Discuss the role of absurdity within the humour of Vic Reeves Big Night Out, Brass Eye, and The Office - Master of Arts Dissertation

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd

Discuss the role of absurdity within the humour of Vic Reeves Big Night Out, Brass Eye and The OfficeScott Daniel Hayden

Tutor Dr. Garin Dowd Course MA Film and the Moving Image Student number 10227744 Date of submission June 31st 2007

Dissertation submitted to Thames Valley University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the Master of Arts in Film & the Moving Image.

1

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd CONTENTS

Research

ONE PARAGRAPH PROPOSAL..3 RESEARCH PROPOSAL......4 LITERATURE REVIEW....9

Dissertation

INTRODUCTION.15 PARODY ..18 VIC REEVES BIG NIGHT OUT ...21 CARNIVAL ..32 BRASS EYE 35 UNCERTAINTY...45 THE OFFICE ....47 THE ABSURD...61

BIBLIOGRAPHY..67

2


Discuss the role of absurdity within the humour of Vic Reeves Big Night Out, Brass Eye and The Office ONE PARAGRAPH PROPOSAL Utilizing a range of critical and theoretical approaches ranging from anthropology to psychoanalysis, it is this Dissertations intention to identify and elucidate an absurdist sensibility within the modern comedy of Vic Reeves Big Night Out, Brass Eye and The Office. By employing intellectual sources and comic theories ranging from Freud, Esslin, Camus and Beckett to Koestler, Bergson, Palmer and Critchley, this study aims to examine how these three diverse comedies rejection of the played with, yet ultimately reaffirmed logic of traditional comedy serves to articulate a feeling of the absurd condition whilst expressing the sentiment that perhaps all does not make sense. Word Count = 102

3

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd RESEARCH PROPOSAL AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

It is the aim of this Dissertation to recognize, highlight and analyse a particularly style of absurdist humour within modern English comedy by means of a detailed investigation of three programmes: Vic Reeves Big Night Out, Brass Eye and The Office. I hope to clarify for the reader what I will term the absurd comedy as a comedy where no-one wins, where there is no emancipation, no tie-ups, no transcendence, no resolution and a persistent denial of the played with, yet ultimately reaffirmed order so familiar within the traditionalist comic paradigm. Neither a historical thesis, nor a totalizing comic theory, it is the specific purpose of this Dissertation to articulate this humours paradigm shift away from mischievous but intransigent traditional comedy, to a deconstructive humour devoid of the returned-to certitude of re-established, welcome and cosy convention. By demonstrating the techniques these three very different comedies utilize whilst endeavouring to examine the processes that mark its approach to humour as oppositional and distinct from the traditionalist model of comedy, I hope to exhibit a scholarly depth of understanding on the subject through a deployment of reputable sources used to punctuate my examination of this parodic, yet avowedly absurdist style of humour. Indeed, by expressing a feeling of human irrationality and pointing toward something altogether less coherent than the traditional comedy viewer has grown accustomed to, the specific target of the Dissertation is to reveal the comedy in question as a play on traditional comedy itself that invites the viewer to laugh at the very idea there is order, sense and meaning to be had in the first place. While the term absurd comedy is used as a convenient device used to discuss the similarities among the three comedies of this study, it is notable that the comedians in question do not see themselves as part of a unified aesthetic programme and therefore the term should not be read as an all embracing and binding classification but instead as what Esslin describes (with recourse to his term Theatre of the Absurd) as an 4

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd intellectual shorthand for a complex pattern of similarities in approach, method, and convention, of shared philosophical and artistic premises, whether conscious or subconscious, and of influences from a common store of tradition1 METHODS I opted to exclude certain forms of research (questionnaires, interviews) due to the highly subjective nature of the topic and chose instead to take up a multi-disciplined methodology. Employing a discursive yet, somewhat appropriately digressive argument, the Dissertation is structured around three central analytical studies (3,000 to 4,000 words on each programme) and is supplemented with a comparing/ contrasting of examples of comic theory pertaining to traditional comedy. To demonstrate a sufficient academic grasp on the role of comic absurdity and how it differs within these comedies I studied at the British Film Institute library to access journals and other hitherto inaccessible articles, annotated print-outs of texts at The British Library and spent several weeks in the Learning Resource Centre trawling through academic periodicals such as Educational Theatre Journal and Screen on the Universitys Athens electronic database to provide me with the research necessary to convince the reader that the argument is articulated with a scholarly authority. In addition, six months of email correspondence with Dr. Robert Edgar Hunt of St. John York University (contacted through the BFI website as a specialist in comic theory) helped me to grasp a greater understanding of the philosophy of the Absurd that would underpin the study and also encouraged me to explore the link between parody and Absurdism, making me aware of texts and scenes I would never have otherwise considered fertile enough ground for analysis. SUMMARY Starting with a discussion of traditionalist comedy with recourse to Mick Eatons notion of the playful yet intransigent/ returned to inside of the conventional comic mould, the Dissertation states its intent to reveal the absurd comedy as a play on1

Esslin, 1965: p. 14

5

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd televisual conventions that parodically deconstructs form to leave a more open-ended and uncertain comedy. Contextualising the term parody that has been subject to much scrutiny under numerous studies of pastiche and meta-fiction, the paper then highlights the deconstructive elements of the idiom as a mode able to be used on any given codified generic form as a self-reflexive intertextual discourse that plays on the level of ubiquity within a respective discourse. Accordingly, the first section of textual analysis concerns Vic Reeves Big Night Out and provides relevant parodic examples that demonstrate how when a situation presented under a normalized setting that seeks order meets absurdity, the comic is created as a result. Consequently, by utilizing an understanding of this logical absurdity of the jokes structure through the studies of Elder Olsen, Arthur Koestler and Jerry Palmer the analysis considers the plausible foolishness of Vic and Bobs rejection of the normal rules of light entertainment logic in the context of parody and comedy. This leads to a discussion of Freuds work on jokes with recourse to the jokes ability to undermine the rites of rational adult criticism. Concurrently, Big Night Out is described in opposition to the traditionalist obligation to cohesive form as its rejection of order and convention is reduced to an irreconcilable amorphousness. Additionally, the self-contained traditional comedy that reiterates the model it temporarily transgresses is shown to be opposed by the freedom that is the result of Big Night Outs disruption of normality, opening conventions, and then leaving them that way. Drawing parallels with Lear, Carroll, Kafka, the Dadaists and particularly with reference to the Theatre of the Absurd the absurd comedy of Big Night Out is further discussed as a complete (non-temporal) breakdown of order as the shows lack of pay-off/ reconciled normality is discussed as a joke on traditions pretensions to order. Bakhtins concept of carnival then provides some context to the deconstructive nature of the comedy, uncovering as it does the cracks in discourse while using tradition as the basis of its humour by subverting it until all is seen to be

6

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd illogical. At this point the differentiation between traditional and absurd comedy is further discussed with reference to Peter Bergers idea of laughter as transcendence. The second analysis of Brass Eye and its take on the investigative news programme considers the usage of Russian formalist techniques to illustrate the shows simultaneously Brechtian parodic/ Swiftian satiric impulse. After a consideration of the validity of Bergsons idea of laughter as something provoked when the humane is transformed into the machinic, the study focuses on Brass Eyes protaganists (unwitting) demonstration of the reduction of all that was once familiar into incoherent irrationality. Subjecting a series of quotations to textual analysis, the section analyses how by rigorously and stringently utilizing convention the show is able to highlight its own ridiculous nature. As the shows hopes for general rules and all-encompassing explanatory answers are shown to be essentially futile, the absurd comedy of Brass Eye is compared to Becketts Waiting for Godot and Endgame aswell as Ionescos The Bald Soprano and Sternes Tristram Shandy in an effort to the decribe its tone and further clarify this comedys differentiation from the traditionalist model. At this point the Dissertation progresses onto the final example of The Office and focuses on its ironic realist denial of farcical comedic tropes before analysing examples of its unsettling lack of comforting convention and its incessant disruption of the normative comic patterns expected of its (docu-) sitcom format. Emphasizing meaninglessness and repetition, the shows unorthodox circularity is dicussed so as to set up a consideration of the central characters, which in turn allows for a discussion of Freuds concept of humour and his emphasis on the super-ego/ ego dichotomy necessary to finding ones-self ridiculous. To conclude I shall discuss Camus philosophical notion of absurdity in relation to the nature of the absurd comedys objectivity, recognition and acceptance of the absurd as a way of mitigating the metaphysical gulf between the individual and the indifferent, irrational environment. Indeed, by highlighting the absurd comedys consciousness of the incongruity between the want for meaning in opposition to the absurd world it displays, the humour of the study serves to mitigate its sense of hopelessness by

