REFLECTIONS ON BURLESQUE AND CALAMITY

‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’

THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE, Karl Marx

‘If I cut my finger that’s tragedy. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.’

ALL ABOUT ME! Mel Brooks

Tragedy shows how, inadvertently,

we may destroy our own lives, as well

as those of others’, through some fatal flaw –

pride, insouciance, self-obsession, fear. Farce,

meanwhile, is the only art form that shows

how so-called inanimate objects,

things-in-themselves, shape human destiny.

Consider whether the dumb-show that follows,

set – in an earlier, apparently

less chaotic epoch – on the island

of Ireland, is drama or pantomime.

Two young lovers, having consulted

an appropriate almanac, choose

what is forecast to be a moonless night

to elope. Unfortunately two rungs

of the wooden ladder the young woman –

a Catholic –  has brought break and the man –

a young scion of the Protestant

Ascendancy – falls on top of her.

Meanwhile the moon appears, and distracts

an old woman passing by – a writer

of bucolic verses occasionally

published in The Lady but an admirer

of narrative verse.  She collides head first

with a lamp post (which the lamplighter

has forgotten to light), and so drops

the banana she has just finished eating,

a comparatively exotic fruit

for the time. The elderly father –

of the putative but prone bridegroom –

learned of the elopement (which is not

now happening the lovers having had,

as it were, almost literally, a falling out)

from an anonymous note at his club.

The cab he has taken stops in the street

near the Aberdeen granite gates of his house.

He pays, then runs, but does not see –

clouds having obscured the moon again –

the unconscious poet nor her discarded

banana skin, and, crying out, slips,

cracking open his congenitally

thin skull on the Yorkstone paving.

The old woman regains consciousness,

and, oblivious of the corpse, wanders home,

suffering from partial amnesia.

The police discover the young woman’s third

cousin was hanged as a Fenian.

She is arrested and questioned frequently.

She becomes a republican. The young man,

in due course, marries a scioness

of the Ascendancy. They return

from their honeymoon to discover

the house he inherited has been burnt down.

The published poet, reading an account

of some of the events in the Irish Times,

thinks briefly what a grand tale they would make.

You may well ask, Dear Reader, what has all this

to do with Hegel, Marx, Louis Bonaparte,

his uncle Napoleon, revolutions,

dialectical materialism,

Melvin Kaminsky aka Mel Brooks

of ‘The Producers’, ‘Young Frankenstein’,

‘Blazing Saddles’, and ‘The Elephant Man’?

In Ancient Greek Tragedy the actor

who played the protagonist, as well as

wearing a mask, wore buskins – thick-soled

laced boots – to give him height.