MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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tramp into an enormous chicken. Later, Charlie, whose imaginative
flights are less predatory, conjures up a dream of love and warmth
around the dance of the Oceana rolls, a fantasy that is later realized
by the film's happy ending. In this picture, unusually, the tramp
finally becomes rich, as Chaplin himself had, but on the boat bound
for home he wins the girl only by reassuming his tramp costume and
falling back into steerage. Only then does he know that he's loved for
himself, not for his money.
The subversive qualities of Chaplin's mms and of most comedies
arise out of a deep-seated conservatism. Chaplin stays close to the
bone of human experience, emphasizing our need for food, love,
warmth, nurture, and self-regard, which society often fails to pro–
vide. Modernist works, with notable exceptions - Beckett's plays,
Joyce's
Ulysses,
Kafka's
Metamorphosis
-
rarely function well on this
basic and quotidian level. When modernists express their wonder at
Chaplin they often slight his fundamental humanity and turn him
into a surrealist, or a formal innovator like themselves. "The egre–
gious merit of Chaplin," according to T. S. Eliot, "is that he has
escaped in his own way from the realism of the cinema and invented
a
rhythm."
Even James Agee, who had celebrated his own discovery
of ordinary life in the tortured pages of
Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men,
echoes Eliot when he says brilliantly that "Chaplin got his
laughter less from gags, or from milking them in any ordinary sense,
than through his genius for what might be called
inflection-the
perfect, changeful shading of his physical and emotional attitudes
toward the gag." Chaplin's own accounts of his working methods are
quite different, stressing above all his need for close observation and
likeness to life. (As early as 1915 he wrote: "We rehearsed over fifty
times some of the small situations.... This was because I was striv–
ing for naturalness, and it meant intense concentration and hard
work for all of us .")
I cannot here go on to discuss in detail the Marx Brothers and
their occasional scenarist S. J. Perelman, and his brother-in-law,
Nathanael West, and, finally, the more consciously modern comedy
of Woody Allen, as the subject demands. But I believe they exploit
some of the same outsider motifs that ally Chaplin's work to the tra–
dition of Jewish and urban humor. ''Jews are marginal men," wrote
Isaac Rosenfeld in 1944, and the Jewish writer is a "specialist in
alienation," yet this disability gives him an ideal perspective on
modern society, in which displacement, exile, and change are almost
the norm rather than the exception.
One of the ways the Jew triumphs over his marginality and
