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Jest in Literature - Good News/Bad News
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Gunjan Saraf
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Jul 01, 2002 08:53 PDT
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JEST in LITERATURE
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1st July 2002 # 014
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My illness is due to my doctor's insistence that I drink milk,
a whitish fluid they force down helpless babies.
~ WC Fields
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IN THIS DIGEST :
Note -
~ Gunjan
Sharing Doc's mail
How to Write a Popular Play
~ Bernard Shaw
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---------------------------------------------------------
====> Note
Hi,
First, a thank you to all of you who sent in their best wishes
for The Doc. I'm sorry I haven't replied to each of your mails
individually but then I've had this little flue bug bugging me.
Good News is that The Doc is getting better (as you'll see
from some of his comments to me that I'm sharing with you,
cause I bet you must be missing his humor too). Bad News
is that he isn't fit enough yet to work on Issue 14 which means
you're stuck with me again for the second week in a row.
(I heard all those rude groans!)
I've let GBS substitute for The Doc. Hope you find that
suitable! ;-)
Comments or Questions :
mailto:li-@workinghumor.com?Subject=Note
====================================
Do you like to see those FUNNY, RAUNCHY &
sometimes a bit NAUGHTY PICTURES?
YOU DO!!!! well this is the ezine to join. Trev knows
just what the doctor ordered and will send a picture
a day. Please click the link or copy & paste.
trevsnaughty-@topica.com
(sorry this is a R.18.only ezine).
====================================
====> Sharing Doc's Mail
I'm home. They wanted to give me a venogram. I told them I'd
Beowulf the first one of them that got near me with that needle
(that would be rip his arm off and beat him with it, if you'll recall).
I had a venogram once. They told me the same thing this time as
they did after their seventh butchered-jabbing-ruthless attempt last
time: "But if we don't do this and find out for certain you could die."
They just don't understand that some things are worse than death.
A venogram is one of those things. I told them at least I'd go fast,
cussing, and in pain, but then it'd be over and I wouldn't have to deal
with any further of their Nazi experiments. I'm a real treat to have in
the hospital by the way. This actually is my first overnighter. Those
candy-stripper or assistant nurses or whatever they call them? It's
all lies. That was the only reason I stayed at all, and then they had
me strapped down so tight I thought maybe I was just getting ahead
of things, but, NOoooo. They just want to jab you and stab you
and make sure your insurance is going to cover their practice of
medicine. They say, "Where does it hurt," so sweetly. Then like
an idiot, I point at my leg and say,"there." And then they each jab
it and say, "Oh, there?" "Does it still hurt?".......
So I said screw your venogram -- actually, I said what I've
wanted to say since the last time they did that horror to the
top of my foot. I said, "Make you a deal. You can give me
one, if I can give you one." They sent two interns in who
actually were stalking me like they were going to wrestle me
to the bed. I couldn't believe it. I can hardly walk without
screaming, and they sent in the big guns. When my Doctor
finally walked in (he's the only doctor I'll ever go to, ever)
he started laughing because I was standing there with that
stupid-assed robe on that doesn't hide anything, and I was
holding these guys at bay with a bed pan. Sometimes I
amaze myself at my seeming pacifistic notions, and then
these types of acts. I hope we're allowed some disparity
in our demeanor when we pass on, because I'll have a
lot of explaining to do otherwise.
So, anyway, I'm home, I'm still screaming, but you're right,
I'm getting better. Deep Vein Thrombosis. Any higher and
it would just be a pain in the ass. I'll talk at you soon, either
when the drugs wear off, or I run out of them.
Thanks for the thoughts.
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How to Write a Popular Play
The formula for the well made play is so easy that I give it
for the benefit of any reader who feels tempted to try his
hand at making the fortune that awaits all manufacturers in
this line. First, you "have an idea" for a dramatic situation.
If it strikes you as a splendidly original idea, whilst it is in
fact as old as the hills, so much the better. For instance, the
situation of an innocent person convicted by circumstances
of a crime may always be depended on. If the person is a
woman, she must be convicted of adultery. If a young officer,
he must be convicted of selling information to the enemy,
though it is really a fascinating female spy who has ensnared
him and stolen the incriminating document. If the innocent wife,
banished from her home, suffers agonies through her separation
from her children, and, when one of them is dying (of any
disease the dramatist chooses to inflict), disguises herself as a
nurse and attends it through its dying convulsion until the
doctor, who should be a serio-comic character, and if possible
a faithful old admirer of the lady's, simultaneously announces
the recovery of the child and the discovery of the wife's
innocence, the success of the play may be regarded as
assured if the writer has any sort of knack for his work.
Comedy is more difficult, because it requires a sense of
humor and a good deal of vivacity; but the process is
essentially the same: it is the manufacture of a misunderstanding.
Having manufactured it, you place its culmination at the end of
the last act but one, which is the point at which the manufacture
of the play begins. Then you make your first act out of the
necessary introduction of the characters to the audience, after
elaborate explanations, mostly conducted by servants, solicitors,
and other low life personages (the principals must all be dukes
and colonels and millionaires), of how the misunderstanding is
going to come about. Your last act consists, of course, of
clearing up the misunderstanding, and generally getting the
audience out of the theatre as best you can.
Now please do not misunderstand me as pretending that this
process is so mechanical that it offers no opportunity for the
exercise of talent. On the contrary, it is so mechanical that
without very conspicuous talent nobody can make much
reputation by doing it, though some can and do make a living
at it. And this often leads the cultivated classes to suppose
that all plays are written by authors of talent. As a matter of
fact the majority of those who in France and England make
a living by writing plays are unknown and, as to education, all
but illiterate. Their names are not worth putting on the playbill,
because their audiences neither know nor care who the author
is, and often believe that the actors improvise the whole piece,
just as they in fact do sometimes improvise the dialogue. To
rise out of this obscurity you must be a Scribe or a Sardou,
doing essentially the same thing, it is true, but doing it wittily
and ingeniously, at moments almost poetically, and giving the
persons of the drama some touches of real observed character...
