The Laugh of the Future

     Norton (appearing in a television commercial, wearing a chef's hat and standing in front of an array of household utensils): Are you the Chef of the Future?
     Ralph (facing the camera, eyes bugged out; holding something that looks like a Swiss Army knife crossed with a pencil sharpener and ice pick): Hamahamahamahama the Chef of the Future!
     Norton: And do you have something that will do the work of ALL these old-fashioned tools?
     Ralph: Hamahama the Chef of the Future!

     As our civilization slouches and slides further into paganism, I ask myself what life will look like, and in particular what good things we take for granted now will be lost.  It's not an exercise in prophecy so much as a recalling of how Christianity transformed the old pagan world.  If we revert to paganism, for a time the Christian transformation will be in part retained, if only as ghostly memories from a world whose distinctiveness no one any longer understands.  But, barring a revival of the Christian faith, even those memories must fade.

     So here let me pay tribute to an apparently humble pleasure that Christianity brought to the world, one that was only vaguely anticipated by the ancient Greeks and Romans.  I mean the pleasure of a certain kind of comedy.  Laughter there had always been, of course, but for cultures untouched by the Christian "deep comedy" (about which our contributing editor Peter Leithart has written most eloquently), laughter seldom or never escapes the realm of scorn.  Aristotle, that keen analyst of drama, says that in comedy we laugh at the vices of people who are beneath us, and certainly that definition holds true -- to a certain extent -- through the Christian era, too.  We laugh at Bottom, the ass translated into an ass.  We laugh at Don Quixote, who mistakes a statue of the Virgin Mary for a damsel in distress.  We laugh at Charlie Brown, who tries to steal home with two outs in the final inning of the championship game, is tagged out nine feet from the plate, and lies on his back through the night, crying out, "Why? Why? Why?"  And we laugh at vain, blustery, foolish Ralph Kramden the bus driver, once again blowing his meager savings on a harebrained scheme, once again seeing his so-little-justified pride shot down in flames.

     But there is a great deal more to comedy that is steeped in the Christian world -- and those very examples I've given above prove it.  Plautus is full of fools, but only the Christian Shakespeare could give us Bottom's Vision, "that has no bottom".  It took divine revelation to teach us that there is a foolishness wiser than the wisdom of men; or that in the lowliest and stupidest of men there is a grandeur and a mystery that should make us laugh not for scorn but for wonder.  One old Shakespearean critic has called it the Comedy of Forgiveness -- the strange belief, quite foreign to the pagans, that laughter too might be redemptive, as participating in the greatest comedy of all, that of a world wherein man is saved by the means he least expects, and therefore by the most fitting and comical means of all.  For the fact is that we like Bottom not just as a source of laughter, but as Bottom and no other; as we like Don Quixote, and Charlie Brown, and the fat bus driver Ralph Kramden.  We like them because we take for granted that they are of inestimable value, and because we know that they replicate, in particularly ridiculous form, a story that is our own.  Hence the forgiveness that haunts the poor, sad, lonely marriage of Ralph and Alice, which would otherwise be intolerable for the audience to watch -- an exercise in cruelty.

     What happens when that comic vision is lost?  For a while it hangs around in debased form: you have a vampire forgiveness, pale and bloodless.  People sort-of-forgive one another because they sort-of-reconcile, but, having lost any clear notion of sin, they don't know what they are forgiving, and having lost any clear notion of redemption, they don't know why they should bother, other than to call a truce acceptable to all parties.  But soon that sort-of-forgiveness is seen as sentimental, tacked-on, not integral to the comedy; and then it is dispensed with.  The laughter of fellow-feeling for silly and suffering mankind -- the laughter of Krazy Kat, or As You Like It -- must disappear, with crudity and cruelty and scorn returning in full force.  In large part this has already happened.