Light Humor and The Dark Underside

Light Humor and the Dark Underside of Wish Fulfillment: Conservative Anti-realism
Author(s): Kathy MacDermott

Source: Studies in Popular Culture , 1987, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1987), pp. 37-53
Published by: Popular Culture Association in the South
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23413990
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Kathy MacDermott
Light Humor and the Dark Underside of

Wish Fulfillment:
Conservative Anti-realism
So, it comes to this once more: fiction and realism

are not concepts for the production of literature, but,
on the contrary, notions produced by literature.
(Macherey and Balibar)1
The complicity of the realist novel in constructing an ideol

ogy of the real is often brought forward as an introduction to
the virtues of the anti-realist novel. Anti-realism, it is argued, is
a radical form of writing which defamiliarizes the world and
obliges us to read out most fundamental assumptions about
"how things are" as part of a public and collective verisimilitude
organized along the lines of a realist text. This view of anti-real
ism was taken, in a less systematic form, by the dadaists and sur
realists who composed the Parisian avant-garde in the 20s, and
especially by the movement which centered around transition
magazine and called itself "the Revolution of the Word." transi
tion serialized Finnegans Wake, Finnegans Wake begat the nouveau
roman·, and the nouveau roman in turn sponsored more systematic
investigations of the reproduction of ideology through the con
ventions of realism. But it does not necessarily follow from the
complicity of realism in ideology that anti-realism is ideologi
cally pure. And historically it did not follow. At the same time
that the radical anti-realist movement was gaining momentum in
Paris a second form of anti-realism was gaining momentum in
New York, a conservative anti-realism which acted to confirm
and reproduce the collective verisimilitude. Taking the cases of
Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, S. J. Perelman and, centrally,
P. G. Wodehouse, I will be examining both the formal strategies
of this comic and conservative anti-realism and the way in

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38 Studies in Popular Culture
which these strategies produced a self-consciousness about con

ventionality only to reincorporate both self-consciousness and
convention into the dominant ideology.
American anti-realism developed, as did that which emerged
in Paris, out of a response to the perceived failures of realist fic
tion. The difference was that the American perception of these
failures was conservative rather than radical, nostalgic rather
than revolutionary. Reviewers writing for Life, Puck, Judge and
the Arkansas Review in the 1880s appear to have wanted Dickens
back, or Thackeray, or Scott. They satirized what they called
the "realism" of Henry James and W. D. Howells as "dull,
amoral, lacking in heroes, excessively detailed and analytical"2 as
too engaged in reproducing the minutiae of reality to exhibit
compelling clarities of characterization, ethical judgement and
plot:
The recent school of American novelists, repre

sented mainly by Howells and James, is endeavouring
to work a reform in fashion. Instead of in a Dickens
or Thackeray manner finishing a story, Mr Howells
especially amuses himself by chopping it off, leaving
the reader to draw his own conclusions. This is cer
tainly very accommodating, but it is not art.3
"It may be Life, but it's not Art" is the implicit and fre
quently the explicit argument put by the American satire of re
alism at the turn of the century.4 This is an argument which
draws behind it two corollaries: first, that there is an entity, Life,
which is "dull, amoral, lacking in heroes, excessively detailed"
and so on; and second, that the function of Art is not to repro
duce reality but rather to refurbish it, to improve on Life, to
supply interest, morality, heroes, clarity of signification and hi
erarchies of meaning, and generally to be edifying. Art, that is,
was that which transformed Life, while Realism reproduced it.
By the 1920s the situation had altered radically. Real
ism—by this time taken to be represented by the work of Hem
ingway—had become centred as Literature; Art, accordingly, was
being displaced, marginalized, its transformative function re
duced to the skillful editing and revision of Life for the popular
press. Art could, of course, still mean and be used interchange
ably with Literature; but a new, reductive meaning of Art was
emerging, a meaning which drew on the old associations of Art

