The first part of this book has been an attempt to outline the anatomy of the comic with the help of different perspectives, such as those of philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences. It goes without saying that this attempt could only partially succeed. It is salutary to recall Bergson’s description of laughter as a foam that disappears as one tries to hold it (salutary, one may add, both for the nervous author and the skeptical reader). As stated at the outset of this arguably Quixotic enterprise, all one can try to do is to keep walking around the phenomenon in the hope of seeing it more clearly as a result. And that is all that this book can continue to do. For most of the rest of it the topic will be different forms of expression of the comic, most of them literary. There is a particular problem here. The relevant material is overwhelmingly vast. The literature of every human culture contains huge accumulations of comic writings. Even the most cursory overview of these would daunt the most unabashed megalomaniac, or alternatively would require the establishment of a large number of scholarly committees with a work schedule measured in decades. All that a solitary author bereft of delusions of grandeur can do is to look at a few clear cases (to use a phrase of Max Weber’s)–that is, cases that help to bring into sharp focus these different manifestations of the comic phenomenon.1
Benign humor is most easily defined as what it is not. Unlike wit, it does not make excessive intellectual demands. Unlike irony and satire, it is not designed to attack. Unlike the extravagant creations of folly, it does not present a counter-world. Rather, it is harmless, even innocent. It is intended to evoke pleasure, relaxation, and good will. It enhances rather than disrupts the flow of everyday life. It is, so to speak, at the far end of the Dionysian ecstasies in which the comic experience was originally rooted. One might perhaps argue that this darker side is always there, under the surface of the most innocuous jokes, but it is almost completely hidden, present if at all as a mere soupçon.
In this incarnation, then, the comic functions as a mild and thoroughly healthy diversion. It is in this form that “humor is the best medicine,” as the Reader’s Digest puts it.
Benign humor is the most common expression of the comic in everyday life. It provides the mellow amusement that makes it easier to get through the day and to manage the minor irritations. It is what is intended when people are criticized for not having a sense of humor, a character flaw (perhaps even a moral flaw) that makes them less capable of coping and harder to live with. Suppose that there is an escalation of minor mishaps in, say, a work situation. The boss has just come in showing all the signs of a brooding bad temper, the computer system is down, the coffee machine has also broken down, and–to top it off–it turns out that the overnight cleaning staff has thrown out a pile of important papers that had been prepared for the boss’s perusal. The very accumulation of these mishaps will induce laughter in those who have the putative sense of humor and thus make is easier for them to overcome the difficulties, while those lacking this redeeming quality will stew in their frustration. Humor, the Reader’s Digest could go on to say, is the best management tool. (It may be observed in passing that just this has been suggested seriously, and often very humorlessly, by business experts.)
Benign humor in such instances manifests itself in momentary interruptions of the sober activities of living. It is a spontaneous reaction to the incongruities of an ordinary situation. It is not planned or staged by anyone. There may also be entire episodes, by design or happening accidentally, that evoke a humorous response. Take a very common episode of family life: A little girl is dressing up in her mother’s clothes. She puts on a dress or a blouse, far too big for her, so that she virtually disappears in it. She slips on a pair of high-heeled shoes, perhaps tops the costume with a hat that slips down to her nose. In this get-up she stumbles around the room in a perfect parody of her mother. No matter whether she has staged this performance before or whether this is the first time, it may be safely assumed that the family (including the parodied mother) will find the entire episode hugely amusing. But even an outsider, innocently trapped in this little comedy, may find it quite funny and respond accordingly. The little girl may conclude her performance to unanimous laughter and applause (which, one may further assume, will encourage her to repeat it frequently and may even give her the idea, held onto into adulthood, that she is a natural-born comedian).
Unlike other forms of the comic, this kind of humor does not have to be deliberately produced or explicitly articulated. It can just happen. Also, it can be enjoyed by oneself, in a solitary chuckle as it were. By contrast, wit, jokes, or satire are always conscious products, and their production depends on a social situation in which the comic producer has an audience. Yet, obviously, benign humor can also be deliberately produced or staged, be it by amateurs like the aforementioned little girl or by people who make a profession out of this. Only when benign humor is deliberately produced can it create a finite province of meaning, though of a very distinctive sort. It is quite close to everyday life, though it takes out of it whatever is painful or threatening. It brings into transitory being a world of mellow lightness. Its effect is that of a brief, refreshing vacation from the seriousness of existence. Almost any medium of creativity can bring this about. World literature is obviously full of examples, and even Shakespeare, who in other works confronts every conceivable depth of human anguish, wrote comedies from which every trace of pain or sorrow has been removed. The contemporary American in quest of benign humor may find it in the poetry of Edward Lear or Ogden Nash, in the stand-up performances of Bob Hope (still going strong, indeed heroically, at age ninety), by watching an old movie of the Marx Brothers, or by contemplating the pictures of Norman Rockwell. This or that product of benign humor may, of course, be dismissed by some people as too cute, too unsophisticated, or as expressing a comic sensibility that is too foreign to enjoy. Be this as it may, nobody, however sophisticated or ethnocentric, will have reason to complain of a shortage of sources of benign humor to turn to in case of need.
