In episode 6.11 of The Sopranos (“Cold Stones,” May 21, 2006), Tony Soprano and rival gangster Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent) meet to discuss a deadly serious crisis that will eventually lead to the gruesome homophobic murder of Tony’s gay capo, Vito Spatafore (Joseph R. Gannascoli), and then to the retribution killing of Leotardo himself in an all-out gang war. For atmosphere, this scene might have taken place in a graveyard—or some other suitably solemn setting. Indeed, it does take place in the shadow of a monument to a dead New Jersey icon. However, the scene is given an almost surreal quality by the fact that the icon in question is Lou Costello, the rotund radio and film comedian who, with partner Bud Abbott, formed one of the great comic teams in American pop cultural history.[1]
The incongruity of having the serious confrontation between Tony and Phil Leotardo take place in the shadow of a statue of a comedy legend is typical of The Sopranos, which often combines such disparate materials. The choice of Costello (whose monument actually features multiple times in the series) is particularly apt, given his New Jersey roots and the fact that he could in many ways be seen as a sort of comic alter ego of Tony, who repeatedly claims in the series that he has to play the “sad clown,” hiding his inner pain while maintaining a cheerful exterior. Much of the comedy of the Abbott and Costello combination arose from the stark contrast between the personal styles of straight man Abbott and funny man Costello; just as much of that comedy arose from the incongruity of the placement of their comic antics within genres (war, crime, horror) that were normally among Hollywood’s most serious.
In this reliance on odd combinations to generate comedy, Abbott and Costello are hardly alone. Not only do their great predecessors Laurel and Hardy immediately come to mind, but numerous theorists have argued that humor frequently derives from the surprising juxtaposition of materials from two seemingly incompatible contexts. For example, in The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler argues that humor (and creativity in general) is often produced by a process he calls “bisociation,” which involves a blending of elements from previously unrelated realms of thought. The Sopranos is centrally built around such processes of bisociation, the central instance being its dual focus on Tony Soprano’s domestic life as a harried suburban family man and his professional life as a businessman—whose business just happens to be organized crime. So it should come as no surprise that The Sopranos generates a considerable amount of humor, despite the fact that it often features scenes of gritty and graphic violence, as gangsters such as Tony mete out death and destruction on a routine basis. Sometimes, the victims of this violence are near and dear to the gangsters themselves, leading to genuinely heartrending scenes. Being a gangster, The Sopranos reminds us, is serious business. Yet The Sopranos never takes itself too seriously, and there is a strong strain of comedy that runs through the entire series. This mixture of comic and serious (even tragic) modes is one of the characteristics that makes The Sopranos postmodern, but it also says something about the nature of American comedy, which, at the turn of the millennium, was taking a darker and more violent turn than it ever had before. Thus, the comic elements of The Sopranos place it at a particular moment in American cultural history—as do so many other elements of the series.
The gangsters of The Sopranos might be deadly, but the series is not deadly serious, as we learn at the very beginning of the pilot episode. The series’ first scene of criminal violence is shown in flashback, early in the episode, as Tony relates the events of the day of his recent panic attack to his new psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, though in a misleading way—the mismatch between what we see on the screen and what Tony tells Melfi providing much of the scene’s comedy. The events of the day in question include a moment in which Tony and his “nephew” Christopher Moltisanti encounter a man by the name of Mahaffey, with whom they have an issue regarding “an outstanding loan,” and with whom they subsequently (as Tony describes it to Melfi) “had coffee.” What in fact happened, as we see in the flashback scene, is that Tony and Christopher spotted Mahaffey from their car, then stopped to accost him about the loan, which he has obviously been attempting to avoid paying (and apparently even bragging about it). Christopher attacks the unimposing Mahaffey, who seems a mild-mannered type, but Mahaffey knees him in the groin and escapes, leaving Christopher writhing on the ground. What follows is a comic and chaotic chase scene, in which Tony eventually runs down Mahaffey with his car, then brutally beats the injured man, with Christopher pitching in as well. All the while, the upbeat music of Dion DiMucci and the Belmonts (“I Wonder Why”) plays in the background, emphasizing the comic nature of the entire scene. Indeed, it would be quite easy to picture most of this chase scene set to something like Boots Randolph’s “Yakety Sax” (better known in the world of television comedy as the theme music from The Benny Hill Show).
