The Consolation of Comedy: Why We Ought to Laugh at Ignatius J. Reilly
John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is as funny as it is unsettling—or perhaps the novel is funny because it is unsettling. When protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly first appears before the D.H. Holmes department store, he strikes a straightforwardly comic figure: obese, indignant, and infantile. He is easy to laugh at, this middle-aged man dressed in trousers voluminous enough to allow for “free locomotion,” holding a string for his lute and waiting for his mother.
But as we follow Ignatius in his rambles through New Orleans, the comedy moves from the realm of the physical (Ignatius’s flatulence and ever-delicate valve) to the realm of the moral (his verbal abuse of his mother and hostility toward people in general). Some of the funniest scenes in this novel—and there are so many of them—would be embarrassing to describe out loud, even to a friend. Which can bring the reader, particularly the reader of faith, to a place of unease: is it okay to laugh at Ignatius Reilly?
Despite the novel’s success, many people would say no. I only recommend Confederacy to the closest of friends, and even then, the book often comes back to me partially read, returned with a slight look of concern. While I’ve always loved the book, I understand this response. There is much that happens within Confederacy that, were it to happen in life, would elicit anything but laughter. Ignatius is both un-virtuous and offensive. He is discomfiting whether you are inclined to label such people as “sinful” or “problematic.” His personal habits are disgusting, his self-perception delusional, and his treatment of others abhorrent. So why have so many, including myself, found his story delightful?
One reason we are able to laugh at Ignatius is precisely because his story is not set in the real world. Toole situates his protagonist in New Orleans and has been lauded for his meaningful rendering of that place. And yet New Orleans is secondary to the ultimate setting of the novel: the comic universe. The comic universe is a place which almost everyone recognizes intuitively, though we seldom think about it explicitly. In her introduction to The Terrain of Comedy, Louise Cowan maps this very territory. Her guidance makes the seeming dissonance of Confederacy—a delightful presentation of an utterly un-delightful character—comprehensible.
For Cowan, the form of comedy is bound more by ontology than by “structural and thematic” resemblances found across the genre. Comedy is more than a story that ends happily and makes us laugh. Cowan quotes Bakhtin as saying that it represents an “inner genre” that allows us to perceive a “particular aspect of reality.” There are certain things, Cowan goes on to say, that are “discernible in life only through having been given form in the realm of comedy.” The genre, or form, of Confederacy is what allows those of us who love the novel to take its questionable moral content in the correct spirit—the comic spirit, that is.
While the genre of comedy may reveal something about an aspect of reality, the genre itself is not meant to represent reality in its entirety. Quite the opposite. For Cowan, genre represents a warped or incomplete version of the world in order to emphasize things we may not see while experiencing actual reality. In this way, genre opens our eyes to things always existent but usually unseen. C.S. Lewis, in an essay in God in the Dock, describes miracles similarly: as small demonstrations of things God has already done on a large scale. Miracles may seem to warp or disrupt reality, but really they reveal an already existent reality too big for us to see. Lewis writes: “The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”
I like the idea of comedy as a kind of literary miracle because it highlights the transformative nature of comedy, the way it draws delight out of the most dreary or disappointing situations. Toole begins Confederacy with a mundane scenario—a middle-aged son waiting for his mother to finish her shopping—and turns it into one of the most entertaining and harebrained sagas in contemporary literature.
In Ignatius, Toole writes a character who is absurd, and yet writes him in such a way that we do not despise him, even as we may disapprove of him. We only ever see Ignatius behave badly, and yet we do not shut the book. When I think of Ignatius Reilly, I run through a catalogue of faults: his laziness, his physical repugnance, his bloated and absurd sense of superiority. And yet, what do I feel? Sheer delight.
This dual effect—appropriate disapproval and incongruous delight—cuts to the character of comedy and the way it orients us toward that “particular aspect of reality” that can only be “given form in the realm of comedy.” What is this “particular aspect of reality?” It is a tension that we witness to as Christians—that we serve a perfect God who loves justice, righteousness, and holiness and yet also delights in a humanity which is unjust, unrighteous, and unholy. Surely God does not delight in us because of our injustice or unrighteousness, but rather in spite of it. The reader’s delight in Ignatius despite his un-delightful behavior is analogous to God’s attitude toward us: to Him our sin is absurdly clear, and yet it does not make Him love us less. He does not shut the book.
