A core premise of this blog is that Comedy is based on a game I call “Phallus, Phallus, Who’s Got the Phallus?” or The Phallus Game. It’s based on the notion of a comic fetish. The core principle of a fetish is that it veils an absence, the absence of something that is deeply desired. That something is a source of mysterious power, so whoever actually possesses it can wield some of its power. Whether it is an absent god, as in a cultic fetish, or the mysterious exchange value of certain made objects, as in Marx’s commodity fetish, or the great penis, as in Freud’s notion of the fetish as screen to block the shocking awareness that women do not have penises, the fetish is a compensation — a supplement, a prosthesis — that simultaneously affirms that a longed-for power is not available to be possessed and wielded while it also hides that awareness. It is ambivalent and destabilizing in its very nature. So, what does this have to do with comedy? Freudian psychoanalysis (and Adlerian maybe even more so) is a treasure trove for comic theory. I’ve noted before that it may not have helped heal many individual humans, but as an explanation of comedy’s character types and complications, it’s priceless.
The Freudian fetish is always a “phallic supplement.” There’s no need to go into the details (which can be very funny) here. Suffice it to say that the phallus in this context is the pretense to have power over people, events, and the world, and it is usually condensed into objects that represent that power. The phallus is, of course, associated with males, but every psychoanalyst stresses that the penis and the phallus aren’t identical. In Eugenie Lemoine-Luccioni’s illustrious formulation: “If the penis were the phallus, men would have no need of feathers or ties or medals.”
The phallus is itself a kind of linguistic fetish-object, since it pretends to represent something that doesn’t actually exist — the word stands for a symbol, a symbol of displayed power. But there’s no reason for the phallus to be male at all. It belongs to whomever possesses it, or more properly for the purposes of comedy, is possessed by it. It’s hard to possess because it’s unstable, not actually fixed down to anything. In the Winnebago Coyote stories, Coyote’s penis sometimes runs away from him, and Coyote has a hard time getting it back. So, in fact, the phallus tends to have a mind of its own and jumps around from possessor to possessor. The phallus is always a jumping phallus.
As crazy as this might sound, almost every comedy worth its salt demonstrates it. Think of all the comedies that revolve around a lost object that moves from character to character. Think of it this way: every comedy involves a game of power slipping away from characters trying to get hold of it to fix it down and wield it. And every core comic type — fool, clown, churl, gull, trickster, heavy father, eiron, etc. — represents a certain traditional socio-tactical response to power. In anarcho-slapstick comedies, nobody gets to hold onto power until the Comic Spirit decides the game is over; object after object is used both by and against the protagonists. In object comedies like The Italian Straw Hat and Bringing Up Baby phallic fetishes keep slipping away from characters who desperately desire them. (Bringing Up Baby is a symphony of this kind of comedy.) In comedies of manners, the comic fetishes tend to be words, which can escape control in a myriad ways — through misunderstandings, malapropisms, professional jargon, dreamy logic, nonsequiturs, code-switching, on and on.
A phallus is a funny thing. Its career from phallos, the archaic masculine archetype of power, to the Freudian displacement of the penis, to Jacques Lacan’s Master Signifier –- from myth, to dream, to language –- displays its great utility for patriarchal dominance. But it’s an image that is always already comic. That’s because the great symbol of the male essence is almost always an inaccessible ideal for any human male; in fact, it stands as a critique of an actually existing sex-organ that is almost always flaccid, except when it is uncontrollably roused to (temporary) display. In reality, most men are weak representatives of the great archetype, usually effectively “castrated,” and pathetic pretenders to the magnificent elusiveness of the Master Signifier. (When the proud organ remains powerfully erect for more than four hours, call the doctor, as the Viagra ads have it. And there you have it. Comic if you win, comic if you don’t.)
The phallus as a sign of male power is itself a joke. When we look at it not only as a symbol of patriarchy, but as an actual power, it’s a pretense: the essence of efficacious virility that’s detached from the carnal limits of actual patriarchs. It’s actually detached from castration. The double-negative – detachment from detachment –, however, doesn’t yield a positive, except in the imagination. On the contrary, it conceals a new negation: the phallus is really an infinitely mobile, infinitely metamorphic power to effect action that can go anywhere. Like Coyote’s detachable penis, it can take any shape, go anywhere. No matter how insistently patriarchy believes that it is the core energy of male dominance, it’s not even male. Comedy delights in empowering any thing with efficacious power. Women, animals, slaves, umbrellas, “effeminate” men, fairies, lawyers, trains, earrings, hats. It is part of the comedy of psychoanalysis that every loss of male power is viewed as “castration” –- the severance of the male body from its source of jam. The phallus is the trickster’s mask of patriarchal power. Its comedic irony is that this totem of maleness can take any shape the Comic Spirit wants it to take – a vagina, if it wants. The phallus is a joke – it reveals what all jokes reveal, that one was buying into the wrong explanation all along.