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MacDermott 39
and craft or skill, and which might well have developed along
side, and in the service of, the simultaneous perception of a split
in culture between high culture and popular culture. This sec
ond, degraded sense of Art was, then, lined up against both Life
and Literature in a manner typified by P. G. Wodehouse in his
literary instructions to William Townend:
You have your heroes struggling against Life and

Fate, and what they [the popular magazines] want are
stories about men struggling with octopuses and pi
rates. You make your reader uneasy. He feels,
"Well, maybe this poor devil will struggle through all
right, but what a wretched thought it is that the
world is full of poor devils on the brink of being
chucked out of jobs and put on the beach." You
make them think about life and popular magazine
readers don't want to . . . This tends to make a story
heavy: it lifts it, in fact, into a class of literature in
which your intended public simply doesn't belong.5
It is Art which converts Life and Fate into octopuses and

pirates or hedgehogs and bowler hats. When Art conceals itself,
the result is escapist fiction; when Art foregrounds its presence,
the result is comic anti-realism.
In the 1920s the comic anti-realist position was characteristic
of a group of writers of what has been called both literate hu
mor and light humor, writers who found a reliable market for
their work after the founding of the New Yorker in 1925—among
them Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman. Like
Wodehouse they were prepared to regard realism as Literature;
like him the were prepared to displace the realist claim to be
referential by emphasizing instead the transformative strategies
of Art: style and the fictionalizing devices of plot, characteriza
tion and setting. Mainly they wrote essays—for the New Yorker
at first, and formatively, but for other periodicals and even an
thologies. They delivered reviews, observations "about town",
pieces on the state of the arts—but these essays were always
turning into vignettes and staying that way. That is to say, the
expository function of the essay gets caught up in the forms of
fiction and the text turns out to be ultimately about itself and its
narrative strategies. This process is inscribed in the work of
Dorothy Parker, who as "Constant Reader" reviewed for the
New Yorker intermittently for six years, from 1927 to 1933. In

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Parker's reviews even direct literary judgments are suspended

between connotation and denotation. That is, cultural and criti
cal issues are posed in such a way as to refer back to their writer
and their writing at least as much as outward to any external
referent:
Now The Sun Also Rises was as "starkly" written

as Mr Hemingway's short stories; it dealt with sub
jects as "unpleasant." Why it should have been taken
to the slightly damp bosom of the public while the
(as it seems to me) superb In Our Time should have
been disregarded will always be a puzzle to me. As I
see it—I knew this conversation would get back to
me sooner or later, preferably sooner—Mr Heming
way's style, this prose stripped to its firm young
bones, is far more effective, far more moving, in the
short story than in the novel. He is, to me, the great
est living writer of short stories; he is, also to me, not
the greatest living novelist.6
Constant Reader delights in raising the subject of her

self—delights so clearly and so often that her self is transformed
into a caricature, a convention in the process of defining itself.
Even the Hemingway of this review is defined, repeatedly, by
his effect on Constant Reader. Constant Reader's tendency to
slip into broadly autobiographical gestures is symptomatic of lit
erate humor's displacement of the satirist-reviewer by the racon
teur-narrator. And that in turn is symptomatic of a shift, exhib
ited here in "The Short Story, Through a Couple of The Ages,"
away from referring to narrating and from reference to intertex
tuality:
I read about bored and pampered wives who were

right on the verge of eloping with slender-fingered,
quizzical-eyed artists, but did not. I read of young
suburban couples, caught up in the fast set about
them, driven to separation by their false, nervous life,
and restored to each other by the opportune illness of
their baby. I read tales proving that Polak servant
girls have their feelings, too ...
And then I found that I was sluggish upon awak

ening in the morning, spots appeared before my eyes,
and my friends shunned me. I also found that I was
reading the same stories over and over, month after