7

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd inviting the audience to recognize and laugh the illogicality of traditional expectations. Finally, the conclusion of the paper aims to elucidate for the implied reader (Postgraduates with an interest in English comedy and the aesthetics/ mechanics of humour), that the absurd comedy is an invitation to the audience to recognize an element of humanity within the comedies struggles, a reminder that the meaninglessness it presents is, however hopeless, still essentially laughable. Word Count = 1, 426

8

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd LITERATURE REVIEW The following is a summary of six key sources in the area of research I have chosen to help me investigate the topic of the Dissertation. Each section briefly discusses and examines how the respective text in question influenced and contributed toward addressing the central argument outlined in the one paragraph proposal. JOHN MORREALL THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAUGHTER AND HUMOUR (1987) John Morrealls study condenses the theories of laughter into three broad categories: the first is Superiority theory, the classical philosophical perspective (its origins with Plato and Aristotle) which views humour in terms of laughing at rather than laughing with, as seen with notions of religious, racial and cultural superiority propounded throughout various societies (e.g. reactionary ethnic jokes). The second is the Relief theory of Herbert Spencer in the 19th century where laughter is explained as a release of pent up energy, elaborated and enunciated by Freud, where the energy that is relieved and discharged in laughter provides pleasure because it allegedly economizes upon energy that would ordinarily be used to contain or repress psychic activity. And finally, the Incongruity theory, that is, the felt incongruity between what we know or expect to be the case and what actually takes place in the joke (its origins in Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard). While it is clear throughout his study that neither totalising theory should be seen as correct in its own right2, what I took from Morrealls work was an understanding that all three approaches stem from an enlightenment-to-modernity base and therefore view elements of the comic as a loss of logic and rationality. Following the notion of modernity being fundamentally connected with the oppression of anyone who stood outside its discourse, Morreall inadvertently highlights a clear path to the notion that the comic has always been at the expense of others. Whilst Morrealls work is never2

In much the same way, Morton Gurewitchs efforts to compartmentalize comedys varied sub-genres (satire, humor, farce and/ or irony) in Comedy: The Irrational Vision only served to highlight the many problems of creating exclusive definitions of comedy. (Gurewitch, 1975: p. 9)

9

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd directly utilized in my study it provided a broad philosophical framework for me to delve deeper into individual theorists (primary sources in many cases) that developed the overall argument. DAN HARRIES FILM PARODY (2000) Harries definition of what King called the parodic mode3 represented the most succinct articulation of parody I encountered in my research. Drawing on the classical work of Aristotle through to contemporary theorists such as Rose and Hutcheon, Harries concept of parody connoting both closeness and distance was integral to my understanding of the parodic elements of this studys oscillation between similarity to and difference from its respective target/ source text (variety show, investigative news programme and sitcom). Identifying the basis for parody as we know it now by contrasting the logical, Aristotelian universalized stories and plot with the form of the lampoons disjointed series of jokes and comic routines with no necessary or probable connection between them4, Harries method of compare and contrast provided a frame of reference for me in which to distinguish the differences between the traditional and the absurd comedy. Recognizing that within parody the spectator finds a signifier comic due to the recognition of an element of accuracy contained in the gag as the signifier deploys the force of discourse against itself by exposing the ideological framework upon which it depends, Harries study persuaded me to concentrate on the parodys exposure of artistic devices and then the systems to which they belong. MIKHAIL BAKHTIN RABELAIS AND HIS WORLD (1941, 1965) Bakhtins concept of the carnivalesque as a social institution is used briefly in the study to draw parallels with the contemporary notion of parody and enables me to3 4

King, 2002: p. 157 Aristotle in Golden, 1968: p. 49b7-9

10

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd emphasize Bakhtins insistence on the plural quality of meaning (heteroglossia) within seemingly finite and ordered tradition. In the same way Bakhtin (prefiguring post-structuralism) viewed novels as necessarily inter-textual, referencing an entire complex web of past and present discourses within culture, the comedy of this studys incorporation of broad forms that mix the sanctified and the irreverent to become subversive5 so as to transgress its usual bounds is prefigured by Bakhtins study and provides the Dissertation with an authoritative reference point on the reduction of the seemingly concrete to the forever unfinished6 SIGMUND FREUD JOKES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS (1905 ) Throughout Jokes Freud showed that in jokes (and dreams) word-representations, that is, verbal signifiers that are located in the conscious, are treated as if they were thing representations, that is, pre-verbal signifiers or representations of the outside world buried in the unconscious. Indeed, it is Freuds explanation that it is only in the passage from thing-representation to word-representation that an image acquires the index of quality or seal of the conscious that demonstrated to me the jokes potential ability to highlight the unstable nature of language. Exploring the spaces between words to demonstrate the unreliability and potential nonsensicality of language, particularly with regards to the nonsensicality/ logorrhoea encountered in all three of the comedys and their protagonists attempts to attain significance and meaning within essentially absurd situations, reading Jokes I began to think about the jokes potential to disrupt other lexicon aswell, particularly televisual grammar which led me to elaborate on the study of parody in a greater detail than I was anticipating.

5 6

This is an issue noted and examined in Krutnik, 1984: pp. 50-59 Bakhtin: p. 26

11


SAMUEL BECKETT From the comic business of Waiting for Godots (1952) clowning with boots, cross talk about the bible and joking about the audience (that bog) to the vaudevillian wordplay of Endgame (1957), I took an interest in Becketts propensity to find humour within essentially absurd and futile situations. The over-bearing tone of his work, positioning his characters within the midst of nothingness, without religion, safety or salvation, embodied the sense of being thrown into a hopeless position I wished to articulate of the absurd comedy and its absurd protagonists. His characters need to repeatedly talk, to persist and exist in attempts to try and make sense of their environment (Why this farce, day after day?7), striving to communicate (return the ball wont you?8) and struggling to express a sense of being (the disembodied mouths stand alone soliloquy in Not I (1972)) presented ideal orientation to help me express the humour of this study as unlikely parables of human absurdity. Beckett most succinctly surmises the central problem that took my interest in L'Innommable; Dans ma vie, puisqu'il faut l'appeler ainsi, il y eut trois choses, l'impossibilite de parler, l'impossibilite de me taire, et la solitude (One must speak; man cannot possibly communicate with his fellows, but the alternative silence - is irreconcilable with human existence.)9 The idea that habit is a great deadener10, that Didi and Gogos Sisyphian repetitions, while not tending more toward any conclusion, display a need to stay, a need to sustain idle discourse and keep silence at bay offered a weight of strength to the three examples in my attempts to show how, ultimately, what the audience is invited to laugh at in the absurd comedy is a realization of essential absurdity and the immutable dislocation with the world.

7 8

Beckett, 1957: p. 10 Beckett, 1952: p. 48 9 English translation by Beckett published as The Unnamable: 1958 10 Beckett, 1952: p. 84

12

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd ALBERT CAMUS THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS (194211) While Kierkegaard was one of the first thinkers to describe how the absurdity of certain religious truths prevents humans from reaching God in a comprehensible and rational manner, and Sartre recognized absurdity on an individual subjective basis, it is the philosophy of Albert Camus, interested as it was with the idea that life is not absurd, but rather that the Absurd is life, that best surmises the concept of what has come to be known as Absurdism that concerns the final section of the study. Articulating the twentieth century disillusionment in Christian and humanist notions of civilization as part of a divinely ordered creation with established social and metaphysical definitions of meaning (stretching from the Enlightenment to Nietzsches pronouncement of the death of God), Camus viewpoint of human abandonment that finds solace in hopelessness, a distrust of consolidation and a denial of external meaning provides the Dissertation with its overarching philosophical tone. In the context of a discussion of parodys breakdown of the conventions of artistic representation, Camus direction to the individual to seek not the divine fable that amuses and blinds, but the terrestrial face, gesture, and drama in which are summed up a difficult wisdom and an ephemeral passion12, influenced me to consider the absurd comedy as a stage for such difficult wisdom. Opposing the traditional (divine) comedy with the irrational, the unreasonable and the at times incomprehensible, I took the absurd (difficult) comedys un-ceasing revolt, its refusal to accept any easy, tidy answers or reconciliation in its struggle as the analogy that would shape the overall tone and conclusion of the Dissertation. Word Count = 1, 418

11

While originally written in 1942, the paper was not available as an English text until Justin OBriens translation in 1955 12 Camus, 1960: p. 87

