Reading, 'Riting, and Ramblings

These definitions of "comedy" and "tragedy" puzzled me. Most people would say that the definition of a comedy is that it's "funny," and tragedies are "sad." But I accepted the teacher's word as gospel and aced all of my quizzes.

Now that I'm writing a comedy of my own, I've been doing a lot of thinking about what makes a story "funny." I've watched a lot of sitcoms. I've dissected the comedic relief roles in books and movies. And I've come to the counter-intuitive conclusion that the essence of comedy is tragedy.

Those definitions of Shakespearean "comedy" and "tragedy" did not arise because English Lit scholars lack funny bones and tear ducts. Of course comedies are funny and tragedies are sad. But if you take a good, hard look at a comedy and a tragedy side-by-side, there is little to no structural difference between them. A simple switch in tone and mood can flip one to the other.

Take a look at this simplified summary of A Midsummer Night's Dream:

After Hermia's father commands her to marry Demetrius, she plans to elope with her boyfriend Lysander. Her best friend Helena, who has feelings for Demetrius, exposes the lovers' plot to make him give up on Hermia. Demetrius chases Hermia and Lysander into the woods, with Helena not far behind.

The king of the fairies asks his servant, Puck, to straighten out the messy love square by casting a spell on Demetrius. Puck accidentally makes Lysander fall for Helena instead. The four end up running around the dark forest, confused, the women shouting at each other in tears and the men trying to kill each other with swords.

Eventually Puck straightens out the mess and the two couples live happily ever after.

If you see the play acted out, it's clearly a comedy—the dialogue is bawdy, the pacing is manic, and the subplots are farcical. But based on the plot alone, is this a comedy or a tragedy? Until the resolution, it's impossible to tell.

The play has the elements of a classic (literally Classic) tragedy: flawed men making bad decisions; aloof god figures toying with mortal fates; people betraying each other left and right. All it would take to seal the deal is to end it with Hermia taking Demetrius' sword through the heart to save Lysander, so the enraged Lysander kills Demetrius and himself, and Helena drinks poison in her grief. And maybe the fairies drown off stage, just to tie up loose ends.

The play-within-a-play at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream illustrates how very easy it is to go the other way around. The Mechanicals, an amateur theatre troupe of Athenian laborers, manages to turn the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe into a ludicrous parody. The whole idea of star-crossed lovers talking through a chink in the wall, and the man falling on his sword because he believes his girlfriend was eaten by a lion, is so stupid when it's acted out in brief by earnest clowns in bad costumes.

Shakespeare's own tragedies have been turned into parodies countless times, either on purpose or by accident. If you've ever seen The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged)—and if you haven't, you should watch it here—then you know that all it takes to make Hamlet funny is to do it...faster. (Skip to 1:24:26 for the whole play in about fifty seconds.)

In fact, almost every "serious" story turns comedic if you do it...faster. And almost any comedy will turn into a drama if you dampen the tone. This doesn't just apply to 400-year-old plays in Early Modern English. Take a look at the Wikipedia synopsis of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

The series follows "The Gang," a group of five depraved underachievers....Each member of the gang shows varying degrees of dishonesty, egotism, selfishness, greed, pettiness, ignorance, laziness and unethical behavior, and they are often engaged in controversial activities. Episodes usually find them hatching elaborate schemes, conspiring against one another and others for personal gain, vengeance, or simply for the entertainment of watching one another's downfall....Much of the show's dialogue involves the characters arguing or yelling at one another.

Are we talking about a sitcom or a TV serialization of The Godfather? Summarizing will suck the "funny" out of anything. Even the frothiest comedies out there sound like dramas in their Netflix taglines.

• Parks and Recreation: An employee with a rural Parks and Recreation department is full of energy and good ideas but bogged down by bureaucracy.
• Arrested Development: The Emmy-winning story of a wealthy family that lost everything, and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together.
• Scrubs: A young attending physician and his fellow doctors practice mischief and medicine while learning life lessons at the Sacred Heart teaching hospital.
• Malcolm in the Middle: While navigating the perils of adolescence, wunderkind Malcolm also grapples with a suburban family that gives new meaning to the word dysfunctional.

