Tag Archives: Jerry Lewis

Jerry Lewis’s Animistic Comedy

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Many a schlemiel-comedian has made his or her livelihood by way of this or that physical gesture (or series of gestures).  Oftentimes, these gestures are animations of this or that physical feature.  One need only think of the assemblage (to use a word made popular by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guittari) of Groucho Marx which included raised painted eyebrows, mustache, a cigar, his odd frames, and his “Jewish” nose.  By simply raising his fake eyebrows, widening his eyes, or twitching his cigar, Marx had a punch line.

To be sure, this assemblage has been fetishized and marketed.  The animating gesture, so to speak, is missing.

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In some cases, this assemblage has become a sign of comedy.  Here, in fact, is a book cover by MIT press. The book – The Odd One In – by Alenka Zupancic (the Slovenian philosopher Slajov Zizek’s teacher) espouses a philosophy of comedy.

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The cover and the title make an allusion to the Groucho Marx joke about him not wanting to belong to a club that would have him as a member.  This classical schlemiel joke is also told by Woody Allen.  He, so to speak, also animates it at the beginning of his film Annie Hall (1976) by retelling it – albeit with his own physical mannerisms and gestures that play more on the charming “sexual schlemiel” stereotype.

Although we are clearly aware of how each of these comedians is comically animating their features by way of this or that gesture, what we might miss is the fact that they may also – at times – animating the spaces they are in and even time.  One comedian who animates not just himself but also the space and time he occupies is Jerry Lewis.

I was fortunate enough to have recently come across this brilliant insight into Lewis’s character when Steven Shaviro (whose work on film theory, literary criticism, social networking, and philosophy is exceptional – to say the least) apprised me of two recent essays he had written on Jerry Lewis.  The second of these two essays addresses Lewis’s relationship to space and time by way of a reading which takes the comedic theory of the Nobel Prize winning late 19th and early 20th century philosopher, Henri Bergson as a counterpoint.

I deeply appreciate Shaviro’s insights since I have also taken Bergson’s Essay on Laughter and his notion of “creative evolution” as a counterpoint to my reading of the schlemiel.  What I point out in my work is how, for Bergson (as for many members of the German-Jewish Enlightenment), comedy is purgatory.  The act of laughter is based on the act of targeting this or that comic behavior which is “mechanical.”  Laughter is a way of saying that such mechanical action must be excluded (purged) from a society which is based on “élan vital” and on a vitalism based on becoming and change.  Mechanical repetition evinces the opposite and that’s why, according to Bergson, we laugh at it.  We want to become; we don’t want to mechanically repeat.

But in my reading the schlemiel is not to be seen as a character whose behaviors must be excluded; rather, they should be emulated in the sense that they challenge society to change; not the other way around.  This is what we see in much Eastern European literature.  The “lord of dreams” that Hannah Arendt sees as an obstacle to normality is, in Eastern Europe, closer to truth that those who laugh at him.  Her repetitions, therefore, put us into question and this fundamentally challenges Bergson’s reading.

Shaviro’s reading of Jerry Lewis – by way of Henri Bergson – offers another challenge to Bergson while, at the same, opening up a new way of approaching comedy by way of paying more attention to the way a comedian’s gestures affect and animate the space and time around them.

Shaviro takes Jerry Lewis’s film The Patsy (1964) as his starting point.  He focuses mainly on the music lesson given to Jerry Lewis by Hans Conreid, the “stuffy, Germanic music teacher.”

In this clip, Lewis appeals to physical gesture by “contorting his body into various grotesque postures.”  But, more importantly for Shaviro’s thesis, his gestures affect the space around him since he “ends up either..wrecking the furniture” by touching it or “by sliding down off it and onto the floor.”  These caricatures go on and on and end up affecting time and space.

Regarding Bergson, Shaviro points out that Lewis’s gestures are “inelastic” to “an alarming degree.” Lewis is “open to any and every suggestion that reaches him.”  His body is like an “electronic transformer” which “amplifies gestures and expressions instead of electric currents.”  But, in contrast to Bergson, Shaviro says that these gestures enliven things around the comic and that instead of being outside of a life process – as Bergson suggests comic gestures are – they generate a process. This generation is “visible” and spatial.

Moreover, instead of separating objects in space, Lewis’s gestures of “reciprocal interference” bind things in the room together into a network of oscillating relations. This works, also in terms of time, since instead of crashing objects immediately, Lewis postpones the crash by holding this or that object up before it falls. This creates a “temporal delay” and an excoriating long wait for this or that explosion or crash.

The key, as Shaviro argues, has to do with reading Lewis in terms of “animism” as opposed to the “vitalism” that Bergson thinks about.  This animism gives life to dead objects by way of what Shaviro calls “contagion.”  But this kind of animism differs from that spoken of by Joseph Campbell and others since it does not “possess” the animator and efface his or her identity.  Rather, this animism works like an electric current.  And, even the delay of this energy is a part of it’s relay.  In fact, the delay of the crash in the above-mentioned scene, according to Shaviro, is an extraction from the horror genre since it works by animating dead bodies; here, objects in the room.

