1 Comedy and Hybridity
In My Autobiography (1964), Charles Chaplin recalls an incident from his childhood which, he claims, had a formative influence on his view of the comic:
At the end of our street was a slaughter-house, and sheep would pass our house on their way to be butchered. I remember one escaped and ran down the street to the amusement of the onlookers. Some tried to grab it and others tripped over themselves. I had giggled with delight at its lambent capering and panic, it seemed so comic. But when it was caught and carried back into the slaughter-house, the reality of the tragedy came over me and I ran indoors, screaming and weeping to Mother: “They’re going to kill it!” …. That stark, spring afternoon and that comedy chase stayed with me for days; and I wonder if that episode did not establish the premise of my future films – the combination of the tragic and the comic. 2
The incident also establishes, in compressed form, many of the premises and concerns of this book—including the ambivalent relationships between violence, slaughter and laughter, between conflicting emotions, between laughing humans and animals, between memory, memoir and storytelling, between the tragic and the comic. Comedy, in Chaplin’s memoir, seems able to hold in balance or even combine apparent opposites.
Credo: like Chaplin, I believe that comedy is (almost) never pure, never just itself; it is (almost) always a compound, a hybrid of apparently discordant elements. Many theorists of comedy have said something similar. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), Søren Kierkegaard declares that ‘the tragic and the comic are the same’; in Stages on Life’s Way (1845), he claims that ‘only by the most profound suffering does one gain real competence in the comic.’ 3 More recently, the critic Eric Bentley notes that, whilst ‘we conventionally consider … any contrasting element [in comedy] as secondary, an undertone, an interruption, an exception,’ he proposes instead a hybrid model of comedy, whereby such contrasting elements are seen as fundamental to it—to the extent that ‘we [might] … regard misery as the basis of comedy.’ 4 Likewise, Glen Cavaliero argues that ‘comedy exposes the fallacy inherent in every monolithic interpretation of human experience: it refutes exclusiveness, points out inconsistencies.’ 5 Along similar lines, Hédi Abdel-Jaouad states that: ‘humour … is inherently a hybrid genre …. Humour … often heralds the heterogenous at the expense of the homogenous.’ 6 Though speaking specifically of ‘Beur’ humour in France, Abdel-Jaouad’s claim has, I think, wider implications.
The claim that humour and comedy are hybrid ‘genres’—or, at least, hybrid modes—is central to the current work. Throughout this book, comedy is viewed in relation to other literary modes, forms, genres, subgenres and generic traits. Chapter 2 examines the hybrid genre of ‘comedy-horror,’ in relation to Edgar Allan Poe’s late short story, ‘Hop-Frog’ (1849); Chapter 3 looks at literary memoir, a genre which Judith Barrington calls a ‘hybrid form,’ 7 and one which—in Edmund Gosse’s genre-defining Father and Son (1907)—combines ‘comedy’ with ‘tragedy’ 8 ; Chapter 4 views comedy in relation to the Modernist short story, exemplified by Wyndham Lewis’s collection The Wild Body (1909–1911, 1917–1918, 1927), and war-time violence; Chapter 5 concludes the book by looking at some of the ways Katherine Mansfield’s apparently ‘serious’ short stories stage different types of laughter and jokes.
The works which form the core ‘case studies’ and starting points in these chapters—Poe’s ‘Hop-Frog,’ Gosse’s Father and Son, Lewis’s The Wild Body, Mansfield’s ‘Miss Brill’ (1920), along with some of her other stories—are themselves all representative of hybrid forms and genres. ‘Hop-Frog’ is not only a ‘comedy-horror’—it also mingles American storytelling traditions with a kind of Rabelaisian grotesque; Father and Son helps to establish a model of twentieth- and twenty-first-century English memoir, which mingles not only comedy with tragedy, but also autobiography with biography, personal history with social history, non-fiction with fictional techniques; Lewis’s short stories mingle philosophy with storytelling, violence with laughter, the language of war with that of humour; Mansfield’s tragicomic stories stage both laughter and tears and also, I argue, explore the relationship between the story form and the joke.
Many critics have noted the short story, as it comes down to us from the Modernists, is a ‘hybrid form’ 9 ; as such, it is closely related to humour and particularly the form of the joke. ‘A joke,’ writes Matthew Bevis, ‘is often a scaled-down story,’ and ‘comic forms … practise the art of storytelling.’ 10 Short stories, like jokes, are ‘scaled down,’ compressed narratives. For Sigmund Freud, this compression is fundamental to what makes a joke effective; in The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905), he argues that ‘a tendency to condensation, or, more correctly, to parsimony, predominates in all … [joke] techniques. Everything seems to be a matter of economy, [of] … a particular kind of abbreviation.’ The ‘economising … brevity of a joke’ 11 is very much related to the shortness of a short story: like a joke, a short story disavows completeness and favours compression, abbreviation. As María Lerena puts it, the short story often ‘deal[s] … with a fragment’ and disavows ‘the godlike visions possible in the novel,’ instead locating ‘knowledge in the isolated, stray experiences of a character who, quite suddenly, has to face a reversal of perception, or an incongruity.’ 12
This moment of ‘reversal’ or ‘incongruity’ in a story is analogous to a joke’s punchline; the joke—as many theorists have claimed—often depends on a ‘reversal’ and, in particular, an instance of ‘incongruity.’ The so-called incongruity theory of the joke has a long philosophical lineage, which includes Francis Hutcheson, Immanuel Kant, Jean Paul Richter, Arthur Schopenhauer, James Beattie and Herbert Spencer. In his essay ‘On the Physiology of Laughter’ (1860), Spencer argues that ‘laughter results from a perception of incongruity,’ because ‘consciousness is unawares transferred from great things to small … when there is what we call a descending incongruity.’ 13 No doubt this ‘descending incongruity’ is what Alexander Pope, in his essay Peri Bathous (1727), would understand as ‘bathos,’ or ‘the art of sinking in poetry.’ ‘Bathos is an art,’ states Pope, in which poets ‘mingle bits of the most various or discordant kinds’ in order to ‘contribute to [their] … principal end, which is to glare by strong oppositions of colours and surprise by contrariety of images.’ 14
If Pope is talking specifically about the art of sinking in poetry, his definition of bathos might also apply to modern short fiction. Many short stories involve a ‘sinking’ feeling of anticlimax, the incongruous juxtaposition of different registers and ...