I. The Metaphor

Metaphor and drama share an essence: transformation. A metaphor carries one world of meaning to another, enlarging what it comes to by what it brings along with it. What is at stake is a meaning, which is transformed to something quite beyond its original state.

Drama takes an action done by characters, and transforms it from the mundane to the meaningful, carrying meaning from the realm of its factuality to wider worlds. Seen this way, drama transforms all action to the act of understanding, of putting some sort of prop under mere fact, of supplying--by some combination of rational, imagistic, associative, and poetic means--context, explanation, cause, meaning, analogy, connection, relation.

The fact of death, transported by metaphor in one ancient vision of the world, sees death not just as the opposite and terminus of life, but also as order turned to disorder, ambition turned to destruction, strength and wisdom turned to weakness and foolishness. And this in turn is transported into (that is, becomes a metaphor for) a world where sudden changes of fate, mediated by the gods, are the barometers of wisdom. This is the world of tragedy, in which our most luminous visions and most courageous efforts to understand, to preserve, and to improve may be reversed into chaos, destruction and death. The irony could not be more profound or more total. A world where this can happen is a tragic world, where our fates are an agonizing mystery, death is imminent, violence is capricious, maiming, and deadly, striving can be dangerous, and pain is permanent.

Similarly, imagine a domestic world, concerned only with patching up its problems and moving on with life. Surviving, getting the best of the person next to you in a competition for food, money, or a mate, is transported to (becomes a metaphor for) getting ahead in society, wanting to learn from mistakes, overcome problems, and promote harmony in the widest possible circle. This, in turn, is transported into (becomes a metaphor for), a world where these are the sole concerns—where peace reigns and lives continually improve, uninterrupted and unaffected by the sober uncertainties and heavy burdens of the tragic universe.

[page 100] In comedy, a world where the essential action is domestic, there is a moving together, a healing, a joining of the once separated couple who are to create the new generation and continue the flow of life. The ironies of this world are those of ignorances, stupidities, foibles exposed, and dignities deflated. In this world, the defective and the guilty are not dangerous or deadly, but merely ridiculous. They can recover and learn, and re-integrate into the community. This world is protected from violence. If violence occurs, it is not serious (a slap, a punch, a fall) and the wounds heal. Even bruised egos heal and the characters learn what they need to learn to change their ways and get along.

Comedy is healing, accommodating and including, while tragedy is explosive, destroying families and even civilizations for the sake of enlarging vision. That is, if the comic vision is the building or repair of a community, affirming domestic custom and the wisdom of social virtue, the tragic vision affirms only that we can strive to understand, strive to choose wisely. This latter vision is achieved ironically, in an extreme encounter with limits. We learn how large our deeds, human understanding, ambition and striving can be by watching those much larger than ourselves exceed their limits and get crushed.

II. The Comic Mirror

Within this tragic vision, there is an implied comic mirror, lurking on the other side of the deepest ironies. This comes out most eloquently in farce. Farce approaches tragic vision by being the opposite of realism, eschewing the mere factuality of things, and the flat ironies that accompany them. In realism, things are what they are, and only what they are. Whatever implication or meaning we may assign to them has a tendency to collapse, to be patently ironical (it is what it is but nothing more) in a world of mere factness.(1)

In farce, however, fact functions in a world wildly distorted, working by a logic which may be clear, but which is wacky and impossible. "Is man no more than this?" Lear asks. If man is but a "bare, forked animal," he is a lot less than we took him for. This is, or can be, deeply ridiculous, deeply amusing. When Laurel and Hardy's determined politeness and civil [page 101] good manners turn suddenly to infantile rage, causing them to wreak methodical destruction, piece by piece, on whatever object attaches to the person they are angry at (automobile,(2) grocery shop,(3) house(4)), the destruction is funny. In defense of their dignity and respectability, they tear apart something valuable which belongs to whoever impugns that dignity, like a child tearing apart another child's teddy bear. And the offending party retaliates, creating new destruction and new humiliation. With each round of the battle, the destruction, and the fun, escalate.

Looked at literally, this is pathological. Laurel and Hardy, and whomever they are fighting with, are committing felonies. Looked at metaphorically, the violence is transported to a world in which the threat of violence and destruction is displaced into something far less dangerous and more familiar. It is like our primal response as babies to the game of peek-a-boo. In the first instant, the emergence of a face from a hidden place is frightening. But an instant later, it is recognized--that's Mommy or Daddy or Uncle Harry!--and the fear is replaced by recognition and vented by laughter. The whole process is so much fun that, as we all know, if the child is young enough it can be repeated almost endlessly. Thus in farce, the metaphor allows us to recognize that this is, after all, only dignity and property that are being destroyed, not lives and civilizations. While the world is being torn apart, in small, it is being affirmed in large. We can feel that momentary twinge of horror--he's tearing the walls of that house down!--then laugh and indulge ourselves in the infantile fantasy without ruining the larger world of meaning we think we see and persistently count on being there. And in fact, the ritual of farce is in part a ritual invocation of that larger world, an implicated order, held in abeyance, banned for the evening by agreement, vital by virtue of its absence. It may be possible to claim that the farce is the sacrifice to the tragedy, as if by performing the farce, by admitting this level of fabulous destruction and disorder, we stave off the necessity of the tragedy.

