Looking Into the Abyss and Laughing

There’s a largely forgotten Scorsese film called King of Comedy. It stars Robert De Niro and Jerry Lewis and follows the life of a socially awkward, and probably crazy, comic as he tries to claw his way into the entertainment business. What makes the movie unique is that it doesn’t try to balance comedy and tragedy; it simply fuses them. Essentially, it gives the viewer a direct view of the abyss inside the protagonist’s soul, but refuses to do so without some Jerry Lewis slapstick.

In an age when everything is either taken far too seriously or extremely lightly, black comedies like Fargo, The Truman Show, and this film provide a balance. Popular culture teaches us to take life lightly, often glorifying violence, risky sexual behavior, and substance abuse. Conversely, a person’s chosen media source will have him up in arms when some institution uses the wrong gendered pronoun for a trans-student or when someone somewhere says something bad about Christianity. Life is both truly tragic and truly comic, a combination more in the vein of Love’s Labor’s Lost than Superbad or Melancholia.

Examined more closely, dark comedies are also a salient means of social critique. Because they treat important issues seriously, but not too seriously, dark comedies transcend simple generic categorization and confront themes without draining them of life. King of Comedy, for example, anticipates the horrors of celebrity culture, providing an examination of subtle mental illness alongside a funny, but unwavering, gaze at media consumerism. While it does not deal with the kinds of issues surrounding Robin Williams’s death, it’s the perfect film to watch following something so deeply and terribly human; it offers a glance at the not-so-funny side of comedy and at the laughable gaffes that line tragedy.

Art should not be primarily about escapism; it should, rather, examine the world in which we find ourselves. While there are good dark comedies and bad ones, the genre as a whole is often underappreciated. A solid black comedy, however, is so much more than bad humor and Bergman-esque grimness; it’s a way of scrutinizing the true nature of life, the tragicomedy of existence. Sometimes bleakness can be answered only with a laugh, and sometimes life can only elicit tears. But both are genuine expressions of our humanity and thus important ways of critiquing and understanding the world and the people in it.