University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Centre for Research into Film & Media

The Birth of Parody

Nihilism in Art-Comedy, from the Marx Brothers to South Park

047045549
Supervisor: Dr. Douglas Morrey
September 2005

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the MA in Film Studies in the Centre for
Research into Film and Media, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. I declare that this
work is entirely my own and that in all cases where I have drawn on the work of any
other author, either directly or indirectly, this is fully and specifically acknowledged in
the text of my dissertation and the work cited in the bibliographical references listed at
the end of the Dissertation.
Abstract

Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy inquires into the life-affirming qualities of tragic art and
its aesthetic sublimity, whilst denouncing the fraud of realist art. This dissertation will
extend this project by looking at another aesthetic category, the ridiculous or
laughable, and apply this to academically neglected comedy films.
These ridiculous films are identifiable by their divergence from Classical
Hollywood realist narratives, in addition to a successfully ludicrous, or playful,
approach to life. The amorality, surrealism and anarchy found in the films of the Marx
Brothers, for example, will allow us to term this genre “art-comedy”, because of its
resemblance to art-cinema. We will find that this genre reflects the strain of joyful
nihilism advocated by Nietzsche in response to the death of God; the Marx Brothers
relish the opportunity to be meaningless, so as to confront and affront the absurd.
Despite art-comedy’s neglected status, we will be able to conclude that such movies
represent a counter-cultural challenge to the prevailing intellectual paradigms and
moral establishments.
It was for these reasons that there was a strangulation of the genre in the
middle of the last century, and from it emerged a meaningful, psychoanalytic
comedy. It was now necessary to laugh at oneself, but never at society. In a bid to re-
appropriate some of the lost ridiculousness, auteurs such as Blake Edwards and
Chuck Jones used the parodic device of meta-cinema to use and abuse cinematic
language and narrative conventions. Although these parodies drew a firm line
between reel and real, Jean-Luc Godard employed pastiche to blur the division
between cinema and genuine conscious experience, enabling his laughs to have
truly absurd resonance. We will see that his laughter, however, like that of the
parodist Woody Allen, lacked the joy and optimism of the Marx Brothers. Allen
emerges as a disciple, a high priest of comedy, moving from his early ludicrous (if a
little meaningful) slapstick into a nihilistic consideration of how the Marx Brothers may
save your life – and indeed, endow it with meaning!
Finally we will see how parodies themselves are parodied in South Park.
Comedies, realist texts, real and mythological figures from throughout the culture, a
mountain town and four children become designations of intensity, all of equal
invalidity due to interminable, and hilariously meaningless conflict. These tropes
restore a Nietzschean and metaphorical approach to interpreting the world, and
reflect a similar species of nihilism, advocating laughter, and indefatigable will to
embrace, with pleasure, the horrors and absurdities of being.
Table of Contents

Abstract ............................................................................................................ 1
Table of Contents ............................................................................................. 2
Table of Figures ............................................................................................... 3
Acknowledgements .......................................................................................... 4

Meet The Marx Brothers................................................................................... 4

Introduction – From the Sublime to the Ridiculous............................................... 5

The Boys of South Park ................................................................................... 8

The Marx Brothers as Authors, Artists and Nihilists............................................. 9

Introduction.............................................................................................................. 9
The Brothers and their Surreal Disguises.............................................................. 11
Groucho ............................................................................................................. 11
Harpo ................................................................................................................. 13
Chico.................................................................................................................. 15
Zeppo................................................................................................................. 16
Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Play ................................................................... 17
Jokes and a Return to Childhood....................................................................... 17
The Laughter of the Nihilists .............................................................................. 18
When They Stopped Playing (And We Stopped Laughing) ............................... 20
Mental-Images and Dream-Images ....................................................................... 22

Art-Comedy and Parody ......................................................................................... 24

Wake up, doc!........................................................................................................ 24
Godard and the Laughter of Death........................................................................ 30
Three Examples of Post-Godard Parody............................................................... 35
1. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (T. Jones and Gilliam, 1975) ..................... 35
2. The “spoof”..................................................................................................... 36
3. Woody Allen: From faire-faux to quotation.................................................... 38

The Optimism in South Park .................................................................................. 42

Justifying South Park............................................................................................. 42
South Park and South Park; Simultaneously Real and Reel................................. 43
Ludicrous vs Ridiculous......................................................................................... 46

Conclusion............................................................................................................... 51
Filmography.................................................................................................... 54
Bibliography.................................................................................................... 57

2
Table of Figures

Figure 1 Screen capture of the Marx Brothers from Duck Soup (McCarey, 1933). 4
Captured by the author

Figure 2 Promotional still for South Park (Comedy Central, 1997+). 8

th
Taken on 29 August 2005 from Comedy Central at
http://press.comedycentral.com/images/press/gallery/h/southpark/southpark1.jpg

Figure 3 Two screen captures from Bad (Scorsese, 1987). 13

Captured by the author

Figure 4 Screen capture of Harpo Marx in bed with horse, Duck Soup. 15
Captured by the author

Figure 5 Screen capture of dog leaping from Harpo Marx’s chest, Duck Soup. 15
Captured by the author

Figure 6 Three screen captures of Duck Soup’s “mirror gag”. 16

Captured by the author

Figure 7 Screen capture from Fast and Furry-ous (Jones, 1949). 23

Captured by the author

Figure 8 Screen capture from Duck Amuck (Jones, 1953). 25

Captured by the author

Figure 9 Screen capture from The Pink Phink (Freleng, 1964). 28

Captured by the author

Figure 10 Screen capture of Woody Allen in his Stardust Memories (1980). 40

Captured by the author

Figure 11 Screen capture from “The Simpsons Already Did It”, South Park. 43
th
Downloaded from South Park Episodes on 29 August 2005 from
http://southpark.unas.cz/opisyodcinkow/sezon6/607.jpg

Figure 12 Still of “Chinpokomon”, South Park. 44

th
Captured by Gothamist, downloaded 29 August 2005 from
http://www.gothamist.com/images/2003_11_chinpokomon.jpg

Figure 13 Screen capture from “A Very Crappy Christmas”, South Park. 45

th
Captured by The BRM Official Club Website, downloaded 29 August 2005 from
http://scorcher_fx.tripod.com/BMRofficialsite/id1.html

Figure 14 Screen capture from “The Death Camp of Tolerance”, South Park. 47
Captured by the author

Figure 15 Screen capture from “Die Hippie Die”. 48

Captured by the author

3
Acknowledgements

For extensive and insightful comments on my drafts, I must offer my gratitude to my

supervisor, Dr. Douglas Morrey. I am also indebted to Dr. Ann Davies, who offered
advice on the title and the preliminary ideas that gave rise to this dissertation.

Meet The Marx Brothers

Figure 1 – (l-r) Zeppo, Chico, Harpo and Groucho.

But is this a still from Duck Soup or Hannah and Her Sisters?

4
Introduction – From the Sublime to the Ridiculous

This study is concerned with answering the following question: “Why will the films of
the Marx Brothers save your life?” The question is motivated by the conclusion to
Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), in which a suicidal atheist, driven
mad by the meaninglessness of a world without God, is able to find comfort,
community and purpose after a chance viewing of the Marxes’ Duck Soup (McCarey,
1933). In spite of the fact that books on Allen emerge at the same rate as his films,
only Borch-Jacobsen (1987) has seriously considered this question, using it to launch
a study into the French pornographer and philosopher Georges Bataille, and his
“Laughter of Being”, a laughter at the nothing behind everything. This dissertation is
devoted to why we laugh at films, in particular talkie comedies, how they are related
to the problem of a Godless world, and how these nihilistic films differ from the
traditional comic fare offered by the film industry, and in particular Hollywood.
Mast (1979: ix) made the point, whilst introducing his excellent study of the
whole history of film comedy, that there had been a shockingly small amount of
critical attention paid to comedy films. Fortunately, this seems to have provoked a
few more engaging titles devoted to the genre as a whole, including Neale and
Krutnik’s (1990) rather technical book, Karnink and Jenkin’s (1995) socially aware
study and Horton’s (1991) somewhat random bag of essays. Matthews (2000: 17)
correctly observes that the dearth in the research occurs due to a focus on spectacle
over narrative; too many theorists have been unable to assail comedy’s disregard for
convention. This is backed up by the fact that narrative studies (including those
above) will frequently concentrate on Hollywood romantic comedy, and the related
genres of screwball and social comedy. The genre has been exhaustively and
brilliantly covered by Cavell (1981), Babington and Evans (1989) and Sikov (1994),
the latter unravelling some of the more subversive aspects of laughter provocation.
The great directors of the genre have also had many books written about them, in
part due to their involvement in other Hollywood genres. Silent comedy, and its
masters have also been well covered; as Mast (1979: 23-26) points out, it is easy to
chronicle something finite, but the silent comedies also boasted artistry that many
have found lacking in the sound cinema’s lazy reliance on dialogue to propel
narrative. Mast argues however, that the anarchistic, early 30s comedies of the Marx
Brothers, W. C. Fields and Mae West were hybrids, highly respectful of the visual.
Jacques Tati also used sound uniquely, as his films are virtually free from dialogue,
with sound effects dubbed on later. Yet none of these names can boast substantial

5
research (the Marx Brothers will receive a full literary review in Chapter 1); nor can
the groundbreaking cartoon shorts produced by Warner Bros. and MGM, although
introductory texts by Bordwell and Thompson (2004) and Nelmes (2003) both
discuss Duck Amuck (Jones, 1953), which is to be a key text in this dissertation. The
much-maligned slapstick of Jerry Lewis, Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges is
critically neglected, although Horton (1991: 25-42; 174-205) has provided a recent
exception to this. Blake Edwards, Monty Python, and the Hollywood “spoof” genre
have also been largely ignored, although Luhr and Lehman (1989) is devoted to
Edwards the auteur (Neale and Krutnik also discuss some of the jokes in the Panther
films), whilst Matthews (2000: 12-51) briefly concerns herself with Python and parody
before becoming concerned with the right-wing ethics of Steve Martin and the
domestic comedy genre.
This study is not merely devoted to looking at some under-appreciated films,
but at developing a genealogy of laughter to explain why they are under-appreciated,
and how they differ from conventional films and comedies. The laughter of many
theorists is concerned with cultural or political readings, like Matthews and Karnink
and Jenkins, often deriving from Russian literary criticism, especially Bakhtin. The
question of how one’s life can acquire meaning through the watching of the Marx
Brothers however, demands a philosophical and psychological response; certainly
the cultural and political dimensions of Allen’s films always take a back seat to his
existential crises.
Bergson believed that we laugh at human action being reduced to mechanical
action. Mast (1979: 3-4), who makes much use of this, says that the theory works
well with certain varieties of gag, but not comic narrative. I disagree: it would appear
to explain much of Tati’s or Wile E. Coyote’s narrative struggle with a mechanised
world, whilst never adding anything to a study of the Marx Brothers’ entirely organic
anarchy on the gag or narrative level.
This being film studies, there is also a healthy subscription (led perhaps by
Neale and Krutnik) for psychoanalysis, and Freud’s (1905) theory of jokes. Although
this is important, we will see in Chapter 1 that whilst this helps us understand the
ludicrous (the playful) origins of humorous action, it does not help us comprehend the
sheer philosophical weight of the ridiculous (the laughable) 1 . Palmer’s reading of the
“logic of the absurd” suggests that laughter is caused by a naked gap between our
expectations (Neale and Krutnik, 1990: 68-71). This is fine, except that it is clearly

1
Neale and Krutnik (1990: 66) use Olsen’s distinction between ridiculousness and
ludicrousness. The former is intentional, the latter unintentional. This distinction was, it
seems, drawn without respect for either etymology or common sense.

6
Kant’s (1790: 333) theory: “Laughter is an affect that arises if a tense expectation is
transformed into nothing”. Kant however, fails to note the similarity between the
ridiculous and the sublime, which is an expectation exceeded by all measure. What is
meant by expectation is the transcendental aesthetic of space, time and reason that
clothes our phenomenal experience. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), where Nietzsche
attempts to apply the sublime to tragic art, he reflects that whilst sublimity humbles
horror, comedy releases us from the “repellence of the absurd” (1993: 40). Sadly this
is not pursued further, although Nietzsche’s laughter re-occurs as a major theme
throughout his work. Despite the libraries of books available on Nietzsche, only
Bataille has entered into a detailed discussion of his laughter, and although there are
very few books on Bataille, there is as we have seen, a large essay devoted to his
laughter! The principal task of this dissertation will be, therefore, to uncover
Nietzsche’s theory of the ridiculous and its relation to the absurd, re-appropriate and
distinguish it from Bataille’s and see how it can be applied theoretically to comedy
films and the question posed in the first line. 2
A similar attempt has already been made for literature. Hauck (1971: 3-8)
mocks Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus (1942) for its humourlessness, but states that
American humorists have long been involved in the absurd act of creation of
meaninglessness, in being ludicrous, in being subject to the ridiculous: they are
“cheerful nihilists”, just like Sisyphus – happy, in spite of everything (or rather,
nothing).
Although in the first chapter we will be able to define the Marx Brothers and
Nietzsche as cheerful nihilists, ludicrous (in action) and ridiculous (to the receiver) we
will note a decline in this cheer; after the Second World War ridiculous comedy
becomes psychoanalytic and meaningful. To escape the perceived limitation of
ridiculousness by psychology however, many filmmakers, in an attempt to be
ludicrous, resort to modes of parody. We will be surveying these films and
filmmakers, many of whom are listed above, in the second chapter. We will see that
Bataille and Allen do share a similar laughter – albeit of a rather less joyous variety to
the Marxes and Nietzsche. Little has been written about cinematic parody and meta-
cinema 3 aside from Siska (1979), but there is a vast amount of material on literary

2
It is important to note that due to the sprawling and idiosyncratic nature of the volumes
written by these two authors, the careful selection of secondary texts will be imperative.
3
Mamber (in Horton, 1991: 79-90) went “In Search of a Radical Metacinema”. Unfortunately
he was a little too radical, finding two films that were not meta-cinematic in the slightest (The
Shining (1980) and The King of Comedy (1983)). Although he does successfully identify The
Purple Rose of Cairo (Allen, 1985) he manages to say absolutely nothing about why Allen
might have employed the device.

7
parody (Rose, 1993; Waugh, 1984). Post-modern (Hutcheon, 2002) and post-
structuralist (Ulmer, 1987) approaches are also relevant here.
In the final chapter we will look at the emergence of a genre of animated TV
sitcoms, argue for their significance in film studies as cinematic parodies, and find
within them the mad and playful nihilism of Nietzsche’s aphorisms (with the help of
Deleuze’s (1973) masterful interpretation). The cartoon to be analysed is South Park
(Comedy Central, 1997+), which, due to its comparative newness, has yet to be
subjected to much academic scrutiny. Only Irwin et al’s (2001) book on The
Simpsons (Fox, 1989+) and Larsen’s (2001) essay on South Park will be of
relevance. Although Larsen cites many of the same thinkers as me, his focus is
undoubtedly the defecatory humour within South Park, which, whilst amusing, serves
only cultural interpretations. The paucity of sources will, therefore, require me to
indulge in close textual analysis of episodes.
Should the dissertation be successful, the case could be made for more
attention to be paid, both to comedy films, and to neglected philosophical approaches
to film studies.