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MacDermott 41
month. So I stopped, like that. It is only an old

wives' tale that you have to taper off.
Anti-realist comedy is characterized by a keen nose for

cliches, which it recovers and exhibits to the reader with their
formulaic ends foremost. In this way anti-realism directly as
serts its distance from simple escapist or sensationalist writing
while nevertheless drawing on the latter for materials and mo
tifs. This means that the actual relationship between anti-realist
comedy and the cliches it cites is not simply parodie or satiric.
In the passage just quoted Constant Reader indeed satires cliches
of plot in the first paragraph but then directly proceeds to an
thologize cliches of style in the second—the style in this case be
ing that of the advertisement in general and the radio adver
tisement in particular. The overall function of cliches here,
then, is simply to textualize the subject under discussion, to re
move it from referentiality, to turn it into Art. "Bored and
pampered housewives" ceases, that is, to denote a group of peo
ple and suggests instead a literary prop, its new referent "bad
stories I have read." Such anti-realist texts are ultimately bound
to signify, more or less explicitly, "this is not-Life":
[There was] a certain Moorish bimbo in the great

wastelands along the upper Bronx River by the name
of Etta Falcovsky who had become twenty-three years
of age without changing her name to Yvette Falconer
and who did not comb her hair straight back and sag
from her hips in order to look like Edna Best ... The
boy friend did not wear striped shirts with stiff bo
soms and there were no pleats in his waistband. He
had not read "The Mansions of Philosophy" and he
was not taking journalism at Columbia.7
Like Parker's list of literary stereotypes, this list of social

stereotypes compiled by S. J. Perelman programmatically inter
feres with reference by foregrounding textuality in the form of
stereotype and cliche. What the text is about is not simply the
stereotypes it claims not to be about; it is also about stereotyping
as a procedure for replacing denotation with connotation. Of
course there are other literary procedures available for fore
grounding textuality. Gerald Weales in his essay on the New
Yorker specifies as the "shared literary devices" of the "little

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piece" writers the non-sequitur, repetition (lists, refrains), comi

cally excessive incidental detail, the juxtaposition of journalism
and fantasy, conscious over-writing and misuse of metaphor8—all
techniques for privileging the textual over the referential.
It is worth noting again that anti-realist procedure is an in
version of escapist procedure. Both rely heavily on narrative
methods for shaping or transforming Life, methods which no
tably include stereotyping in characterization and cliches of
style and situation. But whereas escapist fiction seeks to re-pre
sent Art as Life, or at least to suppress the distinction, anti-real
ist texts foreground their shaping activities in such as way as to
re-present Life as Art. The position of the reader in each liter
ary situation alters accordingly. Escapist fiction requires the
reader to marginalize her own consciousness and to center that
of the hero/heroine, while anti-realist fiction insists that the
reader perform a series of conscious formal tasks—identifying
cliches and stereotypes, bracketing non-sequiturs, detecting over
writing and misuse of metaphors, and recognizing all these as de
liberate strategy—tasks which constitute the text's comedy and
therefore its meaning as text. There are suggestive analogies be
tween the ways these two sorts of texts position a reader and the
likely class positions of those readers, as the down-market realist
text invites passivity and full identification while the compara
tively up-market text invites a conscious activity in a fully con
trolled content. Thus the role of the reader of comic anti-real
ism is not self-conscious and writerly in Barthes' sense; rath
she is the conservative analogue of the radically self-conscio
reader. Comic self-consciousness operates only within limit
elicits only a restricted set of conscious strategies and it off
only a restricted field in which to apply these strategies.
characteristic activity of comic self-consciousness is literary, t
identification of sources and strategies; and the sources
strategies it identifies are characteristically textual rather t
directly social. These texts are either explicitly written or
scribed in the language itself as modes of discourse; but in eith
case they are "readable" and meant to be read:
An advertisement in a London paper reads: "5,000

Hedgehogs Wanted." Of course, it's none of my
business, especially as it is an Englishman who wants
them, but I trust I may speculate to myself without
giving offence.

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MacDermott 43
One hedgehog I could understand, or possibly two,

to keep each other company. There is no accounting
for taste in pets, and I suppose you could get as at
tached to a hedgehog as you could to a dog, if you
went about it the right way. I, personally, would pre
fer a dog, but then, I'm dog crazy.
But 5,000 hedgehogs seems to be overdoing it a bit.

