On the Comic Spirit

Not so long ago the author of what was counted the wittiest of recent comedies produced another comedy, which was received with booing j and even, among those who would hardly descend to booing, received with boredom. As I have never seen either the play called a success or the play called a failure, I am naturally not going to pronounce on the merits of the playwright. But the contrast suggests certain considerations about the position of modern comedy which may do something to solve the riddle. Everybody agrees that the comedies in question are what is called "modern" 5 which seems to mean that they are comedies about cocktails and artificial complexions and people who walk about in a languid manner, when they are supposed to be taking part in a wild dance of liberty and the joy of life. In the recent case some apparently felt that the appearance of a film hero in blue pyjamas was a little absurd. To some of us, I grieve to say, the appearance of a film hero is always absurd, even when the film has wholly discoloured his sleeping-suit. But even to these too sensitive souls the hero is only felt to be absurd because he is supposed to be heroic. And that involves a truth which may have something to do with the reaction against this comedy. It might be stated by saying that, where there is flippancy, there cannot be irony.

It is obvious on the surface that all fun depends on some sort of solemnity. The Bishop of Rumti-foo is a funny figure because the Bishop of Rome is a serious figure. A horrible thought crosses my mind, at this moment, that perhaps there are some in the new world who know nothing of the Bishop of Rumti-foo and his missionary efforts j who may even look him up in a clerical directory or consult the atlas for the discovery of his diocese. I do not know how many people now read the Bab Ballads; but those who do will find many inventions much more amusing than any of the cocktail comedies. To those who have ever known the work, it may possibly recall the particular figure, if I say that the Bishop of Rumti-foo had another link of association with the Bishop of Rome. His name was Peter. He preached to the cannibals of Rumti-foo and persuaded them to wear clothes 5 generally to wear his own cast clothes 3 so that each of those wild barbarians presented the appearance of an imperfectly or hastily attired Anglican bishop. But his most famous exploit was learning to dance; not at all in a languid modern manner, but in a wild and fantastic manner, to amuse the islanders of Rumti-foo. And this alone will serve to illustrate the contrast needed for comedy. It seemed very funny in the Bab Ballads that a bishop should fling himself about into wild attitudes like an acrobat 5 or indeed that a bishop should dance at all. But I imagine that there were high priests of old hieratic cults who really did dance at high solemnities, as David danced before the Ark. Those people did not think there was anything funny about a high priest dancing 3 because a high priest was simply a man who danced. And just as there is no fun in it when everything is serious, so there is no fun in it when everything is funny. A man who thinks the high priests of Rome and Rumti-foo equally absurd and antiquated, will not see any difference between them and the wild priest of the primitive cult 5 or between the dancing dervish and the dancing David. Some regard ecclesiastical emblems, last lumber of an abandoned barbarism, as things to be dismissed as grotesque and meaningless. And they would see very little difference between the insignia of the Bishop of Rumti-foo and the fetishes or totems of the tribe of savages among whom that excellent missionary discharged his mission. Suppose that we have really agreed to class clericalism with cannibalism. It will then be no longer possible to make fun of a bishop by imagining him clad (or unclad) like a cannibal. It will be impossible to make any more comic contrast than we should feel between the ways of the Sandwich Islanders and those of the Solomon Islanders. There will be no more comedy in the confusion than there would be in the confusion between one set of savages who baked their missionaries and another set of savages who boiled them. Where both are equally grotesque objects, there is no effect of the grotesque. There must be something serious that is respected, even in order that it may be satirized. There may be something amusing in a bishop's gaiters 3 but only because they are a bishop's. Take somebody who has never heard of a bishop and show him over a huge emporium which sells nothing but gaiters, and it is doubtful whether even the ten-thousandth gaiter which he takes up to gaze at will of itself move him to peals of mirth. Modern comedy seems to be collecting gaiters and to have somehow mislaid the bishop and consequently missed the joke.

Now, when we talk of the artificial and superficial character of the old comedies, we do not mean exactly the same thing. The comedies of Congreve or Sheridan did not, for the moment, take the world seriously. But they did not describe a world in which nobody took anything seriously. The respectable things were there, if only to be treated with disrespect. Moreover, the respectable things were respected things. There were a hundred indications that the things being mocked were things that were generally and normally revered. A dialogue of Congreve may be flippant, in the sense that he keeps entirely on the surface. But he does not imply that there is no solid ground under the surface. The old comedy is like a scene of people dancing a minuet on a very polished floor 3 but it is a polished oak floor. The new comedy is like a scene of people dancing the Charleston on a sheet of ice — of very thin ice. Both floors are very smooth j both floors are very slippery j on both floors undignified accidents occur from time to time. But we know that the Congreve character will not sink through the floor j that the earth will not open and swallow him; that he will not fall with a crash into the wine-cellar and destroy dozens of fine old port. In the other case we feel that the whole thing may dissolve 5 and there is nothing under that hard and glittering ice except watery sometimes, I fear, rather dirty water. But, anyhow, the old scoffer was dancing on something solid, even if he was dancing on his mother's grave. And the quaint old custom of paying some respect to graves, and even to mothers, was necessary to the grotesque effect even of that dance of death. But the comedy of ice melts very easily into mere colourless watery and the mockers of everything are really mockers of nothing. Unstable as water, they shall not excel.

For in a world where ever>thing is ridiculous, nothing can be ridiculed. You cannot unmask a mask J when it is admittedly as hollow as a mask.

You cannot turn a thing upside down, if there is no theory about when it is right way up. If life is really so formless that you cannot make head or tail of it, you cannot pull its tailj and you certainly cannot make it stand on its head. Now there is a certain degree of frivolity that becomes formlessness. If the comic writer has not, at the back of his mind, either his own theory of life which he thinks right, or somebody else's theory of life which he thinks wrong, or at least some negative notion that somebody is wrong in thinking it wrong, he has really nothing to write about. He attempts to produce a sort of comedy in which everybody is indifferent to everything and to everybody else 5 but you cannot create excitement by the collision of several different boredoms. Boredom is dangerously infectious j and has a way of spreading across the footlights. The reason is that there is not in the frivolity any touch of the serious, and therefore none of the satiric. The satirist is no longer set down to make fun of a bishops he is set down all alone in the cold world to make fun of a gaiter. The old aesthetes used to explain that Art is unmoral, rather than immoral. It would be rather truer to say that Art can be immoral, but cannot be unmoral. Unmoral comedy is rapidly ceasing to be comic.