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| The Irresponsible Self |
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| by James Wood |
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| Pimlico
Essays, journals, letters & other prose works |
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Introduction:
Comedy and the irresponsible self
I
Comedy, like death and sex, is often awarded the prize of ineffability. It is regularly maintained that comedy cannot really be described or explained, that to talk about it is merely to do it noisy harm. Particular derision is reserved for the formal criticism of comedy, which seems to most sensible people like an unwitting bad joke, since nothing is funnier than solemnity about laughter. But the people who resist the intrusion of criticism into comedy are often the same people who claim that a poem or music or the idea of beauty can’t really be talked about either.
Such people seem to fear too much self-consciousness, or to have too little faith in words, and in particular too little faith in the possibilities of exegesis. Actually, much comedy is explicable, exhaustively so; what can be a little absurd are theories of comedy – so plentiful in modern times – though that did not deter Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Meredith, Bergson or Freud. Since I obviously believe in criticism’s capacity to talk about many things, I will offer for critical discussion a joke – or, really, a witty reply. One London lunchtime, many years ago, the late poet and editor Ian Hamilton was sitting at his usual table in a Soho pub called the Pillars of Hercules. The pub was where much of the business of Hamilton’s literary journal, The New Review, was conducted. It was sickeningly early – not to be at work, but to be at drink. A pale, haggard poet entered, and Hamilton offered him a chair and a glass of something. ‘Oh no, I just can’t keep drinking,’ said the weakened poet. ‘I must give it up. It’s doing terrible things to me. It’s not even giving me any pleasure any longer.’ But Hamilton, narrowing his eyes, responded to this feebleness in a tone of weary stoicism, and said in a quiet, hard voice, ‘Well, none of us likes it.’
I think Hamilton’s reply is very funny; and so did The New York Times, which reproduced it in its obituary of Hamilton, but mangled it by failing to italicise ‘likes’.That such a mangling is instantly felt as damage suggests that the joke is indeed explicable – for we instinctively know that the comedy of the reply inheres in that wearily stressed verb ‘likes’. So why is it funny? There is comedy in the inversion of the usual idea that drinking is fun and voluntary. In Hamilton’s reply, drinking has become unpleasant but unavoidable, one of life’s burdens.The cynical stress on likes gives the reply a sense of weary déjà vu: it sounds as if Hamilton is so obviously citing a truism that it is barely worth saying it aloud. It is always funny when singular novelty is passed off as general wisdom, especially when it is almost the opposite of the truth.
The joke simultaneously plays on the inversion of drinking as good fun while playing off the grim truth of alcoholism, which of course is indeed a state in which drinkers may not much like alcohol but cannot release themselves from it.Against those two worlds – the world of ordinary, pleasant, voluntary drinking, and involuntary alcoholic enslavement – Hamilton’s reply proposes a stoical tragi-comic world, populated by cheerful but stubborn drinkers doing their not very pleasant duty.The joke seems to me to open, in a moment, a picture at once funny and sad.
Hamilton’s comic stoicism also creates, like much comedy, an alternative community. Instead of asserting his difference from the poet (‘Well, so be it,but I still like drinking’), Hamilton effectively says, ‘Well, so be it, but we’re all in the same boat, and none of us is having a good time.’ Hamilton’s reply barely offers the poet the chance of resigning from this community; we are all stuck in it: it is the price of adulthood (or literary adulthood). At the same time, the joke can only work if it rests on the idea of a normative community, the ordinary world in which people enjoy drinking and are free to drink or not to. Mildly rebellious, the joke is also oddly forgiving, because Hamilton offers himself as the weary, downtrodden example of what living in this alternative community will do to you, and offers the alternative community as the real normative one. The beauty of the quip is that it seems at first to assert a superiority, only, on closer inspection, to offer a helpless commonality.
I like Hamilton’s joke, too, because it arises gently from its context, out of a natural exchange, and in so doing offers us access, albeit fleeting, to the character of the man who made it. It is unflashy; it is not an obviously great or crushing mot. It represents the opposite of those forced moments when someone says ‘Do you want to hear a joke?’, at which point most of us freeze, alarmed that we won’t get the punchline, and nervously aware that we are now inhabiting a ‘comic moment’. In literature, there are novels that have the feel of Hamilton’s quip – novels in which a mild tragi-comedy arises naturally out of context and situation, novels which are softly witty but which may never elicit an actual laugh; and there are also ‘comic novels’, novels which correspond to the man who comes up to you and says ‘Have you heard the one about . . . ?’, novels obviously very busy at the business of being comic. Tristram Shandy, for instance, is in multifarious ways a marvellous book, but it is written in a tone of such constant high-pitched zaniness, of such deliberate ‘liveliness’, that one finds oneself screaming at it to calm down a bit. Dr Johnson, a greatly tragi-comic figure himself, found Tristram Shandy too eccentric to bear.The ‘hysterical realism’ of such contemporary writers as Pynchon and Rushdie is the modern version of Sterne’s perpetual excitements and digressions.
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| RRP £12.99 • Paperback |
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| Publication Date: 01/09/2005 •
320 pages • Demy Octavo • ISBN/EAN: 9781844130979 |
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