When you get up into the thousands with hedgehogs
you are just being silly, it seems to me. And, aside
from the looks of the thing, there is a very practical
angle that you might very well find yourself hedge
hog-poor.9
This text by Robert Benchley is founded on a second text,

while its actual referents are modes of discourse—the personal
("I, personally, .. . ") the commonsensical ("there is no account
ing for taste in pets"), the literate ("speculate to myself without
giving offense")—the wit of the raconteur-narrator, and ulti
mately the setness of the set piece which sponsors these shifts in
literary attention. Partly the shift from referentiality to textual
ity is so evident in the little piece because it is little: read sequen
tially, in collections, the generic manner declares itself quickly,
anthologizes its characteristics and establishes its conventions
before your very eyes. These conventions, or at least some of
them, could also act within the broader conventions associated
with the traditional novel; and it is within this format that anti
realism would be enabled to exhibit its relation to narrative real
ism and verisimilitude.
This notional novelistic space is in fact occupied by the
middle and later works of P. G. Wodehouse. By 1925, when the
New Yorker was starting up, Wodehouse had arrived at an anti
realist formula. It was a formula developed through a long pub
lishing association with Collier's, Woman's Home Companion, Cos
mopolitan, the Red Book, and most conspicuously the Saturday
Evening Post. These magazines, in addition to pre-dating the New
Yorker, were also somewhat further down-market and decidedly
more conventional in their editorial policies. Their editors
tended to prefer their fiction with all the standard equipment qf
plotting and characterization; and it was within the framework
of those editorial policies that the Wodehousian formula was
fixed. So fixed was it in fact that any of the later novels will

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serve the purposes of illustration. Pigs Have Wings combines, like

most, a crime and a romance plot; but possesses in addition the
advantage of a romance hero (Jerry Vail) who is also a writer of
detective fiction. This means that, on the occasion when Jerry
Vail, taking possession of a freshly rented suburban villa, finds a
tremendous pig in its kitchen, his reflections naturally take the
following lines:
This sort of thing was no novelty to him, of

course. He could recall at least three stories he had
written in the past year or so in which the principle
characters had found themselves in just such a posi
tion as he was in now, with the trifling difference
that what they had discovered in their homes had
been, respectively, a dead millionaire with his head
battered in, a dead ambassador with his throat cut,
and a dead dancer known as La Flamme with a dag
ger of Oriental design between her fourth and fifth
ribs. Whenever the hero of a Vail story took a house,
he was sure to discover something of the sort in it. It
was pure routine.10
Unquestionably Vail had accurately deconstructed his situa

tion vis-a-vis the crime/pig plot; his role in the romance plot is
closer to the stereotypes of romantic melodrama—as is that also
of Gloria Salt when at the point of transferring her affections
from Sir Gregory Parsloe back to Orlo Vosper:
Youth, according to most authorities, is the season

for gaiety and happiness, but one glance at this girl
would have been enough to show that nobody was
likely to sell that idea to her. Her lovely face was
twisted with pain, her dark eyes dull with anguish. If
she had appeared, looking as she was looking now, in
one of the old silent films, there would have been
flashed upon the screen some such caption as: BUT
CAME A DAY WHEN REMORSE GNAWED
GLORIA SALT. THINKING OF WHAT MIGHT
HAVE BEEN HER PROUD HEART ACHES (Pigs
Have Wings, 117).
Robert Hall has already observed that Wodehouse's main

generic models include—in addition to musical comedy and
"bilge-literature"—detective fiction; and there is no doubt that
Pigs Have Wings has, in its four major sub-plots, considerable re

