I have been reading Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions as of late, and the book has really got me thinking. First off, let me say that Vonnegut is probably my favorite all-time writer and I constantly find myself cracking up at his work. However, I found myself crying and thinking about the nature of life as often as I laugh in his works. Few authors have been able to pull off this particular trick, and it has left me wondering: Is something still comedy even if it is sad?
Vonnegut, who saw much, much death in his life, makes mortality a (if not, the) central theme in all his works. So let's start there. Is death funny? I would say yes and no. It is not funny when someone close to me dies. It is not funny when a young Vonnegut watches a friend die during the war. But on the other hand, I find the Darwin Awards to be hilarious. So, is there even a middle ground?
Vonnegut is the master of making us feel two things at once. He subtly slips in humor to dire situations, making the scene lighter. One reason for this is most likely that this is his way of dealing with terrifying things. It's much easier to laugh something off than to dwell on it. And I believe it was Kurt himself who said that we can laugh about death, we cry about it, or we can choose to just let it go. So, in Slaughterhouse-Five, when the narrator (not Billy Pilgrim) tells us over and over again - "So it goes," we are left to think that he has chosen the third option in dealing with death. Yet, the imminent laughter in the imminent danger makes us think differently. Perhaps Vonnegut himself wasn't even totally sure how to deal with it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think the reason we laugh at one type of death and cry at the other has to do with our personal orientation to the object of death. Perhaps this is obvious, but for the Darwin Awards we don't think about the person's wife or mother who gets the phone call telling her that her husband/son had been found, say, impaled on a tree. We don't witness her personal reaction, instead, we only feel the superiority that whoever it was died from doing something awfully stupid, something we, smart folks as we are, would never do.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, in the case of the Vonnegut stories, we are right there with the narrator, reacting along with him to the terrible pain that death brings. And although we might find humor later in the absurdity of the reactions of the same narrator, we still embody the pain he felt earlier.
I hope this makes sense and isn't just too obvious. I want to add, before I finish this comment, that I too enjoy Breakfast of Champions immensely, despite its dark subject matter. Another novel that makes me feel similar is Joseph Heller's Catch 22.
All humor usually contains an element of pathos--at least the humor that lasts. If you can laugh and cry, then you are exercising the gamut of human emotion, and in Greek tragedy (and comedy as well) that generates catharsis.
ReplyDelete