This kind of animation is connected to “cartooning and cinematic animation” which Lewis learned (“inherited”) from the animator Frank Tashlin.  As Shaviro notes:

Cartoon animation gives exaggerated life to imaginary and initially inanimate figures; Tashlin and Lewis apply such exaggeration to living bodies themselves, creating an “unnatural” more-than-liveness.

Here is one of Tashlin’s animations from the 1940s.  As you can see, inanimate objects like a cage and signs are given life by way of exaggeration.  And this, as Shaviro argues, brings together a kind of animism that is opposed to a Bergsonian vitalism (élan vital).

Shaviro ends his essay on Lewis by suggesting that we also look at Karl Marx’s descripion of  a table which illustrates “commodity fetishism.”  In the example brought by Marx, the product – here a table – comes to life.  Marx finds this illustration of the “magical character of commodities” to be grotesque.  Playing on Bergson and Marx’s readings, Shaviro makes up a word to illustrate the ideas he is working with; namely a “Marxist-Bergsonian” phenomena which involves the animation of dead objects in space and time by way of comedy.

This thesis is fascinating and it makes the claim that the animism we see in Lewis’s comedy articulates a historical-economic backdrop for his comic-animism.  This theory puts an interesting spin on the comedy of Groucho Marx as well since the fetishized glasses, nose, and mustache that are a sign of comedy and of being the “odd one out” have the most power not when they are on this or that person’s face but when they appear in Marx’s films.

Here, for instance, is a great scene that demonstrates how he animates time and space.

I’ll end with a clip from Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) since it illustrates how Zelig – the human animation – changes vis-à-vis whatever space he is in.  And these changes give vitality to everyone around him and create an electric circuit of sorts (much like the spinning of a record).  Perhaps this is a product of capitalism, but, as Irving Howe argues (in this very film), it can also be read as a product of assimilation. Regardless, Shaviro’s suggestion about Lewis could also be applied to Allen.   Ultimately, these animated comic gestures would be nothing without animation but, as a part of the package, Jewish identity is (as Jacques Derrida would say vis-à-vis the text and deconstruction) supplemented by animation:

 

Jerry Lewis, Comedy, and Psychoanalysis (Terminable/Interminable)

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What has always intrigued me about the schlemiel is the fact that he constantly fails and that nothing, it seems, can help him.  And one of the things that pops up in modern Jewish-American literature and film to help the schlemiel out of his embarrassing condition is psychoanalysis.  The psychoanalytic cure (aka “the talking cure”) presupposes that there is an “end” to analysis.  As I have pointed out in my readings of the schlemiel, the psychoanalyst appears from time to time in the films of Woody Allen or in Phillip Roth’s notorious schlemiel classic – Portnoy’s Complaint – to offer a cure.  In Allen’s earlier films, the cure often falls short.  But in his later films, like Hollywood Ending, we see the opposite.  In that film, a psychoanalyst holds the key which, at some point, Allen’s main character embraces.  And doing so changes his life and makes him “normal.”  His analysis is, at some point, terminated.  In truth, Allen embraced the cure and has left the schlemiel behind.  (I have written and published two essays on this topic in different Woody Allen anthologies.)

Writing on the schlemiel in Phillip Roth, Sanford Pinsker points out that Roth was very uncomfortable with the schlemiel and the effect Portnoy’s Complaint had on his career and image.   That novel, in fact, is structured on a discussion between a psychanalyst and Portnoy.  With this in mind, Pinsker argues that all of Roth’s novels following Portnoy’s Complaint are aimed at psychologically working through the schlemiel and leaving him behind (for Roth, therefore, literature offered some kind of analysis which had a clear goal in mind: becoming normal).  Although she doesn’t appeal to psychoanalysis, Hannah Arendt, in her essay “The Jew as Pariah,” also sees the schlemiel as a malady of sorts which can and should be cured.  For her, the cure is social, historical, and political normalization.  Writing during World War II, Arendt envisioned a time when the Jew would be accepted as an equal and will no longer be forced to find shelter in being “exceptional” schlemiels/pariahs.

In all of the above-mentioned cases, we see the same logic which, I would argue, has its basis in Germany and central Europe and not Eastern Europe.  In all of these cases, the schlemiel is equated with some kind of abnormality (psychic or political) which can be cured.

In my last few blog entries, I have been pointing out how, for both Ruth Wisse and Steven Shaviro, psychology, though useful, may be too reductive when dealing with either the schlemiel (Wisse) or with Jerry Lewis’s brand of masochism (Shaviro).  Nonetheless, I was very pleased to see, after I posted my blog entry on facebook, that Steven Shaviro read my piece and pointed out how he had recently written yet another two essays on Jerry Lewis.  In the first of the two essays, which are both e-published, Shaviro speaks to the issue of the psychoanalytic cure and its relation to Jerry Lewis’s comedy.  I was very pleased to see this because I have been pondering the tension between affirming the schlemiel (the Eastern European model) and rejecting him (the German model).   As I have noted above, this model has been appealed to by way of this or that use of psychoanalysis in the films and novels of many a Jewish-American writer and filmmaker.

