Laughter, Tragedy, and Comedy Revisited
I can’t resist offering a postscript of sorts to an earlier post I wrote about film depictions of Lolita. As I suggested there, Kubrick’s Lolita has widely been praised on the grounds that it captures the undeniable humor of the novel; by contrast, Lyne’s Lolita has been criticized because it mostly fails (or declines) to do so.
On my view, however, this gets things backwards: Kubrick’s version fails precisely because it plays Lolita as comedy; Lyne’s succeeds precisely because it plays Lolita as tragedy. There is undeniable humor in Lolita, as Kubrick and others have correctly recognized, but this humor fades to the background when contrasted with the tragedy depicted in it. In other words, to get Lolita right, its humor has to be subordinated to the tragedy it depicts, not foregrounded at the expense of the novel’s plot or theme. On my view, while Kubrick inverts the relevant priorities, Lyne get them right.
In that post, I’d invoked Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice as an illustration: The Merchant of Venice is not technically a tragedy, and has in the past been played as a comedy. But it would be a mistake (to put it mildly) to play The Merchant of Venice for laughs. Like all of Shakespeare’s plays, it has its share of humor, but neither its plot nor its subject-matter are funny. And so, it can’t literally be played as a comedy. Or maybe I should say that it can, but only at the price of destroying the play.
I happened to re-read Shakespeare’s Hamlet last week after a gap of maybe twenty years, and it occurs to me that Hamlet is at least as good an illustration of my point as The Merchant of Venice. I’d forgotten how much humor there is in Hamlet–the number of laugh lines, largely delivered by Hamlet himself, and the number of scenes that are laugh-out-loud funny, often involving dialogue between Hamlet and the somewhat ridiculous Polonius.
Indeed, a great deal of Hamlet consists of a play-within-the-play that both is and isn’t funny, and much of the drama of the play turns on humor that’s meant (by Hamlet) to be funny, but ends up being macabre or grotesque. Surprisingly (to me, anyway) much of what’s interesting and problematic about Hamlet is his (deeply) defective sense of humor. And part of what’s interesting and problematic is that sometimes, defects and all, Hamlet’s jokes are in fact funny. You laugh, and then you sober up, but the sobriety doesn’t undo the humor.
Funny or not, the fact remains that Hamlet is a tragedy. A Kubrick-like attempt to turn Hamlet into a comedy–with Peter Sellars as Polonius–would destroy the play. An inventory of the laugh lines in the play wouldn’t change that. A killing spree isn’t funny, no matter how many literary sophisticates pile on to insist that it is.
This may all seem like a bunch of abstract literary points irrelevant to our current circumstances. But I think the moral and political relevance is clear. We live in a society that has literally lost its sense of humor, not in the sense of losing its capacity to laugh at things, but in the sense of losing the distinction between what is and isn’t funny.
The simplest illustration of this is the promiscuous use of the “laugh emoji” on social media. People now regularly use laugh emojis to laugh at mass death, mass rape, mass incarceration, and mass deportation. I sometimes find myself wondering what would possess someone to laugh at something so horrendous. Other times, I stop wondering and just wish they’d delete the laugh emoji altogether.
The point isn’t limited to social media, of course. We’ve all by now seen the video clips of Israeli soldiers laughing at and taunting their victims as they violate or kill them (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4). The phenomenon precedes the October 7 attacks by a long shot, but has accelerated since then.
Nor, of course, is the phenomenon limited to Israeli soldiers. I was once at an accident scene in Hamilton, New Jersey where people mocked and laughed at the victim as she died; she was conscious as it happened, pinned and crushed underneath her vehicle. She died before my very eyes, her eyes bulging in shock, her head protectively cradled by her husband, with the crowd’s laughter serving as the soundtrack of her death. It happened back in 1999, but I’ve never forgotten it. I still make a point of avoiding that stretch of road, and can’t think of “Hamilton” without remembering what happened.