13


Discuss the role of absurdity within the humour of Vic Reeves Big Night Out, Brass Eye and The OfficeScott Daniel Hayden

14

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd INTRODUCTION In their book Popular Film and Television Comedy Neale and Krutnik speak of how the comedic inclination toward anti-verisimilitude13 via departures from rules, conventions and types is in itself an expectation of comedy, and therefore cannot really be regarded as dissident because within comedy subversion is something of a generic requirement. Consequently, because a comedy audience expects the unexpected, any deviation can be seen as a permissible deviance, within what Neale and Krutnik call the appropriate site for the inappropriate, the proper place for indecorum; the field in which the unlikely is likely to occur14. However, and perhaps somewhat paradoxically, the genre of comedy has itself grown to establish its own rules, conventions and types within which the aberrant nature of the comic is seen to be tamed and contained within conventional/ traditional structures. A general model of this is described within Steve Seidmans work on film humour (equally applicable to television) as he shows how traditionally comedy has been seen to act as a way of negotiating the balance of the disruptive, playful pre-Oedipal pleasures of the comic with the integrative, structured, adult conformity of the Oedipal, thus offering a narrative model for how to evolve into a coherent individual, taking ones place in the social order, and for regulating difference15. Interestingly, Seidman notes how the basis on which the mainstream comic films of which he speaks are sold (comic fantasy) are often diametrically opposed to the generic problems of individual evolution and cultural initiation as he describes how narrative issues are often resolved at the expense of what makes the genre interesting16 as the irregular and disruptive comic is eventually contained, controlled and reconciled within a traditional scheme of normality. In this sense it is possible to view the traditional comedy as providing a reaffirmation of cultures belief in social conformity17 as while initially appearing bizarre and fantastical, the traditional comedys ultimately neat resolutions present a world that eventually reaffirms the13 14

Neale and Krutnik, 1990: p. 93 Neale and Krutnik, 1990: p. 91 15 Seidman, 1981: p. 146 16 Seidman, 1981: p. 141 17 Seidman, 1981: p. 78

15

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd order and stability it was seen to transgress. Thus Seidmans idea of a dialectical exchange between the pre-Oedipal and the Oedipal followed by a resultant compromise between the two poles in a movement towards adult/ social integration suggests a temporary suspension of customs, as he sees most traditional comedy, to pick up norms and play with them before eventually returning them to their correct place18. Indeed, this is a common observation, Mick Eaton noting that comedys transgression of the familiar always involves a familiarisation of the transgression19 as any humorous pleasure involved in a joke is, as Frank Krutnik has stated; inextricably linked to a replacement of transgression in relation to ideology, a re-setting of boundaries20. Neale and Krutnik go so far as to argue that most traditional comedy (particularly sitcom) can represent something of a reactionary communalizing role, appearing as a microcosm of broadcast television in general that extends the bonding activity of the gag by imbricating the viewer into its traditionalist ideology in what they call an institutionalizing of the pleasures and processes involved in joke-telling21. By disrupting norms only to then re-establish them, this notion of subversion/ re-confirmation can also be seen to align the viewer with what Gillian Swanson has referred to as systems of propriety, or norms of acceptability22, thus re-affirming cultural customs and the highly recognizable model of what Eaton has identified as a returned to neat, smooth inside23, that is, a world that ultimately makes sense. It is at this juncture that the disparity between the traditional model of comedy and the comedy that concerns this study becomes perceptible.

18

For example, Catherine Johnsons study of the formative social realist comedy of the 1950s demonstrated how the traditional comedic play between identification and distention that lightly violates serious codes only set up deviations from norms/ rules in order to eventually reinstate them, thus placing the audience in a position whereby any transgression of established social codes (e.g. social decorum) was always seen as a transgression, and were therefore essentially conformist. (Johnson, 1980: p. 74) 19 Eaton, 1981: p.25 20 Krutnik, July-October 1984: p. 58 21 Neale and Krutnik, 1990: p. 243 22 Swanson, 1984: p. 34 23 Eaton, 1978: pp. 65-8

16

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd Indeed, it is the marked non-correspondence between the comedy of this studys situational normality (the situation to which each respective episode returns), and the familial normality which Eaton identifies as the ideological touchstone of the traditional comedy, that demonstrates how for what I will term the absurd comedy, the coherent notion of an inside that traditional comedy has been seen to restore is persistently undermined. Utilizing the three very different examples of Vic Reeves Big Night Out (Channel 4, 1990-91), Brass Eye (Channel 4, 1997 and 2001) and The Office (BBC 2, 20012004), I hope to show how the avowedly absurdist nature of this studys comedy can be seen as distinct from the traditionalist model of comedy in that its play with norms is followed, not by reconciliation and order, but by a refusal to return said norms to their correct place, thus creating an altogether less stable and perhaps more unsettling brand of humour. By dismantling the comfortable certainties of traditional televisual orthodoxy whilst displaying certain specificity through a heightened awareness of medium that renders familiar and conventionalized acts as somewhat strange and illogical, I aim to show how the comedy of this study utilizes the characteristics/ mode of parody to exhibit the seemingly rational and logical elements of convention in a jarringly unfamiliar light before refusing to settle back into the comforting sense that traditional comedy audiences have grown accustomed to. Therefore, before discussing the three examples of this study it is perhaps prudent to take time to consider the varied implications of the problematical term parody so as acquire a clearer understanding of its meaning and influence on the humour of this study.

17


PARODY In considering the varied resonances of the original Greek term parodia, Linda Hutcheons influential study is particularly helpful as she draws attention to the prefix para having connotations of contra (against) suggesting mockery and/ or ridicule, but also able to mean besides24. Margaret Rose also traces the term from Aristotles parodia to describe Hegemons comic imitation of epic verse in 3BC, before ultimately defining parody as at first imitating and then changing either, and sometimes both, the form, and content, or style and subject matter, or syntax and meaning of another work, or most simply, its vocabulary in what is essentially a comic re-functioning25. Similarly, Dan Harries speaks of parodys inherent duality of similarity and difference as it utilizes elements of its own composition in what is a re-contextualization of a target or source text through what he calls the transformation of its textual (and contextual) elements26. For example, by faithfully replicating the semantic/ lexical settings of genre characters, the syntax of narrative based structures and the overall tone/ style, one can view parody as operating in terms of logical absurdity (which I shall return to in more detail later), with one dimension needed to ensure logic (similarity) and another for creating absurdity (difference). Harries eventually defining parody as a method to modify either the lexicon, syntax or style by way of creating a signifier that ironically suggests an opposite meaning from its employment in the target text27, indeed, Hutcheon calls this an ironic inversion28, that is, a repetition with a critical element which emphasizes difference rather than similarity.

24 25

Hutcheon, 1985: p. 11 Rose, 1979: pp. 33-46 26 Harries, 2000: p. 5 27 Harries, 2000: p. 55 28 Hutcheon, 1985: p. 32

18

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd While Mikhail Bakhtin viewed the parodic as a natural development in the life cycle of any genre29, Geoff King has noted that parody can be seen as a recycling of the products of the past as part of the process any genre is likely to go through once it reaches a series of stages that culminate in a state of over-familiarity, clich or decadence ripe for parody30. Appropriating the conventions and iconography of other cultural forms, even in academia (e.g. Sokal31), the modern prevalence and inclination of the parodic is seen by Harries as a play with the ironic super-saturation32 of existing forms, or what Hutcheon calls a demonstration of the post-modern state of culture and society as culture and is seen to turn on its own traditions. Although it is tentative that any popular cultural products develop in ways other than through amalgamations of re-combined or re-visited elements, the greater media/ film literacy among the viewing public as a result of technological (VHS/ DVD) advancement and growth of media/ film studies from the 1960s onwards has undoubtedly developed an increased level of self-conscious awareness regarding media genre styles and conventions, Hutcheon noting that historians of parody agree that parody prospers in periods of cultural sophistication that enable parodists to rely on the competence of the reader of the parody33. Notably, the first significant comedies to utilize the audiences knowledge in this manner and create what was to become the blueprint for modern parody were the radio/ television versions of The Goon Show (BBC 1951-1960), Spike Milligans Q (BBC, 1969-1983) and Peter Cook and Dudley Moores Not OnlyBut Also (BBC 1965-1970) coming about as they did during the demise of the established forms of theatre, music hall and variety by the first generation to have the common reference point of television. These comedies general mocking and/ or abandonment of traditional forms displayed the bilingual nature of the parodic (speaking with and against that which it parodies) within a technique contemporaneously associated with Monty Pythons Flying Circus (BBC 1969-1975) and since identified by Roger Wilmut as the format sketch, that is, a comic method to take something with a29

Bakhtin: 1981 King, 2002: p. 120 31 I refer of course to Social Text and their un-knowing publication of Sokals article on Morphogenic Field which preposterously linked Lacan with Quantum gravitational theory. 32 Harries, 2000: p. 1 33 Hutcheon, 1985: p. 1930

19

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd strong and recognizable style or presentation (e.g. news, sports, chat shows) and proceeding to empty out the content34 before replacing it with something altogether more strange. Taking its cues from these antecedent format sketch comedies, I hope to demonstrate how the absurd comedy of this studys markedly self-reflexive style similarly creates a sense not only of a distinctive and extensively parodical world, but of a world pertaining to television that serves to expose its limits and absurdities through a making strange of the all too recognizable. Furthermore, I hope to reveal how the absurd comedy develops the parodic idiom of the format sketch by not only adopting a frame-work before turning it against the grain of itself, but also by displaying a strikingly absurdist sensibility that serves not only to deconstruct the adopted form but also to highlight the illusion of its targets traditionally neat and coherent logic. All of which leads us to our first example of the absurd comedy Vic Reeves Big Night Out.

