Ah, Laughter's Sweet Release!
By Robert Faires, Fri., April 9, 1999
It's for this reason that comedians are notoriously suspect of Friday audiences. Ask any performer whose business it is to be funny what they think of those end-of-the-work week patrons, and you can expect to be told they're the toughest crowds of the week. Friday night audiences are still too close to the job; they're still shaking off the stress of the previous five days, and their minds are still too clogged with orders, memos, and phone calls to absorb much in the way of new material, much less process it and respond with the level of enthusiasm it deserves. Oh, these audience members want to empty their heads of all that 9-to-5 drudgery, they want to leave the daily grind behind and loosen up and enjoy themselves -- that's part of the reason they're out on Friday night, after all -- but the Zombies of the Rat Race typically need a decent night's sleep to let go of their workaday worries and cares and function as normal folk. Thus, the theatres and comedy clubs of this world must continue to suffer those Friday night houses of glassy-eyed, insensate spectators and jokes that sail silently through the air before landing with a disheartening thud.
That said, though, it must also be noted that there are those rare occasions when humor is able to pierce even the veil of job-generated numbness at the end of the week. Sometimes on a Friday night, against all odds, a punchline or a sight gag or perhaps even a whole string of comic situations and consequences makes it through the wasteland of burnt-out brain cells in your head to find a couple of synapses that aren't totally fried and connect you with a bit of comedy. And when it does, when you're distracted and weary and the least disposed to laugh and yet the humor hooks you and a glorious wave of glee wells up from your belly, it reminds you what an extraordinary curative laughter is. Reader's Digest be damned, it is the best medicine!
This lesson was driven home to me in full force just last week upon seeing the comedy Son of Arlecchino at Planet Theatre. This latest effort from Tongue and Groove Theatre returns to Austin's stages an antique dramatic form that is nonetheless dear to the heart of company artistic director David Yeakle: commedia dell'arte. The script by Leon Katz begins with that randy old goat Pantalone -- he of the voracious libido -- scheming how to keep his pious bride Isabella chaste and to worm his way back between the legs of his mistress Columbina, who has locked herself away from him for the past three months. What he doesn't know is that Isabella is hardly the innocent he imagines her to be and that Columbina's withdrawal has been to keep Pantalone from knowing she is heavy with child -- another man's child. As the wizened satyr plots his strategies, he must contend with a Don Juan-in-training who seeks his counsel in the ways of seduction (which he applies to guess-who's wife), his neighbor doctor whose own ardor for Columbina leads him to brew a pernicious potion which will curb Pantalone's passionate powers, if not shrivel the manly source of them altogether, and the bawd who must keep Pantalone from learning of Columbina's condition even when she is about to deliver the child under his very nose. And, of course, he -- and all the characters -- must contend with Arlecchino, the clown, the rebel servant, the rude, crude, wailing, railing, cursing, eating, farting rogue, who defies all and is yet the key to the play's nonsensical outcome. The situations are outlandish, the characters sketched in bold outline, their reactions big and broad, and the humor raucous and cartoony. Drawing-room comedy this ain't.
I arrived at the theatre carrying every second of the work week between my shoulders. Every word of every story I had edited that week, every tap at the keyboard, every press release, every phone call, every e-mail message received and sent, every interruption, was logged in the muscles running along my spine and across my back, so that they felt like taut cables soaked in quick-dry cement. And the inside of my head was a Tilt-a-Whirl of story ideas, schedules, errands left undone, calls left unreturned. I was about as zombiefied as one gets by Friday at 5pm.
