LITR 4370 TRAGEDY Final Exam Samples 2015 (final exam assignment) Model Answers to Part 1. Finish Genre Definition

Part 1. Finish genre definition and example(s) from Midterms 1 & 2: Using Introduction to Genres page, redevelop, revise, and improve your "working definition" of your chosen genre in all three categories (Subject / Audience, Formal, Narrative) and use them to describe and analyze the genre  you began in Midterm1. Cite, explain, and analyze two or more examples of your genre from your reading, viewing, or listening experience and  and 2 research sources from course website or beyond. (total length: 6-8 paragraphs, 3+ double-spaced page equivalent)

Eric Anderson    

8 May 2015

          Part One: The Triumph of Dark Comedy

          We all know, I daresay, the two famous masks of drama: tragedy, weeping; and comedy, laughing. These grimaces offer a very plain binary with which we may categorize certain modes of artistic creation. The genres are divided by the emotion they aim to elicit; they are shorthand for an expectation, a tacit "contract with the audience" (White, 1). While tragedy is thought to be the more meritorious and noble of the two genre monoliths, the existence of such a distinction shortchanges the staggering impact that comedy, in its various guises, is capable of. To suggest that tragedy supersedes all forms of comedy is to suggest that so-called noble, heart-swelling catharsis—crying—is more useful than ecstatic, visceral, gut-busting catharsis—laughing. What is the practical worth of such a claim of superiority? After all, crying and laughing are eerily similar physiologically. People sometimes cry until they laugh, and oftentimes it is unclear which emotion one is convulsed by. Dark comedy, by focusing on macabre or serious topics and combatting them with disarming humor, binds ostensibly opposed emotions and creates a unique, all-encompassing ecstasy. Drowned in a sea of milquetoast modern-day content, the parody news journal The Onion's special 9/11 issue (2001) and the surrealist television comedy Xavier: Renegade Angel (2007-2009) stand out as two dark comedy jewels glittering morosely, reflecting back the dreadful insanity of life, endowing the audience with invaluable perspective.

          Nietzsche is correct in deeming comedy "the artistic release from the repellence of the absurd" (40). The implication is that the world is inherently absurd and repellant, which is a foundation of my understanding of dark comedy as a genre. Seen so, dark comedy is a mimesis, an "imitation of nature", as Aristotle says. The world spawns madness organically, so creators of dark comedy need hardly provide the exaggeration less dire comedy requires. Generally speaking, dark comedy entails controversial content and unpleasantness and shocking lightheartedness or irreverence intended to challenge boundaries and the audience's sense of common propriety with the overriding prime intention to elicit laughter amid other conflicting emotions. Out of the crowd thinned by the mass departure of the narrow-minded and/or offended, we are left with a somewhat nebulous, intrepid niche demographic. Simple categorical terms—such as dude, chick, or teen—are unhelpful in delineating the audience of dark comedy. If there is any commonality among proponents of the alarming sub-genre, it is a heaping dose of skepticism infused with morbidity and an open-minded, even Manifest Destiny-like, approach to the 'limits' of comedy. The existence of any given satire or parody "lets the audience understand that the work [being satirized/parodied] is worthy enough to satirize", writes Kayla Riggs in her 2012 midterm. Dark comedy works much the same way in that it requires a majorly sensitive topic for the comedy to be considered requisitely dark. Terminal cancer, for instance, fulfills this stipulation; conversely, a carefree pie to the face does not. Any taboo or socioculturally-sensitive topic is unsafe from dark comedy's scrutiny. Humor, far from being context-invariant or limited, is detectable even in darkness. While it is true that "history could make a stone weep" (190), as remarks an introspective pastor in Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, the formidable jokester Mark Twain forwards a differing redemptive outlook, urging us to remember that "against the assault of laughter nothing can stand" (qtd. in "Theories of Comedy"). Again, the masks are more closely linked than we may expect. Without humor and the cunning slant of dark comedy, weeping like the sad mask would be one of the only tenable reactions to gloom. The September 11th attacks, the deadliest tragedy on modern American soil, put our nation's comic minds to the urgent test.

          With tactful playfulness and trademark wit, The Onion's issue 3734, a collection of satirical news articles published in the aftermath of the September 11th, transformed a weeping topic into a darkly comic one for its stunned, mature, comedy-loving American audience. One headline, making good use of our tendency to casually relate anything and everything to our beloved filmic representations and in so doing reaffirm the ever-expanding universe created by the mimetic art-life dialogue, reads: "American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie". "Hugging Up 76,000 Percent", reports another soothing yet defiant headline—simple unification rejecting terrifying absurdity. A third piece features a representative of the stew brand Dinty Moore who, in a surge of patriotism, claims that "The entire Dinty Moore family is outraged by this heinous crime and stands firmly behind our leaders" ("Dinty Moore Breaks Long Silence on Terrorism With Full-Page Ad"), an example of comic inflation wherein a typically inconsequential matter is swelled beyond normal measure, here by preposterous bravado and solidarity, which is, considering the brand's limited leverage with relation to violent geopolitical affairs, little comfort at best. When pressed for opinion, the Almighty, full of anger, condemns the act of maniacs killing in His name and restates his anti-violence position:

                   "I'm talking to all of you, here!" continued God, His voice rising to a shout. "Do           you hear Me? I don't want you to kill anybody. I'm against it, across the board.                  How many times do I have to say it? Don't kill each other anymore—ever! I'm              fucking serious!" (God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule)

This is an example of comic incongruity because it runs counter to the mass perception of how God speaks. Here, instead, his diction is vulgar and frazzled and not dignified and heavenly. Accompanying this article is an inset graphic of a reticle with the United States targeted; the overlaid caption crudely screams: 'HOLY FUCKING SHIT: Attack On America', which is a visceral mimesis mirroring the collective conscious at the time. To see such a sentence in print, even in a parody, offers profound catharsis in the form of laughter. A little chortle in response to some unfortunate bozo slipping on a banana peel is one thing; using humor to reconcile emotions in the wake of wide-scale tragedy is quite another, and infinitely more emphatic. The Onion's unrelenting comic force, filtered through dark circumstance, offers its readership much needed laughter, which is, as Andrew O'Hehir says, "a weapon of symbolic rebellion" (qtd. in "Theories of Comedy"), a refusal to cower, lose spirit, or retract claws.             

