june 14, 2014 vol xlix no 24 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 158

POSTSCRIPT
SOCIETY | COMEDY
To Laugh or Not to Laugh
The non-innocent logic of comedy is almost
always premised on exclusion, the one laughed
at being ostracised and separated from the ones
laughed with.
Avishek Parui
I
n a scene in J D Salingers campus classic The Catcher
in the Rye, the schoolboy Holden Cauleld attempts
to attract the attention of three ladies in a bar by
pretending to be posh and playful. After realising his
imminent failure to irt with lan, Holden lies about seeing
Economic & Political Weekly EPW june 14, 2014 vol xlix no 24 159
POSTSCRIPT
COMEDY
Comedy is designed
to deconstruct
neutrality, and
incorporates a
carnivalesque
quality that
does away with
hierarchies,
control and
polite restraint
the Hollywood movie star Gary Cooper in the adjacent
room. This has the intended effect and the ladies are
immediately drawn to Holden, one of them even conrm-
ing excitedly that she too had seen the back of Coopers
head as he was leaving the room. This assertion is based
entirely on faith on a spurious statement, and it appears
so foolishly funny to Holden that it killed him in secret
laughter.
The section in The Catcher in the Rye is inter-
esting inasmuch as it immediately instantiates
some classic traits that characterise comedy
selective deception, gullibility, the playful trans-
formation of lie into believable fact and, most
importantly, the problematic proximity of the
comic situation to a sense of loss. The content of
comedy is complex as well as uncomfortable
inasmuch as it almost always appears at the
cost of someone elses well-being, whether its
a loss of face, faith or even something more
immediately and permanently damaging.
Comedy is thus often the inverted image of a loss that
happens to someone else. As in the case of Malvolio in
Shakespeares Twelfth Night, the subject of comedy is
often rendered into a sorry gure, cut down by the logic of
laughter around him; one that grows through a combination
of deception and merciless marginalisation. Shakespeare
repeats and renes this logic several times in his fascinating
oeuvre, from Bottom in Midsummer Nights Dream, who
cannot see his own magically planted donkey-head and
is hence excluded from the laughter directed at him; to
Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, who is tricked into
believing in an amour that does not exist.
Comedy is almost always a mode whereby one laughs
at someone or something, and the preposition becomes a
pointer to the prepositioning of the logic of laughter. From
Chaucers The Millers Tale, where a gullible carpenter is
cuckolded by his beautiful wife and her young lover, to The
President Wore Pearls episode of The Simpsons (Season 15,
2003), which is a parody of Andrew Webbers Evita and
also alludes to the 1968 student riots in Paris, the order of
comedy often appropriates violence and bathos. In the
process, it incorporates the sudden violation of seriousness
in the shared economy of profundity.
The politics of comedy is almost always premised on
exclusion, the one laughed at is ostracised and separated
from the ones laughed with, underlining the grammar
of mapping in and mapping out that the comic order
appropriates.
The politics of exclusion in comedy does not stop at
the level of its content but also spills over into the experi-
ence of spectatorship. For if one is not clever or switched
on enough to catch the cue and laugh at the right point
of time, one immediately runs the risk of being put in
the ring line of laughter, rendered associable with the
LAST LINES
ones laughed at inside the narrative of the joke. Comedy is
thus inclined to demand more from its audience than
tragedy. It entails an intelligent understanding of irony, an
ability to interpret metaphorically, and alertness towards
allusions. The shame in being rendered into a comic fool
in a performance is not structurally dissimilar to the
shame in being the non-responsive gure in a society
of spectators, with the threat of immediate and often
merciless exclusion.
Comedy is designed to deconstruct neutrality,
and incorporates a carnivalesque quality that
does away with hierarchies, control and polite
restraint. In many ways, comedy becomes sub-
versive precisely at the point where it is most
offensive as nothing from the Holocaust (con-
sider Art Spiegelmans graphic novel Maus) to
the US presidential elections and is too sacred
or signicant to be shot down and sabotaged by
comic congurations. And in denying solemnity
to such issues, comedy opens those up for interrogations
and debates in ways that a serious study of the same cannot.
Through its concoctions of savage attack and suave nihilism
(consider Oscar Wildes masterpiece The Importance of
Being Earnest), comedy is endlessly playful with its blatant
disregard of accepted orders of logic. In its psychological
content as well as formal designs, comedy often offers
fractured elds where laughter and loss merge to relish the
relativity of meanings.
Avishek Parui (avishek.parui@durham.ac.uk) is an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher
Education Academy and Postdoctoral Tutor in the Department of English Studies,
Durham University, the UK.