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For the monthly film discussion series I host, last night I showed O Brother, Where Art Thou?, by the Coen Brothers, and talked about music's ability to take you out of yourself, a film and subject chosen as kind of a resting place after a few more challenging movies with heavy themes and complicated narratives. After the program, the oldest (I think) audience regular, who has not had trouble following much trickier stuff, e-mailed me privately to ask me to explain the movie, because she hadn't understood what was going on or why we were laughing when we laughed.
I haven't responded yet; I'm still constructing the response in my head. Despite popular dogma that you can't explain why something is funny, you actually can; you can't necessarily make the other person laugh at it, but you can explain it. (And sometimes that is enough to let them in on the joke.) In the case of O Brother, almost all of the humor comes from the gap between how characters perceive themselves and how we or their companions perceive the situation, whether it's Clooney's insistence on a hairstyle everyone else finds off-putting, or Babyface Nelson's complete delight over his march to the electric chair (and everyone else's agreeable happiness for him).
In a drama, these gaps of understanding would be played for tragedy and would cause a breakdown of community, but since this is a comedy, people who have been kind are rewarded despite their hypocrisies, and friends are loved in spite of (or even because of) their flaws and limitations. We thus have an opportunity to laugh at our own self-illusions in a safe space that reinforces our sense of belonging to a community, defusing pent-up tensions from the occasionally awkward social situations that permeate our lives. (This all sounds very intellectual, but even kids get it: it's the model for every Goofy cartoon.)
If you don't understand, at least on some level, that there's a difference between appropriate behavior and the way the characters are behaving, it is true the movie makes no sense. As a thought exercise, it's kind of interesting to do. The events of the film lose thematic cohesion and become basically random. The warmth of the friendships disappears, because it's not clear that people are forgiving each other; the relationships are simply abusive. I can sympathize with that feeling of confusion, and it points to the problem of this kind of comedy when it fails: instead of reassuring the audience member that they are part of the community, as intended, it alienates them.
I mentioned earlier that the petitioner is (I think) the oldest member of the audience, which I did not introduce as an othering tactic, but because of a study I read about a year ago, in which the researchers found that older people were less able to tell when the character David Brent in the U.K. version of The Office was behaving inappropriately, and were more likely to be confused by other characters' horrified or avoidant reactions to him. Although the researchers hypothesized this showed an insensitivity to facial expressions, possible alternative explanations include everything from generational shifts to broad cognitive decline to an increased capacity for forgiveness.
My audience member is someone who is definitely still involved in the community, who interacts regularly with people from subsequent generations (such as me), who herself behaves appropriately, and who is definitely mentally sharp - not to mention witty. (In fact, she has some of the best comic timing of the people I interact with regularly.) Age may be a red herring. Yet it makes me think about the obvious and not obvious, and how simple comedies, such as Goofy cartoons, require a fairly sophisticated understanding of multiple competing perspectives, some of which are metatextual and external to the screen. (Hence the problem of topical comedies rarely aging well.) It's what makes comedy difficult. You have to get your audience to anticipate one thing, and then offer them an ending which is different enough to be silly, but not so unexpected that it's frightening.
For instance, in high school, I wrote what I called anti-limericks, in which the first and second line do not rhyme, the third and fourth line do not rhyme, and the fifth line is a run-on sentence. Not rhyming is, it turns out, harder than rhyming. For example:
This works because I have created an expectation that I will say ten, and then I don't. Seven and eight don't work, because although they don't rhyme with gin, they are both numbers we regularly hear after six, and wouldn't instantly register as jarring. Nine and eleven don't work because they have vowel sounds similar enough to gin that it's plausible I'm just rhyming badly. It has to be twelve. It also works because gin and ten is an obvious, if imperfect, rhyme. If I wrote:
there's no joke to be in on; it's alienating. There is no way you'd anticipate the word "insessor," which is rare enough you've probably never heard it; even though it rhymes perfectly with professor and I've used clue words like "lazy" and "recliner," it's not likely you're going to work out I'm substituting for an archaism meaning "one who sits." It's too difficult, and so instead of being funny, it's frustrating. (Context, of course, matters; in a group with an in-joke about insessors, this kind of thing could kill.)
It all reminds me of game theory in economics, which is a bit of a misleading name. In game theory, in the marketplace, your goal is not to win the game; your goal is to be winning. For this to be true, your opponent has to continue, indefinitely, to play. It's how you get the classic example of the soda wars. Coke does not want to beat Pepsi. Pepsi doesn't want Coke out of business. Their sales benefit from "us versus them," and that would go away without a "them." More importantly, if they're both selling drinks for a dollar, they can both sell drinks for a dollar. If Coke cuts prices to 70 cents, they might get some Pepsi customers, but then Pepsi might cut prices to 50 cents (and still have a healthy margin). Coke's price of $1 only seems rational because there is Pepsi right next to it on the shelf, also a dollar. They're not exactly price fixing; they're not exactly colluding. But they aren't really competing in the way we think of competing.