If that story seems outlandish, just visit any factory farm where non-human animals are slaughtered for food, and you’ll see the same thing happening on an industrial scale. If ever you want heartily to be laughed at, defend those animals on a public setting on social media and see what happens. A bet: more people will find the animals’ suffering funny than will want it to stop, and far more will find it funny than will do anything to stop it.
It was Aristotle who claimed that humans were the only animals capable of laughter (Parts of Animals, III.10, 673a8), and Aristotle who argued that humans are the only animals capable of injustice, including both armed injustice (Politics, I.2, 1231a31-40) and paradoxically enough, the most “bestial” injustices (Nicomachean Ethics VII.5-6). If you put these three things together, you get the conclusion that humans are the only animal capable of laughing at the “bestial” evils that they themselves commit, with the weapons they invent for the purpose. That gives us the rather sobering paradox that the human capacity for laughter both is and isn’t a laughing matter.
As it happens, it’s Aristotle who also argued that a virtuous person has a sense of humor, where having it in the relevant sense means having the capacity to distinguish reliably between what is and isn’t funny, and acting accordingly–all of which Aristotle, in that calmly self-assured way of his, took to be an objective matter (Nicomachean Ethics, IV.8). Every decent person, he implies, knows the difference between what’s funny and what’s not, laughing at what’s funny, and brushing aside inept attempts at humor that merely demean by punching down. Right?
I don’t know. It’s not easy to prove that humor is an objective matter, but it does seem clear enough that we now seem to be living in a society in which Schadenfreude has gradually been transformed from a vice into a virtue: everything, no matter how macabre or humiliating, has now become fodder for jeering laughter. Meanwhile, the claims of sinister clowns like Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and Robert Kennedy, et al are taken absolutely seriously, as though every deranged assertion out of their mouths deserved serious reflection and a straight face. It’s yet a further paradox that the contrast between those two things is so contemptibly laughable, and one more paradox that the laughter involved should be so mirthless. Funny how that is.
In his 1869 novel, The Man Who Laughs, Victor Hugo tells the nightmare tale of Gwynplaine, a young English nobleman disfigured as a child by royal command, his face carved into a permanent grin. The disfigurement is done by the Comprachicos, or Child-Buyers:
The Comprachicos traded in children. They bought and sold them. They did not steal them. The kidnapping of children is another branch of industry. And what did they make of these children?
Monsters.
Why monsters?
To laugh at.
The populace must needs laugh, and kings too. The mountebank is wanted in the streets, the jester at the Louvre. The one is called a Clown, the other a Fool.
The efforts of man to procure himself pleasure are at times worthy of the attention of the philosopher.
What are we sketching in these few preliminary pages? A chapter in the most terrible of books; a book which might be entitled—The farming of the unhappy by the happy.
Lolita and The Man Who Laughs are, to be sure, radically different books with radically different authors and aims, but they share one thing in common: both depict the deliberate disfigurement of children against a comic backdrop without in either case being works of comedy. Humbert disfigures Lolita as surely as the Comprachicos disfigure Gwynplaine. Humbert is amused by Lolita as surely as Gwynplaine’s tormentors are amused by him. And Humbert is as insensitive to Lolita’s personhood as Gwynplaine’s tormentors are to his.
Somehow, laughter finds an essential place in stories that both seem as distant from laughter as any two stories can be. That raises the question: how is laughter possible in a world where the deliberate disfigurement of the living has become the stuff of comedy? How do we laugh without farming the unhappy to the happy? Believe it or not, I think Lolita gives something of an answer to these questions. I hope to lay it out in a later post.
Thanks to Charles, Gail, and Hilary Persky for such engaging conversations on Hamlet (and on Shakespeare generally), and to my Symposium Great Books symposiasts for their discussion on Lolita. I got the Victor Hugo reference from Ayn Rand’s “The Comprachicos” in her book The New Left (1970), but have taken it in a very different direction.