Comic moments within violent crime narratives have, of course, become quite common in recent years, and this initial crime scene from The Sopranos is very much like something straight out of Goodfellas (1990), the gangster film that the series resembles most in spirit. There is in fact a long legacy of gangster comedy in American popular culture, and gangster films with strong comic elements go back at least as far as the 1933 James Cagney vehicle, Lady Killer. Beginning with such films as The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1971), gangster comedies became more and more common. By the 1980s, films such as Johnny Dangerously (1984) and Wise Guys (1986) made the gangster comedy a recognizable phenomenon. Meanwhile, such films probably helped to pave the way for the comic elements in films such as Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction (1994), while the upsurge in gangster films in the 1990s was topped by a flurry of such comedies as Mickey Blue Eyes (1999) and Made (2001).
The comedy of The Sopranos is often very much in the spirit of such hybrid comedy/crime films as Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction, and much of its comedy derives directly from the experiences of its characters within the world of organized crime—as when we learn that, when Tony was a boy, his father spent some time in prison but young Tony thought his dad was in Montana serving a stint as a cowboy. Still, the comedy of the series is presented in several different registers. Indeed, the comedy of The Sopranos can be seen as the culmination of a number of different trends in American comedy that developed over the course of the twentieth century in both film and television. In terms of the latter, The Sopranos contains many classic elements of the family situation comedy (or “sitcom,” as it is more commonly known), again deriving considerable comic energy from the seeming disjunction between this genre and the gangster form that provides the principal narrative matrix of the series. But The Sopranos also contains elements that are clearly related to a number of comic traditions from American film. Some scenes involve the relatively simple, broad comedy of confusion, error, and incompetence (verging on slapstick) of a kind that might have done Lou Costello proud. Other comic scenes, on the other hand, are relatively sophisticated, including scenes of absurdist comedy reminiscent of the work of modern playwrights such as Samuel Beckett or Tom Stoppard.
There is a sequence in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) in which the film suddenly shifts into a scene from a family sitcom (complete with totally inappropriate laugh track)—though it is from an outrageously unconventional sitcom in which young Mallory (Juliette Lewis) is sexually abused by her gross father (played by veteran comedian Rodney Dangerfield), until she is finally driven to join her boyfriend Mickey Knox (Woody Harrelson) in murdering both her parents. The scene is too extreme to be truly funny in itself, despite the incongruous placement of a sitcom within a violent crime film. However, there is a certain amount of satirical humor to be found in the radical disjuncture between this sequence and the idealized representation of the American family that one expects to find in a certain kind of sitcom. Meanwhile, the sequence contributes to an extensive constellation of images that helps Stone’s film to satirize American popular culture and to suggest the possible complicity of that culture in our society’s fascination with aberrant sexuality and grotesque violence. Here, in particular, the film seems to want to suggest that the unrealistic and idealized representation of family life as presented in the typical sitcom helps to disguise the dark heart of the American family drama and to divert attention from the very real problems posed by issues such as incest and domestic violence.
The Sopranos performs no such overtly critical exploration of the sitcom form, though it does in many ways question idealized visions of the American family in popular culture. Still, partly by the sheer fact of its appearance on television, the most obvious context within which to read the comedy of The Sopranos is that of the sitcom. After all, television comedy has long been dominated by the sitcom form, from the early days of such pioneering series as the hugely influential I Love Lucy (which originally ran from 1951 to 1957). As Carl Freedman puts it, noting the sitcom elements of The Sopranos, the sitcom is “perhaps the most durable and most thoroughly televisual of all television genres” (86). In addition, the sitcom has quite frequently focused on the domestic comedy of the family situation, a focus that was entirely appropriate for programming in a medium that beamed itself directly into the domestic space of the family living room. I Love Lucy itself was a family sitcom of sorts (though with important elements reminiscent of other comic forms, such as the anarchic comedies of the Marx Brothers). Moreover, other family sitcoms of the 1950s helped to establish the conventions of the form, while becoming some of the most iconic series of early television. Series such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952–1966), Father Knows Best (1954–1960), Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963), and The Donna Reed Show (1958–1966) are among the best-known television programs of their era, while at the same time contributing in important ways to nostalgic memories of the 1950s and early 1960s as a simpler, happier time when all problems could easily be solved by families facing them together. As Judy Kutulas puts it, in these sitcoms “everybody got along, everybody was happy, and everyone wanted to be together. There was just enough conflict to drive plots. By the time the half-hour was over, everybody was happy again” (51).
