The Joyful Mysteries of Comedy

Bernard Farrell

Comedy is full of mystery. And that is why psychologists can spend years trying to discover why we laugh and how we laugh. Retired comedians can make money teaching would-be comedians how to tell jokes. (Trevor Griffiths had fun with that in his biting play, The Comedians). Theatre managers sit scratching their heads as they stare at empty seats when another sure-fire comedy mysteriously fails. And dramaturgs persist in trying to crack the code and teach aspiring playwrights how to write these sure-fire comedies. All fruitless exercises because, I would suggest, comedy defies theory, experience or education. Instead, it relies on Instinct, Attitude and Inspiration. And can anything be more mysterious (or mercurial) than these three, strange bedfellows?

Many years ago, when I decided to write a play, I wrote a comedy. I don’t know why. To me, there was no option. I had a story to tell, a story that, at times, angered or intrigued or puzzled me and the only way I could tell that story was to lace it with laughter. And so I have continued in my career, dealing with my frustrations in play after play, sometimes lacing them with lashings of laughter, sometimes with less. But never with none.

In 1978, at the rehearsals of my play, I Do Not Like Thee Doctor Fell, I overheard one of the actors saying to another, ‘You know, I think there could be a few laughs in this’. This was the first play that I had ever written and, by good fortune, it had been accepted by the Abbey Theatre and was due to open in three weeks. When I heard that comment, far from being encouraged, I was immediately plunged into a silent whirlpool of panic. This was not only because the actors in question were actors of some experience and reputation – the cast included Liam Neeson, Tom Hickey, Garrett Keogh, Billie Morton – but also because, while the play was indeed very serious, it was also intended as a comedy, and would be nothing if it didn’t have a lot more than ‘a few laughs’. Clearly, from the unperformed script that they still held in their hands, there was little to indicate much laughter.

If I knew then what I know now (twenty plays later), perhaps I would not have been so worried. I would, at the very least, have recognised the process. The play, as written, does not have any obviously funny lines. There are certainly no jokes. And the issues that hold and harness the drama – betrayal, bullying, suicide, attempted murder – are more the stuff of tragedy than comedy. And presented with this subject matter, the play’s first director, Paul Brennan, gave the play what I would in later years recognize as his precise, analytical exploration of each character, each sub-plot, each action. Thus the play was rehearsed in an atmosphere of forensic examination, truthful seriousness, with little hint of comedy.

The actor’s comments, therefore, clearly reflected the mood of that rehearsal room, and it was not until the first preview in the Abbey’s Peacock Theatre that the play was allowed to reveal its true self. Then, in presenting the characters’ anguish, terror and dilemma with absolute seriousness, the story mysteriously emerged in all its hilarious glory.

So Paul Brennan’s astute method of telling the story through laughter – and not for laughter – allowed this, my first play, to make its mark, attract its audience, please the critics and keep the Abbey box office ticking over nicely. And the lesson for me was: The darker the play (and Doctor Fell is dark) the more light it will require. But the secret is that this light (the comedy) should be subtle, allowed almost to emerge unannounced, never to dominate – in short, it should be (that word again) ‘mysterious’. And if the playwright has done his/her work in the writing, the laughter will enhance – but never unbalance – the drama, and nothing will be lost.

If, in 1979, the reaction of the audience took some of the actors by surprise, it was nothing to the surprises that awaited me, following that opening. Many of my friends, who never imagined that I could write a play, were astounded by my theatrical emergence and often, out of desperation, asked which parts did I write and which parts were written by the actors. One friend – desperately trying to solve the mystery of me – earnestly asked which came first, ‘the gags or the story’. Indeed, some of my neighbours – many of whom never bothered to see the play anyway – took a curiously dim view of what I regarded as Comedy.

The most memorable example of this was my chance meeting with a rather supercilious lady whom, for simplicity and out of respect, I will call Mrs Haughty. She had lived nearby for almost all of my life but, with her perennial air of superiority and entitlement, had always managed to ignore me. But on one particular day, shortly after the play opened, on a road in Glenageary, she not only engaged me in conversation, but even called me by my name! Our exchange went something like this:

Mrs Haughty. Bernard, I understand that you have written a play?

BF. Yes I have, Mrs Haughty.

MH. And I understand that it is in the Abbey Theatre?

BF. It is indeed.

MH. And I believe that it is a comedy?

BF. Yes it is.