34

Wilmut, 1980: p. 198

20


VIC REEVES BIG NIGHT OUT Throughout Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimers break-through act Vic Reeves Big Night Out, the central protaganists visually and verbally inventive deviations within the cyclical normality of its variety show/ music hall template presents a comedy that continually aims to defer and subvert the patterns and norms on which it is built. For example, when Vic is introduced as Britain's Top Light Entertainer and Singer and brought to the stage by Captain Birdseye (Bob in a grey beard and nautical outfit) on a Harley Davidson whilst singing Aquarius the entrance is largely made comical through a prerequisite knowledge of the naturalistic manner that has been previously seen to the audience as the traditional hosts entrance (from a door/ the side of the stage/ curtains opening etc.). Indeed, it is only once the premise (of a lightentertainment variety show) has granted a measure of plausibility, can what Jerry Palmer calls the liberation of nonsense35 take place. After the entrance, every episode begins with Vic sitting behind his cluttered prop strewn desk before adressing his audience with manic irreverence (e.g. About this time of the evening I like to slip a Petri dish under a squirrel), introducing his labcoat wearing assistant Les (always demonstrating Less love of spirit levels and his inordinate fear of chives) and greeting The Man with the Stick (Bob in an enormous paper helmet holding a stick with a mystery item at the end) before proceeding to introduce the acts on the nights show. Novelty Island is one such segment whereby Vic introduces various talents to perform from the centre of a small paddock, a traditional format appropriate to the light entertainment genre. However, acts such as Mr. Wobbly Hand, Earl Cooper and35

Palmer, 1987: p. 181

21

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd Hats Off To Harry Nilsson, a man whose hat floats off of his head whenever the music of Harry Nilsson is played, Judith Grant with Dusty The Sighing Caterpillar and the Slitherer, a man covered head to foot in bin bags and slithers around to the sound of Morse Code, all provide jarring contradictions to the general expectation of what is stereotypically seen to be the more usual talent show contestant (singers, comedians, magic acts). It is in this sense that by displaying what Wolfgang Kayser calls fantastical caricatures36 of the borrowed codes and conventions of its subject matter, Big Night Out can be seen to systematically set and then break up the elements it suggests before displacing them freely so that the usual correlations and associations prove in-operative in its own intentionally and overtly paradoxical version. In The Theory of Comedy (1968) Elder Olsen explains this comedic tendency as he notes how comedy always requires an agent contrary to the kind required to make the act serious before stressing how there must also always be normality in the abnormal for a joke to work, noting how the basis of the ridiculous and the ludicrousis the unlike37. Therefore we can see that the laughable lunacy Vic and Bob seek to conjure is the result of a plausible foolishness born from the simultaneous freedom of imaginative ideas (incongruity) and the reason of a fixed idea (format). Olsens idea is further explained in Arthur Koestlers concept of bisociation which describes how the emotional dynamic that leads to the production of laughter, in response to a logical structure, is the result of a disjunction between operations of emotion and reason in the delightful mental jolt of a sudden leap from one plane or associative context to another38. For example, while thought processes can change direction, nimbly, at a moments notice; emotions possessing greater inertia cannot, as Koestler ultimately views laughter as the mechanism through which emotion is released after a shift of association deprives it of its original object; it is emotion deserted by thought that is discharged for laughter39. Accordingly, we can transfer from Koestler that it is the simultaneous presence of two frames of reference (absurd and logical) that is central to the comic effect as it creates a perception of situation in36

Kayser, 1966: p. 30 Olsen, Elder, 1968: p. 15 38 Koestler, 1980: p. 328 39 Koestler, 1980: p. 33337

22

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd two mutually compatible associative contexts as two different meanings of the same idea are put into play. The sudden bisociation of a mental event with two habitually incompatible matrices results in an abrupt transfer of train of thought from one associative context to another as; the emotive charge which the narrative carried cannot be so transferred owing to its greater inertia and persistence; discarded by reason, the tension finds its outlet in laughter40. Elaborating on Francis Hutchesons influential Thoughts on Laughter (1725) that simply describes the laugh as a response to the perception of incongruity41, Koestlers concept shows that it is the swift clash between two mutually exclusive codes or rules which is seen to produce the comic result, as the audience is compelled to perceive situations in two self-consistent but incompatible frames of reference, that is, in a joke the audience is asked to function simultaneously on two different wave-lengths42. This model is in turn enunciated within Jerry Palmers The Logic of the Absurd (1987) to identify and articulate the structure of comedy, and particularly of the joke. For example, Palmer describes the comic as acting in two stages; firstly, the moment of disruptive surprise and secondly, the moment of semantic and logical resolution to express respectively the loss and restoration of the position of power and control. To do this Palmer discusses how jokes necessarily involve incongruity (whereby departures from the norm are discussed in terms of semantics and logic) and then surprise (where departures from the norm are identified, concieved, measured, and adressed in terms of their temporal articulation)43. Palmers model shows how in comedy one line of reasoning always tells us that what we see is implausible, whereas a second contrary line of reasoning tells us that the event does have a measure of plausibility relative to social and aesthetic norms. However, while the joke structure consists of two antithetical syllogisms, one plausible, one implausible, it is the implausibility syllogism that carries the greater weight and thus guarantees the status of gags and jokes as comic. Therefore, for Palmer each gag is constructed out of two, contradictory unconscious systems of reasoning, which work from a major premise to a minor premise down to a40 41

Koestler, 1984: pp. 27-100. Hutcheson in Berger, 1997: p. 22 42 Koestler, 1984: p. 328 43 Palmer, 1987: p. 29

23

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd conclusion. For example, when during a discussion of home improvements Vic says to Bob that; You know Iron Maiden, I was thinking of cutting their hair off and using it to thatch my roof44 we can apply Palmers model accordingly: A - The sensible and established method of covering a roof in the thatched style would be to use vegetation such as straw, water reed, sedge, rushes and heather, a fairly well known and traditional method (major premise). B - i - Vic wants to use the hair of a middle-aged heavy metal band to do this job (empirical observation, minor premise). ii Using the human hair of a middle-aged heavy metal band is impractical and inadequate for the task of covering an entire house (second minor premise). C Conclusion = Vics proposed method is implausible. However, Vics comment also carries a second simultaneous yet contradictory line of reasoning that tells us that the statement does in fact have a measure of plausibility: A The hair of a heavy metal band like Iron Maiden is, stereotypically, long and thatch-like. B Iron Maidens band members have long thatch-like hair not entirely dissimilar to the vegetation used for making thatched roofs C Conclusion = Vics proposed method has a degree of plausibility The resulting imbalance between the simultaneous implausibility and plausibility syllogisms creates the consequent peripeteia (a sudden change/ reversal of circumstances), it is this moment that unleashes the process of reflection analysed in the two syllogisms. For Palmer there are two distinct peripeteia, one involves a contradiction of knowledge/ values/ expectation about the outside world that the audience may be assumed to derive from their ordinary everyday experience (discourses of social formation) as seen here with Vics proposed home improvement. The second peripeteia is the contradiction of a series of common sense expectations concerning the prospective course of events (for our purposes) on screen that are the product of44