The Boys of South Park

Figure 2 – (l-r) Kenny, Cartman, Kyle and Stan confront “Death”.

8
The Marx Brothers as Authors, Artists and Nihilists

Introduction

Used by Woody Allen to examine the closeness of tragedy and comedy by

setting them alongside the existential issues explored by more “serious” filmmakers,
the Marx Brothers, amongst the first talkie film comedians, differ profoundly from
most of those that have succeeded them. Their embodiment of a wilful pre Hay’s
Code “Clown Comedy” (Karnink and Jenkins, 1995: 156) has been unmatched. In
spite of the Great Depression they appear to have possessed an optimism that the
Hay’s Code frowned upon, and that filmmakers have struggled to repossess through
the modernist and post-modernist eras. This optimism, expressed through a
Nietzschean will to power, or rather, to interpret (Vattimo, 1985: 124), works to
subdue fraudulent social orders and expectations, and belongs outside the rigidity of
Hollywood morality. They could be considered part of art-cinema, a realm typically
dominated by cerebral films that deliberate on issues such as existence, identity,
meaning and man’s relation to the world and others. Using Deleuze (1983, 1985) and
Bordwell (1985) we will see that the Marx Brothers reflect, unconsciously or
otherwise, the concerns of the tradition.
We will begin by looking briefly at the history of the Brothers and the patchy
critical history surrounding them. Then, after looking at each brother, we will dissect
their use of humour with an eye to surrealism and to Freud. The themes thrown up by
this will lead us inexorably to Nietzsche, whom, for the sake of future chapters, it will
be necessary to distinguish from Bataille, whose theory of laughter Borch-Jacobsen
(1987) relates the Marxes to. We will need to distinguish early Marx Brothers from
late Marx Brothers, for this is the difference between their art-films and their
Hollywood films. Finally, we will set the Marxes’ Clown Comedy apart from the genre
of Comedian Comedy and other, more pessimistic varieties of Clown Comedy
including the films of Jacques Tati, Chuck Jones and Jerry Lewis.
Work on the Marx Brothers has been sketchy, and the books and essays
devoted to them (such as Eyles, 1974 and Jordan, 1975) are highly descriptive and
subjective, frequently focusing on what they enjoy or dislike, rather than on analysing
the formal aspects of the Marx Brothers’ contribution to the cinema. Superior
engagement with their films is to be found in the best books on the comedy genre
(Neale and Krutnik, 1990; Karnink and Jenkins, 1995; Charney, 1978; Mast, 1979)
who find the Marxes’ important, both in their genealogical place in comedy film, but
also because of their unique uses of humour. Nevertheless, all of these books focus

9
on the more traditional cultural (frequently Bakhtinian) readings of comic discourse
that here we are moving away from in favour of something more aesthetic. The most
interesting reading of the Marx Brothers, is also the most aesthetic, and comes from
Deleuze (1983; 1985), who we will be looking at in more detail later. Obtuse, but
fascinating philosophical readings are also available from Žižek (1991) and Barthes
(made even more incomprehensible by Ullmer, 1987). Žižek (1991: 73) suggests that
a Groucho Marx gag illustrates that, “man alone is capable of deceiving by means of
truth itself”. This is noteworthy as much of my argument shall focus on how, in the
Nietzschean spirit, the Marx Brothers cast doubt on there being a “true world”.
Barthes, on the other hand, suggests that, on viewing their Night at the Opera
(Wood, 1935): “The logical future of metaphor would therefore be the gag” (in Ulmer,
1987: 46). Barthes was excited by the exploration of language conducted by the
Marxes’ use of puns, and Ulmer (1986: 56) suggests that pedagogy may be
improved by placing the Marxes’ nonsense alongside common-sense and science. It
will be argued here that the Marxes produce metaphors rather than similes, another
link to Nietzsche.
Naturally, much of the difficulty in finding references is due to the quality of
genre readings over auteurial readings. It is quite difficult to say that the Marx
Brothers were auteurs when they did not write, direct or produce their movies, which
were, moreover, made in the studio system. Nevertheless, each film employs each
brother in the same way as in the previous film, each time with the same traits and
personae. These characteristics were the creation of their respective owners and
developed whilst they were Vaudeville performers, and in each case I think it is
possible to show how these personae embody distinct aspects of their world-views
and personalities. As a result, this chapter will not be looking closely at the directors’
contributions to the films; it will become clear that the Marxes treated their directors
and the Hollywood system with a disdain similar to that they employ within the films.
Admittedly, Leo McCarey appears to have had more understanding of the Brothers
than the other directors, and several of his shots from Duck Soup will be discussed.
Common to each brother, and an important point, is that they were the
children of émigré European Jewish parents, and they were brought up in an
impoverished New York ghetto. After their Broadway successes, their plays The
Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers were filmed by Paramount (Florey and Santley,
1929; Heerman, 1930). This led to three more Paramount releases: Monkey
Business (McLeod, 1931), Horse Feathers (McLeod, 1932) and Duck Soup. These
five are the films being considered here, and in the next section we will be looking at
the personalities the Marx Brothers portray in them. We will start with Groucho, the
man who Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan (1979) gives as a reason for living.

10
 The Brothers and their Surreal Disguises

Groucho

Groucho, named as such because of his dour world-view and financial

prudence (“grouch-bag”), always wore a striking costume, which was later marketed
and became a classic disguise. With his painted-on moustache, bushy eyebrows,
frock coat and cigar, he looks very much like a self-assured middle-aged man worthy
of respect – or at least he would, if it were not so blatantly a costume! Those around
him do not appear to notice this, and in most of the films he is received as famous,
courageous and successful; he plays an hotelier, an African explorer, a college dean
and a dictator 4 . Groucho’s characters have clearly conned their way through life into
privilege. We never witness any of the acts of daring people describe, or see him
work at the jobs he has. His brave African explorer faints at the sight of a butterfly!
He seems very much in the spirit of Jeffrey Archer; Eyles (1974: 156-157) suggests
that Senator McCarthy was also in the Groucho mould, using illogic and arbitrary
associations against his enemies, and getting away with it. If his costume is therefore
a tool to infiltrate high society, it is necessary to mask his origins as a Jew from the
ghetto, hence his character has pompous Anglo-Saxon names such as Jeffrey T.
Spaulding and Rufus T. Firefly. The characters in the films have no reason to suspect
he is not a perfect WASP.
One might expect that his jokes would give him away. Groucho has three
types of joke: reams of nonsense, cruel insults and pathetic physical inadequacy. His
nonsense features expressively delivered, but empty assertions: “Chicolini here may
talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don't let that fool you: he really is an idiot”;
statements where the double meaning of a word changes the entire meaning of the
sentence, leading to a surreal image: “I got a good mind to join a club and beat you
over the head with it” and questions for which there are no answers: “Now, what is it
that has four pairs of pants, lives in Philadelphia, and it never rains but it pours?”.
Deleuze (1983: 199) suggests that he is a “man of interpretations, of symbolic acts
and abstract relations […] Groucho pushes the art of interpretation to its final degree
because he is the master of reasoning, of arguments and syllogisms which find a
pure expression in nonsense.” His understanding of thought (for he knows what
everyone else is thinking (Eyles, 1974: 20)) and language finds expression in a
rhetoric beyond reply. The gravity of a situation may be undermined by an avalanche

4
Monkey Business is an exception to this rule, although Groucho was reportedly unhappy
with the way the film was written (Eyles, 1974: 62).

11
of clichés, or the semantic terms giving concepts significance could be taken apart.
When he does not have the room to swing a cat – the problem is that he has neither
the room nor the cat. More seriously it could be the ignorance of a general who
insists that trenches be bought rather than dug. Eyles (1974: 22) suggests that:
“Groucho so misuses the clichés of form and expression that they stand exposed for
the tricks of argument they so often are.” Like his ridiculous costume, his use of
language mocks those who believe in their institution. We are told, in a logical
system, that God must exist – this is the Ontological argument. Groucho’s point is
that you can prove anything you want with the right turn of phrase. Much of his illogic
also derives from his selective memory, which is part of the Ontological argument’s
farce: in a logical system, pink broccoli exists as readily as God.
Groucho even reinterprets the rules of film form, he seems embarrassed by
the communal singing of songs, he addresses the camera in Horse Feathers and
Animal Crackers, has a “strange interlude” and soliloquy in Animal Crackers and
continually diverts attention from the plot with fruitless assertions and actions, e.g.
handing Margaret Dumont a playing card and telling her to keep it. These things
prevent a subjective association with him as a lead character. One sees through the
eyes of a Hollywood hero, but one cannot if he turns his eyes back on you, and
especially if he diverts your attention from the story you are meant to be following.
The plot is subordinate to events and experience; much like life, it does not follow a
coherent narrative. A character in a realist narrative is bound by the plot; the Marxes
are not. Much like Sartre’s existentialism whereby nothing is the boundary; to be
limited by narrative is to be in bad faith.
Groucho’s transgression of norms would initially appear to be carnivalesque.
As Kristeva (in Stallybrass and White, 1986: 201) says: “Carnivalesque discourse
breaks through the laws of a language censored by grammar and semantics and, at
the same time, is a social and political protest.” Yet, as Karnink and Jenkins (1995:
274) argue: “The Marx Brothers express a demand for personal freedom and self-
expression; we recall what makes them different from other characters, not what
makes them human”. The carnival is a shared occasion, sanctioned by society in a
protest against itself. Bound by words and society, the Marxes are an onslaught
against it. This is why Groucho communicates in insults.
In his soliloquy he procrastinates about love with his suitors, again using the
double meaning of a word: “How happy I could be with either of these two if both of
them just went away” or using a cliché to savage someone: “You're just wasting your
breath, and that's no great loss either”. These are directed at everyone, in particular
the highfaluting types who regard him as charming in spite of his bad manners. As
Eyles (1974: 36) says, the WASPs are unable to see through their own image of a

12
person. They are incapable of interpretation, and although unconditionally accepting
of Groucho, they are dismissive of Chico and Harpo. It sometimes seems as though
Groucho infiltrated society only to dismantle it. As Mast (1979: 282) suggests, talk
becomes a weapon; the insults are carried away on the stream of selective memory
and false inferences. It becomes like a dream, whereby the listener is captivated and
carried away from their objection. In Monkey Business, he faces down a mobster by
reinterpreting his assertions, asking him ridiculous questions, and belittling his gun
and intellect. As Deleuze will compare Tati and Lewis’ comedies to ballet, it seems
fitting to suggest that Groucho’s movement is like Michael Jackson’s combat
dancing. When Scorsese was able to interpret it for Bad (1987), the final shot (Figure
3 – right) reveals a delicate and pale man, suggesting that Jackson’s gang of
dancers (Figure 3 - left) was a lie, and that he had bluffed his way through Wesley
Snipe’s brute force with a reinterpretation of space and sound. Against the force of
the abiding morality and the strength of social powers, the ingenious (or perhaps the
ingenuous) can always find a way around.

Figure 3

This then is the admission of Groucho, the ghetto child in the surreal disguise.
One must fight with what one has, and Groucho is certainly without strength and
dexterity. He is clearly the slightest Brother, he frequently exhibits cowardice, and he
is useless with objects, amusingly man-handling a ball in Duck Soup. The muscular
and adroit brother is Harpo, who, by way of coincidence, is also the one who cannot
fight with words.

Harpo

Dressed in a shabby overcoat and a big curly wig, Harpo is Groucho’s polar
opposite. Far from a foothold in society, he is lucky if he has a name or a job; in
Animal Crackers he is introduced as the Professor, only for someone to take his coat
and the whole one-piece academic costume with it. He cannot crack jokes because

13
he is dumb, but as Mast (1979: 283) says, using the talkie cinema for silence was
somewhat innovative!
He appears to be completely devoid of social etiquette: he is a kleptomaniac,
enjoys getting into fights and chasing women, and he is prone to random acts of
destruction and, by putting his legs between people’s armpits, proximity. One could
say he was the animal found in four of these films’ titles, and his actions bear striking
similarities to those of dogs. Dogs play incessantly, and they do this by chasing those
who run away, by fighting, by stealing and destroying things. Leo McCarey seems to
agree with me; in Duck Soup Harpo sports a kennel tattoo. When Harpo cuts neck-
ties (Mast, 1979: 284), banishing the world of work, he perhaps shows us why we
have dogs – for the play, and the complete lack of respect for social humility they
represent. Moreover, Matthews (1971: 32) argues that the nature of Harpo’s fetishes
and impulses is surreal and, as such, represents unconscious desires. Certainly, he
thinks that his kleptomania and girl chasing is sexually motivated, and I also think
that the repression of childhood is expressed through Harpo, and this is why people
own dogs. Like a dog or a child, he is capable of displaying an angelic innocence and
naivety that enables people to forgive his aberrance. Understandably then, the real
Harpo was described as, “a famously well-loved man. He’d walk into a room and
dogs and children would go to him” (Krasna, in Norman, 1981: 101).

Figure 4 Figure 5

His are often the most surreal images; in a shot that could be from L’âge d’or
(Buñuel, 1930) he is found in bed with a horse (Figure 4), and a dog emerges from
his tattoo (Figure 5). Eyles (1974: 27) suggests that Harpo is “not bound by the
limitations of words”. If Groucho explored these limits, Harpo takes on the
reinterpretation of conceptual schema through music and his gentle harp playing. He
also constructs a dream-like language by presenting various of his hoarded objects
to make visual puns, such as in the Animal Crackers gag where he presents a flute,

14
fish, flask, flush and some flesh in response to Chico’s demand for a flash. These, his
mimes, whistles, horn honks and experiments with musical instruments create visual
and sound imagery that is as rich as it is unconventional; a reinterpretation of
communication. Frequently, existentialist writers have criticised the inauthenticity of
idle chatter and the workmanlike utilisation of tools. One would never get this from
Harpo as every object and action is used to make a statement, as honest as it is
deviant from social conventions. Only one person appears to be able to figure out
Harpo’s associations however, and that is Chico.

