Turning Tragedy into Humor

Chaplin eating his shoe

In Silverscreenings article on Dr. Strangelove, she brought out a very interesting aspect of the film, how Stanley Kubrick originally intended his film to be a serious drama, but he kept having ideas for his film that he knew would make people laugh, so he instead turned the film into a comedy. Ultimately, she felt that the humor made his point about nuclear warfare all the more potent.

Humor can serve many purposes. One is simply to entertain and make us laugh (always pleasant). Another is rhetorical, to make someone’s position look absurd. I have to admit to being leery of humor used in this way. Not because it isn’t effective or even funny, but because I always feel like I have to be on the alert that I do not allow the humor itself to change my mind.

But another use of humor, the one Silverscreenings highlighted, has really fascinated me. It is to use humor to make something that is not funny at all more accessible to us. Using humor to help us comprehend something that might otherwise be too horrible to grasp. Two masters of this technique who I have been thinking about recently are Charlie Chaplin and Charles Dickens.

Perhaps the finest example of turning something terrible into an indelible moment of humor is the scene in The Gold Rush, where Charlie Chaplin and his friend, played by Mack Swain, are starving in a cabin during a snow storm. Chaplin cooks his boot and serves it for Thanksgiving and later Swain imagines that Chaplin is a chicken and chases him around the cabin trying to shoot him. It’s funny, and yet starvation is actually horrible. While the German army were sieging Leningrad, the inhabitants ate glue. One reads of stories of people becoming deranged with hunger. During the Stalin-induced famine of 1933 in Ukraine, there were a startling number of people who ate other people.

Curiously, it does not seem like Chaplin exaggerates at all in The Gold Rush. He just made it funny. He took a topic that no one would particularly like to watch and made us watch it. He does the same thing with poverty.

Mr. Podsnap, in the act of sweeping all unpleasantness away

Charles Dickens is another person who uses humor in this way. Not exactly a barrel of laughs, but Beadle Bumble in Oliver Twist could have been a loathsome character (which he really is), but Dickens turns him into a figure of fun, even though it’s clear Dickens hates him and everything he stands for (the workhouse), but even gives him several unforgettable lines (“The law is a ass”). By making Bumble unforgettable, Dickens also makes the workhouse unforgettable.

I’m reading Our Mutual Friend right now, Dickens’ last completed novel, where we meet the wealthy Mr. Podsnap, who has a trick of using his arm to metaphorically sweep all unpleasant subjects away from him – any subject that would “bring a blush into the cheek of the young person [his daughter].” Hunger, poverty, the existence of other countries other than his own. I think that is what Dickens uses humor to do, to prevent us from sweeping it all behind us.

But it also makes it accessible. Few people would voluntarily watch a movie or read a book about starvation. I’m not sure starvation is something we could fully comprehend (unless we had really gone hungry) or even nuclear warfare. We understand intellectually, but not truly. Humor can give one an “in.” A way to approach the subject and really look at it.

 

“Humorous Verbs – so specific that they’re vague”

In lieu of anything original to say on this slightly sleepy Wednesday, I thought I would instead share this hilarious video that Andrea Lundgren shared with me about using specific verbs to forbid action – thus revealing the absurdity of it.

 

Life With Mother Superior – Jane Trahey

After seeing and falling in love with the movie The Trouble with Angels (Rosalind Russell and Hayley Mills), I desperately wanted to read the book it was based on: Life With Mother Superior, by Jane Trahey. I checked at my library and they didn’t have it and then I looked it up on Amazon and found a used copy was selling for $134. So, instead I asked my library to get it through an inter-library loan (if you’ve never used this feature at your local library, this is absolutely the best way to read obscure or expensive books).

It’s a pity this book is not more easily available, because it is a hoot. I was surprised at how much dialogue, narration and events found their way into the movie. Some of the funniest lines and events of the film (like when Mother Superior says in a deadpan voice, “Where’s the fire?” after she’s locked the girls into the nun’s dormitory and they escape through the fire chute), come straight from the book.

