Heteroscedasticities

Monday, February 01, 2010

American humour

I'm currently reading Gormenghast, the second book of a trilogy of the same name by Mervyn Peake. Gormenghast is a castle, the home of the Earls of Groan, and so large that it is a world unto itself. The everyday life of the castle is rigorously ritualized, and this book follows the rise of Steerpike, an ambitious, Machiavellian, viciously conniving man who, by intrigue and murder, becomes the Master of Ritual. The story itself is very dark - Steerpike plots the death or subjugation of almost everything in his path - and by the end of the book, nothing beautiful has been left untouched. My principal feeling after the last hundred pages, in which Steerpike, having been discredited, found guilty of murder, and outlawed, is killed by Titus, was one of relief - relief that the tension that had built up over the last hundred pages was resolved - rather than joy in the ending. It was like an ordinary sunny day after prolonged rain: a fitting metaphor, because the setting of the denouement of Gormenghast is a storm that floods the castle, and with the death of Steerpike the rain stops.

A sub-plot follows the Professors, who are in charge of the education of the children who grow up within the castle walls, including Titus, the seventy-seventh Earl. These are men who are made out to have failed at living, and for each of whom the job before them is merely a way to pass the time while waiting out their lives. Certainly not the least impotent of the lot is the new headmaster, Bellgrove.

Within the castle also lives a doctor, Prunesquallor, and his sister Irma. Irma is a singularly unattractive middle-aged spinster, with a pointed nose, weak eyes, and a manner that would try the patience of a saint. She conceives a plan to find herself a husband: hold a soirée, inviting all the Professors (the capitalization is Peake's) and pick out one to marry.

When she sees Bellgrove, she is quite overcome. For all his deficiencies, Bellgrove is a handsome, distinguished man, so long as he remembers to not open his mouth and show his rotting teeth. Bellgrove is similarly overcome, not having held the hand of a woman in a month of Tuesdays, and there is a chapter in which we follow them in their wanderings about the garden in the moonlight. It is a romance of the weak, where the flaws in each party are starkly clear, and where we know that the emotion they think they feel is only in their minds, produced by the novelty of it all. It would be better, even, if they "mistake instinct for emotion", as Pratchett says, but there is no feeling there, just empty dreams of passion. It is a terrible thing to read - the pathos is almost unbearable. More so because you recognize in your own past the sorrow of their unknowing - every girl you've thought you've had feelings for which subsequently turned out to be only the desire to have feelings.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I looked up the book on Amazon, and saw that a reviewer had written about how amusing the courtship of Irma Prunesquallor was, and how grateful he was for this comic relief in an otherwise tense book. But I was only startled for a moment, because I have had frequent cause to remark on what seems to be an American attitude to humour: the ability to laugh at the absolute misery of your fellow man.

Before you think I am unjustifiably using a single example - and one whose American provenance has not even been established - to make a general point, I should reiterate that this cavalier treatment of Irma Prunesquallor and Bellgrove only brought the thought to the surface of my mind. There are other examples whose antecedents are indisputable.

The first is The Life Acquatic with Steve Zissou, a movie with Bill Murray and Owen Wilson I watched a long time ago. Owen Wilson is the failure son of Bill Murray, who disappoints him at every opportunity. While I was weeping silently in my seat at the utter humiliation and desperation that Bill Murray's character felt, all around me the audience was rolling in the aisles, going into hysterics at each new stab into Bill Murray's heart.

But a better example is Charlie Chaplin. I've only seen him as an icon of funniness because that was what I was told, not because I'd watched the movies and seen what they were actually like. When I finally did watch one, it was not funny in the slightest bit. Not. The. Slightest. Bit.

Finally, there's every movie that Ben Stiller ever made. Each of them has him suffering ignominies that would make me curl up and die. People actually laugh at him while he suffers, and I am horrified by it.

Is there an alternative view of humour? Is there humour which does not require someone to be pilloried to make me feel good? I can delight in clever puns, which, even if they are meant as put-downs by the person who says them, are recognized as such and dismissed as unimportant by the victim. Jokes in which the victim does not realize that he is being made fun of are more painful than anything. Self-deprecating humour is the best, perhaps. Herriot's stories are funny and devoid of venom, because more often than not he is the victim of circumstance - there is no malevolent force or person that makes him suffer. And his cheerful optimism and the constant recognition of how wonderful his life is helps a great deal. The humiliation or ridiculousness of the victim, so essential a component of American humour, is entirely missing.

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