Strix
RASPUTIN AND ADMIRAL BYNG
TRAGEDY is a curiously perishable commodity It is not merely that the atrocious wounds which the human race inflicts on itself cease to hurt and heal. Something more positive, and more surprising, happens. The tragedy which shocks one generation provides the next but one with a rather private-schoolboy sort of joke.
Several things about this process interest me. One is the time- lag involved This seems to vary There must be people alive, one or possibly more of whose grandparents were eaten by cannibals. Yet for three or four decades at least the idea of missionaries being prepared for the table by their captors has provided the professional humorist with one of his most reliable gambits. It took us, on the other hand, many hundreds of years before we discovered a rich vein of comedy in the predicament of Early Christians being thrown to the lions. In this particular case the long delay may be due to the fact that our age is more irreverent than the other irreverent ages which have preceded it: but since we still do not, for some reason, find anything particu- larly funny in the often curious fates of individual martyrs, I am not sure that this is a completely valid explanation.
What starts the conversion of tragedy into comedy? I suspect that the process is made easier if the original event is com- memorated in verse or song. The Charge of the Light Brigade (which, although we pulled ourselves together and took it seriously last year, has long been regarded as one of the more risible episodes in British military history) must partly owe its status as such to Lord Tennyson, whose spanking heroics lend themselves readily to parody or pastiche. For similar reasons Horatius, and the boy who stood on the burning deck, and Sir Richard Grenville live on in our memories in an aspic of travesty.
But comparatively few tragedies and disasters are handed down to posterity packaged, as it were, for the parodist in this way. The poor missionaries, for instance, made their swift transit from the obituary columns of the Church Times to the pages of Punch without any such adventitious aids. Perhaps in a case like this the whole thing starts with a wag making a joke which, though regarded at the time as in bad taste, is so funny that it gets bandied about in different versions until the ice is broken and the subject of the joke is given a sort of permis de sejour which sanctions its transfer from tears to laughter.
The whole business seems to be surrounded by a variety of tabus. Some are quite easy to understand. For example, Mr. Noel Coward could perfectly well compose—perhaps already has composed—a comic song about Mata Han, who was ex- ecuted by a French firing-squad in the First World War; but he couldn't possibly compose a comic song about Nurse Cavell. who was executed by a German tiring-squad. How much longer will the close season for jokes about Nurse Cavell con- tinue? There would seem to be no possible means of judging. All one can say is that the memories of heroes and heroines tend to remain laughter-proof for longer than the memories of villains and villainesses. It may be noted, however, that murderers, who are often regarded as vaguely droll even before they are hanged, have a way of carrying their innocent and unfortunate victims with them into the realm of comedy. When we repeat
Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her father forty whacks,
our attitude to both actors in this laughable episode is basically the same.
It goes without saying that foreigners, who are funny when alive, cease for only a brief period to be funny when dead. Yet, perhaps because the disasters which befall them matter less to us and so seem in retrospect less piquant, the facetix with which they provide us are seldom of a lapidary and enduring quality. It is the same on a lower level The frightful catastrophe which overtook a great uncle is gleefully retailed and kept evergreen within the family circle; the misfortunes of mere neighbours, though equally terrible and diverting, are forgotten between one generation and the next.
About the tragedies of war we do our best to be humorous at the time, but afterwards it seems to need a considerable period before a specific blunder or defeat is promoted from the level of regrets or recriminations to the mellow status of a music-hall joke. Passchendaele is still an horrific name, incapable, if uttered by a comedian, of raising the laugh which Balaclava or Ladysmith might raise. I doubt if a skit on Journey's End in a sophisticated review would be acceptable. Nothing, I think, out of the last war has yet acquired a preservative coating of humour. Of the old wars, some seem to us intrinsically funnier than others. The Civil War is a favourite one (especially with humorous artists, to whom it offers obvious advantages) to make jokes about; the fact that virtually the entire population knows roughly what it was about and whom it was between may be one of its recommendations.
All wars, of course, decline gently but inevitably towards the ridiculous as the men who fought in them decline into old age.
There is something funny as well as touching about very old men and their memories, and the battles which they wheezily describe are somehow infected, in the process, by the quaintness of the narrator's manner and utterance. This always happens, and sixty years hence, in country pubs, our descendants will bawl into nonagenarian ears. 'Come on, Joe. Tell 'em about Arnhem': and Joe will quaveringly oblige, and the room will be full of laughter.
The slow but almost automatic process which in the long run converts all tragedy into comedy of a kind is partly, I suppose, due to some form of defence-mechanism operated by the human spirit which, if it had to support all the sorrows of the past as well as the sorrows of the present (to say nothing of its fears about the future), might find the going even heavier than it does. But I am sure that humour comes into it too. Take, for instance. Rasputin and Admiral Byng. We remember Admiral Byng with an indulgent smile, not because we cannot bear to remember his execution in any other way, but because a Frenchman made a good remark about it. Rasputin, an ex- travagantly sinister character, survives as a macabre figure of fun not because we need to exorcise his real image from our minds but because there is, in a gruesome way. something ridiculous about the fact that he had to be murdered in three or four different ways before he actually became dead.
There is I fear, a ghoulish streak in us, a certain relish for the unspeakable, the violent and the catastrophic and a readiness to see the funny side of them: it is often discernible in small child- ren (whose unlucky ends, unlike those of our great uncles, we incidentally never sublimate into amusing anecdotes). To put our symptoms of heartless bad taste down wholly to the less insupportable burden of the tribulations which we carry with us through the Vale of Tears seems to me dishonest. Tragedy is tragedy. Time, the Great Healer, may be responsible for our forgetting about it, or not minding about it as much as we used to; but Time, the Great Healer, does not change tragedy into comedy. Original Sin does that.
And a very good thing too, if I may be forgiven for saying so.
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