Kenneth Burke’s “theory of comedy” is really more a theory of education and human relations than an analysis of a literary genre. According to the lessons of Burkean comedy, we should not take our troubles too seriously. Rather, we should use them as a means of self-improvement. Do not grieve your mistakes or discouragements, but cherish them for the way they enable possibilities of insight.
I take pleasure in the notions of mistakenness and trouble, when these aspects of human behavior prompt such eloquence as they did when Kenneth Burke wrote his great treatise on comedy, Attitudes Toward History. On page 41 of that miraculously human book, Burke writes, in ways that still make me shiver:
The progress of humane enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken. When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy.
Burke was talking there about the “poetic categories”—comedy, tragedy, satire, and the like—explaining how their resources, their methods, their potentialities offered strategic ways of understanding human motivation. Comedy in Burke always led to humility, the discounting of one’s grandeur. Comedy “keeps us in trim” by knocking us down a peg. Whereas in tragedy we get all elevated—”man in the cosmos” shaking his fists at the gods—comedy pulls things down to a human scale, portraying a mistaken, misdirected “man in society”—a comedy of errors, where the hero forever must find correction and chastening by the “truth” and all its complicated circumstances and largeness of perspective, ungraspable in this human realm, but best and most accurately approached with a compassionate smile.
Comedy teaches, first and foremost, the “discount”—stepping back from the intensity of an experience, a conclusion, an endpoint and realizing that maybe our calculations are not quite hermetically sound. Comedy warns us that our plans are like wishes made on the Monkey’s Paw. Or that our calculations are more like those of Dr. Octopus (Spider-Man II) than Einstein. We certainly have miscalculated. Comedy admonishes us not to abandon the project but rather to adjust our attitude. We must slog ahead through the muck of “man in society” but let us do it with the proper humility. Rather than deny the errors in some attempt to bolster our case, we should embrace those errors, own them, be thankful for them. Let us value error as the reading specialists do in a “miscue analysis”: Errors are our friends, for in seeing just where we go wrong, we have the hope of a greater precision the next time. As Burke puts it in his novel, “you should have lived twice, and smiled the second time. . . .” If there must be tragedy, error, and trouble, the trick is to not let it stop there–but to take the edge off (through the “discount”) and come back at it again, a second time, with a smile and a lesson learned (not in that order).
So the comic frame helps us redeem our troubles—even those that are not directly the result of our own mistakes. We take our lumps from others—and like Rocky getting pummeled by Apollo Creed, the comic frame says “ain’t so bad!” We learn to value our struggles in life as opportunities for growth. Burke presents the “comic frame” as a “method of study (man as eternal journeyman)”—one that leaves us with a “better personal possession” than mere wealth or material possessions. The comic frame opens us to the possibilities of education. Burke writes:
The comic frame, in making a man the student of himself, makes it possible for him to “transcend” occasions when he has been tricked or cheated, since he can readily put such discouragements in his “assets” column, under the head of “experience.” Thus we “win” by subtly changing the rules of the game—and by a mere trick of bookkeeping, like the accountants for big utility corporations, we make “assets” out of “liabilities.” (171)
Treating our liabilities as assets—that’s the type of “transcendence” that led to this blog entry. For I was thinking of all this lately, as I was involved in a troublesome “liability”—some committee work with a colleague that had gone bad, and left me with a conflict. There were disagreements, principled stands taken, and much anguish over the possibility of error and offense. After it was all over (at least most of it for me, personally), I found myself writing to an administrator who was deeply embroiled in the matter from another angle:
Will this thing end, and end well? When I think of all the work you are involved in [. . .,] I think we’ve got to move beyond these little blips, which often become great chasms. . . . But I do feel the best way beyond is directly through. God gives us both canyons and mules. The rim view is nice, but a little too unreal. The mule trip across–that’s process! Anyway, anyway. . . .
Thence came the transcendence! Ironically, I was talking of mules and process and plodding through the thicket as a way of getting “beyond.” In essence, I was arguing for anti-transcendence, when, in a moment of poetic inspiration, I was able to “rise above” the whole matter and write a poem. Transcendence in the service of anti-transcendence: Methinks I would have my cake and eat it too. . . . But that’s what poetry and comedy do: they let us inhabit our contradictions, and wherever there be liabilities, we’ll take those too, for they are part of us too, and add to our measure.
This poem is the result of my committee work, of my scholarship in Burke’s theory of comedy, of my need to make peace, of my weekly work with my pre-service teachers, who had me reading about the use of poetry writing in getting students to tap into their experience, of my colleagues who keep me sane, of my love of paradox, of the play of language, with the word “blip” leading to “chasm” leading to “canyon,” of my need to transcend with my clodhopper boots trudging on in the morass of things. . . . We must try to get our house in order down here; we must get the human scale of things tweaked just so, for just above this microcosm of detail and setback and tiny elegance is that macrocosm that we sometimes catch a glimpse of—that true “beyond” where God in his awesome ways is quietly, eternally trying to chasten and overcome us with glimpses of just what can be.
The Way Beyond
by Angelo Bonadonna
March 1, 2005
God gives us both canyons and mules.
The view from the rim–that’s beautiful
but that’s hubris, too
too beautiful
too transcendent
too detached
Is that the other side?
So close, so bridged by a mere glance?
God gives us both canyons and mules.
That’s me down there
the mule with its 40 acres
too
to there
through there
God gives us our place,
and our way out of it, too.
Though the forest be lost for the trees
the trees are all we have
so mark them well
And with bark and leaves
and sweat and toil
and this smelly mule
we may reach the rim
and bridge all with a glance,
collapse all in silent awe.