Sound like a barrel o' laughs, don't they?

Comedy and tragedy, story-wise, are essentially the same. The only real differences between them are in intent and execution. How do you make a story more tragic? You make the characters more miserable. How do you make a story funnier? You make the characters more miserable. Trouble creates dramatic tension. Trouble creates laughs. It's the pacing, subtext, and mood tell an audience whether they're supposed to laugh or cry.

The pros can make you do both at once—the death of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, the cemetery scene in Steel Magnolias, the first ten minutes of Up. Some of the most successful comedies have been about the most depressing material, like abject poverty (The Kid) and the Holocaust (The Great Dictator), the Korean War (M*A*S*H), and nuclear warfare (Dr. Strangelove).

But you don't have to end the human race to get a laugh. To the characters in any comedy—especially the light ones—their world is a tragedy. While the audience laughs at Adrian Monk's shenanigans, Monk is always on the verge of a psychological breakdown. Monty Python's King Arthur and his bumbling knights are dead set on obtaining that Holy Grail, and they respond to every ludicrous character and outrageous obstacle they encounter on their pilgrimage with perfect seriousness. Even Lucy Ricardo has her heart 100% set on entering show biz. She jumps into her zany schemes headfirst, convinced that they'll rocket her to stardom, and she's ashamed of herself when they don't—though not enough to dampen her enthusiasm when the next bad idea pops into her head.

Yesterday I flew to beautiful tree-covered Oregon, where I have a job interview this afternoon. Travel can be fun, but it can also be dreadfully dull. The drive to the airport, flights, layovers, train and bus rides to the hotel took a full twelve hours from 6:30 am EST to 3:30 pm PST, and I didn't have much to do during them but sit quietly or nap.

The six hours of flying were the worst, stuck in a tiny cabin with no freedom or personal space. Since I don't have a tablet or a smartphone, and my laptop is too large to use in a tiny airplane seat, I could only listen to songs I've heard a zillion times before on Sweetie's mp3 player while sneaking envious glances at all of the passengers around me watching movies, reading the news, or getting work done. Even the white-haired, arthritic man across the aisle was taking photos out the window with his iPhone.

Eventually, bored out of my mind, I reached for the American Way magazine in the pouch of the seat in front of me. First I read about some list published by professors at Beloit College that points out how different today's incoming college freshmen are compared to previous generations. To my indifference, I found that from the class of 2017's point of view, some famous people I've never heard of have always been dead.

Then I flipped to an article by women's fiction writer Allison Winn Scotch praising Keri Russell's latest film, Austenland.

Just because Keri Russell plays a ruthless Soviet spy on FX's The Americans doesn't mean she can't still get in touch with her softer side, the side that fans adored in Russell's breakout role on Felicity. Indeed, in her new film, festival favorite Austenland...Russell stars as a Jane Austen-obsessed singleton who vacations at a Jane Austen-themed theme park in search of love and adventure (in an early-1900s sort of way).

First of all, "early 1900s"? I don't expect the average person to know the exact year Pride and Prejudice was published, or to recognize the time period of the costumes the actors are wearing in the photo, but could no one at American Way magazine take two seconds to type "Jane Austen" into Google and see the years 1775–1817?

Why, Allison? Why? I read your blog! I trusted you!

But once I got over that erroneous digit, I thought the premise sounded kind of fun. Most Austen-themed movies set in the modern world are unbearable. The Jane Austen Book Club was as fresh and natural as bagged cotton candy from the dollar store. Becoming Jane has a rating of 57% ("rotten") on Rotten Tomatoes, despite Anne Hathaway's noble efforts to rescue it from predictable froth. But Austenland sounded like it was more satire than exploitation of "Austen Power"—the phenomenon that nets studios millions of dollars every time they make a new adaptation of one of Jane's novels. So when I finally arrived at my hotel and settled down with the free Wi-Fi, I looked it up.