That said, I’d like to go through a few of Shaviro’s points; since his argument, regarding Jerry Lewis’s comedy, resonated well with my own claims for the schlemiel.  He argues, in short, that Jerry Lewis’s comedy is not about affirming a cure so much as challenging the talking cure.  And instead of terminating analysis, Lewis’s comedy leads to what Freud, in one account, would call “interminable analysis.”

The first of the two essays on Lewis is entitled “Smorgasbord.”  The title of the essay is based on Lewis’s original title for his 1983 film whose final title was Cracking Up.  Shaviro starts off his reading by noting the Jewishness of this film which one can find in the emotionally riveting case of the “self-deprecating” comedian.  This act of self-deprecation is a way or strategy for warding off “humiliations imposed upon” the Jew by “others.”  And this is:

A quintessential strategy that has historically been adopted by Jews, by women, and by members of oppressed groups. (7)

Shaviro brilliantly frames this strategy in terms of another “great Jewish invention” – psychoanalysis:

We might well compare Jewish humor to another great Jewish invention that endeavors to deal with unavoidable, internalized suffering: psychoanalysis.  Like humor psychoanalysis gives relief by providing a “safety valve” through which one may give vent to otherwise unmentionable miseries.  (8)

Shaviro notes that psychoanalysis and comedy offer “insights” that are often self-deprecating.  And the “cure” (which Shaviro puts in scare quotes) “consists in recognizing and giving voice to, the most unpleasant things that one can find out about oneself”(9).  However, Shaviro notes (against popular wisdom) that both comedy and psychoanalysis do not “really provide a permanent solution.”  Rather, both are a part of an “interminable process.”  And this is what we see in Lewis’s comedy:

He struggles interminably to come to some conclusion, his well-meaning efforts instead spread chaos far and wide.  Every one of Lewis’s character’s actions seems to have limitless reverberations…Waves of destruction spread outwards, to infect or contaminate other people, and to overwhelm Lewis’s physical surroundings.  (11)

Shaviro points out, in this regard, Lewis’s failed attempts to kill himself in the movie.

Regarding this interminable failure, Shaviro points out who instead of transforming himself (as we see in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris or in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up), Jerry Lewis’s character in this film “reiterates” and repeats things.  In this film, for instance, Lewis tries to give up smoking but keeps on going over and over again through the procedure of stopping – but to no avail.  He can’t quit and is, so to speak, “confined.”

Once again, Lewis’s persona is unable to achieve freedom, even at his machinations have cascading effects beyond the limits of his confinement.  (27)

Shaviro ends his essay with a detailed description of Lewis’s encounter with a psychoanalyst.  The twist is that he is not cured so much as free from the symptoms of neurosis that he transfers to his psychoanalyst:

All of the symptoms that have been excised from Warren’s (Lewis’s) body and mind reappear insteaed in Dr. Petchick.  All of a sudden the psychiatrist has adopted all of Warren’s mannerisms and incompetentcies. He lights a cigarette and gets punched out by Dick Butkis; he flails about, running this way and that, causing cars to crash and structures to topple, spreading chaos around him. (32)

And this, for Shaviro, is the main point.  Lewis’s comedy works by way of transferring his stammerings to others.  Instead of getting rid of his malady, he gives it to others.  The great irony of this, according to Shaviro, is that Lewis, in real life, is an advocate of the laughing cure and comedic catharsis but his films teach the opposite: one cannot be cured.  Comedy, like psychoanalysis, is (ultimately) interminable and that interminability is contagious.  In other words, one cannot simply be cured.

Shaviro’s reading of Lewis – in this instance – has important implications for schlemiel theory.  Lewis’s inability to be cured serve as a reminder to us that, in the schlemiel tradition, the desire to “cure” the schlemiel of its malady was posited by Jews who wanted to leave the past behind and felt that the schlemiel represented that past.  His awkwardness and dreaminess were for Arendt, and many others, remnants of a Jewish population that was “worldless” and unaware of how to act in a society and history from which they had been excluded for centuries.  On the other hand, the Eastern European Jews saw in the schlemiel a challenge to society and to its evils. They clung to its simplicity and honesty.  The only cure – for many of them – would be the end of exile or for society to eliminate all evil from its midst.

But let’s be frank and ask what, exactly, that would consist of.  Would it consist in being accepted by others as an equal? Would in consist in having a “Jewish State”?  Or would it consist in the end of evil?  Of the three options, it is the last one which held a lot of appeal for writers like Sholem Aleichem and I.B. Singer – but, in truth, they knew it was a utopian hope.  This implies that the schlemiel and its failures would be interminable because evil itself are and will – most likely – be interminable.

What Shaviro suggests is that Jews like Jerry Lewis know that the cure is far off and that it is shared. The healing process will not, by any means, just happen.  And film has an ethical role in the sense that it reminds us that the basis for interminable analysis is something that just can’t go away in a few days or years or, for that matter, in two hours in this or that film.  What Lewis does is expose us to this desire for a cure, its frustration, and its endless reiteration which are all features of the schlemiel and, for that matter, Jewishness in general.

