The phrase "Comedy of Errors" is not only a cliche -- it's the title of one of William Shakespeare's earliest plays, one of the two I participated in with Hampshire Shakespeare Company this summer. (You still have one more chance to see it, performed by the high-school students of our Young Company, tonight in Hadley.) Why am I speaking today on the "errors of comedy"? Well, the pun appealed to me at the time I needed to declare my sermon title -- maybe that pun was my first "error of comedy". More seriously, perhaps, comedy is a significant part of my life and of the human condition. Today I want to list some ways in which comedy can be an error, or lead to error, and then take a stab a saying what comedy really means to me. And along the way I'll tell some jokes.
I call my first error of comedy "comedy as compulsion". I'm addicted to telling jokes. I collect them, I memorize them, and my brain makes associations very quickly. In conversation I hear a word, like "pirate", and my mind jumps to my favorite pirate joke. I'll jump into the conversation as soon as I can and tell that joke. I like to think I'm moderately skilled at telling jokes and thus moderately entertaining, but I know that I do this too much, to the point of being annoying and dominating conversation.
I won't tell that pirate joke now, but I'll share my favorite example of compulsive joke-telling, from the old TV series Hill Street Blues. (That's another part of the compulsion -- the urge to share pop culture references whether they're relevant or not.) Frank is a police captain, and two of his detectives have managed to recover a severed hand in time for it to be reattached. This is good, but they behaved insensitively somehow while doing it and have been called before the police chief with Frank. The absurdity of the situation, and his association with the phrase "severed hand", are too much for him and he comes out with the following, at the risk of his career:
A man's hand is cut off -- he grabs it, stops the bleeding, and runs to a surgeon. "Doctor, can you fix my hand?" "Sure, for $100,000." He can't afford that so he runs to another surgeon. "Doctor, how much to fix my hand?" "$1000." "Great!" The second surgeon sews the hand on [hold up hand], the fingers work [move fingers], he pays up and he's happy. Next day he's walking down the street and meets the first surgeon. "Hey, Doc, you wanted a hundred grand? This other guy did it for one. So I got one thing to say to you: [raise arm and grab it at wrist for Italian "up yours" gesture, watch now-detached hand as it flies off]"
(Of course, Hill Street Blues being what it was, for the rest of the episode you saw other characters telling this joke to one another in the background.)
My second error of comedy is "comedy as social offense". Don Imus is only the most recent public figure to damage his career with an inappropriate joke -- he seemed to have been surprised at the outcry when he referred to the Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos", since he hadn't used any forbidden words and it was the sort of thing he says all the time. But for some reason that particular remark so exemplified an attitude toward high-achieving black women, not to mention toward women in general and black people in general, that his employers decided he was no longer useful to them.
I like some "ethnic jokes" in the abstract, just as wordplay or wit. ("Why was Jesus born in Palestine instead of in Connecticut?" "Because they couldn't find three wise men and a virgin in Connecticut.") The offense comes, I think, in using the joke as a tool of oppression, if you'll forgive the political language. Oppressors insult the oppressed, rather than the people of Connecticut, because they can't fight back and telling the joke confirms that they can't fight back. Don Imus found out that some of them were not as helpless as he thought.
I'd like to share a couple of jokes with you about our most famous minority in Northampton, I don't find either one offensive, and I hope you don't either. The first is well-known: "What does a lesbian bring to a second date?" "A U-Haul." The second I've taken from this fine book Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein:
An old cowboy goes into a bar and orders a drink. As he sits there sipping his whiskey, a young lady sits down next to him. She turns to the cowboy and asks him, "Are you a real cowboy?"
He replies, "Well, I've spent my whole life on the ranch, herding horses, mending fences, and branding cattle, so I guess I am."
She says, "I'm a lesbian. I spend my whole day thinking about women. As soon as I get up in the morning, I think about women. When I shower or watch TV, everything seems to make me think of women."
A little while later, a couple sits down next to the old cowboy and asks him, "Are you a real cowboy?"
He replies, "I always thought I was, but I just found out I'm a lesbian."
So the young lesbian is just a bystander in this joke -- somehow "straight person" isn't the right word -- what's funny is that the cowboy is too naive to know what a lesbian is. What appeals to Cathcart and Klein is the error in logic that he makes in interpreting what the lesbian says. Is this joke offensive? Some people will be offended, but almost by definition those are the people who are offended by the very existence of lesbians, or consider their existence to be something to be kept from children. (Hence the inane controversies over Buster the Bunny and Heather Has Two Mommies.) The other joke plays on a stereotype, lesbians' alleged tendency to rush into commitments, but it's not a particularly demeaning stereotype and furthermore it's one that treats lesbians as people rather than as abstractions.
