The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [104]
Nothing seems funnier to us than the sight of someone imagining that he has the world around him organised and under control, when in fact we can see that it is nothing of the kind. This was why audiences for The Music Box (1931) found it funny to see Oliver Hardy, the earnest fat man in a bowler hat, trying to work out with his hapless partner Stan Laurel how to move a grand piano up a flight of steps, only to see it constantly slipping out of their grasp. This was why British television audiences in the 1970s laughed at the sight of Basil Fawlty, played by John Cleese in the series Fawlty Towers, desperately trying to preserve his persona as a coolly efficient hotel proprietor and to persuade his guests that everything is in perfect order, while behind the scenes it is only too obvious that all his establishment's arrangements are sliding into chaos. The same basic joke inspired Groucho Marx's role as a hotel manager in A Night in Casablanca. In the 1980s it was essentially the same joke which underlay the spectacle of Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby engaging in their game of ruthless rivalry in Yes Minister, the British television series written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn. The ambitious politician and the devious civil servant are each pursuing their own agenda behind an outward mask of civility and the pretence that their only concern is the public good. We see how, beneath the surface, the vain, gullible minister is really driven by egocentric calculations of how he might win plaudits or avoid criticism from the media and his colleagues. The outwardly deferential official is secretly trying to manipulate and outmanoeuvre his supposed master, to promote his own interests as head of his department. What makes us laugh is that we the audience are allowed to see both sides, self-delusion and reality. We can always see exactly what is going on behind the two men's respective personas, as each episode builds up some situation which promises to create maximum embarrassment for minister, civil servant or both. We also know that eventually, in the nick of time, some form of `recognition' will take place, allowing face to be saved and everyone to end happily.
Indeed, beneath the surface of these modern comedies which are primarily intended just to make us laugh, it is striking how far they are still shaped by those basic situations and rules of the Comedy plot going back thousands of years, as when Laurel and Hardy based one of their best-known films Our Relations on the plot of a comedy written in Rome in the third century BC. The only real difference lies in the extent to which the emphasis is placed on the `comic' element at the expense of the rest of the underlying story. For instance, a typical Marx Brothers film when they were at the height of their fame in the 1930s and 1940s showed a little community of people working together (a circus, a sanitarium, a department store, a hotel), the future of which is threatened by a powerful dark figure engaged with his cronies in a conspiracy to pull off some villainous coup. This casts a shadow over all those threatened with disaster if the villainy succeeds. These invariably include a pair of young lovers wanting to get married who, in traditional Comedy terms, are technically the hero and heroine of the story. But our main attention is inevitably reserved for the fooling and wisecracking of the three stars themselves. Groucho is usually passing himself off raffishly as some figure with vaguely superior pretensions (such as a doctor, lawyer or hotel manager). Chico and Harpo play unashamedly `inferior' lower-class characters. Between them they eventually manage, usually by spending some time in disguise or under assumed identities, to outwit the `dark' figures and save the day. And this, of course, to provide the story with its archetypal ending, finally paves the way for the young lovers to get married.