Last week in the “Washington Post,” Ron Charles took note of a rare feat pulled off by “Less,” the winner of the annual Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is a comic novel. He’s certainly right that honors are rarely heaped on such works. A glance back at the topics of the last few Pulitzer winners tells the doleful tale — slavery, Vietnam, WWII, a boy’s grief, totalitarian North Korea.
This bias in favor of works of art filed with seriousness, gloom, tragedy, sorrow, big ideas and news even more depressing than the daily front page is not confined to the Pulitzer. The Nobel Prize for Literature is even more committed to grim solemnity.
It’s also rare for a comedy to win a Tony or Oscar. Apparently if a work of art makes you smile or pokes fun at life as it is lived most of the time by most people, it is unworthy of honor or respect. And yet, it is conventional wisdom in the theater that writing comedy or playing it is harder than tragedy. On his death bed, the actor Edmund Kean said, “dying is easy, comedy is hard.”
Is comedy really a secondary, inferior art form? Many of Shakespeare’s greatest works are comedy or romance. People may go dutifully to dark dramas and ponder man’s inhumanity to man, immerse themselves in war, death, divorce, madness, cruelty, dysfunction and what Aristotle defined as the tragic emotions — pity and terror. But Shakespeare, the canny entrepreneur, knew the shows with happy endings did pretty good business. They may have been “Much Ado about Nothing” or not but, as he promised his audience, they were also “As You Like It.” Joy, absurdity and topsy turvy can also provide a catharsis too.
Part of the reason downer dramas prevail at awards season is the nature of the prize givers. They are awarded, in effect, by trade organizations whose goal is to burnish the image of their business — motion pictures, theater, publishing— or in the case of the Nobel, philanthropic betterment. Therefore, no trivial entertainments need apply.
That doesn’t just rule out laughs, but love stories unless they end with Desdemona dead. Lowly genres like mystery, science fiction, fantasy, romance and the thriller are also beyond the pale. Sobriety, not quality, is the yardstick.
No doubt this bias is imbibed in school where students are led to believe some of the dullest works, even if by masters, are the gold standard, so long as they are on important themes unlikely to rile up the school board. But does anyone return with joy to “Julius Caesar” or
“Great Expectations” in later life? Not when they’ve been fed them like bitter medicine. It’s little wonder that few bother to pick up a classic or venture inside a theater ever again.
Preferring tragedy or the higher melodrama is not just a silly bias but a historically questionable one. Tragedy is not, per se, better than comedy. The great critic Northrop Frye argued that writers and readers were temperamentally either “Iliad” people or “Odyssey” people. By this he meant they gravitated to stories of tragedy and agon, or to stories of romance, adventure, enchantment and times out of joint set right. One is not superior to the other. They are just different ways of understanding human life, or as some say, the human comedy.
I’d argue that the genius of literature in English has always been more comic than tragic, once you get beyond cold, bold Beowulf. As soon as you get to sunny Chaucer the fun begins, continues in the Arthurian legends and blossoms in Elizabethan and Restoration comedy with mistaken identities, pomposity punctured, and fun poked at characters who are human, all too human.
When you get to the novel, the roll call of satirists, farceurs, and romancers is long and distinguished — Swift, Sterne, Fielding, Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Wilde, Shaw, Chesterton, Waugh, Amis and many more. And which American would you rather read if push came to shove — Twain or Dreiser?
Even if you argue, with Hamlet, that art is supposed to hold “a mirror up to nature,” is human nature all serious and concerned with deep issues? We know life is real, life is earnest. However, if we take a take a step back from the headlines with their wars, famine, pestilence, death, hatred, bigotry and greed, do we see titanic figures contending — Macbeth, Henry Fleming, Frederic Henry, Tom Joad, Agamemnon?
No, we think of Washington, Moscow, Beijing, not to mention our little Podunk and see a cast worthy of comedy, satire and farce. Bumblers, bunglers, incompetents, pompous fools, weaselly connivers, and fallible strivers who can’t see the forest for the trees, who mistake personal interest for the public interest, and who are done in by vanity, cowardice, cupidity and the rest of the usual sins. As Sondheim said,
“Nothing with kings, nothing with crowns;
Bring on the lovers, liars and clowns!”
In fact, the mirrors of comedy and romance may actually offer the truer reflection of the tale told by an idiot signifying nothing in which we find ourselves at home, at the office, and in the larger world we inhabit. So let’s give a little respect to the mask with the smile for a change.
And tell the truth, which of these films would you rather see again, the Best Picture winner for its year or the also ran? “Argo” or “Silver Linings Playbook,” “The Departed” or “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Million Dollar Baby” or “Sideways,” “The English Patient” or “Jerry Maguire,” “Rebecca” or “The Philadelphia Story,” which is to say, Lawrence Olivier who won Best Actor for Hamlet or Cary Grant who never got a statuette for anything? If forced to choose, I’d be inclined to say:
“Nothing with gods, nothing with fate;
Weighty affairs will just have to wait!
Comedy Tonight!”