2: WHY THE CRITICS ARE ALWAYS WRONG
Now it is these strokes of talent that set the critics wrong. For
the talent, being all expended on the formula, at least consecrates
the formula in the eyes of the critics. Nay, they become so
accustomed to the formula that at last they cannot relish or
understand a play that has grown naturally, just as they cannot
admire the Venus of Milo because she has neither a corset nor
high heeled shoes. They are like the peasants who are so
accustomed to food reeking with garlic that when food is served
to them without it they declare that it has no taste and is not food
at all.
This is the explanation of the refusal of the critics of all nations to
accept great original dramatists like Ibsen and Brieux as real
dramatists, or their plays as real plays. No writer of the first
order needs the formula any more than a sound man needs a
crutch. In his simplist mood, when he is only seeking to amuse,
he does not manufacture a plot: he tells a story. He finds no
difficulty in setting people on the stage to talk and act in an
amusing, exciting or touching way. His characters have
adventures and ideas which are interesting in themselves,
and need not be fitted into the Chinese puzzle of a plot.
3: THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE
But the great dramatist has something better to do than to
amuse either himself or his audience. He has to interpret life.
This sounds a mere pious phrase of literary criticism; but a
moment's consideration will discover its meaning and its
exactitude. Life as it appears to us in our daily experience
is an unintelligible chaos of happenings. You pass Othello
in the bazaar in Aleppo, Iago on the jetty in Cyprus, and
Desdemona in the nave of St. Mark's in Venice without
the slightest clue to their relations to one another. The man
you see stepping into a chemist's shop to buy the means of
committing murder or suicide, may, for all you know, want
nothing but a liver pill or a toothbrush. The statesman who
has no other object than to make you vote for his party at
the next election, may be starting you on an incline at the
foot of which lies war, or revolution, or a smallpox epidemic
or five years off your lifetime. The horrible murder of a whole
family by the father who finishes by killing himself, or the
driving of a young girl on to the streets, my be the result of
your discharging an employee in a fit of temper a month
before. To attempt to understand life from merely looking
on at it as it happens in the streets is as hopeless as trying
to understand public questions by studying snapshots of
public demonstrations. If we possessed a series of
cinematographs of all the executions during the
Reign of Terror, they might be exhibited a thousand times
without enlightening the audiences in the least as to the
meaning of the Revolution: Robespierre would perish
as "un monsieur" and Marie Antoinette as "une femme."
Life as it occurs is senseless: a policeman may watch it
and work in it for thirty years in the streets and courts of
Paris without learning as much of it or from it as a child
or a nun may learn from a single play by Brieux. For it is
the business of Brieux to pick out the significant incidents
from the chaos of daily happenings and arrange them so
that their relation to one another becomes significant, thus
changing us from bewildered spectators of a monstrous
confusion to men intelligently conscious of the world and
its destinies. This is the highest function that man can
perform--the greatest work he can set his hand to; and
this is why the great dramatists of the world, from
Euripides and Aristophanes to Shakespeare and Molière,
and from them to Ibsen and Brieux, take that majestic
and pontifical rank which seems so strangely above
all the reasonable pretensions of mere strolling actors
and theatrical authors.
4: HOW THE GREAT DRAMATISTS TORTURE
THE PUBLIC
Now if the critics are wrong in supposing that the formula
of the well made play is not only an indispensable factor
in playwriting, but is actually the essence of the play itself--
if their delusion is rebuked and confuted by the practice of
every great dramatist, even when he is only amusing himself
by story telling, what must happen to their poor formula
when it impertinently offers its services to a playwright who
has taken on his supreme function as the Interpreter of Life?
Not only has he no use for it, but he must attack and destroy
it; for one of the very first lessons he has to teach to a
play-ridden public is that the romantic conventions on which
the formula proceeds are all false, and are doing incalculable
harm in these days when everybody reads romances and
goes to the theatre. Just as the historian can teach no real
history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion
that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty
woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of
the first order can do nothing with his audiences until he
has cured them of looking at the stage through a keyhole,
and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round
the divorce court. The cure is not a popular one. The public
suffers from it exactly as a drunkard or a snuff taker suffers
from an attempt to conquer the habit. The critics especially,
who are forced by their profession to indulge immoderately
in plays adulterated with falsehood and vice, suffer so
acutely when deprived of them for a whole evening that they
hurl disparagements and even abuse and insult at the merciless
dramatist who is torturing them. To a bad play of the kind they
are accustomed to they can be cruel through superciliousness,
irony, impatience, contempt, or even a Rouchefoucauldian
pleasure in a friend's misfortune. But the hatred provoked by
deliberately inflicted pain, the frantic denials as of a prisoner
at the bar accused of a disgraceful crime, the clamor for
vengeance thinly disguised as artistic justice, the suspicion
that the dramatist is using private information and making
a personal attack: all these are to be found only when the
playwright is no mere marchand de plaisir, but, like Brieux,
a ruthless revealer of hidden truth and a mighty destroyer
of idols.
(This essay was originally published by Bernard Shaw in his
Preface to Three Plays by Brieux)
Comments and Submissions :
mailto:li-@workinghumor.com?Subject=PopularPlay
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Winding up Cartoons
Heart Treatments
http://jokeworm.com/AToons/Ad293.shtml
Show ID
http://jokeworm.com/AToons/Ad290.shtml
One opposed
http://jokeworm.com/AToons/Ad287.shtml
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Gunjan
gun-@workinghumor.com
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