The Very Model of a Modern Catholic Comedy
In Which Daniel McInerny Sweats Out the Writing of a Comic Novel for These Apocalyptic Times–and Hilarity Ensues!
A comic novel? The very suggestion will elicit gasps of consternation.
“In these ‘interesting’ times, when the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity, amid the incessant thrum of wars and rumors of wars, with the global economy about to fold up its tent, with artificial intelligence rampaging across the countryside like Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, with all manner of ninnyhammers and yahoos at the levers of power—how can you even think of writing something as frivolous as…a comic novel!?
“Do you even watch the news? The last thing we need right now is your larking about. We need artists who can go deep down into the very heart of our present darkness and shine a light.
“Take Dostoevsky as your model, man! Give us a 1,000 page take-down of nihilism starring mad Russians, existential angst, and people sitting in restaurants talking philosophy for hours without once being interrupted by a waiter.”
With such harangues throbbing in my ears, I turn to the bookshelf for encouragement and inspiration. With an abject eye I glance at the colorful, forbidding volumes of P.G. Wodehouse, lined up against me like a firing squad. Not only do Wodehouse’s comic novels set for the comic novelist a high, not to say mesospheric bar, but his own estimation of the value of the comic novel doesn’t exactly reassure me that I need make no apology to Dostoevsky:
“I believe there are two ways of writing novels,” Wodehouse once opined. “One is making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going deep down into life and not caring a damn...”
It’s a nice quip—veritably oozing with the characteristic Wodehouse charm. But a toucher glib. As much as one does not like to contradict the Master, the quip gives away the entire store to the mad Russians. As logicians say when they want to show off, it presents a false dichotomy. Comic writing in no way abjures “going deep down into life.” After all, in that most epic of comedies, the Divine Comedy, Dante sinks as deep down into life as one can get, all the way down to the lake of ice at the very bottom of the pit of Hell. Even Jerry Seinfeld’s bit about the sock that always seems to go missing in the dryer depicts something “deep down” about modern family life: that no matter how well-meaning our state-of-the-art GE 7.4 Cubic-Foot Gas Dryer, it’s often not enough to keep our busy lives, and fractured attention-spans, in order.
So, can we dismiss the idea that comedy is not serious?
Not that this puts an end to my troubles. Indeed, they are only just beginning. The ghost of the great English actor Edmund Kean rises before me with the words he allegedly spoke at his demise: “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.” How is it possible to take modern readers down into the depths of the human predicament and make them laugh along the way?
Another desultory side-glance at the bookshelf, and I take down John Vorhaus’ The Comic Toolbox. I turn the pages and light upon his definition of comedy: a combination of Truth and Pain. I chew the pith of this insight and begin to think that the dependable Vorhaus might be on to something.
The truth is that Dante strayed from the la diritta via, the “straight path,” and, when we first meet him, is experiencing the consequent pain of finding himself alone in the Dark Wood without a GPS. The truth is that getting every dirty sock washed, dried, folded, and put back in the sock drawer is a Herculean task, what with everything else going on in life, and the pain (somewhat less acute than Dante’s) is that a sock goes missing, and we are faced with the challenge of tracking it down behind the clothes hamper or going with a smart-casual sockless look in February.
Comedy is Truth and Pain, and yet it cannot be tragedy, for that would give us genre confusion. Sophocles’s Oedipus discovers that he has killed his father and married his mother. Ba-boom? No, no Ba-boom. There’s nothing funny about Oedipus’ plight as Sophocles tells it. But give the scenario to an industrious member of the SNL Writers Room, and watch it become a winning comic sketch. What, then, makes the comic difference? It is that the comedian has the hutzpah, and maybe even the chutzpah, to exaggerate the pain beyond common experience, though without anyone seriously getting hurt in the process. As the pain is so exaggerated, but without significant consequences, the audience is afforded the detachment necessary to allow it to contemplate the truth of the pain.
A joke recently heard: Why is it that grandparents bond so easily with their grandchildren?
Answer: They have a common enemy.
Ba-boom.
The common experience, the common truth, is that one of the reasons grandparents and grandchildren bond so easily is that, in being together, they both enjoy relative freedom from responsibility: the grandparents from the responsibility, often fraught, of dealing with their own, adult children; the grandchildren from the responsibility, often vexing, of obeying the interdicts of their parents. The grandparent’s children and the grandchild’s parents are the same couple, and the joke’s exaggeration is to conceive of this couple as a common pain in the neck, indeed as an enemy.
