Divine Comedy - Laurel & Hardy
Back in the Mofussil ages, when Doordarshan reigned supreme over the Indian eyeballs with its programming of kitschy Ramanand Sagar's epics, Sunday evening Hindi movies peppered with too many advertisements for Lux Beauty soap, Cinkara tonics, Lalitaji's Rin Detergent etc (I leave it to the more talented mimics I know to write a cultural history of those early TV years in India), the powers to be managed to slip in some subversive programming such as Tom & Jerry cartoons, German detective soaps (I forget the name now), which I distinctly remember had a 'shocking' episode on busting of an amateur porn ring (now you know why!), and also the comedy of the Great Chaplin.
However it was "Laurel & Hardy" that held my attention and allegiance then, as they do so now. I was thinking about them late last night in bed as I was reading this in Kurt Vonnegut's latest acerbic and funny book A Man Without A Country (for the interested, this book is basically an eighty two year old socialist-humanist's chataqua on comedy, creative writing, fossil fuel powered thermodynamic whoopee, the Chosen One's, i.e., Small B's Administration of Guessers etc, and because of its slenderness can be comfortably read in an afternoon) :
"Humor is an almost psychological response to fear. Freud said that humor is a response to frustration - one of several. A dog, he said, when he can't get out a gate, will scratch and start digging and making meaningless gestures, perhaps growling or whatever, to deal with frustration or surprise or fear.
And a great deal of laughter is induced by fear. I was working on a funny television series year ago. We were trying to put a show together that, as a basic principle, mentioned death in every episode and this ingredient would make any laughter deeper without the audience's realizing how we were inducing belly laughs.
There is a superficial sort of laughter. Bob Hope, for example, was not really a humorist. He was a comedian with very thin stuff, never mentioning anything troubling. I used to laugh my head off at Laurel and Hardy. There is terrible tragedy there somehow. These men are too sweet to survive in this world and are in terrible danger all the time. They could be so easily killed."
While one can find separate biographies of thin Laurel (most interesting fact: he was British, and was an understudy to Chaplin as he was starting out in comedy) and plump Hardy (he was born in Harlem, Georgia, not far from where I currently live), their lives might be more insightfully treated as a set of Siamese twins, in which the two confused heads are at constant war with each other. Or as Vonnegut again put it in the prologue of his novel "Slapstick",
"The fundamental joke with Laurel and Hardy, it seems to me, was that they did their best with every test. They never failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies, and were screamingly adorable and funny on that account".
Anyway, here you can watch a short documentary on these fellas. Finally, we come to the comedy itself. YouTube has plenty of choice morsels for belly aching laughs. Here are some of the longer ones:
<a href=”www.youtube.com>Big Business: Selling Christmas Trees
<a href=”www.youtube.com>You Gave It To Me
<a href=”www.youtube.com>Laurel Visits Hardy at the Hospital
Movie Posts
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A Note on Poetry Improvisations
About a month ago, a friend had emailed me this article from the NYT that details the QuickMuse project. And very unusually, my brother-in-law later emailed me the link to QuickMuse too.
The basic premise of this project is to square off two well known poets against each other in Cyberia, and thus provide an online spectacle for the interested public as they watch each of the poets' improvisatory process unravel in pixels, as they hopefully travel towards a poem starting from the mediator provided poetic inspiration. For the first duel, a line of Elizabeth Bishop, "Writing poetry is an unnatural act", was the starting point.
While this is all nice and good, being a desi, even if I am admittedly semi frigani-fied, when I read this, I immediately was taken to the memory of reading in a n online article detailing a mushiara featuring all the great Urdu poets during the final days of the Mughal empire. My Google skills must not be as great as I thought they are, and hence I came up empty. But yesterday dhoomketu left a comment pointing me to this excellent article on the art of ghazal, which was where I had first encountered a description of this mushiara. To quote from it:
"Because the expression of genius within tight boundaries can become a theatrical enterprise, ghazal poets were historically a social lot. They gathered often to recite before their fellows in competitive symposia called musha'arahs, which reached their peak in the Mughal court, although they are still held today wherever Urdu poets are active. In these sophisticated and ceremonial occasions, the poets in attendance were given a misra'-i tara, a half-line in the meter and rhyme in which each then had to compose his ghazal. In order, from the lesser poets to the masters, each participant recited his work for the appreciation of his peers and the audience. A lighted candle was placed before the poet whose turn it was to recite.
"The Last Candle of Delhi," by Farhatullah Beg, is a semi-historical account of a royal musha'arah attended by 59 poets, including the masters Ustad Zauq, Mirza Ghalib and Momin Khan, and their student followers. Zauq was court poet of the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah II, who himself wrote fine ghazals and under whose auspices the musha`arah convened. Farhatullah’s account was based on an actual 1845 musha'arah recorded by Karim-ud-Din Maghfoor, who collected the ghazals recited that night in a volume called a guldastah ("bouquet")
Early in Bahadur's reign, musha'arahs were held twice monthly at the Red Fort in the Diwan-e-'Am, or Public Hall. They lasted from 9:00 in the evening until dawn— a time known as "the aristocratic hour." Invitations specified the tarah, or meter-and-rhyme pattern, for each evening's ghazals.
"At the word of the heralds," the account begins, "all present settled down on folded knees and lowered their heads. The Emperor's page took out Bahadur's ghazal from a silk cloth, kissed it, touched it to his eyes and began reciting in a resonant melodious voice. The audience was too entranced to applaud. They swayed in rapture of delight at every couplet. Occasionally phrases like Subhan Allah! Subhan Allah! ["Glory to God!"] escaped underbreath from their lips. Otherwise the room remained silent, spellbound and completely lost in itself."
More worldly moments occurred as well: Although one recitation was gem-like, it was considered out of place, for it was recited in Persian, and this musha'arah was a celebration of Urdu. A ghazal by Indian Army Captain Alexander Heatherly, born of an English father and Indian mother and attending that night's performance in uniform, was roundly applauded. A failure by an otherwise senior poet is doubly mocked, first by the thunderous silence of masters, and then by the inane cheering of sycophants.
The account goes on to follow the highs and lows of both magisterial and pedestrian versifying in ghazals, and all of it—from grudge matches and artistic slights to the flare-ups of past feuds, tactical alliances between rivals and catty asides—speak to the passionate vitality of the form. It is the master Ustad Zauq who ends the musha'arah as dawn breaks: His recitation of a wistful elegy—pointedly not a ghazal—serves to bring the evening to a close and with it, unbeknownst to him, an era." ...
I, for one, think it is much more of poetic to hold a poetry face-off with candles rather than glow of computer monitors. And the above description of this last mushiara in Delhi makes me even more want to go back to that night in a time machine, and to be one of the audience 'waah waahing' those master poets.
While one can attend various poetry conferences, and even fairly large poetry festivals such as the Dodge Poetry Festival here in the United States, the closest one comes to competitive poetry is the poetry slam movement. This movement, however, is nearly divorced from literary, i.e., academic poetry, and if David Lehman, the ever constant promoter and salesman of "Best American Poetry" series, writing in a humorous essay included in his book, "The Big Question" (these are two other essays included in this book), seems to indicate that most poetry produced for slams, and in slams, has little or no artistic and literary merit. And based on the miniscule experience I have had with slams I think I would concur with Mr. Lehman. To win a slam, I think, you need to be more of a dramatic performer or actor than a poet. Besides some great poems - I am thinking of Emily Dickinson's oeuvre - are simply meant to be read alone, in a quiet room.
My Daily Notes
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