What a Fuckin’ Comedy [1]
December 2004

Something happened, around 1970 (give or take a decade or two). Basically, it was the end of the world... In the culture and society of western civilization, something immeasurably large came to an end, and something else came about. Call it the end of linear history, call it a Foucauldian shift, call it whatever you want. This is by no means a new idea: it has been expressed, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, sometimes “accidentally,” in many formats, and in many fields (it is far beyond the scope of this essay to sort through those cases). What it actually means, and whether we should even go around saying that it really happened, will be perpetually up for debate, forever elusive – but this status, this kind of anti-resolution to a problem, is perhaps the defining characteristic of that “something else” which has (perhaps) come about. The question is, how to navigate this situation. With no solid ground, where do you stand? Even with all that has been written or said or made on this subject, this is still the question. This is due, in part, to the separation between the theorists, who spend all day thinking about this, and ordinary people, who understand it, probably better, but have scarcely ever given a conscious thought to explaining it. What could serve as a common ground, a connection? It seems that a very good candidate would be film.

Film can be addressed by both sides. Mass popularity and celebrity are integral to the medium. Everyone goes to the movies. We all want to say whether movies are good or not good. But most important is the simple fact that film is actually a part of the fabric of everyday culture, more so than literature, much more so than contemporary art; and it’s a particular kind of part, which lends itself more to reflection than with music, architecture, fashion, graphic design, industrial and automotive design, or any other popular form of culture. People – ordinary people – are well aware that movies say things about life. How could this not be the case? Movies are full of characters doing things, saying things, feeling things... There are a few direct ways in which film does address large cultural issues, which anyone who sees the films will understand (among numerous others, Almost Famous is exactly about this shift, in the early 1970’s, in the field of music; Boogie Nights deals with later stages of it, in the early 1980’s in the field of porn movies), but there are also a few potential ways in which film could do more.

To begin to get at this, let’s take an indirect example - an artifact – from a time which is decidedly before this shift... something which was popular, well-received, and well-connected to its time, through the actors, director, and/or some other factors. Howard Hawkes’ film Monkey Business, from 1952 would certainly work, though it’s important to note that a vast number of others would too. Howard Hawkes was simultaneously an innovative, creative, talented director (auteur, even), and a thoroughly mainstream director. His grand narratives in the mid-twentieth century included many of the most notable dramas, westerns, and comedies of the time. Monkey Business is of course a comedy. It was also a vehicle for Cary Grant, who was one of the biggest stars of that era; a large part of its audience was surely there “to see a Cary Grant movie.” It also stars Ginger Rogers, a familiar face, albeit one whose fame was fading, and Marilyn Monroe, who in retrospect, is beyond fame, but at the time was almost unknown.

As is the case with most comedies, there is a sort of formula: something goes wrong, and wacky hi-jinks ensue. For some reason, our hero’s behavior is strange, and suddenly the scene becomes a show: out of this more or less plausible situation of a scientist – a chemist to be exact – working in his laboratory, some kind of vaudeville act erupts. Things get silly, inappropriate, wrong in some manner, and it’s all very showy. We get pies, squirting water bottles, chairs pulled out from under people, a fish down someone’s pants, reckless driving, ill-advised purchases, a bit of skirt-chasing, and plenty of exaggerated emotions and rash decisions, all suddenly directed more at the audience than into the scene.

These classic examples of comedy schtick operate in this way: a character, who has been made to be believable and likable enough so we care, ends up doing things which he shouldn’t be doing – embarrassing things, irrational things – but stops short of actually being destructive or hurtful. There’s an elevated level of discomfort, for characters in the movie, and for the empathizing audience, but it’s not so high as to actually disrupt. It’s like a vaccine: we’re given a weakened form of something bad, so we can defeat it. We laugh at it.