If the phallus is funny, the fetish is hilarious. The fetish, so important for thinking by archaic peoples, enlighteners, psychoanalysts, and artists of perversion, is an image of itself. While the phallus is an image that can’t reflect or double itself in the human symbolic word, the fetish can do nothing else. From one perspective, a fetish is a material condensation of a spirit that would be invisible and unarticulated without it. It is articulation itself –- only, when the explainers explain it, it is always someone else’s illusory articulation. Illusion or not, it provides real pleasure to the fetishist, who feels the power of the spirit in it, and this inspires in the reasonable, norm-abiding observer ridicule, envy, and wonder in equal measure. From another perspective, the fetish is precisely the opposite: the visible stand-in for what does not exist but is mightily desired. It pretends to be something, but it stands for nothing. The power of the fetish seems to derive precisely from not being what it purports to be. But to the fetishist, the condensation of spirit is neither an illusion nor the real thing; it’s a vehicle for a personal, creative swerve (a “perversion”) away from a crushing, impersonal, distributed order, always on the gaze. It produces endless mobility, pleasure, and ecstatic chaos. Its comic possibilities are endless.
A fetish is a disguise. It is a misunderstanding. A category mistake. A broken-down schema. A trick. A trap. A misdirected message. A rite without a deity. A toy. An absurd proposition. A mixed metaphor. A shaggy dog story. A monument to nothing. It is a mojo hand. A part that pretends it’s a whole, a hole about which there is much ado. It is a crazy plan. It is a comic machine.
Comic fetishes are the material condensations of the Comic Spirit’s vital powers. They are the tools that block, confuse, trick, and ultimately liberate the comic actors. They are very material. They come in at least three classes: objects, bodies (and body parts), and languages. Comedy turns these into fetishes by giving them agency independent of the desires of their handlers.
Comic Objects pretend to exist independent of human perception. They are not inert. At worst, they are dormant. They always have the potential to act with intentions of their own – sometimes blocking, tripping, distracting, casting spells; sometimes enabling, enhancing, redirecting, entrancing. Object Comedies are among the most revered and magical genres of comedy. Consider The Italian Straw Hat, The Wrong Box, The Twelve Chairs, Easy Living. Consider Chaplin’s and Tati’s universe of houses and household objects, and Buster Keaton’s big machines. Their very physics is comic.
More often, they are distributed throughout the comic world. Often these objects seem to double words or bodies. Consider Astaire and Rogers tap dancing on roller skates. Consider Bringing Up Baby’s intercostal clavicle. These are never mere metaphors –- their materiality always asserts itself. Comic objects are things that refuse to be mastered, but may be willing to co-operate gratis with a human graced by the Comic Spirit.
The Comic Body is the intersection point of language and object. Bodies in comedy can be object-like, especially body parts. A leg that won’t stop jittering or that refuses to move and has to be dragged along by the other one. An arm that rises to a Sieg Heil on its own. A little square mustache. A schnoz so big it incites duels. A body with curves like Venus rising from the sea. A body that moves like a chicken, that acts like a chair, that rolls like bowling ball into other bodies that fall like duckpins.
Comic bodies do what real bodies can’t do, and can’t do what real bodies can. Often opposing qualities are combined in same body: consider Buster Keaton’s inflexible stone face and his extraordinarily flexible, acrobatic body. Bodies can also be language-like, becoming signs within a system of signs. They can be aided or contradicted by costumes – all costumes are disguises, according to Henri Bergson. All clothes can become fetishes. Consider feathers, neckties, medals, top hats, sable coats. Even a naked body is a sign when it is incongruous.
Comic Language is language when it is freed from its normal references. It can be like an object if it’s not understood, or is self-enclosing – if it seems to exist independent of the speaker, or of the community of normal speakers. It can be like a body if it is tied to the act of speech or writing – like the fast-talking Jimmy Cagney, Lee Tracy, and Jean Harlow, and all comic newsrooms – or when speech is linked to particular body, like Mae West’s lascivious drawl. Even muteness can become comic language; consider Harpo Marx.
Different kinds of comedy will emphasize different aspects. Slapstick and physical comedy emphasize the comic body. Farce tends to emphasize not only human bodies, but the material bodies of spaces: rooms, doors and windows, wrong turns in the streets. Comedies of wit and manners tend to emphasize comic language but screwball likes to match verbal slapstick with the physical kind.
The comic fetish is how the comic phallus enlightens the audience that there is no stable world with comprehensible rules, norms, and codes. The comic phallus is how the trickster Comic Spirit — maybe the gods Hermes and Coyote themselves — enlighten the audience that there is no stable controller of power. And the Comic Spirit is what enlightens the audience that maximum disorder can be happily resolved gratis — creating bonheur, a happy hour.