More working-class sitcoms of the 1950s (The Honeymooners is surely the best example) showed more troubled family situations, and it is surely no accident that this series is the sitcom to which The Sopranos alludes most frequently and most directly.[2] Of course, by the time of The Sopranos many sitcoms—Married . . . with Children (1987–1997), Roseanne (1988–1997), or even The Simpsons (1989– ) and Family Guy (1999– )—had begun to generate comic energy precisely by undermining the idyllic model of the American family depicted in the idealized 1950s sitcoms. Such series also typically had a working-class focus, though other revisionary family sitcoms—the classic case would be Arrested Development (2003–2006)[3]—derived comedy specifically from the cluelessness of privileged characters. In all cases, such series have generated much of their comedy precisely from the radical disjuncture between their vision of the American family and the more traditional sitcom version.[4] Some of the comedy of The Sopranos is similarly derived, and it is certainly the case that there are numerous moments in which embattled father Tony Soprano (who, let’s face it, bears more than a passing resemblance to Homer Simpson) finds that his domestic problems are not nearly as easy to deal with as they appeared to be for the patriarchs of 1950s sitcom families.[5] Indeed, this difference is an important aspect of the historical narrative of decline and decay from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century that runs throughout The Sopranos.
This aspect of The Sopranos is perhaps best encapsulated in a scene in episode 1.11 (“Nobody Knows Anything,” March 21, 1999), the title of which would appear to be an ironic reference to Father Knows Best. Here, Tony becomes exasperated with his daughter Meadow during a family breakfast at which she complains of the prudish media persecution of President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinski scandal. When Tony suggests that he doesn’t want her talking so openly about sex in the family home, she reminds him that such discussions are considered acceptable in the 1990s. He responds with a suggestion of his own periodic 1950s nostalgia: “Out there it’s the 1990s, but in this house it’s 1954.” One can almost hear the laugh track. But of course it isn’t 1954, the year Father Knows Best premiered: now it’s 1999 and, as the title of the episode reminds us, things are much more uncertain. Such uncertainties include bringing up children in a confusing age, and the Soprano children certainly become involved in a number of contemporary adolescent misadventures in the course of the series (some more comical than others), often leaving Tony in the position of the overmatched sitcom dad. Meanwhile, this particular scene is especially funny as Tony’s reaction shows much of the same prudery that Meadow is complaining about, while Tony’s own expressed prudery contrasts so strongly with his personal sexual conduct (which makes Bill Clinton look like a choir boy) and with the fact that his criminal empire includes such things as prostitution and the strip club where he has his “office” and spends much of his time.
In the traditional family sitcom, viewers are presumably meant to be comforted and amused by the relatively mild misadventures of families such as the Andersons and Nelsons and Cleavers, who represent a fantasy version of the kind of family that viewers wish they could have—and perhaps might strive for. In the more postmodern, ironic sitcoms, on the other hand, viewers can laugh at the more radical problems confronted by dysfunctional families such as the Griffins and the Bundys, who perhaps make the viewers feel a bit better about their own, less extreme, family disorders. Nevertheless, these more contemporary dysfunctional family sitcoms, however funny, do suggest growing anxieties about the ongoing ability of the traditional family structure to deal with the increasingly complex problems posed by life at the beginning of the new millennium.
Meanwhile, the family comedy of The Sopranos also depends strongly on the contrast between Tony’s parallel frustrations as the head of a conventional domestic family and as the boss of an organized crime family. Both families are communities of a sort, though, and this parallel structure points toward the way in which the sort of comedy embedded in sitcoms depends heavily on utopian visions of community, visions that are increasingly difficult to maintain in the postmodern world. If Tony’s domestic family is held together by traditional blood ties, his crime family is presumably held together by traditional conceptions of honor and loyalty that should provide an island of stability within the chaos of postmodernity—except, of course, these conceptions are themselves seriously embattled. There is very little honor among the thieves in Tony’s world.
The dysfunctions of Tony’s crime family can be quite funny at times, while the alternative family structure provided by his criminal organization points toward the way in which some of the most successful sitcoms in the years leading up to and following The Sopranos were similarly engaged in an effort to find alternative forms of community in a world in which older family-based structures no longer seemed adequate. Thus, series such as Cheers (1982–1994), Seinfeld (1989–1998), Friends (1994–2004), The Big Bang Theory (2007– ), and Community (2009–2015) feature communities of characters who are brought together largely by friendship and common interests, though there might also be smaller family groupings within the larger circle of friends. The dual family structure of The Sopranos thus allows it to participate in two different sitcom traditions at once, in still another illustration of the impressive generic range of the series.
