The pundits are wrong to call last night’s Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner (a regularly held Catholic charity event in New York) a “roast.” True, John McCain and Barack Obama each stood up and jocularly mocked themselves and one another, in front of political guests, journalists, and the television-watching public. But a roast is a no-holds-barred event where multiple friends of a guest of honor take turns making fun of that guest of honor, while he or she, all the while, sits silently and graciously taking the punches.
Last night’s event may not have been a roast, but both McCain and Obama each proved to be very funny men, and in the process, made me wish they’d shown some of this side to their personalities during their debates.
Their comic sides reminded me of two disparate events that I only rarely think about, each of which demonstrates the principle that human beings have the most absurd capacity to break for a laugh even in the middle of the fiercest and most tragic moments.
Recall the famous 1914 “Christmas truce,” when German and British troops along the Western Front crawled out of their respective trenches on Christmas Eve to sing Christmas carols together in the “no man’s land” between them — a brief, soon-to-be-forgotten celebration of happiness and a momentary relief from the wretchedness of warfare.
Or consider the ancient Greek tradition of the “satyr plays,” which functioned as direct comic relief (replete with bawdy sexual jokes) in between the second and third parts of a very long performance of a trilogy of tragic plays. (Curiously, just as the satyr play was, for the Greeks, comic relief for three tragedies, last night’s comedy routine was, for us, comic relief for the three presidential debates.)
I’ve always loved pictures and statues of satyrs — the mythical creatures of the ancient Greek imagination on which the satyr plays are based. They’re half goat and half man, and frequently possess leering grins and phalluses the size of canoes. Although only one satyr play survives in full (we know them mostly only from fragments), we know that the satyr plays vented the intense, hot pain that came from watching the violent struggle within any given trilogy of tragic plays.
While an American presidential campaign is hardly the equivalent of trench warfare or ancient Greek tragedy, each of them does constitute a fight over how much humans are able to control change, and who, precisely, will get to try to control it. The only way to survive any of these things, and still come out sane is, apparently, by taking a comedy break.