In what follows, three clear cases will be looked at. They are very different from each other, coming from different countries and working in different media, though all three were contemporaries. What they have in common is that each one, in his way, produced an opus of unmistakably benign humor. The three cases are the English novelist P. G. Wodehouse, the American comedian Will Rogers, and Franz Lehár, the twentieth-century master of the Viennese operetta.
P. G. (Pelham Grenville–no kidding) Wodehouse (1881–1975) must be one of the most prolific writers in the history of literature.2 Depending on how one counts anthologies, he published a little over or a little under one hundred books in his lifetime. On his ninetieth birthday he gave himself a present by finishing yet another novel. And writing is what he did all his life, virtually all the time. The child of colonial civil servants (not at all part of the aristocracy about which he was to write all those novels), he turned to full-time writing early on, and the immense success of his novels gave him a comfortable income. Despite the unambiguously English sensibility of his opus, Wodehouse has had a devoted American readership from early on and he spent a large part of his life in America, where he also played an important part in the development of the Broadway musical and for a while did film scripts in Hollywood. He was happily married, lived in stable circumstances, worked hard and painstakingly at his craft as a writer. By all accounts he was an amiable, well-meaning, and easygoing individual. Indeed, his biography yields just one very distressing episode, worth telling because it suggests an innocence of character that seems to come right out of one of his own novels.3 Wodehouse and his wife were stranded in France at the time of the German invasion in 1940. Wodehouse was interned as an enemy alien. He was treated very well and did a lot of writing while in custody. When he was visited by an American journalist (this was before the United States entered the war) he agreed to do some broadcasts to his American readers, telling some funny stories about his imprisonment. It did not occur to him that the Germans, who allowed him to use their radio facilities, could look on these broadcasts as a propaganda coup. The broadcasts were naturally much resented in Britain, and after the liberation of France Wodehouse was briefly arrested and investigated on suspicion of treason. He was lucky in that the first British intelligence officer to interview him was no other than Malcolm Muggeridge, who was completely captivated by Wodehouse and exonerated him in his report of any fault other than political stupidity.4
Though they constitute only a part of Wodehouse’s entire opus, his most famous and enduringly successful novels are those that deal with the adventures of Bertie Wooster, an endearingly imbecile young aristocrat, and Jeeves, his omniscient “gentleman’s gentleman” (the term butler is somewhat below the latter’s dignity). One may say that these two figures have by now attained almost mythological status. Two stories will have to suffice here to explicate the inspired idiocy surrounding them.
The first is entitled “Jeeves in the Springtime.”5 Bertie feels the onset of spring and the following dialogue ensues with Jeeves:
“In the spring, Jeeves, a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove.”
“So I have been informed, sir.”
“Right-o! Then bring me my whangee, my yellowest shoes, and the old green Homburg. I’m going into the park to do pastoral dances.”
“Very good, sir.”
Never mind what a “burnished dove” may be, let alone a whangee. It is hard to imagine a more idiotic exchange. It is typical of the interaction between the two characters, Bertie charging ahead with mindless energy, Jeeves standing by with ironic detachment yet ever ready to get his master out of the scrapes he invariably ends up in. The interaction follows a more or less fixed formula. The amazing thing is that Wodehouse’s comic genius makes it seem fresh every time around.
Here is how Bertie experiences spring: “Kind of uplifted feeling. Romantic, if you know what I mean.” But just in case anyone imagines an eruption of vernal eroticism, he adds: “I’m not much of a ladies’ man, but on this particular morning it seemed to me that what I really wanted was some charming girl to buzz up and ask me to save her from assassins or something.” This is again very typical of Bertie’s relations with the other sex. When it is not a matter of trying to escape from the demands of terrifying aunts and marriage-minded viragos, Bertie’s notions of romance are romantic in a basically prepubescent style. Jeeves indeed appears to have liaisons of one kind or another, usually with female members of the domestic staffs of Bertie’s circle of friends and relatives, but no prurient details are ever revealed or even hinted at. A not unimportant point: Wodehouse’s world is singularly devoid of any sort of sexuality, is thus innocent in the most literal sense.6
What happens in the park is a bit of an anticlimax. Bertie runs into young Bingo Little, a young gentleman of an intellect about equal to his. Bingo drags him off to a somewhat seedy restaurant and introduces him to Mabel, a waitress there and “the most wonderful girl you ever saw.” Bingo is in love with Mabel and wants to marry her. The problem is his uncle, old Mortimer Little, on whom he is financially dependent and who might cut off his allowance if he enters into this kind of mésalliance. This financial circumstance is once again typical of Bertie’s circle and indeed of Bertie himself (who is dependent on his ferocious Aunt Agatha). These people have neither work nor money, but they manage to support a lavish life-style on the basis of obscure and precarious sub-sidizations. One is reminded here of the way someone once described the characters in Dostoyevsky’s novels, as unemployed and unemployable. But none of Wodehouse’s characters are greatly affected by this economic situation beyond a peevish annoyance, and they are certainly not driven by any remotely Dosto-yevskyan passions.