In Monkey Business, it’s doubly weakened though. By means of the switch, from a convincing narrative, over to a recognizable screwball-comedy routine, the audience is taken to a separate zone, barely related to the first. If the “people” we were just watching on the screen become “performers,” giving us a bit of good old slapstick, there’s scarcely anything disturbing about it. It’s very safe, despite the fact that it centers around erratic, drug-induced, inappropriate behavior.

This film is safe in more ways than that though. First of all, it has a happy ending. After Barnaby’s (Cary Grant’s) absentmindedness, after his misadventures, after Edwina’s (Ginger Rogers’s) similar childish behavior, after her call to her ex-boyfriend (a lawyer) for a divorce, everything somehow turns out just fine. There was a crisis, but it was dealt with, and now it’s all over. The marriage is fine, everyone’s happy, a lesson has been learned. Near the end, Barnaby comments on the recent events, saying, “you’re only old when you forget that you’re young. That’s my new formula.” This is in reference to “the formula,” the elixir-of-youth the story revolves around. This formula, a vague product of science, a potion men in lab coats (and sometimes mischievous chimpanzees) spend their days working on, is an emblem of human progress and ambition, something very much on people’s minds in the 1950’s. Nuclear weapons, nuclear power, jets, rockets, space, computers, plastics, medical developments; all of these were seemingly advancing in leaps and bounds. So, of course, the subject shows up in movies. But let’s look at how it shows up, here: firstly, the central character is a scientist, a respectable man, though his intellect, that absentmindedness, is his downfall as a person.

The project is serious and ambitious, but then when “the formula” does work in some way, it’s the result of an escaped chimpanzee playing with the chemicals. The joke is on science, clearly. When Barnaby’s boss believes the formula has literally changed him into a baby, he exclaims, “This proves there are no boundaries to science,” which an audience could only understand as a ridiculous statement, given the situation. This ridicule of progress, in this context, is a little bit complicated. At first, it may seem that to poke fun at the “marvels of modern science” is a bit risky, not safe. When something new and perhaps frightening comes along, skepticism is unavoidable; as far as this film is concerned, the questioning has already happened, so it’s just chiming in. What does an endorsement of something - of, in this case, popular skepticism of science and indeed intellectuals like Barnaby - mean, if the endorsement is from a screwball comedy? This very serious sense of doubt is taken, and put into the context of cheap entertainment. It loses it’s weight when it’s addressed this way. Again, as with the comedic aspect, something dangerous or bad is made into something safe. If audiences confront these fears as they’re watching Marilyn Monroe getting shot in the ass with rubber bands, and Cary Grant falling down a laundry chute because he’s lost his glasses, the light in which they see these fears inevitably changes... At the end of the movie, they leave the theater entertained, and in some way reassured; the big scary world has been re-presented as a nice, neat, encapsulated story, and all the problems are just silliness, or “low comedy disasters,” as Barnaby himself puts it.

The idea here is that a cultural product, like a film, can function as a “window” into the hopes and fears of a society, and into the way the society wants to deal with those hopes and fears, which is perhaps more important. So, if we look at what happens and how it’s framed, how it “turns out in the end,” we can get an idea of what 1950’s America was like by watching Monkey Business. This is the unspoken premise of all cultural criticism. It is strange that it tends to be unspoken, and stranger still that there is rarely any attempt at an answer to the next question, which is of course, “so what?”

Do we need some kind of proof of what our society is thinking about? If so, is this horribly unscientific, admittedly debatable “humanities” essay the proof we want? Despite the often authoritative tone of these essays, the goal is not to prove anything, nor establish facts of any sort. It’s simply a conversation. It can be an important one though. Some things are simply not provable, and this path is the only way to get anywhere near them. And for ideas which can be addressed in a more scientific manner, a different angle can only help. In light of this, answering the big “so what” becomes even more difficult though.

