“YOU’RE FUNNY, ALAN”
Four wretches cringed in the center of the forest clearing on an Attic hillside; dancing firelight mingled with the terror in their eyes What new indignity was to be heaped upon those already inflicted by the simple villagers?
Each soul suffered from an affliction recognized then as ‘demon possession’, but today goes under the sanitized sobriquet of ‘mental illness’. One madman foamed at the mouth and tore at the sturdy log to which he was bound. Another poor soul searched for the invisible moon, whining like a puppy – her lunacy embodied in animal distress.
A third sat staring vacantly – an imbecile, a vegetable. He clutched a smooth pebble and muttered some meaningless phrase in endless repetition. The fourth sat to one side – she was plotting the murder of the other three!
Suddenly the clearing exploded with crashing sound and chaos – the 4 Corybantes, children of Apollo the Sun god, leapt into the firelight. They beat sword to shield – they shrieked wild incantations into the startled night; they surrounded the four ‘patients’ with a circle of hitherto unimagined hideousness, of demonic dancing and cacophony of musical instruments, with their wild and plangent rhythms – a dervish that could only lead to a horrible end. The Four clung together for a fragment of mutual comfort; they’d been reluctantly wrenched into sanity – for a few moments at least.
Hardly noticeable at first, the words and movements of the Corybantes slid imperceptibly from chaos, to a semblance of order. Were those actual rhythms being beaten on the shields? An anapest – short, shot, long? An iambic – short, long? And was that a pyrrhic – short, short – the ‘fire’ rhythm itself?!
In time, all the 12 Cosmic Rhythms were committed to the night – an unfamiliar calm entered the souls of The Four, a calm carried on the pulse of sound. And then there were the movements – there seemed to be a synchronicity between word and gesture. The arms of the now-graceful Corybantes expressed, in intelligent movements, the sounds of their powerful mantras, ringing resonances in the nocturn.
A dim light of comprehension flickered in the fear-wide eyes of The Four, the ‘healees’. Then one of the Corybantes broke off and (surprisingly) performed a small skit in which a sleepy buffoon couldn’t get into his trousers. Log Man laughed out loud – a full belly laugh. A staccato symphony of sanity which filled the glade; somewhat scabrous, but sanity nevertheless. The ‘buffoon’ laughed with him. Log Man released himself from his ligneous prison, left the circle, and returned to his sleeping village – still falling about with mirth!
The second Corybante caught the attention of Lunar-seer with a delightful, self-deprecating farce in which she had, under a spell, fallen in love with a knotted old oak tree! Her bandishments were delivered with wit and elegance. Lunar Seer thought it odd at first, then funny, then hilarious! She giggled like a tickled schoolgirl; the peals of her laughter fell around her like a spangled veil. The night rejoiced, and she went home, still immersed in joyful tintinnabulation, a mantel of mirth.
Pebble Clutcher was unamused – so was the 3rd Corybante, whose face remained impassive as she eyed him speculatively. Minutes passed, Pebble Clutcher felt a creeping discomfort seep into the fringes of his soul. Then he noticed it – a tic in the eye of the 3rd demi-god – there it was again… something familiar? Then the divine hand tried, unobserved, to scratch the divine bottom! A chuckle issued from the now animated face of Pebble Clutcher – he was sure he’d seen that before!
“My friends, I am here to announce a change of a dress … er, I mean, address! And how lovely to see all you happy folk here today, bubbling with excrement … I, um, I mean, excitement…”
Now she knew! It was a clever impression of the bumbling village head man. He had a nervous tic – he was an inveterate bottom scratcher.
Those were typical of his malapropisms! (Sorry, a modern term – the phenomenon has always been the same.) this skilled impersonation, or Burlesque, went on with delicious irony, throwing ever more light on Head Man’s eccentricities. The 3rd Corybante parodied them with deftness of gesture and word.
The pebble dropped for Pebble Clutcher, his woes forgotten in the spirit of theatre that filled the glade. His face was wreathed in chuckles of happy recognition of things known, but not fully conscious; and when the ‘performance’ ended, he got up and strolled into the night, his demeanor calm, his mood jocular.
The murderous eyes of the last of The Four still glinted malevolently, her mouth was as tight as a trap. Looking away, the 4th Corybante apostrophized into the night.
“Mummy, Mummy – how can I stop junior kicking me?”