The story unfolds in a sequence of events that could not ever be plausible except in a Wodehouse novel. Bingo implores Bertie to ask Jeeves’s advice (who is “by way of being the brains of the family”). Jeeves, it turns out, is well-placed to be of help, since he is “on terms of some intimacy,” practically amounting to an engagement, with old Mortimer’s cook, a Miss Watson. Jeeves knows that the frightful uncle is suffering through a painful episode of gout and likes to be read to in bed by his valet. Jeeves suggests that Bingo should volunteer to take over this chore and to read from the works of one Rosie M. Banks, an author who specializes in romances between individuals of divergent class backgrounds. It is not long before Bertie is invited to lunch in the Little household. He discovers, to his chagrin, that Bingo has told his uncle that Bertie is the real author of the Banks novels. When Bertie brings up the matter of Bingo’s class-defying marriage plans, old Mortimer is not in the least disturbed. Indeed, inspired by the Banks ideology, he himself is about to take a similar step by marrying Miss Watson. When Bertie recounts all this to Jeeves, the latter is also quite untroubled. He had concluded some time ago that he and Miss Watson were not really suited, and he now has a new understanding–with Mabel, the waitress who so beguiled poor Bingo! Once again Jeeves stands revealed as a mini-Macchiavelli in the miniworld of Bertie Wooster.
The other story (picked more or less at random–almost any one would do) is called “Without the Option.”7 The title refers to a sentence of imprisonment without the option of paying a fine. Bertie and his friend Sippy (Oliver Randolph Sip-perley) have been arrested. They had been in a state of advanced inebriation on the night of the Oxford/Cambridge boat race, and Bertie had suggested that Sippy (who was depressed because of demands made on him by his Aunt Vera–yes indeed, a lady on whom he is financially dependent) cheer himself up by snatching off a policeman’s helmet. Bertie is only fined, but Sippy, the actual assailant, is sentenced to thirty days “without the option.” This would not be so bad, except that Aunt Vera had ordered Sippy to visit friends of hers, the family of one Professor Pringle in Cambridge. If he does not go, she will find out about his shameful brush with the law, and (yes indeed) she might cut off his allowance. As usual, Jeeves is called upon for advice. He suggests the only possible solution: Bertie must go to Cambridge, pretending to be Sippy. Bertie refuses, but when he hears that Aunt Agatha had telephoned, evidently aware of his own legal contretemps, he wants to leave as quickly as possible. As usual, Jeeves has already anticipated this turn of events:
“Jeeves,” I said, “this is a time for deeds, not words. Pack–and that right speedily.”
“I have packed, sir.”
“Find out when there is a train for Cambridge.”
“There is one in forty minutes, sir.”
“Call a taxi.”
“A taxi is at the door, sir.”
“Good!” I said. “Then lead me to it.”
The Maison Pringle is as forbidding as Bertie had feared. Professor Pringle is “a thinnish, baldish, dyspeptic-looking cove with an eye like a haddock,” and Mrs. Pringle gives the appearance of “one who had had bad news about the year 1900 and never really got over it.” And then there are “a couple of ancient females with shawls all over them,” the mother and an aunt of the professor. The latter remembers Bertie/Sippy as a nasty boy who teased her cat many years ago. But worse is yet to come. Heloise Pringle, the professor’s daughter, appears. She closely resembles Honoria Glossop, to whom Bertie had been disastrously engaged for three weeks until thrown out by her terrible father, Sir Roderick Glossop (the loony doctor). She even talks like Honoria. No wonder because, as Jeeves knows, the two are cousins. Heloise fixes her attention on Bertie and, with “the look of a tigress that has marked down its prey,” immediately decides that he is a promising matrimonial prospect. Bertie, of course, is terrified. This time even Jeeves has no solution. The possibility that Bertie might turn down the formidable Heloise evidently occurs to neither himself nor Jeeves. But the two engage in an almost philosophical exchange about the mystery of Bertie’s repeatedly attracting young women as “brainy” as Honoria and Heloise:
“Jeeves, it is a known scientific fact that there is a particular style of female that does seem strangely attracted to the sort of fellow that I am.”
“Very true, sir.”
“I mean to say, I know perfectly well that I’ve got, roughly speaking, half the amount of brain a normal bloke ought to possess. And when a girl comes along who has about twice the regular allowance, she too often makes a bee-line for me with the love light in her eyes. I don’t know how to account for it, but it is so.”
“It may be Nature’s provision for maintaining the balance of the species, sir.”
