laughter as weapon

[queenlua]

i'm not a comedian or a comic writer or even particularly funny so here are some half-baked thoughts on comedy:

• i was reading about the great dictator the other day, which i've seen excerpts of, but i should really watch the whole damn thing soon, because i'm so intrigued by the story of its making.
  
  so, charlie chaplin was probably the only major silent film star who successfully made the transition to "talkies". slapstick comedy and absurdism, mostly, though it was best-of-class slapstick and absurdism. with the dawn of the talkie era, Chaplin became interested in more serious films, and he started producing The Great Dictator when the third reich was just starting to rise to prominence, pre-WWII, when everyone was still treating germany with kid gloves. as a result, none of the major studios wanted to touch the project (didn't want to alienate a large market), but Chaplin decided that, since "Hitler must be laughed at", and since he was a p rich dude at this point, he'd just finance the damn film himself. he took a long time making it—so long that, by the time it was in post-production everyone was yelling at him to hurry up and release the damn thing, because now Britain had declared war and needed the propaganda and everyone hated the Nazis.
  
  people came to the film. it was a huge hit.
  
  chaplin hadn't known about the concentration camps, though. the vast majority of his viewers hadn't, at that point.
  
  chaplin later said that, had he known the true extent of the atrocities in germany, he couldn't have made the film. and who could have? making a repressive, dogmatic regime look ridiculous is one thing. making a systematically murderous regime look ridiculous is... well, it seems impossible.
  
  and yet i'm intrigued, haunted, by that "must be laughed at" line of his. laughter as moral imperative. comedy as moral imperative.


• a recent le guin thinkpiece commented a bit on this as well. she points out that the modern republican party has gotten so ridiculous it's actually hard to satirize—what could The Onion write about Trump that would be unbelievable?
  
  she also comments that she finds trump less scary than ted cruz—because trump is easy to laugh at, trump seems ridiculous, trump's a nut and not a true dictator—but cruz seems quiet and menacing and scary.
  
  i mean, i'm sure she has more reasoning behind this, and the presidential race certainly has progressed to a weird place since she wrote this (this was pre-Cruz-dropping-out), but i think it's an interesting thought—the Things That Can't Be Laughed At as a heuristic for things that are truly fearsome.


• i love the idea that laughter can topple regimes, end cruelty, shame the shameless. and we do have at least one cute example.
  
  there's this famous old story about the kkk. you probably read it in freakonomics. tl;dr, there was a post-WWII resurgence of the KKK. a young writer, disturbed by this trend, infiltrated their meetings and found out all their code words and secret titles and the like. then, he suggested that the Superman radio play feature Superman fighting the KKK, using all the info he'd gotten.
  
  it was a smashing success. kkk members came home to their kids playing "superman vs the kkk." all their secret ceremonies and code words looked ridiculous when reproduced over a superhero program, made them look like comical pompous villains. kkk membership fell drastically thereafter; people went to rallies to make fun of them.


• there's that speech in twain's the adventures of huckleberry finn, right, by colonel sherburn. if you haven't read the book: throughout the whole of huck finn, twain mocks hypocrisy and callowness and southern culture relentlessly, he doesn't pull punches, and it's all got this air of jovial ridiculousness with an undercurrent of steady truth. it is splendid.
  
  and then there's a scene where a group of foolish men go forming a lynch mob, as reprisal from some perceived slight from colonel sherburn. sherburn stands on his porch with his gun, and he sneers, and he speaks: "The idea of YOU lynching anybody! It’s amusing. . ."
  
  that moment is so deadly serious; the comic tone of the book screeches to a halt as we see sherburn standing before this mass of men, and all he's got for them is contempt, and scorn, he finds them wanting. and he gives a long speech about how they're only half-men, they're cowards, their idea of southern bravery is a lie they tell themselves, and he may as well spit on them for all they're worth, and they tuck their tails and turn away. i remember getting chills all up and down when i read this passage for the first time, the man was so frightening, so full of dark truth.
  
  and then, slowly, the novel returned. the comic lightness returned. we went on. but i've never forgotten that part of the novel and i know i wasn't supposed to.
  
  maybe that's one of the tricks, being really really funny until suddenly you aren't, and knowing the exact correct moment to make that switch.