We think that the creative effort and the intervention of art are more intense in tragedy than in comedy. While comedy is often referred to as “costumbrista”, no one would think of referring to tragedy or drama (even though they are not the same) as “costumbrista”. Comedies satirize aspects of real life, creating a deforming and ridiculous caricature, while tragedies challenge fate to provide extraordinarily improbable situations. We think of tragedies as unique and singular, and their characters are endowed with a self-sacrificing aura, an unfortunate greatness that invites compassion and respect, while comedies are ordinary and grotesque because their characters display so many flaws or flaws (petulity, greed, imbecility that we do not want to recognize ourselves, laziness, sloppiness, vulgarity). . We silence doubt with laughter.
Some have suggested that the difference is only a matter of time: the repetition of tragedy always takes the form of a comedy (in history, as Marx said), or that tragedy, considered many years later, always has a funny aspect (as many comedians would say): Lenny Bruce, Carole Burnett, Woody Allen). Most reworkings of novels and films take inspiration from a tragedy or a genre drama and turn them into a parody or pastiche of intense comedy (remember this subgenre, as well as Hot Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Fatal Distraction, or Shaun of the Dead). spoof movies that are parodic mash-ups of various or movies of the same genre: Catch All You Can, Scary Movie, Hot Shots, Love at First Bite, Almost 300, Police Academy, Spanish Movie, etc.), but the opposite usually doesn’t happen.
The comic approach transforms the tragic bursts and excesses of hyperventilation that serve as models into comical grimaces or demonstrations. It’s a way to honor it, but also to put it at a hygienic and skeptical distance, to desacralize it, to replace the metaphysical agony of big questions with the intense ordinariness of everyday life, which we view with a certain disdain, as if we were above it. Deep down, we perversely dream of being the protagonists of tragedies and hate being the protagonists of comedies, even though others always seem like suitable candidates to us: comedians are others. Who would not want to experience the epic and tragic drama of Bogart and Bergman’s Casablanca or some of the films of John Wayne or Montgomery Clift and would not be ashamed to put himself in the shoes of Dreams of aa Woody Allen? Seductive or Sacha Baron -Cohen from Borat.
Comedies are not appetizers
However, it is possible to plausibly object to this presentation of the relations between tragedy and comedy as what is superior and inferior, what exalts us and humiliates us, what is subtle and what is crude, what gives food for thought and reflection. That which, for various reasons, saves us from thinking, reveals (and revolts) and distracts us, consoles and legitimizes us.
To be or not to be, Arsenic for affection, Kiss me, fool, Brian’s life, It is almost useless to remember the mastery, narrative skill and nuanced examination of the human being in such extremely funny works as The Simpsons or The Life. office exhibition. But no one thinks they are on the same level as Hamlet, Othello, Ben-Hur, The Dancer in the Dark, The Sacrifice of the Sacred Deer, Years and Years, or Succession. By the way, some of the comedies mentioned today cannot pass the censorship of today’s tormadas, who get excited when we laugh at something considered sacred, but are dazzled by everything that makes us cry, scare us, or even pity us. if they are trivial things, scarers, or postures.
However, this distinction between humor and drama is not that clear and the mixture of them is experienced with great intensity. This shouldn’t surprise us because this happens both in real life and in fiction. It occurs when we share our neighbor’s misfortunes, weaknesses, or limitations with third parties, whether at a funeral or in a hospital emergency waiting room, among those who witness the punishment or humiliation inflicted on another, or even at a public execution. Humor that is very politically incorrect, very crude, but very difficult to get over.
