{"id":13724,"date":"2011-06-01T15:44:49","date_gmt":"2011-06-01T19:44:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2011\/06\/01\/13724.html"},"modified":"2019-04-30T16:31:40","modified_gmt":"2019-04-30T21:31:40","slug":"playing-it-straight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2011\/06\/01\/playing-it-straight\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing it Straight"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>When Your Humble Blogger mentioned to an Equity Actor that the next show was to be a comedy, the Equity Actor (who is, by the way, terrific) gave the well-known advice to play the comic characters straight, that is, that the characters don&#8217;t know that they are funny. Like all the worst advice, it is completely true.\r\n<P>Well, not completely&#8212;there are a handful of comic characters who know that they are funny, with <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20071023093217\/libretto.musicals.ru\/text.php?textid=6&amp;language=1\">Pseudolus<\/a> the first that comes to mind. Characters, like people, do crack jokes on occasion. Richard III. Falstaff. The Fool. The Porter. But on the whole, yes, comedy comes from the character being oblivious to what is funny about the situation, or about the other characters, or even about himself. In the current show, I think Sandor Turai (whom Your Humble Blogger plays) has about three lines that he himself finds witty, and even with those, his reaction is more pleased self-regard than laughter. So, yes, I play the comic character straight.\r\n<p>And yet&#8212;it&#8217;s terrible, terrible advice. So you play the character straight. So what? Why is that funny? You could play King Lear straight and it wouldn&#8217;t be funny. If you played the Tyrones straight, it wouldn&#8217;t be funny. Why would it be funny to play Sandor Turai straight?\r\n<p>The first thing that comes to my mind is the script. If you have a good script, then the character played straight may be funny simply because of the situation. Take, for instance, the People&#8217;s Front of Judea:\r\n<p>\n<!-- iframe plugin v.6.0 wordpress.org\/plugins\/iframe\/ -->\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/WboggjN_G-4\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" 0=\"allowfullscreen\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\"><\/iframe>\n\r\n\r\n<p>Nobody is doing anything funny. Nobody is using a silly voice, or a silly walk, or even wearing a particularly humorous costume, given the setting. The lines are funny, and the situation is funny, and the people are funny. They play it completely straight&#8212;in fact, John Cleese is almost deadpan here.\r\n<p>Contrast, though, with this other scene from the same film:\r\n<p>\n<!-- iframe plugin v.6.0 wordpress.org\/plugins\/iframe\/ -->\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/kx_G2a2hL6U\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" 0=\"allowfullscreen\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\"><\/iframe>\n\r\n\r\n<p>Silly voice! Silly costume! Silly wig! Such silliness! And, of course, they are playing it straight. Well, playing it straight with some extra eyebrow waggling and general goofiness.\r\n<p>Now, what about this?\r\n<p>\n<!-- iframe plugin v.6.0 wordpress.org\/plugins\/iframe\/ -->\n<iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Dsw9jYU_rJI\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" 0=\"allowfullscreen\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\"><\/iframe>\n\r\n\r\n<p>Margaret Dumont is playing it straight, but is Groucho? I mean, if you can claim that Groucho Marx, with greasepaint moustache and eyebrows, silly voice and all, is playing it straight in this scene, does <I>playing it straight<\/i> have any meaning whatsoever? And yet&#8230; that&#8217;s the way to play this scene and have it be funny.\r\n<p>Here&#8217;s the thing: if you are doing something that&#8217;s funny and playing it straight, it&#8217;s going to make the funny thing funnier (probably). If what you are doing isn&#8217;t funny and playing it straight, then playing it straight is not going to make it funny, and in fact might make it less funny than doing the unfunny thing while wearing a funny nose and glasses. So the advice, as far as I&#8217;m concerned, is <I>start with something funny<\/i>, and then play it straight.\r\n<P>Alas, I have no way of knowing whether a thing is funny or it isn&#8217;t. Not until someone laughs. During the last dress rehearsal, I spent the bulk of the second act with the part of me that watches observing me playing the temper tantrum as straight as I could possibly do it, and saying <i>This isn&#8217;t funny at all! This guy&#8217;s just an asshole! What&#8217;s funny about that?<\/i> Too late to change anything, of course, and I had to trust that my director had good judgement. Until we had an audience, at which point the laughter confirmed that it was, at any rate, funny enough.\r\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger should probably rethink the title of the post, particularly coming off the last one. Oh, well, what the hell.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theeyater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13724"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20013,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13724\/revisions\/20013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}