In class, "Parson John Bullen's Lizards" was introduced to us as "written slapstick." Admittedly, I'm not a particular fan of slapstick. It never really makes me laugh.
However, as I read through the description of the chaotic climax of "Lizards," I found myself more amused than I typically am with slapstick. I could visualize the scene, and what I visualized was fairly typical of the slapstick I've seen on the screen: the slapstick that isn't funny to me. What then, is the difference? Why does this make me laugh when watching it acted out probably would not?
I'm not certain of the answer, but I think that it has a lot to do with the metaphor. The first part of the story that I marked as particularly funny to me was the description of the pastor "standin' astraddle of [Sut], a-foamin' at the mouf, a-chompin' his teeth--gestrin' with the hickory club--and a-preachin'" (236).
Sut's narrative voice is full of these metaphorical descriptions that bring the action to life in a way that, ironically, actually bringing the action to life wouldn't work for me. Maybe it's because envisioning someone foaming at the mouth and chomping at the teeth while preaching allows for a comical imaginative scene whereas actually seeing this portrayed would just seem over the top and ridiculous.
Another example of this descriptive metaphor occurs when Sut describes one of the lizards diving "head-fust into the bosom of a fat woman as big as a skinned hoss and nigh onto as ugly" (239). Once more, any attempt to physically portray this woman would either fall short of Sut's description or be too ridiculous for me to find funny (unless, perhaps, it was a cartoon rather than live action). Now that I think of it, I find slapstick humor in cartoons much funnier than I do in any live-action portrayal, so the way that I envision these descriptions is probably connected with that.
The metaphor also functions as a supplement to the dialect. Many of the metaphors are region specific. For example, Sut comments that the lizards' climbing made "a noise like squirrels a-climbin a shellbark hickory" and the Pastor slapped himself "about the place where you cut the bes' steak outen a beef." These colorful phrases acted to not only highlight the humorous quality of the action, but to also create a better understanding of the setting, a central point to the plot of the story. This story would not be nearly as funny if it took place in a large city. The fact that these people all know one another and know everything about one another's lives highlights the humility of the Pastor (as well as the initial reason for the lecture he gives Sut).
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I see your point about problems in visually portraying slapstick. I'm not sure why, but I also have the experience of finding slapstick far more funnier in, say, comics than in a film like Modern Times. I wonder if this has something to do with imagination. In the case of reading a descriptive metaphor, we are given lots of details, but we still supply the complete picture with the help of our imagination. With comics and cartoons, we are given the picture, but it is not quite realistic--maybe the eyes are like round black frying pans in a visual description of the character's shock: there's an instant, however small, when we don't immediately get the image, and we need our imagination to connect "shock" and frying-pan eyes. Or maybe we see a character without a mouth drawn in. What could this signify? Perhaps the character is stupefied, has nothing to say. Perhaps someone just told this character a really lame joke, and now this character has been drawn in the instant when he reacts to the lame joke. But we need our imagination to interpret the absence of the mouth.
ReplyDeleteSo maybe there's something in the joy of using our imagination that is present when we read descriptive metaphors in text, and also when we see comic or cartoon characters, but not when we see the image strikingly as in a film.