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What Makes Us Laugh?

INDIRA GHOSE IS ONE OF THE FEW to have written well about whatever it is in Shakespeare’s plays that makes us laugh or smile. Her Shakespeare and Laughter: A Cultural History, published in 2008, was exceptionally well researched and full of intelligent commentary. It is no disparagement to describe this much shorter book as an offshoot. Building on her previous work, one of Ghose’s chief aims here is to suggest links between the comic techniques Shakespeare employs and aspects of comic practice in our present world. As she says, ‘taking a closer look at [Shakespeare’s] humour helps us to understand how comedy works in contemporary life’; it ‘sheds a light on the mechanisms of comedy today’. In his Popular Appeal in English Drama to 1850, a book published almost fifty years ago, Peter Davison (the future editor of Orwell) juxtaposed passages of quick-fire repartee from early Shakespeare with the routines of comedy duos like Abbott and Costello, driven forward as both mostly are by wordplay and puns. He did this in order to demonstrate the longevity of certain comedic devices, and the formalist emphasis made his case more convincing. Ghose is doing something similar when she notes how Shakespeare’s use of the traditional practice of ‘flyting’, to strengthen the bond between Falstaff and Hal, can be compared with a scene in Clint Eastwood’s recent film Gran Torino, in which the hero calls his barber ‘a crazy Italian prick’ and his friend responds with ‘Walts! You cheap bastard! I should have known you’d come in, I was having such a pleasant day.’ She shrewdly notes that, underlying the flyting of Romeo and Mercutio, there is an attempt to salvage ‘a male utopia from which women are banished’, and that the way in which Beatrice and Benedick ‘swap ingenious insults at a breathless pace . . . sizzles with mutual attraction’, going on to compare their exchanges to those between George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones in the Coen brothers’ film, Intolerable Cruelty. Because it is less specific, this bringing together of the old and new is perhaps not so straightforward when Ghose is discussing how Shakespeare’s early clown figures can be both ridiculous in themselves but also the means