiring the services of mortal fools (those who labor and act in the movie vineyard). In all of these kinds of comprehension and appreciation, there are comic rudiments people can invoke that movie them towards beyond delusion and illusion towards lusion.

Making Fun: Funning Movie Genres Moviegoers have long been familiar with the traditions and practices of moviemaking, many inherited from previous mediums such as stage drama and popular literature, relying on categories of stories and types of characters which audiences recognize and appreciate. Moviemakers quickly adapted these conventions into generic forms and narrative formulas that catered to popular expectations, and came to be referred to as “genres.” Movie genres are highly fluid and flexible, but recognizable and often predictable—the Western or gangster movie, the romantic comedy and the family melodrama share repeatable but adaptable characteristics that both persist and change over time. As movie genres developed in the centers of film culture, people became used to generic structures, responded to variations in themes and characters in response to new times, and understood innovations which played with and varied away from genre conventions by new creative talent and audiences. Many generic forms became so well-known that moviemakers dared to make fun of them in the midst of their heyday, and indeed movie parody became a welcome subversion that audiences often enjoyed seeing as comic violations of type. Still, making fun of what kinds of things people habitually like to watch often makes them uncomfortable, since there is often an element of humiliation in parodic mockery and ridicule, so some serious moviemakers resist or resent such spoofing. On the other hand, there comes a point

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when a movie genre richly deserves to be parodied, and at that moment someone usually emerges with a welcome and sprightly roasting. A welltimed and incisive generic parody can actually have the effect of changing or even ending the featured structures and habits of certain types of movies, often by making it difficult for movie audiences to take them quite as seriously anymore. In this way, the classic news documentary, a once familiar feature of movie-going, inverts into generic parody in the “mockumentary,” poking fun not only of a subject (a fictional rock group on tour, a vaguely familiar actor running a mock presidential campaign) but also of the conventions and expectations of documentary style “reallife” clips of actual persons and events, such as celebrity gatherings, power brokers posing, and action shots, such as athletes playing, planes crashing, or volcanoes erupting which form the visual basis of the usually anonymous and unseen narrator's solemn voice narration. Similarly, some movie genres become quite venerable and adaptable, especially if some social developments keep alive interest in that kind of story complex. Such is the case with science-fiction films, dating back to the fantasy literature about space travel by humans going to the moon and beyond or alien travelers coming to Earth. As human probes into the expanse and mystery of spacetime have expanded, science-fiction is recurrently given renewed impetus, including our tantalizing interest in whether there is intelligent life “out there” and whether it (or them) will visit us someday. Since such an irresistible human interest is involves large questions about human destiny and the nature of the universe, a goodly portion of sci-fi has been superserious, including those films which depict human contact with beings from other worlds, usually with anticipation and dread as either portentous or apocalyptic. Such large questions addressed by a popular movie genre inspire the comic counter-force of generic parody. Finally, the history of the movies is recurrently characterized by the sudden appearance of a temporary genre, a type of movie that seems to speak to anxieties and concerns which are on people's minds at a specific social and historical moment, allowing us to “displace” very real cares and worries into cinematic enactment which represent and symbolically resolve the issue at hand. Once that highlight of popular opinion and expression passes on a contemporary social matter elsewhere, the once engrossing genre is eclipsed and disappears. Such was the fate of the 1970s movie phenomenon, the “disaster movie,” playing to all kinds of contemporary imaginings but once exhausted with history moving on, was given an appropriate parodic coup de grace in 1980.

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Zelig (1983): Making Fun of the Documentary Genre Movie documentaries of all kind abound, and even though they are by nature very topical and factual, they compress and arrange their cinematic representation in such a way as to blend fact and fiction, or perhaps more accurately, to imbue visual and verbal factuality into cinematically interesting images and stories with a viewpoint and insight. Documentaries obviously can address virtually anything of interest, but one important topic is the biography, which shows and tells movie audiences about someone they should know, either remembering or anticipating. An historical biography recalls the life of someone we should admire or revile, often with a view towards the contemporary relevance of that person's life. A campaign biography of a candidate for high office often propagates the personal and political qualifications and values that make the person fit for public trust, although negative biographies propagate the opposing case for distrust and unfitness. However, if moviemakers can construct documentaries about real people, they can also put together documentaries about fictional people. If documentaries about real people reflect a point of view whereby the moviemakers “document” the life of someone for us to learn from, then it is also possible to do the same with a fictional person, whose “documented” life holds merit and lessons for us now. If this is done as tongue-in-cheek comedy, both the fictional person in question and the usual solemn documentary style can be especially funny because of its parody form funning the usual serious style. We meet an insignificant and nondescript man named Leonard Zelig, whose heyday was the 1920s and 1930s, a turbulent period of political upheaval and cultural transformation. It was also the period when the sound documentary became a staple of world movie experience, ranging from the newsreels people saw in theaters to the propaganda films that began to emerge from both totalitarian and democratic states as war approached. Too, with the emergence of mass media, such as large-scale newspaper and magazine distribution, radio, and the movies, great impetus was given the quick rise of popular celebrities, sometimes even ordinary figures who grip public imagination without any outstanding achievements (such as in sports or writing) or qualities (such as beauty queens or movie stars). This could range from someone thought to be terribly wronged (an abandoned wife) or someone who is awfully strange (a flagpole sitter, someone who collects shaving mugs). In all cases, there is something that makes them outstanding enough to be the subject of media attention, at least for a moment. The wondrous parody here is that Zelig just wants to be like everybody else, and is able to go to great lengths to do so. He is the son of Jewish immigrants in New York, and like so many people with

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ethnic origins and ties living in a new and strange land, has to deal with the lure of assimilation into the larger mass culture which blends him into the mainstream, posed against the counterforce of his differentiating origins, not to mention all the other identifiable groupings he encounters in urban life and modern times. He is also made aware of the achievement ethic, which makes people admire those who have achieved in various fields, including the newer modes of play, such as media stardom (movies, theater and radio), sports, and “cafe society” celebrity. Like so many other people at such a time and place, Zelig is a nobody who would like to be a somebody, but in his case he tries to be an everybody. The documentary style allows director Woody Allen, who plays Zelig, to tell the amazing story of a completely fictional character as if he really were a popular luminary from that period. The story begins with Zelig’s humble origins in a Jewish neighborhood, aided by the grandiose voice of the narrator who relates Leonard's story. We learn that Zelig experienced “troubles in his family life...he was bullied by anti-Semites, his parents...side with the antiSemites. They punish him by often locking him in a dark closet. When they are really angry, they get into the closet with him.” We are also told his father's only advice to him was to “save string.” What young Zelig could not save is any stable identity independent of the contradictory social demands of diversity in a complex society and conformity in a democratic order, so through a fantastic (and thoroughly cinematic) ability he was able to adapt to whatever diverse group he was with at the moment as a means of accommodation, to the extent that he could alter his physiognomy to actually look like and act like those he was with. So we see Zelig in newsreel-staged poses with Chinese laundrymen where he looks Chinese; with obese people he balloons out as grossly fat; we see him in Harlem as a black man playing in a jazz band. Then, as Zelig becomes famous, he becomes both a popular if freak figure, inspiring a dance craze and song and even a Hollywood “biopic” dramatizing his heroic struggle, so he is widely recognized as the “human chameleon.” Zelig begins to show up in more famous and unlikely places: we see him in the on-deck circle of a spring training baseball game waiting to hit after Babe Ruth and hanging out in a Chicago bar with a group of Mafia gangsters. He becomes lionized and courted as leisure-class company for the rich and famous of his day: we see him at a party hosted by F. Scott Fitzgerald, at the Hearst castle with the publisher and his guests from Hollywood royalty (Chaplin, Fairbanks, Cagney), posing with Presidents Coolidge and Hoover. However, Zelig is obviously troubled and is admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where he continues his self-delusion by telling the doctor (Eudora Fletcher) that he too is a psychiatrist, having

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studied with Freud in Vienna. This treatment is interrupted when he is removed from care by his half-sister and a carnival promoter, who turn him into a sideshow freak until their lover's quarrel breaks up the show. Zelig is returned to the care of Dr. Fletcher, who moves him to her country estate, vowing to cure him. She hypnotizes him and (for our voyeuristic delight) films the episodes, including the one where he admits he loves her but can't stand her cooking (especially the pancakes) and her “long and pointless” jokes. She is falling in love with him, and making progress on a cure, but errs in the other direction by so inflating his self-esteem that he develops an authoritarian personality that is ideologically rigid and aggressively intolerant of other people's worth and opinions. Despite her efforts, Zelig's original malady returns, and a scandal erupts when numerous women come forward to claim that he had married them. Then he disappears, but Eudora catches glimpses of him in newsreels from Europe, posing with the Pope on his balcony at the Vatican, and more shockingly, as one of Hitler's brownshirts. She goes to Germany, and finds him sitting behind Hitler giving a speech at a Nazi rally; when Zelig sees her in the audience, his psychotic trance is broken and he begins to wave at her, irritating the Fuhrer but freeing him from the Nazis. Zelig and Eudora escape in a plane, which he flies across the Atlantic upside down, and they are proclaimed heroes on their return. They return to her estate, and settle down to quiet and normal life together, since identity, like grace, begins and ends at home. It is easy to dismiss Leonard Zelig as an amusing if unique misfit, relegating him to the status of the circus freak, but misses the comic point: he is an exemplar of the modern pathos of identity, more precisely the confusion about and search for a stable identity in a world of “protean selves.” By trying to be all things to all people, or “fitting in” places where you didn't belong, Zelig made the common mistake of trying to be someone else rather than being himself. Woody Allen uses documentary parody to “document” how egregious the search for identity can become, and how desperately graceless acting as a “hanger-on” with celebrities or as a “hitchhiker” riding with true believers in a mass movement can be. Eudora's person and place gives Leonard some ontological security for him as an individual rather than a type, so in the end rather than making fun of Zelig's comic malady and quest, we can now make fun of them as a couple, two mature people acting like two school-age kids in love. And as is the wont of comedy, we all realize that grace is not acquired nor enjoyed alone. The ancient idea that “grace perfects nature” applies even to those pathetic souls who try to belong everywhere and fear they belong

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nowhere, until they make the happy discovery that they can be graced to belong somewhere.

Galaxy Quest (1999): Making Fun of the Science-Fiction Genre While Zelig documents the story of someone who wanders the world and then goes home to a loving woman, Galaxy Quest uses a movie genre to relate a parodic story of people who live at home but then go on an adventure abroad, indeed as far away as one can imagine. This movie also shares the interplay of fact and fiction, with the fictional Zelig encountering quite factual people and places and the people of Galaxy Quest moving quite unexpectedly from a fictional world to a factual one, at least a movie-made factual world. Both movies share the comic quality of making fun of a movie genre, and also making fun in a movie genre. Both movies came along when the genres they make fun of were both familiar and well worked over as movie types, so documentary and science-fiction were perfect targets for cinematic fun-making of what they typically do. As mature genres, their extant conventions made them an excellent forum for using the familiar to explore the comic unfamiliar, thus making fun for us in an old and tired generic form. They also share a kind of comic validation of their existence and experiences, Zelig by the commentary of very real and influential New York intellectuals who make tongue-in-cheek remarks about the cultural importance of Zelig, and for the Galaxy Quest crew, the social reality of ardent science-fiction fans, most notably the “Trekkies.” These are devotees of the television series Star Trek, which even though cancelled became a recreational diversion and even avocation, inspiring such events as conventions where the actors on the (cancelled) show would attend and sign autographs, and the fans would “dress up” as characters and creatures from the series (eventually the TV show and crew revived as a series of movies, and then into a TV sequel with a new cast). Like Zelig, Galaxy Quest introduces a wry parodic twist: if intellectuals can act as if Leonard Zelig was a real person, what if some beings not of this Earth act as if the Galaxy Quest crew were in fact space travelers and adventurers who could be enlisted into helping beings in a far-flung galaxy who are in deep trouble? If a cultural intelligentsia can endorse the reality of Zelig, why can't the “Thermians” recruit famous Earth warriors seasoned by their outer space experience help out aliens in need? In the movie, the actor “crew” of the Galaxy Quest TV series are attending a convention of the series’ fans, many of whom enjoy dressing up in costumes which appeared on the show and mimicking and remembering favorite episodes. The actors are weary of their continued

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identification with the roles they played on the show, which has been cancelled for eighteen years, all of them bemoaning the fact that their careers have suffered ever since because of their venerated type-casting in the series. One of the numbers (Dane) played Dr. Lazarus on the show, a member of an alien species noted for their superior intelligence and having shark-like fins on their head, but in reality was once a respected actor on the English stage, now reduced to earning a paycheck by dressing up as Lazarus and attending fan conventions, signing autographs and repeating his signature oath from the show: “By Grabthar's Hammer, by the suns of Warvan, you shall be avenged.” Another actor (Gwen) played the “computer officer” on the show's spaceship (The Protector), but was largely limited to repeating what the computer commands, included in the cast as appealing “eye candy” wearing a form-fitting and bust-revealing uniform and named “Tawny.” Their common resentment about life after the series was cancelled is acutely felt by a now grown mature actor who played a “boy wonder” young officer (Lt. Laredo) on the show but now finds little success or respect now as an adult and like the rest is weary of performing like trained seals for the enthusiastic fans (he lectures one that in fact their spaceship was a special effect: “There is no ship!”). In addition, this endless round of appearances is taxing for them not only because it is past history and an irritating reminder of how they have floundered since, but also by bringing them together rekindles old conflicts and experiences (Jason, who played the captain of The Protector, considers himself a desirable Lothario of many on-set romances, still hoping to revive relations he once enjoyed with Gwen, but she spurns him). So the intrepid crew of The Protector are now a pretty forlorn and graceless bunch, reduced to being lionized for a role they have long since abandoned by strange admirers who are either cultic or nostalgic, and thus don't appreciate them for what they are now or what they might become, and certainly not as human beings but as the remnants of a part they once played. They feel as if they only exist in re-run. As happens so often in comedy, our heroes don't feel very heroic, actually feeling that they are a pack of losers who did nothing except a TV series that would otherwise be forgotten were it not for the organizations and conventions of enthusiasts enjoying the fantasy of a childish dream of technological marvels and high adventures in strange places with unknown beings. To the amazement and contempt of the now unemployed actors, their fans—many of them young and “geeky”—not only still venerate them and the series, and somehow think of them as real astronauts and what happened on the show as real events. When Jason does overhear some non-believers making fun of them, the show, and the conventioneers,

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he sinks into despair, goes home and gets drunk. His reverie is abruptly interrupted by beings at his door, dressed up as “Thermians,” which he had taken to be another alien costume fantasy at the convention, but he had promised, with a wink and nod, to help them in an inter-galactic conflict as “Commander Taggart” of The Protector. He assumes they are a group of costumed series devotees who want him for an amateur shoot in a backyard mockup of a space vehicle, so he goes along in his hung-over state on a groggy lark. It turns out that they actually are space aliens, octopodial creatures who use a device to make them look human. They obviously have some advanced technology but appear to be a new and naive species with no concepts of deception or fiction. Indeed, they have watched Earth television and learned much from it, thinking that fictional shows such as Galaxy Quest are a form of reality television similar to news programming, so the crew of the show are actually what they portray on the series and thus are heroes and experts they can rely on to help them (they also believe the people stranded on Gilligan's Island, a popular TV series long in rerun, are in fact stuck there: “Those poor people,” one of Thermians remarks in sympathy). Even more amazing, the Thermians are such admirers of Galaxy Quest that they have modeled their society on the kind of cooperative and quasi-military ethos of the series, complete with uniforms and insignia and the “techno-speak” that accompanies such hightech social organization. And, they came to Earth in quite functional spaceships they based and built on the model of The Protector. By this point, the shape of the comedic parody is becoming clear: the movie is making biting fun of a TV and movie genre by including along with its gullible and uncritical earthly fans real beings actually from outer space, that like some of their Earth counterparts have collapsed the categories of the fictional and the real. In a larger sense, the movie is also making fun of the generic conventions and propagations of TV and the movies by fomenting such puerile and devotional attitudes among beings here and abroad. The movie is also making great sport of the popular acting profession, with its infamous egocentric and over-serious pretensions, as with the actors here who think they are unappreciated and underemployed but will exploit the old sci-fi series they were in to make a quick buck. The movie makes somewhat gentler fun of the somewhat bizarre series fans, who like the Thermians are adults having reverted to or never left childhood. A delightful counter-theme emerges from the dedication of the fans, and by extension the trust and hope of the Thermians, stressing how important such stories are to the young and the young at heart. There is present an element of a Peter Pan fantasy wherein the young can soar and risk and win and not get hurt, but in more general terms such science-

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fiction stories are in the tradition and spirit of the adventure story, at least as old as the Gilgamesh epic and Homer, wherein the adventurers represent some kinds of value and ideals of importance that are tested and conflicted in mortal warfare in which the grace of the heroes is tested and triumphant. Certainly some of the discomfiture the Galaxy Quest actors feel towards their enthusiastic and devoted fans and the ingenuous Thermians is that they don't feel very adventurous and heroic, and are in that way “down to earth,” while their admirers are imbued with their fictional selves on screen, preferring the artificial world of fiction (and in the case of the Thermians, emulating it) which projects them into a romantic world of godlike mobility and superhuman powers and missions of rescue and salvation. The earthbound actors not only have no fanciful dreams about what they portrayed, as their careers have played out, they don't feel adequate for what their fans expect, living in a kind of thespian purgatorial state, since they are in a limbo of graceless dormancy from which there seems no revival or rescue. Now comedy offers no salvation or redemption, but it can renew a sense of vivacity and a pragmatic purpose that leads to possible and achievable solutions. The Thermians take Jason onto their spaceship (which he thinks is a set) to negotiate a surrender with their demonic adversary (Sarris), a powerful and literally reptilian warrior general who has genocidal aims towards the Thermians. Jason still thinks this is all fans fooling around, and jokingly orders them to attack; he asks to go home, and they comply by projecting him through space back to his house, at which point he begins to realize that he in fact was in outer space. His fellow actors are skeptical, but go along thinking it is another gig; it finally begins to dawn on them too, and what follows is a series of encounters and adventures that draws them more and more into a deadly conflict on the side of the Thermians. What is really funny to watch is that the Protector crew is indeed revitalized and has acquired a sense of purpose, only now they do it by actually engaging in a real outer space conflict, and succeed because in-role they have some inkling as to what needs to be done, drawing on their fictional “experience” to fight Sarris. The crisis comes when Sarris secretly boards the ship and takes control, demanding the “Omega-13” device (from the last Galaxy Quest episode), which if activated disintegrates all matter in the universe, the prospect of which makes Jason admit that they are merely actors and the show was a fake, much disappointing the Thermians. Sarris activates the ship's self-destruct mechanism and leaves, but Jason adroitly contacts an avid Galaxy Quest groupie on Earth to research how the ship works, since he has worked it all out on computer, in particular Omega-13, which he and his fellow

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researchers think actually reverses time for a short period. Acting on that, the now committed and combative crew destroy the enemy ship and begin returning to Earth, and the evil Sarris sneaks aboard and begins killing crew members, but Jason reverses time and brings them back to life to defeat the attack, landing on Earth with the help of the series’ groupies, bringing them down to crash into, by comic “accident,” a Galaxy Quest convention. This “boffo” entrance thrills the conventioneers, and when Sarris emerges once again for the final single combat, Jason finishes him with a blaster and the crowd goes wild. The film ends with the revival of the Galaxy Quest series on TV with the original cast returning, adding one new member, a Thermian girl who fell in love with a crew member and now will play an alien using the stage name “Jane Doe.” Like Zelig, the measure of an excellent movie parody is that above all else it is entertaining, using the genre it is spoofing for delightful interplay of what is being made fun of (the genre) and what fun we can have with it in the process of undermining (the comic plot). In many ways, it is a tribute to the vitality and tenacity of a movie genre that it can survive such a lampoon, reminding us that we continue to enjoy movie genres such as science-fiction even when it is being made fun of, perhaps in so doing giving new impetus to our enjoyment of the generic form. (There are testimonials from Star Trek actors as to how much they enjoyed Galaxy Quest.) However, it is possible for comic parody to be so timely and effective that it actually hastens the demise of a movie genre that was popular for a time.

