The Last Laugh: Strange Humors of Cinema

Wellesian Laughter

31 James Morrison Wellesian Laughter Orson Welles’s laughter was one of his most distinctive features, by many reports. An interviewer for the Saturday Evening Post, visiting Welles in France in 1963 on the completion of his film version of The Trial, describes a “gust of wicked laughter shaking his Falstaffian frame” (qtd. in Macdonald 295). On the set of the “The Tonight Show” while compiling a profile of Johnny Carson, Kenneth Tynan hears “a gust of Wellesian laughter” (315) issuing from one of that program’s most frequent visitors. On the first page of her book about her father, Welles’s daughter Chris Welles Feder conjures an image of St. Nicholas when she recalls how Welles’s “button nose twitched and [his] great belly shook when he let loose with a thunderous laugh” (1). At the end of his final film appearance, in Henry Jaglom’s Someone to Love (1985), Welles is stranded onscreen, demanding that the camera be stopped; when it keeps running, Welles responds with gales of strange laughter . As Peter Conrad describes the scene, “[Welles] chortles, chuckles , laughs, guffaws, and applauds. . . . He is obliged to go on being himself. . . . Despite the pretence of mirth, his abiding self-mistrust is apparent in his sad, fearful eyes” (372). Wellesian laughter is a force of nature, in such accounts. It comes in “gusts” and evokes “thunder.” It denotes a recognition of the world’s absurdity (in its “wickedness”) and a form of revelry, a “Falstaffian” pleasure. At the same time, it connotes pathos, a loss of control (“let loose”), or decline of mastery. In its most characteristic forms, it is 32 James Morrison not only an expression of unease but the cause that unease is in others . Dwight Macdonald, for instance, citing the Saturday Evening Post piece at the beginning of his contemptuous review of The Trial, reacts with the verbal equivalent of a cringe. In his film performances, Welles’s laughter impends as an undercurrent threatening to overtake his booming, orotund voice. In Citizen Kane (1941), Welles’s first full line—“Don’t believe everything you hear on the radio”—is dispensed with a giggle, and the spontaneity of his performance is staked in large part on suddenly shifting registers of intonation, with traces of a joyless mirth shading much of his delivery. As Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil (1958), Welles’s speech is a slurry dribble that gives way on a dime to a rasping chortle or an aggressive silence, as if words were nothing but placeholders between those poles. Even as Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight (1966)—the performance that squares most readily with the recollections of Welles’s daughter—Welles marshals laughter as a principal sign of Falstaffian exuberance, but his laughter in that film is seldom without its countercurrent of distaff melancholy. Whatever else it may be, Wellesian laughter almost never stands as an expression of straightforward happiness. Subject to the rigors of theory, of course, laughter rarely does express simple happiness. The most influential accounts of laughter in the twentieth century do less to rescue it from its neo-classical associations with vulgarity than to redeem that vulgarity as a glorified reaction against the rigidity of modern officialdom. In his work on the carnivalesque energies of popular cultures, for instance, Mikhail Bakhtin notes that laughter troubles ordinary hierarchies of high and low even in its basic physical manifestations, issuing from the gut through the mouth. Traversing these bodily dimensions, laughter emerges, in turn, as a valuable weapon to dissolve social boundaries and degrade the power structures that derive from arbitrary divisions. In Bakhtin’s work, the crowd joined in laughter produces an anarchic charge that works against the authority of imposed order. One might expect Elias Canetti to follow this line of thinking in his monumental study Crowds and Power (1960), because like Bakhtin—but by contrast to earlier theorists of crowds from Thomas Carlyle to Gustave LeBon and Sigmund Freud—Canetti views the crowd impulse as an alternative to pathologies of power. Yet he treats laughter not as a shared response that bonds the group but as a primal vestige by which one individual will Wellesian Laughter 33 asserts its superiority to another. For Canetti, laughter is not an assault on power but a symptom of it, a reflex of the individual who derides others rather than entering into the potential equality of the crowd. Bakhtin is hardly alone...