Umberto Eco states that comedy begins when we see how characters break rules or violate socially acclaimed order. At the same time, Eco writes that “in comedy… the broken frame must be presupposed but never spelled out.” [1] Therefore, according to Eco, for humour to be understood, the listener of a joke/the viewer of a skit must be familiar with common standards of social behaviour and thus have certain expectations of how the characters would normally behave in the real world. Eco gives examples of the maxim of quality/quantity jokes that work only if we understand the context in which they are told. [2]
This reminds me of the crime comedy Seven Psychopaths (Martin McDonagh, UK/US, 2012) which can be viewed as a parody of Hollywood crime films. In one of the most famous scenes of the film, Hans (Christopher Walken) refuses to obey the order of an armed man and put his hands up. According to the standards of the crime/thriller genre (and real life), when someone faces a man with a weapon, they are expected to do whatever it takes to save their life. Here the genre trope is broken by the hero’s surprising refusal to follow the order and by the total absence of the hero’s concern for his life. Hans acts confidently and even threateningly in the scene, as if it is he, who is “the danger”. This violation of the logical and realistic behaviour which is reinforced by the bad guy’s exaggerated confusion, is what makes the scene comical and quite absurd.
In his films, Martin McDonagh often plays with viewers’ expectations by constantly disobeying the laws of the real world and altering well-known generic tropes and cliches. It does not only make his films and filmmaking style more original, but also adds humour (mostly dark humour) to the otherwise dramatic situations.
1. Umberto Eco, “The frames of comic ‘freedom’,” in Carnival!, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 1984), 4.
2. Ibid., 5.
You touch on something important with McDonagh’s sense of comedy, that of the subversion of expected conduct in the face of danger. We can see this testing of the other’s resolve in The Banshees of Inisherin, whereupon Gleeson’s character threatens to chop off his fingers if Farrell continues talking to him. There’s an obvious absurdity to self-mutilation in this situation, so Keoghan suggests he calls his bluff – the horrifying humour of it reveals itself when Gleeson follows through with his threat.