This is not, de facto, a bad thing. It's not efficient and does not make for a marketplace that equally shares consumer and producer surplus. (Surplus, in this context, is the gap between the lowest amount someone was willing to sell for and the highest someone was willing to pay.) There are situations in life in which efficiency is not a priority. I would characterize these as "most situations." If I'm an adult playing baseball with an eight year old, and I try to pitch a perfect game, I'm not an impressive pitcher; I'm a jerk. On the pro level, baseball management has taken this to heart, and major league teams agree to salary caps and a draft system that lets the weakest teams pick new players first. They don't do this because it's fair; they do this because it's more fun to watch an event with some suspense in it than a game where the Yankees win in a rout every time.
This important distinction, the "everybody keeps playing" distinction, is why geeks can be "great" gamers who nobody wants to play with. To succeed in a game theory sense, it's not enough to get the highest score. You have to also have the sophistication to give your co-competitors the sense they are themselves on the verge of a win.
It's a trait, you may have noticed, that is possessed in abundance by successful confidence men, and is amply present at casinos. It's why my "most situations" isn't "all situations." Just as it is possible to do things that are legal but not moral, such as exploiting tax loopholes ("exploiting" is the key word that points to the morality problem, and it's instructive to look at the difference between multi-player videogamers who use "exploits" and single-player gamers who talk to each other about emergent properties), it is possible to use the psychology of friendly competition to abuse someone's trust and take all of their money without providing anything in exchange. (Also known as stealing.)
What does this have to do with comedy? In both cases, the practitioner - comedian or con man - needs to correctly guess the expectation of the chosen audience, and then stay on the right side of the line that would frighten them off. In the con man's case, he wants to behave inappropriately without the mark noticing. For the comedian, the goal is to create a situation where inappropriateness is obvious but not fatal.
It all makes me think that whatever makes comedies of manners harder to read for the elderly is linked to the mindset that makes them vulnerable to con men, even when society warns them to watch for the cons. Somewhere, somehow, the ability to spot inappropriate behavior in an unusual situation erodes away. It makes me wonder if gossip over innumerable hands of bridge isn't much more cognitively important than we have thought.
I haven't responded yet; I'm still constructing the response in my head. Despite popular dogma that you can't explain why something is funny, you actually can; you can't necessarily make the other person laugh at it, but you can explain it. (And sometimes that is enough to let them in on the joke.) In the case of O Brother, almost all of the humor comes from the gap between how characters perceive themselves and how we or their companions perceive the situation, whether it's Clooney's insistence on a hairstyle everyone else finds off-putting, or Babyface Nelson's complete delight over his march to the electric chair (and everyone else's agreeable happiness for him).
In a drama, these gaps of understanding would be played for tragedy and would cause a breakdown of community, but since this is a comedy, people who have been kind are rewarded despite their hypocrisies, and friends are loved in spite of (or even because of) their flaws and limitations. We thus have an opportunity to laugh at our own self-illusions in a safe space that reinforces our sense of belonging to a community, defusing pent-up tensions from the occasionally awkward social situations that permeate our lives. (This all sounds very intellectual, but even kids get it: it's the model for every Goofy cartoon.)
If you don't understand, at least on some level, that there's a difference between appropriate behavior and the way the characters are behaving, it is true the movie makes no sense. As a thought exercise, it's kind of interesting to do. The events of the film lose thematic cohesion and become basically random. The warmth of the friendships disappears, because it's not clear that people are forgiving each other; the relationships are simply abusive. I can sympathize with that feeling of confusion, and it points to the problem of this kind of comedy when it fails: instead of reassuring the audience member that they are part of the community, as intended, it alienates them.
I mentioned earlier that the petitioner is (I think) the oldest member of the audience, which I did not introduce as an othering tactic, but because of a study I read about a year ago, in which the researchers found that older people were less able to tell when the character David Brent in the U.K. version of The Office was behaving inappropriately, and were more likely to be confused by other characters' horrified or avoidant reactions to him. Although the researchers hypothesized this showed an insensitivity to facial expressions, possible alternative explanations include everything from generational shifts to broad cognitive decline to an increased capacity for forgiveness.