Airplane! (1980): Making Fun of the Airplane Disaster Movie Moviemakers and movie audiences have always loved films about disasters, be they natural, social, or technological, since vicarious pleasures can be found in the “safe” setting of the movie theater while we match people on screen in great peril and travail. Since the beginning of movies, we have seen re-enactments of earthquakes (such as the San Francisco quake of 1906), battles (early mock-ups of miniature ships fighting in the Spanish-American War), and technological marvels which fail spectacularly (a month after its 1912 sinking, a one-reel movie appeared, entitled “Saved from the Titanic,” featuring an actress who had actually been a passenger on the doomed vessel). Although the disaster movie constitutes something of a loose but identifiable genre, the taste for witnessing people causing and coping with disasters rises and falls with the varying concerns and imaginings of different times. Disaster films were not particularly popular in the 1940s, for example, since nothing onscreen could equal the disaster

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unfolding in the conduct of World War II and its aftermath. But they were popular in the 1970s, in the postlude of the upheavals of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, the overwhelming sense that economic development and governmental power was disastrous, and in the awareness of increasing ecological damage and political scandals such as Watergate. So such a gloomy sensibility inspired movies in which groups of people caught in some sort of catastrophic situation respond to it, sort out who is culpable and obstructive on the one hand and capable and reliable in the crisis on the other, and somehow manage to survive a chaotic and lethal situation. Disaster films thus “displaced” real-life threats and fears with fictional but identifiable terrors, such as earthquakes, attacking sharks, meteors, diseases and swarms of insects, and so on. But the most popular involved the failure of some sort of large and complex structure, such as a building or vessel. The Towering Inferno portrayed the usual array of characters and plots surrounding the opening of the world's tallest building, with the cast attending a party at the top, and a fire breaks out, trapping them there, while firefighters and others desperately try to save them, (it turns out, as we expect, that faulty construction and wiring installed by the cheapskate and greedy owners are at fault.) In The Poseidon Adventure, a Titanic-like vessel is in danger of sinking, so passengers have to use their wits in order to survive. Since the arrogance and pride of elite hubris is to blame, ordinary people have to take charge and make do on their own to survive the folly of the rich and powerful. The initial trendsetter was the film Airport (1970), in which a deranged bomber tries to blow up an airplane in flight for the insurance, so the crew and passengers, as well as airport personnel on the ground, have to clear a snowbound runway for the plane to make an emergency landing. The movie inspired several sequels and gave impetus to the entire era-specific genre, finally beginning to lose audience interest towards the end of the decade. At the moment in time the disaster genre was exhausted, it gave the parodists the opening for a major mockery, in the form of burlesque (broad humor in a variety and succession of comic skits) and caricature of the array of roles typical of the disaster film. In particular, by taking the conventions and role structure of the airliner-in-trouble movie, of which there were plenty, the stuff of parody can flow easily. This was done in a movie entitled Airplane!, which not only used many of the episodes appearing in the Airport movies, but also actually used some of the actors who had appeared in them, letting them have great fun mocking the very roles they had recently played. Further, they could expect movie audiences to be more or less familiar with the previous airline-disaster movies and many to have seen them. So, they could heighten the fun by playing with

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the diegesis of the sub-genres, introducing all kinds of extraneous elements into the story just to further violate the integrity of the melodramatic story line and the solemn characterological gravity. Woody Allen has a narrator tell the story of Zelig and his individual pathos, interspersing his malady with his appearance with historical figures and at historical events, and being analyzed in retrospect by actual latter-day intellectuals who profess familiarity with his case and comment on his past importance. Galaxy Quest moves us in and out of social reality, television reality, and cosmological reality, with people playing social roles as a person, dramatic roles as part of a cancelled TV series, parasitic roles as objects of zealous admiration, and astronautic roles as part of the crew of an alien spaceship. Combining these various roles to establish a pragmatic ethos brings results for all their roles (reviving them as vital people, renewing the series for them to star in again, pleasing and perpetuating their fan base, and helping out a nice alien race against a dastardly enemy). In Airplane!, the problem is logos, the propensity of technological wonders to go awry, requiring the intervention of knowledgeable persons skilled in such things as flying an airplane, directing and controlling its flight and safe landing from the ground, and maintaining rational control of the passengers arid crew to avoid panic. The logos, or “know-how,” of technological control is the key dramatic element in the disaster movie, so the anti-logical force of parody will dictate the opposite. This kind of film gives dramatic force to Murphy's Law: If things can go wrong, they will, and a parody of the techno-disaster movie gives great comic play to our fears of unfathomable technological malfunctions and offers witty reassurance that comic grace can prevail even in the face of normal human inadequacy. The movie opens with a ponderous score alerting us to the ominous peril that awaits the passengers (and us, the audience along for the flight), but then the music changes to a parody of the score from another disaster film, the shark-attack classic of the era, Jaws, and we see a shot of a cloudy sky with the tail-fin of a jet airliner moving through the soup like the fin of a shark. We open with the expected rush and bustle of a major airport, and hear the monotone voices of announcers providing information, but unexpectedly the announcers get into an impromptu argument about her having an abortion. This sets the tone for borrowed references not only from other movies but also from contemporary music, advertisements, and other popular phenomena, but most of all from the previous and serious airplane-disaster films of the decade. The cast are now playing send-ups of their previous roles, as well as familiar actors who do take-offs of their known personae from movies and TV. All sorts of figures show up in

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cameos, and indeed a famous basketball star is cast as the co-pilot. A special little treat for contemporary audiences occurs at the opening, when the hero (Ted, a former fighter pilot now reduced to driving a taxi) pulls his cab up onto a curb, turns on the meter and leaves the passenger in the cab as he chases his girlfriend (Elaine), a stewardess who just left him (the passenger is an actual political activist who led a successful movement for property-tax relief, preaching frugality in government and now stranded with a mounting taxi fare). Such gags, as well as slapstick, puns, unexpected lewdness and rudeness, indeed just about every vaudeville-level kind of humor imaginable, drives the movie and sabotages all the dramatic pretensions of the airplane averted-disaster film. The movie is then episodic and sporadic, but does have some extended jokes and comic characters and a core plot. At the center is the ex-pilot who is afraid to fly and cannot pilot a plane because of combat trauma and memories of lost colleagues (especially one “George Zipf”), but hopes to convince the adamant Elaine to reunite with him. Ted takes a seat next to a sweet old lady who makes out-of-character comments on the quality of Elaine's body and mistakenly asks him what their trouble is, so he proceeds to tell her about their past in the Peace Corps and their night in a tough Casablanca-style bar in North African city named “Drambuie,” which is transformed by a fight breaking out between two Girl Scouts and then the jukebox beginning to play a popular disco song (stealing from another period movie), and all of the tough customers begin to dance, centering on Ted and Elaine parodying a famous period dance scene. Recurrently, we cut back to the self-absorbed Ted continuing his endless story, not noticing that the old lady has committed suicide, followed by others seated next to him who commits hara-kiri and so forth. Another recurrent skit involves a young boy (Joey) who is allowed to visit the cockpit, where Captain Oveur keeps asking him questions that hint at pedophile deviation (“Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”) Some of the short episodes are parodic references to incidents in previous airline-disaster films, such as the presence of a critically ill little girl en route to a medical center for a major operation. She lies on a stretcher with an IV line running to her arm. To comfort her, an airline attendant sings a song to her. When the attendant turns away for the plaudits of the passengers, she accidentally tears loose the girl's IV tubes and sends her into life-threatening spasms. As the singing attendant continues to perform, she is oblivious to the girl’s peril. Another memorable episode involves two young African-American men talking in the esoteric street language known as “jive” which is unintelligible to the flight attendant, so a helpful white lady (played by a

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TV star famous for her role as a prototypical suburban housewife) intervenes because she “speaks jive,” and proceeds to communicate fluently with the young men to discern what they want. The dramatic thrust of the story centers on the fish served for dinner on the plane, which turns out to be contaminated, and affects both passengers and crew, as pointed out by a doctor (Rumack). The crew is incapacitated, so Elaine contacts ground control of their plight, as the aircraft careens out of control; they instruct her to inflate the “automatic pilot,” which turns out to be an inflatable life-size balloon in the shape of a pilot, even sporting a painted-on face and uniform. Automatic Pilot displays calm grace in the crisis, and everything goes swimmingly for a bit, but then “he” begins to deflate, and ground control informs Elaine to re-inflate “him” manually using the inflate valve below the belt buckle; she proceeds to do that, but when Dr. Rumack peeks in the cockpit what he sees seems suspiciously like fellatio and leaves them, with the crucial Pilot having a big smile on his “face.” As they near their destination, we learn that the happy pilot cannot land the plane, so Elaine tries to convince Ted to pilot, but he is still traumatized. He is only convinced by Dr. Rumack, who was in “the war” and knew Lt. Zipf, here reprising a famous scene from an older movie about Notre Dame legend George Gipp, only changing the halftime pep talk line to “Go out and win one for the Zipper.” Ted relents, and the ground controller (who advances through cigarettes, alcohol, cocaine, and glue during the tension) brings in Ted's nemesis from the war to “build up this man's confidence,” but the imperious officer (Kramer) proceeds to advise crashing the plane in the water to avoid more loss of life and begins talking about his hellish childhood. Nevertheless, Ted crash-lands the plane, the passengers disembark, and he and Elaine reunite, while the stricken plane takes off again with Automatic Pilot at the helm, accompanied by an inflated “female” companion. It is oft said that we have comedy in order not to perish of the harsh truth; perhaps it is also the case that we have comic parody in order not to perish of the alarmingly serious. The movie documentary is famous for examining the pathos of a particular individual (such as someone wrongly convicted of a crime, or the fall from grace of some celebrated person) as a serious matter worthy of consideration to illustrate some important issue or validate some human value. Zelig takes the generic sense of the documentary and inverts its narrative plausibility and “documented” sensibility into generic nonsense, telling a personal story that is a crazy-mirror image of the weighty or momentous subject matter typical of documentary conventions. Galaxy Quest takes a movie genre famous for its serious tone and cosmic (literally) themes at a moment when it seemed to have reached

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generic exhaustion, and upends its usual and expected sense into tonguein-cheek nonsense in a kind of sci-fi counter-ethos which mixes up the real and true, the artificial and false, and the “plasmatic” fun that parody can do with the generic “multiverse” it creates. Airplane! takes the simple complication of the airplane-disaster film and milks it dry, making basic fright of the fear of flying and suspicion of technological reliability into a counter-premise that makes such a heroic logos funny (exemplified in the moment the stewardess takes the intercom to reassure the passengers there is nothing to worry about and in the next breath inquiring, “By the way, is there anyone here on board who knows how to fly a plane?”). The “poetic license” of parody allows such liberties of wit to not only invert but also make grotesque a genre by treating it as nonsensical, following the Aristophanic dictum that derisive laughter is a better weapon for incisive humbling of great objects than solemn acidity. Parodic license expands its deflationary purpose by transforming generic conventions into an animated cartoon, recreating a genre into an “as-if” and “pretend-like” world in which people can change size and color, space aliens can recruit TV actors for a dangerous mission, and airplanes can be piloted by an inflatable doll. Generic parodies revel in a carnival atmosphere of nonsensical freedom, allowing audiences a kind of cinematic reversion to childhood in which we may enjoy the negative pleasure of how silly movie genres can become. Such fun might even serve the pragmatic purpose of either reforming and revitalizing a genre by lightening it up or suggesting new vistas or by putting it out of its misery (as with the airplane-disaster film). In that way, comic grace perfects the nature of generic principles and topics after the carnival.

Making Fun: Movie Self-Parody We have seen something of the comic therapeutics of movies making fun of moviemaking, and moviemakers making fun of movie genres. Occasionally there will be a prestigious moviemaker, usually a veteran and famed director, who will make a movie that is not their magnum opus or summing up, but rather a self-inflicted and self-aware respite of fun in which they flirt with parodying their own trademark style and thematic mode, giving a light-hearted comic turn to what gave them the attributed status of a movie auteur. In other words, they are playing with the “movie thing” that made their distinctive reputation for some well-deserved and self-parodying laughs, letting audiences in on the joke, as it were, by relaxing and enjoying their own comedic version of the director's familiar and signature movie signature. This kind of film obviously occurs well

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into the director's career, when they are well-known enough and confident enough to “let loose” and engage in a form of self-caricature.

Fellini's 8 ½: Director's Block By the early 1960s, Federico Fellini was one of the most acclaimed directors in the film world, having made six full-length films of outstanding quality (and two short segments in collaborative films), and as someone in the prime of his career was expected to make more great films. But now he felt the weight of his reputation and public and production pressures, as well as the complications of “personal matters” (women). So with nothing coming in that was inspirational nor anyone else helping him get oriented on his next movie project, Fellini hit upon the happy idea of making a movie about a director (Guido) who is trying to make a movie but has director's block, distracted by the variety of people who have a stake in him, aware of a past that keeps emerging to haunt his present, and concerned about the high expectations he arouses, all adding up to a fear of an uncreative and unhappy future. Guido, like Federico, is famous and regaled and expected to keep doing great things pleasing to his backers and moviegoers, but he is stuck. Fellini's working title for 8 ½ was La Bella Confusione (“The Beautiful Confusion.”) Guido is supposed to be hard at work directing a vaguely conceived but grandiose science-fiction film, for which a gigantic mock-up of a hugely phallic space vehicle has been constructed. But Guido's creative “juices” are not flowing, and he feels overwhelmed by the demand that he make a movie that outdoes his past triumphs, bringing it in on time and under budget, and with big box office returns. He begins to have fantasies of escape: the film starts with him trapped in a traffic jam in a tunnel where he fears suffocation, so he escapes his earthly and bodily entrapment by floating up into the sky above the fray, tethered like a kite, but enjoying the bliss of heavenly uncaring until the inevitable moment he is jerked back to earthly care in the form of all those in his life who want to know what he is going to do next. Such fantasies are not uncommon during a person's existential crisis, “midlife” or otherwise, since one's present reality and prospects are so painful and constricted that it is preferable and pleasanter to slip away into memory and reverie and fantasy. Guido/Federico is all too aware that he must live in an eternal present with hard edges, but that rude comedy can be softened by the oblique comedy of imagination. In the pathos of this kind of personal predicament, Guido's mind is also floating, and we quickly grasp that as Federico's alter ego, he is making fun of himself, what he does, and indeed the human capacity for reality-

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avoiding and fantasy-engaging. Guido's moment of reflection in his life that he allows us to share reminds him that life is funny in all the ways that comedy entertains. He has reached a critical stage in which he has become inert and dispirited. At such times, past, present, and future recur and rotate in a reflective mood and recursive scenes that comprise a comic dreamscape. He returns to his past with nostalgic memories of being bathed and put to bed as a child, he and his pals going to the beach to leer at a grotesquely carnal prostitute who lives in a shack there, and bitter memories of childhood guilt imposed by Catholic schoolmen. In his beleaguered present, he is beset by conflicting advice and unwelcome criticism (his writer, a serious Marxist, informs him that his proposed film is “a series of completely senseless episodes”), which for Guido likely characterizes his concept of his own life, and for Fellini the aesthetic of cinematic kinesis. Guido's senseless episodes in his present includes conflicting advice (his producer wants the film to stay on schedule, an aged churchman urges a return to piety, and his doctor tells him to rest up at a spa and drink lots of mineral water). Guide's sense of senselessness is intensified by his women, a wife who is intelligent and urbane but also remote and asexual and a mistress who is sensual but overly lewd and flashy. He goes to a spa to rest and stands in line for mineral water, thereupon seeing a vision of a romantic and libidinal future in the form of the girl in white who brings him a glass. He begins to idealize the beautiful Claudia as a lady bountiful or fairy princess who embodies a dream of the ultimate escape in the arms of a simple young beauty in whose eyes is a deep womanly wisdom that he longs to fathom, so naturally he wants to cast her in his movie (alas, she turns out to be shallow and petulant, definitely not the comforting and exciting love-mate he imagined). Guido's sexual frustration plays out in his erotic fantasyland of a harem dream, in which he presides over all the women he has loved or just wanted (such as an airline stewardess) as they march and mingle while he cracks a whip to discipline them into obedience. As he probes into his own life, these flights of fancy take on more importance, and we begin to grasp the synchronicity of Guido's life, and by extension the lives of all those who are part of his human “rhythm.” People are constantly in motion, moving to musical and social rhythms they likely do not fully understand. Nor do they grasp that the circle that Fellini has drawn for Guido's ensemble is that of the circus, his great cinematic metaphor, complete with magicians, mind-readers, clowns, bands, and so on, all performers in the great midway of folly, the fool's parade in which we all march. (Guido as a child had a mantra he and his siblings shared: “Say the magic words, then when the picture moves its eyes, we'll all be rich.”) Like Guido, we would all

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like to be extraordinary and rich, loved by one and all, and find our Cinderella or Prince Charming, but in fact are ordinary in accomplishment and acquisition, often unloved and ignored, with no ecstatic happy ending in sight. But the show must go on, and in the moving final sequence Guido is in directorial mode on the beach where a circus tent stands, and he grandly declares, “Open the curtains!,” and down the stairs from the spaceship set comes a procession of all those who have been part of his life. They all join hands and dance on a circular platform as Guido directs and touches them, to the delight of all. Guido is still incomplete just like his movie, but he is now making the picture move its eyes, and there Fellini's movie ends where it began, in a magic circle that is forever unbroken. As production of 8 ½ started, Fellini wrote a note to himself that he attached to the viewfinder on his camera, to remind him what he was doing: “Remember, this is a comedy.” His film comedy is a self-portrait of a renowned movie artist making fun of himself and the tremors of moviemaking and even the entire human carnival he has encountered walking through the midway of life. Guido's life is populated by people of all varieties and enriched by an active and imaginative fantasy life and wonderful memories. Now advancing into mature and older life, he engages in and shows us what is being lost, such as the wonders of childhood and the joys of youthful sexual athleticism. Now, he wonders, can he “create something true and meaningful on command,” as his producer asks of him. At a press conference, he admits he doesn't have anything to say, to their derision (at which point, he crawls under the table and imagines himself committing suicide). But in the end he has freed himself from the walking dead at the spa and the juvenile emptiness of his fantasy girl Claudia, and seems to have reached a plateau of comic grace by realizing, as the circling revelers say, “you can't do without us,” and enjoining his wife with an invitation: “Life is a holiday. Let us live it today.” The parabolic circle of reflective pathos has led Guido to finally address and answer a quite pragmatic question: what to do about living with nonsense? The answer turns out to be making a movie about the nonsense of moviemaking and indeed living nonsensically during the extended holiday of life.