Is Jerry Lewis a Masochistic Comedian or an Unconscious Anarchist?

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All anarchists are fully conscious of their will to destroy the law.  The unconscious anarchist would not be; his anarchic “effect” would therefore be an accident. Steven Shaviro calls Jerry Lewis an “unconscious anarchist.”  But what does Lewis’s anarchism consist of?  Before we can answer that question, we need to look at the origin of this discussion; namely, the discussion of Masochism and its relation to humor.  And that brings us three questions: 1) Is the Schlemiel an “unconscious anarchist”; 2) To be an unconscious anarchist must one be a masochist; 3) Can we avoid psychologizing the schlemiel and reducing his political, social, and ethical potential?

In the beginning of yesterday’s blog entry, I pointed out how Ruth Wisse rejects – outright – the claim that the schlemiel is a masochistic character.  The reason for this is because she feels that this reading is – more or less – a reduction of the schlemiel to a psychological malady.  This reading obviously casts a negative glance at the schlemiel and it misses the point that Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem or I.B. Singer were looking to make; namely, that the schlemiel is, as she says at the beginning of her book, a challenge to the “political and philosophical status quo.”  Moreover, in the chapter where she challenges the reading of the schlemiel as a masochistic character – a reading made, primarily, by the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik – she points out that I.B. Singer’s Gimpel is a post-Holocaust character who, in the most ethical sense, looks to challenge the evil wrought by that horrific event by wandering, so to speak, after goodness.

The reason I brought up Deleuze’s reading of masochism was not to challenge Wisse by offering yet another psychological interpretation; on the contrary, I was very interested in how Deleuze reads Masochism (and Sadism) as challenges to the Law.  And by law, Deleuze does not simply imply law as such (although that is on his horizon) so much as social norms.  The point of the masochist’s humor is not to transgress the law (and the Idea of the Good) in the name of the Idea of Evil, which is what Sade’s irony does (according to Deleuze – since irony always rejects one thing in the name of something else; namely, a higher principle); rather the point of masochistic humor is to challenge the law by zealously keeping it in all its details.

I ended yesterday’s blog entry by briefly mentioning Steven Shaviro’s reading of Jerry Lewis, based in major part on the work of Gilles Deleuze, as a masochistic humorist.  I brought in Shaviro because it applies this not to a sexual masochist – as Deleuze does vis-à-vis Leopold Sacher Masoch, the author of Venus in Furs and the founder of masochism –  so much as a real humorist: Jerry Lewis.  I would like to return to Shaviro’s reading in this blog entry because he provides a valuable reading of Lewis and tests Deleuze’s claims for humor against Lewis’s comic performances.  In addition, Shaviro, like Wisse, moves away from the psychological reading and toward a more political or socially oriented reading.  Nonetheless, Shaviro takes his reading of Lewis to a place where Wisse, in her reading of the schlemiel, would not.  And he does this because Shaviro’s reading of humor is oriented according to a post-Marxist framework instead of an ethical framework (which is the basis of Wisse’s reading).

One of the most important distinctions Shaviro makes with respect to Lewis, is the fact that Lewis’s comedy may “mobilize all the affects of masochism” but “his comic personas never possess the will to twist and pervert the law that characterizes the true masochist”(110).  In other words, Lewis is only half a masochist or what Shaviro calls an “unconscious anarchist.”  And, as a critic, he looks to unmask what Lewis cannot see; namely, social and economic forces that his comedy unconsciously embodies and rejects.

Following the thread of Deleuze and applying it to Lewis, Shaviro points out that in many of Lewis’s films “Lewis’s overzealous efforts to obey orders, to mimic models of success, to act pragmatically, and otherwise to accede to the socially defined norm only end in failure and confusion”(110).

Here is an example from  Hardly Working:

What is most interesting about all this is that Lewis is “anarchist…despite his hyperconformism: he disseminates chaos in the course of earnestly trying to do exactly what bosses, psychoanalyists, media specialists…etc want him to do”(110).  This, points out Shaviro, is radically different from a “carnivelesque transgression” that you would find in the pages of Marquis de Sade.

Lewis is a failure.  Whenever he is “faced with responsibility,” he fails.  And when he does, claims Shaviro, he “experiences chaos on his own body.”  This is “disseminated in waves” to everything around him.  But this comic destruction of norms does not, according to Shaviro, issue a “judgment against norms” so much as a judgment “against himself.”  This characterization of Lewis’s failure is fascinating for schlemiel in theory because it is contrary to what we find in the schlemiel.  The schlemiel’s failures preserve some form of hope and do in fact present some kind of challenge to (or judgment against) the status quo; Lewis’s gestures, according to Shaviro, do not.  He, rather, is the sight of judgment and abjection.

Moreover, Lewis’s self-confidence is the main issue.  He is constantly at the mercy of other people who he hopes to impress.  But he fails.  Dean Martin often plays the role of this character.