Chico

Named Chicko for his womanising ways, he speaks in the films with an Italian
accent that he originally sported whilst hustling in New York. As an inveterate
gambler, he, more than the others, actually required a false identity to survive. Eyles
(1974: 25) cannot abide his “stupidity”, but this is to misunderstand the disingenuous
nature of the disguise that is being employed. “How did you become an Italian?” asks
a fellow conman in Animal Crackers. Unlike Groucho, and the WASPs, who perch in
high society, Chico does his best to remain on the periphery – he is the immigrant
who will not melt into the American Dream pot. Groucho is the corrupt leader who
arises from it, showing its rules for the lies they are. Chico’s false identity does not
need to adapt to survive, because of its assumed stupidity and its interpersonal
prowess. Chico often appears to know people in the films, and he always knows
Harpo. As Deleuze (1983: 199) says, Chico uses Harpo’s fetishism to, “take on
action, the initiative, the duel with the milieu, the strategy of effort and resistance”.
This action takes the form of a nonsense suited to each individual situation. He feigns
ignorance against the villains by making puns (e.g. why-a-duck/viaduct; why-a-
fence/wire fence), he cracks one-liners and spouts illogic to baffle his employers, he
plays piano in a visually entertaining way to charm high society, he spars with Harpo,
and he is the only person who can turn Groucho’s illogic against him; as Mast (1979:
282) says, he even pretends to misunderstand illogic, leading to surreal
conversations, such as the meetings and lives of facial hair in Monkey Business. He
is the gland holding the Marx Brothers together, forever hoarding ways to
communicate and interpret the communications of others, but never revealing his
authentic identity or understanding. Perhaps he never really has one, he is the
impassive act of the combination of consciousness.
A film with just Groucho and Harpo could not work because they cannot
communicate. In Duck Soup, Harpo is disguised as Groucho, and they repel each
other’s mirror image for several minutes. It is only Chico’s casual intervention as a

15
third Groucho that shatters the mirror and takes them to the next scene (Figure 6).
Although Groucho and Harpo give rise to events, it is Chico who applies them to
each other, to society, and enabling them to fly up onto the screen as a series of
related (perhaps conjoined but more probably disjoined) events. It is fitting then, that
it was Chico who charmed/inveigled most of the Brothers’ contracts.

Figure 6 – Chico breaks the mirror

Zeppo

Jordan (1975: 114-115) is at a loss to understand why Zeppo appears to be

like the “insipid” characters populating the bit parts of the films. His minute roles,
usually as a secretary with a white-collar name like Jamison, see him employed as a
straight man. On the stage he was the understudy to his brothers and apparently a
good Groucho, meaning he must have been a versatile comic. Perhaps the problem
is that there is no room for a fourth comic type; as Hirsch (1981: 189) says, the four-
person ensemble is very rare in comedy – South Park is another that employs it. So
why include Zeppo in the films? He seems to represent that antithesis of
consciousness that links every solipsist, however tentatively, to the world. In our lives
we are the stars of a narrative peopled by insipid characters. Secretaries are not
celebrated, they are perceived as peripheral. Yet it is they that frequently allow the
world to function, and so the one brother who does not wear a disguise is offering the
reality of film form and star system for our scrutiny. If society takes people for
granted, it would be wrong for the Marx Brothers to treat their stardom without irony.

16
 Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Play

Jokes and a Return to Childhood

Understandably, the Marx Brothers have frequently been likened to the

surrealists (Matthews, 1971: 29-37; Artaud, 1974) due to the peculiar imagery and
the breakdown of memory and causation. As surrealism often drew on Freud’s
theories regarding dreams, it makes sense to look at the Marx Brothers in relation to
Freud’s theory of jokes.
Jokes originate in the unconscious (Freud, 1905: 225), although they are
forged by play in childhood (Freud, 1905: 227), which is a process of investigation
into, particularly, a play with words. We have seen above how Groucho, Harpo and
Chico all have unique, humorous ways of reinterpreting language and
communication.
According to Freud (1905: 230), jokes share certain similarities with dreams,
such as the same collapsing of boundaries of space and time, memory, logic and
causation. When dreaming, one image inexorably leads to another, often with no
motivation or physical possibility, but always with immense self-confidence. The Marx
Brothers go from one impossibility to the next, be it in conversation, action, or
narrative, just like a dream. Freud suggests that such humour is linked to a pre-social
childhood unrestrained by the world. For children, the world is not dangerous; it is a
game, ludic (Borch-Jacobsen, 1987: 738), so humour restores us to that carefree
state of play, regaining the lost pleasure of childhood happiness (Freud, 1905: 302).
Yet the Marxes are joking, not dreaming. Deleuze (1973: 143-144) says that Freud
(with Karl Marx) formed the dawn of our intellectual culture; Freud was involved in
codifying madness, and in this context explaining away laughter as a form of anxiety
– laughter is wrong, it is for children. According to Nietzsche, “we are still only
children” (Deleuze, 1973: 144), in which case there is no need for restraint or the
cessation of the ludic. The Marxes, and Nietzsche are unrestrained – and humorous
(Deleuze, 1973: 147).
This comparison seems well-founded; both Nietzsche and the Marx Brothers
have been called nihilists (McCann, 1990: 70-71), and as Nietzsche says in the sub-
title to Twilight of the Idols (1889), philosophy should be conducted with a hammer,
which, coincidentally or otherwise, is the name of Groucho’s character in The
Cocoanuts.

17
The Laughter of the Nihilists

Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-

rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.
Aye, for the game of creating, my brethren, there is needed a holy Yea unto
life: its own will willeth now the spirit; his own world winneth the world’s outcast.
Nietzsche, 1997: 22

As this quote suggests, we are looking at the Marxes’ childish surrealism as

distinctly life affirming in its deconstruction of old values. One might also suggest,
psychoanalytically, that they are mad. Madness is anti-social, and it is the wellspring
of cheerfulness in the Gay Science (2001: 77), the science of non-agreement. It is
the madman who proclaims the boldest deconstruction, that of the death of God, in
favour of living people living their lives, rather than focusing on their deaths
(Nietzsche, 2001: 158). Madness is also the source of comic and tragic art (Sallis,
1991: 110 and n. 23), and is found in the dreams of Apollo and the intoxication of
Dionysus. It is only in the drunken dreams responsible for our will to interpret that we
can be happy. Curiously, Marx writer S.J. Perelman’s description of a “harpist
afflicted with satyriasis” (in Norman, 1981: 98) evokes both Apollo’s lyre playing, and
Dionysus’ mischievous, accomplices. This would naturally explain Harpo’s
hippophilia!
So the Marx Brothers must be mad; they are irrational and illogical, especially
with regard to language. As Vattimo (1985: 27-28) understands Nietzsche, language
is tied to relations of power in society. Some “lies” uttered within the language
become “truth” and therefore morality. There are other lies, called art, and these are
recognisable as untruth and they demonstrate the untruth of the true lies. As we said
earlier, Sartre’s bad faith is a true lie (a mask), the Marx Brothers’ masks and
disguises are clearly recognisable as untruths, they are comic and artistic, and they
use them to explore the untruth of the moral truths.
Art suffers however - the Platonic art, which, like Hollywood is founded on
rationality and morality, cannot call itself comedy or tragedy, because it is a decadent
lie posing as truth. Nietzsche despises the moral art, because it is only the tragic and
comic, or “mad” art that can help us bear life (Vattimo, 1985: 25), or, in the case of
comedy, to tame absurdity (Nietzsche, 1993: 40). The enjoyment of tragedy and
comedy is open only to those who can bear to live without ultimate solutions
(Vattimo, 1985: 140), for these too would be lies, and the Will to Power is accessible

18
only through constant reinterpretation and investigation (Vattimo, 1985: 124), which
must be expressed, not just by enjoying art, but by being an artist in one’s approach
towards life.
Nietzsche and the Marxes both gunned for the same moral idols: causation
(Nietzsche, 2001: 113), as we have discussed, and history (Vattimo, 1985: 80) which
the Marxes make light of with their musical medleys and costume changes towards
the end of Duck Soup (Mast, 1979: 285). The chaos in Horse Feather’s college also
satirises the institutionalising of knowledge.
As Ansell-Pearson (1992: 313) says whilst discussing Nietzsche’s overman,
textual deconstruction is involved in breaking down the foundations on which
knowledge and philosophy are based. When deconstructed, there is a “free play of
signs in which new, more complex hybrid identities can be created”. It follows then
that Aycock (1993: para. 1) should suggest that a deconstructionist writer such as
Derrida is “playful” due to his language games and his puns. The task of philosophy
has become the game of deconstruction and interpretation; that of the child who has
no need of final solutions, and the madman who could not possibly accept them. We
can therefore understand Artaud’s remark that the Marx Brothers are destroyers of
“all reality in the mind” (in Matthews, 1971: 33). The Marxes and Nietzsche are not
involved in a Freudian game of revisiting the unconscious for ephemeral happiness,
but in carving up the perceived truth and reality of the ego and superego.
Philosophers must indulge in “golden laughter” at the expense of the
seriousness of morality (Nietzsche, 1990: 218). There is nothing to be serious about,
or rather there is nothing more than the seriousness of a child at play (Nietzsche,
1990: 94). The “insipid” characters in the Marx Brothers film do not laugh, and,
perhaps most tellingly, they do not question. Even the ego, the true identity is
deprived in Nietzsche as it is in the Marx Brothers: “the subject is not a given, but
something fabricated, something added on” (in Vattimo, 1985: 125).
Certainly Bataille (1992: 152) agreed with this interpretation of Nietzsche as
the philosopher of play. Indeed, as comedy tames absurdity, it becomes apparent
that play “or uselessness” amounts to the same thing - fundamental absurdity.
Similarly he prefers to remain in interpretation rather than to become conceptual.
This is the problem of laughter for him, as it is part of interpretation and therefore
interpreting, it cannot be defined. Borch-Jacobsen (1987: 748) makes an attempt
however: What is laughed at is drained of being, becoming nothing but joy. Laughter
becomes sovereign (golden?) because he who is laughing appropriates the being of
that which is laughed at. Yet this theory seems as domineering as the societies and
values it is levelled against – the sucking of being into a laughing “I”. No wonder
Sartre said it was “bitter and strained” (in Bataille, 1992: xiv); it is laughter at the dead

19
(Borch-Jacobsen, 1987: 740) and the fallen. Nietzsche and Sartre did not concern
themselves with death; they were both concerned with life and with living life free
from restraint. It also suffers one other major flaw. “Bataille” liked to think he was the
same as “Nietzsche” (Noys, 2000: 37) and hence he wrote his journal On Nietzsche.
Bataille is rigidly subjectivising himself, and, in the belief that Nietzsche is laughing
with him from the grave, appropriating his corpse.
The Marxes too are disinterested in cadavers as images of themselves in
eternity. Their play and the laughter it provokes are a direct affront against
restrictions preventing the living of life in life – although Allen and Godard all have a
certain death fetish, this is not apparent with the Marx Brothers. The task of this
dissertation in the future chapters is to consider how this pessimism comes about.
Furthermore, the Marxes are not subjectified. Unlike Allen who is (perhaps
ridiculously, but tellingly) accused of “playing himself”, of placing his subjectivity on
celluloid, the four masked and doubly pseudonymed Marxes have continually
oscillating identities due to their inadherence to dogma. In Duck Soup we see
Groucho prosecuting Chico, moments later defending him, singing and dancing with
him, and going to war with him. No one ever sees a real person. Nor has anyone
ever seen Nietzsche; the crippled, shy, modest individual wrote like Groucho spoke
and Jackson danced – in flamboyant performances apparently transcending their
societal selves.

When They Stopped Playing (And We Stopped Laughing)

An adult relieves his heart from its terrors and doubles happiness by turning it into a
story. A child creates the entire event anew and starts again right from the beginning
Benjamin, 1999: 120

The birth of parody may well be due to this sagacious observation; Welles famously
said that making films was like playing with trains, but it seems that later comedies
fall into parody to tell the story of stories! The Marx Brothers’ films are not parodies,
and they do not even appear to be stories. This childishness, doubtlessly a
permissible experiment at the beginning of sound cinema differentiates their films
from Classical Hollywood, and places them closer to art-cinema.
Obviously this was necessary to avoid Hollywood morality and causality. It is
the insipid characters who choose to have a plot, especially in The Cocoanuts, the
only Paramount Marx film with a relevant title (it is set on Cocoanut Beach), and it is
the Marx Brothers who interrupt it, and bring the films to farcical conclusions. Not

20
only is there no plot, but a story space impossible to explicate – where did the
characters come from? Where will they go after?
Mast (1979: 287) takes all this to be a poor use of the new talkie cinema, but
it seems that the directors were confused by what they were faced with. Groucho
said of the directors of Cocoanuts that, “one of them didn’t understand English and
the other didn’t understand Harpo” (in Eyles, 1974: 16). Indeed, their fights with
directors and disrespectful conduct on the sets (Eyles, 1974: 17) would explain much
of the chaos. Victor Heerman resorted to locking them in cells on set!
Bordwell (1985: 157) states that a Classical Hollywood film should have a
heterosexual love story and a work related success story, both of which must be
clearly resolved by the end. The Paramount Marx films are free of, or exterminate
these stories, let alone have resolutions – especially Animal Crackers, which
concludes with Harpo knocking everyone out, including himself. Certainly, the films
seldom employ continuity editing or direction in such a way as to open up a coherent
space-time.
When realism represents coherence amongst events, the Marxes clearly
differ, and match up well to Bordwell’s (1985: 206-207) definition of art-cinema. They
certainly explore themes such as “alienation” and “communication” with their
respective detachments from society and from normal language use, but most
crucially, it explores character over plot, and just as the Marxes are involved in the
interpretation of their own characters, so are we. Also in common is the use of non-
actors (clowns), and there being no causality or deadlines – a Marx film could
feasibly run continuously.
Duck Soup did not run continuously, it flopped, and Paramount sacked the
brothers. Jenkins and Krutnik (1995: 156) would call the Paramount films “Clown
comedy” because a clown is socially aberrant – Fields is another example – whilst
Bob Hope can be socially integrated and is therefore a comedian. There was
increasing pressure coming from the Hay’s Code of standards killing off the clowns.
In addition, the producer Irving Thalberg decided that the Marxes needed a more
Hollywood direction, because women, apparently, do not like things that are not
causally motivated (Mast, 1979: 286). The Marxes would go to MGM and make
comedian comedy A Night at the Opera – a proper movie with a heterosexual
romance, and an opera success story. The Marxes facilitate these plots,
demonstrating their new moral direction. There is no Zeppo, Groucho pays his way,
Harpo is a proletarian with a disability and Chico is firmly rooted in his surroundings.
Unsurprisingly, most critics, especially Jordan (1975: 147) and Mast (1979: 285),

21
note a relentless decline in quality from this point 5 . Thalberg was right though; they
took a lot more at the box office this way.
Soon the American-made clown comedies of the Marxes, Fields, and Mae
West were gone and replaced by social and moral and financially successful
comedies by Capra, and romantic comedies by Hawks and Cukor. Some clowns
would remain but perhaps fittingly, they were not taken seriously by Hollywood or
America. They include Jerry Lewis, loved only by the French, almost as much as
their own: Jacques Tati. Their clown comedy was different however, for it marked a
shift from what Deleuze terms the Marx Brothers’ “mental-image”, to the “dream-
image”. The final section of this chapter will evaluate this shift, and analyse how the
two images affected subsequent comedy.

