Laughing matters

four Marxist takes on film comedy

Jakob Ladegaard

pp. 102-122

in: Ewa Mazierska, Lars Kristensen (eds), Marx at the movies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

At first sight, Karl is not the most obvious Marx to mention in the context of film comedy. The analytical prose and careful argumentation of Das Capital appear as the near opposites of Groucho's volleys of verbal humour, and the philosopher's stern view of society as determined by economic laws and class struggle does not seem easily compatible with the lighthearted universe of comedy, where the Marx brothers are able to transgress all social barriers without effort and reprisals — as if the rules of the social field were as easily changed as the rules of American football in Horse Feathers (1932). Although Marx did imagine that history would eventually reach the happy ending proper to comedy as a narrative genre, he generally thought of history in terms of heroic struggle associated with the epic or tragedy. This is evident in his famous remark in the beginning of The Eighteenth Brumaire that "all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, so to speak, twice […]: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce" (Marx 2010: 103). Tragedy here stands for the true mode of 'serious' revolutionary struggle, while farce designates its empty, formal repetition in the revolution of 1848–1851, the mocking "caricature" or "parody" as Marx proceeds to call it, of a revolution carried out by reactionaries. The implied view is that farce is a spectacle that enthralls the audience (here, the French people) by an outward show that perverts the truth of the historical situation.

Cited authors

Marx Karl