Rio Bravo (1959): Director's Stock The few movie directors who can rightfully be designated as “auteurs” gain that status over time not only by the success of their movies, but more so because they develop an identifiable style and subject matter that

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audiences and critics enjoy seeing in renewed form. Fellini was pausing to ask himself what he was going to do now, wisely deciding to have fun with his dilemma rather than lament over it. In the case of Howard Hawks, he became well-known for many talents, including a gift for comedy and ability to work in different genres, but his reputation as distinctive derived from his ''ensemble” films in which a group of people, largely men in a socially separated grouping or profession, are faced with some kind of task in which their mettle is tested and in the process gain (or regain) individual self-respect and tough-minded feminine companionship while creating a primal family or community. In the past, this included groups of men and their women delivering mail and medicine in the Andes, beleaguered ranchers driving a herd of cattle to market, fighting creatures from outer space in the Arctic, and hunters in Africa trapping exotic animals for zoos. By the late 1950s, Hawks had been making films for over thirty years, so by this time everyone who enjoyed his films was familiar with his “formula” of primal conflicts and coalitions in the face of danger. In this mature period of his career, Hawks could afford to relax and take the hard edge off, so unlike the serious and intense Red River, he used the Western to make fun of his auteur formula by turning it into comedy. So since everyone familiar with the Hawksian style knew what was going to happen, why not play it for laughs? It is said that Hawks (and Wayne) disliked High Noon, another intense Western, because the sheriff hero is afraid and begs in vain for communal help to fight the revenge-minded outlaws coming to town, and even is tempted to run for it with his new and beautiful young wife. This offended the moral code of Hawksian sociology, which envisions an ethos of male professionals (and sometimes women scientists and the like) who quarrel and struggle with problems but nevertheless display courage under threat and refuse amateur help. Rio Bravo is often regarded as an “answer” to High Noon (if it is it is a lighthearted one that one cannot take seriously), although the sheriff and his colleagues do get amateur help from the Latino hotel owner and a female gambler, in fact having more local help than the sheriff in High Noon, who faces the Miller gang alone, finally getting decisive help from his bride who abandons her Quaker beliefs to shoot one of the gang members in the back. The ethologists who study animal behavior and the psychologists who study child's play have long observed that there is a moment in interaction in which a code is shared that announces “This is play.” Something like this emerged from this movie, since from the opening scenes on, we grasp that this is play, as if someone had announced at the start, “Everyone knows the plot, so let us have some fun.” And they do: we are transported

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to a Western setting, a saloon full of patrons are enjoying drams of whiskey; in skulks a disheveled and hung-over figure who is in desperate need for a drink; a cynical man at the bar gestures about giving him a drink, then tosses him a silver dollar into a spittoon which he reaches into to get. The sheriff (Chance) kicks the spittoon away from him (Dude), then approaches the man (Joe), but the angry Dude knocks Chance cold, and Joe begins to beat up Dude; a bystander tries to stop it and Joe shoots him. The unfazed Joe goes to his brother Nathan's saloon, where the bloodied sheriff staggers in to arrest him, but Joe's henchmen get the drop on Chance until Dude shows up and shoots the gun out of his hand, giving Chance the opportunity to drag Joe off to jail. Now this kind of scene is familiar territory for a Western, but audiences then and now notice that in subtle ways what is going on is comedy—Dude's desperate need, the puzzled look on the face of the bystander Joe kills, Joe's lethal and entitled insouciance, Dude's marksmanship despite extreme alcoholism, and the groggy sheriff pulling off the arrest of Joe, are all great fun to watch. The real fun begins inside the barricaded jail where Joe is held prisoner, while outside the hordes of gunmen hired by his rich and powerful brother Nathan stand watch and plot how to free Joe before the U.S. Marshal arrives. The little group—Chance, Dude, and the garrulous old jailer (Stumpy) are in a state of siege, surrounded and outnumbered with no hope of relief or allies. Indeed, when a wagonmaster and his crew come to town, he offers to help Chance, who refuses because the extra men would just be amateurs giving Burdette's professionals more targets to shoot at. Indeed, later that night the wagonmaster is killed in ambush by a Burdette hireling, leading to Dude and Chance chasing him into Burdette's saloon. They go in and disarm the gunmen sitting around, looking for a man with muddy boots and leg wound. Dude is frustrated by their search and the gunslingers begin to laugh at him, one of them throwing a coin into a spittoon. Then he notices blood dripping into a beer on the bar, realizing that the gunman is in the loft, whirls and shoots him. Chance lectures the gang about their outgunned group's willingness to fight, and later when Nathan comes to town, informs him that if they try a rescue, Stumpy will kill Joe. This sets the stage for the “cold war” standoff between the Burdette gang and Chance's meager coalition. He does acquire help in the youthful form of a gunfighter from the wagon train and the shapely form of a female gambler (Feathers) who had arrived on the stage. The former (Colorado) was approached to help but refused, then later rejected by Chance because he didn't prevent his boss from being killed; the latter Chance accused of cheating, discovering that she had been the companion of a card sharp and wanted by the law; Colorado discovers that she wasn't

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cheating, after she had baited Chance into searching her, which he then refused to apologize for. Gradually, they both become part of the group: Colorado informs them that the Mexican tune Burdette had ordered his saloon band to play is “The Cutthroat Song” played for the benefit of the “Texas boys” bottled up in The Alamo, meaning no quarter nor mercy for the losers; Feathers surreptitiously begins guarding Chance's hotel room while he sleeps, and slowly but surely becomes his girl after aggressively courting and tempting him in the familiar manner of the independent “Hawksian woman.” The dramatic conflict is now set and the personalities on both sides are now known, and for Western movie conventions pretty familiar. We see the overweening economic power of a cattle baron used to getting his way and willing to do anything to protect his worthless brother pitted against a badly outnumbered and trapped but determined sheriff unwilling to involve the townspeople into forming a posse and thus dependent upon the help of an alcoholic former deputy, a crippled old man, a callow young gunfighter, and a traveling woman of the world. So what makes this funny? We sense that Hawks is imbuing the conflict into a kind of lighthearted caricature of his kind of storytelling, making Burdette and his men into comic replicas of the Western villains of old and thus too bad to be true, while the sheriff and his pitiful coalition are so absurd they cannot be taken seriously. Even the scenes of actual fighting and killing have a comic edge to them, so the famous “blood in the beer” scene is actually rather funny, as is the climactic shootout between Chance's side (he and Colorado) exchanging Dude for Joe, facing Burdette's army holed up in his warehouse, with Stumpy showing up to help and beginning to thrown dynamite, with Chance and Stumpy crabbing at each other and Dude fighting Joe, ending with Burdette and company surrendering. But the crux of the comedy is that what is important in the film is not so much the external conflict but rather the formation of a family, making for delightful if unusual domestic comedy. Chance is a father figure for both Dude and Colorado, Dude being the prodigal son who strayed away because of a woman and is now reduced to wallowing in alcoholic self-pity but can redeem himself in his father's eyes by regaining his courage and selfrespect; Colorado is a cocky younger son who is a free spirit but is learning to face up to responsibility and maturity. Stumpy is a surrogate mother figure who cooks and cleans and complains about how he's taken for granted and put upon badly, but quite willing to guard his “home” by shooting intruders. Feathers brings a complementary feminine principle into the family, sensuality for Chance and companionship for Colorado as an older sister and for both a worldly-wise woman who understands and

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appreciates men so well she can stand up to them and help them in bed and out. When two Burdette gunmen have the drop on Chance, she throws a flowerpot through a hotel window, distracting them long enough for Colorado to throw Chance his rifle and kill them, after which she gets drunk. The banter between all of them features the Hawksian dialogic trick of everyone talking past each other or at each other in puzzled misunderstanding or critical but not unfriendly judgments. Thus the comic story of the movie is the formation of a rather strange ethos, a disparate group brought together by adversity but nevertheless bonding as a mutually supportive primary group. In the end, Stumpy is crabbing at Chance, worrying that he will go off the deep end like the now reformed and restored Dude once did; Colorado is now a charter member of the local police force as is the sober Dude. Chance and Feathers are now free to be together, as she realizes when she was going to do a song at the hotel bar in revealing black tights, and he threatens to arrest her, which is her cue to bond with him. She gives him the tights and asks if he wants to keep them so she can wear them for him alone, but he throws them out the window, and they are picked up by Dude and Stumpy making rounds, the latter asking he if he will ever be sheriff, to which Dude replies, “Not if you don't mind your own business.”

North by Northwest (1959): Director's Chock In 8 ½, we were treated to the comic spectacle of the director's dilemma, finally eliciting our sympathy by sharing in Guido's comic pathos and enjoying his resolution to live and work on with a kind of existential grace. In Rio Bravo, we witnessed the abiding mytheme of the Western—the creation and establishment of civilization—reduced to the bare essentials of family formation, not only by defeating a barbaric threat but also bringing into social being a group of people who share empathic understanding of each other, thus creating local civilization on that experiential bonding. Their shared comic kidding and wisecracking becomes the root metaphor for a primary ethos that will characterize a lighthearted culture and peaceable kingdom (expressed best by the shaken Feathers after the lethal flower-pot scene: “We're all fools”). The serious purpose of making a great movie and harmonious town is both subverted and affirmed by making fun of the process, letting us see how messy and uncertain moviemaking actually is but also how out of human inadequacy and pettiness somehow movies do get made, and how bickering and seemingly incompatible people who are not exactly respectable (a gunman turned sheriff, a derelict alcoholic, a juvenile gunslinger, and a fugitive

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gambler and “fancy woman”), but witty and wise enough to form an empathic team to lead a good community. Like Fellini and Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock had a long and illustrious career, and even though he didn't stray much from his trademark suspenseand-thriller formula, he never made an autobiographical film but it can be argued that most all of his movies have at least a comic undertone. At his best, he seemed to be having a great time, and audiences learned that along with his characteristic “thrills and chills” there were also plenty of “spills” that gave his movies their comedic accents. Hitchcock's movies share with the Fellini and Hawks films a plot in which a pragmatic purpose is served but with a great deal of fun along the way, demonstrating that out of comical nonsense can emerge good sense. For Hitchcock, society seemed to be a rather funny place in which all the struggle and strife his movie subjects were concerned with were in fact exercises in futility, struggling over something they deem important and valuable, but for the director merely a “macguffin,” his term for the thing everyone is concerned with and want but actually just another vain and ridiculous object of desire. His movies are an open invitation into his world, a playfully ironic place presided over by the directorial impish spirit suggesting to us that what happens there is a game, pitting usually sophisticated people against each other in some kind of voluntary struggle over something of actual unimportance but fun to watch for the comical plight and romantic byplay and breathless plotting, and absorbing us in a logically illogical cinematic reality in which comic possibilities and even comic grace is somehow attainable. In Fellini's self-reflection, the comic play centers on individual entrapment making for alienation from both intellectual and sensual life; in Hawks' social world of ascendant barbarism, sociability is at issue and civil society a forced truce of temporary peace but with primal partnering the way to rough grace. But for Hitchcock, both entrapment and barbarism are ineradicable aspects of human life, for the world is not only funny it is also crazy. In his films, Hitchcock directs us to identify with ambivalent heroes and perversely admire attractive villains, and consistently depicts misidentified or misused people (often “the wrong man or woman”) in situations that are desperate but also comic and domestic groups (such as couples who are afraid of commitment) as dreadfully funny. Hitchcock's world of threat and crisis to both individuals and societies would be gloomy indeed but for his comic “framing” of everything from murder to international espionage, as a pleasurable, if often slightly wicked, diversion made safe in a vicarious universe. In North by Northwest, we see a culmination and inventory of Hitchcockian themes, even in the comedic opening credits (showing the

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crowded “mass society” of urban people arguing over cabs and Hitchcock himself in his famous cameo appearance just missing a city bus). We immediately meet a well-dressed and urbane advertising executive (Roger O. Thornhill) exiting his Madison Avenue office building followed by his secretary, to whom he is dictating memos in his hurry to meet some important clients at a hotel bar. He is twice-divorced, takes his mother to the theater (and in another recurrent touch, is something of a “mamma's boy”), and has an executive “master of the universe” air about him. Arriving at the bar, he is extolled for his capacity for alcohol, and realizes he needs to contact his mother; as a page goes by “paging George Kaplan,” Thornhill gestures to him in order to get a message to her, but is observed by two armed accomplices looking for Kaplan, who kidnap him not realizing that they have the wrong man. Taken to the suburban country estate of a United Nations official (Townsend), he meets their superior who he assumes is the official, and despite his insistent denials, they assume in return that he is Kaplan. He has entered a world of highpowered intrigue, in which identities are disposable by necessity to insure secrecy. They finally get him drunk and at the wheel of a car to run off a cliff, but his alcohol capacity saves him, and he winds up at a local police station and later traffic court, where no one believes his story. They disbelieve even more so when they visit the mansion with the imposters gone and the distinguished Townsend at the UN. Meeting the real Townsend, Thornhill relates his encounter but Townsend is quickly killed, Thornhill photographed with the knife, and immediately on the run as the “UN Killer,” thought to be George Kaplan. Compounding the play with identity is the fact that Kaplan is a non-existent ploy by American intelligence to decoy the man (Vandamm) posing as Townsend who is a foreign agent seeking the macguffin (microfilm), since the real American agent is in his midst (Eve). Thus the fun really begins as they keep trying to kill Thornhill-Kaplan off, each time played as comedy, since audiences knew Hitchcock's tricks and that can't happen. For instance, Thornhill is seduced by Eve on Vandamm's order as a loyal mistress, and without revealing to the seduced that she is a plant, but she falls for him, yet still gives him Vandamm's directions to meet “Kaplan” at a farm country crossroads, where a crop-duster plane tries to kill him. He returns to Eve, then follows her to an art sale where she and Vandamm and his gunmen are buying a vase (which naturally we learn at the end contains the stolen microfilm secrets). Thornhill is in the sale crowd but surrounded by killers and can't get out, so he makes a scene, announcing outrageous bids and accusing an object for sale as a fake; the police arrive and arrest him, taking him to safety, so as they leave he remarks to one of his would-be

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killers, “Sorry, old man, keep trying.” Hitchcock continues convoluting the plot as more and more improbable and fanciful, but since his wellknown premise is that the world is nonsensical, he is able to make the situation increasingly absurd and unlikely, knowing that audiences love it. The movie climaxes on top of Mount Rushmore, famed for the carved Presidential faces on the side of the mountain, with Thornhill and Eve fleeing with the statue and climbing down on the faces of the Presidents (Hitchcock's working title was “The Man in Lincoln's Nose,” wherein Thornhill hides until he sneezes) until rescued by the intelligence authorities. He and Eve return to New York on the train berth where they first united, now properly married, and the last shot shows the long train moving swiftly into an open tunnel. Hitchcock was famous for making fun of about everything, from marriage to juries to party meetings, but one recurrent theme is the comedy of unauthenticity, obviously at the center here and in most of his other movies. His comic play exploits our awareness of the modern anxiety about identity and the fear that people aren't really who and what they say they are. The principals here—Thornhill, Eve, Vandamm—aren't who they are thought to be, so true identity is so elusive it becomes funny, as exemplified by Thornhill's actual profession of advertising. Such structured propaganda is the dominant form of public communication in the modern world, by publicizing things and people for attributes they don't have in the guise of attractive but exploitative representations which are temporary and disposable, as phony as a spy and double agent pretending to be what they aren't (an art dealer and mistress). More broadly, Hitchcock shares with Fellini and Hawks a mature sense of fun and capacity for self-deprecation in their comic reflection. In different ways, the great directors did these films as an act of recreation, for Fellini overcoming his mid-career uncertainty through self-parody, Hawks having fun with the parodic celebration of his distinctive style, and Hitchcock engaging in a kind of comic culmination of all his thematic topics, summing up his jocular and whimsical world-view. These are directors confident enough that they can risk demystification of what they did by taking us on a comedy of adventure, Guido seeking self-direction, Chance and his cohorts seeking stable social relations, and Thornhill and Eve seeking self-knowledge of who they really are. Auteurs became renowned because they created recognizable and pleasurable cinematic worlds, but these few were also willing to make fun of what they created by recreating their worlds in comic form. They made movies about people seeking some kind of grace in graceless worlds, so it is a mark of their greatness that

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they could see the wisdom of cinematic gracefulness in poking fun at themselves, since after all the funniest things or on earth are ourselves.

Having Fun: Playing with Social Ways Moviemakers have enjoyed making fun of what they do and who they are, and they also enjoy having fun through comic byplay with social ways, subjecting people who are doing important things or are implicated in some important social situation or cultural enterprise to the rigors of comedic analysis. It is one of the gifts and joys of comedy that it can find and put people in the damndest messes and scrapes and watch the funny ways they figure out how to make do and maybe make things play out their way. Indeed, when we look at the corpus of social comedy, one of those joys is the way people managed to make pragmatic use of the comical situation they are stuck with, and in so doing alter or even undermine the way things are into a better way or at least happier and more graceful outcome. The variety of social ways and circumstances are infinitely varied, but there are certain patterns that we may identify and utilize in our inquiry. A familiar and accessible division is the Dionysian, Apollonian, and Faustian modes of action and acculturation. In the Dionysian mode, we are dealing with human activity we associate with “first nature” the passionate and vitalizing forces that urge us toward the expression of physical feelings and the valuation of cultural vivacity. In the Apollonian mode, we see human action in the context of “second nature,” socially sanctioned and negotiated order that directs expression into social roles and the value of cultural regularity. In the Faustian mode, we are in the dynamic realm of “third nature,” historically projective expression directing movement into temporal quests exalting the value of future-oriented effort and energetic expression of concerted pursuit of a triumphant destiny. These are all “positive” organizations of action in their own ways, and each can be quite serious (e.g., passionate poetry, hierarchical ideology, and rhetorical inspiration to march) and proprietary. Thus Dionysian fervor can translate into religious fanaticism, Apollonian reason into organizational rationalization, and Faustian commitment into social force, all in search of some fulfillment of social grace. The comic antipode and even remedy for such searches is to let us see people in action, enjoying them when they are having fun in a comic setting and supporting them when they are trying to have fun in an “uncomic” setting. In the previous section, “making fun” involved the aesthetic observation of people in a particular social world, the movies,

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making fun of what they do, and in that sense was an observation idiom. Here, “having fun” suggests an subjugation idiom, wherein we watch at once remove people in various and often strange or hostile social worlds managing to subdue their situation and have fun despite difficult circumstances and unfamiliar territory Moviemakers were able to depict fellow movie denizens making fun of themselves and their calling, demonstrating kinds of self-aware grace; here we celebrate the capacity of people to have fun no matter what befalls them as well as the pragmatic employment to which comedic funning is put. Even in dire a or bizarre social contexts, people grasp for some experience of grace and find in comedy a way of getting there, reminding us as always of the valuable resilience and adaptability of the comic pragmatic.

The Dionysian Pragmatic: The Social Employment of Passionate Funning We distinguish the Dionysian dimension of human life from the Apollonian and Faustian by stressing the passionate and animate feelings and actions loosed by the impulses of vivacity and naturalistic spontaneity. The emotive and intuitive aspects we associate with Dionysian liveliness acts as a counterpoise, and often threat, to the orderly and sensible methodology of Apollonian normality, and also the mobilized aspirations of Faustian purposefulness. In simplified terms, the distinction and conflict is between the funny and fun-loving versus the serious and sober-minded; the former preference is to seek life in the sprightly and lovely interludes in which the comic and playful attitude prevails. The Dionysian force in human life is a vital and even fearful impulse that can underscore ecstatic revels and good cheer, but also drunken bacchanalia and anarchic lust and violence which threatens social peace and purpose. Dionysian urges are primal and ineradicable, entering social and cultural discourse and action in a variety of ways, some accommodating, some repressive or exploitative, and others quite frolicsome and sportive, having fun with the very desires which Dionysian fervor and ardor activates. So we might usefully distinguish between the pragmatics of passion (for instance, in channeling attraction into mating, affiliation, and procreation) and the demonics of passion (wherein energy is ruthlessly repressed or suppressed, preventing passionate fulfillment, or channeling fervor towards antisocial violence, such as rape or pillage), or lastly the comics of passion, where people having fun and sharing passionate merrymaking is the direction of comic mirth and good will in celebration and observation of our shared human inclinations. It is this last perspective we will adopt here.