The more we learn, the less we know, it seems. Did it seem that way in the 1950’s though? We can’t be sure, really. By looking at something like the above film, we can get some idea though... and then by comparing it to a film of a different time, we can get more of an idea. So let’s say we want a comparable thing from a period just after the great shift, the “end of the world:” the mid 1970’s perhaps. It would make sense of course to choose something well-known, and well-made, since this is about popular culture. A screwball comedy starring someone like Cary Grant? There’s no such thing at that time, and the fact that there is no such thing is in itself very important. In the 1970’s, there were disaster movies, horror movies, conspiracy movies... Apocalypse Now, Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Taxi Driver... clearly, there was something very different going on from a decade or two earlier. Stars no longer looked like Cary Grant, they were kind of “ugly,” happy endings became more and more scarce, as for comedies, there were some, most notably Woody Allen’s, but these are not the descendents of comedies like Monkey Business.

Certainly, there is such a thing as a comparison which is not worth making: who cares how The Deer Hunter compares to The Little Mermaid? Those are so far from each other, it would be pointless to talk about how they relate. But a comparison of two things which are too similar could also be pointless, if we don’t learn anything from the comparison which we couldn’t have just learned from one of the things alone. So, as much of a stretch as it may seem, let’s consider this: Monkey Business as compared to Dog Day Afternoon.

Sidney Lumet’s film, of 1975, is based on factual events of August 22nd, 1972. On that day, in Brooklyn, a man and two accomplices attempted to rob a bank at gunpoint, but the situation escalated into a televised hostage crisis, with hoards of police, FBI agents, and thousands of onlookers, often cheering for the bank robbers. When you go to rent this film, do not look for it in the comedy section. It does, however, share something of its structure with the classic comedy, and it is, at times, quite funny... The formula is actually there: something goes wrong, and wacky hi-jinks ensue. For some reason our hero’s behavior is strange, and suddenly the scene becomes a show: out of the actual, non-fictional everyday situation of some people conducting business in a bank, some kind of vaudeville act erupts. Things get silly, inappropriate, wrong in some manner, and it’s all very showy. But here, the show is not for the audience watching the film, it’s for the TV audience within the film. And there is no collapse of the plausibility, it’s almost the opposite; if anything, it’s elevated by the horrific dissonance between the violent and the comedic elements. And what’s more, the characters are aware of it: the lead robber, Sonny, played by Al Pacino, remarks at one point, “what a fuckin’ comedy.”

From the beginning, it’s a series of very funny mishaps. First, for Sonny’s big moment, where he reveals his rifle hidden in a gift box (how many slapstick gags involve a box with a bow on it containing something other than a nice gift?), he awkwardly fumbles it, the ribbon won’t cooperate, and he almost drops the thing. Then, further ruining the mood, one of his accomplices chickens out, so Sonny has to allow the guard to allow him to leave, but then they pause at the door so Sonny can get the car keys from him. The tellers tell him to watch his dirty language; he sets a fire in a trashcan to destroy some registers, but he can’t put it out; a teller’s husband calls and has her ask Sonny when he thinks he’ll be done; he herds the hostages into the vault, but then one says they have to go to the bathroom... And it only gets weirder, as it is later revealed –on TV, as the hostages watch - that Sonny partly wants this money to pay for his partner Leon’s sex-change operation: comedy always comes out of something unexpected, with inappropriate timing. So then Sal, Sonny’s accomplice in the bank, feels it’s necessary to make the newscasters get it right and stop saying that there are “two homosexuals holding the hostages,” since Sal is not a homosexual: comedy always comes out of foolishly misguided priorities. So we can see that in the details, this film employs the tactics of classic comedy schtick, the mishaps, the twists, etc. And even on a larger scale, it follows the pattern of a comedy, just the same as Monkey Business: there is one central plot, but then buzzing around that plot are elements which confuse or obstruct or even disassemble it; and eventually the central plot has been beaten, and has to surrender.