MH. And I understand that, in this comedy, there is a boy who throws a cat under a train?

BF. Ehhh – yes, that is true, Mrs. Haughty.

MH. And you think that is funny, do you?

With that, she disgustedly turned and walked away, never giving me a chance to reply. But if she had, what would I have said? Perhaps, if I had waited a few weeks, the reviewers would have told me that what I had written was a Black Comedy. That might have helped in explaining its comedy to Mrs Haughty. However, a few weeks later, when the play transferred to the Abbey main stage, it was then referred to as ‘a Biting Satire’, and, in varying productions in the months and years that followed, I have seen it become ‘an Absurd Drama’, ‘a rollicking send-up’ and ‘a side-splitting night’!

So I could never have really explained the comedy to Mrs Haughty or to anyone. To me, it was not a style or a title or a brand of comedy – it was simply a play that I had to write. At times, it became absurd, at times terrifying and sometimes frivolous – but, put together in the right, instinctive order, all these elements performed their function of telling the story in its most powerful way and, mysteriously, it worked!

Then, in the hiatus that followed the celebration of Doctor Fell, a fresh set of questions began to emerge, many of them harbouring thinly disguised challenges and others the dimly recognised traces of treachery.

The most common question was the harmless, ‘And what’s next in the pipeline?’ But, occasionally, came the warning, the shot-across-the-bow: ‘It’s not going to be another comedy is it?’ Probably the most threatening was one that was always asked in hushed tones, with a wink of the eye and the mischievous appearance of ill will parading as undying support: ‘That Doctor Fell will be a hard act to follow, won’t it?’

Each time I heard any of these questions, I was reminded of Brian Friel’s masterpiece, Faith Healer, in which Francis Hardy, the faith healer of the title, performs a magical feat of healing and is at once commanded by admirers and naysayers alike, to do it again and do it better! The play itself is written in a masterly blend of tragedy and comedy but, at its core, it is – I would suggest – Friel writing about the creative process: its mystery, its triumphs, its falterings, its recoveries and, principally, its unpredictability. Whether this is true or not, I do know that with each demand and question to me, I had many a ‘Francis Hardy moment’, and, every time, I prayed that what happened to him would not happen to me!

I know now, in hindsight, that what was critically expected of me at that time was another black comedy. However, the Abbey, in commissioning a new play made no such stipulations. Joe Dowling, then the Abbey’s Artistic Director, just wanted a new work, to be delivered in my own time, in no specific style and in no particular hurry.

The play I wrote was a satire on the way the Irish behaved abroad – an opportunity for me to voice, and an audience to share, a 1980s mirror image of ourselves, as we all availed of cheap travel and rushed to holiday abroad, away from the squinting windows of home, finding freedom in the company of strangers and free to pose as anything except what we really are. It was a play of pretence and pretentions, of snobberies and selfishness, it was a reviewer and a revealer of our hidden vices – and certainly not a black comedy.

The broad reaction to this play was interesting – and made me realize that, as in the theatre of the Greeks and the Romans, comedy will always be seen as the poor cousin of tragedy. Moreover, even within the genre of comedy, there is a hierarchy of ‘types’, against which each is critically judged, identified and then neatly slotted into its box. Black comedy – possibly because of its proximity to tension and tragedy – is probably the most respected. Satire and parody remain high and the commedia dell’arte style has enjoyed a revival (possibly because experts like to both explain it and pronounce it). After that, the status and appreciation levels drop sharply. Eventually if a work is even suspected of being farce or ‘boulevard’ or burlesque it moves into the danger zone of critical dismissal.

Canaries – for such was the name of my second Abbey play, so named because it is set in the Canary Islands – was indeed a satire, with serious undercurrents and, to contrast the light and shade, I occasionally applied dollops of farce. Once again, for me, this form (or selection of forms) was dictated by nothing more than the demands of how best to tell the story.

The play opened at The Abbey for the 1980 Dublin Theatre Festival and was a popular success. Critically, however, there were murmurings that, after Doctor Fell (and presumably having got black comedy out of my system), I should have moved onwards, and upwards, and closer to tragedy. Instead, in their view, I had dodged the challenge and gone for ‘easy laughs’. And I thought – ah, if only that were possible.

