COMEDY

THE BODY 83THE GROTESQUEThe grotesque could be described as an embodiment of the abject. Aform of humorous monstrosity devised for satiric purposes, thegrotesque marries the repulsive and the comic, as in the paintings ofHieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) or George Grosz (1893–1959), oreven in the spirit of pantomime dames. Retrospectively applied to thedecorative arts of Ancient Rome, the term originally referred to animaginative combination of the real and the fantastic, and especially anunnatural or stylized distortion of organic nature in stark contrast to theregularity of classical order (Vitruvius himself complained about itbitterly). ‘Grotesque’ was a term initially reserved for the visual arts,but later extended to include anything across the arts that containedelements of the ridiculous, the horrifying, and the bizarre. The grotesqueis a form of exaggerated and ambivalent social commentary producedby the violent clash of opposites, especially those that are comic andterrifying, existing in a state of unresolved tension. The site of thegrotesque clash is the human body, resulting in deeply ambiguous anddivided reactions to the horror of corporeality and oneself as anorganism. Mr Creosote, the diner from the 1983 film Monty Python’sThe Meaning of Life, might serve as an example. Here is a man sogluttonous that his eating causes him to vomit torrentially—until heultimately explodes after eating an after-dinner mint. Mr Creosotesurvives but finds himself ripped apart and looking down at his exposedribcage and enlarged heart. As viewers, we are amused by the absurdityof the spectacle, and appreciate its poetic justice. But the image is alsounnerving and disgusting, a visceral rendition of a body destroyed by itsown appetite and made to witness what it has done. It is the unresolvednature of this scenario that gives the grotesque its particular force. Thegrotesque, then, is a humorous mode that aims to produce an ambiguousfeeling pitched somewhere between pleasure and disgust.By far the most notable author of grotesque comic fiction is FrançoisRabelais (c. 1494–1553). Rabelais’s stories of the giants Gargantua andPantagruel follow them through a series of absurd adventures andgrotesque scenarios that celebrate physicality by means of anunremitting obsession with it. Rabelais’s giants and their companionsengage in a continual round of eating, drinking, defecating, urinating,sweating, copulating, and passing wind. They are insatiately anal, oral,and phallic monstrosities whose sexual and scatological openness hopesto release the world from pathological inhibitions and the stress ofmaintaining manners. What they champion is unruly, desiring, animal