12. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1966), no. 131, 64.
13. James Mottram, The Coen Brothers: The Life of the Mind (Dulles, Va.: Brassey's, 2000).
14. Ibid., 124.
15. Laura Miller, “The Banality of Virtue,” Salon.com, http://archive.salon.com/09/reviews/farg01.html.
16. I have discussed Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994), nihilism, and comedy in great detail in Shows about Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from “The Exorcist” to “Seinfeld” (Dallas: Spence, 1999). On the banality of evil, see Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963; rev. and enlarged ed., 1965; reprint, Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Classics, 1994).
17. Spicer, Film Noir, 149; James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1998), 214–15.
18. Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 245.
PHILOSOPHIES OF COMEDY IN
O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?
Douglas McFarland
It is said that upon a visit to Berlin in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Groucho Marx was taken to the mound of rubble that had been the site of Hitler's bunker. Groucho stepped out of his jeep and climbed to the top of what constituted Hitler's gravesite, where he unexpectedly proceeded to dance the Charleston. On one level, the gesture is meant to defy evil, to assert the celebration of dance over the horrors of Hitler's madness, to demonstrate the irrepressible energy of the human spirit. Groucho, in short, thumbs his nose at the Führer. But his act of irreverence is also the staging of a radical and scandalous incongruity. Comedy is, as Kierkegaard asserted, “wherever there is contradiction.”1 In this case, the contradiction between a 1920s dance step and the perpetrator of the profound atrocity of twentieth-century Europe expresses the absurdity of the human condition. Groucho's gesture is ultimately as unsettling as it is liberating.
Within the overarching narrative framework of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) the Coen brothers have generated their own complex set of comic absurdities. Although it has been called the “least serious” of the Coen brothers’ oeuvre, the film is, in fact, one of their most thoughtful. With its fast-paced picaresque style and collection of zany characters, the film has undoubtedly delighted a wide audience, but its serious themes and at times disturbing contradictions also challenge that delight. The film has been fruitfully explicated in terms of pastiche, dissonance, and “engaged reinvention,” but the film's serious comic underpinnings can best be understood through the overlapping concepts of the mechanical, the contradictory, and the absurd articulated by Henri Bergson and Kierkegaard. According to Bergson, we laugh when we see a human as a “set-up mechanism…a jointed puppet.”2 For Kierkegaard, the comic represents the unmediated contradictions of the human condition, incongruities that defy resolution but generate laughter. It is a blend of these perspectives that we experience in O Brother, as zany cartoon figures dance like mechanical marionettes across a landscape of existential incongruities, at times oblivious to their ontological status and at others struggling to resist the rigidity of law and the inflexibility of social roles and personal obsessions.
The philosophical explication of comedy runs its own comic risks. From Aristophanes to Rabelais and Swift, the scholar has been the natural butt and easy target of comedy. The philosopher's rigid obsession with his or her system of thought, a “hobby horse,” as Sterne would put it, is potentially as laughable as Ulysses Everett McGill's (George Clooney) obsession with a particular brand of hair pomade. And no doubt, the Coen brothers would be amused by my own exegetical method. But my intention is not to impose an artificial intellectual category on what is visceral and alive but to provide a means to engage the social, ethical, and existential complexities of laughter in O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Generic Incongruities
The title of the Coen brothers’ romp through Depression-era America comes from Preston Sturges's film Sullivan's Travels (1941). O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the title of the socially conscious film that Sullivan, after directing a series of successful musical comedies, now intends to make. He decides to move away from making films similar to Busby Berkeley's Gold Diggers of 1935, a celebration of sex, money, and dance, to ones similar to William Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road (1933), an indictment of social inequality, economic depravation, and railroad bulls. But after experiencing a transforming epiphany, Sullivan proclaims upon his return to Hollywood that there is as much, if not more, value in comedy as there is in working-class manifestos. On this “cock-eyed caravan” that we call life, laughter is a necessary tonic for its many trials and tribulations.
The Coen brothers’ film, therefore, immediately confronts its knowledgeable audience with a generic incongruity. Although the film bears the title of the gritty film Sullivan originally intended to make, and indeed it does chronicle the travails of those facing economic hardship, social injustice, and political corruption, it is also a madcap comedy, perhaps the very comedy Sullivan decided to make after returning to Hollywood. We are left with an indecorous hybrid: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) filmed as screwball comedy. Rather than therapeutic, the Coens would seem to have made a film that elicits a potentially jarring incongruity. This unresolved contradiction in generic perspective provides the ongoing comic dynamic of the film. What results is not a traditionally mixed generic form such as tragicomedy or pastoral epic but a self-consciously contradictory artifact.
The incongruity between comic high jinks and social commentary is addressed in an early self-referential scene. Three escapees from a chain gang, encumbered by the manacles that fasten them together, are struggling to climb aboard a boxcar of a moving train. Ulysses McGill, the apparent leader of the group, is first to pull himself up. But at the very moment of his triumph, as he pauses to ask if anyone of those already riding the train might be a smithy, the chain that binds him to his fellow fugitives tightens, and he is suddenly and unceremoniously yanked off the train. Satisfied that he is free and mobile, he forgets that he remains chained to his two companions and as a result takes a comic pratfall. To put it differently, he remembers that he needs a blacksmith's file to be unshackled, but he concurrently fails to remember that he is shackled.
The wide-eyed, exaggerated, and even goofy look on McGill's face, as well as the automated movement of his body as it is jerked down and pulled across the floor of the boxcar suggests Bergson's notion that we laugh when we see “something mechanical encrusted on the living.”3 The comic buffoon is one who has become a “lifeless automaton.” Bergson's phenomenological understanding of comedy is an outgrowth of the contrast he makes between habit and recollection in Matter and Memory. He describes rote learning as a habitual type of memory: “Like every habitual bodily exercise, it is stored up in a mechanism which is set in motion as a whole by an initial impulse, in a closed system of automatic movements.”4 The comic figure is one given over to the “easy automatism of acquired habits.”5 This renders him a “jointed puppet…a set up mechanism,” and the “more exactly these two images, that of a person and that of a machine, fit into one another, the more striking is the comic effect.”6
In this context, it is important to note the twofold subtext that informs Bergson's explication of laughter. Written at the turn of the twentieth century, his treatment reflects his perception of a dehumanized culture, one in which the individual is increasingly enveloped in modern mechanization. This phenomenon was addressed as early as Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and as late as Charlie