Bertie desperately tries to avoid the frightening Miss Pringle, stays mostly in his room, only leaving it by climbing down the drainpipe (thus reinforcing the aunt’s opinion of him as both criminal and mad). The situation is resolved by the appearance of none less than Sir Roderick, who has been invited to dinner. He, of course, recognizes Bertie and, upon being told that Bertie had pretended to be Sippy, confirms the aunt’s diagnosis of his being perfectly insane. Bertie escapes in extreme distress, seeking refuge (of course) with Jeeves: “Hell’s foundations are quivering and the game is up.” To which cri de coeur Jeeves can only observe: “The contingency was one always to have been anticipated as a possibility, sir.” Only one course of action is possible–to go to Sippy’s Aunt Vera and tell her all. This is what Bertie does, precipitately. To his surprise, Aunt Vera is delighted with the news about her nephew’s attack on a policeman. Jeeves knows why: She has had a number of unpleasant encounters with the local constable, who has been serving summons on her for speeding and for allowing her dog out without a collar, and she is therefore angry at policemen as a class. How does Jeeves know this? The constable is his cousin.
Throughout his work Wodehouse has moved in a distinctive world of his own creation, both totally unreal if compared with the actual England of the times and tangibly real to any reader willing to suspend doubt in order to enter it. It is a frozen Edwardian world kept going by Wodehouse long after Edwardian England had passed into history, an almost mythical England that, among other things, corresponded to all the stereotypes held in the minds of Americans. It is a world full of carefully depicted individuals, very many of them–among others, fifty-three named members of Bertie’s Drones Club and sixty-three butlers (not counting Jeeves). An enormous stylistic genius went into the creation of this (if one may put it paradoxically) profoundly trivial world. Hillaire Belloc called Wodehouse the best living English writer and Auberon Waugh called him the most influential novelist of the time. His biographer put it as follows. “Wodehouse made an infinite number of amusing remarks in his lifetime, invented a teeming population of clowns. The dream he dreamed of the England he preferred to the real one is an amusing dream, a vividly conceived and tightly constructed dream, but above all it is benign.”8
Thus Wodehouse is an unusually clear case of benign humor. He presents his readers with a world utterly without darkness, without real pain, without any strong passions. One enters it as a sort of enchanted kindergarten. The humor, of course, is in the characters and the plots, but above all in the style (not so much in the dialogue as in the descriptive passages). No one but Wodehouse could have written, for example, of “Aunt calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps,” or could have summed up a situation by stating that “ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes.” David Cecil, another admirer, sums up Wodehouse’s opus as follows: “We embark on his books assured that we shall find nothing to make us shudder or reflect or shed tears; but only to laugh. And with a laughter that is a laughter of pure happiness.”9
On the face of it, no two authors could be more different than Will Rogers and P. G. Wodehouse, embodying, respectively, a prototypically American, homespun, folksy approach to life and the fastidious, manneristic understatements of an aristocratic culture in terminal decline. Upon closer inspection, though, one recognizes kindred spirits across all the differences of nationality, class, and creative style. It is not only that both men were enormously productive, had very great success, and lived essentially happy lives (though Rogers’s was cut short by a fatal airplane accident at age fifty-six). More relevant to the present considerations, they exuded a compelling benevolence, an invincible innocence, throughout their work and by all accounts in their personalities as well.
Will Rogers (1879–1935) was born in what is now Oklahoma, of partially Cherokee descent, a fact of which he was very proud (as he told his WASP audience, when their folks arrived on the Mayflower, his folks were there to greet them).10 He learned all the skills of a cowboy on his father’s ranch and indeed worked as a cowboy in his early years. He was particularly adept in the use of the lasso, and it was this that first led him into the world of entertainment, or that segment of it where the audience was thrilled by a performer’s ability to rein in almost anything by means of the lasso. There is some disagreement as to the exact moment when Rogers first began to speak to the audience in the course of these athletic feats. At first he did so to gloss over incidents when one of his tricks failed, and one of his first funny statements was to the effect that the management would not allow him to utter the vulgarities that he felt like uttering on such an occasion. He graduated from cowboy shows to vaudeville, made a big jump in his career in entertainment when he was employed by the Ziegfeld Follies in New York, and from there branched out into radio, films, and eventually into the writing of a newspaper column (which for a while even appeared in the New York Times).11
Rogers spoke with a western accent. His humor reflected the stereotypical “cracker-barrel” philosophy of the Old West–robust yet relaxed, animated by common sense and healthy skepticism, yet never hurtful or overly witty. There were individuals who doubted the authenticity of this, but the great majority of witnesses testify that Rogers the man had very much the same benign character as Rogers the performer. Be that as it may, it is as the embodiment of benevolent wisdom that he was loved by millions of Americans and mourned by them upon his premature death. He made no pretense of intellectual superiority (“All I know is what I read in the papers”) and he could thus be inspiring without intimidating. His most famous statement, of course, was, “I never met a man I didn’t like,” which he repeated frequently. It is noteworthy that he first made it with reference to Leon Trotsky !12 He rarely gave offense, even when he was critical of people, and he was usually willing to scratch an observation if someone claimed to be hurt by it: “I don’t think I ever hurt any man’s feelings by my little gags. I know I never willfully did it. When I have to do that to make a living I will quit.”13