Mental-Images and Dream-Images

According to Deleuze (1983: 199), the affection (Harpo), association (Chico) and
interpretation (Groucho) of the Marx Brothers gives rise to “mental-images”. These
are used symbolically to denote abstract relations, leading to pure images,
independent of plot, that break sensory-motor links to the world (Deleuze, 1983:
218). Such images are to be found in the films of Godard, and Allen’s favourite,
Antonioni (Deleuze, 1983: 205-217; 1985: 1-13, 18-25) – films that could feasibly be
called existentialist, and certainly art-cinema. Although many users of the mental-
image seek to find a relation to the world, the Marx Brothers look for dissociation,
much like Godard’s amoral, thrill-seeking characters.
Beyond interpretation and the mental-image, lies the dream image, whereby
action is replaced by a “movement of world” (Deleuze, 1985: 335). The pure images
that dissociation gives rise to “enter into a circuit which turns back on them, then
launch another circuit” (Deleuze, 1985: 65). No longer is it the choice of the clown to
bedevil the machines of society, as the clown is carried, swept away by them – it is
the world devouring life (Deleuze, 1985: 66). Tati’s M. Hulot is carried on a wave of
carnage in which machines breakdown; such as the ruthlessly regimented
holidaymakers of Les Vacances (1953) or the factory and house of Mon oncle
(1958). Deleuze believes it to be like a musical, or a ballet (rather than one man
dancing in pretence, defence and offence) – disconnections and reconnections. It is
not an act of interpretation, but a dream, something that must be interpreted.

5
In fact, they did their first two MGM films for the money. Harpo and Groucho were not
interested in doing more, but relented when it became apparent that Chico’s life was in
jeopardy thanks to his horrific gambling debts (Norman, 1981: 104-105).

22
 Its tragedy is in Hulot’s constant quest for life in the loneliness of the dream,
with his fondness for his nephew in Mon oncle or his quest for activity in Les
Vacances (Mast, 1979: 294). His dream is a nightmare to be escaped. Far more
tragic is Chuck Jones’ Wile E. Coyote. He
does not seek trouble, but a means to
survive. I have a recurring dream in which I
am challenged and every punch I throw is
without force. This is Coyote’s problem – the
world moves out of his way, and he is
trapped in a Sisyphean nightmare of failed
punches (Figure 7). Nothing he attempts has Figure 7
consequence. All attempts to interpret, as in
Fast and Furry-ous (1949) where he dresses up as Superman (the Ubermensch!)
and attempts to fly, he is equally damned to frustration.
Jenkins and Krutnik (1995: 160-161) discuss a post-Hays and post-war
tendency for clowns to look within, rather than out. The dream-image reflects a
psychological problem. Whilst the mental-image enables reinterpretation of a
problematic world, the dream-image demands that it is your neuroses, that you are
mentally severed from the superego. As Jones said: “As you develop any character,
you are, of course, looking into a mirror, a reflection of yourself, your ambitions and
hopes, your realizations and fears” (in Schaffer, no date). The mirror is a fixed act of
interpretation, as is the interpretation of the dream over which one has no control.
They are virtual and mimetic. In Duck Soup, Groucho looks into the mirror and sees
Harpo, a static image that is then shattered by Chico, leading to a new discovery.
Nietzsche held that life was only justifiable as an aesthetic experience, that life must
always be metaphorical; yet as Henderson (in Horton, 1991: 155) suggests, the
cartoon character is denoted by a fixed identity over which he has no freedom.
Interpretation within the text is no longer possible; the world is fixed, scientific, and
one’s issues within it need to be resolved through their interpretation, rather than a
new world created out of them. The world is immutable, given and may be glimpsed
only through psychoanalysis. It seems that adults can no longer play in the post-War,
Freudian world. Laughter becomes the confession of mental illness.
In the next chapter, we will see how Jones, Godard and Edwards faced this
problem, and sought solutions to the nightmare in meta-fiction, and in parody, in an
attempt to move from introspection back to the Marxes’ examination. In every Allen
film we see him with therapists; is every film he makes an attempt to get away from
them?

23
Art-Comedy and Parody

Siska (1979: 289), using 8½ (Fellini, 1963), writes that the art-cinema’s
“increased self-consciousness had led to an art whose subject matter has
unabashedly become the nature of art and the role of the artist”. Meta-cinema has
therefore become a necessity. This is true also of art-comedy because the director of
the dream-image film becomes aware that meta-cinema re-enables play with the
world – albeit a purely fictitious one. A director, like Jones or Edwards, is able to
wake his dream-image star up to the realisation that it is not all in his head – he really
is divided in some way from the world, because the director is able to put the
established world of realist film out-of-joint, deranging, not just the psychological
state of the performer, but the world that he inhabits. This changes with Godard,
whose unique use of parody illustrates the way in which it has become impossible to
not see the world filmically, thereby restoring the immediacy of the cinema to thought
and the mental-image, over the dream-image. Yet we will see that in spite of this, and
his ludic explorations of absurdity, his films are not cheerfully nihilistic – they are
closer to Camus’ humourlessness.
From Godard on, parody becomes an almost obligatory part of comic movie
making. We will distinguish the empty commercial parody of Hollywood from the art-
comedies; and ludic works by Monty Python, from comedies that move from parodic
dream-images, to reams of quotations devoted to accepting the absurd, by Allen.
Throughout the chapter we will retain and expand upon the dialectic between
Nietzsche and Bataille that began in the last chapter, the former the exponent of
cheerful nihilism, the latter, his miserable jester and disciple. With the decline of the
Nietzschean in the works discussed here, art and laughter will emerge as an escape
from being, as virtual images offering new ways of seeing, rather than as a new way
of being and investigating, of making one’s own life art. This is especially the case
with Allen, who is saved by the Marx Brothers because they emerge as a new faith –
a paradoxical faith of meaninglessness.

Wake up, doc!

If one creates the dream, then the play, the discovery, is reawakened. One
must denounce the self-assured “truth” of the interpretability of phantasy or else, like
the mirror, it is a virtual image of reality. Psychoanalysis and the interpretation of
dreams come with answers. Freud for example held that art, like laughter,

24
compensated us for our lost sense of play (Waugh, 1984: 34). It is clear that this
distinction needs breaking, whereby art and laughter again become play.
If Chuck Jones’ characters were reflections of his personal anxieties and
fears, he could then deconstruct, or shatter the image he has of this anxiety, just as
Chico shatters the carefully constructed virtual image and rule-bound quiescence
Harpo and Groucho create in the mirror gag. Like the Marxes, Jones can cast doubt
on his ego. This is possible firstly through the introduction of another consciousness,
and secondly through the positing of this consciousness beyond the text.
In Jones’ hands, Daffy Duck represents the desire to be significant – a
Hollywood star. In Duck Amuck (1953) he instead finds himself in an experimental
film where the scenery, denoting genre and therefore the way he should act,
continually changes, without even the punctuation of editing. The soundtrack cuts,
the camera antagonises him with an excessively extreme close-up, and he becomes
trapped between two celluloid frames causing him to be doubled. He is even rubbed
out completely. “Where am I?” he asks, suddenly a semi-diegetic excuse for a star;
but the cartoon is also asking “Who” and “What” is “I”. That this is all revealed to be
the doing of an omnipotent and malevolent director (Bugs Bunny), shows that one’s
identity, and the world it inhabits, can be toyed with, and that the ego which has been
so painfully constructed in a mirror-image can be reinterpreted meta-fictitiously.
Although dream-image films follow simple plots that sweep away their stars (e.g. Les
Vacances and Playtime (Tati, 1967) describe the activities lucklessly pursued by M.
Hulot), Duck Amuck, like the Marx films, features a continually interrupted plot (in the
same shot the scenery and costumes renders it swashbuckler, arctic adventure, “sea
picture” and war film) that splits the film into
a series of moments and gags. But
whereas the Marx Brothers interrupted their
fiction-crafting directors, it is here the
director who interrupts the performer: “Let’s
get this picture started!” cries Daffy as “The
End” descends on him. The most profound
message of the Birth of Tragedy is that
Figure 8
realism cannot reflect a real world – it will
make us reliant on a false image of one; the cartoon concludes in an abstract blue
and red realm, very much signifying where free-play can take us, but Daffy,
intransigent and insistent on realism, is devastated mentally (Figure 8). Thompson (in
Nelmes: 2003: 220) is incorrect to say that Duck Amuck is an “ego-on-the-line

25
dream” 6 like a lonely Coyote cartoon – it is Jones playing, joking with his own
identity, and the assumptions that give rise to such dreams.
As Sartre says, consciousness cannot be used to analyse consciousness
purely, as it necessarily posits it in the process (Waugh, 1984: 27). This of course is
why psychoanalysis is a form of bad faith to him. We cannot describe our own
experience of consciousness without it becoming caught up in the ego. Even
psychoanalysis requires a therapist, just as one of Sartre’s books requires a reader.
It is, as Deleuze had discovered with the Marx Brothers, in the trichotomy of relation,
affection and interpretation that divisions between self, world and others break down.
Jones split himself into two to efface himself, but in live-action film the possibility for
creative interplay is heightened. When this happens, with clashing dual auteurs, one
is not permitted to view a coherent text that is the product of one person’s searches
through the unconscious. One dreams alone, just as one plays alone when one is a
newborn baby, grasping in the dark (Piaget, 1951: 161). The ludic phantasy must
therefore be a communal game. We are then attempting to sublimate one or “I”, just
as Nietzsche (1889: 31-32) does when illustrating how its place in language leads to
the establishment of empirical facts or “things”. “I” is, in every sense, a fable or a
selective construction, like a realist film. This process of sublimating the Cartesian
subject occurs, according to Ulmer (1987: 42) in Night at the Opera with the Marxes
joint deconstruction, but here I wish to argue that a similar process is underway in
Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers’ The Pink Panther (1963) and A Shot in the Dark
(1964); films of inner chaos paralleling their unconventional production.
Both movies were filmed simultaneously. Pink Panther would have been a
glamorous gentleman-jewel-thief movie with Peter Ustinov playing a Poirotesque
detective. He dropped out with Peter Sellers filling the role, and he and Edwards
quickly developed Inspector Clouseau, an apparently incongruous slapstick homage
to M. Hulot (Lewis, 1994: 256; 623), transforming the film into a comedy. Shot in the
Dark was a Sellers vehicle based on an Agatha Christie style stage-play 7 . Sellers
demanded that the director be sacked and that Edwards be brought in (Luhr and
Lehman, 1989: 70). Again, Clouseau would invade a serious, Anglophone mystery
narrative. Edwards’ television career exhibits a significant interest in solving
mysteries; Lewis (1994: 625) suggests he enjoys seeing “the man who restores order
to a chaotic world”. Yet in these films the intrusion of Clouseau, and his use of
illogicality and libido to solve crimes, suggests that reason “can no longer function in
a post-Freudian world in which desire and the irrational define much of experience”

6
My italics.
7
One of its writers was also responsible for the screen adaptation of Christie’s Witness for the
Prosecution (Wilder, 1957).
26
(Luhr and Lehman, 1989: 102). Ulmer also suggests that the sublimation of the
Cartesian subject is a Freudian phenomenon, but Freud merely follows the same
Germanic tradition as Kant and Nietzsche. Moreover, Waugh (1984: 82) points out
how plot takes precedence over character in detective fiction, something that is
contradicted here.
The Pink Panther is a very glamorous film set in a luxurious Alpine resort
filled with royalty, beautiful women and charismatic gentlemen. It starred the
charming David Niven and was marketed as his film. Yet he was forced into the
sidelines by Sellers’ invasion. Ironically, the humour comes from Clouseau’s attempts
to be like Niven, to be a suave leading man. His attempts to be cool are interminably
thwarted by his catastrophic association with the mise-en-scene – should he attempt
to look casual by resting on an object, he will be thrown to the floor or scalded. Here,
the mise-en-scene represents “things” and Clouseau’s problem is his formidably
French “I”. As Sellers said of Clouseau, he is a man of “great, great dignity” (in Lewis,
1994: 623). “I” leads to “things” and Clouseau emerges as the antithesis of the Marx
Brothers. Harpo refuses to acknowledge any boundaries between him and other
things and always appears adroit. Clouseau is incapable of producing music with his
violin, and unlike Groucho, he cannot use his illogic against people. Although Chico
used his poor accent and misunderstanding to confound people and make jokes,
Clouseau cannot speak in either an English or French accent, and his attempts to
communicate fail as he muddles his sentences and mispronounces his words.
Indeed, in every Clouseau film we see him don various disguises, and each suits him
rather better than his own, which he can never master. He stars in a film in which he
is the most obvious outcast, precisely because of his longing to star. Like Daffy, he is
at the whim of a cruel metteur-en-scene, and yet whilst Daffy expected a classical
realist narrative and the Marx Brothers avoided it, Edwards simply casts the wrong
man, so as to subvert the realism. Both the dream-image film and the Hollywood film
are escaped through their imbrication.
Sellers was as notorious as Brando for causing disturbances on the film-set
(Lewis, 1994: 624) – in particular he never kept to the script and would intentionally
make (frequently funny) mistakes. Yet in these comedies, as in (some of) the other
Panther films, Edwards manages to keep a sensible narrative going, whilst imposing
on it a believable, and yet utterly non-causal conclusion. In Pink Panther Clouseau is
delighted to discover that he is being framed for the crime he had failed to solve due
to the notoriety he now has – he is Niven at last. In Shot in the Dark he is proven
right, despite arriving at his conclusions arbitrarily.
Edwards admits his predilection for the incommensurate during the opening
to Pink Panther, which, moving between the Orient, Paris, Rome, Hollywood and the
27
Swiss Alps, is a disorientating way in which to open narrative space (Luhr and
Lehman, 1989: 80-81). No one watching notices or questions this - just as they do
not notice that the bad guy gets away with it and that the irreproachable policeman is
jailed, that the criminal is a pillar of the establishment, and that adultery is rife. The
Catholic Legion of Decency condemned Billy Wilder for far less in Kiss Me, Stupid
(1964). As both were comedies, it makes sense only to conclude that people were
distracted by the meta-fictitious element; that it is fine for the myth not to work without
a real hero at the centre.
In Shot in the Dark, in contrast to Pink Panther, it is Clouseau who demands
on there being a plot, apparently to Edwards’, and the cast’s confusion. The dark
shot appears to refer both to the murder and the filming! Clouseau adopts the
persona of the ingenious detective who thinks one move ahead – who sees past the
easy answer to the underlying complexity; Inspector Morse immediately springs to
mind. Except in this case it is patently obvious that there is no mystery. His boss,
Dreyfus, finds that rationality is no weapon against Clouseau’s comedic conviction. “I
will decide what is ridiculous!” he declares. No wonder that in later Panthers Dreyfus
regards him as the world’s greatest menace – Clouseau has been permitted to
spread ridicule, to deconstruct; he cannot leave a room without breaking something.
On several occasions he even ends up breaking the law! This would also explain his
servant Cato, who is hired to bring disorder to his life at all times (Luhr and Lehman,
1989: 101). Dreyfus, the Panther series’ exemplar of reason, is psychologically
devastated by the carnage, ultimately resorting to international terrorism and super-
villain stereotype in an attempt to regain a grip on rationality and reality (The Pink
Panther Strikes Again, 1976).
Yet Edwards gets away with it
because he makes it apparent that we are
watching a film. He wields his directorial
power by pushing Sellers out. After
Clouseau has correctly “deduced” the
identities of the murderers, they
collectively begin to argue and ignore
him, leaving him exasperated; he turns to
the camera – breaking the subjective Figure 9