The comic dysfunctions of the Soprano crime family are presented amid continual suggestions that crime families used to be more functional. However, once again, the narrative of crisis and decline that underlies virtually every aspect of The Sopranos is at work in its own distinctively self-undermining way. Thus, if Tony’s nuclear family does not necessarily function all that well, it definitely seems preferable to the family in which Tony and his sisters grew up a generation earlier. Similarly, if the gangsters in Tony’s crime family are constantly undermining one another, there are hints that gangsters were always this way, idealized visions of family honor such as those promulgated in The Godfather notwithstanding. On the other hand, a great deal of the comedy of The Sopranos comes not from the fact that its gangsters frequently and intentionally betray one another so much as from the fact that they are just not very good gangsters.
The early scene in which Christopher and Tony accost Mahaffey represents a central category of comedy in The Sopranos, which involves the bumbling incompetence of various characters—a motif that is funny partly because it contrasts so sharply with the familiar stereotype of the coldly efficient Mafia hit man. Of course, films such as Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction had already reminded us that professional criminals can, in fact, be highly inefficient, though the film whose spirit most directly anticipates the comic incompetence of the gangsters of The Sopranos is probably Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo (1996), which also features botched criminal activity, while at the same time gaining considerable humor (as does The Sopranos) from the juxtaposition of the day-to-day world of American domestic life with the dangerous and violent world of crime.[6] Indeed, it may be no coincidence that Fargo itself would later become the basis of a successful television series.
Meanwhile, if Christopher Moltisanti is often comically inept as a gangster, it turns out that he is even more ridiculously incompetent when he attempts to venture into other realms, especially during his periodic forays into the movie business. Early in the series, we learn that Christopher dreams of being a screenwriter (and perhaps an actor—but only if he can play himself in a movie about his own adventures in crime). Indeed, he seems convinced from the pilot episode onward that he can convert his life experience as a gangster into box-office gold. Unfortunately, Christopher has absolutely no talent as a scriptwriter and can, in fact, hardly string together a coherent written sentence.[7] Moreover, by the time The Sopranos opens in 1999, the gangster film cycle of the 1990s had largely run its course, so his biography is not nearly as marketable as he might have thought.
In episode 2.7 (“D-Girl,” February 27, 2000), Christopher has a close encounter with the film industry when he meets on-the-rise director Jon Favreau (played by himself), who does show some interest in Christopher’s street smarts, but is ultimately turned off when Christopher (never above making an idiot of himself) comes on too strong.[8] Christopher (though already romantically involved with Adriana La Cerva) gets a bit further with Favreau’s assistant, Amy Safir (Alicia Witt), with whom he has a brief fling and with whom he becomes convinced he has fallen madly in love—though his comically overblown emotions seem directed more at the film industry in which she works than at the woman herself, however charming she might be.
Amy doesn’t really return Christopher’s affections, and she is distinctively less than enthusiastic about the unfinished screenplay (derived from his adventures as a gangster) that Christopher manages to get her to read. There is, she explains, a “wait-and-see attitude” toward gangster films these days because Mickey Blue Eyes was such a flop, a suggestion that, while perhaps true, is itself something of a gag, given the number of regular Sopranos cast members who had also appeared in Mickey Blue Eyes, including Tony Sirico (Paulie Gualtieri), Vincent Pastore (Sal “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero), John Ventimiglia (Artie Bucco), and Aida Turturro (Janice Soprano), along with several others who had smaller roles in The Sopranos.
Amy’s interaction with Christopher includes other gags as well, as when we see her reading an announcement in Variety that Robert Rodriguez has signed on to do a remake of Viva Zapata! with “Harvey and Bob,” referring to Scorsese gangster-film regulars Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro. Given the nature of Rodriguez’s films, this idea is a funny one, as is the general reference to Hollywood’s tendency to recycle films and motifs that have been successful in the past.[9]
This same tendency is lampooned in Robert Altman’s 1992 Hollywood satire, The Player, in which producer Griffin Mill envisions doing a contemporary remake of The Bicycle Thief and in which virtually every new film idea is pitched as an incongruous combination of two previous films, such as “Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman,” or “Ghost meets Manchurian Candidate.” Christopher himself later follows this practice when he hilariously describes Cleaver, the combination slasher/gangster film he hopes to produce, as both “Saw meets The Godfather II” and “The Ring meets The Godfather.”
The entire Cleaver motif is one of the key comic sequences in the entire run of The Sopranos, as Christopher bungles his way through the entire production process, accompanied by his new partner in crime, the ludicrous Little Carmine Lupertazzi (Ray Abruzzo), pampered son of the former head of one of New York’s Five Families.[10] The entire process of making the film is hilarious, including the fact that it ultimately does get made at all, despite the ineptitude of Christopher and Carmine. The comedy of the Cleaver plot arc begins with the initial investors’ pitch meeting, in which all the potential investors are gangsters, and in which screenwriter J. T. Dolan (Tim Daly), with considerable comic trepidation, explains his concept for the film, which he has whipped up overnight after being strong-armed into doing so because he owes money to the mob. At the meeting, Little Carmine memorably presents his own credentials as an experienced film producer by noting, “Some of you know I’ve had nine pictures under my sub-species, four in the ‘South Beach Strumpets’ series alone.” Apart from his characteristic tendency to speak in malapropisms, Little Carmine’s statement is funny because of the inflated pride with which he announces his status as the producer of several low-budget, straight-to-DVD porno films, which he apparently thinks makes him some sort of Hollywood mogul.
