Getting even

John Lahr muses on comedy and revenge

by Johnette Rodriguez

When John Lahr went to Yale and then Oxford, he was amused to hear the way his professors discussed American comedy and clowns, for he had grown up with one of the best -- his father was Bert Lahr -- and he had met the rest -- Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and the Marx Brothers among them. Armed with that eye-witness knowledge and a distinguished career as a drama critic -- he's been at The New Yorker since 1992 -- Lahr wants to set the record straight about the sources of comedy. He will present his ideas in a free lecture titled "Comedy and Revenge," on Thursday, March 2 at 4 p.m. at Brown University's Leeds Theater.

"The way that academics always talk about comedy has nothing whatsoever do with the real crazy, infantile, vindictive spirit behind the people who make comedy," Lahr said emphatically, in a phone conversation from his home in London. "The impulse of comedy has much more to do with revenge and attack and aggression and getting even."

"The whole job description of a clown is to be [politically] incorrect," he continued. "To think against the received opinion of the community. That's their benefit. To test boundaries. To test the limits of the unacceptable. To say the unsayable."

Lahr divides his time between London and New York and wherever else his inquiring spirit takes him-- Los Angeles and Stockholm are two other stopovers in his captivating book of essays, Light Fantastic: Adventures in Theatre (1996). The first section of the book is "Comedians," with essays on seven different comics, including Joe Orton and Barry Humphries. His book about Humphries, Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization : Backstage with Barry Humphries, won the 1992 Roger Machell Prize for the best book on the performing arts, and Dame Edna currently alludes to Lahr and his book in her Broadway show. His biography of Orton was made into a 1987 film, Prick Up Your Ears, and he subsequently edited The Orton Diaries. His affinity for a British playwright and an Australian comedian prompted comparisons with comedy in the U.S.

"The real difference is that in English/Irish culture, humor is based on irony and on the expectation that things are not going to work out," Lahr noted. "American comedy, insofar as it's allowed to be comic, is very much controlled and geared toward the mass media, which don't allow real dissent or real thought or real irony. And the culture itself does not support the ironic in the same way, because America is a culture of abundance. Ireland and England are cultures of scarcity. The difference is a sense of expectation and optimism in the one versus limitation in the other."

Queried about good American comics, Lahr mentioned the late Bill Hicks, to whom he devoted an essay after he was banned from the Letterman show; Chris Rock, with some reservations; Richard Pryor, with no reservations. Woody Allen and Rosanne will be part of his talk at Brown.

"I'm a big fan of Rosanne -- I like Rosanne as a comedian," he affirmed. "I think she has the authentic stamp of the mischief-maker. She can't resist breaking boundaries. There's something in her that's anarchic and therefore authentic. I mean, most of these people are just hankering to get their TV show on and get comfortable. But Rosanne is just not comfortable in her own skin and will always have something of the true comic in her, even though she's a millionaire."

In addition to his writings about theater -- he is a two-time winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, presented annually by Yale, Princeton and Cornell -- Lahr has published two novels; drafted numerous stage adaptations, including The Manchurian Candidate; expanded his New Yorker piece on Frank Sinatra into a Book of the Month Club selection, Frank Sinatra: The Artist and the Man; and written a best-selling biography of his father, Notes on a Cowardly Lion. His father remains an inspiration for him.

"He was, again, the true comic, the essential comic," Lahr emphasized. "He didn't tell jokes. He was a character performer, a physical comedian. But he brought on to the stage a kind of almost metaphysical quality. He was a metaphor in the way that Buster Keaton was. He didn't understand what he was saying, but he was saying it very articulately, about suffering and wonder and about just getting through life."

"He was of the first generation of great clowns," Lahr added. "Part of my argument is to show the importance of these people who were called `low comics' in their time. The very fact that they were `low' meant that they were popular but they weren't discussed by the middle classes, who make the taste, as valuable in the same way."

Lahr points out a significant connection between those first American clowns and some of the major playwrights of the 20th Century.

"Look at Beckett -- my father debuted Waiting for Godot in America, and the influences on him are clowns like my father, whose meaning Beckett deconstructs," Lahr remarked. "If you look at Artaud and the Theater of Cruelty, the model is the Marx Brothers. Or you look at the Brecht alienation theory, what is he talking about? He's talking about Chaplin. These low comics were real inspirations, for they are, in essence, playful and kinetic and anarchic and they make a statement with their humor. They think against the culture."

That aspect of comedians can sometimes make them pretty unpopular people, however, as Lahr set out to explore in his essay on Jackie Mason and Mort Sahl, in which he concludes that people have a hard time laughing at something or someone of whom they are righteously in favor. They find it hard to question fervently-held opinions.

"The whole point of laughter and the good kind of humor is to disenchant," Lahr argued, "because, like in fairy tales, people always talk about enchantment as a positive thing. Well, it's not. It's only the disenchanted who are free. What laughter does and should engineer is a kind of psychic freedom. At the moment, in America, comedy is going in the reactionary way, because the people who own the networks and the TV studios and the whole self-censorship of commerce keep laughter from being outspoken. It makes it much more anodyne, so that's why there's not much satire in America."

Surely John Lahr's talk at Brown promises to be anything but anodyne, as it blows the wool from your brains and the dust from your eyes on the subject of comedy.