Years ago, no doubt when undertaking to direct a comedy,
Curmie developed a theory that all onstage humor falls into one of four
categories. One variety is not funnier
than another; they just behave differently.
The various forms are determined by two yes/no questions: does the
character saying the line or performing the action know they’re being funny,
and do other characters onstage recognize the humor of the situation.
This schema also works for allusions, which aren’t
necessarily comic, but which function similarly to comedy in that they serve to
underscore the superiority of the audience: those who catch the reference get
to form the phrase “I see what you did there” and feel pretty pleased with
themselves.
A yes/yes comic moment, then, would be when one character
tells a joke or delivers a witty line or makes a funny face or whatever and at
least one other character laughs or otherwise acknowledges the humor. This is the most straightforward comic form.
Yes/no moments are when the other character doesn’t get the
joke, and the audience responds both to the joke itself and to the other
character’s stolidity. Audience
superiority is essential, and we experience that superiority when we separate
ourselves from the characters by understanding what they do not.
No/no comedy happens when none of the characters understand,
at least in the moment, the humor of the situation. Comedy sometimes works best when the
characters are dead serious. That
classic scene of Lucy and Ethel and the conveyor belt is a good example.
This paradigm is where we find the most sophisticated use of
allusion. An example would be the scene
in the first episode of the “Endeavour” TV series. Our hero has just been transferred to Oxford
and is looking for a place to stay. The
landlady of a rather rundown boarding house mentions that the other residents
are Mr. McCann and Mr. Goldberg.
Many, perhaps most, viewers won’t even know there was an
allusion there. Folks in Curmie’s line
of work, however, immediately recognized the names McCann and Goldberg as the
antagonists in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, which takes place in
the seedy boarding house where they’re staying.
People who get the joke get to feel superior; those who don’t won’t feel
inferior because they didn’t know there was a joke to get.
Sometimes, of course, the allusions will be understood
immediately by virtually all spectators: think of all the famous Shakespearean
lines, plot elements, character names, etc., in a film like “Shakespeare in
Love” or TV series like “Upstart Crow” or “Shakespeare and Hathaway.” It’s a variation on this theme that is the
real subject of this essay.
No/yes comedy scenes occur when a character is unaware of
the humor, but another character gets it.
Often, this other character triggers audience response. A few years ago, Curmie played the Master of
the Revels in a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the Mechanicals’ performance in Act V, it
was imperative that those characters not know they were saying double
entendres with sexual overtones. My
job, as actor, was to have my character get those unintended jokes and react,
subtly (I hope!) but clearly.
Sometimes the audience got the joke immediately. Sometimes not. If they laughed as soon as the line happened,
great. But not infrequently the laugh
came a beat late, when it took them a moment to understand the humor. To the extent that some of this late reaction
came from watching my character react, thereby tipping them off to the gag,
those late laughs were a sign I was doing my job. To some extent, the audience was reacting to
a reaction rather than to the comic moment per se.
Of course, that one-second delay made things difficult for
the mostly inexperienced actors playing the mechanicals. If there isn’t an immediate laugh, they
should move on with the next line, but that runs the risk of stepping on the
laugh. But if they wait for a laugh that
never comes, that’s even worse.
Anyway, moving on.
Let’s talk about recent events.
The U.S. Army Chorus performed at the White House Governors Ball on
February 22, an event attended by both Donald and Melania Trump. Their song of choice? “Do You Hear the People Sing.” It was, to be sure, an intriguing
selection.
Bizarrely, it appears the song is a favorite of Trump’s, dating back to the days when he was pretending to be a populist (in the worse possible sense of that term, of course). He even used it as his entrance music at a rally during the 2016 campaign. He may be sufficiently stupid or sufficiently narcissistic (or both) to miss the irony in this choice this time around.
In the aftermath of Trump’s series of authoritarian
executive orders, including giving free reign to the only person in the country
more despicable than Trump himself as head of DOGE, the firing of top military
brass (ever so coincidentally those who weren’t white men) and the installation
of a fool like Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, after that bizarre line about “long live the king,” there is a delicious sense of naughtiness to the choice of song, whether
intended or not.
It could be, in other words, a no/no rather than yes/no
phenomenon. Curmie doesn’t think so. He
rather agrees with Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), who tweeted,
“They picked Les Mis—a musical about standing up to tyranny. They protested you
at your own event and you were too stupid to get it.”
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter much what was intended, although it
might affect the title of this piece. Gentle Reader, what happened is what happened, and we all saw what we saw and heard
what we heard. Perhaps this was a
postmodern performance, and the song was intended to catalyze meaning rather
than carry it to the audience (us, as opposed to the folks in attendance live).
Or perhaps Trump’s fondness for the song provided a level of
deniability for whoever chose to perform an anti-authoritarian anthem in front
of a plundering plutocrat: “We were told he liked that song…”
Or perhaps the newly installed head of the Kennedy Center is just a stolid vulgarian who couldn’t decipher “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
