By the 1960s traffic roundabouts were being constructed throughout the UK and became particularly common in metropolitan London, where they provided a systematic and organized response to the untamed beast that is London traffic. In America, this innovation was virtually unknown to drivers until city planners introduced them in the 1990s.
So much the worse for the Griswold family, who encounter a roundabout for the first time in 1985 in National Lampoon’s European Vacation, where they quickly fall victim to a similarly mechanized gag. In this sequence, the family enters a roundabout in central London while driving to their hotel. However, Clark Griswold quickly encounters the difficulties of exiting said roundabout, causing the family to remain trapped in the same circle for hours.
The repetition of the gag creates what Michael North calls the “intensified reflex versions of the repetition intrinsic to film” (4)—just as the reel of film on which this sequence was shot unspools and respools in the projector, the Griswolds circle endlessly, repetitively, pointing out the same landmarks with each revolution: “Look kids! Big Ben! Parliament!” The family’s circles are inherently mechanical, a faulty cog in the traffic machine whose movements are facilitated by their rented car, yet another piece of complex and foreign machinery. The fact that this film is a sequel starring the same family embarking on yet another vacation adds an additional layer to this mechanized repetition—North writes that audiences find a particular joy in repetition, of which the sequel is a most basic example.
The Griswolds and their roundabout woes are, as North puts it, “not imposed on the industrial process, or invented in defiance of it, but […] derived directly from its workings” (10). They are deviants from a system which should (and theoretically does) work, making them the butt of this gag, but their deviation manifests as a purgatorial assimilation into that system. They are folded into the mechanical workings of the roundabout so thoroughly that they cannot escape it, an incorporation which is so complete that each revolution is accompanied by the same verbal component, which takes place even when hours have passed and everyone but the driver is asleep. The Griswolds thus fall victim to an industrial and mechanical loop which is made all the more comedic with each additional revolution they make.
Works Cited:
Kenneth Todd, “A History of Roundabouts in Britain”, Transportation Quarterly vol. 45 no. 1 (1991), pp. 143-155.
Michael North, Machine-Age Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3-23, 201-203.
National Lampoon’s European Vacation, dir. Amy Heckerling (Warner Bros., 1985).
I firmly believe that Chevy Chase would have no qualms about swerving into oncoming traffic (just a vibe), but his inability to adapt to the foreign traffic customs seems to match Bergson’s discussion about the humor of ceremonies. From within roundabout society you can laugh at the apparent absent-mindedness of the non-initiated, while from outside you can laugh at the absent-mindedness of its adherents: “those taking part in it give us the impression of puppets in motion” (46).