frame – and shrugs. We are reminded that the director imposes Clouseau’s ludic
success upon him. The figure of the cartoon Pink Panther, as realized by Friz
Freleng (Figure 9) is Edwards. The director is a sneaky, concealed force toying with
phantasmal entities, making them ridiculous. Our dreams and art are play, but it
becomes clear that it can only happen on the level of the text or the myth.
28
 For the Marxes, cinema was an inconvenient medium in which to express
their being-playing. In the above films we find many of the key Marx traits: the
subversion of morality, the rejection of logic and causation, and the destructive
capabilities of the clown. This time however, it occurs in the direction, not just in the
performing. Instead of the infallible ego of the Hollywood film’s leading man and an
invisible director, we see a fallible ego taken to pieces, and the director making his
presence felt.
The misuse of formal conventions, rather than the pastiche of elements of
other films, makes the films discussed here parodies. Rose (1993: 52) defines
parody as “the comic refunctioning of preformed linguistic or artistic material”.
Edwards’ seeming disregard for convention, whilst acknowledging it, in particular by
taking what would have been generic films and turning them into slapstick by
admitting an utterly incongruous actor/hero, clearly fits this definition. That this
occurred through the use of two creators is suggestive of parody’s tendency to kill the
author (Rose, 1993: 186); that it hides within time honoured constructions suggests
more of a formalist approach, such as Shklovsky’s theory that parody is used for
“laying bare the device” (in Rose: 1993: 281). In this case, whilst these films parody
Hollywood and the dream-image, and deconstruct their assumptions, these films also
admit their own lack of immediacy; these parodies are not absurd or ridiculous texts
like the Marx films, but realist texts that have been made ridiculous. Rather than
being-playing, they are setting out a space in which play may be allowed, albeit at the
expense of the realist text. As Sukenick (in Waugh, 1984: 34) says, “A story is a
game someone has played so you can play it too”. This filmmaking does not provide
a mirror to the author like a dream-image, or, like a realist narrative a voyeuristic
insight into a life, or, like a Marx film, the opportunity to engage in anarchy. Instead,
the rules of realist film are questioned and the mirror shattered, but all the while it
remains the meta-being of its creating creators. This is why Nietzsche (1990: 152)
thought parody was unoriginal and despairing. He took the hammer to the underlying
ontology of realist art, and yet here it is merely the art that suffers. Nietzsche worried
that parodists would merely wear a mask. The realist text here wears the mask of
ridiculousness. It is sanctioned and carnivalesque.
Piaget (1951: 142-145) suggests that when a child matures, play becomes
progressively more and more rule-bound and that the ego is subordinated to reality.
Our mad world closes down into a sane one due to the ruled games. It seems that
Freud’s assertion that art compensates us for lost play remains true. According to
these parodies it is not reality that is questioned, nor our ego, it is realist art and its
poor representation of both.

29
 The next step for art-comedy must therefore be to abolish this distinction
between life and the phantasm, living and creating. A parody, or meta-fiction must be
established whereby the world becomes metaphoric (Waugh, 1984: 3). Jean-Luc
Godard seemed to have such a project in mind, and it is his contribution to the art-
comedy film to which we now turn.

Godard and the Laughter of Death

Godard’s frequent cinematographer, Raoul Coutard said that Godard’s films

had only two principal subjects: death and the impossibility of love (MacCabe, 2003:
123). The mission in this section is to identify how these concerns are reflected in his
uses of ridiculousness and laughter; and to see how they affect him as someone who
plays or interprets. We will see how he avoids the virtual, imprisoning image of
psychoanalysis, but also why, ultimately, his is a pessimistic message. Finally, we
will look at how Godard set the agenda for parody in the cinema throughout the 70s
and onwards. If it could be objected that Godard is not strictly a comedy director,
then we could go on to argue that Monty Python and Woody Allen are Godard for-
laughs.
Godard’s films are ridiculous. Lesage (1979: 13) describes them as playful
and witty, replete with gags and puns. He embodies that strain of the comic that
eases towards the sublime and tragic. Jean-Paul Belmondo’s death scenes are
funny, as in À bout de souffle (1960) where the ubiquity of someone shutting a dead
man’s eyes is inverted by Belmondo shutting them himself. In Pierrot le fou (1965) he
straps dynamite to his head, lights it, remarks what a stupid thing it is to do, and
explodes. Godard also uses surrealism, such as the unjustified piles of smashed cars
in Week End (1967), or the apparent nonchalance with which corpses are treated in
Pierrot. In these instances, of course, the things that evoke humour are of a lethal
and immoral nature. The lack of justification for any of them leads Lesage (1979: 14)
to suggest that they are absurdist.
More importantly however is the pastiche – what Deleuze (1983: 213) calls
faire-faux, used to incite laughter. A neo-realism is introduced by undermining the
gravity of a cliché. Belmondo, as film star, should be the epitome of cool, and yet his
suits are ill fitting and his socks do not match his shoes. His counterpart in Une
Femme est une femme (1961) similarly attempts suave with the exaggerated
movements he makes whilst throwing his scarf over his shoulder. In Bande à part
(1964) a man’s death becomes farcical as he staggers around in an overstated
manner. We see that by disavowing a filmic assumption, the purpose of which was to
look too real, we acquire a new image that looks false only because it seems
30
genuinely real. At one moment Belmondo is a realistic character, Alfred Lubitsch,
existing in a film apart from us. But who is he when he turns to the camera and grins
– a real person? Or is the character seeping out of the screen and engaging with us,
like Frank Baxter in The Purple Rose of Cairo (Allen, 1985)? This is similar to the
question asked over Groucho’s asides to the camera.
Another way in which Godard’s humour is Marxian is the way it interrupts the
plot. Matthews (2000: 18) suggests that parodic gags in films frequently interrupt the
flow of the narrative, and in Godard they not only change the tone of the image, as
described above, but provide interruption to the conjunction of images, such as the
seemingly pointless sequence of musical poses Anna Karina and Belmondo adopt in
Une femme, or the dash through the Louvre undertaken by the Bande à part. Indeed,
much of Godard’s general strategy is found in frequently comic interstices. Scenes
will often fail to follow from the preceding ones, montages will be chronologically
disordered, and action will be interrupted or replaced by non-diegetic or diegetically
impossible images, whilst the sound cuts apparently at random. Such “irrational
cuts”, as Deleuze (1985: 180-181, 278-279) calls them, render the images
experiential, rather than compatible for integration within a coherent story-space.
When watching Godard, one will often feel confused, but one may begin to laugh,
rather helplessly, at the inspired chaos that abounds. This all leads to a mental-
image (where the sensory-motor schema breaks down into moments), albeit of a far
more aesthetically sophisticated variety to that found in the Marx Brothers’ films. Just
as Artaud had praised the Marx Brothers, Deleuze (1985: 165) uses Artaud’s
considerations of the cinema to explain Godard. The shocks of the mental-image are
conducive to thought and this is beyond mere surrealism and the dream-image:
“[bringing] together critical and conscious thought and the unconscious in thought:
the spiritual automaton (which is very different from the dream, which brings together
a censure or repression with an unconscious made up of impulses)”. In this way it
gestures to that which is psychologically unthinkable – addressing Sartre’s concerns
over the study of consciousness mentioned previously. Godard’s cinema represents
pure thought.
With Godard, as with the directors discussed above, the art is a cumulative
effort. Lesage (1979: 11) says that Godard has always been divided by his wish for
collective art, and his position as a lone creative genius. Just as the Marx Brothers’
cinema is about pure being as opposed to being “I” in relation to “things” and “then”,
Godard’s cinema never fully reflects himself because of his unique way of making
films. As an animator, Chuck Jones has a high amount of control over all aspects of
his films, just as Tati would maintain control by directing, acting and even writing and
producing. Godard is a rather more elusive auteur; he would write criticism under
31
another name (Hans Lucas (MacCabe, 2003: 124)) and his gaze is forever hidden
behind dark glasses (Brown, 1972: 111). He makes sure the performances of his
actors are not honed to an image that he has – he scribbles the script down at the
time or even shouts it to the actor on the set, so as to force them into improvisation.
Coutard, a former photo-journalist, does his best with handheld cameras to get the
spontaneity into the can – in Pierrot’s escape scene, the camera darts around unsure
of whether to focus on Karina or Belmondo. Similarly the direction or post-production
appears to obey the demands of the performers, as in Bande à part when Karina
demands a minute of silence and the atmospheric sound cuts in obeisance. Godard’s
use of ready-made items, such as real locations and buildings, songs, paintings,
comic strips, quotes from books and even philosophers and their philosophies (as in
Vivre sa vie, 1962) further illustrates how the content of the films has come from
without. He asserts his directorial control, almost by appearing to relax it! Like the
Panther films, as with the Marx films, there is a dependency on a collection of
individual personalities and their whims. When Barthes argued for the death of the
author he described the text as, “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable
centres of culture” (quoted in Rose, 1993: 186). A “Godard” film is such a text.
Bordwell (1985: 320-332) describes Godard’s method as palimpsest, revealing its
chronological development not only through the ready-made items, but even through
the unconcealed style of visual and sound editing that makes us aware of all the
stages of post-production. Une femme, for example, begins with the cry “Lights,
Camera, Action!” to a credit sequence inter-cut by the opening of the action,
permitting the text to sprawl outside of its celluloid confinement in time and space,
and to question how each of its contributions was composed.
This enables it to collect the consciousnesses of many creators (one could
say they are not “Godard films” but “films by Godard”) and explains the desire of the
characters to find intimacy. Yet his characters are usually confused by what this
entails. Finding it impossible to relate, they ultimately betray or kill each other. Bugs
Bunny manipulated Daffy’s voice and body to make him become an abstract entity,
rather than a concrete one. According to Godard (in Sterritt, 1998: 14), there is no
difference between the abstract and the concrete, and the community of identity in
his films is similarly confused. Godard’s omniscient, novel styled voice-over in Bande
à part relates the characters’ inner-life and contrasts it against their physical
manifestation on the screen. In Pierrot le fou, the characters’ confused dual-narration
complicates and disorders the images, forcing them to become nightmarish or like
“events redrawn from the memory” (Bergala in Morrey, 2005: 22). The loss of “I” in
other people melts the time, space and reason schemas. Morrey (2005: 27) suggests
that the two characters in Pierrot are opposed through Belmondo’s linguistic
32
abstraction and Karina’s phenomenological concretion. Essentially, they cannot
communicate, but their beings are interlocked and frustrated; like Bugs and Edwards
they play with another’s identity, but have their own played with, and the result is a
combination of frustration, madness and death.
So why in so many of Godard’s films are the lovers damned to death and
despair? Godard had considered adapting Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus (Brown, 1972:
30), mentioned in the introduction as the cornerstone of humourless nihilism in the
post-death-of-God world. Such an ambition would suggest that Godard saw man as
essentially lonely, engaged in fruitless activities. Perhaps this is the result of the
parody. We can only play games that have been played before (Sukenick’s stories),
or tread the same paths as Sisyphus. Morrey (2005: 26) says that a Godard
character, due to the quotation and faire-faux, is always forced to act “in the style of”
something or someone. His heroes are usually motivated to become significant;
either to become an actor or actress, or to become a filmic, usually film-noir icon. À
bout de souffle’s Michel is a petty thug who idolizes Bogart – he stands in a cinema
foyer looking adoringly at a poster of his idol. It is only looking towards death, his
afterlife as text and icon, that he can endow his life with meaning. Although naturally,
the comedy of his death, where he crawls around pathetically and pulls silly faces,
renders the ending absurd.
And yet why should this be more absurd than actually being a film star?
Godard’s parody is in fact an admission that, “It is not we who make cinema: it is the
world which looks to us like a bad film” (Deleuze, 1985: 171). Realist film established
a distance between people and the world, insisted that it be perceived through
screens and through dark and shaded eyes. Hence Michel attempts to meet Bogart’s
gaze; like the icons of Christ and the Saints, it apparently has far more meaning than
any “real” world around him.
Play in the cinema becomes impossible because one is never free of parody
and its Nietzschean connotations of bankruptcy – that one becomes a “clown of God”
(Rose, 1993: 189) 8 . Nevertheless, Godard creates new images from the communal
imbrication of the genres he picks on to show this impossibility of acts of originality.
As Deleuze (1985: 20) points out, one sees a cliché and puts it to use in putting a
plot together. As clichés from different genres collide, different plots and pictures
emerge, choking the previous ones. The characters pool their generic experiences
seemingly drawing clichés into a surreal melee, always attempting to explain what
something is “like”; just as Pierrot’s disordered escape montage is a “complicated
story” that cannot quite be told or explained. It is not metaphors that emerge but

8
This is elsewhere translated as “God’s buffoons”, although the clown seems more
appropriate as it is an intentional entity.
33
similes. The “like” of simile makes art a window to an inaccessible reality. In Pierrot
the characters are engaged in the process of saying, “I like you”. They clash their
clichés in an attempt to lose themselves in each other (to be lovers, erotic), but the
result is fractious and blurry, like lovers using poems and symbols in abortive
attempts to attain unity. It is then only in death that they can lose themselves in each
other, the sky blending into the sea. In À bout de souffle it is, “I want to be like you”.
Far from a psychoanalytic mirror, a dream, it results in complete division between the
self, other selves and the world. It is not a dream or phantasm however; thanks to the
images’ neo-realism; it is a lived nightmare like that of Sisyphus. To be a clown of
God, it seems, is to wear a mask in deference. Realism was a misleading disguise
loathed by Bazinians, but the subsequent neo-realism is again a mask in front of the
underlying truth of a real world.
Like his murderous protagonists, Godard’s incompatible clichés devour each
other like black widow spiders, whereas Nietzsche, according to Derrida (1978: 101),
is a spider who becomes lost in a web of new relations. The Marx Brothers, with their
metaphoric masks fought, but did so by moving into continually new relations. In
Godard there are no original acts and therefore no acts ludicrous enough, death
becomes the only solution, the stake on which to impale subjectivity and to finally
commune one’s consciousness with the world; much like Camus’ Outsider, who
wishes for a great crowd at his execution. Godard’s world is real and lethal, and the
only way to get through the window of simile appears to be to jump out of it to certain
death. Perhaps this is why his death scenes are so ridiculous.
Both Bataille and Godard shared this fascination for the frustrating “silence” or
impermeable spaces between people (Hegarty, 2000: 158-161) and both would
appear to believe that the self could be transcended only through communication:
laughter and its madness (le fou), eroticism and ultimately death. Through these, the
creator/created divide is pierced (Hegarty, 2000: 97-98); yet it seems the only
satisfactory response is a comically crazed, erotic death. There seems to be a great
sadness in such fatal laughter; the failure to be ludicrously happy and loved in the
world, as anything other than dead icon, must be read as a somewhat cheerless
nihilism.
If the dream-image was the self-created world that highlighted inadequacies
within that self, then the trans-textual parody enables both selves and worlds to be
taken apart, and for them to comment back on the universe outside of film. Yet it
would seem that if Edwards’ films are too easily recognisable as films, Godard’s, in
deranging the divide between films and the world, affirm both the cinema as an
educator and reify the world as apart from a self it reconstitutes.