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Belle Epoque (The Age of Beauty) (1992): Funning Girls It is a staple of ancient lore and world folklore to relate the tale of a young man wandering or running away who comes across a “green world” of pastoral bliss, including a bevy of nubile young women who are isolated from the world and the presence of lust-worthy men but now avail themselves of the opportunity to finally have some erotic fun. This story line is at least as old as The Odyssey and as new as teenage movie comedies (occasionally reversed to depict a young woman who encounters and enjoys a group of young men). Perhaps the great and abiding mythological and historical precedent for such free-spirited female sexuality and fun-loving bodily expression can resides in the Dionysian maenads (the “raving ones”), otherwise quite mild and respectable women who at certain special times of the year would leave home for ritual celebrations of their god in pastoral settings and a state of erotic grace. These rites were reputed to include ecstatic dancing and drinking and sexing (apparently with rural boys) and even tearing and eating animals, and wearing only fawn skins and ivy-wreaths and sometimes snakes. This escape (and escapade) in the lives of these women was for them an interlude, in the sense of a sanctioned respite but also something memorable to posterity because of the intense and pleasurable fun they were having. It is no wonder that subsequent accounts of their “godintoxicated” celebrations included tales of them drawing milk and honey from mountain streams by lowering their magic stick (thyrsus) to the ground, and feats of strength and sexual abandon. The maenads have no doubt fueled male fantasies and feminine interest ever since and in fact survives in certain kinds of secular or orgiastic settings, such as youthful vacation sites, beach cultures, and university parties. This tradition interests us here because of its endurance in literary and cinematic expression, undoubtedly because of its depiction of female freedom and license, but also because of its comic possibilities in the portrayal of female funning, and how funny the exercise of female power and choice with regard to sex can be. Here our interest is not moralistic but rather comic, since for the movies female lust is certainly as funny as male lust, and more importantly women have to cope with and make decisions about their own sexuality as much as any other gender or preference. Sexual grace is as mysterious and crucial to women as anyone else, but naturally with its own gender-specific character and comic potential. Given its problematic nature, passion is fraught with comic pathos but also the possibility of comic pragmatics, that the physical and experiential fun of sex can unify and clarify nature and grace.

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We find ourselves in a Mediterranean clime of sunlight and heat and bucolic warmth and fertility, but not in a peaceful land. We are in 1931 Spain, a country beset by political upheaval. The traditional monarchy is collapsing, the radical Spanish republic is making an effort to establish a popular democracy (although tinged with Stalinist ties), and the counterforce of fascism (the Falange) is on the rise, as it was all throughout Europe. This was to be much shorter belle epoch than earlier, in Europe before the First World War, but some took the brief opportunity before the civil war and resultant dictatorship to exercise the newfound right of free expression, including sexual freedom. We meet a handsome and confused young man (Fernando) who is a deserter from the Army and wandering the countryside. He meets an old and friendly man (Manolo) who declares himself an anarchist and a painter, discerns Fernando as a like-minded individual who needs shelter, and invites him to his lonely and rundown villa as a safe haven. They enjoy a spirited discussion (along with the local priest) that evening, but the next day Fernando declares that he should leave, so Manolo takes him to the train station. The train arrives, and Manolo!s four nubile young daughters alight to come home; the girls gaze at their new house guest and he returns their lovelorn and sensual inspection, so as we might expect he decides to stay on at Manolo's for awhile. Given the permissive atmosphere at the villa and the free-spirited temper of the times, we expect that there will be much sexual flirtation and experimentation between the isolated and interested girls and an “eligible” young man who conveys that irresistible combination of personal innocence but also bodily availability. This film could have remained a juvenile comedy of a young man briefly living and loving in sexual paradise, but instead what happens is that the comic point of view shifts to the young women. It is they who are the sexual initiators and learners, using him as the “raw material” for their inquiry into what they want and who they are as women and persons. At least for this brief historical period and familial context, we see women making their own sexual choices and fulfilling their own carnal desires, traditional patriarchal and religious authority defied, and personal freedom and hearty pleasure exalted as the province of women as well as men. This Dionysian enactment is the polar opposite of Garcia Lorca's “House of Bernarda Alba,” in which patriarchal dominion reigns to the point that the repressed daughters are confined to the house with all the windows closed, religious devotion and chastity enforced, and no hope of escape through marriage. Here the daughters are delightfully different, each learning their individuality by relating to Fernando and expressing what they feel and want. Their names—Rocio, Clara, Violeta, and Luz—evoke the sensual fragrances of a garden (here of Earthly

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Delights) and of summery frolic. Each in her own way discovers something about herself through her encounter with the romantic and attractive young man. Rocio is flirtatious and glamorous, using her playfulness to seduce him when it suits her and frustrate him when it doesn't. Clara is a lonely widow who is still youthful and lovely, using him to overcome her grief and rejoin the vital world as a still desirable and available woman. Violeta at first seems a tomboy cross-dressing simply to be outrageous, and insists that when they have sex he must dress up as a woman. (There is a wonderful sequence at a carnival where Violeta dresses in an army uniform and brings him dressed as a maid, in the grand tradition of carnivalesque inversion; nevertheless, they wind up in the hay afterwards.) Violeta thus plays with bisexuality, but Luz is the youngest and most frustrated, since she is envious of the sibling exercise of sexual freedom while she is annoyingly virginal. In the end, the Dionysian revelry results in the civil union of Fernando and Luz who then migrate to America and the other sisters all have experienced some variation of erotic learning (Violeta is urged to marry a “nice girl”). Such a privileged moment in a sensual “green world” may from the viewpoint of social normality be a time of sanctioned craziness, but in this film that madness is the play of female adults who are incomplete and lonesome, not merely for erotic fulfillment but in their own ways they each suffer from lack of sympathy. Their need is not merely for elemental sex but more deeply for understanding and compassion of their pathos, for someone to let them express affection and fellow-feeling as well as passion. Fernando is lusty but also sympathetic, and for the moment he will do. Human pathology includes the logic of how to deal with pathos, since as pragmatic beings we are not helpless against that common kind of malady. Fernando fills a need and a void for which the sisters are grateful and Luz is happy, demonstrating that Dionysian grace conjoins erotics with sympathetics in the grand human comedy of seeking and finding bedmates and soul mates.

Victor/Victoria (1982): Funning Couples The Spanish “good moment” ends for the persons involved in that appropriate Dionysian celebration of natural joy, a picnic on the banks of a river in which all the sexual participants, as well as father, mother, and her lover, enjoy relaxation after all the activity. While this movie ends in a bucolic feast, Victor/Victoria begins in urban famine, during the Depression of the 1930s. We are far away from a pastoral reverie, and there are no nubile maenads in attendance, but we are in Paris, where the hunger for

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food and the hunger for sex intermingle. We meet Toddy, a gay performer at a night club that caters to “gay Paree” and the slumming wealthy, as he watches a down-and-out and very wan coloratura (Victoria) audition for a job singing there, suffering another rejection because the owner deems her too “pure” for his clientele. Disappointed and hungry, she sulks out, but not before she belts out a vocal pitch that shatters his wine glass. Returning to her cheap hotel, she finds that the landlord has seized her belongings and locked her out of her room until she pays her back rent. Desolate, she promises to go to bed with him for a meatball if she can just sleep; later, she awakens to find him bending over her, but she screams on seeing a cockroach and he flees. She goes to a restaurant and eats ravenously, and invites the passing Toddy (who has been fired after insulting a patron and fomenting a brawl) to join her. They dine well, even though neither has a franc, but not to worry because she puts the hotel cockroach in her salad to complain and avoid having to pay; the waiter and manager are skeptical, but as they bicker the cockroach escapes and runs up a woman's leg, causing the whole place to erupt in a uproar and they escape. They flee in the rain to Toddy's shabby flat, and since he is a gay friend and her clothes have shrunk, she stays the night. The next morning, Toddy's gay lover, a young and brash hustler, shows up and insults Toddy; Victoria, wearing men's clothing, claims to be Toddy's new boyfriend and knocks the intruder out. We are clearly in a place and at a time that is not a belle epoch, and despite the Dionysian atmosphere the social ethos of the Depression-era urban life dictates some rude and calculating survival skills, including the pragmatic utilization of Dionysian interests in the service of making money. Toddy hits upon the clever idea of “transforming” Victoria from a female singer to something more complicated that will appeal to the decadent urbane trade, passing her off as man who is a female impersonator; she is skeptical, but they are in desperate times and circumstances, so they bring “Victor” to audition for a show with her performing as a drag queen (she is advised by him, “Make your gestures broad!”), although part of her appeal is the mystery of which sex she actually is. So “Count Victor Garzinski” is a hit, intriguing one virile male patron at the club, a Chicago gangster (King), attending with his brash “moll” (Norma) and bodyguard (Squash). King wants to find out if she is man or woman and is incredulous when she insists that she is a man, causing the jealous Norma to ridicule King and so threaten his masculinity that he sends her back to Chicago. King manages to sneak into Victor's posh suite and observes her naked in her bath, revealing the truth; after another upheaval at a gay club, King and “Victor” escape to his place,

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where he baits her: “I don't care if you are a man” and kisses her; she yields, “I am not a man” and they conjoin in heterosexual love. But when Squash returns and sees them in bed, he is shocked, thinking that this is homosexual love and revealing that he too is gay (the comedy is heightened by the fact that Squash is being portrayed by a former football star). Things are awkward for King and Victoria, since she must keep up the public deception, but King is annoyed because everyone thinks they are a gay couple (just as Squash and Toddy have become). The nightclub owner gets suspicious, hiring a bumbling Clouseau-like private detective to stalk them, and at the urging of Norma, King's business partner shows up to use King's ''gayness” as a way of fleecing him out of his wealth. At the signing, Victoria interrupts, disclosing to Norma that she is actually a woman, thus preventing the sale. The club owner brings in the police to expose Victor's fraud, going to the dressing room but emerging with the evidence that he is indeed a man, and indeed he is: Toddy appears on stage in drag as Victor, delighting the audience, which now includes the feminine Victoria aligned with King, and Squash proudly watching his performing lover Toddy. The young women in their age of beauty were in search of personal sympathy, using sex as a method of self-discovery and exploration. Dionysian beauty is for them manifest in their experience of pathos in their wildly comic encounters with their willing if highly confused prey. In this film we are in a difficult social ethos that is not sequestered from historical upheaval and deprivation, so the focus of individuals is directed towards actions even more primal than sex. For the principals here, sex is no less fun but complemented by its utility in social survival. The comedic crux here is not personal growth but rather role dexterity, making do with what you can offer, including comic display of sexual deviance and sexual masquerade. Both Toddy and Victor/Victoria become comic performers for a mixed audience of both straights and gays, but the comic game that is afoot is who is what and doing what with whom. Even in these times of dire straits, sexual identity is crucial for social grace, including the bonecrushing bodyguard who turns out to gay. Since role and identity do not always merge, the comedy revolves around questions of empathy, the struggle over people relating to and understanding the range and legitimacy of sexual choices. The maenads of the Spanish villa heed the goat's herd song of Dionysian irrationality without interference, but here in the close quarters of Depression-era Paris, one hopes for empathy from others about what you had to do and what you had to hide, especially when both became known. The closing scene of the movie, when all the audience is applauding the drag queen's performance, is as much a tribute to the

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Dionysian god of joy as the closing picnic on the grass of the Spanish girls and their lover. Human passion evokes both sympathies and empathies, both of which can play out well in the drama of comic pragmatics.

Belle de Jour (1967): Funny Spouse The women at the Spanish villa were concerned with the question, how can I use passion to discover myself? In Paris, the question becomes, how can I express passion in order to either fake or reveal a social self? These are vital Dionysian question, concerning matters of personal sympathies (the Spanish girls) or social empathies (the Parisian ensemble); but there is also the question and quest of self-knowledge, or how can I use sex to clarify who I am and what I can be for my own comprehension and education? The Spanish daughters share an erotic earthiness that makes personal and bodily experience essential to becoming an adult woman, and the denizens of the Parisian night scene a social eroticism essential to urban theatricality in its open or hidden roles. Thus the girls of the Spanish earth are engaged in initiatory self-discovery and those in the Parisian underground surviving through social dramatization, both variations on anagnorsis: discovering the wonder of one's unique self, or propagating the role of one's social self. In the Dionysian aspect of human nature, there is a third alternative: the search for self-revelation, knowledge of one's deepest desires and true being, perhaps the most fierce and dangerous of the Dionysian quests. The search is not for sympathetic lust or love, nor empathic social understanding, but rather “logopathy,” experiencing and recognizing the meaning of the dreamscape of desire and the irrational impulses that one wishes to entertain and even experience, in the uncharted territory of the pathology of self-knowledge, a dimension of Dionysian experience wherein overcoming inhibitions expands and enriches one's vital life. We meet a newlywed and stunningly beautiful woman (Severine) married to a prim and dutiful husband (Pierre) who is a competent surgeon but hopelessly uninspiring lover who doesn't arouse her and he in turn considers her frigid. Early on, we observe their night-time ritual of preparing for bed, he in pajamas and she in a provocative negligee, but in separate beds with no prospect of marital sex. This pristine bourgeois scene is preceded and complemented by a scene in which Severine and Pierre are riding blissfully along in a horse-drawn carriage, which he orders to stop; she is forced out by the drivers, who drag her into the woods, where Pierre orders them to strip and whip her and then rape her, all of which she ecstatically enjoys. This, like so much else, is a fantasy, a daydream of

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erotic deviance and forbidden desires that “turn her on,” while by contrast normal and expected sex and for that matter love doesn't interest her. (Indeed, she is not tempted by an affair, which is offered by a jaded family friend, someone tempted not only because of her groomed high-fashion beauty but also her social and physical impenetrability: “Keep your compliments to yourself,” she orders him icily.) We find her impenetrable as well: there are allusions to childhood molestation and strict discipline, but nothing we can grasp, so we are left with her Dionysian preferences, kinky bondage and domination such as being tied up in a Catholic-school white gown while giggling men throw mud at her. As long as such flights of fancy are private daydreams, they are limited in their consequences to her own psychic health and the stability of her marriage. But the society libertine who proposed an affair tells her of a mutual friend who now works in a high-class brothel where women of class sometimes go in the afternoon both as a wicked lark and for easy money. After some reluctance and shaky starts, the chic Madame Anais finds that Severine responds to her disciplinarian “firm hand” and soon is a regular on the two-to-five PM shift and enjoying herself immensely. An Asian client fascinates her with a mysterious buzzing box he carries, the contents of which we never learn (tweaking our own fantasies) but after he leaves we see her prone and woozy from the intense orgasmic pleasure she has just been paid for. The Madame dubs her “Belle de Jour” (after the day-lily, which blooms as a “daylight beauty”), and tells a regular client that he'll like her since “she's a real aristocrat.” The serene goddess is adept at extreme sex, including visiting sadistic pain and pleasure on clients, and regularly servicing a young thug (Marcel) with metal teeth and leather fetish-wear, enjoying much his muscular brutality but fearful of his jealousy. Severine leaves the brothel work, but Marcel discovers her home and threatens to reveal her secret life to her husband; she implores him to leave, but he waits downstairs until the husband arrives and shoots him, fleeing but eventually killed by the police. The police are baffled and she reveals nothing to them and the husband survives, with the film ending showing him blind and paralyzed and her taking care of him, and her now daydreaming about him being healthy again and them as a happy couple. The Dionysian impulse in human life invokes a dark and liminal force in us, mysterious and frightening urges deep in our minds and glands, evoking wild and reckless fantasies and provoking irresistible desires and extremities. Severine seems the most rational and composed of persons, but beneath the cool exterior are overwhelming longings beyond her (and our) comprehension. She says that she cannot help herself and is lost, but in the process she acquires some experiential wisdom about human nature

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and sexual knowledge about forbidden desires and dangerous lovers. Like all of us watching, she cannot help but look: she watches another girl with a “john” through a peephole and recoils, “This is disgusting,” turning away but unable to resist, looking through the peephole again. Indeed, the surreal nature of the entire movie makes us wonder if we have been looking through her peephole the whole time, with none of what we see in any sense part of objective reality but rather her subjective imaginings and morbid desires projected for us to share. Her guilty pleasures become the subject-matter of the film, involving us more than we might want because we intuitively understand and perhaps even secretly share the desire to abandon conventionality and normality and explore and enjoy the furthest reaches of our own Dionysian urges. The raw energy of the Dionysian makes us into funny creatures in which the intensity of desire and the imagination of the irrational recast as comic subjects lured by the insensible but alluring truth we find at the extremes. Severine is comic because she is a figment of her own movie, real or imagined, bringing us along on her descent into the sexual underworld that both repels and attracts but inspires self-revelation as a being of desire. Unlike the Spanish girls and Victor/Victoria, Severine has no clear personal or social objective or any pragmatic sense, but she does share with them, in her own way, the sense that this is all play. Severine too is fooling around, although trekking into dangerous territory at the raw edge of human grace. But like them she is enjoying herself as the comedy unfolds, in her case the comedy of her hidden and perhaps true self being revealed to her, and in our case as the audience some revelation as to our own rich and subliminal fancies that lurk in the dark comedy of our minds.

The Apollonian Pragmatic: The Antithetical Comic Counteraction of Social Cunning It can be argued that comedy is a dramatic form of rebellion. In one way or another—making fun, having fun, being funny—there is an implicit suggestion that there is something in life worth rebelling against. The heritage of Dionysian ritual invective and Aristophanic satire remains essential to comic expression, however gentle and oblique or savage and biting. The Dionysian funning above included expressive rebellion with social significance, even if what was happening was highly personal. The Spanish sisters did not consult social authorities as to what they should do but rather decided to find out for themselves what they wanted out of personal sexuality, engaging in what we might call educational sex. The principals in the Paris bistro engaged in theatrical display and disguise, all

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of which flaunted or hid a sexual identity that was an aberrant secret of sexual rebellion. Severine's sybaritic adventure was her own business, but certainly points up the unhappiness of upper bourgeoisie marriage, and the loneliness and frustration of an unfulfilled wife in urban society. They all found comic pragmatics—doing something fun—a way to explore and even resolve their situations and experience some kind of grace. When we come to Apollonian themes, we are explicitly looking at socially sanctioned activities which are normal and organized and to which individuals have to deal, even though such systems may not work very well or do things we think are stupid or insane. It is at points such as these that comic rebellion against Apollonian social discipline and coordination takes place, exploratory junctures of unreasonable reasonableness, irrational rationality, and insane sanity. As long as social systems function reasonably well and social expectations are moderate and beneficial, comic rebellion is limited to critical grousing. But when Apollonian rationality and order goes mad, then the sane corrective of comic insurgence and disobedience asserts itself against social disgrace.

M.A.S.H. (1970): Comic Healing in Wartime We are transported to Korea, 1951 at the height of the war, an intense local conflict involving large international powers and big stakes. The war has virtually stalemated along a contested front, with daily casualties among the infantry that does the fighting on both sides. This requires the presence of medical units (“mobile army surgical hospital”) close to the fighting for immediate attention to wounded soldiers. Such units are largely doctors and nurses, but they are still part of the Army, so they are professionals in two ways, as doctors and as soldiers. As doctors, they are appalled by the carnage, but as soldiers they are expected to adhere to the military rationales for why such bloodshed is necessary and downright heroic and patriotic. Three of the surgeons (with typically military nicknames, “Hawkeye,” “Duke,” and “Trapper John”) are excellent and efficient doctors in the tent operating rooms. Here we are introduced to the horrific organizational context of war comedy, the ignoble parade of badly wounded soldiers worked on, not always successfully, by the dedicated surgeons, amidst blood-drenched sheets and amputated body parts, the true consequence of military rationality about the maximization of enemy casualties, which both armies practice with skill. We quickly learn that these young doctors have nothing but contempt for the war machine in which they must serve, not only because the Army is committed to an immoral enterprise but also because so many of them their colleagues

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seem to think it is so moral and good they take it seriously. Clearly comic rebellion is called for as the only recourse and antidote for retaining one's sanity in an insane situation. The doctors define off-time as playtime, not only with the usual G.I. partying and womanizing but also with impudent joking and fooling the serious-minded Army “regulars.” Two of their targets are Dr. Burns, an earnest and pious man who prays for country and army but is in fact a terrible surgeon and offensive moralist and prig, and a career nurse, Major Houlihan, who “thinks of the Army as my home” and is appalled that the rebels have no respect for the Array and its rules. She and Burns are attracted to each other, and unite in their distaste for the irreverent and disrespectful merry pranksters who taunt them. This stiffnecked attitude extends to all the sex going on in the camp, yet Burns and Houlihan cannot resist, even though they have just filed a report complaining about all the “unmilitary goings-on.” The tryst occurs in her tent, which the practical jokers manage to broadcast over the camp PA system so everyone can hear, including the passionate moment when the “by the book” Major implores the “Good Book” Major to “kiss my hot lips,” so embarrassing to the moral paragons that Burns goes berserk and is shipped home in a straitjacket. The heroic and dutiful facade of military obedience and its unfunny consequences are so funny that the sane disobedients are driven to “trash” the insane obedients and their insanity. (When Trapper John is desperately trying to save the life of an enemy soldier, a nurse protests that he treating a prisoner of war; “So are you,” he snaps, “You just don't know it.”) The humane doctor in them impels their comic inversion of Apollonian control which makes people “objective” and compliant to protocol rather than alive to the needless suffering which premises the Army ethos but makes what they do part of a graceless enterprise. In their modern way, Trapper John and Hawkeye are very much in the tradition of Aristophanes, in his attacks on those in Athens who created and perpetuated the Apollonian structure of official control deteriorating into the self-destructive madness of the war with Sparta, as well as those among the populace who acquiesced complacently in the endless slaughter, (most famously, in the sex strike by the women of the cities in Lysistrata). For our doctor rebels here, though, sex is one of the diverting strategies asserting “life against death,” and indeed in one case may well have been. The camp dentist confides to Hawkeye that he was impotent in a recent encounter with a nurse, and wishes to commit suicide; the boys arrange a “Last Supper” for him, complete with coffin and “poison” (a sleeping pill) and he sleeps there, awakening to find Hawkeye's girlfriend volunteering for erotic therapy, after which the dentist has recovered his

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vital force and will to live. This and many other episodes reveal their humane concern for whomever is sick or wounded, and they are quite willing to use any means (such as blackmail) to heal someone. So their antics are not altogether designed to blow off steam or express discontent but also for the concrete practical purpose of what doctors are supposed to do. They are only vicious to those who don't share their sense of organization pathos, and find life only in the fun of comic episodes either in spite of or outside the systemic insanity of inflicting and then trying to fix meaningless pain. And like Aristophanes, their critical and subversive comedy stems from moral and medical intelligence, and thus suspect to the authoritative norms of official conduct expected as civic duty and one's “civic name.” Intelligence, comic or otherwise, was pursued out of Athens in order to sustain the rule of graceless futility and mortality. So too as our young and unrepentant doctors rotate back to civilian life, they will take with them the memory of organized deadliness and humorless murder, which their comic intelligence attacked but could not stop.

