Horrid Laughter –War Comedy 1930-60.
The War Books Controversy entirely changed the ways that the Great War was portrayed. This change was not only a literary one but affected virtually every mode of cultural discourse. Histories focused on military ineptitudes, magazines which had hitherto illustrated the war through vainglorious watercolours were now filled with graphic photographs of casualties and corpses, and films began to portray the “horror” of war. Remarque’s All Quiet on The Western Front was one of the most successful films of 1930, winning the Oscar for Best Picture. The war was no longer a victory, no longer a triumph against incredible odds or an indication of the bravery of individuals. In 1939, it was no longer a bringer of peace to Central Europe, a fact which was unanimously recognised. The Treaty of Versailles was ineffective and unjust – not one single portion of the reparations demanded by the Allies was received by Germany. The Great War went on becoming a historical disaster long after it was over.
Popular culture encouraged this ideology immeasurably. The war became synonymous with “horror”, “pity”, “The Dead”, “shell-shock” and above all, “futility”. These themes dominated the ways the war was depicted and meant many of the previous modes of discourse were either suppressed or reconditioned. There was a dramatic divergence in the ways that the war was portrayed – anything that suggested patriotism, courage “against the odds” or jingoism was derided, replaced with the cynicism of writers such as Graves and Sassoon and reinterpreted with the new techniques of modernism and psychoanalysis. In this new construction, comedy was not so much disallowed, as only encouraged in very specific forms, and because of this very little could be created. The period between the 1930’s and the present day is noticeable for the amount of comedy it didn’t create; the war as a theme virtually disappearing. It was during this time of submersion that the idea of the war as the war writers described slowly became the only valid representation.
In many ways the War Books were liberating. They encouraged a flood of memories and experiences to be recovered, and allowed many soldiers traumatised by the war to express their own feelings and to be at least partially understood by the population they felt had spurned them. The change in writing about the war meant that the struggling, clumsy texts like Crascredo’s No Joke were replaced by more lucid works such as Goodbye to All That, which successfully blended dark satire with recollection. However, not everyone wanted to talk about the war, not everybody had fought “a bloody war”, and not everybody wanted to feel that they were the “victims” this new depiction encouraged. Lyn Macdonald comments in 1918, To The Last Man that “The word ‘horror’ has become inseparable from contemporary judgement…but it is too glib and appraisal. In many years of conversing with former soldiers I can say with perfect honesty that I have never heard the word ‘horror’ on their lips, though many of the experiences they spoke of were indeed horrific”(introduction, p.vii). The new type of remembrance could therefore be as damaging as the old attitudes, suppressing and reworking the war in a way that was equally unsettling to pretending all was well. Part of this ethos is demonstrated in the ways that comedy had to adapt.
In The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia, Glenn Mitchell describes the reception of Duck Soup in the following way:
It has been suggested that an anti-war comedy was mistimed for 1933, given the mood of despondency and the comparatively fresh memories of a World War only fifteen years earlier; yet times of economic depression frequently encourage dark humour and comedies set in the Great War had proliferated almost since the armistice.” (p.86)
Mitchell is wrong in two major ways here. Firstly he suggests that the anti-war critique was contemporary of the film’s release, which it was not. Criticism of the film’s war content is not apparent in any concurrent reviews. Secondly, he highlights the amount of films produced whilst neither giving examples or explaining that these were all pre-1930 (and the film of All Quiet On the Western Front), when cinematic depictions caught up with the War Books. From 1930 onwards, it is rare that any films mention the First World War. If they do, it is in a highly formulated way. Mitchell’s description here is typical of this new interpretation, responding to the way people feel they ought to react nowadays, rather than how critics did at the time. His interpretation of the ”fresh memories” is symptomatic of how the war myth insinuated itself into readings of comedy.
This is what makes Duck Soup subversive. The Marx Brothers make little direct reference to the war, using it as merely a background tool to enable their own anarchic brand of comedy. By doing this, Duck Soup does not need to employ any of the standard “War is Hell” tropes, and the war becomes merely another farcical event to be swept along in the dramatic action. This is both unusual and remarkable because it is such a denial of contemporary cultural thought. Duck Soup was one of the only films daring enough to attempt this, and it was only allowed because the Marx Brothers’ style waswell-known as one which took only token interest in plot or situation. After 1930, films directly concerning the war were avoided, and although it was often used as background, the war became a symbolic occurrence rather than an event. This trend was reflected in all of the dominant modes of popular culture. To find the Great War mentioned in comedies is exceptionally rare – to suggest there was anything remotely amusing about the war was now “not done”. Furthermore, it was seen as offensive and inaccurate. The War Books demanded a reworking of the war; and one of the first casualties in this recreation was the old style of comedy.