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MacDermott 45
course to each generic model. But in addition simply to being

present, these models bear an active relation to plot which (1) is
made consistently self-conscious by passages like the two above,
and (2) modifies literary sources in the manner cited by Vail. A
pig is characteristically substituted for a corpse. Sub-titles are
submitted in place of psychological scrutiny. These are the
kinds of transformations that crucially unrealize plots and char
acters, already partly unrealized by the simplifications of sensa
tional fiction. Wodehouse ably described the first stage of this
process to Townend:
Your hero, being real, can't approach his difficul

ties gaily and meet them in a dashing way. I do hope
all this is clear. What I mean is this: A man trapped
in a ruined mill by pock-marked Mexicans and one
eyed Chinamen can be lively and facetious. A man
in the position of most of your heroes can't be any
thing but deadly serious (Performing Flea, 30).
When in turn pock-marked Mexicans and ruined mills are

replaced by pigs and suburban villas, and when the substitution
blatantly demands to be regarded as a substitution, the literary
effect is not of a return from sensationalism to realism but
rather of a further removal from it. Realism may insist on p
rather than pock-marked Mexicans; but light humor insist
turning the Mexicans into pigs before your very eyes. The
mechanism operates when "great literature" is substituted
sensational writing: the model can be raised and disclaimed
way of an assertion of realism or raised and incorporated
comic mock heroic. A misread letter which put off a roma
match for twenty years is identified as "one of those unf
nate misunderstandings which are so apt to sunder hearts
sort of thing Thomas Hardy used to write about" (Pigs H
Wings, 149). The invocation of tragic inevitability reduces
tual presence—not in the direction of "unpleasant" realism
rather in the direction of mock heroic stylishness. Wheth
their sources be high or low, fictional models are invoke
Wodehouse to displace emotion by redirecting attention to
category or story-telling which sponsors it:
In these days when changes in the public taste

have led to the passing from the theatre of the old
fashioned melodrama, it is not often that one sees a

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baffled Baronet. But anyone who had chanced to

glance in at the window of Sir Gregory Parsloe's
study now would have been able to enjoy that specta
cle. In the old melodramas the baffled Baronet used
to grab his moustache and twirl it. Sir Gregory, hav
ing no moustache, was unable to do this, but in every
other respect he followed tradition (Pigs Have Wings,
125).
Anguish=melodrama; terror==adventure stories; perplexity

detective novels; love=musical comedy, and so on.
Characterization in Pigs Have Wings can be no more than an
extension of plotting—which is to say that characters, like their
plots, are identified with genres and allowed to signify only via
(as recovered from) some other texts. Wodehouse was adamant
about not having characters take precedence over plot
(Performing Flea, 27), which in effect meant organizing motiva
tion around events rather than vice-versa. Stock types act typi
cally; "a real character in one of my books sticks out like a sore
thumb" (Performing Flea, 105). Motivation is largely supplied by
stereotypes, and stereotypes largely by specifically media sources.
The baffled baronet, the young struggling writer (but not of Lit
erature), the dreamy peer, the haughty aristocrat, the million
aire's lively and adventurous daughter, the warm-hearted moth
erly ex-barmaid—all are characters whose behavior is certified
by cliche rather than by any more sophisticated conventions of
psychological realism. There is no nature, only culture; people
are born good or bad; a change of heart is a change of role. The
characterization of Pigs Have Wings is as transparent as that of
Everyman: the villain is a "fiend in human shape" with "evil de
signs" and the hero has both a "heart of gold" and a "soul over
flowing with the milk of human kindness" (pages 14,7). The de
termining difference between a Wodehouse text and a morality
play is that in the former the value terms do not in fact signify
values. Phrases like "fiends in human shape" displace their own
significance, their own pretences to reference or reflection, and
instead signify literariness (cliché), comedy (cliche which recog
nizes itself) and a happy ending (cliche which recognizes itself
as part of a benign pattern). And just as "fiend in human
shape" signifies something much less disturbing, more emotion
ally cuddly than a fiend in human shape (namely a Victorian
melodrama genially ransacked), so "evil designs" signifies some
thing other than evil designs. Ethical codes are displaced by so