Some extracts from Rogers’s columns may serve by way of illustration. The first is from a piece entitled “Male Versus Female–Mosquito”:
Just the other day, a fellow in Atlantic City, New Jersey, come through with some statistics that really ought to set us thinking! … This guy is a professor and chief “entomologist.” That word will stop you ignorant ones. But you got a fifty-fifty break, I don’t know what it means either. Well, this professor delivered this address at a convention of the New Jersey Exterminators Association, duly assembled in the very heart of the mosquito belt. So I gather from that, that an entomologist is a man that has devoted his life to a study that must include this New Jersey product. He has either given his life’s work for, or against, the mosquito. It’s a surprise that New Jersey had such an organization called “The New Jersey Mosquito Exterminators, Inc.” Anyone who has ever visited that state could not possibly understand how there could be an organization devoted to the annihilation of those comical little rascals. Or if they have got such a society, where have they been exterminating, and when? But you see, what they have been doing is holding dinners. All you do in America nowadays, is get a name for some kind of organization, then you start holding dinners. An organization without a dinner is just impossible. Now the only mosquitoes exterminated was at the dinner. Well, during the scratching and slapping and singing of the mosquitoes, this guy read off the following authoritative statistics. “The normal productivity of one lone female house mosquito in one year is 159,875,000,000 offsprings.”14
This opening is pure Rogeriana: slow, rambling, in no hurry to make a point. An immediate disclaimer of superior knowledge–Rogers doesn’t know what the word entomologist means, has to figure it out from the context (“All I know is what I read in the papers”). Then a series of mild digs, at the state of New Jersey, at American organizations that have no real purpose. And then a deft sketch of an absurd situation–an assembly of mosquito fighters being helplessly bitten by hordes of mosquitos. There is some satire in this, of course, but it is so mild that it is hard to imagine anyone being really offended by this, not even professional exterminators or citizens of New Jersey.
Having given the thought-provoking statistic, Rogers goes on to ramble. He figures out that all these zeroes add up to billions of little mosquitos. Then he provides the information that only half this number should really trouble us, because only the females bite human beings. The males are quite harmless:
Now women, what have you got to say for yourselves? Get that, the males are harmless. They don’t bite, buzz or lay eggs! That’s great. It makes me proud I am a male. That fellow Kipling had it right when he wrote (or maybe it was Shakespeare, or Lady Astor or somebody over there), “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.” Women denied it then, and there was a great mess raised about it. But this New Jersey entomologist has finally got the dope on ’em.
Would feminists be offended by this? Teachers of English literature? Perhaps they would be if Rogers had developed these remarks into full-blown satire. But he does no such thing. Despite the title of the piece, this is no satirical take-off on male/female relations. (To emphasize this point, just imagine what James Thurber might have made of this episode.) Rogers goes on to say what the learned professor failed to say in Atlantic City: The exterminators should concentrate on the females only. Or, alternatively, they should teach the females birth control: Perhaps they should be moved from New Jersey to Fifth Avenue in New York, where they would learn that their exuberant fertility is definitely lower class. And this is how the piece ends:
Course the whole thing is kinder mysterious to me. I don’t see how the female can be the one that lays all the eggs, raises all the young, does all the biting, and still has time to sing. Now when do they find time to raise all these children? There must be times when they can’t be singing or biting. Now the way this entomologist has left us now, about the only way we have left open to do, is to watch a mosquito till he bites you, and then destroy him–I mean her. In other words, if he bites you, he is a her, and if he sings, he is a her. Watch him and if he lays an egg, then it’s a her. But if he just sits there all day and don’t do anything, why, about the only conclusion we can come to is that it is a he. Don’t kill him, he does no harm, he just sits and revels in the accomplishments of his wife. So when you find a male, the best thing to do is just to sit there and wait till his wife comes between bites. How does the male live? That’s what they are going to take up at the next dinner.
What is, finally, the point of all this? It is safe to say that the question is irrelevant. There is no deeper point here, no satirical intent. It is a play on situations, on words, on absurd incongruities. The point is pure entertainment.
Now, not all of Rogers’s writings are that harmless. He commented widely and with definite satirical intent on American mores and politics. But here, too, the tone is mild, conciliatory. The evidence is that most of the individuals actually named in some of these spoofs did not resent this and enjoyed laughing at themselves as portrayed by Rogers (Calvin Coolidge was apparently an exception, but then he was notorious for his lack of humor). The following, from a piece entitled “Investigations, Hearings and Cover-ups,” is as timely as it was in Rogers’s day. Here is the beginning:
Say, did you read what this writer just dug up in George Washington’s diary? I was so ashamed, I sat up all night reading it. This should be a lesson to presidents to either behave themselves, or not to keep a diary. Can you imagine, 100 years hence, some future writer pouncing on Calvin Coolidge’s diary? What would that generation think of us? Calvin, burn them papers!