Unfortunately, in theatre as in life, there are no easy laughs. Ask any poor devil who ever had to make a Best Man’s speech or any of us who ever tried to chat up an out-of-our-league stranger at a party, and prayed for laughs. We would be contented to see a smile, or half-smile. Now, put that same challenge to a playwright who sets out to extract laughter from a crowd of strangers, sitting in the darkness, probably in from the cold night, perhaps having spent twenty minutes trying to find a parking space and now angrily aware that, with the price of tickets and the cost of a baby-sitter, this night has cost them a lot of money and therefore, it better be good! Easy laughs do not come easily.

Canaries, I would suggest, was not a success because it had layers of farce, but because it was a stinging satire that hit its targets accurately and, in doing so, earned its laughter through an audience’s recognition of what was onstage and their sheer relief that they were not in the same humiliating predicaments. In the glow of the play’s success, I never tried to make these points nor did I even try to defend the legitimacy of farce. Instead, when I was commissioned to write a new play for the Abbey, I did write a full-blown, indisputable, unrepentant farce!

This was almost inevitable as I have to admit to a real affection for farce – even if I always find it extremely difficult to write, and to get right. In later years, in plays that were regarded as my ‘darker’ and ‘more serious’ work, there is always more than a sprinkling of farce. My influences (those I blame!) are essentially the French masters – Molière (whose Don Juan I later adapted for the Abbey Theatre), Eugène Labiche, Georges Feydeau – and certainly Dion Boucicault (whose Forbidden Fruit I refashioned as Petty Sessions for the Abbey). In Britain, I point the finger at Ben Travers, Arthur Wing Pinero, Alan Ayckbourn and Joe Orton – but, at the root of my appreciation for the relentless, logical lunacy that is the essence of good farce, I look no further than Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

From my childhood, I – like many others who work in comedy – have regarded Laurel and Hardy, at their best, as the masterminds of everything perfect in this genre. This was perhaps never better demonstrated than in the thirty minutes of their 1932 film, The Music Box, a simple story of them trying to deliver a crated piano up 131 concrete steps. Here we witness again their perpetual battle against an unsympathetic world, whether in human form (a nursemaid, a policeman, a postman, an outraged professor) or inanimate objects (prams, pens, steps, a piano) which seem, in turn, to assume the personalities of their vexing, human counterparts. Expertly woven into this comic extravagance is a verbal array of malapropisms, mispro-nunciations and witticisms, all underscoring their bewildered alienation in a society they do not understand and that will never understand them.

So it would not surprise me if there are elements of the comedy of Laurel and Hardy in my third play for the Abbey. However, All In Favour Said No! was not written as farce for the challenge, nor as an homage. Again, for me, it was the only style that suited a play about the ridiculousness of head-office hierarchies and the posturing of factory-floor unions when faced with the threat of a strike. Its success brought me great personal joy (as it got a lot out of my system) – and, I think, also granted me much comic confidence in having managed to write a full-blown farce where, throughout, when the comic buttons were pressed, the audience appropriately erupted.

Many of these comic buttons, of course, do not always come directly from the script but rather evolve from rehearsal-room decisions – where the director, the playwright or an actor may occasionally make an assured declaration that if a particular word is stressed or a certain action is taken, the audience will certainly explode into laughter. It is a risky business and, at that early point in my career, I seldom attempted it, choosing rather to make quiet, tentative suggestions to the director during coffee breaks. However, in the rehearsal for this play, I remember hearing myself confidently informing the entire room that, for better comic effect, a line should be directed to a different actor, in a different direction, at a lower tone. I then added that this would result in prolonged laughter before another line could be spoken. This was received in silence and then questioned by seasoned actors, but I remained adamant. At the first preview, before our first audience, (the acid test of comedy), I waited in trepidation for the moment and, thankfully, when it came I was proven to be right. It was a small victory, probably long forgotten by everybody involved but, for me, it remains a turning-point: the moment when, instinctively, I knew I was right and had the confidence to proclaim it.

Subsequent plays moved me through varied and different moods of comedy, from uproariously comic work to dark plays that provoke the kind of laughter an audience will guiltily question themselves about on the way home. Moving from Dublin premieres of the plays at the Abbey and the Gate Theatres, to Red Kettle Theatre in Waterford, to the Laguna Playhouse in California, brought different demands, new freedoms, changing styles and constant challenges… but always presenting new opportunities to explore varying aspects of comedy and, occasionally, to encounter comedy in many, unsuspected cultural flavours.