In terms of the humor in these two films, there is a very significant difference though. In Dog Day Afternoon, the parts we actually do laugh at are the parts which bring the film closest to real life. What we generally know about bank robberies comes from movies, and in those classic bank robbing scenes, the characters are either very smooth, or very stupid. Sonny is neither of these; he’s no scary villain, nor is he a pathetic fool. When he fumbles his gun, when he has a lover’s quarrel with Leon on the phone in the midst of a hostage crisis, we instantly know, this is the way things really happen. There’s random crap coming out of nowhere... the cohesive narrative is a myth. In Monkey Business, the myth is protected, because the humor only comes at the expense of any believability: that film just throws out the story, so narrative isn’t even there to deconstruct.

The biggest difference of course is that Dog Day Afternoon is not a comedy. Overall, it is not funny. We don’t leave the theater feeling entertained or reassured. If humor is a “vaccine” against something uncomfortable, then this is the actual “disease.” This film is not just mildly disturbing, it’s fully and robustly disturbing. None of the characters are people the audience is likely to empathize with. Al Pacino is a very different sort of star from Cary Grant; no one wishes they were him, or wishes they could have him. The cop, Moretti, is no hero, Sal is downright creepy, the FBI agents are all like androids, and the hostages are just very ordinary folks. Sonny, Pacino, does become a hero of sorts within the story. When he steps out the front door of the bank to talk to Moretti, the crowds of onlookers cheer for him. He yells for the cops to holster their guns, and chants “Attica! Attica!,” the crowds joining in, a reference to a recent case of police brutality. He is a hero because he opposes the cops – the law – the authority – because he takes a chance and takes matters into his own hands. There’s nothing funny about this, and nothing reassuring about it. Sonny is not a conventional hero, and not even an anti-hero: he’s too unstable, too much in the wrong. But finally, this film is not a comedy like the good old days because the ending is not a happy one. Sal gets a bullet in the forehead from an FBI agent, at pointblank range, in front of everyone. Half a minute earlier, one of the hostages gives him a rosary, to comfort him on his first flight on an airplane.

The most important difference though is in the motivation for the central character’s actions. As for Barnaby, he is twice insulated against any responsibility for what he’s doing. It’s a drug he’s taken – for science of course – and it’s not even his formula, it’s what the chimpanzee mixed. Barnaby, the person, is exculpated. All his zany behavior is completely blamable on “the formula:” it’s not him. For Sonny, it absolutely is him. He’s there, all alone; he’s made this mess, he’s cut himself off from any support or safety. His mother comes, crying, hysterical, with all the failed excuses: “The FBI understands it’s not you that’s doing this, it’s the pressure... You wouldn’t marry (Leon) if your wife was any good to you...” Shortly thereafter, he dictates his will to one of the tellers, and says, “To my mother, I ask forgiveness.” The fact that Sonny is fully responsible for his actions entirely changes the implications of those actions. This is emblematic of the position our culture finds itself in, in a post-historical, post-narrative, post-linear, post-modern world. If we say, “suddenly, our hero’s behavior is strange,” the emphasis is not on “strange,” or “hero,” it’s all on that apostrophe. Without the guidelines which existed in the 1950’s, we’re making it all up as we go along.

The reason film can show us things in a way nothing else can, and the reason this comparison is one worth making, is this: audiences liked these movies. A good film which people enjoy, will entertain by telling a story people want to hear. So, for any given era, there is a certain story, which connects to films in their making, and in their reception, all on a slightly less than conscious level. In the 1950’s, for the most part, it was a safe, reassuring story. By the 1970’s, it was largely a story of crisis and disruption. For these two particular films, there’s a thinly penciled line between them; it’s almost as if one is a perverted, twisted version of the other, a twin from another place... But so what? Are we enlightened by just saying this? No, it’s not about the idea, it’s about the films. Beyond all of this, there is still something not-describable in the experience of seeing these two films, as close to each other as possible in time. It’s a strange, jarring feeling, which can simultaneously make these words seem very important, and very inadequate.

[1] Spoken by Sonny (Al Pacino) in Dog Day Afternoon.