When the roll-call of Western Culture is finally written, one of the artistic products that will be left like a pair of dragons yearningly watching the departing ark as the waters rise around it is likely to be the British TV comedy. Much as critics like to run the tattered flags of Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army, Monty Python and The Office up their flagpole, we salute them with a notably post-Imperial tristesse. Like bottle-caps in mud, their brightness is more a feature of the dismally unfunny vehicles of their era than their inherent value.
Moreover, how many people actually like the finely-crafted farce of Fawlty Towers rather than, say, the Spanish waitor being hit with a teaspoon? How many people value the the dry documentary style of The Office above David Brent's humiliating, iconic dance? The high aesthetic criteria on which critics exalt these comedies are distant from the audience laughter that has seemed to underwrite those critical opinions. And if laughter really sets the seal of greatness on comedy, then reserve a place in the Hall of Fame for You've Been Framed.
Nevertheless, it is untenable to say that comedy is of a lower form than tragedy, and if we doubt this for a second then we only have to consider how few are the great comedies, how many the great tragedies, great string quartets, great serious novels. A great humorist such as P. G. Wodehouse is a lightning-strike amid the steady downpour of serious British fiction.
Is the fault, then, in our stars or in our selves? I don't know when I last heard someone boasting about reading a comic novel or watching a sit-com. If art is the new Top Trumps, then the cards with the highest value always seem to be the ones about: a doomed love-affair; a fatal illness; and, preferably, a high-stakes historical event such as the Holocaust. I hope that people consume this moral fibre purely for health of their image when discussing them afterwards, because its nutritional value always seems to me to be negligible.
Richard Curtis's gentle comedy begins with with the modest but perceptive comment that Love, Actually, is all around. Love and comedy are indeed pervasive in our society, but the fleshless bones on which today's culture vultures seem to feed gives scant evidence of this.
2 comments:
I, for one, find the ritual humiliation of Manuel in Fawlty Towers one of the low points in the programme, but I wouldn't necessarily single out the "craft of the farce" for special emphasis, as there are other delights that I treasure more. Neither do I care much for The Office and David Brent's dance left me cold.
The problem with humour is that it's just not serious, and critics labour under the delusion that it's harder to be Harold Pinter than Harold Lloyd, whereas of course both need equivalent levels of skill. Boris Johnson struggles to be taken seriously, not only because he's a toff with mad hair, but also because he's naturally a very funny man.
However, I know that you don't read much modern fiction, so you might be unaware that Martin Amis and Will Self have written some acclaimed comic novels, while Howard Jacobson's Redback is a minor masterpiece.
I suppose I can admit that, contrary to modern received opinion, I like Richard Curtis films, and enjoyed Notting Hill when it was shown recently. I don't care for FWAAF but that's because of Andie MacDowell.
comedy and tragedy combine rather in The Confederacy of Dunces, one of the funniest novels ever written, one which I bang on about relentlessly and one whose author committed suicide when he failed to find a publisher. Cue Mummy Tiger running to the rescue and the posthumous awarding of the Pulitzer.
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