COMEDY

58 COMIC IDENTITY1990:248). Not only is Hancock economically confined, but we findthere are erotic limits imposed on him as well. Sid’s hyperbolizedphysical description of Hancock’s blind date, built up by swellingromantic music, abruptly ends when we learn that her name is Gladys.Similarly, Hancock’s home, the place where he should be master,revolts against him in the form of his elderly maid, Mrs Cravat. MrsCravat refuses to conform to any of the conventions of polite domesticservice, just as Hancock fails to be an aristocrat: she is surly,aggressive, rude, and dismissive of Hancock’s pretensions to socialnicety, even amplifying his own pomposity by bringing in the breakfastand announcing it as ‘oeuf scambléd’, scrambled eggs, transformedthrough bad French into a parody of an expensive restaurant. Theexpanse between Hancock’s bathetic mediocrity and the glamour towhich he continually aspired was also the subject of a film-lengthtreatment, The Rebel (1960), in which he travels to Paris to become anartist, enjoying immense success despite an acute lack of ability. By theend of this film we are thoroughly convinced that high art is fraudulentnonsense, and the best thing that Hancock can do is return to thesuburbs and remain an eccentric. In this sense, bathos is not only avoicing of one’s imprisonment within class structures, but also astatement of reconciliation that acknowledges suburban ‘normality’ asthe only identity that is truly honest and decent.In summary, we might say that comic identity appears to be found ina sense of division or incompleteness. This can manifest itself as aconflict between alternative world views, between appearance andreality or between self-image and public perception. It might also be thecase that a character is not fully attuned to the world nor entirelypossessed of a sense of themselves or their surroundings. Obliviousnessto the demands of everyday life might be invigorating, but it alsocondemns characters to repeat the pattern of their mistakes. In anhistorical context, to such dividedness there is attributed a philosophicalor mythic dimension, as in the case of folly and tricksterism, that assertsthe existence of a universe outside the individual and a higher powerthat controls it. In the modern age, the dividedness of comic identity andthe fluidity of meanings that accompany it could be read as symbols ofincreasingly individualistic egos and the estrangement of self andsociety. Either way, comic humans are incomplete.