Such a dissection of comedy is not what you’re looking for when you go out to the Laugh Shack on a Saturday night. But the idea that comedy is a contemplation of Truth and Pain is precisely where the intrepid author of a comic novel must start. The human person is an agent of truth, and one of the most delightful ways we discover and contemplate truth is in the enjoyment of comedy. Comedy gives us, at once, both of Wodehouse’s alternatives: it takes us “deep down into life” while also providing the exuberant experience of the musical theater.
But to be an agent of truth and also Catholic is to be inclined toward the comic in an even more intimate way. For while the Catholic imagination is certainly capable of writing tragedy—see Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, or any of my first fumbling attempts at writing fiction—it is in its fullness a comic imagination.
To make this point as plain as a pikestaff, whatever that is, we need to add something to what has been said so far. Comedy exaggerates Truth and Pain beyond common experience and without anybody really getting hurt. But at least when it comes to a comic story, the point of the exaggeration is to lead the comic protagonist to a resolution of the protagonist’s conflicted relationship with reality. We don’t want Dante stranded in the Dark Wood, or even on Mount Purgatory, forever. We don’t want Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy to keep antagonizing one another at balls and house parties until they both end up sad, bitter, and permanently single. We want the happy ending. The comic closure. The proposal accepted and the march down the aisle.
The critic Northrop Frye, in his essay, “The Archetypes of Literature,” argues that the central myth of literature, in its narrative aspect, is the quest-myth, and that the governing pattern of this archetypal quest leads the protagonist to some kind of fulfillment. This fulfillment defines narrative comedy. As Frye describes it, it is “a vision of innocence which sees the world in terms of total human intelligibility. It corresponds to, and is usually found in the form of, the vision of the unfallen world or heaven of religion.” Accordingly, in the archetypal Catholic version of the quest-myth, Dante’s conflict in the Dark Wood leads him on a journey of moral transformation that culminates in comic fulfillment in the Empyrean.
Yet this is where things get ticklish for the modern comic novelist who is also a Catholic. The Catholic writer today who wishes to follow Dante and offer the world a Catholic understanding of the archetypal comic narrative has a difficulty that Dante himself did not experience. While Dante could depend on his culture’s general understanding of, and adherence to, the supernatural backdrop he gave to his protagonist, the modern Catholic writer cannot. Why not?
It’s a long story, one which, like Oedipus’ story, can be told as a tragedy, but which might, in different hands, be told as a comedy. Like any good comedy, it has a killer comic premise, or what the dependable Vorhaus describes as a gap between a character’s “fantasy” or comic reality, and that character’s “real” reality. Lucy Ricardo’s fantasy reality is that she thinks she’s good enough to sing and dance at Ricky’s club. Her real reality is that she’s tone deaf and trips over her own feet. Across the gap between her fantasy reality and her real reality, conflict is generated and “hilarity ensues.”
But we’re interested, not in Lucy Ricardo, but in the peculiarly modern self, the self who arose in Europe beginning approximately, if you’d like a round figure, in 1500. The fantasy reality of the modern self gets started with his self-declared emancipation from all traditional sources of authority—ecclesial, political, social, and artistic—as well as from the traditional, Aristotelian way of conceiving nature as ordered to a comic fulfillment that precedes our choices. Popes, kings, and Aristotle were all found to be ill-suited to the modern funny bone, and so the modern self lit out for the territory of individualism and self-definition.
The novelist Iris Murdoch, on a break from her own fictional attempts to show modern individualism its own feature, described the modern self in this way: “We no longer see man against a backdrop of values, of realities, which transcend him. We picture man as a brave naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world. For the hard idea of truth we have substituted a facile idea of sincerity.”
A brave naked will—like Mr. Bean in the sketch where he loses all his clothes.
The philosopher Charles Taylor, I suppose wanting to keep his moral philosophy G rated, calls this modern self the “buffered self,” buffered against intrusions from God or any supernatural reality.
