Laugh ’til it Hurts

Any authentic Movie Night Program needs to include a two-reel comedy short on the bill ahead of  the feature, and thereby hangs a ramble. 

A “reel” in the old days equated to approximately ten minutes of screen time, thus a six-reel feature ran about an hour and a two-reel comedy short ran about twenty minutes. It formed a buffer between the News of the Day and the serials, cartoons and features on either side. In most ways, the two-reel comedy was the progenitor of television's half-hour sitcom, the main difference being that the “situations” changed in most every “episode,” even when the stars were the same.

Its best practitioners are barely remembered today, and regarded with polite disdain by many who do remember them and wish that others would not. Laurel and Hardy and The Three Stooges were masters of the form, and even Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Chase and other greats found their first successes in the two-reelers.

But alas, any guest audience who attends your movie nights is going to be made up of Modern People; and no audience is more averse to humor than a modern one.

No genre has been hit harder by contemporary social conventions than Comedy. It was always the most delicate of genres, for being so very subjective and personal. But the rise of Social Media, Personal Offense and “Sensitivity” that is anything but sensitive have conspired to reduce comedy to a series of poop jokes and pee jokes and snot jokes and Memes. Even in my own home I can’t show W.C. Fields comedies to a mixed crowd, because my guests find him too offensive. With his alcoholism and his avowed distaste for women, children and dogs, Fields has rendered himself Radioactive in the minds of over-sensitive, over-zealous, self-appointed Guardians of Good Taste. This is precisely why he is so funny, and why it’s so important to defend the past from the censoriousness of the present.

The simplest way to explain it is that all true comedy involves Pain. Comedy is Tragedy seen through Silly Glasses; and in our modern humor-free world, laughing at the misfortunes of others is no longer socially acceptable, especially if those misfortunes occur to politically “protected” species. 

Fields, Laurel and Hardy, and The Stooges in particular have never been highly regarded by anyone lacking a Y chromosome. At least in part, it’s because they never put women on a pedestal, and never held back from showing women being every bit as imperfect the men. Dim-witted and ineffectual as Laurel and Hardy undeniably presented themselves, they were easily dominated by the harridans that they were often (on screen) married to. Much of the comedy in their ouvre is built on their efforts to accomplish the very things that their wives do not want them to accomplish — and on how they fail so spectacularly at accomplishing it. Fields, on the other hand, rarely went against the wishes of his screen spouses, unless it in some way involved drink.

Don’t misunderstand. There are usually good reasons for a species to be protected. But comedy has be approached without rules of engagement. Comedy only works when it is completely one hundred percent democratic, when there are no sacred cows. Comedy only works when EVERYBODY gets a pie in the face.

The Stooges quite literally did just that, while Chaplin, Keaton, Fields, L&H and the other great comedians always gave as good as they got, and got as good as they gave.

So when you are putting together a program for your movie nights, do not neglect the comedy short, even if the comedians attempt to milk one of your sacred cows. (W.C. Fields once famously tried to take a large tax deduction of milk as a business expense for comedians!). We ignore comedy at the expense of our culture, at the expense of our humanity — and although the modern world refuses to acknowledge anything above simple biology, it isn’t Pooping and Peeing and Fucking that Makes Us Human. What makes us human are our more complex imperfections: including fear, cruelty, dishonesty, and yes, even sexism and racism. Without seeing the negatives, we can’t see the more positive human traits such as hope, aspiration, warmth or devotion. 

When classic comedy embarrasses you, reflect on how far we have come. That’s what it’s there for.

—Thorn.