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957): Comic Selling in Peacetime The bad boys of the medical unit illustrate many things about comedy, not the least of which is the interplay between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the former manifest in an organizational attitude that overrides the sympathetic pathos of the healing arts from which the personnel were derived. The pragmatics of the surgeons (stop the pain and cure the patient) was in conflict with the demonic ethos of war and the warrior mentality which espoused ferocious aggression and human sacrifice over against the pathos of medical concern. As was common in the history of comedy, the close and disconcerting presence of a demonic consequence is an occasion for comic truths and people who by rebellion enact rejection of organizational powers to hurt. They use the comic to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, attacking the indefensible and embracing the defensible. Their comic stance and antics border on the quixotic but it does communicate somewhat naughty and defiant comic grace. This dynamic interplay applies to other social contexts in which the rational becomes operative as “rationalization” resulting in the orderly and calculated exploitation and manipulation of people who can be used or abused for some demarcated ulterior purpose. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? opens with a series of sketches which mimic television commercials by inverting the “pitch” audiences were and are used to: a beer is promoted as “heavily-brewed, clear swamp water”; a

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soap is guaranteed to contain radioactive “fallout”; a cheerful spokesperson is engulfed by a ravenous washing machine. We are in the modern era of mass media and mass propaganda, wherein the power to produce and transmit programming is sponsored and accompanied by interspersed advertising. This form of propaganda became something of a metaphor for the pecuniary practices and consumptive philosophy of societies pervaded and propelled by the arts of marketing. Everything and everybody is for sale and indeed a potential marketable product, including the “mad men” (so named for Madison Avenue, the American center of the advertising industry) themselves who are at the center of the project of inducing consumers to keep serving the endless and always “new and improved” products and services that are the tantalizing lure of more and better. The social ethos of control is based in the adroit propagation of influential messages and the creation of desires in a process that is ever-renewable. The Apollonian culture of control moved steadily from the production of essential goods disseminated through rational information appealing to necessity to the consumption of superfluous goods marketed through irrational propagation appealing to luxury, from the use of things to the play of things. The branches of mass propaganda—advertising, publicity, and public relations—are designed to convince people of all sorts of nonsense, including that products had animating powers (green giant gods picking frozen peas), celebrities and “stars” are inherently luminous and talented (even of if evidence for such qualities is scant), and corporations are benevolent organizations which embrace good works and humanitarian goals. Such graceless manipulation in fact commits to pecuniary truth, nonsense posing as sense but actually displaying Dionysian lures (soap makes you sexually alluring, vicarious fantasies about the rich and famous are fun, and brand-name food corporations provide us with affordable and nutritious products). After a century of the “new propaganda,” many social critics have thought that the ubiquitous and relentless pervasion of propaganda has mutated from a socially pragmatic agency into a demonic force responsible for consequences they did not fully anticipate but nevertheless fomented, perverting the ethos of commerce from utility to fantasy, using things for practical purposes changed into dreaming of the magical properties things portend. Advertising in particular has become the institution which readily and expertly communicates the siren song of dreamland. We meet one Rockwell P. Hunter, a midlevel functionary writing TV commercials at a Madison Avenue advertising agency, at the moment anxiety-ridden about a pay raise so he can marry his secretary-girlfriend (Jenny). Alas, he and his colleagues learn they are “slated for the chute”

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(fired) because the agency has lost its most lucrative account, for “StayPut Lipstick.” Rock is distraught, but is encouraged by Jenny to think creatively. He discovers that Hollywood's current “Goddess of Love” is a buxom blonde (Rita Marlowe), herself being marketed by her studio as having “oh-so-kissable lips,” so he hopes to talk her into endorsing and advertising Stay-Put. Fortuitously, Rita is flying into New York because her current boyfriend (Bobo, the “Jungle Man”) reportedly has a love interest other than her. As it turns out, Rita is no “dumb blonde” but is willing to further her career to pose as a sex object, complete with lascivious wiggle and libidinal squeal when she sees an attractive man, but plays her public persona at ironic distance and has a gift for the publicity stunt. Rita actually has a long-lost true love (George Schmidlap), but sees the publicity value in her acquiring a new beau to make Bobo jealous, setting up a tabloid story. So she not only accepts Rock's offer, she also cleaves unto him as her new public love interest, her “lover doll.” The incensed Bobo leaks this to the press, making Rock an instant celebrity renowned as a great lover and charmer by attracting a famous sex symbol, thus mobbed by screaming and hyperthyroid girl fans. The comedy of public pretense intensifies when Rita decides she likes Rock but insists that she remodel him to resemble Bobo, complete with elevator shoes and shoulder-padded suits; at the same time, the now jealous Jenny resorts to exhausting exercises and padded bras to increase her bust size. The Dionysian fantasy is omnipresent, not only visually but also in lines, such as the moment Rita makes Rock president of her production company but confesses that she is in fact the “titular head.” Rock rises in the company but is unhappy, a malady that is cured when Rita appears on a Stay-Put television special, and a “surprise guest” (none other than George Schmidlap) appears, turning out to be the real Groucho Marx, and Rita is again happy. Rock proposes to Jenny, and they leave the consumerist “rat race” for a populist return to nature, running a chicken farm far from the madness of Mad Avenue and Mad Men. The comic madness here is the use of Apollonian rationality, in the form of mass advertising agencies and employees, to undermine the rational habits and norms of the society at large through inducing people to want more than they need, and consume more than they require. In the age of television, they do so by appealing to the fetishization of images, associating products and people with a desirable immediate experience arousing vicarious wants which provide some sort of satisfaction. The agencies of propaganda tempt and provoke us with the prospect of a luminous world only reachable through buying or watching the big parade of things or beings which enrich our quotidian lives. Such a lure is patently

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phony, since most of us cannot be rich or famous or beautiful, but like a drug such consumption offers some fast and easy relief from the humdrum and graceless lives we are compelled to live. The rationalized culture of consumption promises easy grace created for our irrational diversion and acquiescence, constantly available and repeated to sustain the illusion of the experience of grace. It is probably an apt criticism of modern Apollonian rationality that it can only sustain itself through the promotion of an eternal circus show of fleeting images and disposable consumables, objects of momentary interest which are then thrown away to make room for the next big thing.

Brazil (1985): Comic Maneuvering in State-time From the critical perspective of comedy, Apollonian rationality can be quite irrational and Apollonian functionality quite dysfunctional. People who regard themselves as completely sane and highly rational think up and conduct wars, which often they don't have to fight nor observe the demonic consequences. Similarly, the beings who create and disseminate propaganda may well feel that they are performing a necessary task and public service without dwelling on the personal and social downside of inducing masses of people to desire to be what they can't possibly be and want what they can't possibly have. The Apollonian valuation of order can well imply the use of disorder (such as warfare) to further orderly control, and is rationalized by the argument that peace comes out of war. It can also be manifest in the orderly and rational manipulation of attitudes and behavior, on the premise that choice is too important a thing to be left to the choosers, so the choosing of products, services, candidates for office, habits and beliefs, ways of life and love requires the guidance of experts in “the engineering of consent.” Thus freedom to choose is superseded by the manipulation of choices, requiring organized power such as advertising agencies and propaganda channels to get people to accept and act upon nonsense. This demonic amendment and conduct involves the abolition of freedom of choice in favor of pre-selected non-choices which direct us toward the “right” choices. In effect, we are told more politely that war is peace and freedom is slavery. These famous Orwellian slogans point to the demonic potential in misguided or excessive Apollonian orderliness and regimentation, leading to the reactive force of Dionysian rebellion in such exertions as the highjinx of the disgusted doctors or the desire for pastoral escape by the ad executive. The third slogan—ignorance is strength—is the repellent “logical” dimension of the agenda of control that invites comic satire and

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counter-force. The power of ignorance is great as a source of strength, since ironically it is a form of knowledge. The “logological” process here we may term “creduction,” since it emanates from and reasons with certain kinds of unexamined credos which preclude various options of conviction and analysis, prejudges ideas and people by ignoring their merits and qualities, and previews the future as a predictable continuation of certain beliefs and hierarchies. What Orwell and others have sensed is the demonic potential for control if a centralized State can dictate and manipulate how people think and what they know, counting on the power of ignorance to perpetuate obedience and suppress critical thought and independent knowledge. Apollonian light and reason is negated for the rule of official truth and incurious credulity. In Brazil, we are projected into an unnamed place and time, but it is clearly dystopian, a large urbanized society with a pervasive State that displays the architectural dreariness of Stalinist conformity and the gray decay of a social order devoid of vitality or individuality, in the grip of a highly bureaucratized police state ruling through fear of “terrorists.” There are recurrent explosions blamed on these obscure and marginal groups, although their motives or even presence is never identified, so the implication is that they are non-existent and the explosions rigged by the State apparatus to spread fear and silence criticism. The omnipresence of State oppression is symbolized by the surrealistic network of large flexible ducts placed everywhere by the governmental “Central Services,” reminding everyone of the python-like grip of organized power. We are now in the imaginative realm of totalitarianism, which takes the warrior passions and the rationalized propagation of lies and half-truths from official propaganda agencies to forge rule so complete that, like the ducts, the State is everywhere and everyone who is not totally submissive and compliant is an enemy and all are victims of arbitrary domination. Although the consequences of such a demonic inversion of reason are dreadful, totalitarian practice is also very funny, in that they it is invariably inefficient and unproductive, engaging in comically idiotic policies and actions, but nevertheless expecting invariant obedience and deference from a thoroughly debased and defeated populace. The “unreasonable reasoning” of such a political order flows through creductive ducts of illogical logic designed to convince their subjects of the absurd credal folktale of governmental benevolence and systemic prosperity. As we might expect, the paradigmatic form of social organization is the bureaucracy, here featuring the Orwellian aspect of official communication for information control and personnel for intelligence gathering. The key institution is the Ministry of Information, which is charged with the

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dissemination of misinformation and disinformation, but collects information about the populace. Early on, we get a quick look at “happy talk” propaganda with a TV ad for the governmental “Central Services,” which installs and maintains the ubiquitous ducts: Chorus intones, “We do the work, you do the pleasure,” a joyous announcer intoning the good news that if your ducts seem “old-fashioned” you can replace them with ducts in a variety of different colors “to suit your individual taste.” As another “terrorist” blast goes off in the city, we see an interview with a Mr. Helpmann about the now thirteen-year anti-terror campaign the government is waging, with no end in sight. The officious “Deputy Minister” explains the bombings as the result of “bad sportsmanship” by rude and envious losers but helpfully predicts we will soon defeat them because our “morale” is higher. We are obviously in the rhetorical context of “logopathy,” wherein the State monopoly of knowledge is largely expressed in officious communications such as florid guarantees of caring (new ducts) and simultaneous raising and lowering of fear (terror constantly threatens, will be defeated soon). The consequences are real enough since the promise of care for a better life and the (contrived) threat of terrorist actions both facilitate obedient acquiescence and justify extensive police controls. In so doing, a state with totalitarian ambitions and pretensions is a candidate for depiction of perverse and wicked comedy. For what they try to do is so obviously mendacious and outrageously intrusive that is it is no wonder that it descends into demonic habits of thought and action, transforming the need for social order into a maniacal overreach for unproductive and unnecessary power. The maximization of rule makes for many idiotic mistakes. While Helpmann is speaking on TV, a technician in this vast bureaucratic quagmire kills a bug, which falls onto a machine typing forms, changing the name of “Tuttle” to “Buttle,” making an actual anti-government renegade's arrest and detention form misdirected towards someone named Buttle. We see then an apartment dwelling of the usual grimy and poorly maintained type, this particular one housing a young and feisty woman (Jill), who is suddenly alarmed by the presence of a police commando unit who cut a hole in her floor to descend down and arrest Buttle, giving Mrs. Buttle a receipt. When the wife cannot find out what happened to him, Jill tries and naturally is now classified as an enemy of the state because she asked, since as she discovers they will not admit mistakes. This “Catch-22” world also ensnares the mild-mannered (Lowry) functionary at the Ministry who is assigned to “rectify” the Buttle case and meets Jill, who reminds him of the recurrent dream-girl he sees when he “escapes” into fantasy. She prompts him to get a transfer into the

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Department of Information Retrieval, which keeps everyone's records, so he can research and help Jill out. They have a brief romance, but then he is arrested, since he now has met both Jill and Tuttle. As he is taken to be tortured, Tuttle and fellow resisters rescue him and blow up the Ministry. Lowry runs through an Alice-in-Wonderland fantasyland where his rejuvenated mother resembles Jill, falls into a bottomless coffin and continues to run from the police in streets that resemble his dreams. When surrounded he escapes by climbing over flex-ducts to meet Jill and they flee into a golden country to the strains of the romantic ballad “Brazil” wherein lovers “softly murmured, 'someday soon.' ” At the end, we see that this escape with Jill was dreamed under the duress of torture, and Sam is now reduced to a catatonic state, where he sits with his endless dream and hums “Brazil.” The dynamic interplay between the Apollonian and Dionysian strains in human character ideally makes possible the repression of impulsive raw energy of existence but is channeled and restrained by rational and orderly use of the light of reason. Comedy's irreverent approach sees the comic possibilities in both strains, raw energy getting destructive or rational order getting too controlling. Here we see the errors and horrors of warrior pathos, managerial ethos, and official logos, including in reaction the introduction of Dionysian pursuits: the rebel-surgeons pursuing women and drink and caprice, the fed-up ad executive escaping to the country, the repressed bureaucrat going away to fairyland with his impish girl. So the Apollonian can quite easily become as graceless as Dionysian excess, manifesting the ugly (war) rather than beauty, propagating the deceptive (advertisements) rather than the true, and ruining ordinary life by the use of the bad (oppression) rather than the good. The comic inversion of Apollonian reveals the gracelessness of rationales for doing evil, so that we can be reminded that even the most awful of human endeavors are after all still damned funny because of and in spite of their dreadful idiocy.

The Faustian Pragmatic: Comic Encounters with Destiny Speaking broadly, the ruling expression of human nature in Dionysian comedy is pathos, appealing to a natural aesthetic and unfolding pragmatic testing of natural limits and potentials in sensual experience. The Apollonian strain features ethos, adhering to a social aesthetic and circumscribing valued and habitual order, but with comic counter-forces testing the limits and potentials of rebellious experience. But when we come to the Faustian impulse, we are in the realm of a special kind of logos, temporal logic that sees history and humanity in the context of destiny and amongst those who

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have the will and power to move toward the future fulfillment of at least a better life and at best the consummation of the world. Since there is a “higher logic” directing us towards the as yet unfulfilled destiny, the exercise of power in the service of a strong will (leader and movement) overcoming inertia and resistance and invocation of a kind of imperial dynamic, we are on the “right side” of history but must struggle to realize the inevitable. Comedy tends towards skepticism of such claims, seeing them as Towers of Babel that are indeed castles in the air. Comedy may not be able to counter Faustian claims and the temptation to believe, but by encountering the representatives of such a mighty force they can help us see them as pursuing impossible goals, seeking infinite powers, and tempting Fate. In the movies, comedy acts as a counterforce that defuses, deactivates, or debunks the most Promethean of ambitions, monomaniacal of rulers, and magical of occult demons. Comedy is able to have great fun with those in the throes of a Faustian mission and belief, since they are typically driven by the devils of their self-imposed purpose and high and gloomy seriousness, thus fair game for comic spoilsport.

Ninotchka (1939): The Comic Corruption of Ideological Power We are directed to the City of Light, Paris before the outbreak of World War II and the Nazi Occupation, a city famous for fun-loving and partying and eating, all the delights of the flesh. At this moment, it is also the residence of titled and wealthy Russian exiles (such as the Grand Duchess Swana), all who fled after the revolution and the rule of the Soviet Union. The Soviets confiscated much of the wealth of this class, and desperate for public revenue, began to sell jewelry, art, and other valuables abroad to raise money. We meet three plain comrades, mid-level apparatchiki in the government, who have been sent to Paris to sell a cache of jewels which happens to be the former property of Duchess Swana. The Soviet agents are found out, so the lover of the Countess (Count Leon) intervenes by showing them a good time. They stay in a luxurious hotel, enjoy the Parisian nightlife, and befriend cigarette girls; with such diversions preoccupying them, the Count obtains a legal injunction forbidding the sale of the jewelry until the rightful owner can be ascertained. Because of their failure, they are joined in Paris by a Soviet “Envoy Extraordinary,” one Nina Ivanovna Yakushova, a stern and nonfrivolous communist functionary who is plainly dressed, all business, and appalled at the frivolity and dereliction of duty of her comrades. She determines to complete the sale with dispatch, but in the interim she will investigate the wonders of Paris, which for her features the power plants

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and sewer systems. By comic chance, on the way to the Eiffel Tower she meets Leon, and even though they know nothing about each other, he flirts with her and she finds him of interest as an example of the decadence of a dying capitalist society. The Parisian playboy kisses her and she admits to a certain chemical reaction, but when they discover each other's identity, she leaves. Later, he follows her to a small working-class cafe, with both the jewels and her charms in mind, and she is not adverse to his company. He tries another softening-up tactic by telling jokes, which elicits laughs from all the other patrons but she is unmoved; then his chair collapses accidentally and he falls on his rump, so his slapstick plight then evokes an outburst of unbridled laughter from her, the other diners, and finally Leon. It is at this cathartic moment that Ninotchka experiences a defining experience of comic freedom, liberation from the Faustian strictures of ideological power and the superhuman demands of governmental professionalism. She and Leon are a strange pair, she a dour Russian committed to a demanding state ideology that in her mirthless manner always sounds funny (“The mass trials were a great success; there are going to be fewer but better Russians”), but in his mirth Leon sounds just as silly (“It's midnight—one half of Paris is making love to the other half”). In an oddly revelatory way, comedy shows us that this odd couple is in different ways equally corrupt, she a functionary in an oppressive and murderous regime and he a player in a frivolous and reactionary leisure class, both made into graceless beings by their respective political economies. Both need to be freed from Faustian demands, be they the ideology of power or the ideology of wealth, and their budding attraction and her newfound sensuality thus sends them (what else?!) out on the town, wherein they both get gloriously drunk, and then at the hotel she tries on Swana's jewels and passes out. The jewels are stolen by Swana, and she informs Ninotchka that she will return them if Ninotchka returns to Russia and never sees Leon again. She dutifully returns, but Leon keeps trying to contact her, failing to get a visa and with his lover letters to her heavily censored. Fortunately, the three emissaries she corrected have botched another assignment, so she is sent to Istanbul to intervene. There she discovers that the comrades have found a new post-Soviet life, and that Leon has been informed of her visit there, arriving to convince her to start a new life for herself with him, and she does.