34
 Parody remains the principal conduit for the ridiculous and the ludicrous
through to the present-day, and since Godard it has taken on a number of forms,
including that of Woody Allen, to whom Godard and Bataille may be readily
compared. The following section surveys the methods and substance of these
various styles, including the ludicrous, but textually-bound Monty Python, and the
adulatory Hollywood spoof genre.

Three Examples of Post-Godard Parody

1. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (T. Jones and Gilliam, 1975)

Of Monty Python’s two vaguely plot-oriented feature films (the other two are, in effect,
compilations of sketches), I have chosen this over Life of Brian (T. Jones, 1979),
because that a far more conventional parody of the biblical epic. Holy Grail layers its
six authors’ interpretations of Arthurian myth on top of one other in a bid to question,
not only the foundations of the myth, but also the questioning of their questioning. By
taking the traditional story they can indulge in play, not by telling the story, but by
commenting on the processes of its creation, much like Godard’s palimpsests and
the Benjamin quote above about creating the event, rather than telling the story. Holy
Grail is without a sensible narrative space, without subjectivity or any assertion of fact
or truth, and it does this by colliding platitudes and doubting its authors. Whereas
Allen seeks to answer philosophical questions with film, Terry Gilliam says that this
film was merely an attempt to create a world in which to introduce ridiculousness. 9
Yet it may appear that this ridiculousness is confined to textual criticism. Indeed, The
Meaning of Life (T. Jones and Gilliam, 1983) and their Flying Circus (BBC, 1969-
1974) would appear to engage more with what is outside of textual confines,
frequently verging on the satiric over the parodic.
There is a staggering amount of interplay between creator and creation. The
narrator makes comments about the acting, only to be reproached by the actors for
stalling. He is finally stabbed, only to re-emerge later to explain that the Black Beast
has ceased to be, due to the animator suffering a heart attack. Gilliam, whilst acting,
is hushed by the cast for drawing attention to the fact that they are collectively
beholding only a model of Camelot. The actors, with straight faces reminiscent of
Clouseau’s dignity, have coconuts because the budget could not fund horses. The
recent DVD release begins with the first five minutes of Dentist on the Job
(Pennington-Richards, 1961) before someone “realises” the error. Those responsible

9
DVD commentary track.
35
for the credits and subtitles are sacked, causing a change in the style of the credits
from Bergman to Carry On. The conclusion is interrupted by an intermission and
finally shut down by the police. These meta-fictitious devices serve to draw our
attention to the processes involved in crafting film, just like Godard’s palimpsests.
The movie, when it actually finds time to have a narrative, administers itself
with deadly serious acting, an overblown orchestral score and archaic dialogue
delivered in the epic fantasy genre’s Queen’s English; the Lord of the Rings trilogy
(Jackson, 2001-3), with lines such as “We must make haste!” were a throw back to
this tradition. Indeed, “Mount Doom” would seem comparable to Python’s “Bridge of
Death”. These clichés are confronted at every turn by modernity; a peasant questions
the legitimacy of magic to establish a system of government, and a formidable, pyro-
maniacal wizard claims the rather anticlimactic name “Tim”. These gags however,
target only the film and every single stage of production, including the creation of
credits. That Monty Python are involved in producing a delectably pointless level of
silliness is irrelevant, as the film does not criticise the various levels of truth a film
may have or not, it simply dismisses them, and leaves you with nothing but a film to
laugh at. It is like Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998); its surrealism is
there because of LSD, not because there is anything to see beyond the phenomenal,
the transcendental aesthetic. Godard’s palimpsests, by contrast, take very real
characters that find themselves in filmic situations and express themselves through
montage and camera address. Python’s references to the “man from Scene 24” and
“Sir-not-appearing-in-this-film” ensure that we never mistake anything for reality.
Perhaps it is because the five English members of Python were at Oxford and
Cambridge that they ended up indulging in parody for positivism. This would explain
why characters frequently draw attention to the sets, or demand that other characters
“look” at the way things really are (Hardcastle, 1993). Reality, and the way it is
perceived, is never questioned by the Python team; but we can feel free to enjoy 90
minutes of wanton silliness at the expense of the film, and film conventions in
general. It is ludicrous, but it is not ridiculous, because a secure, real world shields us
from absurdity.

2. The “spoof”

One of the most popular and lucrative of recent Hollywood genres has been the
spoof. Initially popularised by Mel Brooks’ genre pastiches such as Blazing Saddles
(1974, a western), they became highly popular through Zucker, Abrahams and
Zucker who would target particular films, and then pastiche the surrounding genres.
Two examples are Airplane! (1980) and Hot Shots! (Abrahams, 1991), which parody

36
Zero Hour! (Bartlett, 1957) and Top Gun (Scott, 1986) respectively. This approach
has spawned several franchises, including spy spoof Austin Powers (Roach, 1997,
1999, 2002) and horror/slasher series Scary Movie (2000, 2001, 2003, 2006).
Gags frequently lampoon generic expectation, e.g. a gangster in ZAZ’s Police
Squad! (Paramount, 1982) refers to seeing a guy at a table with “a couple of tramps”.
Although we expect that the gangster is referring to loose women, the man is actually
accompanied by vagrants. Aesthetic conventions are also opposed. The freeze-
frame finale common to many 70s TV shows is such in Police Squad that it is the
actors who freeze with the frame remaining live. Matthews (2000: 18) believes that
such gags interrupt the narrative flow, but as we have discovered through Deleuze, a
cliché helps a plot to proceed, and these are merely subverted clichés which we
laugh at, but continue down the narrative with as they conform to our expectations.
These clichés are not out of place, as in Godard, commented on, as in Holy Grail, nor
is there anyone who does not belong in the film-world, as in Edwards. In a spoof,
everything is played straight, and those within the film make no observations about
the gags. Each film will have a causally coherent, generic plot, mixed with the
obligatory romance; each character will have a story, and all the loose ends will be
tied by the closure. Airplane! is about a failed pilot who is forced to land a plane. He
is on the plane because he chased his former lover aboard. Through flashback we
learn their back-story, and about how he came to be a failed pilot. He lands the plane
and he gets the girl. This is all backed up by David Zucker’s (2005b) 15 rules for
making comedy films. These include giving each joke a cause (3), not “breaking the
frame” (i.e. meta-fiction) (4), playing it straight (6) not being self-reflexive (8) and
clearing jokes from the plot quickly so that they do not interrupt it (10).
By way of example, Hirsch (1981: 120) writes that Brooks is:

Locked into a comic evocation of Hollywood’s golden age, his work seems out of
touch and in the end trivial. Movies about movies, his spoofs are certainly funny in
places, but the laughter doesn’t ring with the social and psychological overtones of
Woody [Allen’s] comedies.

This is very much along the same lines as Jameson’s famous onslaught
against pastiche, where it is accused of being “speech in a dead language”,
nostalgic, schizophrenic, capitalist, bereft of deconstructive portent and, most
importantly for our purposes, “devoid of laughter” (Rose, 1993: 222-223).
Spoof, although the most commercially viable form of parody, appears not to
be the most politically, aesthetically or philosophically charged variety.

37
3. Woody Allen: From faire-faux to quotation

“I relate to him as I would a member of my family”

Allen on Groucho (in Benayoun, 1985: 163)

So why will the Marx Brothers save your life? Why is Groucho a reason to live?
The cinematic clowns are outsiders (Mast, 1978: 314), and Allen takes this
premise to explore the Godardian interests of death and the impossibility of love.
They both adopt the cinema as educator; Allen also has a hero haunted by Bogart.
Admittedly, Allen attempts to seize on Bogart’s social skills rather than his dead
image. In Play it again, Sam (Ross, 1972), slapstick is employed as faire-faux to
illustrate how genuine experiences deviate from realist film experiences, although on
occasion they will match, precisely because those “perfect” moments in life have only
ever been perceived previously in Hollywood films. Like Python however, Allen
began his directorial career taking generic situations such as science-fiction (Sleeper,
1973) or war-torn Russia (Love and Death, 1975) and clashing them against
modernity, as well as frank inner experience. Like Edwards it tends to the dream-
image/realism clash, as it is an inappropriate stock character, a neurotic New York
Jew that leads. In the medieval “Aphrodisiac” (in Everything You Always Wanted to
Know About Sex, 1972) he looks to the camera for approval having successfully
communicated by using the word “pox”. He is also one of the few directors to include
parodies of art-cinema, often mocking Italian film, and in Bananas (1971) we see him
in therapy after having a Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957) styled nightmare.
Indeed, one could say that he, like the dream-image filmmakers, was using the clash
between cinema and reality to understand his psychological issues.
Hirsch (1981: 115) suggests that Allen, like Groucho, uses language, verbally
and eventually filmic, as a defence. The difference, of course, is that whilst Groucho’s
characters confront the world, Allen’s are forever attempting to avoid it. This is
because, as Yacowar (1979: 10) says, the Allen persona is both his mask and his
mirror. The world is a dream-image out of his control as a character, but a mental-
image in its written-directed creation, e.g. in Hannah when he speaks of
“pandemonium” whilst there is absolutely no action within the visual frame; directorial
reality clashes with a character’s psychological maladjustment. Or in Annie Hall
(1977) he is the actor-director playing with time, space and reason, breaking the
sensory-motor schema, and yet effacing himself by finding nothing worthwhile within

38
this manipulation, except for the act of manipulation. Similarly, Purple Rose of Cairo
admits that the escape from realist plot endows great freedom on a subject, but
reflects sombrely on the inevitably of hardship and the need to again escape into
fiction.
Although he exercises complete control over his films, it is through parody
and quotation he enables play with himself. Like Godard, his films are choked with
references to books, poems, films, cultural artefacts and philosophies that blend with
or distort his own voice – but he differs in having no other live creating influences
“break the frame” as Edwards and Python do. This finds its purest expression in Zelig
(1983), a character composed of archived documentary footage, the styled but
fictitious views of contemporary analysts and cinematic pastiche (Matthews, 2000:
28-29). Those films that star Allen are an investigation into his consciousness; Annie
Hall’s irony, is that it has very little to do with her. Without any Nietzschean joy, Allen
is postmodern and psychoanalytic; correctly perhaps, cinema may not be a fiction but
part of his legitimate understanding and consciousness (like Godard, but unlike
Python), but one that extends only to himself, as devouring of other influences, yet
refusing to offer his subjectivity to them.
In Hannah and Her Sisters this changes, as complete play with self in an
obviously fictitious world becomes that of five people, all attempting to relate despite
incarceration in semi-diegetic monologues. Allen’s character Mickey is the most
trapped; he appears to relate to people principally in flashback. His fear of death in a
meaningless and absurd world drives him further away from people and society. He
quits his job, searches in vain for philosophical and religious answers, before finally
settling on suicide as the only alternative to being able to make the “big leap” of faith.
When his suicide attempts fails, he goes to the cinema and becomes absorbed in
Duck Soup. He decides to live – this entails rejoining the other four characters,
marrying one of them and miraculously (for he is meant to be infertile) impregnating
her.
Yet here, as in Manhattan, he is reaching out to the Marx Brothers for
meaning. Rather than parody, Allen quotes the film, apparently refiguring the form of
his own film (for once he is relating his flashback to someone, rather than himself),
thereby parodying his own film! Rose (1993: 79) says that quotation is used by
ambivalent parodists; in the past Allen would have made fun of the text. For all his
love of Bergman, Love and Death undermines the usefulness of The Seventh Seal
(1957) with a daft dance of death. Indeed, throughout, Hannah’s characters find
escape through art – listening to music, reading poetry, painting in a windowless
apartment – without making their lives art (Bragg and Salmon, 1988: 46-47). This

39
Hollywood ending – not akin to Allen’s traditionally ambiguous denouements – would
appear to be the leap of faith, complete with a Virgin birth!
Allen’s gags, especially those involving sex and death, seek communion, like
his films’ characters, but they always stake themselves on redoubtable subjectivity. In
this film, he finds communion, but it is prefixed on laughter in the dark whilst
beholding an iconostasis. 10 Allen is held permanently in the grip of the Duck Soup
mirror, not losing himself in an ever-growing web of life as art, but instead influenced
by film to be a priest of pre-
existent texts. Instead of using the
community to sublimate himself,
he uses the other as fact, to create
and maintain himself as fact – just
as Godard’s ego is reconstituted
by his creation of an external
world. This view would be
strengthened by the rather
disturbing revelation that Groucho
Figure 10 – “Oh! Her Father!” Allen exclaims
looks like his mother! (Benayou,
to Mother.
1985: 163; Figure 10). It is
reminiscent of Barthes’ (1978: 193) remark that: “to be depressed, it is said, is to
resemble the Mother as I imagine her regretting me eternally: a dead, motionless
image”. Nihilism paradoxically emerges as a religion, and Groucho is the Madonna,
Duck Soup an icon.
Derrida (1978: 99) suggests that when parody is used it is to “reconstitute
religion, as a Nietzsche cult”, and this brings us to Bataille, who appears to have
done just that. Bataille’s nihilism is founded on Nietzsche putting his subjectivity at
stake through deconstructive laughter (Hegarty, 2000: 73). Bataille’s philosophy is
always through Nietzsche (especially in On Nietzsche); meaning that although the
death of God abolishes all truth, including that of the self, that Nietzsche does this re-
confers the truth of Bataille’s subject, because Nietzsche is, in Bataille’s own words
(1992: 3) his “support”. As Derrida says, Nietzsche arises as a new God! As Lotringer
(in Bataille, 1992: xv) must ask, when considering Nietzsche’s distaste for invention
through imitation: “Bataille, Nietzsche’s fool?”
Hannah’s predecessor, The Purple Rose of Cairo also ends with this
iconostasis. Whilst the audience’s sadness at Cecilia’s fate grows with the failing
expectation of a Hollywood ending, she begins smiling, trapped in her dismal life, but

10
This idea originates from Dr. Gerard Loughlin’s lectures on the similarities between the
cinema and the church.
40
escaping through a Fred and Ginger film (again, quoted), which, being a musical,
would qualify as a dream-image. If this symbolises tragic stasis then the quotation of
the Marx Brothers’ mental-image can at least be seen as an evangelical call to
action, a suggestion on how to live life. Yet the Hollywood ending by fiat and Mickey’s
concluding assertion that it would “make a great story” would appear to be ironic
confession, not to a “cheerful” nihilism, but to parody’s strained laughter of despair –
“convenient” nihilism, adopted rather than lived. Another simile and another mimetic
concession.
Philosophically Allen also seems very close to Bataille – the “silence”, the
fetishism towards women, the obsession with death, and the need to produce art. Yet
like Bataille, it is all prefaced on his own “I”, and it is only through another text, that of
Mr. Nietzsche/Mr(s). Marx that he can reassemble the link between consciousness
and a world; and it is with such despair that he gives us a realist conclusion to
Hannah and Her Sisters, the very last thing that he could have believed, and the
most cruel joke – a ridiculous text made to look realist! 11
What we need is an art without dependence on the truth of nihilism, an art
that can retain the postmodern and ludic requirement for parody, and yet be based
on pure existence. It is this that I hope we can find in the final chapter on the cartoon
sit-com.