Take that as a thumbnail of the modern, autonomous self. And now, answer me this question. How is a Catholic writer to convince a modern audience that this undivine comedy of the modern self’s jejune progress on the Road to Nowhere is in fact a comedy? The very prospect boggles and leads this Catholic writer to think that maybe attempting to write a comic novel in the 21st century is its own fantasy reality, and that the modern Catholic comic novelist is himself a comic character. Watch him as he enters Murdoch’s blasted modern landscape, its once colorful transcendent backdrop taken down and folded up. Watch him as he ambles down the road—only to run into Samuel Beckett’s two clowns from Waiting for Godot. The modern Catholic comic novelist hopes to show these two clowns that they are actually living a divine comedy. For the two clowns, however, life in a cosmos without any meaning is a cruel, ironic joke. Yet the Catholic imagination aspires to go beyond cruel irony. It wants to uphold Professor Frye’s “vision of innocence” and “total human intelligibility.” But how to do this in a cultural environment that has despaired of both innocence and intelligibility? To attempt real, soul-refreshing humor in our present times can only come off as incomprehensible, as if spoken in an obsolete tongue. In his autobiography, the actor and director Kenneth Branagh talks about the first time he played the clown Touchstone in a production of As You Like It, and what a challenge it was to deliver Touchstone’s opening joke:
ROSALIND: Where learned you that oath, fool?
TOUCHSTONE: Of a certain knight that swore by his honor they were good pancakes, and swore by his honor the mustard was naught. Now I’ll stand to it: the pancakes were naught and the mustard was good, and yet was not the knight forsworn.
Pancakes and mustard? A knight forsworn? What’s he even saying? “You try making that funny,” Branagh moans. But is my position any different, trying to make a modern audience laugh at its own pretensions? How can my humor, couched in the language of the Catholic imagination, be any more comprehensible than Touchstone’s stale joke?
But I refuse to give up. I must find a way to make a modern Catholic comic novel work. There seem to be two directions I might take.
One is to disappear. Get out of town. Move into a world that is not, or no longer, ours. A world like that of Jane Austen, Dickens, Wodehouse himself—or even something like Tolkien’s fantasy world, but with funnier hobbits. That’s one way to skin the modern cat: to show it a virtual reality where virtue reigns, to comically show the flaws of a character like Mr. Collins in a world recognizably Christian. O to have the luxury of Jane Austen! Sitting at her small walnut tripod table in the corner of the cottage at Chawton, revising the marvelous scene of Mr. Collins’s proposal to Lizzie Bennet…
Yes, that is one direction the Catholic comic novel can go. But there is another one, one I’m more interested in, at least at present. One with a contemporary setting, and that flies straight into the teeth of a broad, mainstream, largely secular modern audience. You heard me right. I’m talking about going like Jonah straight into Nineveh, “in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand.” It’s a daunting task, assuredly. And so, like Jonah, I’m tempted to do an about-face and hop the next boat to Tarshish. But here is where a podcast interview by the poet James Matthew Wilson enters the bloodstream. I hear the esteemed poet declare that every artist is called “to express the permanent, but to do so in a way that is under the shadow of the contemporary. Every age needs a new expression of eternal truths.” Maybe it’s easy for a poet to say; he’s not trying to make anyone laugh. But maybe he has a point. I stand convicted, James Matthew Wilson! Nineveh needs eternal truth, but in a language it can understand. I will not go to Tarshish. I will not let them down!
An interesting, though not the only, way to proceed is to begin with the modern self as comic protagonist, in the grip of its fantasy reality as an autonomous individual in search of self-definition. The advantage of such a move is that it presents to the audience a character with whom they have intuitive sympathy. The trick, however, is to move the audience from this intuitive sympathy to laughter. How to do so?
First, by keeping in mind that the modern self does not see himself as comic. He plays it straight. He really believes that starring in his own ego-drama will bring him happiness. He has no idea that in the world beyond his head he is a hero in a very real quest-myth. Accordingly, some effort must be made to puncture the buffered self’s buffer and humble the modern self before the really real. How does this happen with Dante? With Lucy Ricardo? With Mr. Bean? There seems only one way: by putting the comic character in a conflict that puts tremendous pressure on, and ultimately exposes, the fantasy self.