Much of episode 6.7 (“Luxury Lounge,” April 23, 2006) is devoted to a trip made by Christopher and Carmine to Los Angeles on the ludicrous mission of attempting to convince distinguished British actor Ben Kingsley (played by himself in the episode) to star in their crappy, low-budget horror movie.[11] The entire trip, of course, is a comedy of errors, as the two gangsters are clearly over their heads in the higher echelons of the movie world. Kingsley is much more comfortable in this world, of course, but he is decidedly uncomfortable with the gangsters. Much of the comedy in this episode, in fact, comes from Kingsley’s nervous reaction to his suitors, whom he clearly regards as buffoons—but as highly frightening and dangerous buffoons. Kingsley is revolted when he realizes that Christopher and “Murmur” Zacone (Lenny Venito)—another gangster who stepped in for Carmine mid-trip—are on the same plane as he when he flies out of Los Angeles.
When Cleaver, amazingly enough, finally premieres in episode 6.14 (“Stage 5,” April 15, 2007), we find that Christopher and Little Carmine have managed to get Daniel Baldwin to appear in their film as “Sally Boy,” a mob boss clearly based on Tony. Indeed, much of the humor of this episode comes from the fact that Baldwin’s character resembles Tony so closely, eventually leading to tensions between Tony and Christopher after Tony realizes the implications of the gruesome revenge killing of Sally by a resurrected zombie-like version of the gangster Michael[12] (clearly based on Christopher), who plants the cleaver of the title in Sally’s head at the end of the film. After all, the film also shows Sally having sex with Michael’s fiancée, suggesting to Tony (with a little prodding from Carmela) that Christopher has made the film as a form of acting out his fantasies of revenge against Tony for what he (mostly, but not entirely, wrongly) suspects went on between Tony and Christopher’s fiancée, Adriana.
The Cleaver premiere also derives considerable humor from the fact that Christopher and Little Carmine try to take all the credit for the film, cutting the frustrated J. T. Dolan out altogether—until Christopher realizes that Tony is upset, and then rushes to try to blame it all on Dolan. Meanwhile, Little Carmine’s pompous speech at the premiere is a classic of his particular elocutionary style, as when he explains to the crowd, “Much like a child, a film has many parents. That is to say, many individuals who act like parents, or that, by aversion, the film is their baby.”
Little Carmine’s habitual mangling of the English language is indicative of the way much of the “error” comedy in The Sopranos is purely linguistic, as various characters frequently speak in malapropisms that would have done Sheridan’s Mrs. Malaprop or Shakespeare’s Officer Dogberry proud. These slips of the tongue can be highly humorous, even as they sometimes contribute in important ways to our understanding of the characters who speak them. They also help to establish the culture in which the events of the series take place, reminding us that these characters are mostly unsophisticated and uneducated, and that any worldly success they might have achieved is owed to their dishonesty and brutality.
Almost all of the major characters in The Sopranos have their malapropic moments, from Johnny Soprano’s lament that his wife Livia is an “albacore around my neck” to Christopher’s classic expression of concern that the Feds might be trying to “create a little dysentery among the ranks” of the gangsters. Tony himself often mangles either words or information, or both, as when he admits to Melfi that he shares Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum’s rather extreme attitude toward homosexuality: “I agree with Senator Sanitorium. He says if we let this stuff go too far, pretty soon we’ll be fucking dogs.” At another point, Tony tells Melfi, “Revenge is like serving cold cuts,” thus mangling the popular adage that “revenge is a dish best served cold,” perhaps best known these days from its identification as a Klingon proverb in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)—but also spoken by Vito Corleone in a slightly different form in The Godfather, ten years earlier. The latter, of course, is more likely Tony’s source for the quote. Indeed, Tony knows The Godfather well enough that one wonders here if Tony is being ironic and intentionally misquoting for humorous effect. Most of Tony’s malapropisms seem more straightforward, as when he declares that he was “prostate with grief” or when he speaks of someone’s death and “all that entrails.” But some of his other malapropisms are so extreme that one also has to wonder if they might be at least partly intentional and ironic, as when he discusses the unusual sexual proclivities of gangster Ralph Cifaretto by telling Melfi that “a guy like that is going out with a woman, he could technically not have penissary contact with her Volvo.”