[page 102] The cruelty of lots of comedy counts on this. The cruelty is funny because it assures us that even if we cross the line, even if our violence somehow becomes heinous, even if we might perpetrate a holocaust (or fail to stop one), the meaning revealed by the consequent ironies will not fail us, as bitter as it may be. This is not the homey comfort of some interpretations of savior religions, but the grit of Greek irony, filtered through the vision of Lear--the world may share nothing of our values and visions, and may trample us; but we can see that, can understand it, can appreciate the gap between the importance we think we have and the triviality or inconsequence that attaches to even to the largest of our accomplishments, failures, or visions. "As flies to wonton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport." In some perspective, no matter what the horror, we are comic, ridiculous. This is the vision of the abyss, the darkness made visible by tragedy, but made bearable, brought back to human dimension by comedy, especially by violent comedy. We come together in the recognition of the larger, more frightening world, through the much smaller domestic world of houses, cars, slapsticks, and rolling pins.

Let me offer two illustrations. The first is from one of Laurel and Hardy's films, Tit for Tat,(5) in which they are just setting up an electrical appliance shop and run into trouble with the grocer next door. The grocer thinks, erroneously, that Ollie has made advances on his wife. He marches into their store, insults them and breaks something. "Take that." Then, with an harumph, he leaves. Laurel and Hardy go to his shop and retaliate, in turn, by breaking something there. Then the war escalates, with the grocer destroying more and valuable items in the electrical shop and Laurel and Hardy doing the same in the grocery, finally pushing the grocer into a basket of eggs and dumping another basket-full over his head.

But the kicker is that every time Laurel and Hardy decide to retaliate for the grocer's latest raid, and leave their shop to invade his, an anonymous man in a double-breasted suit and fedora enters their shop and steals something from it. Each time, when Laurel and Hardy return to their shop, they encounter him leaving, appliances in hand. Unfailingly, he greets them politely, and they unfailingly return the greeting, never taking notice of the fact that he is carrying items out of their store. Finally, the man returns with a large truck and completely empties the store! While the form of this sequence is the old reliable running gag, the [page 103] metaphorical effect is horrifying. It is as if the universe had it in for our heroes. Just when they are down and under attack, everything is taken from them! Why isn't this devastating? I suspect it is for the same reason that in cartoons, when a character is ironed flat by a steamroller, he always re-inflates to chase again. In this farcical word, no loss is permanent. Healing is magical, and our dignified gents will be back again soon to do battle with the next assault on their pretentious dignities. This whole process is frightening. This world is nasty and vindictive and destructive. But it's frightening in the same way peek-a-boo is frightening. For a moment, deep down, it might look like tragedy, but we quickly recognize our old friend, farce. The sacrifice is offered, made, and accepted.

The second illustration is from Charlie Chaplin. Michael Wood, reviewing books by Joyce Milton and Kenneth S. Lynn on the life and work of Chaplin, repeats Milton's quotation from Chaplin about his theory of comedy: "An idea going in one direction meets another idea suddenly....You shriek."(6) Chaplin illustrates his theory by describing himself as the tramp, dignified and serious, approaching an easy chair, spreading his coat-tails with an elegant gesture, and sitting on a cat. "Nothing funny about it, really," says Chaplin, "especially if you consider the feelings of the cat. But you laugh." And Wood recalls Chaplin as Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator, playing both Hynkel, the ranting Hitler parody, and the tramp--this time a Jewish barber--who, when he gets his chance to speak about fighting for democracy, starts modestly, but gets swept away by his enthusiasm and also ends up in a rant. Says Wood, "Ranting is ranting....An idea going in one direction meets another idea, and Chaplin plays both ideas, [making] the meeting ground...his [own] face."(7) We laugh, but it hurts to remember who Hynkel really stands for, and the torture and genocide of the Nazi era, just as it hurts to think about the feelings of the cat, or the feelings of the poor sap who had that basket of eggs dumped on him, or his house torn down, board by board.(8) Laughing at destruction is the sacrifice to the God of Fear. Wood ends his article this way: "Chaplin's movies, and indeed his life, remind us of all the tramps and others who don't make it to Easy Street, who get to dress up only as themselves, and whose roles do become destinies, because [page 104] the play they are in is endless and all there is."(9) Thus the metaphor of farce reminds us of the real circumstance it distorts. It hurts to think of the ironies of ordinary life and hopelessness many of us face. But whether it is violent destruction or entropic decay, it is precisely the comedian's art to release the laughter, to make us laugh anyway, to help us rise above the seriousness of it all and see it as ridiculous. When we agree to watch, we have sealed the bargain with the sacrificial victim. When we laugh, the sacrifice has been accepted.

III. The Ritual Dance of Offer and Sacrifice

In David Mamet's Oleanna we can see tragedy and comedy doing this same intimate, mirrored dance of offer and sacrifice.(10) Mamet's play is particularly interesting in this context because it begins as a relentlessly domestic problem. There is a dispute between a teacher and a student, and an effort made to heal it. But the teacher, John, is often condescending, and obtuse. For a teacher, he is a remarkably poor listener, arrogant and self-absorbed. The student, Carol, is confined by a kind of learning disability (or developmental stage) that allows her to understand only formulaic, true-or-false answers to questions and explicit instructions about what to do next. The result is that when she asks her very literal questions, John's [page 105] misplaced attempts to reason with her become lectures, ever more one-sided, more convoluted, and more impossible to understand. She becomes more confused and desperate, since she understands nothing of his meanderings, asides, footnotes, allusions, elucidations, and explanations. He, blindly believing that more explanation will cure the situation, launches into one line after another of critical exposition, term definition, issue discussion, and even personal anecdote about his own life, past and present. He vainly believes, in the name of patient pedagogy and reason, that this will illustrate the clear truth, produce mutual understanding, and solve the problem.