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MacDermott 47
cial codes. The Code of the Woosters, the code of the preux cheva
lier, the code of "the unwritten law" and the "gentleman's
agreement"—even "honor among thieves"—these constitute the
rules/roles which preempt much of the need for characterization:
decision-making and motivation are minimized; as Bertie
Wooster invariably points out, one either is or one is not a preux
chevalier. So far as villainy goes, it is simply beyond the pale of
characterization. "You must not", Wodehouse pointed out "take
any risk of humanizing your villains in a story of action. And
by humanizing I mean treating them subjectively instead of ob
jectively" (Performing Flea, 21). To treat a (non-professional) vil
lain subjectively is to risk moving out of the area of coded be
havior into that of ethical decision. In Pigs Have Wings Sir Gre
gory Parsloe is permitted reflections on the arduousness of his
diet, the appropriateness of his romantic connections and the
health and security of his pig. But the rationale behind his code
breaking behavior lies outside the discursive range of the novel.
The codes themselves are typically from sources as diverse as
Kipling and Oklahoma! and the less distinguished of the Victorian
songbooks. They are given to characters with the appropriate
generic affiliations and carry all the irresistible force of an ex
ternal event.
Like the characterization, the discourse of Wodehouse's fic
tion is largely a composite of undisguisedly borrowed models
(including received Wodehouse-isms) delivered through citation
and mimicry. Such is inevitably the case insofar as "baffled
Baronet" is as much a component of style as of characterization;
but the technique is arguably the most prominent feature of
Wodehouse's style. It is on the level of style, for example, that
the "high culture" borrowings "squash in" most observably with
the popular culture material. Consider Sir Gregory Parsloe dis
cussing his diet:
His hostess was gazing at him wide-eyed, as if

swearing, in faith, 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange,
'twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful, and there came
upon him something of the easy fluency which had
enabled Othello on a similar occasion to make such a
good story of his misfortunes (36).
Or Galahad Threepwood's response to Maudie Stubbs' altar

rail desertion:

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I'm not surprised. Enough to upset anyone. A

rather similar thing happened to Mariana of the
Moated Grange, and she was as sick as mud (79).
Humor is a notoriously difficult element to isolate; but it is

arguable that the humor in Wodehouse's style lies in the bipar
tite or tripartite levels on which reality is signified (high cul
ture/mass culture/sensationalism) and in the shift of attention
between these discontinuous constructions. In terms of each
other, the conventions are incongruously inadequate, overs
or understated, melodramatic or banal. But nevertheless, t
taposed levels of signification don't deconstruct each other; t
simply unrealize each other and release the comic vertigo o
distance between the realities they produce. As in the lit
piece, satire is suppressed because reference is suppressed
this case because parody or parodie mimicry are displaced
simple citation. Wodehouse, that is, takes as a starting poi
tracts from the primary sources, not the sources themselves.
I wonder if Bartlett has been as good a friend to

authors as he has been to me. I don't know where I
would have been all these years without him. It so
happens that I am not very bright and find it hard to
think up anything really clever off my own bat, but
give me my Bartlett and I will slay you."
Wodehouse's reliance on specifically intertextual comedy is

partly conditioned by the format of the novel. Given the alter
native format of a metropolitan magazine, the New Yorker writ
ers could afford kinds of allusiveness—to metropolitan topogra
phy and social habits, for example—for which Wodehouse was
bound to substitute broader intertextual gestures. And the con
ventions of the traditionally plotted novel also preempted the
kinds of comic irrelevancies, or the excursions into fantasy,
which the little piece developed as substitutes for plot. (Many of
these devices of the New Yorker style Wodehouse in fact used in
his autobiographical sketches for Over Seventy.) What is common
to the Wodehouse novel and the little piece is the raconteurial
voice which strategically foregrounds its Art while stereotyping
its own comic persona. Also common to both is the intertextual

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MacDermott 49
situation of the prose between high culture and popular culture.