However one interprets Tony’s various linguistic slips (and it seems certain that we are meant to think of most, if not all, of them as unintentional), he is still far from the series’ worst offender in that regard. That honor would go to the most consistent (and the most consistently funny) producer of malapropisms in The Sopranos, Little Carmine. Who else but Little Carmine would describe a particularly difficult situation as a “fucking stagmire?” Far from growing up on the streets in a tough neighborhood, Little Carmine has grown up in wealth and privilege, thanks to the success of his father. As an adult, Little Carmine lives largely in Florida, enjoying a life of luxury that is insulated from the world of the big-city crime families. He is clearly “soft,” as the tough-guy gangsters of the series would put it, but he is also a bit soft in the head, and his inability to utter more than a sentence or two without a malapropism is a clear indicator of the fact that he is just not very bright. (As Tony puts it at one point, “Everybody knows Little Carmine is retarded.”) Moreover, most of Little Carmine’s malapropisms result from his attempts to employ a sophisticated vocabulary of which he does not, in fact, have mastery, indicating both that he thinks he is a lot smarter and more knowledgeable than he really is and that he is a pretentious boor who hopes to convince those around him of his superior intellect.
The deflation of such pretenders, of course, is a classic source of comedy, and Little Carmine’s verbal boners provide ample comedic fuel. In episode 6.19 (“The Second Coming,” May 20, 2007), Tony brutally beats a soldier in the Lupertazzi family, knocking out several of his teeth, after the man has grossly insulted Tony’s daughter Meadow. With tensions between the Sopranos and the Lupertazzis already at a near boil, this incident threatens to push things over into all-out warfare. Little Carmine goes to see Tony, hoping seriously to discuss the gravity of the situation, but instead issuing an unintentionally hilarious warning that is a classic Carminism: “This alteration you had with him. You’re at the precipice, Tony, of an enormous crossroad.”
Such statements are, among other things, reminiscent of the nonsense dialogue that is sometimes employed for comic effect in the theater of the absurd—in that case, with the additional suggestion that the generation of meaning through language is made especially difficult because nothing means anything to begin with. A similar dynamic, one could argue, functions within The Sopranos. Indeed, the comedic elements of the series often veer into absurdism in a number of ways.
Traditional comedy is a cultural mode of a society that believes the world makes sense, all problems can be solved, and all relationships restored. Such confidence, of course, has continually eroded in the United States over the past half-century, leading to new modes of comedy, especially absurdism, that express a belief that the world most decidedly does not make sense. Modern absurdist comedy has roots that go back at least to such nineteenth-century works as Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” stories, and got a particular boost in the early twentieth century from modernist and surrealist artists and writers. In film, there was an absurdist element in the silent film comedies of Chaplin and Keaton, though the anarchic comedies of the Marx Brothers, in the 1930s, were more fully in the spirit of absurdism. Still, such comedy began to take its distinctively modern form during and after World War II, as both the war and the postwar arms race contributed to developments such as existentialist philosophy in Europe and to a growing sense throughout the Western world that life was, indeed, absurd. In the 1950s and forward, the work of playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Tom Stoppard fueled an emerging theater of the absurd.[13] Edward Albee contributed to this phenomenon in the United States, though American absurd humor was particularly strong in the novel, in the works of such writers as Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Absurdist comedy has appeared in film as well, and clearly absurdist elements appear in the works of such filmmakers as the Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, Monty Python, and even the Beatles. Such comedies are typically lighter than the absurdist humor found in plays and novels, though a darker absurdist film tradition resides in the closely associated mode of “black” comedy, which represents a major strain in American film comedy. Black comedies have been around for quite some time, and include such early examples as Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (1955). The form reached a particular high point with Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), a hilarious farce about the nuclear destruction of modern civilization. Indeed, the nuclear fears of the Cold War greatly contributed to the growth of both absurdist and black comedy—and to the convergence of the two—in subsequent decades.
Meanwhile, the convergence of absurdist and black comedy with still other genres has been a central trend in recent years. Virtually all of the films of the Coen Brothers employ black comedy, for example, and their films have constituted some of the most important examples of the genre in recent years, often in combination with neo-noir and other crime-related genres, including such examples as Raising Arizona (1987), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1997), and The Ladykillers (2004). Other black comedies produced in the years leading up to The Sopranos include Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead (1991), Death Becomes Her (1992), Serial Mom (1994), and 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (1997).
