‘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.
By David Selzer