COMEDY

2COMIC IDENTITYTwo babies were born on the same day at the same hospital.They lay there and looked at each other. Their familiescame and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarrecoincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on theirdeathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at theother and said, ‘So. What did you think?’Steven WrightIn Woody Allen’s film Zelig (1983), the title character has a desire tobelong so acute that he physically transforms himself into the likenessof whoever he is with. He soon comes to the attention of a baffledmedical establishment, and, through the help of a frenzied press thatdubs him ‘the human chameleon’, becomes the biggest celebrity inAmerica. Troops of people are brought to meet him and each time hemimics their appearance, turning into a Rabbi, a 300-pound overeater,an African-American musician, or a Frenchman. While Zelig plays withkey American issues, most obviously the immigrant experience and thestruggle of assimilation, it also focuses a recurrent theme of comedy:the nature and limits of identity. Leonard Zelig is so shy and selfeffacingthat he is pathologically driven to assume the identities ofothers. This involves not only absurd physical transformations, but alsopresents an image of failed interiority, of a man who is a reflectivesurface. Many comic characters might be said to play on our fears ofbeing incomplete humans through their failures of self-awareness orinability to reflect on the nature of experience. Comic characters aretraditionally one-dimensional in the sense that they are apparentlyunable to learn and change. Bugs Bunny, for example, is madly funny,anarchic, transgressive, and dangerous, and completely incapable ofreflecting on his actions. Bugs lives in a perpetual series of excitable