Wednesday
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? found few fans in my Feuding Couples Comedy class yesterday. Most thought the feuding too heated, the couples repellant, and the comedy unfunny. In fact, they couldn’t understand why I had included it in a comedy class.
The Edward Albee Society describes the play as a “dark comedy,” so there’s that. But how is it a comedy? Now that I’ve compared Who’s Afraid with comedies that clearly are comedies, I see enough overlap to at least consider the matter. Feuding Couples Comedy (FCC) is a subgenre of romantic comedy, and like its parent it specializes in relationship anxieties. The battle of the sexes gets transmuted into highly intense verbal duels where both parties give as good as they get. Who’s Afraid certainly has that.
As I’ve noted in recent posts (for instance here), the difference between FCC and traditional couples comedy is the intensity level. Without words, things would shift into actual violence—in which case the drama ceases to be comic and, equally fatal for FCCs, egalitarian. (That’s why, while Petruchio-Kate begin as a comic feuding couple, his patriarchal power over her means it doesn’t end as one.) But while FCCs don’t have actual violence (War of the Roses and Mr. and Mrs. Smith being notable exceptions), the prospect for violence hovers around the edges.
In Much Ado about Nothing, for instance, the Beatrice and Benedick relationship is played out against the Claudio-Hero drama where, at different times, the father wishes his daughter dead, the daughter is said of have committed suicide, and a duel is arranged. Only the fact that much ado is being made about nothing allows this to be a comedy. But then, there’s also much ado about nothing in Othello.
In Rover, the Hellena-Willmore relationship is played against a drama in which the ultrafeminine Florinda is almost raped twice (not to mention another time before the play opens). Better to be a strong woman who fights the other gender than a weak one who relies on male protection, the female author figures. Aphra Behn also knew that words were a better leveler than swords and brute strength.
In 20th century screwball comedies, His Girl Friday is played out in the shadow of the gallows and Adam’s Rib against the backdrop of a spousal murder attempt. Clark Gable in It Happened One Night says Claudette Colbert needs to be socked once a day, Cary Grant in Philadelphia Story actually shoves Katharine Hepburn in the face (after first considering a punch), and Henry Higgins threatens to wring Eliza’s neck. At one point in Adam’s Rib, in a scene that also shows up in Who’s Afraid, Spencer Tracy seems prepared to shoot wife Hepburn, only to reveal that the gun is fake.
So yes, FCCs capture the hostility that one partner is capable of feeling for the other. Even good marriages have such moments. Furthermore, because married partners comes to know each other so well, they know which buttons to push for maximum effect. The classic ones, which Albee’s Martha and George have mastered, are emasculation fears (on the part of the man) and attractiveness fears (on the part of the woman). She can make him feel less of a man and he can make her feel less of a woman.
As an instance of the first, Martha informs their guests that her husband is not the man her president-of-the-college father is:
Martha (to Honey and Nick and also to George, who is standing at the home bar with his back to everyone):
So, anyway, I married the S.O.B., and I had it all planned out . . . He was the groom . . . he was going to be groomed. He’d take over some day . . . first, he’d take over the History Department, and then, when Daddy retired, he’d take over the college . . . you know? That’s the way it was supposed to be. (To George) You getting angry, baby? Hunh? (Now back) That’s the way it was supposed to be. Very simple. And Daddy seemed to think it was a pretty good idea too. For a while. Until he watched for a couple of years! (To George again) You getting angrier? (Now back) Until he watched for a couple of years and started thinking maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all . . . that maybe Georgie-boy didn’t have the stuff . . .that he didn’t have it in him.
By the end of this attack George, “almost crying,” breaks a liquor bottle against the portable bar.
After this game of “Humiliate the Host,” George responds with an even more devastating comeback: he reveals that their “son” is actually a fiction, thereby exposing Martha as sterile. He does this by claiming that he just received a telegram informing him of their “son’s” death:
George: Now listen, Marth; listen carefully. We got a telegram; there was a car accident andhe’s dead. POUF! Julst like that! Now, how do you like it?
Martha: (A howl which weakens into a moan) NOOOOOOoooooo.
Despite witty interchanges between highly educated people, Who’s Afraid does not have a lot of laughs. My class is right about that. But literary scholar Northrup Frye informs us that comedy is also about social resolution, and Who’s Afraid resembles other FCCs in that regard. Every play and film I have mentioned concludes with a marriage or (if the couple has divorced) a remarriage. Matrimony may be under stress but it is reaffirmed in the end. It may be reaffirmed in Who’s Afraid.
In this case, George and Martha think that the illusion of having a child is the only thing keeping them together. The big bad wolf they’re afraid of is Truth. Once George “kills” the child, there’s a chance—no certainty but a chance—that they will rebuild their marriage on a firmer foundation.
In an important book on film genre, University of Iowa film scholar Rick Altman theorizes that Hollywood genre films invite us to transgress norms, only to pull back from the brink when we start feeling too anxious. We imagine breaking the law with gangsters and creating mayhem with monsters but then look for reassurance at the film’s end (the gangsters are locked up or shot, the monsters are defeated). In romantic comedy, we may imagine freedom without the irritants of responsibility until, after 90 minutes of imaginary transgressing, a gradually building discomfort becomes intolerable. At that point, the film reassures us by returning us to the social norm of a committed partnership.
Who’s Afraid pushes the boundaries by making us far more uncomfortable than any of the other FCCs I have discussed. George and Martha are a long way from Beatrice and Benedick. Yet there’s enough similarity there for Who’s Afraid to join the FCC club.
At least if you attach the adjective “dark” to “comedy.”