Volume 4, Number 8 · May 20, 1965
Funny Book
By Bernard Bergonzi
The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy
by Anthony Burgess
Norton, 512 pp., $6.95
One needs to be careful about using a phrase like 'black comedy': its very modishness makes it suspect, for it has been bandied about by the fashionable and ignorant in defense of a variety of repellent oddities. Still, it underlines the truth that there is a trace of blackness in all comedy though we usually notice it only in its exaggerated forms. What we laugh at, basically, is the discomfiture of others, whether this is gentle, like the mild frustrations of a pair of Shakespearean lovers, or extreme, as with the brutalities of Ben Jonson's comedy. Hobbes spoke tersely of laughter as a 'sudden glory' at the sight of others' misfortune, and Bergson elaborated the idea of the comic as arising when the organic and vital is suddenly transformed into an object, colliding mechanically with other objects. The classical example, of course, is of the self-assured man suddenly slipping in the street on a banana peel: this is funny, though it would seem less so if it became apparent that he had broken an arm; and the mirth would fade if a couple of bystanders decided to kick him savagely in the ribs. All comedy involves some withdrawal of sympathy by the onlooker, and the difference between the gently comic, the black comic, and the horrifyingly unfunny, is one of degree—often a very large degree, admittedly—rather than of kind. Different civilizations have placed the threshold at different points along the scale; the Elizabethans were a good deal less sensitive than we are, and, as Northrop Frye has remarked, the audience of Roman comedy would probably have laughed uproariously at the Passion of Christ.
Review, 2128 words
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