This, of course, can be read as a psychological issue.  In fact, in the German reading of the Schlemiel (as opposed to Wisse’s Eastern European reading), the schlemiel is guilty of being heteronomous and not autonomous.  He, like women and children (as some Haskalah – Jewish Enlightenment – playwrights and thinkers argued), is too influenced by the other.  To be at mercy of the other is a negative trait that they believed came from the ghetto.  One of the most outspoken voices in this regard was Otto Weininger who saw in Jews (and he himself was a Jew) a masochistic aspect that needed to be addressed if Jews were to be a part of society.  This is stated explicitly in his book Sex and Character.

Although this reading seems to be the “correct” one, it’s not.  As Shaviro points out, this is a negative psychological reading which misses the point that Deleuze was trying to make.  But even Deleuze needs, in his view, to focus more on the social.  For this reason, Shaviro makes a fascinating reading of Lewis that looks into how Lewis’s body – when it breaks down under failure and the desire to please through zealous performances of social norms – is the surface upon which late-capitalism writes:

The social field of American late capitalism is directly invested by the disintegrative movements of Lewis’s physical comedy. In his most striking, intense, excessive moments, a schizophrenic dislocation of subjectivity is linked to bizarre distortions and topographical transformations of physical, corporeal, and social space. (116)

Paying close attention to Lewis’s physical comedy, Shaviro makes a powerful distinction between Lewis and Buster Keaton which characterizes the radical differences between American capitalism in the early 20th and the mid-20th century:

Whereas Keaton’s physical comedy is based on surprising external connections among discrete and solid objects, Lewis’s relies rather on a rush of delirious interpenetrations, in which separate identities of the initial components are lost.   Keaton’s body enters into combination with the wheels and lever of the train (The General) to form a new and complex machine.  (117)

Shaviro further characterizes this difference in terms of gases and solids.  While Keaton works with a “mechanics of solids,” Lewis works with a “mechanics of fluids or gases” since everything bounces and rebounds off of his body; and, as it does, his body loses its “integrity in a series of spastic lurches and twitches”(117).

And instead of reading Lewis’s “dependency” on the other as a lack of self-confidence and autonomy, Shaviro, drawing on a post-Marxist framework, points out that it “dependency” is:

The logical consequence of the Idiot’s typical position as an unskilled laborer and/or a naïve consumer in the American service economy.  

And Lewis’s failure is not a failure of “father figures” so much as “capitalist father figures.”   He can’t “grow up.”  And, since he clings to this infantilization (which we still see in many a Judd Apatow film), Shaviro tells us he offers a contrast to the “commodified form of the self, which can be recognized in the fatuous, overbearing authority figures who populate Lewis’s movies (the hotel manager in The Bellboy, the college president in the The Nutty Professor, etc”

Shaviro states Lewis’s case of remaining a child and not “growing up” (of his “continued abjection, dependency, and maladaptation) in terms of the a refusal of the commodity form: “only an adult can indulge in fantasies of plentitude and autonomy, for these fantasies are produced by the commodity form itself”(124).

Lewis is the “unconscious anarchist.”

What I find so interesting about this claim and Shaviro’s descriptions is how they relate or contrast to the descriptions and characterizations of the schlemiel.  The descriptions we have in schlemiel theory don’t look at the schlemiel’s challenges for failures within a post-Marxist framework.  Nonetheless, they do find the schlemiel’s challenge to be against the “political and philosophical status quo.”  Moreover, if we read Wisse closely and compare what she has said about the post-Holocaust schlemiel, we can see that the ethical pursuit of goodness and trust trumps all.  And it should, as the schlemiel isn’t only to be seen as a challenge the “commodity form” or to be an “unconscious anarchist.”  There is also an ethical component to this challenge and this anarchism.

And this anarchism can also be seen in terms of the “anarchic” relation to the other that Levinas describes in his book Otherwise Than Being.  Levinas places the accent on how open this relation is.  And this implies that there are or could be great surprises as well as great dangers that occur when one is exposed to the other.  And this exposure is itself ethical.  What we decide to do in relation to it, even if we fail, is ethical.  Humor brings this out.

Our awkwardness, which finds one form of articulation in the physical comedy of Jerry Lewis, comes out of our ethical relation to the other.  And although Lewis’s physical comedy indicates how his relations to “things” are more fluid, these relations don’t constitute his humanity.   Something else does, but, in truth, his humanity seems to be squashed constantly by failure.  But this would constitute, according to Shaviro, his “unconscious anarchism.”  I would argue, in addition, that there is another anarchism to this relation, the anarchism mentioned by Levinas.  And this “other” anarchism includes failure as a constant feature of being “exposed to the other.”  It is a failure that is not willed; and if there is any aspect of masochism, it is not intentional or “conscious.”

Shaviro’s exceptional post-Marxist reading of Lewis points out how he is “unconsciously challenging the law.”  What I’d like to bring out is the ethical dimension of Lewis’s comedy.  And, as I am noting above, this will involve a reading which pays close attention to the ethical meaning of Lewis’s physical comedy.  Should it be characterized as anarchic in Deleuze’s sense or in Levinas’s ethical sense?

