Howls

By T.E. Kalem

by TREVOR GRIFFITHS

A comedian is the tightrope artist of laughter. If his audience does not laugh, he falls, plunging into the terrifying void of collective silence. Yet the comedian's precarious venture does not end there. He may possess a commodious catalogue of jokes and tricky bits of business, but finally he has to put together some sort of theory as to why people laugh. This is a question that has puzzled minds of the caliber of Socrates' and Freud's, and Novelist George Meredith's and Philosopher Henri Bergson's, let alone your stand-up comic's.

As a rule, most comedians treat comedy as a security blanket. They comfort the audience by making whatever unsettles, disturbs or frightens people the chief butt of their jokes. That accounts for the wide popularity of sexual humor, of gibes at local stereotypes and assumed rural, urban, regional and national characteristics. But the rare comedian, impelled by motives that lie too deep for analysis, makes the audience itself the butt of his humor, attacks head-on the smugness, vanity and hypocrisy that people prefer to hide or ignore. Placed in the direct line of comic fire, an audience, and by extension a society, can turn vicious. One need only evoke the fate of Lenny Bruce as one case in evidence.

These two brands of comedy are what Comedians, a scathingly funny, perceptively angry and warmly humane play is all about. Those who have relished the plays of David Storey, particularly The Changing Room, will feel immediately at home with Fellow Briton Trevor Griffiths' characters. Six Man chester men with paltry jobs aspire to be entertainers in workingmen's clubs, with a possible whack at the London big time. Each act is one leg of a tripod -- final warmup, audition, postmortem.

The teacher is an old pro, Eddie Waters (Milo O'Shea), whose last laugh seems to have sunk long ago in the still pond of his face. As his students sprint through their routines -- ethnic, absurdist one-liners, god-awful -- Eddie offers his philosophy of comedy: "A true joke has to do more than release tension, it has to liberate the will and the desire, it has to change the situation."

But the audition judge, Bert Challenor (Rex Robbins), holds the opposite view: "Any good comedian can lead an audience by the nose. But only in the direction they're going. And that direction is, quite simply, escape." The two who follow Challenor's advice win. The boy (Jonathan Pryce) who goes into a brilliantly pantomimed rage against two effigies of the upper middle class loses. What he epitomizes is about as funny as death, but Pryce's caustic honesty and formidable skill in playing the role mark a Broadway debut that is electric with life.

T.E. Kalem

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