There is another investigation going on in Congress into slush funds. Rogers comments:
Imagine a Congress that squanders billions, trying to find out where some candidate spent a few thousand! But these boys in Washington have had a lot of fun investigating. You see, a senator is never as happy as when he is asking somebody a question without that party being able to ask him one back. But the only trouble about suggesting that somebody, or something, ought to be investigated is that they are liable to suggest that you ought to be investigated. And from the record of all previous investigations, it just looks like nobody can emerge with their noses entirely clean. I don’t care who you are, you just can’t reach middle age without having done and said a whole lot of foolish things. So I tell you, if I saw an investigating committee heading my way, I would just plead guilty and throw myself on the mercy of the court.15
Rogers has some suggestions to make this investigating business more efficient. There should be certain days for certain things–Mondays for confessions, Tuesdays for accusations, the other weekdays for denials. But what really troubles Rogers is how dumb people appear on the witness stand: they mumble, they deny the obvious, they claim not to remember anything. The more education people have, the dumber they seem to be as witnesses. This has given Rogers a really good idea: Since public figures in America spend over half their time testifying before investigative committees, he is going to start a school that will teach them how to testify (it will be located in Claremore, Oklahoma, “the hub of everything”). The students will be taught how not to be nervous, not to get rattled, but above all to keep records of everything. Whatever they are asked, they will have a record giving the exact answer. This will greatly expedite these proceedings. Also, the graduates of Rogers’s school will not only not fear but positively look forward to being investigated. And here is Rogers’s ultimate motive in suggesting this innovation:
It’s really patriotic reasons that make me want to do this, for I am afraid that foreign nations will read some of our papers and find the testimony of some of our men who are in the Cabinet and high in public office. And they will judge them by that testimony. They will think they are no smarter than their testimony. Well, that will leave a bad impression, and if I can change that and get them to make their testimony as smart as the men really are, why, I will have performed a public service.
This is satire, a “modest proposal,” if you will. But there is no Swiftian edge here. Rogers is making mild fun of the politicians and their foibles. He is bantering. And all the time he includes himself in the foibles he depicts.
While Wodehouse and Rogers share the benign quality of their humor, their comic strategies are quite different. Wodehouse creates a separate world, self-contained and remote from the empirical realities in which his characters act out their systematic inanities. Rogers did not do this. His humor deals with the real world of America, but in doing so it transforms that world, envelops it in a cloud of basically benevolent commentary. Both authors gently debunk all authorities and all pretensions. If there is one virtue that both teach, it is the virtue of tolerance. However, it is unlikely that either would have admitted such a didactic purpose.
The final clear case of benign humor to be discussed here is of a very different sort indeed from the two preceding cases: Franz Lehár (1870–1947), the master of what has been called the silver age of the Viennese operetta.16 The operetta as a form of musical theater has a complex set of antecedents, its origins probably in Italy’s opera buffa, which in turn began with comic insets within the action of opera seria. But the real beginnings of the operetta are in the nineteenth century, centered in Paris, Vienna, and London, dominated respectively by Jacques Offenbach, Johann Strauss the Second (that was the golden age of Viennese operetta), and Gilbert and Sullivan. The operetta soon reached America, where it eventually evolved into the Broadway musical. Lehár’s opus in general and his masterpiece The Merry Widow (first performed in 1905) represent a late flowering of this tradition. It embodies more than any other artistic creation the joie de vivre of the twilight period of Habsburg Central Europe. The older tradition of the operetta had elements of satire and parody in it, some of it quite political (one may recall here the attempt of the Austrian censors in an earlier period to prohibit all improvisations on the popular stage). Also, there is a dark, melancholy undertone in all Strauss music. Lehár purged the operetta of both satirical and tragic elements. He allowed a lot of emotion, but it tended always toward sentimentality. At the same time, Lehár was a musical genius, and the glory of his music regularly transcends the rather insipid actions on the stage. Perhaps it is only in retrospect, in the knowledge of what happened to the Habsburg order soon after The Merry Widow began its triumphant career, that one detects a sense of resignation in the sentimental hedonism of the Viennese operetta of that period. Be that as it may, to this day Lehár’s music represents the spirit of the last great flowering of a now disappeared empire.
Lehár as a person is also very representative of that empire, with its cosmopolitan population. He was born in Hungary and was ethnically Hungarian, but he was also the child of a military bandmaster and he lived in a long list of garrison towns scattered throughout the vast reaches of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. He himself conducted a military band for the few years of his army service. Like Wodehouse and Rogers, Lehár was enormously successful in his lifetime, both financially and in terms of status. Various cultural critics despised what they thought of as the superficial sentimentality of his work. Thus, for example, Karl Kraus, the great Viennese satirist, wrote that the first performance of a Lehár operetta in the Turkish empire was a clear signal of the coming end of civilization. The larger public, though, loved him. Among his admirers, alas, was Adolf Hitler, as a result of which Lehár’s works continued to be performed in the Third Reich despite his Jewish wife and the fact that his two favorite librettists were Jews.