My audience member is someone who is definitely still involved in the community, who interacts regularly with people from subsequent generations (such as me), who herself behaves appropriately, and who is definitely mentally sharp - not to mention witty. (In fact, she has some of the best comic timing of the people I interact with regularly.) Age may be a red herring. Yet it makes me think about the obvious and not obvious, and how simple comedies, such as Goofy cartoons, require a fairly sophisticated understanding of multiple competing perspectives, some of which are metatextual and external to the screen. (Hence the problem of topical comedies rarely aging well.) It's what makes comedy difficult. You have to get your audience to anticipate one thing, and then offer them an ending which is different enough to be silly, but not so unexpected that it's frightening.
For instance, in high school, I wrote what I called anti-limericks, in which the first and second line do not rhyme, the third and fourth line do not rhyme, and the fifth line is a run-on sentence. Not rhyming is, it turns out, harder than rhyming. For example:
There once was a man who drank gin
At the hours of four, six, and twelve
This works because I have created an expectation that I will say ten, and then I don't. Seven and eight don't work, because although they don't rhyme with gin, they are both numbers we regularly hear after six, and wouldn't instantly register as jarring. Nine and eleven don't work because they have vowel sounds similar enough to gin that it's plausible I'm just rhyming badly. It has to be twelve. It also works because gin and ten is an obvious, if imperfect, rhyme. If I wrote:
There once was a lazy professor
Who was known as a constant recliner
there's no joke to be in on; it's alienating. There is no way you'd anticipate the word "insessor," which is rare enough you've probably never heard it; even though it rhymes perfectly with professor and I've used clue words like "lazy" and "recliner," it's not likely you're going to work out I'm substituting for an archaism meaning "one who sits." It's too difficult, and so instead of being funny, it's frustrating. (Context, of course, matters; in a group with an in-joke about insessors, this kind of thing could kill.)
It all reminds me of game theory in economics, which is a bit of a misleading name. In game theory, in the marketplace, your goal is not to win the game; your goal is to be winning. For this to be true, your opponent has to continue, indefinitely, to play. It's how you get the classic example of the soda wars. Coke does not want to beat Pepsi. Pepsi doesn't want Coke out of business. Their sales benefit from "us versus them," and that would go away without a "them." More importantly, if they're both selling drinks for a dollar, they can both sell drinks for a dollar. If Coke cuts prices to 70 cents, they might get some Pepsi customers, but then Pepsi might cut prices to 50 cents (and still have a healthy margin). Coke's price of $1 only seems rational because there is Pepsi right next to it on the shelf, also a dollar. They're not exactly price fixing; they're not exactly colluding. But they aren't really competing in the way we think of competing.
This is not, de facto, a bad thing. It's not efficient and does not make for a marketplace that equally shares consumer and producer surplus. (Surplus, in this context, is the gap between the lowest amount someone was willing to sell for and the highest someone was willing to pay.) There are situations in life in which efficiency is not a priority. I would characterize these as "most situations." If I'm an adult playing baseball with an eight year old, and I try to pitch a perfect game, I'm not an impressive pitcher; I'm a jerk. On the pro level, baseball management has taken this to heart, and major league teams agree to salary caps and a draft system that lets the weakest teams pick new players first. They don't do this because it's fair; they do this because it's more fun to watch an event with some suspense in it than a game where the Yankees win in a rout every time.
This important distinction, the "everybody keeps playing" distinction, is why geeks can be "great" gamers who nobody wants to play with. To succeed in a game theory sense, it's not enough to get the highest score. You have to also have the sophistication to give your co-competitors the sense they are themselves on the verge of a win.
It's a trait, you may have noticed, that is possessed in abundance by successful confidence men, and is amply present at casinos. It's why my "most situations" isn't "all situations." Just as it is possible to do things that are legal but not moral, such as exploiting tax loopholes ("exploiting" is the key word that points to the morality problem, and it's instructive to look at the difference between multi-player videogamers who use "exploits" and single-player gamers who talk to each other about emergent properties), it is possible to use the psychology of friendly competition to abuse someone's trust and take all of their money without providing anything in exchange. (Also known as stealing.)
What does this have to do with comedy? In both cases, the practitioner - comedian or con man - needs to correctly guess the expectation of the chosen audience, and then stay on the right side of the line that would frighten them off. In the con man's case, he wants to behave inappropriately without the mark noticing. For the comedian, the goal is to create a situation where inappropriateness is obvious but not fatal.
It all makes me think that whatever makes comedies of manners harder to read for the elderly is linked to the mindset that makes them vulnerable to con men, even when society warns them to watch for the cons. Somewhere, somehow, the ability to spot inappropriate behavior in an unusual situation erodes away. It makes me wonder if gossip over innumerable hands of bridge isn't much more cognitively important than we have thought.
