I’m trying to think about comedy and anger, how they blend and mix, or keep to their separate corners. I’m trying to think about gratitude and sincerity, and where or how those attitudes or qualities might fit in with or relate to the comedic and the irate. How fury can be harnessed to resolve the source of its being, or to foster its growth, and what’s invested in either option. Why comedy could make room for anger trying to deal with itself, but can’t really do much with that form of ire that tries to keep itself going, to build itself up, to justify itself and claim some sort of victory over others. Welcome, then, to what will probably be the first in at least a couple of essays to consider the whole mess.
It’s all been swirling around in my head thanks to some recent reading, beginning with Tor Ulven’s short novel, Replacement. Does it consist of one man considering, or at least living out, different parts of his life—or are we dealing with multiple individuals, all for some reason stuck in the same book with different, rarely or never interacting journeys? Is this just a catalogue of snippets from multiple people’s lives, the characters ostensibly doing different things, but pulled nevertheless into the same inescapably futile and dispiriting reality that constitutes the human condition? Ulven agreed to an interviewer’s proposal that there were at least “fifteen people, or egos” in the novel, but exactly what that means is never clear; as he responded, “I was after a double effect: it is a different person, and it is the same person; almost individual variations across an impersonal subject.”1
Whatever the case, most of these guys seem to be in misery, or rather angry about that misery—and holding onto that anger for dear life. It could be present when thinking about a woman who’s no longer there, and no longer there out of her own volition—maybe committed suicide, maybe just left—or about the woman taking care of a bedridden old man; or about a woman he/another, younger man is hooking up with and comparing unfavorably to the lady who’s gone. The bitterness might be palpable when an older self decides not to bother with contacting the woman he’s now found again, because what’s the use? “[I]f you got her now, it’d be too late, you’d only be getting the scraps, the leavings, the leftovers, the sweepings, the last remains of a life together… you have no future and no expectations.”2
Regardless of the situation, that undertone of wrath usually isn’t hard to find: a sort of resigned fury that, because its host won’t allow it to be dismissed is often embraced. Whether the person’s riding his bike through a warehouse, looking at people on the beach, drinking himself into a stupor, or apparently burning everything he can find to the ground, I felt like the hostility might reach out and take a hold of my own throat. Even as the character considers, at least a few times throughout the book, the gun he’s keeping or just bought, to be used if he reaches the point at which he’ll finally end it all, you get the feeling that it’s you he’d be disgusted with, you he’d blame for why he has to absent himself, you with all your lack of indignation and your belief in the possibility of even a moment’s happiness who makes the world the miserable place it is for him. One of those vengeful suicides who offs himself just to get back at the girl who’s dumped him.
In the interview I mentioned, Ulven does nothing to dispel the sense that he had a pretty gloomy outlook on life: “[O]n principle,” he said, “I am interested in writing hostile books… I prefer to insist on the misery of existence.” Not that he saw himself as celebrating that misery; he did seem to believe that literature, in looking that agony straight in the eye, could cause a person “to reflect, or sublimate, to use a Freudian term, and thereby distance themselves from the barbarism.” At the same time, that reflection didn’t seem able to do much, where taking a less bleak look at life was concerned: “When the egos in Replacement overlap each other, it is as if they are reborn. But as the same. Born anew, but in the same misery, the same monotony. Possibilities that suddenly contract.”
In his afterword to Replacement, Stig Sæterbakken alleges that humor is present in Ulven’s works, though “often overlooked,” in spite of the fact “that the greatest pessimists are also the greatest humorists (and what else is there in life to laugh at than misery, tragedy, and suffering?).”3 I’ve no argument with Sæterbakken’s general allegation about humorists and laughing at misery; it’s just that I don’t see any of it in this book. In Charlie Chaplin, sure—and maybe more recently, in Hiroko Oyamada’s short novel, The Factory.
That book could fit in with any number of takes on the absurdity of working life; it would be at home for the creators of The Office, or Office Space, or anything in that comedic vein. But the strange situations and characters and characteristics of the factory-as-town that hosts, or is the reason for, the story never have their threatening natures quite resolved or eased, even while the investigation of this closed universe can’t help but result in laughter, if only because there’s no other sane response to it all. The factory is too big to fail, as the bailer-outers of 2008–09 would say; here, that means that there’s just no way anyone could begin chipping away at the monstrosity, nothing anyone could do, no public campaign or activist movement able to take it down, even if anyone wanted that to happen—because everyone around seems to be thrilled with its existence, its prestige, its paychecks for the lucky locals who can get in. Except for the new employees who somehow wound up there because they were laid off from an enjoyable job, or just got assigned to the factory as temps.