So in art as in life. We find the mixture in the black humor of Billy Wilder in The Apartment or Sweet Irma, Ricky Gervais in the TV series After Life or the black humor distilled from episodes of The Kominsky Method. It is no coincidence that the themes they deal with have a tragic aspect: the labor exploitation of bodies and emotions leading to prostitution, the death of a spouse and eternal mourning, the difficulty of rebuilding a love life in adulthood. But the nuances, treatments, and even formats are reminiscent of screwball comedies or sitcoms. In fact, there are no tragic themes; There are tragic (or comic) versions of the same narrative. The same theme – the mafia, its vigilante dealings, extortion, brutal murders, internal struggles for power – may seem like a tragic theme (it is in The Godfather or Breaking Bad), but it presents an emotionally fragile mob boss. the person who regularly consults a psychiatrist gives it a comic touch (Dangerous Therapy) or a tragicomic touch (Sopranos).
Funny
Changing your perspective can also have funny effects. In The Executioner (Berlanga, 1963), Nino Manfredi plays an undertaker who marries an executioner’s daughter. In order to keep the apartment that his father-in-law had as a state gift in exchange for such serious responsibility, he agrees to take over the post when he retires, making a vague promise that amnesty will always precede the inevitable moment. However, shortly after taking office, he has to move to prison in Mallorca; The first convict he will execute is waiting there. He comes in cowed, wanting to run. The guards tell him to approach the cell’s peephole and see the prisoner, and above all to adjust the club’s tourniquet to suit his height. He says that when he looks closer, he sees everything black. At that moment the door opens and a large priest wearing dark sunglasses steps out, so that what he sees is the fabric of his robe. The priest stands between the condemned man and the even more cowardly executioner, offering no consolation to either of them, us malevolent. But this comic effect must have distracted the censors from the image of a Church sanctifying the death penalty.
In Martin Amis’s Point of Interest, recently adapted into a film, an SS officer assigned to Auschwitz falls in love with the camp commandant’s wife. The officer’s flirting and approaching takes advantage of the moments when his boss is busy on the platform (“the area of interest”) where prisoners coming off the train are selected either for the gas chamber or for the grueling work they will finish. They leave within a few months. Here we have a love story almost in a sitcom atmosphere. Letters sent secretly but intercepted, shocks to the heart, confidant friends suggesting the best strategy to the lover, suspicions, espionage, jealousy, it’s like Dangerous Liaisons or, better yet, Much Noise About Nothing, but all of this is planned in the background. Goyesque Disasters of War or Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man: corpses being dragged from the gas chamber to the vehicles that will take them to crematoriums, the extrajudicial execution of special commandos tasked with taking their own corpses to the slaughterhouse, the stench of chimneys with their bone-crunching clanking and fetid smoke.
But the most surprising aspect of the novel is the black humor, especially the black humor with the commander as the protagonist: the stubborn executioner who laughs at everyone while his marriage falls apart. For example, he receives a telegram informing him that a convoy of French Jews is approaching, and the officer, a friend of his who sent him from Paris, warns him of the special security precautions he must take upon the convoy’s arrival. But it was all a joke: the convoy consists of only a hundred people, all under the age of ten, over sixty or disabled, so no exceptional measures are required, not even a meaningful choice. They’re all Zyklon B flesh, and as the doctors leave the ramp laughing, only the welcoming violinists and Sonderkommandos remain to escort the travelers through the birch forest to Camp 2 so they can tidy up before occupying their rooms. The chain of command plays pranks on each other, from the top to the bottom, right down to the final joke of the hot shower.
Let’s return to Woody Allen, who, with Billy Wilder, crossed the border between (in other words) tragedy and comedy most sharply and ambushed us on both sides. Not only did Allen write scripts that were more or less clearly one thing (Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream, Blue Jasmine, or Irrational Man) or the other (undoubtedly the best-known part of his production), he also made this distinction. the narrative proposition itself, either explicitly as in Melinda and Melinda or implicitly as in Crimes and Misdemeanors, are both magnificent.
We can’t help but remember a very sad joke that the character played by the director and actor tells while looking at the camera at the beginning of Annie Hall. Two respectable old women are dining together in the restaurant of a luxury hotel. One says the food there is terrible, the other adds that the portions are too small. This is life: full of loneliness, pain, unhappiness, disappointments, but at the same time how we wish it could last longer. It’s a joke, but it also contains the whole tragic dimension of existence.