I hope to address this more in depth in the next blog.

The Difference Between Sadism and Masochism as the Difference Between Irony and Humor

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One of the most interesting distinctions I have come across, regarding comedy, deals with the distinction made by Gilles Deleuze (a French philosopher) between humor and irony.  According to Deleuze, in his book entitled Masochism, we find irony in Sadism and humor in Masochism (I am capitalizing these words for the sake of emphasis).  As a thinker who is interested in “leaving metaphysics behind,” Deleuze makes the interesting claim that Sadism simply reinstates metaphysics even through it purports to destroy it.   In contrast, Deleuze thinks that Masochism does leave it behind.  Evidence of this distinction can be found in the irony and humor we find in the work of Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, respectively.

The reason this distinction is of such interest to me is not simply that it is unexpected; rather, it is also of interest because, as Ruth Wisse notes in The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, the psychologist Theodor Reik and the cultural critic Albert Goldman both “psychologize” the schlemiel by claiming that he is a masochistic character or, quite simply, a person who, in fear of reality, finds excuses and “rationalizes” inaction:

‘Psychoanalysis,’ writes Theodor Reik, ‘would characterize the schlemihl as a masochistic character who has strong unconscious will to fail and spoil his chances.’  Explaining the popularity of the schlemiel pose in modern culture, Albert Goldman calls it an excuse, an apology, and a rationalization.  (68)

To be sure, the basis of her reading of the schlemiel – in major part – is based on challenging the claim that the schlemiel is a masochistic character.  She argues against the psychoanalyst who “treats the schlemiel concept as a neurotic symptom and tries to determine the causes of a patient’s failure in actual situations.”    In contrast, while the author “may or may not be aware of the ‘masochistic need to fail’ that dominates the subconscious of his (schlemiel) character,” such “knowledge may be irrelevant to the story.”  Wisse claims that, in a story like “Gimpel the Fool,” the “irony…rests on our ability to perceive his failure as a success”(68).  And Gimpel’s “antipragmatic philosophy mocks the need for classification and rationalization of which the tendency to define Gimpel as a masochist is a good example”(68).  This mockery of psychological explanations – namely, the claim that the schlemiel is a masochistic character – affirms, by way of irony, goodness:

Since the schlemiel is above all a reaction against the evil surrounding him, he must reject more and more as the evil increases; Gimpel is prepared to walk into eternity in pursuit of personal goodness. (69).

Read against Wisse’s take on Masochism, Deleuze’s reading offers another way of addressing the claim that the schlemiel is a masochistic character.  I’d like to break his reading down and test Wisse’s reading against it so as to see how or whether Deleuze’s reading has any relevance to schlemiel theory.

Cutting right to the chase, Deleuze writes that “in modern thought irony and humor take on a new form: they are now directed at a subversion of the law”(86).   Both Sade and Masoch (respectively, the founders of what, today, is called Sadism and Masochism), “represent the two main attempts at subversion, at turning the law upside down.”  But the ways they went about doing this and the success in doing so differ radically.

In view of his claim, Deleuze offers definitions of irony and humor in terms of law.  Writing on irony, he states:

Irony is still in the process or movement which bypasses the law as a merely secondary power and aims at transcending it toward a higher principle. (86)

Deleuze’s reading speaks directly to the Socratic practice of irony where “Good” is a principle toward which one transcends one’s “secondary nature” in the name of one’s “primary nature.”   Through irony, one “discovers” one’s “primary nature.”   Sade, like Nietzsche after him, took the Good as their target.  And, as Deleuze notes, they used irony to “overturn” it; or rather reveal that the Good no longer exists and can no longer be used as the basis of law:

But what is the higher principle no longer exists, and if the Good can no longer provide the basis for the law or a justification of its power?  Sade’s answer is that in all its forms – natural, moral, and political – the law represents the rule of secondary nature which is always geared toward conservation; it is a usurpation of true sovereignty.  (86)

Sade sees the law as the basis of all of societies problems.  It is the basis of tyranny.  Deleuze paraphrases Sade as saying: “Tyrants are created by the law alone: they flourish by virtue of the law”(86).  Sade’s hatred of tyranny is the “essence of his thinking.”  And the heroes of his novels speak the “counter-language of tyranny.”

Sade looks to transcend the law, but not toward the Good (as Socrates would do); rather, he transcends the law toward the “direction of its opposite, the Idea of Evil, the supreme principle of wickedness, which subverts the law and turns Platonism upside down”(87).  (Note: The notion or rather language of inverting Platonism was stressed in a several aphorisms by Friedrich Nietzsche.)  By way of such a process, one will discover his or her “primary nature,” which, in Sade’s view is the opposite of tyranny.  Citing Sade, Deleuze notes that, for Sade, law is “inferior” to “anarchy”:

The law can only be transcended by virtue of a principle that subverts it and denies its power.  

This principle is, according to Deleuze, at the basis of the Sadean irony which destroys the law in order to transcend the law.  But, as Deleuze notes, we are still in the realm of metaphysics since one principle (the Idea of Evil) replaces another (the Idea of the Good).