What are the weird, Edward Gorey-esque birds hanging around the river; what about the coypu that build their homes in the drainage pipes—and what about the new breed of lizards in the facilities’ washers and dryers, feeding on lint and not giving a damn what happens to their offspring? What about the ridiculous editing projects that disappear and reappear unchanged, the green building initiative whose appointed expert still, after decades of employment, hasn’t been given any guidance or feedback about what he’s supposed to be doing? What to make of the fact that no one cares if you just doze off in your cube, because no one can really tell what’s happening in this place, anyway?
It’s definitely bleak—and definitely relatable, for anyone who’s been consigned to office work just about anywhere. The characters, though, somehow stay free of the anger and resentment Ulven’s carry around with them. You might say that they’ve been brainwashed into believing any employment at all is worth putting up with, of buying into a social agreement that asserts being unemployed is more shameful than anything else—but these newbies (or even the long-termers) are hardly cheerleading their employer, or reveling in whatever they’ve been given to do. Instead, they seem to be curious about all the idiocy found in this place, and about their own reactions to it; most of the characters are good and committed observers of this milieu, dealing with their puzzlement not by falling into bitterness about the state in which they’re trapped, but by looking more closely at it. Usually what they find is the stuff of dark comedy: gossipy office ladies downing candy; a supervisor who seems continually drunk, detached, and everywhere any of them pops up; inane copy, my favorite of which is all too familiar in its totally assured stupidity: “Goodbye to All Your Problems and Mine: A Guide to Mental Health Care…. Beneath its excremental title was a drawing of two smiling gyoza dumplings, basking under a rainbow…. From the second chapter onward, every chapter was listed as starting on page seventeen.”4 The book feels like the absurd comedy involved in trying to figure out a ridiculous situation that you’ve no choice but to grin and bear, facing up to how things get weird and weirder in already moronic scenarios.
Maybe there’s not that great a difference, then, when you stand back and look at all these disappointed situations; both books present some sort of evidence that, as Ulven said in that interview, “The majority of us lead, if truth be told, rather miserable lives.” The newly hired workers at the factory have no desire to be there, beyond their need to earn a living; they all thought life would be different, that they’d be doing something more meaningful. As one who stands at a shredder all day thinks to herself, “I thought I’d been giving [life] everything I had, but what I thought was my everything had no real value… what else am I doing with my life?”5 Bleak indeed—but just as she observes what’s going on around her, she also studies her own thoughts, tests them for their validity, recognizing that she’s not the world’s most unfortunate, or even uniquely dissatisfied, person, that there’s really no one, not even herself, to blame for what’s “out there, out in the world.” Why, I could imagine her thinking when faced with all of Ulven’s sneering characters, cultivate your disappointment? That certainly won’t solve anything.
It’s the difference here, I think, between the two books’ respective outlooks and emotional tenors: two general ways of approaching what might be the same sort of existential situation. The difference, I think, between comedy and anger: between Dana Carvey’s satirization of the Grumpy Old Man and real-life right-wingers nurturing their resentment up to the point that they’re actually shooting people who ring their doorbell or take a wrong turn down their driveway. Comedy recognizes—observes, as The Factory’s characters do—the ways in which we all fail, whether by losing our literal footing or failing to see what’s right in front of us; victims of fury and bitterness, on the other hand, allow their emotions to grow into such an overwhelming state that the hosts of those emotions are finally possessed by them, ceding their reason and willpower and ability to see straight to the dictates of that wrath, to the point where their individuality is just gone. One more predictably angry old man; one more incel who might just get a date if he sat down and thought for a while about why girls might not want to sleep with him:6 all of Ulven’s characters, blending somehow into the same person. To quibble with a variation on Tolstoy,7 I’m wondering more and more if it’s the angry fellows who are all alike—while those who can laugh might just be free enough to laugh in their own way, with their individuality still intact.