Vic Reeves Big Night Out, series one, episode six

24

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd the televisual grammar/ extra-textual knowledge up to that point. This is demonstrated during Big Night Outs mock-theatre group segment which sees Vic and Bob take a serious tone as they don white t-shirts reading action image exchange to perform a piece entitled The facelessness of bureaucracy45. The change in tone, the t-shirts and an earnest Bob explaining how he will be portraying the pigs/ brutes hiding behind the pensioners house ready to steal her coal while Vic plays the pensioner, grants a conceivable premise for an avant garde piece of performance art (plausibility). The house band (dressed as jockeys) play a Mack Sennett silent comedy style jaunty instrumental as both Vic and Bob put on curly wigs attached to Sean Connery masks; Bob holds some talcum powder, Vic some male underpants which they proceed to move in time with the music for thirty seconds. Punctuated by the sound of breeze to illustrate a pensioner being attacked by some police officers the act completely denies the serious analysis of the system of government their set-up may have suggested (implausibility). While the visual humour displays the joke structure of expectation and peripeteia (common in all comedy), it is the overwhelming pointlessness of the routine, wholly emblematic of the precarious illogicality the show is seen to revel in that differentiates this comedy from the traditionalist model. Consider this sentence, one of Vics many monologues between acts; You would not believe whats going on around the back there. St. Michael, the patron saint of pre-packed sandwiches, has inserted a nice, really quite coloured hen into an acoustic guitar in order to up sales in the Netherlands Although Vics many addresses to the audience may make a loose grammatical sense; they are still in essence a semantic nonsense akin to the mellifluous word incompatibility of the anglo-saxon riddles and limericks of which Big Night Out undoubtedley bears the hallmarks. Such contradictions of common sense often occur as segues between further examples of visually nonsensical behaviour such as Vic pretending to drink from a pink watering can, trying to eat a whole fruit bowl in one attempt or Bob appearing on stage to nail a leek to the side of his new table.45

Vic Reeves Big Night Out, series one, episode three

25

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd The enjoyment afforded by such subversion of common sense expectation of a light entertainment show can be understood with recourse to Freuds Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) where he argues how the source of pleasure such humour provides works by lifting the internal inhibitions of the ego by undermining the rites of rational adult criticism. For example, Freud describes how by prolonging the yield of pleasure from play, jokes serve to silence the objections raised by criticism which would not allow the pleasurable feeling to emerge, consequently Freud believes it is not technique that defines the jokes peculiar pleasure46, but rather it is their capacity to give an economy of psychic expenditure by undermining rational adult criticism (traditional norms) and recreating the fluid, unstable play the child loses in the process of maturation47. As a result, since it is normal practices and expectations that are undermined in Big Night Out we can consequently view its subversion as relating to the comic predisposition identified in Creative Writers and Daydreaming (1907) where Freud viewed jokes/ comic play as fantasies constructed through adult daydreaming as a continuation of and a substitution for the play of childhood translating reality in accordance with the pleasure principle48. Concurrently, we can see that while the reality principles traditional, coherent, common, familiar televisual world of shared practices and symbolic acts (rites) are seen to derive their meaning from a cluster of socially legitimated symbols, it is therefore pertinent to utilize Mary Douglas theory that Vic and Bobs jokes therefore exist as anti-rites, serving to mock, distort and deride the habitual practices that serve to reaffirm dominant cultural norms of traditional orthodoxy, Douglas noting that;

46 47

Freud, 1905: pp. 178-9 Notably, Todorov said of Freuds work that the reduction of psychic economy that is typical of jokes derives from the subversion of rational criticism through the return to primitive nonsense. However, rather than take Todorovs view of nonsense as an opposite of critical rationalism that excludes all other possibilities (constituting an over-simplification of Freuds thought); it is perhaps more sensible to view the comedy as being rooted in a mixture of sense and nonsense (not in nonsense alone). (Todorov, 1976: p. 313) 48 Freud, 1907: pp. 286-7

26

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd A joke is a play upon form that affords an opportunity for realising that an accepted pattern has no necessity, its excitement lies in the suggestion that any particular ordering of experience may be arbitrary and subjective49. Similarly, Howard Bloch speaks from a linguistic basis when he speaks of the jokes profoundly ambiguous character exploiting the capricious nature of signification, noting how; The joke disrupts the assumptions of a natural relation between language and meaning and, at the same time, serves as a screen for the fact that such a relation never really existed in the first place50. It is thus in recognition of what Simon Critchley calls the sheer contingency51 of the un-thinking traditions/ social rites in which we engage that the resultant release of usually repressed forces that the joke provides momentarily permits the subject to return to the un-structured primal pleasures of infancy, offering a liberating contrast to the constraints of the traditional (adult) social arena. It is in view of this that one can begin to view the humour of the Big Night Out to harness this potential by turning the jokes method against traditional television itself, encouraging the audience to acknowledge the absurdity of its constructed convention whilst systematically dismantling any of its pretensions to sense and order. Indeed, by contrasting the restrictive clichs of televisual grammar Big Night Out displays an aimless repetition that stands diametrically opposed to any meaningful narrative strand. Basic causality is seen to break down and traditional set-ups/ events are shown to be illogical and anti-rationalist as each episode, hinging upon an indistinct uncertainty, proceeds from the mere semblance of a design (a loose narrative whereby it is Vics show and that he is incapable of holding it together) into a poetic nonsense in the vein of Lear or Carroll.

49 50

Douglas, 1968: p. 365 Bloch, 1986: pp. 127-8 51 Critchley, 2000: p. 10

27

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd At this juncture it is possible to view the preposterously irregular and fragmented proclivity of Big Night Out as reminiscent in terms of its effect of what Martin Esslin termed the 'Theatre of the Absurd' with regards to playwrights of the 50s and 60s (notably Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco). Here we can see how the manner in which Big Night Out departs from realistic characters and situations ordinarily associated with televisual norms is akin to said playwrights negation of traditional theatre, as meaningless plots, repetitive dialogue and elaborate non-sequiturs prevail whilst time, place and identity become ambiguously fluid. Therefore, within the unreality of Big Night Outs intentionally and overtly paradoxical universe, the rules of convention are seen to no longer apply as the dream-like play with circularity and arbitrariness amongst Vic and Bobs oneiric shifts between numerous characters serve to undermine structure whilst displaying a refusal to give way to any formal resolution or closure52. Indeed, Seidmans idea that the mainstream comics dialectical exchange between the pre-Oedipal play of jokes and the Oedipal world of order is always followed by a resultant compromise between the two poles in a movement towards adult/ social integration is directly opposed as Big Night Outs absurd comedy refuses to pander to such solid logic. While Seidmans concept of mainstream comedy being inevitably tied to the formation of a coherent personality53 is clear within most conventional traditionalist humour as a path to the integrative, structured, adult conformity of the Oedipal as it shows any transgression to be a transgression, thereby reaffirming the model, in contrast the language, characterisation and setting in the numerous sketches of Big Night Out does not coalesce into a unified representation of human behaviour, and audiences cannot easily assimilate the fragmented, disjunctive and contradictory Dada-esque images put forward. While the audience may, of course, attend superficiality to the apparantly alogical sequence of images and enjoy the performance as an exercise in theatricality, it is the persistent reiteration of the impossibility of Vic and Bobs attempts at meaning that is over-bearing as rather than52

Indeed, the loose narrative thread, the large number of characters who appear for only a short scene and its language an amalgamation of high literature and slang, much of it invented was all foreshadowed by Alfred Jarrys puppet play Ubu Roi (1896), itself a notable predecessor of the Absurd Theatre, in which the central character Ubu Roi, a mythical figure epitomising the animal nature of mans cruelty, becomes King of an archetypical Poland and begins to kill and torment all for no apparent reason. Jarry expressed man's psychological states by objectifying them on the stage decorated with a childish naivet so as to underline their horror. 53 Seidman, 1981: p. 141