Deleuze contrasts Sade’s ironic challenge to the law to the Masochist’s challenge, which is based, instead, on what Deleuze calls humor.  Although they both take the law as their “target,” the ironist and the humorist, like the Masochist and the Sadist, are fundamentally different.  However, this assertion may rightfully meet with a puzzled look since, to be sure, the Masochist is one who submits (and here, one would say, submits to the law). Deleuze, nonetheless, claims the opposite: a “masochist would not by contrast be regarded as gladly submitting to it (the law)”(88).

So, what is humor as opposed to irony?  And how does it relate to Masochism?

Deleuze uses a spatial metaphor to illustrate:

What we call humor –in contradistinction to the upward movement of irony toward a transcendent higher principle – is a downward movement from the law to its consequences.  (88)

This downward movement of humor is accomplished by “twisting the law by excess of zeal.”  In other words, one mocks the law by way of being “too zealous.”  And this is what Masochism-as-humor does:

By scrupulously applying the law we are able to demonstrate its absurdity and provoke the very disorder that it is intended to prevent or to conjure.  By observing the letter of the law, we refrain from questioning its ultimate or primary character; we then behave as if the supreme sovereignty of the law conferred upon it the enjoyment of all those pleasures it denies us; hence, by the closest adherence to it, and by zealously embracing it, we may hope to partake of its pleasures. (88)

This speaks directly to the Masochist since:

A close examination of masochistic fantasies or rites reveals that while they bring into play the very strictest applications of the law, the result in every case is the opposite of what might be expected (thus whipping, far from punishing or preventing an erection, provokes and ensures it).  It is a demonstration of the law’s absurdity. (88)

How can we, based on this reading, address the schlemiel?  While for Reik and Goodman, Masochism vis-à-vis the schlemiel has a negative value, for Deleuze, Masochism (and its essence: humor) has a positive value: it challenges the law in ways that Sadism cannot.   By over-observing the law one makes it absurd.

A good example of this is evoked by the film theorist and critic Steve Shaviro.  In his book Cinematic Bodies, he writes on Jerry Lewis as a figure of Masochism.  By being over-zealous and through intense mimicry, Shaviro tells us, Jerry Lewis masochistically inverts the law (or the norm).

In the next blog entry, we will continue on this thread and look into how or whether this reading of Masochism and humor relates to the schlemiel.  After all, Jerry Lewis does play a schlemiel.  But this reading is focused less on the psychologizations that Ruth Wisse criticized than on a different way of understanding one’s relation to “the law.”

Is this the End? Physical Comedy, Style, and the Body

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In a review of This is the End (2013), written and directed (in part) by the often-schlemiel-playing-comedian Seth Rogen, Richard Brody of The New Yorker makes a compelling argument as to the place of physical comedy in this film.  Before addressing the film, he looks into the history and fate of physical comedy, today.

Brody begins by making reference to an article by Max Winter entitled Slapstick Last: Why a Modern Day Harold Lloyd is Unthinkable.  The first words of Winter’s article say it all: “there are no great physical comedians any more.”  However, he makes a distinction: he points out that while physical comedy may be lacking, “physical presence” on stage (with comedians like Louis CK) is not.  Now, today, more people put out something of a “verbal” or cerebral comedy.

The subject of the article, the master of physical comedy, is Harold Lloyd.  He is deemed that king of silent-film slapstick.  His work, unlike the comedians today, says Winter, appeals directly to our bodies and skips over this or that cultural code or popular reference.  Out laughter at his work, says Winter, is “more pure” (that is, bodily) that our laughter today:

The kind of laughing you do during this film, and in fact the laughing you do during most comic films of the silent era, is more pure and often more whole-hearted than the kind of laughing you might do during contemporary comedies. This is because there’s nothing between you and the laugh. Lloyd does a physical stunt, a prank, or a funny face, and you laugh at it: it’s that simple. The humor here is free of pop culture references, or irony, or any of the other triggers we have come to accept as “funny.” It’s almost as if you’re laughing with another part of your brain.

Lloyd’s physical comedy uses the whole body, not just the head or face.  His slapstick relied on bodily gesture:

From his neck up, Lloyd could be a modern comic, with an ever-changing set of expressions that could be seen on TV or in a film today; from his neck down, he belongs to an earlier era, when people waved their legs around, made silly gestures, punched each other in the forehead, and swung their arms wide when they walked. His facial expressions transform this story from a rags-to-riches tale cum love story cum fable of the foibles of industry into a travelogue of a journey through a psychological minefield. In one scene, he’s nervous about knocking on a general manager’s office door; the way he expresses his agitation, with his arched cheekbones, his twitching mouth, and his jumping eyebrows, shows every stage of his thought process, from start to finish. Here, as elsewhere, he caps off his facial gyrations with slapstick: marching up to the door, starting to knock, stopping, starting, stopping, and so on.

Winter’s articulation of how the comedy of the lower body (in one of Lloyd’s scenes) contrasts with the comedy of the upper body (namely his face) brings out a comic/horrific tension that so much of today’s comic does by more intellectual and less physical means.