But as Yeakle's company jigged their way through this dance of debauchery, I found myself responding -- and responding fully. With each smug pronouncement of Michael Ringler's puffed-up Pantalone, his wire-brush goatee as stiff as an erection; with each cornball explosion of mad-scientist laughter from Michael Stuart's literally leaden-headed Dottore; with each door-busting entrance by Allison Leigh DeFrees' hardball bawd Francheschina; with each world-shaking groan from gNatalie Rodic's swollen Columbina, I was laughing. Not just chuckling, not just sniggering ... laughing. And the laughter -- big and boisterous and erupting from deep in my gut -- cracked the tension in my body, the way warm weather cracks the surface of a frozen pond. By the time Chris Krejci's amusingly ailing Arlecchino found comedic relief for his gastrointestinal distress -- in what is arguably the most elaborate set-up in the history of theatre for a fart joke -- all those deadening thoughts of copy and text files and page layouts and the like had dissipated like so much fog, and my shoulders were as loose as they'd been since ... well, probably the preceding Sunday. I felt liberated.
Clearly, when it comes to commedia, David Yeakle knows his stuff. His production of Katz's commedia piece The Three Cuckolds at the UT Department of Theatre & Dance a few seasons back was an unparalleled delight in its depiction of lowbrow characters in search of satiation. As both performer and director, Yeakle has an understanding of physical comedy and an ability to communicate that understanding to his actors. This production confirms Yeakle's skill at translating the bold types of 15th-century commedia into three-dimensional cartoons that still provoke laughter in the 20th century.
However, without taking anything away from Yeakle's particular artistic gifts or credit for this production's success, the ability of this comedy to break the chains of the work week may be attributed in part, I think, to its depiction of humanity's basest desires and the folly involved in being creatures of flesh. Or to put it more simply, the power of the comedy was its vulgarity.
Vulgar comedy is mighty stuff. It's the Great Leveler of the humor biz. Try as we might to refine ourselves as a race, as a culture, as individuals, aspire as we might toward mental or spiritual perfection, we are still creatures of the physical world. To live, we must breathe, we must eat, we must empty our bodies of waste. Our bodies all come equipped with the organs to do these things, as well as sexual organs which inspire in us sexual urges. Vulgar humor takes those facts and uses them to humble us, to remind us, no matter how high-blown we may be, how much humans still have in common with our animal cousins. It's humor that must strip us of our protective clothing and expose those unseen and unspoken-of parts of us. It's comedy that gooses our uncovered asses and broadcasts every sound that trumpets forth from them. It's dick jokes and tit twitters and the seven words that you used to not be able to say on television, and while we may not always like to admit it, when we accept this humor, it can free us from our hang-ups about our bodies, ourselves, our societal codes of conduct.
As a culture, we seem to forget about this from time to time, and we have to rediscover the liberating quality of vulgar comedy. Oh, it isn't that low humor ever goes away -- somewhere in the culture we always have some clown or other squirting water in our eyes, or pissing on our shoes, to get a laugh -- but for long periods low humor will seem less prominent, will appear to have less appeal. But then along will come some artist or other with a gift for the crude, whose bold embrace of vulgarity somehow connects with the culture at large, and we will remember how liberating it is to laugh at our own carnality. Twenty-five years ago, one such artist was Mel Brooks, who shattered the placid, romantic image of the movie cowboy campfire with the undignified sound of flatulence. Another was John Waters, who took the phrase "eat shit" to its literal extreme. In the last few years, it's been Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame and, more recently, the Farrelly Brothers, Peter and Bobby, whose There's Something About Mary had audiences roaring over penis-caught-in-zipper gags and mousse spiked with precious bodily fluids.
These guys are part of the same tradition to which Son of Arlecchino belongs, a tradition of broad characters, large appetites, and the will to act on them, no matter the consequences. In the end -- that is, the final analysis, not the other end ... oh, never mind -- what matters is not the level of the humor or who's making it, whether the dialogue is rendered in classical verse or the rhythms of rap, it's that we still respond to the portrayal of our baser selves, to our capacity for crudeness. And that when we give ourselves over to it, it retains the power to release us from the most confining and deadening parts of our lives.
Son of Arlecchino runs through April 10, Thu-Sat, 8pm, at Planet Theatre, 2307 Manor. Call 454-TIXS.