11
I could easily have begun this dissertation by considering Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels
(1941), which also features the miraculous marriage to “The Girl” after the hero finds comfort
in front of a comedy film. Indeed, Allen’s Stardust Memories, which is also about a director
who wants to make meaningful, rather than “funny” films is exactly like Sullivan but through
Fellini’s lens. Allen claims he had not seen the film at this point (McCann, 1990: 164)
41
The Optimism in South Park

Justifying South Park

In our bid to find a parodic comedy with a taste for cheerful nihilism it is necessary to
turn to television, albeit of a cinematic nature. Whilst most television is certainly
unworthy of a film studies essay, the medium’s rise has moved many shorter film
formats away from the cinema. The first example, highly relevant to this dissertation
is the seven-minute cartoon short, now only generally found before Pixar features.
Short film animators, such as Tom and Jerry creators Hannah and Barbera, moved to
television to make prime-time and Saturday-morning cartoon sit-coms such as The
Flintstones (ABC, 1960-1966) and Scooby-Doo (ABC, 1969-1972) respectively.
Although they were in the style of the sit-com – canned laughter and 22 minutes in
length (the sit-com therefore replacing the classic two-reeler of Laurel and Hardy,
Chaplin etc. anyway) – animated sit-coms would find themselves being made into
both animated and, more recently, live-action feature films. Animation, the film
medium over which one can exact most control, is therefore inherently cinematic.
The aesthetic limitations of shooting from one camera angle in a three-walled
studio in front of an audience, and the entrenched moralism of studio sit-coms such
as The Cosby Show (NBC, 1982-1994), led to The Simpsons (Fox, 1989-), now the
most successful sit-com in history, which broke with laughter tracks and choked its
episodes both with allusions to the cinema, and a cinematic use of camera
movement and editing as laughter provoking devices. Animation is far cheaper, and
therefore the imagination has greater freedom. The Simpsons has been followed by
the similarly cinematic Beavis and Butt-head (MTV, 1993-1997) South Park,
Futurama (Fox, 1999-2003) and Family Guy (Fox, 1999-). South Park has become
the most successful cable comedy in history, and has deep cinematic roots. The first
South Park, the short-film The Spirit of Christmas (Parker and Stone, 1995) tied with
Disney’s Hercules (1997) in the Los Angeles Critics’ award ceremony, and two years
into the TV series there was an Oscar-nominated feature film (Parker, 1999). This is
not the only reason for choosing South Park though, as feature-length versions of all
are, or will be available soon.
South Park’s parody is frequently of a more penetrating nature than The
Simpsons’. Knight (in Irwin et al, 2001: 107) describes the latter’s use of parody as
“popular”; it is comic not ironic, and frequently expresses uncritical fondness for its
targets. Although Homer or Bart Simpson may escape into make-believe parodies,

42
such as Homer’s recollection of Happy Days (ABC, 1974-1984) as his own school
memories, the parody will frequently be pastiche on a television or cinema screen
within the show; or in the “Treehouse of Horror” episodes, the plot of a well-known
horror or science-fiction movie will be adopted. These parodies occurring outside of
the general serialised story of The Simpsons’ world also reveals an uneven ontology.
Other episodes go “Behind the Laughter” or undermine the story by explicitly denying
its reality. This is reminiscent of Holy Grail and the Anglophone approach to the
meta-text. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had a history, on the
other hand, of creating films with a Godardian flair for the incongruous imbrication of
clichés into parody. Their second feature Orgazmo (1997), for example, is a
disconcerting blend of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979), kung-fu film and Batman
(1966) camp. In contrast to The Simpsons’ linear Halloween specials, Parker and
Stone forge a lurid and ridiculous collage of obscure, even obscene cultural
references that envelop unlikely targets. Shock-rock band Korn enter South Park as
a Scooby-Doo style gang of mystery solving hippies whilst Kenny is impeccably and
improbably disguised throughout as ED-
209 from RoboCop (1987), only to be
destroyed at the end by rebel forces from
The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Indeed,
in one episode, Butters, like our Godard
characters before, begins to see the world
as The Simpsons when it becomes clear
all his thoughts come from it (Figure 11). Figure 11
If South Park employs parody
more extremely, it also courts more controversy. Although George H. W. Bush
encouraged families to be less like the Simpsons, Donald Rumsfeld blames South
Park for all the problems in America! 12 Yet, in the sections that follow, we will see
how South Park is an advocate of freedom and happiness, in particular for children.

South Park and South Park; Simultaneously Real and Reel

In many respects what South Park attempts to study is the contradictory way
in which adults and society attempt to subordinate children to the American superego
and reality before they are barely potty trained, such as sex-education taught before
puberty. This is then contrasted with the confusing myths that are posited in their
world as realities, such as Santa Claus. The principal modes of the subordination are

12
In Bowling for Columbine (Moore, 2002).

43
found in TV, films and other media, and usually undertake to indoctrinate, and then to
sell. The toy company Mattel, for example, made the cheap Masters of the Universe
(1983-1985) to sell their muscular, sword-
wielding He-Man dolls, but always found
time to impart a hypocritical (or bemusing)
message regarding pacifism or the perils
of basting cats in condiment. 13 In South
Park’s “Chinpokomon”, the children are
brainwashed by their favourite cartoon
into buying merchandise, and, ultimately,
performing military acts for the
manufacturer (Figure 12). As creators of Figure 12

an (adult) cartoon, Parker and Stone were inundated with, and insulted by offers of
childish merchandising, such as babies’ bibs (MaximOnline, 1999).
Yet in the trash they watch on TV, apparently without any guidance or
concern from their parents, we see the arbitrariness with which children are
educated. For example, Bill Cosby’s didactic Fat Albert (NBC, 1972-1984) cartoon is
completely inverted as the bemused children watch what appears to be an animated
urban ghetto drama. At school they are no safer; their teacher Mr. Garrison is:

a child teaching children, akin to Freud’s primitives who live in a dreamlike blurring of
phantasy and reality, or a return of Nietzsche’s creative primitives, now exhausted by
information overload and free to elaborate spontaneously on traditional text book
history. (Larsen, 2001: 69)

Garrison lives his life rather like a character from TV’s most insipid pulp form – the
TV movie. He worries that his father has not sexually abused him, and he briefly
turns to paedophilia. His lessons consist of showing the children episodes of cop-
show Barnaby Jones (CBS, 1973-1980) – when dismissed for the aforementioned
child-grooming he turns in his “badge and gun”. This reflects on the children; we see
them doing history homework on Ewoks and Knight Rider (Universal, 1982-1986). In
one episode the children perceive a policeman in freeze-frame, as though it were the
end of an episode of Barnaby Jones that they were living. This is, of course, a
manipulation of the Police Squad! joke mentioned previously. We are getting

13
http://flyingmoose.org/heman/mustard.htm, accessed 19th August 2005.

44
parodies of parodies – Garrison emerging as a Zucker brother 14 , educating people
through cinematic and televisual mythology. Other parodies of comedies arise: an 8-
year old Woody Allen bores the gang with his neuroses and inability to play; although
Holy Grail was found to be lacking in satirical punch, many of the jokes and methods
from it are used to reflect the anachronisms of Catholicism; a Jackovosaur, a loud,
asexual and clumsy animal, is thrown out of South Park for annoying everyone – he
finds a home in France, where he is received as the new Jerry Lewis.
The children’s’ lives, perhaps because of this influence, also become
parodies, their adventures frequently taking on the formal aspects of childrens’
television. Most episodes conclude, much like He-Man, with epilogues wherein we
find what the children have learnt to John Williams-inspired schmaltz guitar. The
Peanuts cartoons appear to have had a huge influence: The Spirit of Christmas and
“Merry Christmas Charlie
Manson” have the same
concerns as A Charlie Brown
Christmas (Melendez, 1965) –
the loss of the holiday to
commercialism and bad TV
(Figure 13). The unaired pilot
episode ran with Peanuts’ eerie
incidental jazz music (before
Figure 13 – Snoopy beats Charlie Brown
resorting to the familiar Colorado
banjo plucking), and the animation is similarly one-dimensional. These references
are telling, because aside from the more devious types of childrens’ TV, the reason
why undergraduates enjoy getting stoned and watching childrens’ cartoons is their
insane and unabated surrealism. In Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown (Melendez,
1977), the gang sleep in the snow in t-shirts, swim in freezing water, and career
unsupervised down perilous rapids. This is truly Freud’s ludic, dangerless, juvenile
world; if adults actually watched some of these things, they might be truly terrified!
The devastation and carnage that proceeds in South Park – from the attack of a
mechanized Barbra Streisand to a world-devouring trapper-keeper – seem to be the
fearless fantasies of the young; hence they observe these extraordinary events
without too much hysteria. South Park is, like a show meant for children, as surreal,
as ridiculous, as childhood itself. The perceptions that create this world come from
their lucid, uninhibited imaginations (when an alien asks them what pleasing form he

14
Of course, Parker and Stone acted in David Zucker’s BASEketball (1998) and were
commissioned to make Your Studio and You (1995) by him.

45
should take, they respond with “giant taco that craps ice-cream”), in addition to an
horrific, assimilated cocktail of manipulative commercial TV and film myths, and
irresponsibly surreal TV and film myths. The reality of childhood is bewildering like
this; Piaget and Freud tell us this much. Another who works like this and is influenced
by Peanuts is Bill Watterson, whose comic strip Calvin and Hobbes is about a child
whose pragmatic stuffed tiger appears to come into and out of being depending on
from whose perspective he/it is perceived, suggesting that although Calvin is a child,
his reality is equally valid, if different to that of his parents (Christie, no date). In one
South Park, Cartman paints Jennifer Lopez onto his hand and she/it (seemingly)
acquires reality, signing a record deal and attracting Ben Affleck.
In South Park it becomes clear that there is an immense gulf between the
children and the adults. Their lives too resort to parody when they find perceive
themselves to be in a generic situation; one father thinks himself in Raging Bull
(Scorsese, 1980) whilst drunk and rowdy at a little-league game. The political
conundrums of the adult world always manifest themselves in some form of
recognizable Hollywood genre. The media influence, however, appears to panic
them, forcing them to grow their children up too quickly. Media reports of child abuse
compel the parents to exile their children, as they accept the claim that kids are not
safe, even from their parents. Similarly, every child is put on Ritalin because they
“run around like little eight-year olds”. The children however, are not interested; they
just want to play by themselves. Like the Marx Brothers, the children set themselves
apart from the world and desire to be without plot. In “Towelie”, a sci-fi conspiracy
plot irritates the boys, who simply wish to go back to playing their video game. This is
in contrast to Godard’s characters who set themselves apart from reality by
attempting to engage in realism and give themselves significance; yet in South Park
there is no distinction between fantasy and reality – no deadly cut off that asserts an
“I” because the adults, the media and their bad TV are there to continually question
the construction of the world. The boys’ ludicrousness is both in opposition to, and a
construction of, the South Park world’s apparent ridiculousness.

Ludicrous vs Ridiculous

Everything proceeds through opposition, including the affection, relation and

interpretation schema that Deleuze applied to the Marxes. This occurs with the
children. Kenny (Stone) is the Zeppo, his inaudibility granting him anonymity,
supported by the role of secretary he takes in many games, which is made eternal by
his obligatory and pointlessly gory death; the forgotten death of the other and that

46
which cannot occur to an American “hero” 15 . Stan (Parker) is the Chico, sensibly
shattering the mirror standoff between Cartman (Parker) and Kyle (Stone). The
games they play are competitions forged from outlandish, idiotic arguments; Cartman
insists that he can record a platinum album or that if he puts food up his anus he will
crap out of his mouth; Kyle disagrees, and the adventure begins. Kyle is a Jewish
outcast who reads philosophy, refuses to indulge in trends, and expresses outrage.
When he discovers that the tooth fairy is fictitious (like the death of God) he
questions the basis of ontology, becoming, briefly, the entire of reality, unleashing a
chicken-squirrel and a 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) style montage on an
assembly of dentists and gangsters. These gangsters are other children playing, and
the dentists appear to think they are the FBI. Several reams of ridiculousness then,
are conquered by Kyle’s ludicrousness.
Kyle cannot relate to Cartman however, who plays, not the Harpo game of
“celestial affects” (Deleuze, 1983: 199), but that of Groucho’s logico-linguistic
exploitation. Yet, as South Park is a post-modern place constituted by deranged,
ridiculous parody, his ludic adventures, rather than “destroying all reality in the mind”
in the Artaud sense, layer destruction over what is already destroyed (or what-is-not).
He realizes his filmic status, referring not to left-hand but camera-left, and if, as
Godard says, tracking shots are moral judgments, Cartman can say trite, materialistic
things and make them sentimental by tracking to the correct music: “All I ever
wanted… was one million dollars”. When the
children play games, he will be costumed and
made-up properly with the exact level of
dishevelment, for example, required in a hard-
bitten cop (Figure 14). He will also adjust his
dialogue to fit generic parlance. In “Red
Badge of Gayness” (i.e. Courage, Huston,
1951) in a bid to disprove Stan and Kyle’s
belief in the sanctity of historical fact, he Figure 14

assembles an army in a bid to have the result

of the Civil War altered. He appears throughout the episode in static sepia-tinted
insets, speaking semi-diegetically, as is characteristic of cinematic “letters from the
front”. The inappropriate things Groucho does with clichéd phrases, Cartman does
with film grammar.

15
Kenny was “killed-off” for a season during which time Stone voiced Butters and Tweek who
would also take subservient roles and receive mental and physical torture.

47
 As the directors, writers and performers of the episodes, Parker and Stone
can efface one another at the meta-textual level, illustrating perfectly the oppositional
structure expounded above. “Woodland Critter Christmas” sees Stan as the unwilling
subject of a narrative read by an unknown adult with Jackanory (BBC, 1965-1996)
over-emphasis and Dr. Seuss meter. Stan’s indifference turns to horror as the blend
of childish story platitudes (talking animals, nativity, “the little boy in the red poof-ball
hat”) degenerates into Satanism and bloodletting abjection. He continually attempts
to leave the story, finally drawing the line at having to teach lion cubs how to perform
abortions. The narrator forces him into the clinic with a jump-cut, just as Bugs
manipulates Daffy with directorial devices. Kyle then enters the story, willingly
accepting the invitation of the Critters to become the Antichrist. At this point Kyle’s
outraged objections can be heard over the narrator, and we cut to Mr. Garrison’s
class, where Cartman is revealed to be reading a story he has written. But as Stan is
keen to know what happens to him, Kyle allows Cartman to continue; Stan too begins
speaking in the Seuss poetry, and “they all lived happily ever after”.
Cartman readily confounds his real/reel world, as this world is always ready to
adopt a new genre to reflect moral seriousness. When the gang pretend to be
policemen and unwittingly solve a crime, they are named “Junior Detectives” by the
real police, fittingly for the original form of children’s story perennially adopted, but
they are then unwillingly catapulted by the stereotypically severe chief into Serpico’s
(Lumet, 1973) plot of police corruption, and the bullet-ridden violence of the attendant
realist cop genre. After a miraculous escape and successful resolution they are
offered promotion and jobs on the force. They respond by deciding to play
“Laundromat” owners instead.
As in Godard, play with the world
leads to treacherous situations – a war on
almost every subject – and it is usually
down to Stan to dissolve the tensions and,
with Kyle, disentangle the genres and
dogmas that have collectively led to the
conflict, guaranteeing the kids’ show ending
described above, but crucially, restoring
them to ludic flux, and South Park to its Figure 15 – A misunderstanding of the
adult world?
natural absurdity. It is not, as Creebe
(2001: 75) suggests, “perverse enjoyment of the child characters’ precociousness as
well as their misunderstanding of the adult world” (Figure 15), but the enjoyment of
everyone’s misunderstandings of every relative interpretation of an uncertain world.

