COMEDY

COMIC IDENTITY 57and ordinary, and a belief that easy intelligence equals freedom fromconformity.The underside of Wilde and Coward, and the immersion inordinariness is what characterizes the bathetic hero. Bathos, thereduction of the elevated to the everyday to produce an incongruousanticlimax, is a rhetorical term whose current usage is taken fromAlexander Pope’s Scriblerian tract Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking inPoetry (1727). Bathetic comedy, moments where romantic orglamorous concepts are found to be untenable when pushed up againstreality, became particularly popular after World War II, and mayexpress the antipathy towards Cowardesque privilege felt by the newlyenfranchised working men and women of the nationalized industries.The bathetic hero is perhaps the comic equivalent of the ‘angry youngman’ of the 1950s, continually reminded of the imperatives ofconformity, and the poverty of ambition amongst the working class. Thebathetic hero is poised to reflect on the distance between ideologicalfictions and reality like the marginalized voice of folly in the consumerage. Dark versions of comic bathos appear in the work of Joe Orton andHarold Pinter, both of whom use laughter as a means of attackingmiddle-class sensibility and hypocritical establishment values, but themodel for the bathetic hero in British comedy is Tony Hancock(1924–68), whose popular radio show Hancock’s Half Hour transferredto television in 1956 and ran for five years. Everything was slightlydisappointing in Hancock’s world, and cause for heightened incredulity.Stephen Wagg calls his persona ‘the model of a dyspeptic, statusanxious,petit-bourgeois suburbanite stomping grumpily about the lowerreaches of Middle England’ (Wagg, 1998:7). Hancock was anunemployed actor with delusions of grandeur, living in rentedaccommodation in Railway Cuttings in East Cheam, his address anemblem of dishevelment, with his resolutely working-class housemate,played by Sid James. An episode called The Big Night (1959) that seesHancock and Sid preparing for a blind date, might be thought of as alower middle-class revision of the aristocratic comedies ofsophistication. Mimicking Coward, Hancock imagines himself aninternational playboy, yet as a subject of the working week his play isconfined to Saturday night only and his leisure strictly dictated by time.This is the consistent theme of the Hancock series, the distance thatemerges between the concept of the self generated by the individualdesiring ego, especially one who ‘was not only forever seeking to betterhimself but believed at the same time that he was already superior’, andthat produced by the reality of economic status (Neal and Krutnik,