To my disappointment, but not my surprise, the general consensus is that Austenland falls into the same frilly costume rom-com trappings as its sisters. On the surface, it's about a woman obsessed with cliche romantic fantasies finally growing out of her Regency-era tea sets and life-sized Colin Firth cutouts. But, in the end, the movie is itself another cliche romantic fantasy. It isn't about Keri Russel's character's growth, but her flirtations with various good-looking men. Oh, sure, she comes to her senses and tosses out her VHS boxed sets of Pride and Prejudice BBC miniseries...just before her own Mr. Darcy comes knocking at the door to declare his undying love.

When Hollywood wants to make a Jane Austen-themed movie, what do they do? They make a romance. A romantic comedy, romantic drama, historical romance...one of the basic formulas that gets Victoria Secret-clad tuckuses in the theater seats. They make a movie that's all about fashion and parties and breathtaking romance.

But here's the problem: Jane Austen's novels are about none of those things.

Jane Austen did not write romances. Jane Austen wrote Bildungsroman—coming-of-age novels. Romance is often an important element in her stories, but it is not the backbone of her stories. Calling Emma a romance is like calling Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban a murder mystery—just because a book has some elements of a genre doesn't mean it belongs to it.

The only Austen book I would consider classifying as a romance is Pride and Prejudice, which is probably why it's the most popular of the bunch. In all of the others, romance only hums quietly in the background until the hero pops the question at the end. Here's what the books are actually about:

• Sense and Sensibility: Two sisters with opposing worldviews (Marianne the romantic, Elinor the rationalist) learn that real people don't fit neatly into any ideal.
• Pride and Prejudice: A young woman who's a bit too confident in her wit and good judgement learns to admit she can be wrong.
• Mansfield Park: A girl who's always been pushed around draws on her inner strength to stick to what she knows is right in spite of peer pressure.
• Emma: A social butterfly amuses herself by manipulating the love lives of everyone around her, until she discovers that she knows very little about either love or life.
• Northanger Abbey: A silly teenager who reads too many Gothic romances faces the consequences of letting her imagination run away with her.
• Persuasion: A woman who cared too much for the opinions of other people learns to see through them and go after what she wants for herself.

In a romance novel, the central focus is on the relationship between the heroine and the hero. In Jane Austen's novels, the focus is always directly on the heroine, her flaws, and her growth as she overcomes them. Men exist on the periphery of the story world as commentators, agitators, or incentives for the heroine to change, but they rarely have much (or anything) to do with the plot. They just show up in the last chapter to suddenly, and sometimes inexplicably (I'm looking at you, Edmund Bertram and Henry Tilney), propose marriage and deliver the "happy ending."

If the books are about any relationships, they're the relationships between women. The heroines devote only a small fraction of their time to their love interests, and they spend the rest with sisters, girlfriends, rivals, mothers and mother figures. Emma is as much about Emma & Harriet and Emma & Jane Fairfax as it is about Emma & George Knightley. The central conflicts in Persuasion are between Anne and the overbearing Lady Russell, Anne and her self-absorbed sisters, and Anne and her prettier, younger love rivals. Captain Wentworth basically comes along for the ride. And Sense and Sensibility, of course, is all about the two sisters and their mother, plus a couple of catty in-laws and a scheming social climber who sinks her money-grubbing claws into Elinor's man.

If men do figure into the storyline, they're usually the ones the heroines do not marry in the end. Anne Elliot spends much more story time with her materialistic father, her unfortunate brother-in-law Charles, her platonic admirer William Elliot, and her fellow bibliophile James Benwick than she does with the designated hero, Captain Wentworth. Emma devotes hers to her hypochondriac father, her immature "lover" Frank (who's secretly engaged to Jane Fairfax), and the pompous Mr. Elton (who marries the vulgar Augusta Hawkins for her money). Marianne Dashwood's story is all about her heartbreak at the hands of the philandering Mr. Willoughby, and her marriage to Colonel Brandon is a bit of a consolation prize. Fanny Price barely interacts with Edmund Bertram at all, and when she does Edmund just blabbers about another girl—the most significant men in her life are really her adoptive father Sir Thomas and her rejected suitor Henry Crawford.

