COMEDY

CONCLUSIONThere is a story about a man suffering from depression who goes to seehis doctor. After a cursory examination, the physician turns and says,‘There is only one cure for you. You must go and see Grimaldi the clown.’‘Sir,’ replied his patient, ‘I am Grimaldi the clown’ (Dickens, 1968:13).This story, retold by Charles Dickens in his Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi(1838), seems credible enough because of our cultural familiarity withthe concept of the weeping clown, the comedian who uses laughter toconceal their misery. One can come across the same story told, with thesame degree of ironic pith, about both Grock and Chaplin, which speaksof a modern mythology at work that wants to believe that all prominentcomedians are motivated by profound anguish. How have we arrived atthis idea that laughter is the close cousin of pain, and that our comedy isas expressive of upset as it is of joy? These conventional thoughts are atwork behind the most disquieting double act of twentieth-centurydrama, the bleak couple of Vladimir and Estragon, the tragic clowns ofSamuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Nonsense and quips are the onlyforms of language that allow them to communicate truly the full andfixed banality of their lives. A traditional belief of the Hopi Indians ofnortheast Arizona sees clowning as fundamental to identity, as they holdthat they are all descended from an original clown youth and clownmaiden. For them ‘Clowning symbolizes the sacredness of humanity inthe strict sense—that there is something sacred in being a finite andmortal being separated from god’ (Loftin, 1991:112). By embracing theidentity of their first parents, the Hopi acknowledge the distancebetween their daily lives and their idea of spiritual perfection, findingreligious value in the knowledge that they are flawed; a similar ideamotivates Dante’s definition of his Commedia as a comedy. Theseanecdotes confirm the great suspicion that incidences of comedy andhumour always harbour a deeper, serious impulse, whether they bemanifestations of psychological darkness, or a spiritual recognition of