My friend Robert Sullivan shared this morning's post on Ken Levine's popular blog. In it, he puts forth an idea I've heard before. When times are tough after an economic upheaval, what theatre need now more than ever is: comedy. Comedy, the argument goes, is our ticket to escape, to take our minds off what we've been through and what may lie ahead in a not-so-certain economic recovery post-pandemic.
We heard similar calls for comedy above all else in the period of uncertainty immediately following the attacks of September 11, 2001.
It's understandable why some might think this would be the trick. But I have a different idea.
In those moments when the house lights go down and the curtain goes up, everyone in the audience begins putting their own life worries (of the day and of the year) on a shelf and turning their attention, instead, to the lives of the characters on stage. This is what we have come to do. To set aside our own concerns and for the duration of the play, focus our attention—with head and heart—on the lives of others.
And I would argue the degree to which we're able to do this depends, not on how funny these people are, but instead on something less obvious, harder to perceive consciously, yet far more powerful.
We want to see them struggle, we need to feel their need because life is a series of struggles and needs—never fulfilled entirely—and the thing we all have in common is conflict. To be alive is to be in conflict, with ourselves and others. And we are emotionally sucked into stories, not by what happens in them, but by the characters who inhabit them. The stronger the character's purpose is as a catalyst for conflict with other characters in the story, the more fiercely we will want to stick around to see how it all works itself out.
The best comedy grows out of our recognition of ourselves in those ways in which we fall short of our ideals. That is what makes us human. And that is where the most entertaining comedy comes from. When the writer shows us a side of ourselves we are not exactly proud of yet cannot deny.
So I would agree with Ken in part. Sure, we need comedy. But we don't only need comedy. What we need are stories populated by living breathing human beings that are immediately recognizable to us as authentic and acting in their own self-interest.
Then, whether we laugh or we cry (or both!), we'll be engaged and for 90 minutes or more, our own troubles will recede into the background.
