Modest Proposals of Modern Socialists

Modest Proposals of Modem Socialists RUBY COHN A noun is not an adjective, and vice versa. I affirm this persnickety truism because Modem Drama is dedicating a special issue to Modern Comedy, which is not a mere accumulation of comic techniques. Almost every play of our frivolous era sports some comic element, so broad is our ticklish spectrum. But comedy: what is that? Our two main traditions derive from classical and medieval periods: I) classical - ridendo castigat mores, with the implication that the mores are correctable through ridicule; 2) medieval - a piece with a happy ending. Many subsequent critics blend the two, requiring that a play be funny and happy. I accept the double bind. To be a comedy, a modern play should be funny and should end happily. But "funny" and "happy" are loaded words. As funny, I therefore propose a supple embrace of all kinds of humor, especially accommodating the festive spirit that has been brilliantly studied by Bakhtine, Barber, Whitman. As happy, I am not aware of anyone who quite shares what I propose - an ending that conforms to the putative audience's sense of propriety. Thus, melodrama can he comedy if the handsome hero is united with the imperiled heroine through the machinations of a comic character, as in Boucicaulfs Shaughraun. Satire, too, is comedy, for the "right" audience appreciates the punishment of Volpone and Tartuffe. Sentimental comedy, in contrast, is mislabeled, since it is not funny; The Clandestine Marriage is more typical than She Stoops To Conquer. It is grotesque comedy that hest fits our sour half-century, but the mere presence of grotesque elements does not define a genre. If King Lear is a "comedy of the grotesque,'" we had better laugh all genre away. "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my Acquaintance in London; that a young healthy Child, well nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boiled; and, I make no doubt, that it will equally serve in a Fricasie, or Ragoust." This excerpt from Swift's Modest Proposal may well be the most grotesque sentence in all English literature, at once matchlessly horrible and 458 RUBY COHN incongruously comic. Beneath its "modest" tone, the proposal appalls, and it is the very modesty of the tone that renders the proposal bloodcurdling. The proposal pertains only to Irish infants and can therefore "incur no Danger in disobliging ENGLAND." Modem English theater delights in "disobliging England," and critic Peter Ansorge has observed that English underground theater mocks "the guardians of our society's laws and institutions: politicians are presented as clowns, policemen as role-playing thugs, priests as crooked cartoon cut-outs.'" Literally, these presentations explode into agitprop theater, but metaphorically , they also inhabit sustained drama which satirizes the middle-class sceneas English drama has done for centuries, e.g., The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Contemporary satire, however, seems occasionally to quarry Swift for outrageous detail. In monstrous contrast to Swift's patient, practical persona, however, a few socialist plays disoblige England by dramatizing deformities of English class, sex, church, country, family. Trevor Griffiths's Comedians (1975) serves me as springboard into this grotesque tone, because it spans a small comic gamut and is, if somewhat hesitantly, a comedy. At play's end, Eddie Waters, the sympathetic teacher of comedy, finds a new apt student. The Act I exposition presents the titular comedians - six Manchester working-class men who have enrolled in a practical course in stand-up comedy taught by Eddie Waters. What Waters imparts to the six men is not only timing and technique, but ethics: "a true joke, acomedian'sjoke, has to do more than release tension, it has to liberate the will and the desire, it has to change the situation. ... But when a joke bases itself upon a distortion ... we've moved away from a comic art and into the world of 'entertainment' and slick success'" (Griffiths's emphasis). That world is narrowed, in Comedians, to a single character, Bert Challenor, who is to judge the student performers at a local club. Act Il comprises comic routines, and our own reactions are colored...