Dick (1999): The Comic Correction of Executive Power Comic resolutions such as the one above are uplifting because they demonstrate that even the most Faustian entanglements are ultimately non-

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binding when more basic needs are aroused, in this case romantic pathos that brings together an unlikely pair who flee class commitments for something more graceful and human scale. It is not necessarily a maudlin sentiment to say that comic pragmatics teaches people what really matters, as we witness when steely commitment to an ideological and political power asserting the will of “collective man” is undone not so much by the lure of luxury as the prospect of fun and love beyond committed adherence to striving for a superior community and superhuman being. Goethe's Faust said that he had two souls, one earth-bound and the other on the upward ascent towards a higher community of angels. But since such a goal is unreachable, those in the grip of a titanic destined power are constantly striving towards personal and social perfection, something comedy finds both laughable and curable, by learning to laugh and loving the earth-bound. Observers of the Faustian temptation know that it is also common for individuals to see themselves as an agent of destiny by coming to believe in their own personal “star” and triumphant will. This involves less of an ideological than personal ambition, wherein the person sees himself or herself as an executive power with a calling to a necessary mission. Such people are recurrently in danger of hubristic overreach and fall from grace, being transformed from identity as a heroic adventurer into a comic buffoon whose best-laid plans went badly awry, with the adoring cheers turning into derisive laughter. In Dick, we meet two adolescent girls who live in Washington in the early 1970s, unbeknownst to them a capital city preoccupied and mystified by the present occupant of the Executive Mansion, President Richard Nixon. Nixon is an experienced and ambitious politician, although just how ambitious we come to find out as the movie unreels. For Nixon's belief in his own destiny is also unwinding, or more accurately to be unwound by accidental complications that entangle the deceptive web he was weaving. The two teenage girls (Betsy and Arlene) are from well-todo families, and we first meet them at the apartment of Arlene's mother, who lives in a ritzy apartment and office complex called Watergate. These totally apolitical girls are on their own quest, composing a letter for a contest to win a date with a current singer who is a teenage idol. With a deadline for entry, they sneak out of the building to get their letter in the mail, leaving through the parking garage but taping the latch of the door so they can get back in. A security guard sees the tape, and suspecting a burglary, calls the police, who arrive and arrest burglars in the office of the Democratic National Committee. When one of the burglars happens to see the girls, they panic and run away, thinking they have seen a jewel thief. The next day they go on a school tour of the White House, and see the

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man again. He (Liddy) is an operative involved in secret and illegal “dirty tricks,” and points them out to Nixon's right-hand man (Haldeman), who questions them, but then Nixon himself interrupts with complaints about the botched bugging operation. The girls are clueless about all this, but awestruck at meeting the President, but even more enamored by his dog, who takes to them. Nixon then hits upon the idea of employing them as “official dog-walkers” in order to buy their silence, but as it turns out to be a bad idea since they have to be constantly readmitted to the White House West Wing. Therein, the girls have a penchant for stumbling across things they don't fully understand but sense something clandestine is going on (they open the wrong door to see people busy shredding documents and filling briefcases with money) or accidentally intervening in meetings of import (they facilitate the Nixon-Brezhnev accord by bringing cookies that they didn't know includes marijuana as an ingredient, putting everyone in a good mood and easing the way to a nuclear arms pact). Their unknowledgeable activities also explain some of the mysteries of the Watergate scandal. Nixon secretly taped the conversations in the Oval Office, but on revelation one segment 18 1/2 minutes long was erased, and investigators suspected it was omitted because it was damaging to Nixon's claim of innocence. Here it turns out to have been a lovelorn message that Arlene has left for her lover doll Dick (“I love Dick!” she shouts to Betsy in public), dictating her ardent feelings into the secretary's tape recorder, but when playing it back, she rewinds too long and hears him as foulmouthed, prejudicial, and vindictive, so she erases it. Turning against Nixon, they become informants to investigative reporters Woodward and Bernstein (portrayed as anything but heroic themselves—bickering, petty, and eager for fame) who don't know what to make of their new source (who take the code name of “Deep Throat,” since Betsy's brother had just watched that porn movie, and the girls are interested in oral sex), but the reporters are hungry for physical evidence. The girls go to Haldeman's house and find a young houseguest there; while one diverts him with dalliance in his upstairs bedroom, the other finds a crucial tape implicating Nixon in the break-in and cover-up, which the reporters publish, bringing about his eventual ruin and resignation. As Nixon leaves for Air Force One in forced retirement, the girls make and display a big sign he sees from the helicopter: “You suck, Dick.” Ninotchka and Leon together come to the comic realization that ideological adherence is foolish when one can live a free life, or at least a life free of the entangling commitments expected by Faustian powers. So their chance meeting and emerging attraction gives them a comic edge, an awareness that ideology and servility go together and freedom from both

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puts them together and apart from serious matters and high expectations. Comic grace develops in the wake of discovering that many important things, such as political belief systems and class expectations, are in fact graceless pursuits with demonic potential obstructing the vital awareness of comic maturity. Betsy and Arlene are not fully adults, but their fortuitous adventure into the netherworld of high-powered political intrigue is comic education, since their awe and deference towards Nixon and his minions is slowly undermined by a close look at what they are actually like and do, awakening in these young women political awareness and even moral evaluation, moving them from teen “airheads” to incipient adults with a degree of intelligence and a critical comic sensibility. By the end, comic pragmatism alerts them to the fact that executive power can be as wrongheaded and even sinister as vast ideological power, and the closer one gets to the actual person who is wielding such personal power, the more you are likely to see the skull behind the mask and the laughable pretensions of a very ordinary person wrapped up in emperor's clothes.

Bedazzled (1967): The Comic Levity of Demonic Power The attitude and force of comic grace serves as a kind of humane antitoxin to Faustian commitments or assertions, helping to purge people of admiration for asserted importance, those ideas and personages which claim destinarian status above and beyond widespread unimportance (such as conjugal love and common decency) of humbler comic affirmation. It is altogether too easy for important Faustian beings and forces to descend into demonic power, in such form as the totalitarian state or the extra-legal executive, so possessed of their will to power that often the only line of opposition are oblique criticisms such as comic savaging and sabotage. The idea of demonic power stems from the ancient belief in the existence of evil forces and personages, transferred in the secular world to ideological fanaticism such as Stalinism and also power-mad executives gone out of control. But demons such as Stalin or Nixon are still only human, and like all of us subject to the ultimate comedy of mortal and reputational eclipse. Those we regard as demonic are often in fact stupid or silly, although they have such power they can provoke evil consequences as well as just dumb ones. In many cases, they are not so much evil as merely tricky, using devious tactics and illusionary magic to get things done and appear as a god-like power; their ambitions are often undone by tactics that fail and “smoke and mirrors” that dissipate in the futile quest for the contradictory demonic grace. Oftentimes they are out-tricked by forces or persons they cannot control nor understand, including a trusted

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and indoctrinated bureaucrat who falls in love like a moonstruck schoolgirl and a pair of teenagers who manage to gum up the intricate works of an electoral machine. So agents of destiny are comically undone not so much by the ominous Fates as by the limits of mastery by the graceless in an ungovernable world. Perhaps it is the case that the truly consequential demonic powers in the world are actually tricksters having fun with us in their own devilishly comic way. In Bedazzled, we meet a pathetic soul (Stanley) working in a dead-end job in a London hamburger restaurant, a shy and lonely young man whose sole hope in life is to attract the affections of a waitress (Margaret), all in vain since she has a life of her own and no interest in him. In despair, he attempts a hanging suicide in his dreary flat but the pipe breaks; his gloom is alleviated by the sudden appearance of one George Spiggott, who announces that he is none other than Satan himself (he dislikes “Lucifer,” the bringer of light, because it sounded “a bit poofy”). George's interest in Stanley is quite pragmatic, in that he (the Devil) is in a contest with God over which one can gather a hundred billion souls to their side, like two competing capitalist firms trying to outdo each other in cereal sales. (If Satan wins, he will be readmitted to Heaven as God's favorite.) In good Faustian tradition, George offers Stanley seven wishes in return for his soul, and reveals that he is at present proprietor of a sleazy nightclub staffed by the Seven Deadly Sins (who, he says, are terrible sins to work with: “I suppose it's the wages”). Stanley accepts the bargain out of his hope for Margaret, beginning a series of conjured scenarios (by the magic incantation, “Julie Andrews!”) into which Stanley and Margaret are projected ostensibly as a means to get them together, but as we might expect of someone devilish, George arranges things so that doesn't happen. In one wish, for example, Stanley becomes a multi-millionaire and Margaret is his “very physical” wife, which indeed she is, with everyone handy except him. In another, he is a rock star, with Margaret as an immature and insipid groupie in the audience, excited as he sings longingly, “Love me, love me.” But, alas, no consummation but rather frustration here too, as George himself intervenes, superseding the crowd's attention and zeal as the singer for a new group, “Brimble Wedge and the Vegetations,” with hostile lyrics like “You fill me with inertia,” which moves the groupies, including Margaret, to transfer loyalties amidst spasms of orgasmic squeals. These cunningly conceived degradation ceremonies culminate in Stanley trying desperately to make a wish George cannot sabotage, asking for a life away from “false glitter” where he and Margaret can live in peace. So George transports them to the cloistered Order of the Leaping Berelians, cast as sisters of this order of nuns (complete with a ritual

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requiring them to bounce on sacred trampolines). The disappointed and disgusted Stanley returns to his old job, with Margaret ignoring him as usual, spared eternal damnation because George had exceeded his quota. He returns to Heaven thinking he has won the wager, but is refused again because of excessive pride, one of the Seven Deadlies. In the end, Stanley is still rebuffed by Margaret, and George rematerializes to entice Stanley again, but the now wiser Stanley refuses. The angry George then vows revenge on Stanley and God by unleashing noisy and tawdry evils on the world, including “concrete runways, motorways, aircraft, television and automobiles, advertising, plastic flowers, frozen food, and supersonic bangs” that even God will be ashamed of, since His ruined Creation makes him “unbelievable.” George's parting and prescient thought fulfills his remark that his job is long since irrelevant since humankind obviously can do Satan's work quite well enough without any guidance from him. One does not necessarily have to share George's irreverence to realize that it doesn't satanic intervention to rouse Faustian urges in the human mind, ranging from the grandiose vision of some kind of vast power to the more mundane but equally irrational desire to dominate one other person, even if she is a shallow and uninterested waitress. Stanley can even sympathize with George (he tells Margaret, “He's not so bad once you get to know his problems”), who like him has a dreary and thankless job. Indeed, George appears to see himself as a kind of harassed civil servant in a divine enterprise who doesn't set either the credit or reward he deserves. Like many such employees, he uses the powers at his disposal to pull off pranks, such as scratching LP records, tearing out the endings of books and suchlike, naturally complaining about his work (he had the dying Mussolini set to go to Hell but he confessed and asked forgiveness at the end, so “up he goes”) and the boss (he's English and “very upper class”) and what he does (the Garden of Eden was “a boggy swamp just south of Croydon”), complaining that there's no pleasing Him. George-Satan strikes us as more human than divine and less evil than mischievous, in the ancient tradition and guise of the Trickster, a devilish wit and joker who has great fun mocking and irritating humans with his temptations (such as the scantily clad and gorgeous “Lillian Lust”) and ruses (arranging seemingly ideal circumstances as a set-up for frustration). As an agent of God, perhaps Satan even serves a pragmatic function by undermining our Faustian desires and reminding us how our commonplace fears and wants are quite comical. As finite beings with limited energy and time, our fondest ambitions and fantasies are patently unfulfilling, of which the Trickster makes us painfully aware. Thus the Trickster is something of a comic “wise guy” who makes humanity the butt of his jokes, aid makes us

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wonder if this means that The Joke's on us in the cosmic play and that the whole story is after all a divine comedy.

CONCLUSION THE COMEDY OF THIRD NATURE: LIVING FUN

In this conclusion, we wish to expand our inquiry by examining the funny people who exemplify who is funny in the movies rather than what is funny. Heretofore we have concentrated on “the what” of movie comedy through the taxonomy and narratology of comic plots and genres, what people did that made the movie funny and what types of movies recurrently were funny movies. In our effort at conceptual explication (we are hardly at the stage of explanation) we utilized the concepts of ludenics and kinetics, seeing movie comedy as a wonderful site of special play and tracing the appeal of movies to its dynamic and compelling temporal interest which holds our attention for the duration of the film if it is funny. It is difficult to state after all our elaborate inquiry whether there is any “singular essence” to movie comedy beyond it being play and features pictorial motion, but surely it can be asserted that central to comic play and interesting motion is the creative figure of the comic actor. Like all drama, movie comedy faces the problem of getting audiences to suspend disbelief and exercise playful interest, so it is the task of the comic actor to make belief out of movie make-believe. The key variable that is crucial and essential is the answer to the auditory question: Is it funny? In the final analysis, the disclosure lies in the comic histrionics enacted in the movie, embodied in the appeal and talent of the actor who is supposed to be funny. Thus comic inquiry must supplement understanding of the ludenic and kinetic with the iconic, not only the signs and symbols embedded in the mise-en-scene and the plot but also the iconic qualities of the actors as manifest in the characters they play. The ancients thought that comedy was the generic name for any exhibition which has a tendency to excite laughter, but then as now that excitement depends upon someone in theatrical guise causing the exciting by being funny. In the magnified iconicity of the movies, being funny depends upon projecting the histrionic quality of funny being. Iconic status in movie comedy is as elusive and rare as in any other medium of performance, so it must suffice us to say

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here that some performers are “naturally” funny in their ability to convey something about their screen persona and the comic situation they move and play in, and make movie comedy that excites laughter. These iconic figures communicate a comic lightness of being that makes them funny, even if they are cast in the role of a “heavy” comic foil or a befuddled “serious” fool. Indeed, in different ways they are able to be funny precisely because they are willing and able to play the fool. Some movie actors are able to convey beauty, embody good, or uphold a truth; some can be effective as heroes and others as villains; some are great as lovers, others as crooks, still others in specific roles such as bureaucrat, doctor, banker, rancher, and so on. But it takes some specific kind of histrionic grace to be foolish, engage in foolishness, act the fool, be foolhardy, or whatever is called for to make comic foolery funny. To be funny, comic actors have to immerse themselves in the foolish, at times silly or fatuous, at others rash and frivolous, still others brash or inept; they must enact the absurd and enunciate the nonsensical, appear ridiculous or inept, indeed embody the depiction of whatever human folly is called for in making the play funny. Comic actors are figures in that cultural drama we term carnival and their histrionic foolery carnivalesque, as representatives for us in that fun time and place in which we are allowed to have fun. When we go to the movie carnival, we are able to see various kinds of comic actors—comical characters with a screen presence of funny being, comic performers who are adept at being funny in comic roles, and even a few who embody a kind of comic identity in which they are living funny, a memorable comedic personage who endures as someone of philosophic import. Even though they are all figures of carnivalesque play, they seem to represent the different aspects of comedy we have identified. Some characters (and teams) seem to thrive in movies that feature comic pathos, those films with episodic physical humor or romantic comedies derived from New Comedy, emphasizing mistaken identities and hidden motives which are revealed and reconciled at the end. Such films ultimately can be traced to the satyr-play with the frank celebration of sexual play and union, and thus evolved into such physicality as a quest for personal grace usually manifest in marriage. This strain of comedy exemplify the beauty of living fun, both in at least one comic actor (often the girl) but also in the development of the charming relationship between the principals in its fun and frolic. The good of living fun seems to be the dramatic realm of the funny performer, often set in social comedies which feature and realize good grace shared with other members of society. Rather than the aesthetics of pathos, what we typically see here is the pragmatics of social ethos brought into play through the grace of being funny. If this comes to

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fruition, it is because the principals are not fools but rather capable of fooling around to the extent they affect change. Rather than the foolishness of the satyr-comedian or the mating ritual of the romantic, here we see the use of comic performance and activity in the service of some socially significant purpose, but couched in the dramatic context of ludenic mirth. The truth of living fun is ably represented by the comic personage who embodies wise grace, the risible wisdom of someone who is a canny observer of the human condition and human nature, and presents himself or herself as a kind of exemplar of ludenic truth, how to live a funny life and enjoy the spectacle of humanity. All such comic figures approach what we have termed “third nature,” probing the limits and depths of comedic representation and even philosophical signification. Their histrionic ability to “push the comic envelope” makes movie comedy into a threshold experience; by playing the fool, they bring us into the realm of aesthetic liminality. Through expanding and exploring the possibilities of comic grace, these cinematic figures let us discover and encourage us to create a world of joyful mirth and playful appreciation. The ultimate promise of comedy would then be its potential for inspiring and guiding graceless mortal fools to a humane circumstance of festive and cheerful grace. In a world full of disgrace, conceiving life as fun and the world as a carnival has its appeal as an alternative to the inhumane gloom and excessive gravity of the “normal world.” It didn't take long after the invention of the movies for comedy to appear, first in short skits and then more elaborate “two-reelers.” Given the nature of the medium, audiences quickly learned the tactile appreciation of physical comedy, at first slapstick and then pratfall comedy such as the “Keystone Kops,” which made fun of social authority. But also quickly movie comedians began to be in demand, not only because what they did in the skits was funny but also because they appeared funny. The comic beauty of them included their identity as a comic figure, communicating their unique personal grace as a funny being. The most important was Charlie Chaplin, who developed an identifiable character—the tramp, or “little fellow”—who was costumed in formal but shabby clothes and conveyed a kind of gentlemanly dignity and good manners, despite his low state in the world. Chaplin's “little fellow” does not eschew wealth but neither can he hold on to it, oftentimes through an act of benevolence, and in the end he is usually alone and on the road again. His quest for grace resides not with money or respectability but rather with beautiful women who are innocent emblems of human grace (even if they are blind flower girls or homeless sprites or frontier bar-girls) in the guise of wronged nymphs. The Little Tramp is a good-hearted

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mortal fool, funny not only in his idolizing of women but in his prissy and dainty demeanor and dress, himself identifying with feminine characteristics. For early movie audiences, he exemplified a kind of beauty that was a less rowdy version of the satyr-play, with him as an often sexless satyr consorting with and comforting fallen nature-spirits, the nymphs of the streets and barrooms and road. The Tramp is a funny being we can laugh at in his parodic garb that mimics polite society but laugh with him in his gentle sympathy for the plight of women as well as others, such as children. Chaplin was instrumental in discovering and using the “symbolic language” of the movies, with his grasp of movie mimesis and kinesis, but perhaps more importantly he created one of the first great movie icons in the figure of the Tramp, a homeless and insecure vagabond coping with the brutalities (manifest in bullies such as policemen, bosses, and waiters) and inequities (poverty, neglect) of the modern world. The Tramp became a great movie icon, but he also was the first comic icon, a picturesque figure known worldwide. He was soon rivaled by a more naturalistic comic icon in the figure of Buster Keaton. Chaplin's Tramp was an iconic role the actor played, but Keaton always seemed to be playing himself. Keaton was virtually always a jaunty fellow rooted in a community, an unsmiling and ambitious man interested in doing well and courting a girl, always an optimist but faced with obstacles and adversity. He was always a bit melancholy but never defeated, put in the face of danger and the usual bullying rivals, and in the end triumphs, wins the girl, and is now accepted by the community. Although he is a local rather than the Tramp's cosmopolitan, Keaton's solemn and sincere character is no less a funny guy and if anything more resourceful. Like the Tramp, he is beset by insane developments (the Tramp is inadvertently caught up in a labor action, Keaton is chased across country by a mob of women in wedding dresses mad because he wouldn't marry them). Both inhabit an incomprehensible world but survive through stubborn tenacity and basic good nature. They are both comic figures with different kinds of personal grace but merge in their comic determination. They are funny beings in a world of unforgiving pathos but cheer us by the comic grace of sheer endurance. If the great “silent clowns” were funny because they were graceful comedians coping as individuals pitted against society's absurdities, others were funny as sound-era “dancing fools,” beautiful to watch and funny to hear as they danced and sang their way through rhythmic mating rituals. The plots of musicals can be traced to New Comedy and Plautus, but audiences didn't care: they expected that funny things would happen but at