My third error of comedy is "comedy as aggression". I love Monty Python's Argument Clinic, and I'll argue that it's a significant work of art. I can use it to explain a point of logic to my college students -- the need to separate the language you use to talk about a phenomenon (the "metalanguage") from the language of a phenomenon itself (the "object language"). The customer is paying the argument man to argue with him, so the argument man disputes every statement he makes. But this includes disputing statements _about_ the argument, such as whether the customer has paid, which eventually makes the argument impossible. The argument man is playing the game that Bill Watterson named "Calvinball", where any player can modify the rules at any time, but the customer is expecting the rules to persist. Comparisons to the current administration's concept of constitutional law are left to you.
But as interesting as the logic is, what is happening in the argument clinic is that the poor customer is being cruelly victimized. John Cleese, the original argument man, created an entire television special called How to Irritate People -- most of his most famous Monty Python sketches involved him torturing Michael Palin or vice versa. Much of comedy involves hurting people -- insulting them, tricking them, shoving pies in their faces. Perhaps the biggest laughs in A Comedy of Errors come when one of the two twin servants, honestly trying to do his job, gets beaten by his master (or his master's twin) because the confusion of identities leads the master to think that he has been derelict in his duty.
Which brings us to Valentine Michael Smith's epiphany in the zoo. Humans do mean and cruel and inexplicable things to each other -- that's the way it is -- and they laugh because it hurts so much. Mike, unlike most of us, is in a position to do something about it -- he starts a religion whereby he can share his Martian wisdom and teach people how to "grok" each other and the world. The parallels to Jesus are obvious, especially when Mike dies and is literally eaten by his followers. But the closer parallel to me seems to be with the Buddha, who achieved enlightenment in an instant but stayed on earth to help others achieve it and end their suffering by becoming awake.
Does life consist only of suffering? I've led what I think is a happy life -- relative comfort and success, a wonderful wife and daughter, a number of supportive communities like this one -- so I'm not the one to say much about suffering. I've not yet suffered great loss among the people in my life. But if you've been at the Joys and Concerns part of recent services, you might know that our family has been unlucky recently in the matter of pets -- we've lost two cats to cars and one dog to cancer in the last four months. I won't put those losses up against others' far greater losses, but they hurt.
When we had our dog Ebony put to sleep, I had a Shakespeare rehearsal a half-hour later. As I drove to Hadley, my joke compulsion kicked in:
One old Maine man says to another, "I had to shoot my dog this week."
"Was he mad?"
"Well, he weren't too damned _pleased_..."
I laughed, but I still missed my dog. A couple of weeks later, when I returned from a performance to have Jessica tell me that our cat Aida had been killed, another joke jumped to my mind:
A drill sergeant is informed that Private Johnson's mother has died. He struggles to find a way to break the news. Finally he calls all his men together. "All right, I want every man whose mother is still alive to drop and give me fifty pushups. Not you, Johnson!"
I laughed again, and this time I think there was compassion behind it along with pain -- I felt for Jessica's pain in having to break the news to me, and loved her for it. But I still missed my cat.
There was a moment, though, just as I got to rehearsal from the vet's office, where something came together. I was listening to Ben Lee's album Awake Is the New Sleep and got to these words in the song "Whatever It Is".
And you're dreaming and you're dreaming and you're dreaming
I turn to you and say
Awake is the new sleep
Awake is the new sleep
So wake up and do it, whatever it is
Just do it, whatever it is
The Australian singer Ben Lee is a student of Taoism, a philosophy I've never studied in any detail but one that says a lot to me. You may remember the wandering martial artist Kwang-Chai Caine in the TV series Kung Fu -- he was a Taoist. The Tao is the fundamental nature of the universe -- it is whatever it is. The basic behavioral principle of Taoism is called "wu-wei", which can be translated as "non-action" but also as "acting without action" or perhaps even "just doing it, whatever it is". Taoists like contradictions -- they seem to have more or less invented the yin/yang symbol, and their founder Lao-Tse is credited with today's meditation about what is there and what is not there.
Of course it matters what you do -- deciding to just do it is no substitute for ethics, a purpose in life, compassion, and all that. I see "just doing it" and "waking up" as an attitude rather than a specific prescription. To be awake is to be so fully yourself that when you just do it, what you just do is the right thing. You are a full participant in your own life. It's an ideal, and one that I frequently fall short of.
What does this have to do with comedy? I think that to laugh at the world is an important way to appreciate the world as it is, in its beauty, its complexity, and its absurdity. Appreciating the world as it is, even accepting it as it is, does not mean being passive. Some of the funniest people in American public life today are political activists of different sorts. There's Al Franken, a comedy writer and radio performer who has become a serious Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. There's Jon Stewart, the leading name in fake news. He's an activist too, though his cause isn't liberalism -- it's media literacy. Laughing at the mainstream media is a way of fully understanding it, and Stewart's regular viewers understand a lot more than viewers of Fox or CNN.
Comedy has its risk of error -- of compulsion, of offense, of aggression. But in its own way, how you laugh and what you laugh it is serious business.
Last modified 18 August 2007