          Speaking of claws, the animated cartoon Xavier: Renegade Angel, the short-lived surrealist dark comedy brainchild of the art collective PFFR, is equal parts a clever exhibition of rapid-fire wordplay and irreverent, critical sendup of countless sensitive sociocultural taboos. Critical of many factions and interested in challenging the fundamental nature of belief and inflexibility, the creators of X:RA are unafraid of making enemies or disgruntling the viewer. The essential narrative of each episode follows Xavier—an incompetent, unreasonable, itinerant pseudo-shaman—in his quest to comprehend and master various philosophical concepts. This meandering abstract search for selfness and oneness is a humorous mutation of a trope typical of the romance genre wherein serious journeys are undertaken and the "protagonists are motivated by desire for fulfillment or a vision of transcendent grace" (White, 1). The show makes use a few different formal genres. At the beginning of each episode, Xavier, an example of a single speaker, wanders alone along the desert plains and delivers to the audience a short, absurd, convoluted monologue before the title sequence. After the title sequence, Xavier invariably encounters souls unfortunate enough to make his exhausting acquaintance and the formal genre known as dialogue, wherein "two or more characters speak directly with each other [and] the audience overhears" (White, 1) persists for the remainder of the episode. Xavier's wanderings always lead to destruction and havoc while he ironically rambles on unscathed, unchanged, as oblivious and incapable of introspection as ever.

          X:RA is a mixture of low or physical comedy and high or verbal comedy. The computer-generated aesthetics qualify as low comedy: purposely horrendous, rudimentary, and amateurish for the sake of immediate and sustained laughs. Likewise, Xavier's physical appearance, a manifestation of his chaotic psychology, is grotesque and comically incongruous: a faun-like body covered mostly with brown fur; different-colored eyes; knee-joints that bend backwards; a beak for a nose despite the regular mouth below it; a left arm which is a snake from the elbow downwards; six nipples across his chest; and a third eye, usually concealed by a loincloth, where his genitals should be. In other words, he is so horrendous and extreme he cannot be ignored; and if he were a part of a traveling sideshow, he would be kept behind a curtain beyond the sight of children. Dizzying breakneck wordplay—including the use of portmanteau, entendre, punning, malapropism, rhyme, and experiment—is X:RA's trademark, and a trapping of high comedy through verbal wit. Indeed, the linguistic flexibility and vigor is captivating enough that a blind person could observe the show and not suffer much. This clever language skewers the gravitas of dire situations, making X:RA an ultimate dark comedy. Xavier brags that he is a "survivor—a dying breed", and a "conundrummer in a band called Life Puzzler" (episode 1). Through a flashback hallucination, he learns his father perished in a house-fire and the culprit was "our son", which he misinterprets as "arson" (episode 8). A preacher dryly remarks that the congregation's "sign language translator has donated her hands to the Needy Groper's Society" (episode 9). A burnout chides Xavier for using traditional gendered terms at a music festival called 'Burning Person', because "in today's day and age, women can be set on fire, too" (episode 8) - a commentary on the terminus and unsavory yet frank double-sidedness of gender equality. Offering vulnerability atypical of his population, a charming gang-member reluctantly admits that he likes to "kill on the toilet" (episode 2). Upset by the presence of her son upon notification of their accidental incest, Xavier's institutionalized mother impales her eyes with rods; in response, Xavier, not missing a beat and alluding to the most eminent ancient tragedy in the western canon, "Oedi-pull[s]" them out (episode 20). Painting the world in shades slightly more ridiculous that it presents itself in, Xavier: Renegade Angel is a relentlessly clever and vicious mockery of boundaries, values, perception, and dogma.

          Tragedy, for its dire focus, is taken as the apex of the serious genres. It follows, then, that dark comedy, for its similar ambition, should occupy an equal but opposite position in the discussion of the merits of the many genres. This is to say it would be intellectually dishonest to balance things radically different in scope: such as King Lear with a ribald limerick, or a piddling dime-store bodice-ripping romance novel with a complexly droll tome like Tristram Shandy. Two sides of the same coin, tragedy and dark comedy are unpopular and tough to stomach. In truth, some comedy, especially that of the dark variety, reveals more about the human condition than forms which stop just shy of cutting the bone. Ironically, comedy has a low-down reputation because nearly nobody takes comedy seriously enough.                          

          Dark comedy concerns itself with some of the same weighty topics as tragedy but instead uses humor to inspire acute emotions. Envelope-pushing projects like issue 3734 of The Onion and PFFR's Xavier: Renegade Angel grab our collars, dangle us over the precipice of the absurdly dark modern world, then plant us black on firm ground. Dismayed and astonished yet laughing, we are relieved, given the alternatives of overwhelming apathy or despair, to revel in cathartic ecstasy.