But the overriding common feature of both sorts of text is the
use of formal strategies to foreground the transformative Art of
writing and to signify that "this is not-Life"—that "this" refers
to sources not in reality but in textuality and narrative-making.
In the New Yorker these sources include social allusions and so
cial stereotypes, but both are perceived at the far end of th
transformative procedure: anti-realist social allusions and so
stereotypes refer to the literary process of making allusions an
stereotypes, not to society itself.
Wodehouse's literary position, then, was characteristic o
faction of American writers of literate humor who began in th
1880s to satirize what they perceived as realism, and who by th
1920s had begun to displace it, inserting Art between Life a
the literary mirror, tidying values, typing characters, conven
alizing feeling, and cleaning up the social landscape:
Fortifications, God knows what-all. This is really

loathsome country, the land of lynch—the special
windows in the bus terminals where colored people
have to buy their tickets, the seats in the back of all
public-vehicles they must confine themselves to, the
mean, ignorant faces of their white superiors, the
fake good cheer beamed at the tourists, and the ap
palling ugliness of everything . . . It's obvious to me
I'll have to invent the whole God-damned thing any
way, so I may as well face up to it and get it over
with.12
This comic evasion of Life is not an escape into the text as

in some forms of popular writing, but rather an escape from an
image of Life constructed in opposition to the text and per
ceived as standing outside it. This sense that "reality is out there
somewhere" obscures the fact the "Life" is not an entity but a
negative version of the text itself composed out of a series of
anti-realist transformations: codes (not-ethics); generic subtitling
(not-feelings); stereotyping (not-psychology); stylization (not-re
flection); multiple conventions (not-a-unified-reality). And be
cause it is a construct which is defined at all points against the
artifice of the text, anti-realist Life is naturalized at the very
moment of its construction as not-Art. What conservative anti
realism naturalizes is a view of Life which is reactionary and
even defeatist in its implications. "Life isn't a fairy tale"; "yo

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can't expect happy endings in real life"; "don't wait for a knight
in shining armor to turn up"—all this is patently true because
Life isn't Art. And because Life isn't Art any attempt to
change it, to rewrite in practice "human nature" or social rela
tions is clearly and repeatedly diagnosed as "unrealistic." Con
servative anti-realism associated itself with "natural" dissatisfac
tions—lack of social or economic or emotional fulfillment; the
"human condition" in general—dissatisfactions which it simul
taneously naturalizes and assuages with the artificial but inno
cent and well-earned "binges" of comedy. What happens on
these binges is that the consolations of stereotyping and codified
behavior are applied to the reader worn down by a life which is
"dull, amoral, lacking in heroes, excessively detailed" and, in
short, unreadable. That is, while the text entertains it also natu
ralizes Life as a sort of anti-text from which only the naive will
expect clarity in the versions they are able to make for them
selves of themselves and of the situations which structure their
lives. By not just unrealizing the text but by strategically signi
fying unrealism, anti-realism brings out the cynicism, the expec
tation of dissatisfaction, which is the latent underside of wish
fulfillment. The more insistently the Utopian fantasy is fore
grounded, the more insistently Life lurks in the wings. The
Thurber text is actually about this syndrome; it crops up occa
sionally in the work of Benchley and Perelman; and once a
"real-life" coincidence drove Alexander Woollcott out into the
open:
If the tidings of so uncommon a coincidence thus

have all the tingle of good news, if they come to us
with the force of a boon and a benison, it is, I sup
pose, because they carry with them the reassuring in
timation that this is, after all, an ordered universe,
that there is, after all, a design to our existence.
When we thus catch life in the very act of rhyming,
our inordinate pleasure is a measure, perhaps, of how
frightened we really are by the mystery of its unchar
tered seas.13
But more often the little piece poses itself as a site at once
of entertainment and anxiety, the very thing for the sickbed or
the dentist's waiting room or the Depression:
The ascendancy of wish-fulfillment thinking in the

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MacDermott 51
late twenties—the speculative desires for wealth fed

by bond salesmen, Old Counsellors, newspaper huck
sters—exploded in the thirties on all levels: for now
there lay a far greater distance than ever before be
tween the ideals of society and the democratic possi
bilities of fulfilling them. Even literature seemed de
signed, in the popular sector, to provide a major av
enue of escape. *
What Philip Melling in "American Popular Culture in the