Life with Mother Superior is an almost tongue-in-cheek remembrance of Jane Trahey’s years at St. Marks, a Catholic boarding school. She tells about the pranks she pulled, the battle of wits she engaged in with Mother Superior, her experiences there, the people she knew, her classes.

In the movie, the story follows Mary Clancy (played by Hayley Mills) and her relationship with Mother Superior and her friendship with Rachel. She is the rebellious one and the one who comes up with most of the ideas. In the book, however, Mary Clancy is Jane Trahey’s friend. Many of Mary’s traits in the movie are actually Jane Trahey’s traits, though the girls in the book are really two peas in a pod. Rachel, in the movie, is almost a new creation, though there are some aspects of the original people that find their way into her character. She is awkward at sports, like the real Mary Clancy, but neither Jane nor Mary in the book are followers like Rachel.

Many of the pranks that are pulled in the movie are exactly the same ones that Jane and Mary pulled in reality. There is the smoking, the bubble maker put into the nun’s sugar bowls, the tours of the nun’s dormitory, the skipping of swim class. They even both get expelled, though their parents somehow manage to talk them back into school. What makes it all fun, though, is how Trahey writes it.

Trahey is a very funny writer. Her accounts of sex education is hysterical (“don’t sit on a boy’s lap”), her attempts to sew panties, learning dancing from Mrs. Dowland Phipps, the Senior Prom, the senior play (where she says the wrong line at the beginning of the play, which cues the premature death of Abraham Lincoln; he gets assassinated after 23 minutes and Mother Superior has to step in to assure the parents that the play will proceed to act 2 and 3), crowning Mary in May, the band competition, and so on. I laughed my way through the book.

Interestingly, in the movie, Mary has a character arc. She begins as a rebellious teenager and ends up appreciating the nuns and joining their order. The whole movie is a coming of age story. This is not the point of the book. In fact, I got the distinct impression that at the time of writing, Jane Trahey was quite proud of her doings. She seems to have regarded it as a training ground for a way of life, more creative and free and not dictated by her parents or teachers. There is just a touch of contempt for those rather square students who always do the right thing and make the honor roll, as if they were living a rather prudish, stuffy, suck-up-to-the-teacher, narrow kind of life.

Amidst all the humor, there are poignant moments. As in the movie, the much loved teacher of Geometry, Sister Liguori dies unexpectedly, leaving a grieving school, as well as a grieving dog who loved her. And despite Jane Trahey’s stated view that the nuns were “the enemy” (tongue-in-cheek) there are signs all over the place that the nuns are really more understanding than she admits. As in the movie, Mother Superior really does help Jane with her sewing project and at the end, when Jane is shocked at Mary’s choice to become a nun and refuses to speak to her, it is Mother Superior who comes to her to comfort her and tell her she will one day understand why Mary did what she did. There is a gradual process, throughout the book, of beginning to see nuns as people rather than just as nuns. In a way, Mary becoming a nun completes that process.

One thing that was fun was how rooted in popular culture her book was. The nuns take the girls on a field trip to the Chicago World’s Fair, before it had officially opened in 1933. She also references movie stars like Fay Wray, Jeanette MacDonald, Deanna Durbin, and Ginger Rogers. She goes to see Kitty Foyle, released in 1940, and cries her way through it. She also mentions wanting to learn the Carica, which is a dance that had a brief span of popularity owing to the first dance Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers ever did together in the 1933 film Flying Down to Rio. She has a crush on Robert Taylor, who was the hottie of the mid 1930s. There is no trace of a depression. Her parents seem to have been fairly well off.

After reading the book, I was curious about her life and found the most information in her obiturary in the New York Times, which gives a quick overview of her life as a successful and creative business woman. She lived from 1923-2000 and was a very successful copywriter and opened her own advertising company in the 1960s. She also wrote, penning everything from books about her experiences, novels, pamphlets, slogans for products like Danskin tights and so on. Her most famous ad campaign was for Blackglama, worn by stars like Lauren Bacall, Audrey Hepburn, Barbara Streisand, and Maria Callas. Their slogan was “What Becomes a Legend Most.”

This has little do to with the book, but here is a video showing all the many stars and modals who have worn Blackgama through the years.