In various translations of the plays, I have sat in foreign auditoriums, not knowing a word of the language but hearing the laughter and the silences come at the right moments and knowing that this new audience was solidly in tune with the play. This, in itself, is wonderful evidence that, internationally, we have a broad, comic alignment – that what is funny and ironic in one country, one culture, can find an exact replica of that reaction in another. However, there can be exceptions to this – and these are often comical in their own right.

I remember seeing the German premiere of Doctor Fell, which opens with a caretaker sweeping a room while idly singing a song. This sweeping continues until the second character arrives onstage and the play begins in earnest. In Ireland, audiences always delighted in the humour of how the caretaker, without supervision, haphazardly swept the room, pushing dust under rugs and hiding debris behind radiators. In Germany, however, the play began with the caretaker diligently sweeping the room, inch by inch, carefully collecting all debris and putting it into small sacks. This continued for perhaps two minutes, then four minutes and, at six minutes, he was still sweeping. My fear, as I watched, was that very soon the audience would begin to leave, one by one, not having paid to see a man giving them a masterclass on how to sweep a room.

However, the audience stayed and the sweeping (eventually!) ended and the next character appeared and the dialogue began. At drinks after the play, the director asked me if I had any notes, comments, reactions. I said – truthfully – that it was an excellent production – but wondered at the length of time the caretaker took to sweep the room. The director was puzzled. ‘But,’ he said, ‘this caretaker is a sympathetic character and, for the play and for the comedy, we must ensure that the audience likes him, so we show that he works hard, is a trusted employee and does his tasks perfectly.’

I, of course, agreed. But this was clearly a cultural difference, in which comedy clashed with comedy. In Ireland, we admired the caretaker for cutting corners; in Germany, for that, he would never have been ‘a sympathetic’ character. He would have been a dosser … and immediately disliked … and the comedy would have suffered. Hence, the sweeping marathon!

Years later, I told this story to Alan Ayckbourn – and he responded by reducing me to tears of laughter with even funnier cross-cultural experiences from his own career. The occasion of our meeting was my visit to Scarborough where my play, Happy Birthday Dear Alice, was about to open at his Stephen Joseph Theatre. Over some days, I had the privilege of spending many hours and many meals in the company of this man who, for years, I have idolised as a Master of Comedy.

We talked about his wonderful play, A Small Family Business, which I had seen at the National – and, to the best of my knowledge has never been produced in Ireland. By Ayckbourn’s own admission it is a play about organised crime, greed, sexual deviation, murder and drug-taking – and yet it is hilarious. Its gory murder scene had, on the night I saw it (and I presume every night), the audience in shrieks of the uncontrolled laughter of surprise, fear and relief.

Ayckbourn explained the process delightfully – quoting our need to laugh in the face of hopelessness and then, in the writing, how it falls to the playwright to gently coax the audience to see the correct aspects from the correct angles and to firmly establish the comic context in both action and reaction. When I was not immersed in his theatrical experiences, his hospitality and his self-deprecation, we (as playwrights do) bemoaned the lack of appreciation for the art of comedy.

I used regularly to have these same conversations with Hugh Leonard (or ‘Jack’, as he liked selectively to be known) and, almost as a game, we used to exchange examples of how comedy as an art form is so poorly regarded. I would cite how Molière was never admitted to the Académie Française in his lifetime and Jack would trump that with how Laurel and Hardy, in over twenty-four years of great comedy, only got a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award when Hardy was already dead and Laurel was too ill to accept it. Ayckbourn tells the story of how a critic (in a clearly positive review of one of his plays) wrote that he had laughed shamelessly throughout. ‘Why “shamelessly”?’ Alan wryly wondered. And Hugh Leonard was forever amused at how producers, directors and actors all try desperately to forget that Chekhov was essentially a self-confessed comic writer and insisted that his major, revered works were comedies. ‘But nobody believes him’, Jack would say, with that knowing twinkle in his eye, ‘because they realize that there are no awards going for turning tragedy into comedy – it is the opposite that will have them applauded to the awards podium – even if their tragedy was a comedy in the first place!’

I have often regretted that, in the time since Jack died, he missed seeing at least two productions that would have pleased him greatly. He would certainly have revelled in the 2012 Sydney Theatre Company production of Uncle Vanya (with Cate Blanchett as Yelena) which, amid the tragedy of the play, didn’t ignore or dilute or diminish the comedy. In his review of the Broadway production in 2012, Ben Brantley of the New York Times wrote of the play’s climax: ‘… that scene is as rowdy and demented as anything out of a Marx Brothers movie and as utterly despairing as a choral lament from Sophocles’. Jack would have felt vindicated!

