The essence of comedy is the coming together of opposites, the juxtaposition of incongruous things. So we laugh when an adult speaks like a child or when a simple man finds himself lost amid the complexities of sophisticated society.
- Robert Barron
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, we'll inevitability see some classic Christmas movies invade the networks - among them, Jon Favreau's Elf starring Will Ferrell.
I distinctly remember seeing Elf in the theater eight years ago with my brothers. We chuckled and giggled throughout the film's opening twenty minutes, a bit unsure - but during the above scene, starting with the infamous taxi cab hit, chuckles turn to soundless, gasping, ecstatic laughter. I believe we came close to dying we laughed so hard.
Many will disagree, I'm sure - but for me, this scene with Will Ferrell is on par with some classic comedic scenes, because it taps into the essence of comedy: incongruity.
Why is Elf so funny?
Well, as noted by "How Stuff Works," there are generally three contending theories about humor. The first, formulated by Thomas Hobbes and others, is the "superiority theory," which says that we laugh to look down on someone else and feel better about ourselves. The second, the "relief theory," was most famously espoused by Freud. This theory says that humor is nothing more than a release of built-up psychic energy.
But the last, "'incongruity theory," is the most compelling, and the reigning theory of humor. It defines humor as a response to an incongruity - or, the unexpected union or people, words, or situations that don't fit together. If the people, words, or situations are completely opposite one another - it tends to be even funnier to us.
This theory of humor, as one article notes, has its roots in Aristotle: "In the Rhetoric (III, 2), Aristotle presents the earliest glimmer of an incongruity theory of humor, finding that the best way to get an audience to laugh is to setup an expectation and deliver something 'that gives a twist.'"
We see this element of "a twist" and incongruity in all great comedic moments. Take, for instance, Andy Kaufman's appearance on "The Dating Game." Andy plays a bemused foreigner completely incapable of responding to cues to be seductive and suave - the very opposite of the type of man we expect to see on such a show.
Or, take the top two movies on AFI's "100 Years, 100 Laughs," and what do you find? Some Like It Hot and Tootsie - two films centering around men having to dress up like women to get by.
This formula is precisely what we find in Elf, in which there are several layers of surprise and incongruity.
First, elves themselves may be cute, or even strange - but we don't really think of them as funny. Yet, when a adult human being stands among elves, dressed like an elf, convinced that he himself is an elf despite his obvious human appearance, there is an incongruity - and we laugh.
This formula is precisely what we find in Elf, in which there are several layers of surprise and incongruity.
First, elves themselves may be cute, or even strange - but we don't really think of them as funny. Yet, when a adult human being stands among elves, dressed like an elf, convinced that he himself is an elf despite his obvious human appearance, there is an incongruity - and we laugh.
This incongruity is accelerated when this deluded child-like elf-man leaves the north pole and finds himself in New York City, arguably the most sophisticated, complex city in the United States (just ask any outsider what they think of the subway system). The Big Apple, despite its lure, is often the polar opposite of simplicity, naivete, optimism, gentleness, and aimlessness; a city bound by chronos, not kairos; a place that runs on ticking clocks, not wandering quests.
So when we see our that lovable elf wandering through the city, we laugh because we spot another incongruity - the personification of bushy-tailed naivete and warmth blindly encountering a weary, even dangerous world of cynicism and coldness.
Of course, long before Will Ferrell's Buddy the elf, there was Chaplin, who mastered this type of incongruity with a character called "the little tramp." While the tramp was no stranger to malls, one of his greatest comedic moments occurs when that supremely gentle and unassuming character is sent off to war:
This scene, like most of Chaplin's work, is brilliant. We're delighted to watch our clumsy hero wander through a literal and figurative fog into the ranks of the enemy, where he politely excuses himself, drops his gun, and rushes away. The little tramp is clearly not a skillful warrior - quite the opposite.
If neither Elf nor The Great Dictator made you laugh, surely you're no match for The Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski. And, undoubtedly, the same principle of incongruity holds for "the dude."
The original idea of this film, Joel Coen notes, was a desire to create a "hopelessly complex plot" in the style of Raymond Chandler mysteries in which the lead character "unravels a mystery." In a classic noir or mystery film, the protaganist, the one who unravels the mystery, will normally be an acute and tenacious code-breaker with an encyclopedic memory that is personally invested in solving the mystery.
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| "The Dude" |
The elf, the tramp, and the dude - all three are hilariously gentle and simple creatures who unexpectedly suffer the slings and arrows of complex situations. We laugh at them - not to feel superior and look down on them, but to identify with them; to see our own strangeness and struggles reflected in their slapstick; to be reminded to not take ourselves so seriously.
All right, you say - so what?
Well, in the spirit of this article, we can take this comedic formula and make our own "surprise twist," pairing up the essence of comedy with something we expect to be incongruous with it; something we expect to be, as one writer notes, "dour, serious, or even grumpy."
GK Chesterton writes:
"A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded."
What Chesterton is talking about is Christmas.
He is reminding us that at the center of a Christocentric worldview is Christmas, and Christmas is a "sacred jest"; that the essence of "the bambino" in his crib is an incongruity not unlike the dude at Jackie Treehorn's crib.
Think about it: the incarnation of God on Christmas day follows this comedic formula exactly. A simple and gentle person (God) who would otherwise be happily "doing his thing," stumbles into a complicated, ugly, and dangerous situation (the world), and crazy surprises follow as a result. Thus joy, from this worldview, should not be peripheral to our lives, but central; joy is what we are oriented for, "the uproarious labour by which all things live." (No wonder Dante called his poem the Divine "Comedy").
Given this factual farce at the heart of the Christian religion, it's a wonder that hilarity and piety have been estranged; that "laughter and good red wine," as one poet put it, are no longer associated with a religious framework. Fr. James Martin, the "'official chaplain" of The Colbert Report has done his part to help recover the connection with his new book Between Heaven and Mirth:
The Colbert Report
But it's one thing to be playful - it's quite another to be hilarious just by virtue of your nature.
As Fr. Robert Barron notes in his new book, "it has been suggested that the heart of sin is taking oneself too seriously. Perhaps this is why God chose to save us by making us laugh." Whether we laugh at him or with him - if we're not laughing, we must be missing out on the comic element of the Christian story.
Because what could be more incongruous that the perfect, simple, powerful, eternal, and invisible creator of the cosmos being born a human being in a Palestinian cave on our sloppy and impermanent planet?
(For more on the relationship between spirituality and comedy, see our article "On the Religious Roots of Comedians.")
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