28

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd reconciling the chaotic, fragmented irrationality into an eventual meaning, Vic and Bob instead fill every show by incessantly performing their series of character sketches devoid of purpose (narrative or otherwise) without hope of change or significance. For example, in answer to the amount of racial prejudice in the world these days, Vic proposes that they put a stop to it with Talc & Turnips (his interpretive theatre performance group) as he and Bob, accompanied by slapstick piano music don false teeth, huge wigs, tin-foil hats and pillows stuffed down their matching red leotards. Evoking/ parodying the commedia dell-arte, pantomime, vaudeville and music hall traditions, Vic and Bob then grunt and pratfall through apple-lined hoops, skid on the floor around a tin of custard, nail a plum to a piece of wood and hold up a sign that reads squirrel in bucket of hot trout = racial harmony. As they display these outlandish physical gestures to express themselves the audience is left with a feeling that they are only ever exacerbating the fact that they never manage to articulate anything. It is precisely this meaninglessness and denial of narratological clarification in Vic and Bobs numerous sketches that draws attention to the very same exaggerated behaviour the traditional comedy contextualises in order to justify (e.g. drunken-ness, mind-control or a mis-understanding), therefore ultimately reaffirming the familial normality it was seen to transcend. In Big Night Out such exposition of information that could explain such bizarre incongruities as Talc & Turnips or Vic yelling Oh mambo, mambo whilst drumming two sticks of celery, is forever frustrated. Even when such traditional norms such as the straight man archetype are alluded to in the form of Vics nemesis Graham Lister (Bob in wig, glasses and overcoat), a character who routinely expresses anger at the vacuous nature of what is presented each episode on Novelty Island (a criticism that is quite correct in and of it-self), it is soon after deflated as Lister still wishes to be a part of said inanity, or to essentially replicate Vic, and so again the whole purpose of the act is seen to be without end as the episodic repetition continues. The characters do not develop, their motives are unsubstantiated/ non-existent and cause, effect and connections between their actions and the events of their sketches 29

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd oscillate between the tenuous and the arbitrary. Certainly, by abandoning causal motivation and narrative integration for the sake of comic effect the show can be seen to exhibit what Harold Bloom terms the anxiety of influence54 in that it finds continuity in abnormality as the digressions from the formats to which the audience is familiar act as a self-conscious contrary to the traditional ideas that character traits produce action and clear-cut motivation produces events. Much like an Ionesco play Big Night Out instead takes its structure from accelerating rhythms and/ or cyclical repetitions as its protaganists are seen to disregard psychology and coherent dialogue as each sketch develops more by loose association than logic and can therefore be seen as equivalent to the ambiguous dream-like image carrying a multitude of connotations at one and the same time as it accepts abstraction and points to a disjunctive open-endedness stripped of neat narratives until all is seen to be completely illogical. By embracing the irrational and refusing the obligatory clarification the audience is accustomed to, Big Night Out relentlessly contradicts the models, actions and behaviour of tradition to the point of complete impossibility. As Vic and Bob disregard what Creighton Peet called such customary necessities as the laws of gravity, common-sense, and possibility55 the culmination of their excitement of motion sees them revel in vigour and speediness as their dancing and fighting gives a distorted, disjunctive, speeded-up expression of light-entertainment reality. Yet in spite of how frantically Vic and Bob perform, it only ever underlines the fact that nothing happens to change the situation. Novelty Island continues to exhibit increasingly meagre acts (as noted by the sinister old man who appears every episode to shout Youre wasting your time! at Vic), The Ponderers (Vic and Bob as two semi-naked Swiss men in white make-up contemplatively stroking their long chins before deciding whether or not to butter them) still ponder, and un-employed would-be talk-show hosts Donald and Davey Stott are still completely incompetent at recreating famous television shows (we are both completely redundant). The overall effect is analogous to that of a carousel ride in that while the show moves up and down, digressing on its axis, it endlessly repeats the same path, continuously moving54 55

Bloom: 1973 Peet in Maltin, 1987: p. 26

30

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd yet never progressing as every episode Vic and Bob resume their process of entrance, Les, Man with the Stick, Novelty Island etc. until this habit forms a pattern that begins to operate as its unifying principle of organisation, thus replacing the kind of plotting that spectators traditionally percieve as development or transition. Seemingly locked in an eternal cycle of arousal, activity, then rest, each of the Vic and Bob characters and their respective pantomimes evoke a feeling akin to the pointless tasks of A and B in Becketts Act Without Words II (1959)56 and their carrying of sacks when prompted by a goad. Although never leading to anything of any significance, as Lamont notes; there are no triumphs, no resolution57, each turn in Big Night Out displays a similarly repetitive and mechanical display of futility without any accomplishment or meaning ever being achieved. Just as Esslin believed that the basis of the well-made play carries the implicit assumption that the world does have logic and does make sense, the traditional (wellmade) comedy that depicts actuality as solid and secure with all outlines clear and all ends apparent is therefore denied by Big Night Outs continuous inability to give endings (Donald and Davey Stott walking off stage after their act fails) and/ or meaning (Bob deciding to nail bacon to the wall) as it perpetually negates coherent thought and instead embraces nonsense by revelling in the freedom that is the result of its disruption of traditional normality. It is in this sense of play and inversion of the unifying tendencies of the traditional that it is possible to draw parallels between the discordant style of the absurd comedy and Mikhail Bakhtins concept of Carnival58.

56

While Bair (1990) claims Beckett worked on the play from as early as 1956 and Ackerley and Gontarski (2006) state that the work was written in 1958, it is 1959 that seems to be the general consensus amongst Beckettian scholars such as Webb (1974) in his analysis of Becketts mimes 57 Lamont, 1987: p. 57 58 The theoretical concept of Carnival is developed in most detail in Bakhtin: 1984, it is important to differentiate between the theoretical notion of Carnival (capitalised) and the medieval carnival (noncapitalised) as a social event. For further detail on the concept of Carnival see Dentith, 1995: pp.65-87, Stam, 1989: pp.85-121 and/ or Arnold, 1994: pp.54-60.

31

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd CARNIVAL In Rabelais and His World Bakhtin describes the Middle Ages as rigorously hierarchical and founded on scrupulously austere ideas of order and status. However, in certain privileged moments of carnival and festival Bakhtin details how the usual hierarchies and restrictions were seen to be held in suspension as all that was usually permanent and customary was open to what Geoff King has since called a change, renewal and a constant state of becoming59 A boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture. In spirit of their variety, folk festivals of the carnival type, the comic rites and cults, the clowns and fools, giants, dwarfs, and jugglers, the vast and manifold literature of parody - all these forms have one style in common: they belong to one culture of folk carnival humor.60 By making strange or ridiculous the seemingly rational elements of tradition and existence, carnival is portrayed by Bakhtin to uncover cracks in discourse, not by creating incongruous events on which to base humour, but by utilizing and inverting the somewhat mechanical conventions that were already in place61. Carnival must not be confused with mere holiday play... Carnival is a gap in the fabric of society. And since the dominant ideology seeks to author the social order as a unified text, fixed, complete, and forever, carnival is a threat.62 Although Clark and Holquists view that the function of Carnival as a danger is worth consideration we must differentiate between the task of the isolated pre-enlightenment carnival to the way it can be seen to function in contemporary times as the shift59 60

King, 2002: p. 64 Bakhtin, 1984: p. 4 61 Bakhtin raises the importance of the function of, what appears to be, a homogenous folk culture, however, while in writing about Rabelais he is focusing on what is ostensibly a Christianic folk culture (Jewish communities were excluded from this, denying uniformity in this sense), nonetheless links can still be made to disparate cultural groupings and the way that this highlights certain character types, forms and archetypes which transcend any socio-cultural base. 62 Clark and Holquist, 1984: pp, 300-301

32

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd between carnival as an annual event to a regular and culturally dominant form of contemporary post-modern expression has been seen to alter its effect significantly63, as Kristeva notes; The carnivalesque cosmogony has persisted in the form of an anti-theological (but not anti-mystical) and deeply popular movement. It remains present as an often misunderstood and persecuted substratum of official Western culture throughout its history.64 Here Kristevas emphasis on the faithless stance of the carnivalesque draws attention to the more metaphysical and intangible aspects it demonstrates as it confronts and rejects foundational certainty and refuses to be rooted in any recognisable system of traditionalist principles or reason. It is in this sense that by undermining audience assumptions of a re-confirmed traditional order that one can view the carnivalesque inclination of the absurd comedy to pull the rug from under the Enlightenment view of humanity by drawing attention to an acceptance that the illogical has always existed. Indeed, by rejecting rationalist and empiricist philosophical positions one can view the absurd comedy to transcend the concern for stability that comes with these positions as it is seen to be connected with a final, post-enlightenment freedom which comes with an acceptance of the irrational. Therefore, by focusing on a collapsing of the structures of traditionalist order and stability the style of the absurd comedy can be seen to typify the contemporary period of post-modernity/ post-enlightenment as at the bottom line of a collapse of structure, all that is structure-less starts to make more sense once one acknowledges that the rudder has been lost. Jacques Derrida highlights that the problem with Western philosophical thought is that its claims to truth have always been nothing more that a process of covering the fact that absolute meaning and absolute truth will always remain elusive notions. Whilst Derridas focus is primarily on linguistics and the instability of language63