“Just nail his other foot to the floor Dear.” A think smile moved the corners of the mouth of this brooding ‘audience-of-one’. But it soon disappeared; she hoped it hadn’t been seen – she wouldn’t want anyone to think she was human! More abstractly delivered ‘black jokes’ followed. The smile re-appeared involuntarily.
Then the 4th Corybante declaimed a satirical monologue on the folly of the ‘new-age’ (for Greeks that is) healing practices. Here doctors would inexplicably treat the symptoms of a disease, rather than the cause! This evoke a knowing snigger of cynicism from the deepest recesses of Murder Eyes, and after a time she too – fully replete, as the word satire means (satiate) – left for home. The fire guttered, the purple night was at peace.
And so the First Law of comedy was enacted for the first time – Chaos to Calm, the opposite from tragedy. The combined elements of Word, Music, Movement – and humor – have been used to bring calm to the chaotic souls of humanity ever since.
Thallia, the 8th Greek Muse, the Muse of Comedy (and of the art of Life Spirit, Eurythmy) is, not surprisingly, the mother of the Corybantes – an at-times maligned group of Beings. Their reputation as healers of the soul-sick has endured to this day – serious probmes often require serious solutions yes? The word comedy means ‘singing procession’ or ‘joyous ceremony’ – words, music, movement (‘tragedy’ means ‘he goat’!).
Thallia hold the comedy mask – a grotesque bucolic countenance – at arm’s length. In her right (major) hand she holds the divining rod, it lightly touches the earth, a conduit between her lofty spirituality, and the dark earth. Humor moves lightly between the two.
Thallia is also one of the 3 Graces, or Charities (love beings); her name means ‘blossoming’, the highest of the 3-stage Etheric plant, a symbol of Life Spirit. This sunny quality was thought by the Greeks to be sunlight itself, dancing over meadow and field – and over the Soul of Man. The 8th Muse is truly a Sun Being.
Laughter is ‘the spiritual manifestation of Man’s striving for liberation’ as Rudolf Steiner once said. He also said that babies only truly laugh and cry in the 2nd month of life, when their eyes assume clear focus. This is a sign that the Ego has at last really touched down. This ‘Self’ is a necessary factor in laughing and crying; evidenced by the fact that ego-less animals do neither – not really.
The shortest and most lacrimose sentence in the Bible is ‘Jesus wept’; weeping is a compaction of the soul into matter. Perhaps a weeping Jesus is a recognition of His physicality. Being a Sun God, entombment in the cocoon of the body would surely be cause enough for weeping. But we digress, this article is about laughing!
The word humor comes from a Greek word meaning ‘fluid’. In the oracle centers of the Aegean, the Masters perceived the Vital force of four special fluids in the body (They had no need for cadaver-carving in those days!). These fluids are sublime when inside doing their job, but awful when they spill out! The four are bile; blood; phlegm; black bile – even the words are repugnant.
A predominance of any one of these influences the mood of a person – the humor – each in a different way. In the long term they create the Temperament of the Individual (especially with children 7 to 14). These ‘Humors’ are respectively the choleric; sanguine; phlegmatic; melancholic. The Temperaments influence, among other things, the way we view life, and in a major way, our sense of humor.
Cholerics adore Slapstick, and show their appreciation to the whole theatre with hearty belly laughter (You must have heard them!).
Sanguines love the Farce, or romantic comedy, and literally shimmer with peals of giggling, leading to hysterics in pathological cases. ‘Hysteria’ is from a Greek word meaning ‘womb’ – a reference to menstrual blood, the sanguine fluid.
Phlegmatics can be shaken from their torpor with Burlesque, sometimes with dry, dead-pan delivery – a seeming antitheses of funny. When the phlegmatic recognizes elements in daily life of which they had been unconscious, their faces become wreathed in knowing chuckles. A peek through the vulgar keyhole can tickle their oft-hidden sense of humor.
The melancholics, with their introverted, razor-sharp intelligence, will respond with smiles and sniggers to biting Satire; and in its lowest form, black comedy. The image of the distress of others seems to evoke a complementary response in their dark souls – they cheer up accordingly!
This over-generalized division of the 4 Humors can be seen expressed in the different ages of childhood. The under 7s love the Slapstick of the buffoon; of course clowns are perennially popular. 7 to 14s adore the Farce, with its intricate plot and sit-com dependence on coincidence and witty dialogue. (this is a key to including appropriate ‘comedy relief’ in writing stories for children.)