I have also wished that he had lived to see The National Theatre’s version of Goldini’s often neglected, A Servant of Two Masters, in a sparkling new production and retitled, One Man, Two Guvnors. This had wowed London audiences for months before transferring to Broadway where I saw it with, once again, James Corden in the lead. This was farce at its most brilliant, most assured, most accomplished, in a production that was fast-paced and ruthlessly pared down to its comic essentials – to the hysterical delight of New York audiences.

Jack would have loved that – and indeed, I know that he would have seen in it the essential comic truth of how hard work makes the art of comedy look easy. And even now, I can almost hear him repeating one of his favourite anecdotes, popularly attributed to the dying words of Edmund Kean. Visited by an acquaintance, the great actor was asked if his illness was very difficult to endure. ‘Dying is easy’, he is reported to have said, ‘it is comedy that is difficult’.

That difficulty, however, is often relieved by sheer Good Luck – the good fortune of being able to assemble a perfect cast, production team and director who recognise, understand and appreciate comedy. I have been fortunate in the premieres of my plays in being coupled with directors such as Patrick Mason, Ben Barnes, Paul Brennan, Pat Laffan, Mark Lambert, Jim Culleton and Andy Barnicle who have nursed these first outings into existence with a firm appreciation of the seriousness of comedy and an understanding of its power and, in each case, taken the work to areas far beyond what I would have envisaged.

The payoff, of course, is the exhilaration of hearing an audience respond, on cue, to created comic action, in waves of (controlled!) laughter. The downside is the heart-breaking sense of confusion and mystery when the comedy doesn’t work – when the sense of failure screams out in the silence of the audience. In tragedy, the silence of a bored audience can be excused as ‘rapt attention’. In a comedy, there is nowhere to hide – and all escape routes are closed. The best we can do, in that nightmare silence, is to accept the mystery – and pray for less mystery and more hope in the next one.

For this, we rely again on our comic instincts – and those who will write comedy are born to do that. How do they know they possess these mysterious instincts? They don’t until (and unless) they test them. Are there any signs that a comic instinct for storytelling lies within us? I expect that it is different in each of us.

For me, I remember my father having a wonderful sense of humour – not in the telling-of-jokes sense, but in his ability to observe both the peculiar and the mundane ordinariness of life and to reframe it in a comic way that managed to engage us, his children, as much in our childhood years as through our adolescence and into our adulthood. Thus, he was flexible in his humour, he could adjust – and he knew his audience.

If that was the source for me, I am very grateful. But how did this manifest itself in me – in the days before I started writing publicly?

Well, perhaps a hint of my attitude to the world and my need to reframe it in a comic way was perhaps shown in a cartoon that I saw many years ago, that I cut from the paper, pasted to cardboard and hung above my writing desk, maybe as a reminder or maybe as an encouragement. It is by Bill Tidy and was first published in Punch magazine in May 1968. As mysterious as comedy itself, it became my talisman, my influence, the manifestation of how (unbeknownst to many and maybe to me) I see the world.

The cartoon shows the headquarters of what I presumed to be The White Star Line just after news of the sinking of the Titanic had been announced. We see the crowds, now moving away, broken-hearted, lovingly comforting each other. The high-ranking official who imparted the news is still on the steps of the building and about to go inside. But his attention is drawn to a man who is approaching him, out of the departing crowd. This man is holding a rope which secures a polar bear, standing high on its hind legs. And the man – on behalf of the polar bear – is anxiously asking the official: ‘Yes, but is there any news of the iceberg?’

Now, why have I always thought that cartoon was so funny? I don’t really know – but, without analysing the humour out of existence, is it perhaps because it tells us to see the alternative point of view, to comically flip the situation over, to dig deeper… and not to be afraid to be a little bit subversive. And maybe, for me, that is the root of comedy. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe it is better not to ask – and just to accept it as a joyful mystery… and get on with it.

Extract From: For the Sake of Sanity: Doing things with humour in Irish performance, edited by Eric Weitz (2014)

Cross Reference: Essays on Hugh Leonard and Comedy

See Also: Weitz essay on Farrell’s work in The Power of Laughter: Comedy and Contemporary Irish Theatre, edited by Eric Weitz