His swinging legs and arms seem to be telling you to laugh, while his face reminds you just enough of what your own expression might be in such a situation to make you… well… scared. 

Commenting on Winter’s article and physical comedy, Brody argues that today a return to physical comedy would be impossible since today’s American audiences are, in contrast to audiences of the earlier 20th century, morally appalled by the presence of physical danger in comedy.  In his words, “physical comedy…has been moralized out of existence”:

Here goes: a new Harold Lloyd is unthinkable because physical comedy depends on the proximity and possibility of death, which no longer seems acceptable to viewers who are completely aware of the prevalence of stunt doubles and digital effects, and who are repelled by the idea that a performer would actually face death for what is, after all, only a movie. In other words, physical comedy—the kind that made silent comedies famous—has been moralized out of existence.

Brody cites Mel Brooks and Jerry Lewis to point out the proximity of their comedy to physical suffering and possible damage.  Lewis, says Brody, built his career as a comedian on his falls, trips, and physical acrobatics.

In contrast to them, Brody lists the great “anti-physical” comedians; namely, “Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, and Woody Allen.”  He calls the “great comic cowards” who did all they could to avoid physical comedy.  They are rooted in “stand up” comedy rather than “fall down”(slapstick) comedy.   Nonetheless, Brody adds, with a bit of astonishment, that today, in films like This is the End, physical comedy seems to be making a comeback.

The film, argues Brody, may be filled with lots of slapstick and fall down comedy, but “it’s almost completely unfunny.”  And the physical comedy we see, apparently, is not even done by them.  It is done by stunt doubles.

This isn’t funny because Hollywood has made changes that apparently reflect an audience’s changed “endurance” of suffering:

The world has changed; just as classic-era Hollywood, with its unchallenged prejudices on matters of ethnicity and gender, reflected the dominant presumptions and exclusions of the time, so the endurance of suffering during a rough-and-tumble period when many more Americans did physically hard and dangerous work found its reflection in a comedy of danger.

And This is the End, for Brody is a “superb example of how comedy and comic violence have become subordinated to a conspicuous ethical order.”

What I like most about Winter and Brody’s reflections is the fact that they both point out how the meaning of the body in comedy has altered considerably.  Brody suggests that it has, in fact, been censored for “moral” reasons.  Nonetheless, he doesn’t think a return to physical comedy is possible or necessary.   Winter suggests that we pay more attention to what happened in early physical comedy; namely, a laughter that was “more pure” because it appealed directly to the body.  This, I would argue, could form the basis of a more nuanced ethical argument on behalf of physical comedy that could challenge the new attitude toward physical comedy that Brody makes reference.

To this end, I’d like to end this blog entry with a suggestion.  Roland Barthes’ reading of style in his book Writing Degree Zero suggests that we think of style (and here I would suggest comic style) in terms of the body.  For Barthes, the “imagery, delivery, and vocabulary” of style “spring from the body and the past of the writer and gradually become the reflexes of his art.”   For this reason, style has something “crude” about it since it is the “product of thrust, not an intention”; its “frame of reference is biological or biographical, not historical.”  Moreover, style is a challenge to society: “indifferent to society and transparent to it, a closed personal process, it is in no way the product of choice or of a reflection…it is the decorative voice of hidden, secret flesh.”

Style is a “germinative phenomenon, the transmutation of a humour” and has a “carnal structure.”

All of these reflections on style bring us back to a reflection of the body.  Based on them, one can argue that what appeals most to people who have enjoyed physical comedy in the past was its style. The style of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd is not simply rooted in their routines; it actually gives us a deeper sense of their “hidden, secret flesh.”  Barthes sees the mystery of the body – in all its opacity – in style and I suggest we see such style in bodily comedy.

It may be the case that Jerry Lewis’ style of physical comedy has been, to some extent, displaced by Woody Allen’s style of comedy; but, still, it is not entirely cerebral.  This is not the “end” of physical comedy so much as one kind of “physicality.”

We still see a body on stage “standing up” (rather than “falling down”) before us.  We see this, as Winter notes, in Louis CK’s bearish body pacing the stage and, I would add, in his comic style and delivery. The comic body remains.

To be sure, in the film, This is the End (2013), Seth Rogen’s physical gestures and styles convey his comical, bodily way of being.  The question we need to ask is what kind of bodily secrets Rogen conveys as opposed to what kind of secrets Sasha Baron Cohen or Charlie Chaplin.  How do we contrast their styles if, as Barthes says, they come from an opaque place? Are we given, so to speak, “flashes” of (bodily) wisdom when we watch their differing comic styles? Can we use Barthes, so to speak, to better understand how we bear witness to the mystery of physical comedy?  Is there an ethical relation to the body that Barthes was trying to uncover by way of his reading of style?  And would it be worth our while to pursue what Winters alludes to when he says that the laughter of physical comedy was “more pure?”  Was Barthes also seeking for this “purity,” which touched on the origins of not just comedy in particular but also style in general?