Comedy since the Absurd

Comedy since the Absurd HERBERT BLAV We need to start, in approaching the subject of comedy today, by parsing out the comedy from the laughter. We can hardly think of comedy without laughter, but we have learned to think oflaughter without comedy. There is also the problem of identifying the subject of comedy which, while it may seem to bring them together like the dancer and the dance, separates the laugher from the laugh. There is the subject you may remember and never can forget, the gravity of the laughing matter. Since the incursion of the Absurd upon a guilty and precarious stage, that subject has been looked upon as inseparable from the subject of language, which seems to have no gravity at all, essentially comic, words flying up, the body remaining below, growing more and more suspicious of the nature of language. If man is the animal who laughs, it appears that he laughs through language which, according to recent theorists on the agencies and illusions ofpower, has been making him all the more laughable by making him more powerless as it deconstructs the idea of man. If we think of the deconstruction as subversive and not another agency of power, we arrive at that comic impasse of the postmodern which, replacing the art of the possible with the strategies of the polymorphous, the apotheosis of play, seems to be to play it for laughs: "Spit out yer teeth. Ear pulls. Nose pulls. Pull out a booger. Slow scratches from sboulder to belly. Hitch up yer shirt. Sex, man. Tighten yer ass. Tighten one cheek and loosen the other. Playoff yer thighs to yer calves. Get it all talkin' a language..., By itself, the passage is a decoy. I want to use it as a touchstone, ignoring where it came from, to which I'll return, more or less theoretically, in somewhat comic fashion, roundabout. It might be, however, from a hip rendition of that skinnier Falstaff, Ruzzante returned from the wars, another braggart soldier showing off his prowess. Whoever he is, somebody else is being worked over. And he seems to be the conventional object of comedy, a HERBERT BLAU person becoming a thing, the spitting image of everything anal, puppetlike, uptight, automatic, and genitally fixed which, in a quick release of contradictions , contradicted, produces a belly laugh from a double bind. The sequence contains glimpses, as if through the swinging door of the staccato words, of various things we tend to find comic in whatever period, from the animation of the words to slapstick to body humor to mixed signals to parody (say, Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, scratching slowly from shoulder to belly) to the implication at the intimidated end of the laughing matter, of hyperactive self-abuse. Why we should be laughing at that we're still not entirely sure, but if we imagine the actor, bewildered, miming the imperatives ofthe words, we see an elemental figure in one ofthe oldest comic routines where - restating Beolco and Bergson through Deleuze and Ouattari' - we find the desiring subject reduced to reflexive machine. There was lot of playing around with machines in the acting "games" of the sixties. It was usually for purposes ofparody, and the comedy at La Mama or in the campiness of the Judson Church was rarely more than that. There were also the "psychophysical exercises" with their higher motives and carnal methods, of which the ass-to-mouth resuscitation also seems a parody, the desire for the full unimpeded body of play, libidinal play, its plenitude, "a flow-producing machine" or "signifier without chains," as they say in the Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.3 With Artaud as exemplary figure, the schizziness is honorific, getting "it all talkin' a language," like the barnyard in the belly of the Mother in The Screens. While the Mother also seems to be playing games - with her trick valise and unbreakable legs, .... . Whang! Zoom! Boom! ... boom!",4 imitating lightning on the king's highway, dancing with sweat rolling down from her cheeks to her tits from her tits to her belly - they are far less frivolous garnes, onomatopoeic but also self-punitive, the ideographic documentation of something...