In all operetta (and the same probably goes for opera) there is a degree of tension between the music and the libretto. The comic effect of operetta may well come out of that tension. The music in itself may be light, but it can rarely be described as comic. The action on the stage, as prescribed by the libretto, would most of the time be too insipid to be funny if performed without music as a straight play or if read as a text. Beaumarchais, the author of the play The Marriage of Figaro (which Offenbach also turned into an operetta), once observed that one may sing that which is too stupid to be spoken. In what follows, therefore, it will help if one hears the music (inwardly if not actually) as the essential accompaniment of the dramatic action.17
The action of The Merry Widow takes place “today” (say, 1905) in Paris. The center of the action is the embassy of Pontevedro, a vaguely Balkan state. Originally, incidentally, Lehár named it the embassy of Montenegro, but at that time Montenegro was a real Balkan state (as it has become again) and its embassy in Vienna protested. Thus Montenegro became Pontevedro, and its capital of Ce-tinje became Letinje (though that is mentioned only once). After the brisk, cheerful overture, the first act opens with a reception in the Pontevedrin embassy in honor of the ruler’s birthday. Two plots interweave. Ambassador Mirko Zeta instructs his henchman Njegus (a sort of Leporello figure) to make sure that Count Danilo Danilowitsch marries the rich Pontevedrin widow Madame Glawari, since without her fortune the state is about to go bankrupt. Meanwhile the charming Frenchman Camille Roussillon is ardently wooing Valencienne, the ambassador’s wife. Political and erotic intrigue become elaborately mixed. The latter allows Valencienne to sing one of the most melodious arias of the operetta: “I Am a Respectable Woman” (Ich bin eine anstaend’ge Frau), she sings, as she fends off the amorous Frenchman. She warns him against the dangers of passion, which must be domesticated–a warning, one may say, that all operetta has always taken to heart.18 Madame Hanna Glawari arrives, surrounded by admirers. Valencienne would like Camille to become interested in the rich widow, to be rid of the temptation. As for Danilo, he is a diplomat and always ready to do his duty, but he is also not very happy with his matrimonial assignment. He sings yet another famous aria, in which he praises the delights of the cabaret “Maxim” where he intimately knows all the ladies (the easygoing grisettes of the Parisian démi-monde), who help him to forget his dear fatherland. Yet it is clear that Hanna and Danilo are quite attracted to each other. Danilo sings another aria, quite different in tone, celebrating the stirrings of love, “as the flowers first bloom in spring.” As the evening progresses, the time has come for “ladies’ choice” (Damenwahl) for the dance. Hanna chooses Danilo, who, to spite her, offers to sell his dance to anyone paying ten thousand francs. No one offers to pay. Hanna, of course, is furious. As everyone leaves, she is left alone with Danilo and they begin to dance. Hanna: “You horrible man! How wonderfully you dance!” Danilo: “One does what one can!”
Without the music, it hardly needs repeating, this dramatic action is about as stupid as Beaumarchais would have deemed it to be. The characters are paper thin, the setting is as implausible as can be, and the action follows a well-known sequence (which probably derives from the commedia dell’arte if not earlier): In the first act boy meets girl; in the second act there are difficulties; in the third act boy gets girl. In other words, a very vigorous suspension of doubt (epoché) is called for if one is to be sucked into this little drama. To be sure, good acting and imaginative stage settings can help, but it is above all Lehár’s triumphantly joyful music that has led generations of theatergoers to make this leap of faith. Some will always refuse. Those who assent are rewarded by several hours of perfectly mindless entertainment.
Everything becomes complicated in the second act, which takes place at a garden party at Madame Glawari’s, who is also Pontevedrin and wishes to celebrate the royal birthday “as at home in Letinje.” A vaguely Slavic dance opens the proceedings. Then Hanna sings another famous aria, “Vilja, Oh Vilja,” a romantic love song based on an alleged Pontevedrin legend about an affair between a hunter and a forest nymph. Danilo and Hanna engage in elaborate flirtations, and she berates him (this time in a vaguely Hungarian aria) as a stupid cavalryman who cannot see when a woman loves him. All the men join in a chorus bemoaning the difficulty of knowing what women really want (did Lehár read Freud? Did Freud attend Lehár operettas?): “Women, women, women, women!” No theory explains how women will respond. Meanwhile Camille is making headway with the seduction of Valencienne, as the orchestra plays another famous Lehár waltz with the refrain “I love you” (Ich hab’ dich lieb). Camille sings the insinuating aria “Come into the Small Garden-House, Come to the Sweet Assignation” (Komm’ in den kleinen Pavillon). Valencienne’s respectability collapses and she does indeed follow him into the small garden-house. Unfortunately the ambassador has also made an appointment there, with Danilo, to discuss the great matrimonial plot. He recognizes his wife, erupts into jealous fury. Njegus (a sort of Balkan version of Jeeves, one is tempted to say) quickly acts to save the situation. He lets Valencienne out by the back door, ushers Hanna in, who then emerges to announce her engagement to Camille. The ambassador is reluctantly convinced that he did not see his wife there after all, but he is desperate about the failure of his plan to acquire Hanna’s fortune for the Pontevedrin treasury. Danilo, who does not understand that Hanna only acted to save Valencienne’s reputation, is deeply hurt but pretends indifference. He and Hanna sing a duet, in which marriage is described as an obsolete point of view, unless it is “in the Parisian manner” in which each spouse does as he or she pleases.
