MORRIS DICKSTEIN
merged, in an imagined and superimposed life.... It might ex–
plain why he is unknowable.
277
This may be true for most actors , who, as Diderot noted, may be
most convincing when they are most detached, and who may cease
to be interesting the moment they try to "be themselves." Actors, like
other artists, turn their early wounds into sources of strength, their
marginality into mobility, their anxiety into empathy and finally
into control.
What can be said of acting can also be said of comedy .
It
would
be too sweeping to say that all comedy is based on insecurity, but
this is certainly true of Chaplin's comedy, and it connects him to the
whole tradition ofJewish humor, from the defensive saintliness and
ineptitude of the classic schlemiel, to the nihilistic antics of the Marx
Brothers, to the neurotic intellectuality of Woody Allen . Chaplin's
early life was so painful he didn't
have
to be Jewish; the memory of
indignity was the fuel of his genius. Seen in this light, comedy is an
obsessive return to - and mastery of-painful situations. The come–
dian is the goat who volunteers for public sacrifice, and thus cements
the bonds of the community; he is the fool whose folly proves wise,
the lowly subject who is finally crowned king. He disarms what most
upsets him by exposing it publicly, by turning secret humiliations
into shared laughter.
The Jewish comedian may have few other avenues to success
and recognition . Striking out indiscriminately at himself and at the
world, he is a prime example ofwhatJ. M. Cuddihy calls "the ordeal
of civility," the trauma of social acceptance for the ambivalent out–
sider. Yet long before Jewish emancipation from the ghetto, as far
back as Aristophanes, humor took upon itself the double mission of
satirizing society and reconciling us to it. By ventilating discontent,
by playing on the distance between
is
and
ought,
humor can be either
subversive or quite harmless - a safety valve for the status quo. The
cynicism offolk wisdom, so free of illusion, is also free of hope, shot
through with a sense of fatality. In this sense humor is conservative.
Yet very little has been written about the contrary tendency : its
subversive and anarchic potentialities. In the comedies of Howard
Hawks, for example, rapid-fire dialogue becomes the spirited equiv–
alent of swift , sure physical movement in the silent films of Chaplin
and Keaton. Just as Chaplin plays off his own agility against lum–
bering "heavies," who are too slow or rigid to match his resourceful
dexterity, Hawks sets off his own irrepressible id-figures against