The last of these, a gangster comedy featuring Goodfellas star Joe Pesci, is of particular relevance to The Sopranos. A black comedy of errors featuring a bagful of misplaced severed heads (which are supposed to be delivered to a mob boss as proof of their owners’ deaths), 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag particularly anticipates one of the great moments of black comedy in The Sopranos. In episode 4.9 (“Whoever Did This,” November 10, 2002) Tony beats the odious Ralph Cifaretto to death in a graphic fight scene, then calls Christopher to help him dismember and dispose of the body. Disposing of a body isn’t easy, as it turns out, and their struggles to process the corpse involve a great deal of dark humor, which culminates when Christopher lifts Ralph’s decapitated head by the hair, only to have the dead gangster’s bad toupée come off in Christopher’s hand, much to the latter’s surprise, even though it should have been obvious to anyone that Ralph was wearing a rug. Christopher and Tony then stuff the head, now bald as a bowling ball, in, well, a bowling ball bag. They then dump most of the body in a quarry, but bury the head and hands separately—though with great difficulty, given that the ground is frozen.[14]
Absurdist comedy has had a less-illustrious history on television than in film, though elements of absurdist or existentialist humor do occasionally appear on TV. The HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–2011), which tellingly plays an important role at one moment in The Sopranos, is probably the high point of existentialist comedy on television. In this series (as in such comedy in general), the quest for community that is so central to the typical sitcom is eschewed almost entirely, and harried protagonist Larry David (played by himself) is very much alone in a comically hostile world. David’s great predecessor in comedy is, of course, filmmaker Woody Allen, though important television sitcoms such as Seinfeld and Arrested Development provide absurdist and existentialist moments as well.[15]
The fact that the various quests for community in The Sopranos inevitably break down suggests strong points of contact between the series and the tradition of absurdist and existentialist humor. As is often the case, though, the absurdist humor of The Sopranos seems more closely connected with cinema (or even theater) than with television. Perhaps the height of the absurdist comedy of The Sopranos occurs in episode 3.11 (“Pine Barrens,” May 6, 2001), though this episode also crucially depends upon the comedy-of-errors motif. Here, Christopher once again proves himself to be a rather inept gangster, as does his partner in crime in this episode, the aging gangster Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri. The episode, in fact, is a veritable comedy of errors in which Paulie and Christopher confront a Russian gangster, Valery (Vitali Baganov), in his home in order to collect a payment. Valery insults Paulie, who loses his temper and clocks the Russian, apparently killing him. Hoping to cover up the crime (and thus avoid repercussions from other Russian gangsters), Christopher and Paulie decide to take the body to the remote Pine Barrens area to dispose of the evidence in the woods. When they arrive, they discover that Valery is still alive, leading to an entire sequence in which Paulie and Christopher do one stupid thing after another, as the whole sequence devolves into theater of the absurd, with Paulie and Christopher acting something like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with a dash of Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon thrown in as well.[16] Vladimir, meanwhile, proves hard to kill. Eventually, the Russian disappears altogether, his fate remaining unknown, creating an open-endedness that only adds to the absurdity of the entire sequence.
After Valery vanishes, Paulie and Christopher are left stranded in the snow-covered woods, freezing and starving.[17] When the two gangsters attempt to communicate their situation to Tony, they (of course) have trouble because of a bad cell phone connection. Nevertheless, Tony is able to convey the information that Valery is highly dangerous, a well-trained ex-commando, “some sort of Russian green beret,” who worked with the Interior Ministry and killed sixteen Chechen rebels, single-handed. The information, of course, gets mangled in transmission to Paulie, and viewers who know Paulie know that the miscommunication cannot simply be attributed to the bad phone connection. As Paulie then relays the information to Christopher, it becomes garbled into, “He killed 16 Czechoslovakians. Guy was an interior decorator.” Christopher, surprised at this news, delivers one of his classic punchlines when he remarks that, nevertheless, “His house looked like shit.” By the time Tony finally comes to the rescue, Paulie has lost his shoe (and nearly his foot), and Paulie and Christopher have nearly come to blows over a box of Tic Tacs in an attempt to assuage their hunger, among other misadventures. Paulie’s car has also disappeared, along with the money they had earlier extracted from the Russian. Just to toss in one additional comic note, Tony is accompanied on the rescue mission by the rotund Bobby Baccalieri, dressed in an absurdly overdone outdoorsman outfit, so that he will be prepared for whatever they encounter in the woods.