It's not surprising at all that Jane Austen didn't write about men much, since interactions between the sexes in her time and class were infrequent and strictly regulated. It's also not surprising that modern audiences focus on the romances and ignore what Austen's books are really about. Heart-pounding love stories between lovely heroines and dashing heroes make blockbuster movies; stories of personal introspection and maturity do not.

But if Hollywood bigwigs want to make a Jane Austen themed movie that rates more than two stars on average, they have to reach beyond the rom-com formula. They have to try to understand why Austen's novels have remained popular for 200 years, while her contemporaries who wrote predictable melodramas disappeared from public memory.

Why, in the world of 2013, with completely different social standards and ideals, are people still obsessed with these novels published in the 1810's? Jane Austen's morals are outdated, her worldview is sexist and classist, and her prose, by modern polished and streamlined standards, is terribly wordy and hard to follow. Her books have endured nonetheless, and it's not because they're romantic. The romance is just the sparkly pink icing on the cake. It's because they're witty, they're honest, and they strike a chord with young women and men facing their own shortcomings and confusing times. It's because people can identify with the characters' thoughts (misguided or not), feelings, and trials, even as they judge them and laugh at them.

Since the last time I posted, this, that, and the other thing went down in TK Marnell's world. Nothing unexpected, nothing earth-shattering, but Sweetie and I have definitely gained a few levels' worth of life experience points. I won't bore everyone with the details, but the end result is that from where I'm staying now, it's about a twenty minute drive to the Internet. I can only check it a couple of times a day, and there was a stretch when I was cut off entirely.

• 64% say they pay no attention to who publishes a book.
• 60% say endorsements by bestselling authors don't affect their purchasing decisions.
• 72% say the New York Times Bestseller label would not influence them to try a new author.
• 32% say covers rarely influence them when they buy books.
• 32% say typos don't bother them that much.

Results like these would make any small-time self-publisher do a mini jig in her chair. But then, if she happens to have spent an excessive amount of time in higher education like me, that niggling voice of her Introduction to Research Methods professor starts nibbling away at Force's survey design and analysis until there's nothing left.

The sampling, for one thing, was highly biased. Most of the respondents (81%) were romance readers, because Marie Force writes contemporary romances. They were also the type of readers who subscribe to author newsletters (35%), visit author websites (62%), and follow their favorite authors on Facebook (62%), because that's how she distributed links to the survey.

Sampling problems aside, the way the questions were asked and the responses given are highly suspect. Let's take another look at one of these results.

53% are most concerned with a professional presentation when it comes to book covers, and 32% are rarely influenced by covers.

Now, what does this mean? It means that 32% of readers aren't affected by glossy covers, right? Wrong. It means that 32% of respondents believe they aren't affected by glossy covers. More accurately, it means that 32% of respondents profess that they aren't affected by glossy covers.

First of all, we're told since preschool to "never judge a book by its cover." Nobody wants to admit that they actually care a lot about looks and first impressions. They want to believe that they're superior enough to see past the superficial to the substance beneath. I'm sure 32% of people also say that appearances don't matter when they're choosing men or women to date. Yeah, right.

Secondly, people don't know what makes them buy things. Purchasing decisions are often impulsive and driven by things we don't think about. I'm no expert on consumer behavior, but I've seen enough study abstracts to know that logic has little to do with it. People who are hungry select purchases differently than people who aren't. People who need to use the bathroom exercise monetary impulse control differently than people who don't. Mood swings, ambient music, brand recognition, colorful advertising, product arrangement—they all play crucial and largely invisible roles in shopping behavior.

But when people explain their decisions to others, they rationalize them. They say what they think they should say and avoid saying things that might make them look bad, even to strangers on the other side of a Survey Monkey form. They don't say they bought one book over another because the title font looked more professional. They don't say they were more interested in it because the book was on the front page of Amazon, or it seems to have sold a lot of copies and topped important-sounding lists. They certainly don't say they were feeling the 3 pm doldrums and the cover had a picture of some coffee and a scone.

They say they bought it because the story appealed to them more. And writers want, desperately, to believe these readers are telling the truth, because that would mean we have control over the commercial success of our books. If consumers were reliable and rational, all we'd have to do is write well and our books would fly off the shelves.