Mary Douglass, in her reflections over the nature of jokes, and in consideration of Bergson and Freud’s respective accounts, claims that jokes offer some kind of ‘spontaneous’ quality that arises from social situations – a claim that I thought complimented her conception of the ‘joker’ as an equally neutral proponent of laughter and amusement. Douglass furthermore developed her conception of the joke to be a polar opposite to the rites of social function, something which did not “affirm the dominant values, but denigrate and devalue.”(102) Essentially, jokes serve as some form of “anti-rite” to neutrally disorganise the values established and promoted by a given society. One such proponent of this value, as described by Douglass , would be found in the figure of the ‘joker’ – a chaotic figure “who can say certain things in a certain way which confers immunity”, but “the disruptive comments which he makes upon [social structure] are in a sense the comments of the social group upon itself”.(107) Such a figure, who represents spontaneity and vocalises comic criticisms of society as a diegetic character in a film or television show, has come a particularly long way since our initial conceptions set by either either the Marx Brothers or Chaplin – but it is arguable that these comic figures had to take a more subtle approach as comedy and cinematic form and structure established a more dominant position, leaving their style of performance perhaps outdated and too unbound by social realism to find a place in later iterations of screen comedy.
What I’d like to analyse in particular this week would be how the role of ‘the joker’ fit in the international context, and also in the iterations of screen comedy since the 30s – which brings me to talk about Louis de Funes, who dominated the French comedy scene in the 60s-70s. Funes was notorious in France for his joker-style comedy which he infused into every role he was cast – but contrasting to Douglass’ own conception of the joker as an ‘immune’ figure, a large portion of the amusement from watching de Funes originates from his incompetence in fitting with society and his own close relations – which is perhaps a hint towards the eventual change towards narrative which ‘the joker’ had to adapt to in order to keep making re-apparitions in film form. One of Funes’ most notorious scenes would give us perhaps a clearer picture of this sentiment – in this scene of ‘Le Grand Restaurant’, Funes plays a restaurant manager, eager to accommodate his German visitor with his restaurant’s recipe for potatoes. As Douglass would recognise, all the elements are abstractly set up for a standardised joke – but it is the joker’s (de Funes) access to this other reality outside of his guests’ that allows him to reach for spontaneity (the abstract shadows which form a hitler-stache on his face), and eventually make an unconscious Hitler joke – ultimately deconstructing his own social role as the restauranteur, and assumedly in the process making us laugh.