“A little comic relief in a discussion does no harm, however serious the topic may be.”
– C. S. Lewis
Catholicism seems to revel in what I like to call “the Creepiness of Christianity”. In a divided American Christendom with sunny Megachurches popping up like shopping malls, it becomes all too easy for the man on the street to forget that the symbol of the Christian faith is indeed an object of horrible torture. The Catholic Church, of course, does not forget. She treasures relics and drinks the blood of Christ. She hangs crucifixes near the dinner table and prays the stations of the cross to linger in the Passion of Our Lord.
However, among all this apparent mumbo-jumbo that unsettles modern Americans to no end, there is a persistent and inescapable joy – ordinary Catholics drinking and playing cards and celebrating feasts and scandalizing the puritan world with smile after smile. I think of the famous Roman martyr St. Lawrence, who whilst being burned by the Roman authorities had the nerve and the wit to say, “Turn me over, I’m done on this side.” How strange is the comedy of grace!
How is it, exactly, that in the midst of this Day of the Dead, the skeletons cloaked in flesh dance around like they’re in some Tim Burton flick?
All this, I think, pokes at something essential to the tragicomedy that is human experience. Dark humor – black comedy, whatever you want to call it. It touches us in a way that few other things do. It makes us laugh when we should be crying, smirk when we should be going to bed and never getting up again. We can think of the classical Shakespearean dichotomy of tragedy and comedy, but even the Bard put the grave diggers in Hamlet.
To me, the topic calls to mind some of my favorite comedy films. I think of the dry British dark comedy Hot Fuzz with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. (Spoilers ahead) The film has a hardliner urban cop named Nicholas Angel thrust into the apparently cozy and idyllic village of Sandford. Though the exterior is soft and happy, the village is run by a vicious cult which kills off anyone that makes the village less likely to win the Village of the Year Award. Though the moral of the story is essentially atheistic (as the Pegg and Frost movies often are) I couldn’t help but think that it revealed some truth about human nature and the limits of the rural ideal. Specifically, it calls to mind the town where I spent my high school days – a nice little rural area in central Maine and, of course, one of the former northern hubs of the Ku Klux Klan. There’s a reason you have to go far enough north or south in Maine to start seeing Catholic Churches on the main road and not tucked away on the hill.
More than the Pegg and Frost movies (which include Shaun of the Dead, and Paul – the latter of which I would not necessarily recommend) a meditation on dark comedy ultimately takes me to my favorite comic filmmaker of all time – Mel Brooks. Known for his work in satirizing just about everything, Brooks is probably most recognized for films like Young Frankenstein and Spaceballs. However, I’m equally smitten with his lesser known titles like Blazing Saddles and History of the World: Part 1 (no, there’s no part two… don’t ask why). Brooks has a way of making fun of pretty much everything horrible in society and history – Nazism, racism, autocracy, greed, blind ambition, religious zealotry, and everything in between. Though certainly not as squeaky clean as may be desired by some, Brooks in his best work always has a way of tickling your funny bone while making you think. His movies are a delightful blend of intellectual reference and just plain stupid humor – the mix of which makes him both accessible and elite.
What is more universal than his films themselves (I admit – not for everyone) is his philosophy of comedy rooted deeply in his cultural Judaism which is a consistent thread throughout all his films. We Catholics could learn much from the Jewish people, as we do every time we open up the Bible (Only one of us gentiles managed to squeeze in there in the end – I’ll let you Google who).
Brooks is worth here quoting at length:
“Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way to deal with the world is to laugh – because if you don’t laugh you’re going to cry and never stop crying – that’s probably what’s responsible for the Jews having developed such a great sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh.”
The Catholic Church holds onto all those things which invite continuity with Judaism. It only seems right that the New Jerusalem should get persecution as part of the whole package. In any event, this idea of the mingling of tears and laughter is something essential to the Christian thing. I’ve written before on this blog about dwelling in both the Lenten and Easter cities– but ultimately they are the same city. The City of God.
Dark comedy works because darkness exists. We all live in a world of death, disease, and damnation. Stupidity and futility haunt the steps of our lives. If we ignore this darkness, we are not living in the real world but some finger-painted sunshine realm that has never existed. We laugh about the darkness, because, if we didn’t, it would overtake us – and we can’t let the darkness win.
St. Lawrence, pray for us.
The Comic Book Catholic 