Needless to say, all these complexities are resolved in Act III. The scene is still Hanna Glawari’s garden party, later in the evening. She has rigged up a facsimile of the cabaret “Maxim” and all of Danilo’s favorite grisettes are there to perform, joined by Valencienne, who has disguised herself as one of them (for reasons one is left to guess). The ambassador insists that Danilo must marry Hanna, whatever his personal preferences. Hanna explains the garden-house incident to him, whereupon they confess their mutual love in a duet that repeats the earlier love song (“Love Me!” “I Love You!”). The ambassador finds his wife’s fan in the garden-house, realizes that she has been deceiving him after all, declares himself divorced as of this moment. He then proposes to Hanna himself. Hanna explains that, alas, her late husband’s will stipulates that, if she remarries, she will have no money at all. The ambassador retracts his proposal. But Danilo, fired by love, asks her to marry him anyway, money or no money. Hanna then finishes her earlier sentence: No money goes to her if she remar-ries–because her new husband will now administer her fortune. General rejoicing: The state of Pontevedro is saved from financial ruin, Danilo and Hanna get each other, and (one may assume) Valencienne’s respectability is restored. The grisettes are left to go on with their lives of charming sin.
This chapter has looked at three instances of benign humor. The argument has been that, despite the great differences between them, they have in common an essentially similar expression of the comic. They are far removed from the magic of Dionysian folly. They offer no threat to the social order or to the paramount reality of ordinary life. They provide a vacation from the latter’s worries, a harmless diversion from which one can return refreshed to the business of living. Yet there is a kind of magic here too, especially when this form of the comic creates an enchanted world of its own, as Wodehouse does with his writing and Lehár with his music. This enchantment has its own value, perhaps even its own moral status. The many people who have yielded to it (because they were unsophisticated to begin with or because they temporarily put their sophistication away) have understood this. They have been right. And those who have despised these vacations from seriousness have been wrong–one may say, paradoxically, that they have been profoundly wrong.
The legendary Rabbi Meir of Vilna, after reading this paragraph in his heavenly study, is reputed to have said, “So, enough apologizing already. Go make the knishes.” I have given some thought to moving this great sage from the notes to the main text.
Cf. Benny Green, P. G. Wodehouse: A Literary Biography (New York: Rutledge, 1981).
Ibid., 181 ff.
Muggeridge wrote about this in Thelma Cazalet-Keir, ed., Homage to P. G. Wodehouse (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1973), 87 ff. There was another, truly Wodehousian twist to this story. German intelligence, singularly bereft of an English sense of humor, read Wodehouse in the belief that he provided an ethnographically accurate picture of life in his native country. They dropped an agent in England wearing spats. He was immediately spotted and arrested.
P. G. Wodehouse, The World of Jeeves (New York: Harper and Row, [1967] 1989), 22 ff.
I understand that some critics have suggested that the relationship between Bertie and Jeeves is a homosexual one. This is about as plausible as a theory interpreting Jeeves as a proletarian revolutionary. As he might have put it: “A most injudicious suggestion, sir.”
Wodehouse, World of Jeeves, 300 ff.
Green, P. G. Wodehouse, 237. My italics.
Cazalet-Keir, Homage to P. G. Wodehouse, 6.
Cf. Ben Yagoda, Will Rogers (New York: Knopf, 1993).
Wodehouse, when he was writing for Broadway musicals, also had dealings with Ziegfeld (reputedly a very humorless individual). I have not been able to find out if Wodehouse and Rogers ever met in New York.
Actually, he didn’t meet Trotsky. He was prevented from doing so on a visit to the Soviet Union. He regretted this, commenting, “I bet you if I had met him and had a chat with him, I would have found him a very interesting and human fellow, for I have never yet met a man I didn’t like” (Yagoda, Will Rogers, 234). It seems that Rogers was as perceptive of the Communist as Wodehouse was of the Nazi version of totalitarianism. An intuition that there are hidden connections between all things (Rabbi Meir understands) makes me add that Trotsky also occurs in the aforementioned Wodehouse story “Without the Option”: Sippy, upon being arrested, gives his name as Leon Trotsky. The magistrate, when he sentences him to jail, ventures the opinion that this is not his real name.
Yagoda, Will Rogers, 190.
Bryan Sterling, ed., The Will Rogers Scrapbook (New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1976), 71.
Will Rogers Scrapbook, 113 f.
Cf. Richard Traubner, Operetta: A Theatrical History (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983).
In my case that was a CD of a 1973 Deutsche Gramophon recording of the Chor der Deutschen Oper Berlin. A libretto came with the CD, containing the German text and a perfectly terrible English translation.
“Sehr gefaehrlich ist des Feuer’s Macht
wenn man sie nicht bezaehmt, bewacht!
Wer das nicht kennt, sich leicht verbrennt.
Nimm vor dem Feuer dich in acht.”