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the end there would be a sexual union and a dance and a revel. The singers and dancers were modern rhapsodes, putting into the rhythms of song and dance the ancient rituals of courtship and foreplay and sexuality. This was envisioned most beautifully in the romantic comedies featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, virtually always two ill-matched people caught up in a case of mistaken identity and sexual play, often set in art-deco pleasure-domes frequented by gown-and-tuxedo high society. Rogers was athletic and pleasant but reticent and usually involved in some rival relationship; Astaire was physically graceful and incurably romantic. Together, they overcome their antipathy by dancing their way into rhythmic unity and the gamboling beauty of the “light fantastic” as comic ceremonial of erotic display that prefaces private coupling. Astaire and Rogers became ludenic icons of the comedy of romance between two strong and pulsating people who were meant for each other, but had to sing and dance their way into their joint rhythm, foolish hearts endearing themselves to each other and to movie audiences. Ludenic icons of movie beauty can take many forms, but the silent clowns and great song-and-dance teams are major representations of the beauty of living fun. There is another kind of actor and movie role-type that is more elusive but nevertheless remarkable as a form of iconic play, the venerable actors who are identifiable but able to play in a variety of comic roles over time and establish themselves as a ludenic personage. As movie icons, such actors are usually cast in comedies in which their roles are variations on an iconic theme, playing their familiar personae but in a limited range of comic roles which balances their expected special character with the specific character in a movie. One actor who was admirably able to bring this off over time was Myrna Loy, who was proficient in always playing “herself” but moving deftly from youthful single-girls-in-city comedies to the married swinger of the Thin Man movies to the sophisticated lady of films such as Libeled Lady. In that movie, she displays with skill her talent at comic poise as an heiress who sues a tabloid newspaper over a false story about one of her society romances, to which the paper retaliates by concocting a romancer in an elaborate scheme to undermine the suit. Throughout all these shenanigans, she maintains her patented “cool,” and naturally sees through the scheme but plays along since she likes the romancer. As a mature married woman in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, she endures her batty husband's desire for a home in the country, the maddening complications of the new house being built, and the designs on her by her husband's best friend. And as a mature woman, she presides over a houseful of children and imperious husband in Cheaper by the Dozen. Throughout, she exudes the grace of

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comic composure and imperturbability, enjoying the fun from a cool distance and amused nonchalance. Like the silent clowns and the dancers, such actors enact version of living fun, reminding us that the beauty of personal grace can reside in those who are not so much pretty as funny, showing us the joy of living fun through clowning, dancing, or just watching the human comedy. The good of living fun is represented on screen by iconic figures who are oriented towards good grace rather than strictly personal grace, doing good by fooling with social settings and relationships and thus bringing levity and mirth into social play. The ethos of living fun thus becomes a form of shared grace, seen in social contexts where comedic action makes a difference in the lives of people who share the fun of it all. Pragmatic living fun can be seen in the movies with the actions of funny performers who typify and illustrate the social good of comic disruption and innovation. This can be as simple as icons of leisure and play viewed on screen as enjoying themselves and their fame and fortune and sharing that enjoyment with the people who attend to their entertainment. Or it can be as complicated and “serious” as the conduct of State affairs and warfare, which from the point of view of comedy is so idiotic and lethal as to invite absurdist criticism. And, it can be as pointed as trying to make a social statement through some kind of comic subterfuge. In any event, it is possible for those who choose to live fun can in the process bring something good (charm, irreverence, tolerance) into the social world. In A Hard Day's Night (1964), we meet a charming group of young men with working-class accents and unusual haircuts who seem to be having a great time. The four had formed a musica1 group called “The Beatles” which became a pop-music sensation and made the lads rich and famous. This semi-documentary film catches them at the early height of their fan frenzy, when they are pursued by hordes of teenage girls. The movie doesn't take all this seriously because the boys themselves don't take themselves too seriously. They are amused by all this acclaim and chafe at having to live in a celebrity cocoon and flee from their libidinal following. The movie shows them “backstage” and onstage, relaxed and self-deprecating in private and enjoying themselves as they perform for screaming and crying youths. As nascent cultural icons, they are quite canny about their status but also perfectly willing to enjoy their iconic moment. Their “good” was in the exemplary playfulness they brought to popular culture and to the light-hearted “youth culture” of the 1960s, a moment in time for the celebration of the young and vital. The celebration of anarchic playfulness can also occur in the social context of more weighty matters than recreative and diverting leisure. In

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Duck Soup (1933), the Marx Brothers bring their zany and irreverent wit to bear on “reasons of state” and the rituals and protocols of self-important power. Groucho somehow becomes the new president of Freedonia, which is bankrupt and threatened by hostile Sylvania; alas, the head of state is a charlatan, interested in marrying the rich widow who has bailed out the government and conjures up a war with their rival on the flimsiest of excuses (he admits on reading a report that a four-year old child could understand it but since he cannot, he asks someone to bring him a child). The brothers make fun not only of the pretenses of governmental intrigue but also of war fever, playing a tune on the helmets of soldiers and conducting the war with their usual glee (urging a general beset with a gas attack at the front to take some bicarbonate of soda). Their antidote to the insanity of war is to make fun of it, on the comic premise that one should laugh at such things in order to avoid crying. Their festive anarchism (“the war is won...we've had a lot of fun!”) allows us comic relief and respite from the stupid and needless agony put upon us by the “unreasons” of state. The grace of being funny even in the most idiotic and diabolic social event and political madness becomes the height of sanity. In Tootsie (1982), we see a story of comic disguise, a subterfuge to both get a job and impersonate a member of the opposite gender in a media community (on a TV soap opera). Michael is a middle-aged and middling successful actor who is so difficult to work with that no one will hire him. In order to fund a favorite project, he decides to try out for a job on the soap opera that calls for a woman actor by dressing up and passing himself off as female. He has an acute social sense and wicked sense of humor, so when he gets the part, he plays against the usual type of woman on soaps by “becoming” a feisty and sharply feminist person (Dorothy) both in person and in the drama. As we might expect, complications arise when he falls for his female co-star (Julie) but doesn't know how to approach her without giving away the deception, and worse, her father becomes attracted to Dorothy! At one point, Michael “comes on” to Julie as a woman, which she thinks is a lesbian proposition. Dorothy is also in constant conflict with the sexist director of the show but isn't fired because her character is deemed essential to the success of the show. We are in the midst of byzantine “court politics” but it is clear the deception cannot last, since he is sure to be found out and besides he wants to court Julie. So when the show is unexpectedly forced to do a “live” broadcast, Michael/ Dorothy makes a speech, removes his wig, and reveals that he is “actually” Dorothy's twin brother who took her place for revenge, a classic soap opera story line but one that frees Michael from the deception and the role. He makes peace with various parties, including the amorous father, but the

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reluctant Julie will only admit that she misses Dorothy, and he enigmatically admits that he was a “better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man”; they walk off together, but with her only asking if he will lend her a dress. If the Beatles were a cultural icon of pathos (the passion of fans) and the Marx Brothers running the State icons of comic ethos, then Tootsie/Michael/Dorothy is a comic icon of logos, gender knowledge (how to act like a woman) and social and dramatic masquerade using that knowledge. The good of living fun involves different kinds of comic learning which points to some kind of socially important activity, be it popular diversions, political chicanery, or gender prejudices and complications. The comic uses of foolery serves a purpose or makes a point, although by not being a “serious” conclusion it contributes to comic knowledge which sees even dastardly things as funny and those who are adept at “acting funny” as agents of both social playing and learning. Whatever the motive, there is often good grace in comic outcomes stemming from the exercise of ludenic intervention, a dynamic that introduces the possibility not only of a newly appreciated beauty and a novel appearance of good but also an awareness of the value of comic truth. The truth of living fun differs from personal grace and good grace by the emphasis on wise grace, the comic icon as a representation of ludenic wisdom. This can be seen in someone who is a gentle example of living fun, even if he or she is thought to be “funny in the head.” It may manifest itself in an odd figure who is an acute observer of the unwisdom of society. And, it might appear in an outrageous comic ensemble that sees society as a whole as uproariously funny. In all cases, these purveyors of comic truth give us comic characters who are iconic wise fools demonstrating the potentiality of playful wit. There is an ancient quip describing a comic fool as someone who acts too natural, which we may amend by adding that this includes someone who feels too deeply or knows too much. Comic ethos and pathos is complemented by comic logos, embodied in that motley group of fools whose jests and jocularity reveal comic truths unknown or unspoken by earnest thought or resolute criticism. If there is comic wisdom, then we might even speculate whether a comic sociology and comic philosophy is possible. In Harvey (1950), Elwood P. Dowd is a well-dressed middle-aged man, a person of independent means and regular habits who lives with his sister and niece. The sister (Veta) is unsure whether Elwood is an inebriate or insane, because he frequents Charlie's Bar, makes friends easily (and invariably invites them home to dinner), and always introduces them to his

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companion, an invisible 6' 3.5” tall rabbit named Harvey. Charlie routinely serves them a martini each, and the “regulars” at the bar accept the “presence” of Harvey, although strangers are mystified and his sister and niece are frantic. Veta's daughter Myrtle Mae is hoping to enter local “society,” so on this day her mother is hosting a tea party of town ladies who will meet her and perhaps introduce her to eligible young men of means. Elwood, however, scotches their play by returning home and introducing the ladies to Harvey, and they predictably make a hasty exit, prompting the distraught sister to get Elwood committed to an asylum. After several comic complications (they commit the sister by mistake, and the daughter is attracted to the asylum attendant), the psychiatrist looks for Elwood at Charlie's and meets Harvey, and those two become such good friends they go bar-hopping. Elwood makes friends with another nurse there, inspiring another psychiatrist to realize that the nurse loves him and he reciprocates, so Elwood has two victories in match-making. Veta still wants him to change, so she is told of a serum that will eliminate Harvey and make Elwood “responsible,” but when she is told of how glum and lifeless it makes people, she relents. Besides, they all begin to realize that Elwood is a benevolent figure whose pleasant demeanor and gentle affection for people is what makes him different. Elwood spells out they difference, remarking that he used to be “O, so smart” rather than “O, so pleasant”; he finally decided he didn't like smart and now “I recommend pleasant.” In the end, Harvey's new friend takes him on a quick trip to a favorite city, and then Harvey rejoins Elwood and go to Charlie's. Harvey, it turns out, is a “pooka,” a Celtic fairy spirit who bonds with social eccentrics and outcasts and often takes the form of giant spirit-animals. Elwood too is something of a fairy spirit, advocating the pleasant philosophy of personal grace by living true to the relaxed enjoyment of a pleasing life. We might even term it comic altruism. Playtime (1967) we might term an exercise in the cosmic truth of astute and discerning comic observation, pointing to the use of comic film as exploratory and good-natured sociology. For here we see not the Paris of romance and urban grace, but rather the architectural and technological arrangement of life, largely in rectangles and motorized transport. The new city of advanced modernity is largely lifeless, with no grass or trees, charming old neighborhoods, or indeed tourist interest in the famous Paris landmarks (the Eiffel Tower is only glimpsed in reflection on a glass door) since focus is on shopping for the latest gadgets. There is no privacy, since we can see into apartments through their glass walls, but see nothing interesting or shocking as everyone at home is watching television. Comic observation is exercised by the presence of M. Hulot, like Elwood P.

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Dowd an eccentric outsider, but he is more of an academic onlooker, fascinated and bemused by the alienating environment the world has built for us to live and travel in. Hulot enters a glass-enclosed office building for an appointment, but the baffling and inaccessible design of the building makes it impossible for him to find his contact. Roads, houses, and public facilities all seem designed to prevent human accessibility and proximity. This potentially grim and dystopian world is instead an opportunity for great comic effect, making us aware of how funny it is that humans build and cope with such an inhospitable and frustrating environment, and how the comic imagination can inspire us to think of ways we can play with idiotic arrangements and dance around them in gleeful disdain. This all comes to fruition in the last part of the film, set in a new and fashionable restaurant, wherein the tourists and well-to-do gather for the gala opening. Everything goes wrong: the heating unit cannot be regulated so the temperature becomes unbearable, so everyone begins to remove clothes; the waiters are confused and everyone gets the wrong food; the control of access breaks down so drunks and other street people wander in; and so on, until decorum breaks down, and the customers begin to join the band's singer. The party continues until the next morning, with the drunk and happy revelers celebrating their defiance of standardized and mechanized predictability, to the extent they all get in their cars and try to drive through the roundabout, so unsuccessfully it resembles a circus carousel. The film ends not with a note of frustration but rather a realization of the potential of human play in freeing ourselves from the imposed strictures of organized procedure and serious purpose. Comic play has a penchant for demolishing the formal and ritualistic social order that makes everything rectangular and replacing it with a delightful merry-go-round. By The Meaning of Life (1983), we refer not only to that particular movie but more broadly the body of their career on television, life performance, and their other films as the comedy team called “Monty Python's Flying Circus.” The comic truth of life as a circus complements our images of life as a revel and carousel, and life as a relaxed and happy round of pleasant encounters with beings real and fantastic. In their films, the Python gang make cheerful rounds through classic stories—the Arthurian legend, the Nativity and Roman Israel—and make some outrageous changed and inversions in those cherished tales. In a sense, they are actually making fun of the popular versions of those stories as told by Hollywood, making them ludicrous by adding all sorts of funny gags and plot lines to them (the celibate knights after the Grail are sorely tempted by horny nuns at “Castle Anthrax,” the Jewish “liberation front” plotting against Roman rule and railing about what Roman rule had ever

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done for them, which turns out to be an irritating lot: roads, viaducts, cities, ports, and so on). And much of their humor is quite topical and relevant to current ailments, including different attitudes about contraception from Protestants and Catholics (with a chorus of Catholic children singing “Every Sperm is Sacred”); satires on the practice of medicine, with pediatricians ignoring a woman in labor as they play with their fancy new machines, an organ donor giving up his liver before he is dead; the dreariness of school ridiculed by a sex education class wherein the teacher demonstrates the sex act by bringing in his undressed and shapely wife and proceeding to mount her while teaching the mechanics of the sex act as the boy students remain bored and distracted and totally uninterested in the live demonstration; an exclusive restaurant is disrupted by a super-fat Mr. Creosote, who eats and vomits and finally explodes after a post-dinner mint. In the end, an upscale dinner party (shades of Bunuel) is interrupted by the Grim Reaper, with the guests more upset by their evening plans being disturbed than the prospect of dying. Heaven turns out to be a seedy Las Vegas resort, with popular singers and chorus intoning that it's Christmas every day in Paradise. The “meaning of life” was earlier dismissed by a couple as a boring subject, and indeed it turns out to be rather facile: “It's nothing very special...Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.” Good advice, no doubt, but funny because of its lack of profundity; the meaning of life at this “Is that all there is?” level returns us to the comic thought that maybe the joke's on us. The sardonic air of Monty Python may also bring us full circle, since their kind of derisive and mocking tone reminds us of the disdain and scorn of Aristophanes. He made great sport of Athenian politics (war, politicians as fools and thieves, the exclusion of wiser women) and culture (the prevalence of scoundrels, women who marry for money, philosophers and teachers as sophists and hypocrites). The modern “flying circus” is in the same spirit, and indeed the same savage humor and topical invective has migrated to television (Saturday Night Live) and comic documentaries (Michael Moore) and the Internet and other forms of social media. The truth of living fun is not only seen in local eccentrics who make life gentler and pleasanter for people, or social observers who purview the insanity of modern urban life, but also those comic critics whose live fun is to direct us in seeing that our time, like all times, is a hilarious and ridiculous circus which will soon fly away.

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Unraveling Comedy The dramatic term “dénouement” can be traced to a French term for untying knots, adopted in the theater for the unraveling and clarifying of what has happened in the plot, and to the characters, for the final outcome of the complications of the story. It is hoped here that we have unraveled something worthwhile about specific comedies, types of comedies, and comedy in general. We chose to limit our inquiry to movie comedy, since we thought that in the world of the last century and into the new century, the locus and vitality of comedy could be found in the movies. Even that inquiry turned out to be vast and challenging enough, reminding us that comedy is something of a “multiverse,” with each particular comedy having its own unique and singular qualities, each one illustrating the anticredal tone of comic drama but each one also displaying a feature of selfcontainment that makes generic and taxonomic analysis difficult and problematic .Nevertheless, our conviction remains that the study of comedy and movie comedy in particular can advance and deepen only if such risks are taken. Thus we tried to combine some of the ancient Greek concepts and comic history with contemporary thought and investigation about comedy and the movies. The subject is too rich with human implications and social consequences to ignore or ritualize, so we wed a scheme of inquiry with selected movies and tried to make sense of them by looking at what goes on in movie comedies and aim for the Aristotelian goal of understanding what always goes on in movie comedy. When we unravel movie comedy, it may well help us to keep in mind and apply the concepts that we have utilized here. Comedy is distinctly a major and persistent form of play, what we might term “light play,” since it is light-hearted fun and mirthful frolic in spirit. Thus it is appealing to homo ludens, humankind as players and fun seekers and revelers. This is not to say that light play is without import or impact; indeed, play-learning through such mediums as movie comedy may be much more effective and deeper that serious forms of learning. Movie comedy creates and communicates a world of make-believe, but such make-belief makes belief among audiences and publics in ways we do not fully understand. Movie comedy is an integral part of modern ludenic culture, and in their own powerful medium, motion pictures convey images and icons of comic beauty, comic good, and comic truth, with aesthetic, pragmatic, and philosophic consequences of interest and concern. It is one of the standard motifs of comedy for it to depict change, often pitting the old and settled against the young and vital; in that tendency, it is typical for comedy to view the habitually sensible as senseless and see the sanity of nonsense

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instead, observe the grandiose as puny and laughable, and espouse the robustness of jocosity instead of seriosity and high purpose. Comedy may well be a distinct way of looking at the world, so if enough people embrace that world-view, comedy might unravel lots of things beyond the movie theater. (Too many ravels, not enough revels!) At the core of our inquiry, we used the concept of comic grace. When we look at the unraveling that goes on in movie comedy, we see the human search for grace in play, and share the satisfaction when things are clarified, resolved, and “untied” so that the comic players can enjoy comic grace in festive celebration and a joyous season. Since our own mundane reality leaves a lot to the imagination, we the audience enjoy the satisfactory denouement of happiness or at least contentment, and encouraging us to wonder if the make-believe of comic grace is possible and desirable outside of its dramatic enactment. Comic grace leaves people in a state of play, so we can imagine that they have unraveled inhibitions and complications to the extent that grace extends into the future, perhaps not necessarily “living happily ever after” but certainly enduring in amity and comity through the comic learning acquired that perpetuates human grace, valuing and practicing gratitude and graciousness as habits of living well. Perhaps the key attitude of comic grace is summed up in the term “debonair,” from the French “of good disposition,” “of good cheer,” acting with courtesy, kindness, and wit. Comic grace is best appreciated as a humbler grace; mortal gods may find grace in destiny, and mortal heroes may find grace in victory, but mortal fools find grace in conviviality. Comic grace is a merciful favor and humane reprieve, to be appreciated in the spirit of the Three Graces— Splendor, Mirth, and Good Cheer. The Greeks conceived a vast array of gods, but they also imagined three identifiable forces that governed or intervened in human life: the Fates, the Furies, and the Graces. The Fates were agents of necessity, spinning and measuring the thread of life, reminding us that we have no ultimate control over our fate. The Furies were mysterious agents of chance, intervening in and revenging human wrongs, now thought as representing the random occurrence of chance events such as accidents or natural disasters. The Graces were imagined as agents of all things that make life good—joy and mirth, radiance and beauty, and festivity and celebration, such as banquets and comedy. If we learn and live good grace from them, we can face the Fates and the Furies with good cheer, and enjoy to the end the comic spectacle of ourselves and our world, including watching and laughing at movie comedy.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES

This appendix is intended to be not only a compilation of the bibliographic sources the author found useful in his inquiry, but also a reference guide for those interested in the subject of comedy and movie comedy to use for further reading and research. The literature on comedy is as one might expect quite vast, but the work on movie comedy is surprisingly limited. Hopefully, the present work, with both its conceptual ambitions and obvious limitations, will inspire more advanced and comprehensive work on the idea of comedy and the nature and universe of movie comedy. This hope will be assisted by examination of the corpus of inquiry which has informed this volume, including the books and articles cited and used here. It is essential to the understanding of comedy to not only read comedies but to read about them, and for movie comedy it is crucial that those interested not only see film comedies to also read about and try to make sense of what comedies are about and what variety and depth they are capable of. In that way, this present work will not have been in vain, but will contribute to the larger intellectual purpose of understanding the taxonomic and philosophic dimensions of one of humankind's greatest creations (comedy) and of modernity's grand contribution to its aesthetic power and social participation (movie comedy). Here we can only point to those works that met our dual criteria of aesthetic satisfaction and pragmatic application, meaning that the author liked what they had to say and conceived what he could do with their ideas. As always, the place to start with comedy is with the comic writers themselves, not only because of their historical interest but because what they wrote was funny, and if understood properly, still funny. Beginning at the beginning, reading Aristophanes is still fun and instructive, and set the standard that comedy is what you can get away with. An interesting brief introduction is Paul Cartledge, Aristophanes and His Theatre of the Absurd (London: Bristol Classic Press, 1990). His bibliography includes two of the best works on Aristophanes, A.M. Bowie, Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual, and Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), and K.J. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1972). Among the many good books on comic writers, the one I find most insightful is Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (NY: Columbia UP, 1965); on Shakespeare and the nature of comedy. The indispensable historical treatment is Erich Segal, The Death of Comedy (Cambridge: Harvard UP,

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2001). Along with the primary sources of comedy and the historical and critical analysis, there is a venerable tradition of inquiry into what is going on in comedy, by both comic writers and literary and philosophical critics. A classic and still highly useful collection is Robert W. Corrigan (ed.), Comedy: Meaning and Form (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965). An excellent examination of contemporary comedy and its transformation by new forms of humor and circumstances is Patrick O'Neill, The Comedy of Entropy (Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 1990). However, no matter how much comedy develops and adapts (into “tragicomedy” or whatever), study of its origins reminds us that comedy is deeply imbedded in human nature and social symbolism. Although much disputed, it is still instructive to read the classic anthropological works about those ancient origins, most notably in Francis M. Cornford, The Origins of Attic Comedy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), seeing in Aristophanes the echo of the primitive rural roots of comic dramatic structure. The “school” of Cambridge scholars (Gilbert Murray, Jane Harrison, James Fraser) who developed the “mythritual” theory of the origins of Greek theater has been much criticized, but their basic perspective remains penetrating and useful in explaining what still goes on in the social relationships involved in comic drama and learning. The point that there is both an aesthetic and didactic dimension to literary and cinematic experience is well developed in Frank McConnell, Storytelling and Mythmaking: Images from Film and Literature (NY: Oxford UP, 1979), tracing the content and conduct of books and movies to cultural etiology, how a time and place came to be where and what it is. In many ways, the perspective that there are deep but fathomable origins to what we now read and watch is implicit in the work of some important scholars worth considering. Northrop Frye produced an impressive corpus of work that seems to stem from the mythic perspective, perhaps best approached through his specific essays or lectures, such as Fables of Identity (NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963) and The Educated Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1964). Mircea Eliade explored the archetypical patterns of myths and rites, ancient and modern, alerting us to the possibility that what we see up on the movie screen descends from patterns of belief and action with a long past: Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), and Rites and Symbols of Initiation (NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1958). An exploratory mythic analysis of popular film is Geoffrey Hill, Illuminating Shadows: The Mythic Power of Film (Boston: Shambala, 1992). Aside from the contextual and conceptual insights just discussed, there are many theories of comedy, many of them located in such intellectual mansions as literary theory and historical sociology. The aforementioned

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Northrop Frye posited one of the most famous and accessible theories, grounding comedy in archetypal cycle of the seasons, with comedy associated in the clime of springtime, within the eternal context of rebirth and renewal in a festive season bringing human hope and earthly fertility. A contemporary of Frye, critic Kenneth Burke sees comedy in the context of social conflict and adjustment as a civilizing and humane force with “corrective” powers; thus a comic frame of inquiry can serve as a method of study, or really self-study, allowing us to become students of ourselves and thus see ourselves and our world in comic terms, perhaps in the process allowing for mature self-realization and pacific solutions to conflicts that avoids tragedy. Burke's views are set forth amiably in his Attitudes Toward History (Boston: Beacon, 1961). His comic theory is expanded by sociologist Hugh D. Duncan, Communication and Social Order (New York: Bedminster, 1962). It is useful in this regard to explore work on the human and social roots and causes of comedy, in particular amusement and enjoyment, in such responses as laughter and indeed all forms of comic expression. This is dealt with well by Marcel Gutwirth, Laughing Matter: An Essay on the Comic (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993). He concludes with thought about “comic wisdom,” speculating about the cosmic joke and the ultimate comic figures of our curious species, such as Don Quixote. There are scientific studies of laughter that see our delightful expression as more physical than mental, but certainly something that contributes to our health and sense of well-being. A readable compendium of such research is Robert R. Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (NY: Viking, 2000). An extraordinarily wide-ranging conceptual and taxonomic study of comedy in its relation to social practices and situations is Murray S. Davis, What's So Funny: The Comic Conception of Culture and Society (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1993), focusing, as I have tried in a more limited way to do here, on what comedy can tell us about cultural norms and social practices. An interesting perspective emphasizing comic transcendence is Conrad Hyers, The Spirituality of Comedy (Transaction Books, 2008), suggesting that in a tragic world of finitude and folly the most worthy antidote is the philosophical and theological redoubt of comic understanding. Hopefully, such worthwhile inquiry will not result in the descent of the comic perspective and attitude into seriousness, but rather will bring about the ascent of deadening solemnity into risible playfulness. The concept of play seems embedded in the concept and practice of comedy, both as an attitude and a dramatic form. Play is an elusive idea but a quite rich one, bringing to both individual conduct and social projects a vital lilt of exploration and creation. A good place to start is Jacques Ehrmann (ed.),

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Game, Play, Literature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), which gives the reader the depth and potential of the idea. See, too, a philosophical treatise on the subject, Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1990). The still vibrant classic, addressed in the previous citing, is Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950). See also James Combs, Play World: The Emergence of the New Ludenic Age (London: Praeger, 2000). Gregory Bateson's influential theory of play is included in his collection of essays, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972). Bateson's work has inspired many to ponder the import and possibilities of play, perhaps most thoroughly by Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981), in which play advances the importance of relations and anagogical learning, recommending that we continue to develop the centrality of aesthetics, in our case here, comic aesthetics. This project is furthered by the interest expressed by contemporary pragmatic philosophers and cultural theorists. A bold evolutionary statement is Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (Seattle: U. of Washington Press, 1995). Paul Watzlawick, et.al., Pragmatics of Human Communication (NY: W.W. Norton, 1967), uses Bateson and others to deal with such subjects as paradoxical communication, a core part of comic drama. A major theoretical statement that features the “animism of signs” we have suggested in the present work is Eugene Rochberg-Halton, Meaning and Modernity: Social Theory in the Pragmatic Attitude (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1986). Richard Shusterman has probed many areas of social aesthetics in various works, including Pragmatist Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, l992). A view of the state of pragmatism is Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). An extremely helpful formulation of C.S. Peirce for the kind of inquiry undertaken here is John K. Sheriff, The Fate of Meaning: Charles Peirce, Structuralism, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989). The classic statement of the distinction between “knowings” and “knowns” is John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, Knowing and the Known (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949). A humorous and insightful philosophical treatment of intellectual fun is John Allen Paulos, I Think, Therefore I Laugh (NY: Columbia UP, 2000). A delightful foray into comic philosophy is Thomas Cathcart and Don Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes (NY: Penguin, 2000). Since movie comedy is a form of dramatic presentation, familiarity with the idea and structure of theater informs us as to what to expect and what plays out as funny, as well as what conventions and patterns persist

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and alter over time. An accessible discussion is Elizabeth Burns, Theatricality (NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1972). The more formal books of Kenneth Burke are formidable, but his many admirers have adapted the notion of “life as theater” to many contexts and settings. Most famously, Erving Goffman explored The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1959) in a series of books relevant to the understanding of comedy, such as Interaction Ritual (Doubleday Anchor, 1967). The flood of work that flowed during that initial period is collected in James Combs and Michael Mansfield (eds.), Drama in Life: The Use of Communication in Society (NY: Hastings House, 1976). An enduring essay on the art of drama is Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968), including a discussion of the “histrionic sensibility” and mimetic action. The dramatic metaphor is much disputed, but if truly a part of contemporary life, apt to have consequences as to how we think and live. See Neal Gabler, Life: The Movie (NY: Vintage, 1998). In the study of film comedy, it is also helpful to have some grounding in the nature of film and the history of the movies, especially movie genres. Readers may find, as many do, that some of the more erudite theories of film are impenetrable at worst and unhelpful at best, and that many general histories of the movies suffer from overextended superficiality (eras, lists, awards, trends, etc.) or breathtaking temporal pace. So grounding in conceptual and historical perspective is important, but probably best approached on the solid ground of histories that specify a period or innovation that we can identify and understand, and theories which include the actual movie experience of those who make movies and those who watch them. An excellent place to start is the inclusive overview in Brian Henderson and Ann Martin, Film Quarterly: Forty Years—A Selection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Two quite readable and thoughtful books on the complex subject of what is going on in and around the movies are Parker Tyler, Magic and Myth of the Movies (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1947) and Geoffrey O'Brien, The Phantom Empire (NY: W.W. Norton, 1993), the first an incisive understanding of the movies as a mythopoetic medium, and the latter emphasizing the movies as a “place” we inhabit and learn from over time in the leisure of ludenic retrospection. Two highly instructive studies of the origins and consequently the nature of film/cinema/movies are John L. Fell, Film and the Narrative Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) and Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (NY: Oxford UP, 1981), focusing our attention on those social practices in storytelling and entertainment that accompanied and encouraged the advent and eventually independent animation of

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motion pictures as art and industry. An excellent classic study of the early and exploratory years of moviemaking is Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (NY: Teachers College Press, 1968). The unsurpassed study as crucial to the creation of modern society and culture is Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (NY: Oxford University Press, 1980). The creative period of moviemaking calls for close study of those who were the creative force, such as D.W. Griffith: An American Life (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1984), by Richard Schickel. The elusive question of the role of movies in history is as difficult as nailing jelly to the wall, but so important that it must be addressed. An excellent collection that does survey such temporal knowledge is Steven Mintz and Randy Roberts (eds.), Hollywood's America: United States History through its Films (St. James, NY: Brandywine Press, 1993), giving us concrete evidence of the historical presence and influential imagination of popular movies as a major form of cultural expression and social interlocution. Another first-rate collection that uses specific films as representative of some social phenomenon which characterizes a particular era (e.g., the Depression) or moment in time (the precipice of World War II) is John E. O'Connor and Martin A. Jackson (eds.), American History /American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (NY: Frederick Ungar, 1979). There are several good studies of the movies in the context of a specific time, such as these two on the Depression era: Andrew Bergman, We're In the Money (NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), and Nick Roddick, A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Brothers in the 1930s (London: British Film Institute, 1983). Lary May's book on the early cinema is complemented by his major study of the changes wrought onscreen and off by the Hollywood establishment interacting with the changing flow of events and processes after World War II that underscored the advent of Cold War and conservative-imperial politics, entitled The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), and supplemented by Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). A highly readable and penetrating examination of the movies of the fifties is Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (NY: Pantheon, 1983). It is worthwhile to understand and use the concept of film genre, since genres give us an idea of the pre-motion picture roots of storytelling and depiction and character that were given their own cinematic form and tradition in the history of the movies. Film genres took on their own flair and expectations very quickly as movies became a popular medium and

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moviemakers learned to anticipate and fulfill what audiences were looking for when they chose a type of movie. And genres changed over time as audiences ceased wanting to see some kinds of movies and started attending to new kinds of film. Perennial favorites inherited from literature and folklore such as the love story and the murder mystery endured by adapting to new times and narrative desirability. Some genres may seem to be curiously resilient to outsiders, such as the American Western and the Japanese samurai film. Others, like the Biblical and classical epic, come and go and come again, for reasons hard to discern; at the time of this writing, the musical comedy is in abeyance, but we may be fairly sure that it will revive at some point in the future. There is a vast literature on genres; here we will point to some outstanding examples of genre analysis. A nice overview of the subject is Stuart Kaminsky, American Film Genres (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1984). A worthwhile study of the Western as it participates in the social issues of contemporary contention is John H. Lenihan, Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), which demonstrates how a movie genre pervaded by mythic overtones can be used to imagine not only that valued past but also use the setting to view and speak to issues and tensions relevant to subsequent and current times. Since there are recurrently activated fears of “the end of the world” or at least disastrous and disruptive events deemed possible, our imagination of disaster is given visionary force in Kim Newman’s Apocalyptic Movies (NY: St. Martin's Griffin, 2000), a genre with literary and popular precedents, but in the movies our fascination with various forms of Doomsday has been given full and lurid vent. It is also the case that sometimes a movie genre may appear that was in many ways unexpected both in appearance and popularity. Such was the case with the post-World War II advent of the kind of movies the French began to call “film noir,” movies usually revolving around personal intrigue and passion and often a crime, a type of “dark movie” both in theme and lighting. Film noir has been much discussed, but two books stand out. Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (NY: Henry Holt, 1997), discerning the urban setting of noir as the symbolic labyrinth in which the complex tangle of human motives and actions unfold in ghastly detail, enjoyable as a kind of microcosmic apocalypse in human relations and our belief that there are not only dark midnights of disaster in the larger world but also in our souls. The conviction that we are all suspect in what we darkly want and do has been entertainingly treated in a noir fantasy linking together plots and characters, David Thomson, Suspects (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), with many of the usual suspects from the noir classics

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interacting in ways that reveal much about the darkness within and without. Genre analysis points us to one of the key questions about the movies: why do we want to keep watching certain kinds of movies that we seem recurrently to enjoy? Our interest in movies is animated not only by our desire to see movies with familiar subjects and themes, but also because we like to watch certain actors and also movies by certain directors. One does not have to be a strict adherent of the “auteur” theory to know that there are a few movie directors who achieve a degree of independent status and become well known for their personal signature “stamp” on their movies. People liked to see movies done by figures such as Howard Hawks, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and others because they liked their style. Here we cannot belabor the literature on such figures, but we can point to a few works that are worth pondering. At least one work with which I am familiar deals with the whole question of who is responsible for a film being what it is, by William Luhr and Peter Lehman, Authorship and Narrative in the Cinema (NY: Capricorn Books, 1977). They use the work of John Ford as emblematic of the question of responsibility and individual aesthetic style and judgment in the creation of a film. Ford is useful to think about the issue, as several of the writers do in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Stagecoach (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2003). Ford's creative acumen has been discussed in a larger aesthetic sense in Joseph W. Reed, Three American Originals: John Ford, William Faulkner, and Charles Ives (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984). It is also possibly the case that directorial creativity comes in clusters, in which directors become associated with genres or issues which intrigue them. This has been explored by Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness (NY: Oxford University Press, 1980), looking at the movies of young directors who emerged from the Sixties to pioneer challenging movies, finding in Coppola, Scorsese, and others the overriding them of social isolation in a decaying and violent world. But the most probing work on a movie auteur may well be Thomas M. Leitch, Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), in which he depicts The Master as the consummate chess champion of the movie game, in which Hitchcock draws us into a play wherein he makes the game so much fun we willing let the director play with us. Film theory is often indiscernible from film criticism, at best often validating the pragmatic approach which insists on theory telling us something important about what moviemakers and movies are actually doing. Like everyone else, I have my own theoretical preferences, but prefer an inclusive and eclectic utilization of theoretical and conceptual

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schema put to work in specific contexts. A classical collection edited by Richard Dyer MacCann is entitled Film: A Montage of Theories (NY: E.P. Dutton, 1966), in which various hands—moviemakers, critics, and early observers of the movies—weigh in on what is going on in and around the movies. The abiding impression I have from this collection is that movies are something unique and new, a dynamic medium of expression that fully complements aesthesis and mimesis with kinesis in an activity of social play. There is benefit in perusing two other venerable collections: Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (eds.) Film Theory and Criticism (NY: Oxford University Press, 1974), and the pop-cultural Film: Readings in the Mass Media (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971). See also the good collection of essays in Mark Crispin Miller (ed.), Seeing Through Movies (NY: Pantheon, 1990). More recently and to the point here is the extremely useful and wide-ranging reader, Andrew S. Horton (ed.), Comedy/Cinema/ Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), the editor correctly remarking that film comedy has been curiously ignored in theoretical concern or even as much empirical study as one might expect, reflecting in some way the neglect or ill repute evidenced by the absence of comedy from “great movies” lists and the usual refusal of film societies and academies to honor comedies, illustrating our conviction here that there is entirely too much solemnity in the world. Among the welter of theoretical perspectives and claims, I have found two classics helpful for reorientation: Raymond Spottiswoode, A Grammar of the Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950) and Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). More recent treatises of considerable depth and use are Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: U. of Indiana Press, 1976); David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985; Yvette Biro, Profane Mythology: The Savage Mind of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University, Press, 1982); and the extremely useful guide for the perplexed, Thomas Sobchack and Tim Bywater, An Introduction to Film Criticism (NY: Longman, 1989). Arnheim's Visual Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969) is useful as a treatise of what is going on with, for example, movie watchers, involving a kind of “reasoning” in the productive realm of imagery where we think with our senses. The intriguing work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1941) endures. Two recent works of interest are Rachel O. Moore, Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Durham: Duke UP, 2000) and Stephen Prince, “The Discourse of Pictures: Iconicity and Film Studies,” Film Quarterly 47: 1 (Fall 1993), 16-20.

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Happily, the dearth of good work on film comedy is being rectified, and many useful and accessible books are now available. There are Internet lists of works on comedy, such as the master list of the University of California-Berkeley library. Such lists will include the still valuable works such as: Maurice Charney, Comedy High and Low (NY: Oxford University Press, 1978); Raymond Durgnat, The Crazy Mirror (NY: Horizon, 1970); Lori Landry, Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Gerald Mast, The Comic Mind (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973); Jerry Palmer, Logic of the Absurd: Film and Television Comedy (London: British Film Institute, 1987). Three works in particular I have found helpful include Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (eds.), Classical Hollywood Comedy (New York: Routledge, 1995); Geoff King, Film Comedy (London: Wallflower Press, 2002); and Gerald Weales, Canned Goods as Caviar: American Film Comedy of the 1930s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). The first of these is valuable for its varied and even daring theoretical probing; the second for its sustained narrative in attempting to grasp the entire subject; and the third for its close focus on comedy as manifest in a particular time and place. In the last section of Chapter Three, I introduced some ideas and distinctions that might be useful for those interested in the study of comedy and movie comedy in particular. The ability to play and the willingness to have fun is a key component of that elusive “human nature” that distinguishes us from other earthly species. Understanding the origins and rich history of comedy is a preface to confronting those questions which agitate students of the subject, such as the people who wrote the books cited above. So the inquirer into the nature of comedy and the appeal of movie comedy is not alone, but looks and ponders one of our most delightful human creations and experiences, for understanding comedy takes us a long way towards understanding what is unique and best about our strange and wonderful species. And the best part of such an undertaking is, well, it's so much fun!