In his Jan. 5, 2021, New Yorker essay “The Uneasy Afterlife of A Confederacy of Dunces,” Tom Bissell describes his first experience of Confederacy as “a vivid, tingling antipathy, akin to walking into a party and realizing instantly that you want to leave.” Though his subsequent reading was more pleasant, Bissell still describes the novel as “a long, R-rated cartoon in prose.” One of Bissell’s criticisms is that “Ignatius simply is not compelling enough to make lovable the repulsive qualities that his creator takes immense pains to describe.” But this—making repulsive qualities lovable—is simply not the point. The trick of comedy is not to turn reality inside out by presenting evil as good, ugliness as beauty, etc. Instead, the miracle of comedy comes from its ability to see negative qualities for what they actually are and yet love the protagonist anyway. Toole did not set out to make Ignatius’s despicable qualities “lovable” as Bissell seems to expect. Rather, by placing Ignatius in the comic universe, Toole inspires us to love Ignatius despite his despicable qualities.
But this ease that comedy brokers between disapproval and delight is the reason some readers may approach Confederacy with ambivalence. If the novel must focus on such an abominable character, shouldn’t it provoke our antipathy rather than our pleasure? In his “Essay on Comedy,” George Meredith distinguishes between comedy, satire, and irony and asserts that the pleasure we take in comedy is not a profane one. In Meredith’s assessment, comedy is based on receptivity and goodwill. To love comedy, he says, “you must know the real world, and know men and women well enough not to expect too much of them, though you may still hope for good.” Satire and irony, however, are guided by a contemptuous moralism: “The Satirist is a moral agent, often a social scavenger, working on a storage of bile. The Ironist is one thing or another, according to his caprice.” Increasingly, we seem to live in a satirical age rather than a comic one. From the proliferation of pretend news programs à la The Daily Show to the political nature of stand-up comedy to the polemical tone of supposedly comedic movies like Don’t Look Up, the satirist seems to have usurped the role of the comic poet in the contemporary imagination. It is no wonder, then, primed as we are toward satire, that we may struggle to see the good in comedy.
The attraction of satire is its presumed higher social calling, its ability to straightforwardly rebuke human inadequacies and provoke improvement. Bissell puts his finger on why many find Confederacy off-putting by pointing out that Ignatius’s avid but delusional reading life “is a rebuke of the socially committed novel.” But Meredith disagrees that satire is higher than comedy; to the contrary, he views it as destructive. Comedy is based on a self-deprecating understanding of our shared and morally shoddy human condition—what could more simply be called humility. Satire is based on contempt, Meredith says, and “contempt is a sentiment that cannot be entertained by comic intelligence. What is it but an excuse to be idly minded, or personally lofty, or comfortably narrow, not perfectly humane?” Though it may be directed at very real evils, the form of satire grows out of and provokes disdain for our fellows rather than cultivating humility and compassion through a recognition of our shared faults.
For Meredith, there is such a thing as “the comic spirit” which is revealed through literature but not imprisoned within it. Literature is merely the grounds upon which we develop a recognition of the comic spirit’s presence, but life is where it most aids us. This can be seen in the quarrel of an affectionate couple who are willing to die for each other but, during the quarrel, are “unwilling to utter the agreeable word at the right moment.” If they realize they are in a comic situation, they will note its absurdity, laugh at themselves, and reconcile. If, however, they take a stupid argument over-seriously, they will slip into the spirit of satire. “You may estimate your capacity for Comic perception by being able to detect the ridicule of them you love, without loving them less . . . and accepting the correction their image of you proposes,” says Meredith. In short, humility is the prerequisite for appreciating the comic spirit both in literature and in life.
By writing a comedy rather than a satire, Toole presents us with an unlovable character who many nevertheless come to love. If satire emphasizes justice and resembles the prophetic voice, comedy resembles the gospel by bringing us into contemplation of an unjust humanity brought into loving reconciliation with a perfectly just God.
But does this mean that the reader of comedy must abandon notions of justice, notions of morality? If we are delighted with Ignatius, does this mean we are obliged to justify his flaws, or make him out to be a hero of some sorts? Some readers do this, taking Ignatius as a bastion against political correctness and delighting in him for this reason alone. But this is to laugh at Confederacy as if it were a satire instead of a comedy. Properly understood, comedy emphasizes a spirit of love, mercy, and reconciliation, but does so without ignoring injustice or its consequences.
Take, for instance, Ignatius’s second entry into his “commercial project,” entitled THE JOURNAL OF A WORKING BOY, OR UP FROM SLOTH. In this missive, Ignatius writes of his initial attempts at “liberating” the African-American factory workers at Levy Pants, where Ignatius has recently been hired as an office worker. The entire endeavor is ridiculous, founded wholly on Ignatius’s mistaken idea that the workers, being black, must require liberation from him, because he is white. At one point in his digressive recounting of the event, Ignatius lapses into a tangent about “that dreary fraud” Mark Twain and declares that American art utterly fails to make contact with reality: “Any connection between American art and American nature is purely coincidental . . . the nation as a whole has no contact with reality.” The quote is more aptly applied to Ignatius than to Mark Twain. What follows is a scene which, though written in Ignatius’s own voice, shows Ignatius misinterpreting everything that happens during his brief visit to the factory.