Perhaps one of the reasons for this was the interpreation of the war as a predominantly middle-class discourse. Most of the significant war writers were middle-class intellectuals, regarding working-class comedies such as music hall with distaste. Concert parties were mentioned frequently in the memoirs and poems, but often as a counterpoint to the ‘harsh reality’ of the trench experience. A typical view of this is the Richard Aldington poem; Concert.
I deplore my own vague cynicism,
Undressing with indifferent eyes each girl,
Seeing them naked on that paltry stage
Stared at by half a thousand lustful eyes.
Am I dead? Withered? Grown old?
That not the least flush of desire
Tinges my unmoved flesh,
And that instead of women’s living bodies
I see dead men – you understand? – dead men
With sullen, dark red gashes
Luminous in a foul trench?
(Images of War, 1919)
This type of representation left little room for the actual narratives that had emerged during the war – interpretations which subtly reworked comedy to the soldier’s ends. The condescending attitude of the war writers overlooked this aspect of troop entertainment, and greatly influenced the subsequent representation of both comedy as an essential part of the war, and the ways in which this was presented. The irony exuded by the war writers was excluded wartime comedy, and there were no alternative figures to present as subjects.
It was not until the end of the Second World War that comedy began to mention the war again. At this time there was another distinctive shift in representing the war. Historically and mythologically the war was not only horrific, but the indirect cause of the war just ended. However, this also enabled the Great War to slip into the hazy era of “the past”. Certain specific readings of the war started to intrude into popular culture again.
The war was still not a valid subject, but it began to be mentioned indirectly. Familiar tropes from all wars - the crusty colonel, the sergeant with a good heart and the over-enthusiastic recruit were now specifically applied to the Great War. War veterans were now gently parodied as old buffers telling rambling recollections, and class was mentioned more directly – distinctions being drawn between the hard-working Tommy and the slightly neurotic officer. With characterisations as delineated as these however, these representations tended to appear in genre fiction – thrillers and romances needing superfluous characters. The rapid pace of these fictions encouraged these superficial identities and easily recognisable types. However, accompanying the old portrayals of soldiers was the new characteristic of irony. Representations of the war were portrayed through stereotyped characters, but these were simultaneously presented with the respect and pity that accompanied the image of the war. This was a difficult concept to present – the character had to be nostalgically lampooned; the comedy being continually justified by the recognition that the experience of the character had been no topic for amusement.
For this reason, aggressive comedic portrayals of the war were discouraged and avoided. The war was never used as a central forum or location for the comedy – merely serving to describe subsidiary characters or events. A good example of this comes from a slightly later era in the television programme: Fawlty Towers. In the hotel, there are a number of regular guests including a deaf major, who occasionally embarks on long and rambling tales of his military service to the irritation of the proprietor. The fact that the major is a veteran of the Great War is mentioned consecutively with it being a “frightful business”. There are no other outstanding determinants to this man’s character – demonstrating it is enough to mention his war experience but not comedically acceptable to elucidate further.
The war writers had effectively contained depictions of the war. Comedies avoided it as direct subject matter but began to parody it indirectly through characters or recollections. Unlike the earlier comedies which focused on the minutiae of trench life but then dismissed it as inevitable, these newer comedies depicted a series of standardised references, avoiding individualising detail. This trend was enabled by World War Two when the Great War began to be regarded as ‘history’ and was used as a distraction from the events after 1939. The war was once again reinvented as an era when the innocence of the British nation was lost, a more civilized era than the one in which the population now lived. However, this was additionally seen in terms of the new myth of bitterness, irony and futility. To parody the war also demanded tacit recognition of suffering. This new structure still remains in depictions of the First World War, and has not yet been fully subverted through the more mainstream areas of popular comedy.
Read About Later Comedy, The Rules of War (how to make a war film), Oh What A Lovely War!