On Tue, 20 Feb 2001, Sally Manton wrote:

Can I ask something of everyone? Does the use of violence as humour - as 'a source of innocent merriment' - also have disturbing, if different, overtones? I'm not so much talking about real cartoon violence a la the Road Runner (which I like, though I always disliked Tom & Jerry) but that using film and therefore real people - Monty Python and A Fish Called Wanda come immediately to mind, but I'm sure there are others (again, graphic violence isn't my thing, so I don't watch a lot of these).

It can have disturbing overtones, and this can be a good or a bad thing.

'Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die' -- Mel Brooks

The line between Tragedy and Comedy is very fine (see 'King Lear' act 4 scene 6 for an example, and 'The Tempest' act 5 scene 1 for another). The best comedy skirts right up to deep tragedy, and the most intense tragedy has comic overtones. Just think how little you would have to change 'Fawlty Towers' to make it the tragic tale of one man's spiraling self-destruction in a changing world he no longer understands.

I don't think there's such a thing as intrinsically inappropriate violence in comedy. What matters is whether the violence is executed with skill and thoughtfulness to some artistic end, or whether it's lazy, casual and pointless.

Example 1) The episode of "Bottom" in which Richie and Eddie are trapped on the ferris wheel. There's a sequence in that which is ultraviolent even by "Bottom" standards. Richie and Eddie get into some dispute, and Eddie kicks Richie square in the balls. This is funny, in a slapstick way. Then he keeps kicking him again, and again, and again, way beyond the point where all laughter has ceased and the audience is becoming horrified. All this violence is performed in a very real way -- somewhat exaggerated, to be sure, but the kicks look really hard and Richie's reaction is agonised. And it's great. It stops being slapstick, and becomes something greater. These two losers, impoverished, filthy and drunk, trapped in a desperate situation, forget about cooperating to get themselves out of it and instead kick the shit out of each other for no good reason. It's a metaphorically powerful image, and gains its power from the wincingly-real violence. If they were just bickering and slapping each other it wouldn't work.

Example 2) The denoument of "Austin Powers". Austin dispatches various nameless henchmen in a variety of comical ways, James Bond - style. On each occasion we cut to the henchman's friends and family, in some naturalistic situation, receiving the news of his death and being heartbroken. This brilliantly subverts the spy-movie genre, in which our hero kills people with no consequence save for a witty quip. Contrast this with another secret-agent comedy, "True Lies". That movie doesn't question the genre convention at all -- rather it exploits it for cheap laughs. Nameless goons are shot dead or incinerated in implausible ways, and the hero just laughs and goes on as if nothing had happened. This latter example is one where the violence is used inappropriately and unreflectively, and I find that a bad thing.

And it's an area I *don't* recall seeing a

lot of B7 fiction in >

That's maybe because comedy is so damned difficult.

Iain