Comedy doesn’t remove or refuse to acknowledge the (continuing presence of) despair—but it refuses to revel or wallow in it. The kind of committed anger I’ve been talking about here, though, might start by a frustrated attempt or desire to preserve something, but something that may never have actually existed, whether an ideal picture of love or of the smooth functioning of a homogenous civil society; anger may grow when a person’s hopes, founded or not, just didn’t work out according to their designs—and instead of recognizing, OK, that didn’t pan out, I might be able to resolve the situation or make the next one different, they hold onto the failure and almost invite it to eat into themselves, to suffuse their being entirely. Because this one thing didn’t succeed, nothing ever will—and because I can’t be happy, no one else deserves to be, either.8
Because comedy depends on our unavoidable weaknesses for its material, it’s more generous than that careerist fury, more forgiving because it implicates us all instead of setting up us-them boundaries. Comedy’s presentation of our faux pas, our physical failures, our slips of the tongue, says that this is human life, all of our human lives: that to be human is to fail, over and over—but it’s also to get back up again, and it’s also nothing to stew over. What comedy might in part be trying to say is that although we often do waste or flub our chances, more chances lie in wait, and with luck, we might end up, even if by accident and in spite of ourselves, achieving something good, or at least better. To argue against human vulnerability, to assert that it makes us morally weak, is why that Ulvenesque, old-guy ire, and the unyielding (political) conservatism that often goes along with it, wanting nothing to change or be other than what it’s laid out as desirable, has a very hard time being funny, or thinks it’s being funny when really it’s just resorting to name-calling and other forms of bullying. The conservatism inherent in permanent anger (and maybe vice versa) seems to involve an unwillingness to accept the human-universal fact of frailty and fallibility9—and hence, has no space for forgiveness of self or other—maybe of world at large—when it appears. And hence, too, no recognition that things might change, might even bear the possibility of transformation big or small.
I’m not done with this theme, friends—so look for the next installment in a week or so. In the meantime, try to laugh at what you can, and if shaking a fist at what vexes you, try at least to think of a way to make the situation more bearable.
All quotations used in this essay from the interview can be found at Cecilie Schram Hoel and Alf van der Hagen, “Interview with Tor Ulven,” transl. Benjamin Mier-Cruz, in The White Review (January 2011), https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-tor-ulven/.
Tor Ulven, Replacement, transl. Kerri A. Pierce (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012), 124–25.
Stig Sæterbakken, “Afterword,” Ulven, 148. Maybe there’s a possibility of cynical laughter existing in this work—which may be equivalent to humor, but probably not comedy as I’ll be considering it. For some interesting differences between comedy and humor, see Dick Gregory (especially on timing and “sick humor,” the latter of which slides into humiliation or bullying), or Jean Wilund’s thoughts on comedy being “planned” and humor “pop[ping] out of nowhere”—and her assertion that “For the comedy writer, laughter is the point. For the writer who uses humor, laughter reinforces the point.”
Hiroko Oyamada, The Factory, transl. David Boyd (New York: New Directions, 2019), 26.
This and the following quotation in the paragraph are from Oyamada, 98.
I’m thinking, for example, of Shopgirl’s Jeremy (played by Jason Schwartzman in the film adaptation of Steve Martin’s novel), who instead of gradually sliding from lovable if undatable slob into bitter single man, “improves himself,” as one of the factory’s manuals might say—putting himself through a regimen of essentially growing up. And in a perhaps related variant, comedy based in or at least pointing at anger or offense at what it sees, like The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight, are often trying to rally people to change the situation: call representatives, sign petitions, take part in a boycott. Not feel like you’ve done your part by just watching, and not going into fits without at least trying to do something. (So maybe, according to Wilund’s definition, these shows are really, if the call to change is the real desire, more about humor than comedy.)
The famous first line of Anna Karenina, here translated by David Magarshack: “All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Leo Tolstoy (New York: Signet Classic, 1961), 17.
Or, as Nietzsche would say, ressentiment. And it’s bad enough when it plays out in an individual—but move to a societal level, as the Tea Party and then the MAGA/Greg Abbott/Ron DeSantis/etc. movements have shown, and the demand for “my unhappy way or the highway” becomes even more sinister.
The very things involved in, say, the Christian doctrine of original sin—a doctrine to which today’s infuriated US conservatives assert they believe in. I doubt they’d see the comedic aspect of, for example, Acts 20, when the poor kid Eutychus just can’t take one more past-midnight minute of Paul’s lengthy bloviating, falls asleep, and tumbles out the window.