Thirties" calls escapist writing really combines two categories of
writing—literary escapism and literary evasion—which I have
been trying to distinguish here. The difference between them is
that escapism resolves social contradictions through the action
of myth and stereotypes while literary evasion acts by construct
ing a cynicism about the nature of Life outside the text. It hap
pened that while escapism could revise its forms, enter Cold War
cultural practice, and remain nevertheless escapism, what I have
called literary evasion could not.
By the mid-1950s it was commonplace to observe that light
humor was falling victim to Cold War earnestness. Musical
comedy "plumped for romantic escapism, whether into Scotland,
the islands of the Pacific, or the United States in the mid
1920s"15; the little piece "developed into a righteous cause or two
and became important"16; each new product of the Wodehouse
formula was received and read nostalgically, its comic mode as
much a sign of the past as its setting.
As a literary mode which identified the enemy with Life,
the Human Condition and The Way Things Are, light humor
was not a form which produced and resolved social contradic
tions, but rather a form which displaced and naturalized them.
Both of these (related) effects—the naturalization of dissatisfac
tion and the displacement of contradiction—gave light humor a
functional role in the ensemble of conservative and passivist
signifying practices of the Depression. But despite the fact that
light humor produced an anti-utopian image of Life, it had no
functional role in the ensemble of Cold War signifying practices.
There the enemy is not within nature itself but perversely op
posed to it, monstrous, unworkable. The Cold War construct of
Life is largely built up around this opposition, which is centred
rather than displaced, and is reproduced in various forms as in
dividual vs. group identity, initiative vs. decadence, free enter
prise vs. communism, and so on. Light humor could not offer a

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venue for the representation and dramatization of these opposed

and contradictory forms. Unlike the figures of escapist texts, its
characters, displaced to the limbo of comic artifice, had neither
the verisimilitude nor the ethical decisiveness to (re)produce is
sues of individualism, consensus responsibility, free enterprise,
social darwinism and the internal (decadent) or external
(monstrous) threats to same. Theirs was to "do just what the
scenario tells them to do." It is worth reflecting that the black
humor which substantially replaced light humor inverted its
characteristic strategy and cultivated a deliberate confusion of
the categories Art and Life.
Ainslee
Australian Capital Territory
Australia
NOTES
1Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar, "Literature as an ideological form: Some

Marxist propositions," Praxis, No. 5 (1981), p.53.
2Norris, W. Yates, The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Cen
tury (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1964), p.31.
3Opie Read in Arkansas Traveller, II, 4 (April 28, 1883), quoted in William R
Linneman's "Satires of American Realism, 1880-1900," American Literature, XXIV
(March, 1962), pp.85-6.
4This argument is put at length in Linneman, ο p.cit.
5P. G. Wodehouse, Performing Flea (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1953), p.30. Subs
quent references to this edition will be given in the text.
6Dorothy Parker, "A Book of Great Short Stories," in A Month of Saturdays,
(Ed.) Lillian Hellman (London: Macmillan, 1971), p.16. A Month of Saturdays collec
31 of Constant Reader's 46 pieces for the New Yorker.
7S. J. Perelman, "Fairy Tale for Bored Bar-flies," Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge
(1929).
g
See Gerald Weales, "Not for the Old Lady in Dubuque," in The Comic Imagina
tion in American Literature, (Ed.) Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni
versity Press, 1973), pp.236-40.
'Robert Benchley, "Hedgehogs Wanted," My Ten Years in a Quandary and How
they Grew (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1940), p.178.
10P. G. Wodehouse, Pigs Have Wings (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1957),
p.193. Subsequent references to this edition will be given in the text.
UP. G. Wodehouse, Over Seventy (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1957), p. 39.
12S. J. Perelman, Don't Tread on Me: The Selected Letters of S. J. Perelman
(Ed.) Prudence Crowther (New York: Viking Books, 1987), p.112.

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MacDermott 53
"Alexander Woo
Penguin, 1934), p.
14Philip Melling
Genre, " Approa
Popular Press, 197
15Cecil Smith,
1950), p. 351.
l6Weales, 245.

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Light Humor and The Dark Underside

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Light Humor and the Dark Underside of Wish Fulfillment: Conservative Anti-realism

Author(s): Kathy MacDermott

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