How to suck the joy out of comedy, 101

[Default to the negative]

This fella can give the worst of you a run for your money in over-analysis of comedy.

'It is for this reason that the film does not fall easily into either of the two categories frequently applied to films of this kind: escape or message film. This distinction, applied rigidly, separates synthetic daydreams, vehicles of refuge from everyday life, "escape," from other well-meaning products that spur us on to correct social behavior, "convey a message." But what are we to do with a scene such as the following: King Arthur encounters a rather testy young peasant whom he offends right away by taking him first for an old woman, then an old man. It rapidly turns out that this young male peasant, soon assisted by a genuine old woman, not only does not believe in the feudal system and the divine rights of kings, but is a radical activist member of an anarcho-syndicalist commune. Arthur, draped in his dignity as king, insists upon the legitimacy of his power. This leads to the following exchange:

OLD WOMAN: Well, how did you become king, then?

ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in purest shimmering samite, held Excalibur aloft from the bosom of the waters to signify that by Divine Providence. . . I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. . . that is why I am your king.

DENNIS (the peasant): Look, strange women lying on their backs in ponds handing over swords. . . that's no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

ARTHUR: Be quiet!

DENNIS: You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you.

ARTHUR: Shut up!

DENNIS: I mean, if I went round saying I was an emperor because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, people would put me away. ARTHUR: (grabbing him by the collar) Shut up, will you. Shut up!

DENNIS: Ah! Now. . . we see the violence inherent in the system.

ARTHUR: Shut up!

PEOPLE (i.e., other peasants are appearing)

DENNIS: (calling) Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help, help, I'm being repressed!

ARTHUR: (aware that people are now coming out and watching) Bloody peasant! (pushes Dennis over into mud and prepares to ride off) DENNIS: Oooooh? Did you hear that! What a give-away.

ARTHUR: Come on, Patsy. (They ride off.)

DENNIS: (in background as we PULL OUT) Did you see him repressing me, then? That's what I've been on about. . .

The exchange is comical: we have the juxtaposition of two discursive codes, the high chivalric code of Arthur, couched in almost Tennysonian diction, and the satiric translations of Arthur's code into his own, translations to which we can subscribe, at least initially, and which certainly do have the effect of debunking the high-flowered rhetoric of divine selection of royalty. The anachronistic juxtaposition of these two codes might therefore lead us to think that we have a message here. But the message is without power. Who, after all, even in England, believes today in the divine right of kings? The very anachronism of the peasant's remarks which makes them inoperative as mimetic renditions of medieval peasant revolt makes Arthur's claims, tied as they are by their diction to the universe of literature, equally inoperative. The only structural possibility which remains is for the peasant's discourse to be read as somehow being capable of contemporary application. But that possibility is foreclosed in the film by the peasant's own surrender to the transcoding game: in his drive to deride Arthur's claims he does not stop at the rhetoric of satirical political analysis but goes all the way to a rhetoric no less self-destructing because it is literary.

The slide from "farcical aquatic ceremony" to "some watery tart threw a sword at you" is still within the bounds of effective political satire. But "some moistened bint. . . lobbed a scimitar at me" is too linguistically overcoded to retain any effectiveness at all. After all, a mastery of linguistic expression capable of recognizing that in the code of scimitars women have to be called "bints" because the word is of Arabic origin is more characteristic of master rhetoricians and poets rather than political activists. And, as is always the case in such rhetorical play, the self destruction of the political efficacy is in fact signaled by the chiasmic passage of you to me in the exchange.

Finally, the peasant is shown to be engaged in a rhetorical posturing equal to Arthur's in his shrill insistence upon his own repression. Thus, there is no message here, but neither is there pure escape. For we have laughed not mindlessly; we have identified for a short moment with one character and then recognized the untenability of that position. The possibility of the prompt subsumption of this scene under escape and message expresses the untruth of both types. As Adorno observes: "The escape is full of message. And message, the opposite, looks for what it is: the wish to flee from flight. It verifies the resistance to verification". It is not because they turn their backs on washed-out existence that escape films are so repugnant, but because they do not do so energetically enough, because they themselves are just as washed out, because the satisfactions they fake coincide with the ignominy of reality, of denial.

[the]

How many stars

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(context)

North Dakota Quarterly (NDQ) is a quarterly literary journal published by the University of North Dakota.

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