The Incoherent Self in Contemporary Comedy

The Incoherent Self in Contemporary Comedy MATHEW WINSTON I Through the many changes in sensibility, culture, and literary practice during. the past two thousand years, comedy has normally been inhabited by low characters, some clever and some foolish, who move through various confusions to a happy ending, often in marriage and a communal feast of social reconciliation and self-affirmation. Past societies found these characters "low" because they were not the gods, monarchs, and noble warriors of tragedy, and some of the prejudice that equates socio-economic class with status in the presumed hierarchy of nature still lingers. Beyond that, comic characters are low because they lack spiritual aspiration and are concerned with their material well-being, with cash, comfort, food, and sex. They are also low in their indecorous behavior, and perhaps in so far as they entertain us by their wit or folly rather than enlighten us by their wisdom or ennoble us by their grandeur. But however "low" they may be, comic characters repeatedly assert their right to be happy and to impose themselves on the world around them. l Characters of this sort, the staples of New Comedy, still abound in the commercial theater, in films, and in situation comedies on television. But the case is different in the comedy that is distinctively of our time: in drama, the theater of the absurd and its offshoots; and in fiction, the corresponding manifestations of "black humor.,,2 This comedy follows the prescription of Nicholas d'Eu in Eugene Ionesco's Victims of Duty: "We'll get rid of the principle of identity and unity of character ... Personality doesn't exist ... Within us there are only forces that are either contradictory or not contradictory .,,3 In Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, when Rosencrantz shouts in desperation "WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?" his companion's reply is the exclamation, "Rhetoric!,,4 Questions of identity are necessarily rhetorical because contemporary comedy posits no fixity to The Incoherent Self in Contemporary Comedy existence and no core to human identity. This unusual view of the self, or lack ofa self, is the key to understanding these characters, although the door it opens leads to several corridors. Contemporary comic characters resemble theirprototypes in that they tend to be ignoble wretches with petty grievances, limited responses, and little if any psychological depth. Traditionally, such a character would be either the exception in a society that is otherwise healthy and functioning, if temporarily imbalanced, or a minor figure whose foibles and mannerisms serve as a butt for laughter. The variant ofcomedy that has emerged since the Second World War, however, frequently dispenses with all other kinds of character. Without the contrast of "normal" characters, we cannot judge anyone abnormal; without a fIrm center, we cannot recognize eccentricity; and without knowing the direction a character ought to follow, we cannot consider him or her an aberration who has strayed awayfrom the right path. Historically, comic characters have been presented with the flaws "typical" of their class, sex, and generation, as perceived by societies that had explicit expectations about what behavior was appropriate for the members of each group. In contemporary comedy, however, the characters more often represent all humanity than they typify a specific social segment. As a result, they cannot be transformed because there are no alternatives for them. They are like Didi and Gogo in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot: "At this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.,,5 Such a presentation ofthe comic protagonist as a modem Everyman is in keeping with the traditional presence in comedy ofgeneralized types and with its focus on the reductive elements ofhuman behavior. It is in our shared bodily needs - to eat, excrete, and sleep - that we are least distinguishable from one another and that ourclaims to distinctive individuality or to spiritual superiority are most subject to deflation. The fulfillment of our sexual needs falls in the same category; copulation is satisfying but potentially funny. As W.H. Auden points out, "sexual desire, because of its impersonal and unchanging character, is a comic contradiction. The relation between every pair of lovers is...