Ignatius’s narration of his foray into the factory is full of cringe-inducing stereotypes. He compares his walk down the stairs to entering the heart of darkness; he sees the workers sewing garments and imagines them in a field picking cotton; there is a painful mention of watermelons. And yet he claims to have an “almost psychotic dedication to helping” his coworkers. It is all so very wrong and all so very comical. Why? Because it demonstrates Ignatius’s complete misalignment with reality. He feels righteous, and yet the reader knows he is not.
In this trick of comedy, we are able to hold two disparate things side by side: we know how Ignatius views himself (heroic, magnanimous, needed) and we know how he actually is (ridiculous, pretentious, superfluous). The discrepancy between these two perceptions generates humor (rather than dramatic irony, as it might in tragedy), and affirms the actual reality by exposing the absurdity of the false one. Far from dismissing the existence and importance of moral reality, comedy depends on it. To feel the absence or violation of justice is to assume the existence of a justice that must first exist if it is to be violated. If Ignatius’s perception of the situation were correct, and he actually was helping the factory workers in some way, the scene would not constitute comedy.
In this particular scene, justice not only exists in invisible contrast to Ignatius’s repugnant behavior, but it also asserts itself fully when Ignatius’s moral absurdity morphs into physical humiliation. Attempting to ingratiate himself to the workers, Ignatius begins to dance to their music, “twisting and shouting, mumbling insanely, ‘Go! Go! Do it, baby do it! Hear me talkin’ to ya. Wow!’” Ignatius believes he is performing well; he remarks that his “body moved with surprising agility.” But even though he writes the scene in Ignatius’s voice, Toole is careful that we be aware of Ignatius’s actual impression on his unwilling audience. The workers begin to point and laugh at Ignatius. Characteristically delusional, Ignatius takes this as a sign of their approval and laughs along with them. The result of Ignatius’s folly is both morally and physically predictable: his “considerable system weakened by the gyrations,” he falls.
To laugh at Ignatius as he humiliates himself in front of the factory workers is not to delight in his arrogance or in his ignorance. Instead, it is to laugh at his absurdity, to see arrogance and ignorance humiliated. And we indirectly laugh at ourselves. Ignatius, while actually indulging his own delusions of grandeur, thinks he is operating at the height of magnanimity. By laughing, we recognize the phenomenon and tacitly admit that we too have been guilty of absurdities. In the realm of comedy, to laugh at such things is to participate in the mortification of sin.
Comedy reconciles delight and disapproval and plays further tricks by revealing goodness through badness, manners through mayhem, wisdom through folly. It relies on its audience to have a shared moral sensibility and then toys with that sensibility, not to destroy it but to illustrate what comes of the human urge to flout moral realities—folly and failure.
When Ignatius Reilly enters the factory of Levy Pants, we are narratorially aligned with him, but this alignment does not require us to assume his worldview. In fact, it forbids it. To agree with Ignatius’s perceptions would be to strip him of his absurdity, and if Ignatius is not absurd, then Confederacy of Dunces is not a comedy, and if it is not a comedy, then it is not the great book that so many agree that it is. If Ignatius’s story were not told through a comic lens, it would not be a story worth telling. It already suffers such labels as “digressive” and “rambling.” And if some of Ignatius’s antics are tedious in comedic form, they would be unreadable if written within any universe other than the comedic one.
But “digressive” is not a crime in the eyes of the comedic spirit, who Meredith describes as peering down on humanity, interested not in its future (as satire might be) so much as its present. It looks upon human folly with “volleys of silvery laughter” and “to feel its presence and to see it is your assurance that many sane and solid minds are with you in what you are experiencing: and this of itself spares you the pain of satirical heat, and the bitter craving to strike heavy blows.” If Toole had written a satire, we would be asked to scorn Ignatius. Like the Pharisee, we would say “God, I thank you that I am not like other men.” But because he wrote a comedy, we look at Ignatius and are driven to feel, perhaps to our own dismay, “Yes, we people really are like that, aren’t we?”
Laughter can be brutal or harmful. But true comedy, says Meredith, “awakens thoughtful laughter.” This type of laughter “is a harmless wine, conducing to sobriety in the degree that it enlivens.” Yes, we should laugh at Ignatius, just as we should sometimes laugh at ourselves. When Ignatius engages in delusions of grandeur, he puts himself at odds with truth. When he demeans people, he puts himself at odds with goodness, and when he fills himself with hot dogs and refuses to wash, he puts himself at odds with beauty. Ignatius models for us the absurd life of the sinner, the one who flouts God’s truth, beauty, and goodness. To oppose God, the prophets and gospels tell us, is a doomed enterprise. Who would undertake it but a fool?