Valery’s unknown fate anticipates the controversial ending of the entire series, in which the fates of Tony and his immediate family remain unknown, the screen fading to black in what might or might not be a crucial moment. This lack of closure has its own absurdist aspect, that final cut to black potentially suggesting the ultimate meaninglessness of life—as bemoaned by Tony’s son A. J. when he goes through his own phase of teen existential angst. But of course this philosophical interpretation is undermined by the fact that Tony and his family are merely fictional characters. Nothing happens to them after that cut to black, because they literally do not exist beyond that point. The Sopranos, despite its serious engagement with so many issues, never forgets that it is merely a television show. The different kinds of humor that are sprinkled throughout the various episodes strongly reinforce this lack of self-seriousness, even as they also sometimes provide a satirical dimension that contributes to the engagement of the series with serious issues. The treatment of religion in The Sopranos, discussed in the next chapter, provides a key illustration of both of these aspects of the show.
The scene was filmed at the actual Lou Costello memorial in Paterson, New Jersey.
As a series, The Honeymooners ran only for thirty-nine episodes in 1955 and 1956. However, it appeared as a recurring sketch within Cavalcade of Stars from 1951 to 1955 and was later revived by star Jackie Gleason in various forms on his own variety shows into the 1970s. Dana Polan notes how “The Sopranos explicitly compares its world to that of The Honeymooners in a number of episodes” (106).
As a key sign of the changing television landscape, Arrested Development was resurrected in the new format of the Netflix original series in 2013.
This sort of sitcom, meanwhile, has been taken to a whole new level by the merger of the sitcom with “reality” television in such series as The Osbournes (2001–2005) and Keeping Up with the Kardashians (2007– ), which feature the misadventures of real-world dysfunctional families, with the added fantasy element that the families are rich and famous.
The Simpsons, known for its references to other works of American popular culture, engages in significant dialogue with The Sopranos in at least two episodes, including the season 13 finale, “Poppa’s Got a Brand New Badge” (May 22, 2002), which includes a sequence that is a pastiche of the famous Sopranos opening sequence (complete with the theme music from that opening), and the season 18 opener, “The Mook, the Chef, the Wife and Her Homer” (September 10, 2006), which includes guest voice-overs by Sopranos actors Joe Pantoliano and Michael Imperioli. See also Yacowar’s comment that the opening sequence of The Sopranos tells “the same story as the title montage of our other great television-family series, The Simpsons” (331).
It is worth noting that the central bumbling professional criminal in Fargo is played by Steve Buscemi, an actor who would later play an important role in The Sopranos as Tony’s cousin Tony Blundetto in season 5.
Christopher’s lack of writing talent, while consistent with his characterization throughout the series, may also involve a bit of an in-joke, given that actor Michael Imperioli is, in fact, also a talented scriptwriter, who penned several episodes of The Sopranos.
The comic nature of Christopher’s encounter with Favreau is highly appropriate, given that Favreau would direct the mob comedy Made for release the year after this episode initially aired.
This seemingly throwaway reference is also characteristically rich. For example, the 1952 original version of Viva Zapata! (directed by Elia Kazan and written by none other than John Steinbeck) starred Marlon Brando in the title role, inevitably bringing The Godfather into this intertextual conversation that already juxtaposes gangster films with a biopic about a Mexican revolutionary.
The very title Cleaver, meanwhile, inevitably evokes the central family in Leave It to Beaver, which is about as far as one can get from this film, creating still another incongruous association.
The targeting of Kingsley seems to be largely due to the fact that he had played a sociopathic gangster in the 2000 film Sexy Beast, receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the role. But Cleaver is a far cry from Sexy Beast, a fact that Christopher and Carmine do not appear to realize.
The naming of this character provides another self-referential in-joke, given that Christopher is played by Michael Imperioli.
See Esslin for the classic study of this phenomenon.
There are, in fact, several moments in The Sopranos when getting rid of a body proves difficult—a comic motif that goes back at least to The Trouble with Harry. See Sepinwall (“Breaking Bad”) for a discussion of some memorable corpse disposals on television, including the disposal of Cifaretto.
The connection between Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm is, of course, quite direct, David having cocreated Seinfeld and having served as head writer and executive producer of the show during most of its run.
Indeed, in an interview, actor Michael Imperioli said, “That episode was like a little one-act play. Like a different version of Waiting for Godot” (Carter).
The wooded, snowy setting of this sequence again recalls the snow-covered landscape of Fargo, which might not be surprising, given that it was directed by Fargo actor Steve Buscemi, even if the snow was apparently unexpected and not called for in the original script. The setting also particularly recalls Sam Raimi’s 1998 film A Simple Plan, much of which is similarly set and much of which also involves incompetent criminality.