48
In a bid to get back to their innocent games, once one game has become fatally out
of control, they claim to have “learnt something today”; which is nothing more than
that all parties concerned, including them, are wrong. The debate on the Iraq War is
shown by them to boil down to a taste in rock over country music. The solution is for
both styles to be integrated into the same song. This is true of South Park, the most
ridiculous and surreal combination of every style, genre and belief – from cross-
pollinated TV shows to real-world events – resulting finally in nothing but laughter.
Parker (in Epstein, 2005) admits that this is the approach adopted:

We just pick a topic. We have the boys watching two groups go to war over
something. And in the middle, they're just like, "Hey! Guys! Stop killing each other,"
because there is no clear-cut answer. […] We never like to come across as cynical.
Because we're both very optimistic guys, and [… t]here is optimism simply in
laughing.

The playing of ludicrousness against ridiculousness is a formula with no true

world and no true subjects; South Park is laughter at the absurd nothing, and the
risible constructs people are capable of. There is no bitterness in South Park, as
everyone arrives at the same nihilistic conclusion, and resolves to join the
performing, directing creators and playful children in the game of colliding
incommensurate categories. The children of South Park are not the detached
existentialists of an inaccessible “real” world, a true “adult” world, as in Godard and
Allen, but the creators of their own world, which is subject to other forces coming into
and out of their world. Both they and the world are out-of-joint. Even the parody
continually undermines itself. If the norms of children’s television are spoofed, the
episodes’ resolutions reconstitute it.
Schlegel said that irony was equivalent to self-parody (Rose, 1993: 88). Just
as the Marxes’ masks were obviously false, South Parks dons a fake mask of genre
that serves to leave us free from dogmas, including the “truth” of nihilism imparted by
the children and the “truth” of the conduit. For example, Mr. Garrison, who is
established as a teacher of parody, insane, perverse and living within a bizarre film-
world, is ironically the one who voices the most sensible views on the political issues.
Real-world seriousness mocks genre, whilst the world itself always manifests itself as
a cliché worthy of mockery. The faire-faux of Godard, on the other hand, imbricates
clichés to falsify a mask of mimetic art; but the consequent neo-reality is merely a
neo-lie, which is why Godard’s new world fails to sustain its lovers and existential

49
heroes. There are no heroes and lovers in South Park, just oppositional forces
maintaining the mercurial experience of childhood.
The blending of incompatible categories that the children and the town
indulge in is indicative of perpetual investigation. This is not the decadence and
mindless self-assertion that arises from other interpretations of Nietzsche’s will-to-
power. It is not about destruction, but about destroying the destroyed, the double
negative of making something out of the ridiculous nothingness. Being absurd.
Deleuze (1973: 147) says that Nietzsche is ironic, and Magnus et al (1993: 205) say
that he indulges in self-parody to deconstruct the self. Indeed, the Nietzschean
aphorism appears to function like the South Park episode – Zarathustra’s sub-titular
claim to be “a book for everyone and no one” is like South Park’s disclaimer that it
“should not be viewed by anyone”. Deleuze (1973: 146-147) states that Nietzsche’s
proper names (Christ, Christianity, etc.), like South Park’s misused cultural citations
(Hollywood, Saturday morning cartoons), both idols of a different age (and for
different ages), are “designations of intensity” involved in a free play of “irony and
humour” that continually “ebbs and flows”. What Deleuze realized, and this could be
related to the mental-image, is that the truly shocking and ironic leads to laughter.
Not something that anguishes us, alienates us, but that pushes us into the spirit of
free play, that does not find terror in a real world or a sick self, but that encourages
us to engage in the matter and flux that frame being, even those that scare us and
disgust us: when “Nietzsche finds himself confronted with something he feels is
nauseating, ignoble, wretched, he laughs” (Deleuze, 1973: 147). There is no
doubting South Park’s overall hideousness, but there is also no doubting how life-
affirmably funny it is.

50
Conclusion

The point of cheerful nihilism is that it enables us to indulge in the merry play of
meaninglessness; to revel in the limitless intellectual possibilities and freedoms of
absurdity, and to always look for joy in an iniquitous and often terrifying world. It has
been possible to argue here that this is how the Nietzschean aphorism, the South
Park episode, and the Paramount Marx Brothers’ films operate. Such things do lend
themselves to inappropriate and dogmatic understandings: fascists and philosophers
alike have appropriated Nietzsche, and South Park is variously seen as vile and
brilliant, right-wing and left-wing, nationalist and traitorous. These texts are intended
to be interpreted freely, as they themselves are acts of free interpretation.
Furthermore, their inherent ridiculousness supports a theory of laughter, comparable
to that of the sublime, which pushes the limits of our conceptual awareness and
appreciation of space, time, reason and convention. Through these works, absurdity
in a post-God world is to be savoured, as our laughter is boundless. There is nothing
to be serious about.
After World War II this was not how many people had felt, and even before
then, commercial and moral pressures had rendered the Marx Brothers’ anarchism
untenable. Their use of aberrant Clown Comedy, however, left us with art-comedy,
which, like the art-cinema, was opposed to Classical Hollywood realism, just as in
The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had been opposed to the realist, optimistic art of
Plato.
The art-comedy of the 40s and 50s was dominated by a balletic, paranoid
slapstick that explored anxieties and inadequacies related to the ego. Whereas 30s
clowns would break the superego, these post-war clowns were unable to assimilate
themselves to it. One could be ridiculous, but not ludicrous, as all acts were damned
to failure. In the modernist era however, the spirit of play was regained by the use of
meta-cinema, where a director would spar with his actor, just as the Marxes had
sparred with each other and warred with their directors, leading to the author’s
diminished significance, and the space for the admission of the world’s, rather than
just the self’s ridiculousness. This world however, due to the mode of parody
employed, was only that of Hollywood realism. This is not quite free play, but a rule-
bound game and merely a new way of telling an old story.
Godard’s pastiche of Hollywood clichés, on the other hand, exuded reality
that his characters, outsiders seeking to find meaning and communion, would be
destroyed by. Godard’s laughter was about death, and the hopelessness of life, very

51
much like Bataille, another seeking communion in the post-God world and locating it
in absurd, mortiferous eroticism. Moreover, this parodic construction of the world
gave rise to similes, rather than Nietzschean or Marxian metaphors. What in
Nietzsche and the Marx Brothers is ineffable, takes a parodic form and is incarnated
by Bataille and Godard. Unlike Nietzsche and Sartre’s understanding of the post-God
absurd, but like Camus, it is the world that provides a cage in Godard, rather than
excuses and the conventions of courtesy.
From Godard’s time on, parody has been a part of both art-comedy and
Hollywood comedy. It takes on various forms in Woody Allen’s films, which are
divided, like much of New Hollywood, by both traditions. In the beginning, Allen also
uses pastiche, but to reflect, like the dream-image filmmakers, on his psychological
problems. He became increasingly nihilistic however, using manipulations of film-
form to look fruitlessly for answers in movies like Stardust Memories and Annie Hall.
Ultimately, he settles for quotation, offering the Marx Brothers as exemplars of an
approach to absurdity, just as Bataille had argued that Nietzsche was his way of
coping. The problem is that to do this is to contradict their message; to agree with the
Marx Brothers is to become one of the peripheral characters in their films! Nietzsche
and Groucho indulge in ludicrousness to overcome absurdity; Bataille and Allen
merely concur with their approach, thereby cancelling it out.
Although parody appeared to render an author a “clown of God”, if quoted
texts are melded into a genuine ontology, and treated with irony, one obtains a
deconstructed world akin to many disjoined thoughts or consciousnesses, rather than
Godard’s mapping of a mimetic world onto a reinforced subjectivity. This is what
happens in South Park, proof that parody is more than mere commercialism and
cultural nostalgia.
It is also ironic that South Park is a television show using direction and
cinematic techniques for their subversion; the Marx Brothers made films that were
barely directed and dependent on Vaudeville traditions. Throughout we have seen
the ludic significance of simply doing something wrong; such as Edwards use of a
clown in a straight genre picture, and Godard’s faire-faux. Deleuze (1985: 280) is
clear that cinema may be used in the philosophical act of concept creation;
something that is frequently forgotten by Film Studies. The ludicrous, ridiculous art-
cinema that we have identified produces radical ideas and when it is at its best,
provides us with challenging deliquesce and flux. Deleuze (1973: 142) suggests that
if psychoanalysis and Marxism were the principal movements of our intellectual
geography (and political, cultural and psychological readings are the convention of
Film Studies), Nietzsche provided us with our counter-culture. Art-comedy seems to

52
be just as significant, and deserving of far more attention that it receives, and I have
here been able only to give a brief account of its potential. If it seems ironic that one
should ask that the enemies of seriousness be taken more seriously, we will at least
be able to laugh about it. Psychologists attempt to cure the soul and politicians
attempt to cure the state with varying levels of success, but it is our laughter that
admits to the certainty of pain and suffering with a defiant grin, and leads us with
optimism into the new day.

53
Filmography

In every instance, the credited director is here listed as the author of the film,
although this dissertation frequently flaunts this convention. Play it Again, Sam was
written by and stars Woody Allen, and it is clearly very much a part of his oeuvre; the
same point is made about the first five Marx Brother films. In addition, the creators of
listed television programs are noted along with the network that produces the show.
Most of the information here is taken from The Internet Movie Database
(http://uk.imdb.com).

2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968, UK/USA)

8½ (Fellini, 1963, Italy/France)
À bout de souffle (Godard, 1960, France)
Âge d’or, L’ (Buñuel, 1930, France)
Airplane! (Abrahams, D. Zucker, J. Zucker, 1980, USA)
Animal Crackers (Heerman, 1930, USA)
Annie Hall (Allen, 1977, USA)
Austin Powers (Roach, 1997, 1999, 2002, USA/Germany)
Bande à part (Godard, 1964, France)
Bad (Scorsese, 1987, USA)
Bananas (Allen, 1971, USA)
Barnaby Jones (CBS, 1973-1980, USA)
BASEketball (D. Zucker, 1998, USA)
Batman (Martinson, 1966, USA)
Beavis and Butt-head (Judge, MTV, 1993-1997, USA)
Blazing Saddles (Brooks, 1974, USA)
Bowling for Columbine (Moore, 2002, USA/Canada/Germany)
Charlie Brown Christmas, A (Melendez, 1965, USA)
Cocoanuts, The (Florey and Santley, 1929, USA)
Cosby Show, The (Leeson, Weinberger and Cosby, NBC, 1984-1992, USA)
Dentist on the Job (Pennington-Richards, 1961, UK)
Duck Amuck, (C. Jones, 1953, USA)
Duck Soup, (McCarey, 1933, USA)
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (Allen,
1972, USA)
Family Guy (MacFarlane, Fox, 1999+, USA)
Fast and Furry-ous (C. Jones, 1949, USA)

54
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids (Cosby, NBC, 1972-1984, USA)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Gilliam, 1998, USA)
Femme est une femme, Une (Godard, 1961, France/Italy)
Flintstones, The (Hannah and Barbera, ABC, 1960-1966, USA)
Futurama (Groening, Fox, 1999-2003)
Hannah and Her Sisters (Allen, 1986, USA)
Happy Days (Marshall, ABC, 1974-1984, USA)
Hardcore (Schrader, 1979, USA)
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (Mattel, 1983-1985, USA)
Hercules (Clements and Musker, 1997, USA)
Hollywood Ending (Allen, 2002, USA)
Horse Feathers (McLeod, 1932, USA)
Hot Shots! (Abrahams, 1991, USA)
Jackanory (Kerrigan, BBC, 1965-1996, UK)
King of Comedy, The (Scorsese, 1983, USA)
Kiss Me, Stupid (Wilder, 1964, USA)
Knight Rider (Larson, Universal) 1982-1986, USA
Life of Brian (T. Jones, 1979, UK)
Lord of the Rings, The (Jackson, 2001, 2002, 2003, NZ/US/Germany)
Love and Death (Allen, 1975, USA)
Manhattan (Allen, 1979, USA)
Meaning of Life, The (Gilliam and T. Jones, 1983, UK)
Mon oncle (Tati, 1958, France/Italy)
Monkey Business (McLeod, 1931, USA)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Gilliam and T. Jones, 1975, UK)
Monty Python’s Flying Circus (Chapman, Cleese, Gilliam, Idle, Jones and Palin,
BBC, 1969-1974, UK)
Night at the Opera, A (Wood, 1935, USA)
Orgazmo (Parker, 1997, USA)
Pierrot le fou (Godard, 1965, France/Italy)
Pink Panther, The (Edwards, 1963, USA/UK)
Pink Panther Strikes Again, The (Edwards, 1976, UK/USA)
Pink Phink, The (Freleng, 1964, USA)
Play it Again, Sam (Ross, 1972, USA)
Playtime (Tati, 1967, France/Italy)
Police Squad! (Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker, Paramount, 1982, USA)
Purple Rose of Cairo, The (Allen, 1985, USA)

55
Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown (Melendez, 1977, USA)
Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980, USA)
Red Badge of Courage, The (Huston, 1951, USA)
RoboCop (Verhoeven, 1987, USA)
Scary Movie (Wayans, 2000, 2001, D. Zucker 2003, 2006, USA)
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? (Hannah and Barbera, ABC, 1969-1972, USA)
Serpico (Lumet, 1973, USA/Italy)
Seventh Seal, The (Bergman, 1957, Sweden)
Shining, The (Kubrick, 1980, UK)
Shot in the Dark, A (Edwards, 1964, USA/UK)
Simpsons, The (Groening, Fox, 1989+, USA)
Sleeper (Allen, 1973, USA)
South Park (Parker and Stone, Comedy Central, 1997+, USA)
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (Parker, 1999, USA)
Spirit of Christmas, The (Parker and Stone, 1995, USA)
Stardust Memories (Allen, 1980, USA)
Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner, 1980, USA)
Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges, 1941, USA)
Top Gun (Scott, 1986, USA)
Vacances de M. Hulot, Les (Tati, 1953, France)
Vivre sa vie (Godard, 1962, France)
Week End (Godard, 1967, France/Italy)
Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957, Sweden)
Witness for the Prosecution (Wilder, 1957, USA)
Your Studio and You (Parker, 1995, USA)
Zelig (Allen, 1983, USA)
Zero Hour! (Bartlett, 1957, USA)

56
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16
Sadly Shpadoinkle, a Trey Parker website and treasure trove of interviews, fails to name
the authors of the interviews, many of which are no longer online in their original form.

61