It is notable here to mention the argument of modern comedy as Carnival owes to Ellis, 1992: pp.2337 and his view that cinema has the potential to become like a contemporary version of the medieval carnival. 64 Kristeva, 1995: p.49

33

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd through the concept of differance, he follows up the implications for philosophical thought describing the concept of Aporia as the problem of logic in any given theoretical or philosophical text where it no longer follows the rules of logic that the text itself has set up65. There is an immediate connection here with the notion of incongruity and the humour of this study, as the essence of the absurd comedy is to make explicit these Aporias, these gaps in logic, therefore dismantling traditional comedys pretence of the ultimately logical and the unified. So while Peter Berger chooses to align humour with the holy world, suggesting that in laughter the limitations of the human condition are miraculously overcome by letting us see the madness of the world by affording us a glimpse of another via a signal of transcendence66, we must nonetheless view this perception of laughter as transcendental epiphany as problematic. Instead, it is perhaps wiser to view the laughter that the absurd comedy seeks to provoke in its audience, not as a means of escape that delivers the audience from the world, but as a means of returning them to it after temporarily distracting them from it by defeating their expectations in a refusal of the customary. Therefore its madness does not come from an alternative world, but rather from taking the constructed norms of this world and subverting them ad absurdum, its pleasures lay in the bursting of the bounds of traditional logic revealing it as an illusion.

65 66

For a detailed analysis of Derridas concept of Aporia, see Derrida: 1978 Berger, 1997: p. 210

34

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd BRASS EYE Much like Big Night Out, Chris Morris Brass Eye aims to pull the viewer away from the world on screen via the Brechtian method of the Verfremdungseffekt67 (translating as distancing, estrangement and/ or alienation effect) to provoke a selfreflective viewpoint of its formalistic subversion. By employing this technique the show encourages the audience to acknowledge the conspicuous feeling of irrationality that is the outcome of the parodic and selfobjectifying portrayal of the illogical environment displayed. Indeed, it is through the shows un-folding and revealing of the systematic deceptions of carefully cultivated media conventions that Brass Eyes take on the investigative news magazine programme and sensationalist portrayals of social ills utilizes the absurdity that comedy provides to undermine both televisual and societal logic. Consequently, while Brass Eye exhibits intramural (parodical) tendencies through its accurate facsimile of its targets textures and tones and the un-necessary aestheticisation of content via the shows alarmist music and ridiculous excess of CGI, it is also seen to carry heavy extramural (satirical) tendencies aswell. Escalating the debates of each episode (with titles such as DRUGS and CRIME) to illogicalities, the show juxtaposes between the familiarity of its form and the ridiculous nature of content by using the devices and techniques of its format to invoke the plausibility necessary for its ridiculous jokes as its conventions apparent support of the implausible is seen to undermine the aura of authority of both the devices themselves and the form of institutionalised broadcasting68 that accommodates it. This is particularly apparent as Brass Eye asserts the arbitrary relationship between images and ascribed meaning as footage is often taken from its original source to support the absurd premise of its reports through highly selective editing and voice over. For example, during the DECLINE episode, a Jerry Springer Show (1991- )67

Brechts term Verfremdungseffekt is heavily rooted in the Russian formalist notion of ostranenie (defamiliarization) see Tomashevsky: 1965. 68 Throughout the show absurd jokes are strung onto ridiculous reports e.g. in BOMB DOGS the audience interprets that dogs cant explode, and that it is therefore implausible, however the IRA do plant bombs in seemingly innocuous places, dogs are innocuous, therefore there is a measure of plausibility.

35

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd style segment entitled Priests who say they must pack a piece to keep the peace escalates into a fight between parishioners as stock footage of a tank storming the streets of Vietnam is supplemented with a voice-over that explains how two priests exited the show in an armoured tank, shooting as they left the studio. Employing a method analogous to the meta-linguistic literary parody that the Russian formalists so admired, Brass Eye consistently takes entire sections of an original text and then simply juxtaposes or subjects them to minor syntactic changes in order to alter the overall semantic meaning of the piece in a comic manner. Concurrently, by inverting televisual standards and making clear to the audience that the constructs in operation are discursive fabrications Brass Eye draws self-conscious attention to norms that are usually naturalised and rendered relatively indiscernible by the text as its play with traditional devices systematically exploits them as images of mere performance, thus providing a disjunction that serves to disorient the audience. The show is presented by Christopher Morris himself, playing an anchor character whose reliance on pie charts (the Moralometer reads now at just two morals per head), nonsensical diagrams (So much for recorded crimes, crimes we know nothing about are going up aswell), and other grammatical conventions that can so often be confused with truly genuine logic and valid information, steadily expose a programme drained of any of the finite significance it desires. Indeed, throughout each episode the audience sees how Morris and his teams ostentatious endeavours at explanation, so often called philosophy or politics, can often appear as ossified fiction and/ or empty repetitive chatter, consider Morris voiceover from ANIMALS; The evil in our relationship remains a paradox, if you plot, number of animals abused, against, what makes people cruel, versus, intelligence of either party, the pattern is so unreadable that you might aswell draw in a chain of fox heads on sticks, and if you do that, an interesting thing happens, the word cruel starts flashing69. While representing the serious as the trivial (what Mast describes as precisely the aim of much contemporary comedy70), Brass Eyes ridiculing of clich formed a69

70

Brass Eye, ANIMALS Mast, 1979: p. 9

36

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd more overtly cynical brand of comedy than was comfortable for many critics, snubbing the lyrical, urbane Horatian style indicative of Pope in favour of a more brooding, misanthropic Juvenalian satire evocative of Swift at his most distrustful. For example, during the HIV debate in the SEX episode a member of the audience is thrown out because it transpires that he does not have good-aids but bad-aids (the difference depending on how one contracts it). The consequent response of the real audiences jeers and disgusted looks at the HIV+ homosexual gentleman (played by Morris collaborator Mark Heap) highlighting to the Brass Eye viewers the astonishing ignorance and hysterical misconception of mob reaction that can be a result of the self-important, ignorant and polarising Media portrayals. If a madman broke his way into the studio and shot you with a machine gun, anyone in this audience yawning could get your blood in their mouths. (Audience applause) Youve got bad-aids you shouldnt have come, (to security), can we have him removed in the next break71. Ironically, it is the Morris character and his army of like-minded campaigners exaggerated reverence for dominant social values and excessive respect for authority that is seen to act as the subversive source of the shows humour. Citing Gilles Deleuze work on masochism, Steven Shaviro notes how by scrupulously applying the law we are able to demonstrate its absurdity and provoke the very disorder that it is intended to prevent or conjure72. It is in this sense that the Morris character seeks an organized, yet perpetually unattainable clarity, that is, an irrefutably ordered inside. Whether it be the verdict on science as innocent or guilty for crimes against humanity (answer = there is no verdict as the jury is dead from pollution) or the conclusion on the relationship of humans and animals/ drugs/ sex, Morris continually asks whether we have it right or wrong (cue the answer prancer who then dances between two halves of a circle, one labelled RIGHT, one labelled WRONG, musing over the answer). While in the Deleuzian sense, the masochist is a rebel, a humourist who seeks to reduce the law to its logical consequences, he never possesses the force to bend and distort rules that characterises the true radical, in this sense the Morris71

72

Brass Eye, SEX Shaviro, 1993: p. 88

37

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd character is inadvertently an anarchist because of his hyper-conformism, disseminating disorder and what Deleuze simply calls chaos while he is; in the course of earnestly trying to do exactly what bosses, psychoanalysts, media specialists, and other technicians of normalising power want him to do73. Shaviro notes that any degree of identification with a character such as Morris archetypical host opens the door not to solidification, but to a schizophrenic fragmentation and disintegration of personality74. Brass Eye avoids this by maintaining a distance between the viewer and any of the crazed principals whose reports and investigations propel the show, as Robert Kolker notes, the satirical mode requires the audiences observation and judgement rather than identificationthe conventions of psychological realism and character motivation are removed75. Concurrently, it is from a distanced position that the audience is encouraged to laugh at Brass Eyes rigorously professional and intransigent convention and its elaborate rational machinerys attempts to bring univocal order and incontestable meaning to a world that can never have either. As the Morris characters mechanical displeasure at humanitys problems and resultant longing for unanimity increase, so too does the audiences awareness that the shows sincere attempts to act as a guiding light for civilization and solve societys wrongs by bringing back single rules of general validity are to be seen as essentially futile endeavours. In this sense one can see the Morris characters automated behaviour to recall Henri Bergsons didactic thesis on laughter that describes how when something mechanical is encrusted onto something living and the transformation of a person into a thing occurs, the comic is created. For example, in functionalist Bergsonian terms, laughter is viewed as a social gesture of mockery toward those who are not behaving in a flexible, context sensitive way76, providing utility in society as a social cure for the disease of mechanical inelasticity77, that is, an attack on those who lack the commonsensical ability to observe73 74