Paul Hogan is one of our greatest ‘farcical’ comedians’ his Dentist Chair routine was as unforgettable as it was funny (to me anyway). He is sitting in the chair trying to chat up the lissome nurse, obligingly pressing her left breast into his eye – but every time he tries to speak he’s either got the dentist’s fist in his mouth, or a wrecked Valiant clamped to his teeth. Worst of all (apart from the dentist’s halitosis), his face is numb, and he is unaware of an unsightly steam of dribble running down his chin! The farce laughs at itself. In physiognomic terms, those laughter lines at the edge of Hoge’s eyes are not accidental.
14 to 21 is the age of the Burlesque, with its undergraduate humor, sarcasm and sexual innuendo. It reduces the grand to the trivial, and adolescents love it (Mad comics for instance). Dame Edna Everage, who exploits this to the limit, came into being in the back of a bus (‘Not an FJ Holden like some of you lot!’ she might say!). Touring a theatre company, Barry Humphries would do impressions, to his legless colleagues, of the pretensions to culture of the dignitaries in the carious country towns they visited – especially of the ladies. The character of everyone’s auntie evolved, picking up crumbs off the tablecloth with a self-righteous wet finger!
Beyond 21, Satire delights the now adult audience, especially if it is thought-provoking and based on penetrating observation of human nature. Graham Kennedy earned his outrageous reputation with his acidic humor and superlative skill in satirizing our political and social foibles.
Even T.V. programming reflects this humor/age factor; cartoons in the morning for the littles who rise with the sparrow, but are too busy watching the box to see them! Frothy comedies in the afternoon when the children get home from school – who should be out playing instead of watching the rubbish!
Then we have the more sophisticated family show in the early evening – when the teenagers should be doing something constructive, like a school project! Finally adult-only shows late at night, when mum and dad would be better off talking to each other for a change!
An important role for comedy is social correction; to reveal hypocrisy, excesses and downright calumnious behavior by community leaders and others. No public figure should ever really feel safe from the humorous barb – usually delivered with impunity (laws of defamation and libel withstanding). A heavy responsibility falls on our satirists to be discriminating in the selection of their victims. One might have them rolling in the aisles with jokes about Mother Teresa – what’s the point?
But how many of Joh’s dangerous peccadillos were brought into line by our comedians and cartoonists? Joh of course was funnier than any of them; he removed the sting from his detractors with elan with lines like ‘Those … those people down there in Canberra – as I say, they’ve cooked their goose, and now they’re going to have to lie int it!’.
American humor, cerebrally unsatisfying to some, is best represented by Slapstick and Farce; while British fun-smiths (said to be the best in the world) rely more on Burlesque and Satire. The Two Ronne’s send-up of boy scouts was always hilarious, marching around self-importantly in their shorts and toggles!
Australian humor seems to range easily across the four, with a strong coloring of larrikinism and irreverence.
Comedy usually portrays people worse than ourselves; tragedy the opposite, more heroic. This assures a feeling of superiority in the audience, reader, whatever – an apparently necessary component if we are to think someone is funny. The ago-old image of the top-hatted banker slipping on a banana skin is typical – all of us who are lower on the social scale fall about – rich bankers are unamused!
Comedy is full of contradiction, it often appeals to our animal instincts, originating as it does in Dionysian rituals, with their boisterous phallic parodies – the grotesque make of Thallia. These were fertility festivals; the Old King would be ‘killed’, and a new one, a Hero – symbol of the new year, of the Sun – would take his place. A Scapegoat (one which e-scapes), the He-goat of Tragedy, would be burdened with the year’s sins of the community, and driven into dark-earth exile.
Yet the wit element of comedy can lift us into the most rarified heights of urbanity. This irony was expressed by the self-detractory Norman Gunston, a white-faced (hemophiliac even) Pierrot-type character created by Gary MacDonald. Budget-model T.V. interviewer botched it again; ‘make up’ arranged the hair strands to cover the pate, but forgot to remove the cigarette paper from the shaving nicks! He sends himself up mercilessly while subtly taking the mickey out of ‘Our special guest this evening …’
The Humors and Thallia – the Earth and Ego – the Clown and Noel Coward; I was performing for a kindergarten audience, I had just finished my hilarious depiction of the Dollar Tollar Bird, singing my song ‘I am the Dollar Toller Bird and me you must pass …’; strutting around in my Glossy bossy Green Boots and banging my plywood tollgate. A serious-faced little boy in the front looked into my eyes and said in a puzzled tone ‘You’re funny Alan.’
If I was so funny, why wasn’t he laughing?!
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