A few years back, I pitched the idea of Dramatic Relief in a Taco Break – the concept of a comedy that puts the Laffs away to explore serious ideas and emotions. At the time of writing, my computer is still fucked, I’m writing essays on my phone, and I’m not even in my own house, so it’s time to pull out an old idea I’ve still been contemplating, because it’s more complicated than I made out originally.
One of the more famous examples of dramatic relief is the final scene of Blackadder Goes Forth, as we watch the comedy seem to bubble away and the seriousness of the situation dawns on everyone (“I believe the phrase rhymes with ‘clucking bell’.”). I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything else like it anywhere, where the fact that the situation can only be so funny is an unavoidable fact.
But then there’s something else. We all know about dramas that are secretly incredibly fucking funny – Mad Men is secretly the most floridly-written sitcom of all time – but there are also genuinely serious stories that are entirely conveyed through jokes. The Venture Bros is one of my favourite examples, so committed to comedy that they accidentally make characters like The Monarch sympathetic when he tortures a prostitute with lines like “What’s behind door number one? The polar bear from LOST!”
Similarly, you have the Portal video games, particularly the second one. It becomes an exploration of the idea of Never Giving Up, and the fact that it takes the idea so seriously is part of the joke. The conceit of the story is that your exploring the remnants of a facility built by science company Aperture Science, and the central joke is that they had high ambitions and zero sense; usually, this is expressed through incredibly inefficient ideas, with one of my favourite gags being a set piece you see of a machine that builds a turret piece-by-piece, boxes it, then drops it in another machine that immediately unboxes and deconstructs it.
What’s remarkable is that it follows the logic it sets up all the way. The second act of the game has you listening to recordings by Cave Johnson, the long-dead founder of Aperture Science as he cheerfully guides you through a clear violation of OSHA, medical ethics, human morality, common sense, and politeness. Now, on one level, this is a parody of all-American values, and JK Simmons plays the character as a blustering American clown.
But Portal 2 commits to the idea that its characters are both laughable clowns and real people with real human emotions (even when they’re robots). Cave find himself increasingly humiliated by his failures, and every step of the way his solution is get defensive and double down. It climaxes in a famous mad speech that is the dictionary definition of bathos – Cave is an idiot who has gotten decades of people killed and caused everything you see in the present, failing at everything, and everything he’s saying is dumb as hell. At the same time, I just feel bad for the guy.
What are your favourite examples of comedies that are also serious?