246
PARTISAN REVIEW
way being oh so sophisticated.
If
tho word folksy connotes the adul–
teration of the folk spirit, our current understanding of sophistication
implies an adulteration of the comic spirit. The. sophistication of
One
Touch of Venus
is
the cleverness of the half-educated.
It
is crudity
ill-concealed by quasi-refinement. It is a guffaw suppressed to a
snigger.
One Touch of Venus,
as the title alluringly hints, deals with .
sex or rather, to retain the original metaphor, it touches on sex, and
nothing reveals its character more than than the way it fingers Venus
without coming to grips with her. Nothing in the realm of humor
is more acceptable than bawdry; nothing to my mind is less acceptable
than the Broadway sophistication which pleases old ladies by avoiding
outspokenness and at the same time titillates young ladies by cowardly
insinuations. You may find it funny to hear a woman sing:
Venus found she was a goddess
In a world controlled by gods
So she opened up her bodice
And equalized the odds.
But the very next stanza tells us:
Look what Beatrice did to Dante
What Dubarry did to France
Venus showed them that the pantie
Is mightier than the pants.
And after that there are forty more lines of it.
As
to Mr. Perelman's
prose, it consists of humor on this order:
RoDNEY.
You're practically naked! I can see your-form!
VENUS:
Don't you like my--form?
The idea is to mention sex as often as possible because sex
is
very funny but not to call anything by its name because that wouldn't
be very nice. Perelman, Nash, and their audiences (not forgetting
Kurt Weill who used to be a musician) are nothing if not knowing.
Why, they even know who Dante and Beatrice were.
Which brings me to a second point about
One Touch of Venus
- the nature of its burlesque. Burlesque and parody may be aimed
at the most august object, but they must imply an understanding of the
object. Unhappily we get the impression that Perelman and Nash and
the kind of audience they address do not. The humor of
Giotto and W atteau
Were obvious!y blotto
...
Cezanne and Modigliani
De-glamorized the human fanny
betrays, not quite intentionally perhaps, that hostility to culture which