This operation is more commonly known as satire. For a comic novelist like Walker Percy, satire was the primary way to puncture the autonomous individual’s fantasy self: “anything other than assault and satire can only be understood as a confirmation of the current corrupted meanings of such honorable old words as love, truth, beauty, brotherhood of man, life, and so on.” The comic conflict that generates satire is, according to the dependable Vorhaus, threefold: global, local or interpersonal, or inner and psychological—or, best of all, all three at once. The more complex and exaggerated the comic characters and their conflicts, the funnier the comedy will be.
All well and good. But the kinds of conflicts the dependable Vorhaus describes only make for comedy that we might call situational. Whether global, interpersonal, or psychological, comic conflict at this level can be shared, more or less, by those of vastly different moral outlooks, precisely because it does not reach to the soft and sensitive underbelly of anyone’s deepest moral commitments. Pretty much all audiences can laugh at The Simpsons, or Only Murders in the Building, or a summer beach read because the satire in these stories does not (usually) attempt to puncture first principles. Not that the modern self’s misguided first principles aren’t very much in play in these stories, but there is so much that is simply human in modern situational comedy that we hardly notice how much of it is infected with the cruel irony so typical of the modern fantasy self. We suck in its noxious fumes even as we guffaw at the antics of the modern clown.
So, is it possible to write satire that is more than situational, that does more than laugh at common human foibles and dysfunctional relationships, that gets down to the very command center of the modern self’s self-understanding? I have been stewing on this problem for some time, and I would like to propose that there is such a satire. Unsurprisingly for a philosopher, the kind of saving satire I envision is philosophical at its heart. It is a satire that views human beings as more than sophisticated organisms. That recognizes that the most important conflict in the buffered self’s life has to do with his rejection of any value that transcends his choices. Which is why this deeper satire is best called metaphysical.
In one of his moods, Evelyn Waugh despaired of the possibility of writing satire of the modern world. For Waugh, satire requires a background of shared moral understanding reflecting the transcendent—the very lack of which defines modern culture.
Yet Waugh’s own comic novels refute this judgment. Time and again, through judicious use of the reductio ad absurdum, Waugh shows how satire of the modern self can work. It works by creating conflicts revealing that the modern fantasy is unsustainable, and that its best-laid plans for progress always morph into designs for the guillotine.
In Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy sees modern freedom as involved in the same reductio:
With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as a guarantor of the identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated…is both cut loose and imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g. by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world it wishes to inhabit as its homeland.
And in this Percy is only echoing Romano Guardini, who in The End of the Modern World affirms what Percy calls modern man’s “curious and paradoxical bondage.” On the one hand, Guardini writes, the modern self is defined by his liberty, and so “seemed a man carried forward by his own self-mastered genius.” Yet on the other hand, this positive experience “was countered by man’s loss of his objective sense of belonging to existence. With the breakdown of the old-world picture, man came to feel now only that he had been placed in a life of strange contradictions but also that his very existence was threatened. Modern man awoke to that anxiety which menaces him to this day…”
The trick, then, is to make a story that exaggerates the Truth and Pain of a modern comic protagonist coming to consciousness of his own paradoxical bondage. That is the first move in what I am calling a metaphysical form of satire. But once a modern self’s fantasy reality has been reduced to comic absurdity, the Catholic comic writer might avail himself of a second move. Now that the protagonist’s fantasy reality has been exposed, he is now open, perhaps more than ever before, to alternative possibilities. He might now even be ready to consider God and the transcendent. It’s not about proving to the protagonist that the transcendent really exists, in some Philosophy 101 sense of proof. It’s about showing how the transcendent avoids the Chinese handcuff of modern autonomy. And the most crucial part of this showing—in what is surely the Catholic comic novelist’s most skillful move, if only he can pull it off—is the manifestation of the transcendent moral order—the clunky way of referring to Our Father God’s crazy mad love for us—as the fulfillment the comic protagonist was yearning for the entire time. For the deepest desires of the modern self are ultimately no different than yours or mine. They are for acceptance, love, belonging, community, the emergence from shaming darkness into accepting light. In a word, they are for the “vision of innocence” and “total human intelligibility,” the realization of the desire for the Infinite that characterizes our restless hearts.
A joke once heard from one of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories is famously quoted in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Father Brown describes how he had caught a thief with an unseen hook and an invisible line long enough to let the thief wander to the ends of the world. So, how was the detective able to bring the thief back?
Answer: With a twitch upon the thread.
Ba-boom.