Thoughts On Comedy

[poliphilo]

Comedy is a young person's game.

Ok, there are some comical old people out there, but I can't think of many.

Most comics lose it as they get older. Steve Martin anyone? A lot of the smarter ones retire or find something else to do. Michael Palin, for example, has reinvented himself as an "explorer".

Comedy works by surprising us. The longer a comedian is in business the less likely it is that we'll find his/her schtick surprising.

All comedy is subversive. Even the gentlest. It challenges things as they are. The older, more comfortable, more embedded in the establishment a comedian becomes the less unsettled and unsettling s/he's likely to be, the less in touch with the zeitgeist and the less essentially funny. Witness the career of Bob Hope.

The more you have to lose, the less willing you are to issue the challenge.

The comedians who last the longest are those who are funny by nature. Those who can't help it. Frankie Howerd for example. Frankie's comic longevity had nothing to do with his material and everything to do with who he was- that shamble, that long rubbery face, that unique combination of campness and misanthropic gloom.

The comedian is always a misfit. Out of kilter. Peculiar. Shamanic even.

Comedins lose it because they get scared. They get scared of the weirdness. They get scared of themselves.

Every great comic is a Yorick- that is to say, a death's head.

Comments

Since You Bring Up Freud. . .

[queen-in-autumn.livejournal.com]

One of the things I have always remembered from my senior year seminar in theatre was the discussion of an essay by Freud on comedy, in which he argued that comedy was almost always about aggression, on some level. It's been years since I've read the article, but it's something that springs to mind when I watch or listen to comedy.

I can't put my hand on the article easily, but I just found this on the web:

"Freud, in 1905, stated that wit and humor are socially acceptable outlets for repressed sexual and aggressive desires. Freud also believed that making others comic through mimicry, disguise, unmasking, caricature, parody, and travesty is a highly aggressive act. According to Martin Grotjahn, in his book, Beyond Laughter, published in 1957, “Freud’s thesis is simple and straightforward: Laughter occurs when repressed energy is freed from its static function of keeping something forbidden under repression and away from consciousness. A witticism starts with an aggressive tendency or intent-an insult like, shocking thought. This has to be repressed and disappears into the unconscious like a train into a mountain tunnel….it later reappears and becomes acceptable, and the energy originally activated to keep the hostility under repression is freed into laughter.”

Re: Since You Bring Up Freud. . .

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think that's entirely right. The only thing I'd query is the emphasis on repression. I don't think John Stewart, making jokes about Bush, is repressing his hostility in the least.