Shaviro, 1993: p. 110 Shaviro, 1993: p. 121 75 Kolker, 2005: p. 113 76 Bergson, 1902: pp. 118 & 121 77 Bergson, 1902: p. 23

38

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd what is happening around them and to adapt their behaviour accordingly. However, it is notable that writing in 1900 Bergson equated natural behaviour with social behaviour (as opposed to anti-social behaviour and un-natural mechanical behaviour); whereas paradoxically, the modern comedy sees a far more antithetical temperament between nature and society. Indeed, laughing at the un-thinking flaws in ones character does not always mean urging the target/ butt to correct its behaviour as Bergson suggests, for the mechanical in-elasticity shown in the modern comic is rarely morally reprehensible. It is therefore perhaps more fitting to say that we laugh at the appearance of a mechanism in life in a more abstract sense than Bergson foresaw, in fact, it is perhaps more appropriate to consider Masts interpretation of Bergson that our laughter aims to turn the human machine back into malleable flesh and soul78. How this applies to Brass Eye is most apparent in its illustration of how its team of societal representatives (once the landed gentry, now celebrities) have become encrusted with an absurdly mechanical conduct completely metonymic of the irrational world the shows comedy aims to expose. For example, when Brass Eyes celebrities present fictional campaigns against conjured outrages by reading polemical scripts to camera (purportedly for inclusion in televisual information videos) they are seen to cease being themselves, that is, a conversion to machine-like archetypes generally appropriating faade and standards is seen to take place. This is typified in the appeal for the elephant that has become so depressed he has stuffed his trunk in his own anus, on which the audience sees magician Paul Daniels remark; Ill give you another one that you can cut in later. Ill just say that and you can cut it in later go to the elephant, go to somewhere else. And All right? Still rolling? (Pauses, adopts serious expression, points to camera) Come on help us get that trunk out79. The business-like indifference and prosaic pseudo-concern (according to whether or not it was being recorded) expose how Daniels is encrusted with a grotesquely rigid mechanical-like nature, and is therefore (according to Bergson) worthy of ridicule. By78 79

Mast, 1979: p. 21 Brass Eye, ANIMALS

39

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd revealing the caricatures that the numerous celebritys on-screen personalities perform behind, Brass Eye exposes them as mechanisms in the true Bergsonian sense. Whats more is that by offering no effort to extricate the usage of language as a genuine instrument for logic from the shows ridiculous and illogical diatribes devoid of meaning, the shows incessant waves of information present to the viewer an incongruous dialectic of often pataphysical nonsense within the plausible contexts of legitimate campaigns. Consider TV presenter Nick Owens warning of the dangers of heavy electricity; Heavy electricity is regularly flattening cattle in Sri Lanka, afterwards the poor beasts look like giant fur-covered slugs thrashing about on their backs and made of what scientists call wobbly matter, I wont go into it here, but basically its caused by sodomized electrons which rush to the cows head-end, now, just apply that to a young girl, its an appalling thought isnt it, Gita is fifteen-yearsold, and now because of heavy electricity she is only eight inches tall, now just imagine that, she cant speak, but she must feel quite dreadful80. In the DRUGS episode television presenter/ artist Rolf Harris holds up a foot-long fluorescent yellow pill of Cake, which he informs the viewer is a made-up (made from chemicals, not plants), psycho-active, metabolycally bi-sterbile drug, Noel Edmonds enunciates; What is cake? Well, it has an active ingredient which is a dangerous psychoactive compound known as dimesmeric ansenphoshate and it stimulates the part of the brain called Shatners Bassoon and thats the bit of the brain that deals with time perception, so, a second feels like a month, well, it almost sound like fununless youre the Prague schoolboy who walked out into the street straight in front of a tram, he thought he had a month to cross the street81. As the Brass Eye activists speak in clichd glib platitudes (scientific terms/ emotional examples) draped on skeletal points/ messages (the appeals of the80 81

Brass Eye, DRUGS Brass Eye, DRUGS

40

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd depressed elephant/ Heavy Electricity/ Cake), the objective audience is shown how the habitual repetition of celebrity autocue rhetoric has degenerated any remnant of meaning and destroyed the power of their words to signify. Just as Luckys jumbled and repetitious speech in Becketts Waiting for Godot (1953) displays an oratory discourse reduced to habitually performed formulaic debris, so too does the dialogue in Brass Eye (while still having a residue of intellect) contain only a mere suggestion of significance as over-laying plates of accumulated knowledge (numerous authorities, abstract formulae, allegorical generalisations) collapse into eachother amidst a seemingly endless repetition of meaningless reports, stories and investigations. By mocking the language of beliefs and science in this way, Brass Eye highlights how while initially presented and performed as an honourable instrument of genuine communication, televisual idiom is slowly and surely reduced to an ambiguous unfamiliar noise. Once recognizable scenes turn into ones of absurdity and confusion as fragmented, trite and mechanical language is subjected to what Freud refers to as the laws of the sub-conscious. Words are no longer seen to act according to their unequivocal meanings in their linguistic (signifier-signified) sense as implication is transferred from one signifier to another; consequently the play of the signifier becomes predominant. A semiotic elaboration of the subconscious primary processes, or what Palmer calls the play, the slippage, of condensation and displacement82 comes into play as Brass Eye utilizes the adult rationality of the reality principle and its localised mechanism of denotation and then undermines the literal signified meanings of signs to demonstrate the inherent figurative ambiguity and unreliability of the language it employs. For example, as any term is seen to be capable of evoking a set of connotations it can be seen to belong to a paradigm, therefore within the context of a particular chain of terms in an utterance (a syntagm), Brass Eye continually evokes connotations that are incompatible with the sense of the rest of any of its speeches chains so as to destabilize any hint of meaning the chain may suggest. So when Radio and TV presenter Dr. Fox informs the audience that Genetically, Paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me,82

Palmer, 1987: p. 220

41

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd now that is scientific fact - theres no real evidence for it but it is scientific fact, the audience recognises that while the term crab has loose colloquial associations with sex (-ual disease) and therefore a degree of plausibility, it is also incompatible with the specific context presented of a scientific analogy/ description of a sex offender, an implausibility, and therefore constitutes what Palmer refers to as a semiotic anomaly in the speeches chain. Consequently the statements jarring disruption results in a contradiction that leads to the surprise of humour, the ignorance of the mechanical speakers of Brass Eyes celebrities commenting on anything so as to give themselves more press coverage adds a further peripeteia. In accordance with Kants brief description of the cause of laughter in his Critique of Judgement (1790) as an effect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing83, the audience is invited to express amusement at how Brass Eyes aporia-laden logic dressed up as crucial discourse completely lacks in sagacity or tension, thus affording the viewer relief from intellectual effort (an element Freud argued to be a key reason for the jokes unique pleasure) as all impact and all significance is turned into nothingness. Ludicrous comments such as Dr. Foxs contribute to the overwhelming absurdity of the shows ineffectual attempts at unequivocal meaning as dialogue is persistently rendered illogical whilst appeals for answers and order only ever seem to leave the audience with a view of types/ characters speaking a language that does not make sense while in pursuit of ridiculous objectives that they cannot comprehend. However, despite the utilization of individual ignorance it is still the general and not the personal that is the target of its jokes, for as in the Swiftian sense; no individual could resent/ where thousands were equally meant as by pointing at what all mortals may correct84 Brass Eye offers a universally therapeutic objective to bring about a realization that any pretensions to attain unified meaning and undeniable certainties are themselves irrational and senseless. All assurances of incontestable guide-lines are unmasked as nonsensical illusions and empty chatter as Brass Eye reveals a comic environment best described by Critchley as the world with its causal chains broken,

83

84

Kant: 1790 Swift: 1977

42

Scott Hayden (student no. 10227744), MA Film and the Moving Image, Thames Valley University, 21/12/2011, Dissertation, Tutor - Dr. Garin Dowd a world that is, with its social practice

Discuss the role of absurdity within the humour of Vic Reeves Big Night Out, Brass Eye, and The Office - Master of Arts Dissertation

Documents

term absurd comedy

traditional comedy viewer

thames valley university

dissertation introduction

scott hayden student

moving image student

garin dowd course ma

humour of vic reeves