“That neither audiences nor critics noticed Lucy’s feminist strain is curious, suggesting that comedy is a powerful and unexamined weapon of subjugation.” (Mellencamp, Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud, emph. added)
What I found interesting in this weeks readings about television and the family was the ironic (is it?) continuous thread of concern in most, if not all, about the captivating effect of television on the viewer, especially the woman viewer. Modeleski interacts with Raymond Williams’ vision of television as a “fact of flow” but especially focuses on the ways in which daytime television has been specially curated to “capture” the housewife’s attention and thereby hold this audience captive both literally and ideologically. It is an attack of the senses, in which one is constantly reassured of the norms and values of the current hegemonic state ideals, encouraged to participate with them, whether by advertisement and praise for the new “domestic sphere” – as Spigel is concerned with – or via the parasocial enmeshment of daytime tv characters into into the pedestrian “days of our lives” as Modeleski examines. Yet what most sparked the most pause and attention from myself was this one line from Patricia Mellencamp’s piece on early sitcoms.
What caused this pause was the very diametric opinion I personally have of comedy. In my own education I was taught that, historically, comedy has always been a tool of dissension, if not outright rebellion. The only character in a kingdom who could get away with mocking a king was his fool. Often times the court jester was disguised as something innocuous, jingling motley clothes meant to soften reception for the things the joker said and did, as a fool only said foolish things, right? In reality, it was a dangerous game. Should the king stop being amused, the joker’s work could be interpreted as treason, if the king even needed to muster a legal reason for a death sentence. Dissension is often enough. The fool must play politics: he must know where his monarch’s limits are, where the court’s limits are, and he must be a tightrope walker, constantly playing at falling down, but always catching himself. It is very likely the court jester was in fact the most intelligent person in the court. After all, he played a literal game of life or death.
Throughout history we have had fools to tell us how we are foolish. Court jesters could mock a king, Roman plays could mock emperors, political cartoons have ever mocked whole governments. When one is citizen of an oppressive state, dissension often starts, and is spread, with laughter. And with it, sometimes, the bravery to defy state order. Today, in a vast entertainment landscape that has been standardized and molded by its overarching American capitalist structure, comedians take many forms. Some are more silly than others. All of them retain one point of commonality, however, which is that they all play with preconceptions of social order. They question status quo, and voice the daily peccadillos that plague all citizens, and declare it publicly in a way no one else can (easily anyway.) Sometimes we call these pronouncements “shock humor” - a joke that makes an audience gasp before laughing, because, oh my god, he said that!
And yes we have many activists who can do the job of telling the truth now, and act to create change. One thing comedians benefit from that pure political activism cannot is an extremely broad platform. Confirmation bias is a real stumbling block. While political activists will mostly preach to a choir or to opposition with deaf ears, comedy is rated E for Everyone, and everyone likes a laugh. It is disarming and meant to make the mind that takes it in relax. If a comic manages to get themselves a taped special, their platform increases dramatically. While in the end some audience members might not agree with every joke a comic makes, it does not change that it was made to them, and forced a combined questioning of some social qualm. Don’t get me wrong, it is impossible that all jokesters really have something to say. However, the point is perhaps no longer what they say, it is that it has become so normalized that they can say it. After all censorship has ever been a tool for regimes seeking absolute power.
Yet Mellencamp has a point. It stands to reason too that over time government may get wise and start to use this “tool of the people” for their own purposes, especially when they have any kind of control of the means of production. And so comedy has also been used as propaganda, a tool to unite a people against a common, ridiculous enemy. America’s wartime cartoons come to mind, depicting Hitler in various absurd and mocking ways as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck trounce him and his soldiers. This is a colorful example, but it is not beyond the pale to believe that hegemony will find its way into social comedy. Indeed, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the damaging aspects of hegemonic humor, not the least of which are racially charged jokes. Jokes about Jews, American Blacks, immigrants of all creeds, anyone “different” from some upheld status quo (the dominant group of a dominant system) is verily questioned and ridiculed, viewed sometimes more than the state as a dangerous entity. Because on the other side of questioning societal norm, comedy can instead uphold a social idyll, spotlighting points of structural weakness (which is to say, “other”) in their current environment in an attempt to galvanize a response to eradicate these “imperfections” and meet their idea of social utopia (speaking of Hitler…).
No, I do not deny that comedy can be a dangerous tool in a multitude of ways. The only point on which I disagree with Mellencamp is the contention that comedy is a controlling, or suppressive tool. Comedy by its very nature is disruptive. It disguises itself as harmless in order to let down guards in its audience, only to then force a questioning of whatever aspect of a given environment that they have accepted up to this point, or validates a question that has been sitting unspoken in their minds the whole time.
In this light, if we were to reexamine the I Love Lucy text that Mellencamp criticizes, I feel we would find a much more complicated situation before us. We can equate Lucy to the fool, colorfully and comically dancing around her stage to the audience’s delight. Ricky therefore becomes her mocked king, a symbol of social power in the period, the “man of the house.” That things always return to status quo at the end of the episode is a farce, an innocuous disguise. Lucy has already met her goal: she has questioned the power structure, and for safety returns to the net at night, but the question remains and begins to crack what is a very thick wall of patriarchal limitation. Indeed, Lucy actually does not need to continue her freedom fight at the end of each episode, because in reality she is already living her idyll. I personally have always delighted in the meta irony of I Love Lucy. After all, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were truly married, but in “real life” Lucille was the big star with all the money and power that went with it, while comparatively Desi was the trophy spouse. He did as she asked, starring on a show she ran and starred in, from a production company she founded. The ironic reality of I Love Lucy is that Lucy in the show is never in control, but Lucille is in control of everything. Lucy is not really trying to break free of her manacles in her show. She is showing us the way. The comic is not laughing at his own jokes. The jokes are for us.
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