Slipping on Banana Skins and Falling Through Bars: “True” Comedy and the Comic Character

From Basil Fawlty, The Little Tramp and Frank Spencer; to Jim Carey, Andy Kaufman and Rowan Atkinson... comedy characters and comic actors have proved useful lenses for exploring – and exposing – humor’s cultural and political significance. Both performing as well as chastising cultural values, ideas and beliefs, the comic character gives a unique insight into latent forms of social exclusion that, in many instances, can only ever be approached through the comic form. It is in examining this comic form that this paper will consider how the ‘comedy character’ presents a unique, subversive significance. Drawing from Lacanian conceptions of the subject and television ‘sitcom’ examples, the emancipatory potential of the comedy character will be used to criticize the predominance of irony and satire in comic displays. Indeed, while funny, it will be argued that such comic examples underscore a deprivative cynicism within comedy and humor. Countering this, it will be argued that a Lacanian conception of the subject can profer a comic efficacy that not only reveals how our social orders are inherently inconsistent and open to subversive redefinition, but that these very inconsistencies are also echoed in the subject, and, in particular, the ‘true comedy character’.

around arrogantly, no less sure of the highness of His Highness, until the next accident that will again try to 'ground' him, and so on and so on. (Take, for example, Sir John Falstaff in Shakespeare's comedy The Merry Wives of Winsdor) (2008, p. 29) Zupančič's claim helps to lay bare the importance that can be afforded to the comedy character and its capacity to expose and critique contemporary social conventions as well as contentious forms of humour, such as racist and sexist jokes (Black, 2021). To draw out this significance, we must first consider and critique the contemporary prevalence of 'false' forms of comedy, such as satire, cynicism and irony.

True and False Comedy
In their critique of Cohen's performances in his Da Ali G Show (2000-2004, Paul Alonso highlights how: The 'journalistic' component of Baron Cohen's characters becomes an initial (but essential) departure to developing a more complex structural critique.
Connecting Sacha Baron Cohen's satire with theories of carnival, spectacle, and infotainment offers insight into the important role that satire plays in today's public debates. (2016, p. 584).
Cohen's performances walk a line between openly avowing the very contentions he wishes to subvert and, as evident in the above quotation, openly performing these very contentions in a way that steers more towards a perverse endorsement, which enjoys the performance of the taboo just as much as it does ridiculing them. In fact, this contradiction, it is argued, has become a formative feature of comedy's postmodern condition, so that, 'Through parody, irony, and self-reflexivity, postmodernism is able to both legitimize and subvert culture (both high culture and mass culture) at the same time' (Flisfeder, 2017, pp. 73-74).
Indeed, these contradictions have underscored work that has sought to analyse the performance of racist jokes and comedy sketches (Billig, 2001;Weaver, 2011). As noted by Flisfeder (2017), in many instances the contradiction lies between the legitimization of certain forms of humour-as evident in the performance itself-and The point to be made here is that it is in examples of cynicism, satire and ironyconceived in the above instances as examples of false comedy-that there remains a distance between the universal and concrete. Accordingly: The paradigm of these [false] comedies is simply the following: the aristocrat (or king, or judge, or priest, or any other character of symbolic stature) is also a man (who snores, farts, slips, and is subject to the same physical laws as other mortals). The emphasis is, of course, precisely on 'also': the concrete and the universal coexist, the concrete being the indispensable grounding of the universal. (Zupančič, 2008, p. 30) We Therefore, what becomes clear in the above is the extent to which, while submitting figures of authority to ridicule, ultimately, such practices maintain their power. In false comedy 'it is the logic of domination that is allowed to operate freely, not in spite but because of efforts to undermine it' (Bonic, 2011, p. 97).
In contrast to 'false comedy' examples, Zupančič relies upon her unique adoption of the Hegelian concrete universal as a fundamental feature of 'true' comic expression.
Indeed, for Zupančič, 'the comic character is defined by a particular integration of a universal in a concrete individuality' (Ladegaard, 2014, p. 116). As a result, true comedy occurs when the universal, in both its abstract and actual dimensions, is brought together in a particular concrete example that provides a short circuit (a change of places) between the universal and particular. With regard to Zupančič's example of the baron who slips on a banana peel, the comedy of this scene is not drawn from the fact that anyone-even a baron-can slip on a banana peel, but, instead, it is when the baron stands up and presumptuously continues to appear to himself as a 'baron' that true comedy is performed. It is the symbolic title, 'baron', which proves comic. 1

Comic Subjectivity
For a true comic character, there remains no distance between the comic actor and performed persona, but, rather, it is in the form of comedy that the comic actor immanently embodies the comic character (Žižek, 2005). In other words, the true comic character is 'not so much involved in unveiling and disclosing the nudity or emptiness behind appearances as [it is] involved in constructing emptiness (or nudity)' (Zupančič, 2003, pp. 166-167). The import behind this construction is that the comic character is, in its most subversive form, not merely there to simply reveal that all our social norms 1 Drawing upon a popular Lacanian example, Zupančič notes: 'The point is not that an aristocrat is also an ordinary man. He is an ordinary man precisely as an aristocrat, at the very peak of his aristocracy. Here we should recall Lacan's famous remark that a lunatic is not some poor chap who believes that he is a king; a lunatic is a king who believes that he really is a king. Does this not hold even more for comedy? It is not some poor chap who believes himself to be a king who is comical (this is rather pathetic), but a king who believes that he really is a king ' (2008, p. 32). lack of difference between the two elements confronts us with the 'pure' difference that separates an element from itself. (2006, p. 109) In comparing this 'lack of difference between two elements' as constitutive of the very 'gap' which marks the subject (Sbriglia and Žižek, 2020), we can consider how it is this minimal 'pure' difference which avers the Real, or, at least, suggests a way of engaging with the Real through comedy-a way of 'looking awry' (Žižek, 1991). It is along these lines that the 'comic art' and the comic character, 'creates and uses this minimal difference in order to make palpable, or visible, a certain real that otherwise eludes our grasp' (Zupančič, 2003, p. 168). For Zupančič, 'One could go even further and state that, in the comic paradigm, the Real is nothing else but this minimal difference it has no other substance or identity ' (2003, p. 168).
As a point of subversion, it is argued here that it is the comic character's performance of this minimal difference that bears a unique significance for the subject; one that echoes its position within the symbolic order. Indeed, while contemporary forms of cynicism, irony and satire seek to distance the audience (and the comic character) from the performed content-a divorcing of the universal from the concrete; exemplified by the concern that we can all make mistakes and that the character on screen is only human, just like us-it is, instead, through 'the immediate coincidence of universality with the character's/actor's singularity' that the very minimal difference in the comic character/actor posits its own self-negativity (Žižek, 2006, p. 107). Thus, comic pleasure, for both the subject and the comic character, emanates from the realisation that the universal fails; that the universal, much like Lacan's big Other, is inconsistent and that such failure is achieved, not by ridiculing the universal, but by comically performing the universal's ridiculousness through the many incongruities of its particular concrete example.