The Craft of Comedy

Athene Seyler, Stephen Haggard, Robert Barton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136312946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

"a work on the art and craft of comedy as important in its own way as works by Stanislavski and Chekhov" – Oxford Theatre Companion

In 1939, a young, inexperienced actor wrote to a famous actress of his acquaintance, asking for advice on playing comedy. She responded enthusiastically, and they corresponded variously over the next year. The Craft of Comedy, a record of these exchanges, soon emerged as one of the few classic texts in the field of comedy acting.

This major new edition takes a brilliant book and makes it better. Editor Robert Barton has devised extensive supplementary material, including:

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• An introduction to the correspondents, the culture of the time, and the evolution of their book;

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• Summaries, definitions, and exercises and practice scenes for readers wishing to explore Athene Seyler's invaluable advice;

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• Photographs, additional essays by Seyler, and a guide to easily accessed video clips of her performing.

Seyler's lucid guidance, and Barton's scrupulous editorship, ensure this legendary work's rightful status is restored: as one of the great practical guides to the craft of comedy, and an essential resource for actors and students of acting.

1

Distorted Truth

Stephen Haggard writes to Athene Seyler June 8, 1939 and she replies on June 10.

8th June 1939

Dear Athene,

Not long ago I have a conversation with you in which we discussed comedy in the theatre and most of its aspects. Some days later I went to see Schnitzler’s Wedding Breakfast acted by the _____ Bank Amateur Dramatic Society of which a friend of mine is a member. After the performance I had a talk with my friend which inspired this letter to you. My friend played ‘Anatol’. I think you will agree that this is an extremely difficult part for a young Englishman to play. His performance left a lot to be desired. He lacked a sense of comedy and played rather as if the Wedding Breakfast were a ‘straight’ play which only occasionally (and rather reprehensively) lapsed into comedy. I could see hundreds of things wrong with his performance. But when he asked me to help him to improve it for the second (and last) night I am ashamed to say that I was at a loss to help him. If I had allowed myself to criticize him my criticism would have been destructive only. I have not the technical knowledge, nor the experience of playing comedy, which would have enabled me to offer him something constructive in the way of help. I therefore said very little, until I realized that his true desire was not so much to improve ‘Anatol’ for one performance as to learn about comedy – all sorts of comedy – because he wants to leave his bank and go on to the stage.

My friend seemed so much in earnest about his intention that I have been wondering whether you could possibly spare the time to write a few letters on the subject of comedy for his benefit. Speaking more selfishly, I am conscious of my own weakness in playing comedy and I hope I may find out something of the principles which underlie it before handing on our letters to my friend, who name by the way, is an appropriate one for a pupil, namely William Eager.

I remember your saying once that comedy is ‘distorted truth’. Straightforward truth I think I can recognize – in the theatre at any rate. But how to distort it for comedic purposes – as to that I have only a rather hazy idea. William, I suspect, has none at all. So won’t you please help my eager friend to settle the problems which perplex him? I shall look forward to learning a good deal ‘on the side.’

Yours ever,

Stephen

10th June 1939

My Dear S,

Your letter has had the effect of placing me as it were ‘at the tape’, prancing to be off down the course riding my hobby-horse, to prove to you all my theories about the art of comic acting. If I am able to help your young friend I shall be more than pleased.

To start with then, I should say that comedy is simply a point of view. It is a comment on life from outside, an observation on human nature. Would you agree with me that emotional acting of a serious part involves absorption in the character – identification with it, losing one’s own self in another’s? If so, you will understand me when I say that, on the other hand, comedy seems to be the standing outside a character or situation and pointing out one’s delight in certain aspects of it. For this reason it demands the co-operation of another mind on which this observation is to be made – the audience, and is in essence the same as recounting a good story over the dining table. It must have direct contact with the person to whom it is addressed, be it one’s friend over the port or one’s friends in the stalls and pit.

I hope this does not give you the impression that I would take a low view of comedy as something to raise the ‘laughter of the injudicious’, nor that you will confuse it with the vulgar wink across the footlights to establish good fellowship, or any of the perfectly legitimate tricks employed in the music-halls or revues to ‘get a joke across’ as the saying is. This branch of comedy acting is a very great one, but I’m afraid I haven’t any real knowledge of it or its technique. I am only able from experience to discuss the interpretation in a play of an author’s comic invention.

When I talk of establishing direct contact with an audience I mean a subtle psychological bond, perhaps merely the subconscious acknowledgment that the intention of your job as a comedian is to point out something to an audience, and that the audience’s reaction to this makes up an integral part of your job. You must create a delicate thread of understanding of the character you are portraying between yourself and your spectator, so that in a way, you jointly throw light upon it. I wonder if this strikes you as rather shocking? It is so opposed as an idea to the modern theory of losing oneself in a part and leaving all thought of an audience out of one’s mind – of desiring merely to re-live a set of circumstances and allowing the spectator to peep at them, as it were, unacknowledged. So that when I talk of a comedy point of view I find that I see this as a state of mind in which one desires urgently to point out one’s delight in some aspect of a character to someone else.

Now if you were to ask me how to induce this point of view you would have me rather beat. Because I have to confess that I fear it cannot be induced, that it is a quality of mind which is either born in one or not. But in case this should sound too discouraging to your young friend I must modify my first reaction to the question and suggest to myself that it must be possible to acquire this quality. What does it imply? I shall shock you still further and suggest that it involves a light and superficial glance at life! Comedy, shall I say, is the sparkle on the water, not the depths beneath the gay surface, the glint of sunlight – any other pretty metaphor. But note, the waters must run deep underneath. In other words, comedy must be founded on truth and on an understanding of the real value of a character before it can pick out the high-lights. It is only when one thoroughly understands a person that one can afford to laugh at him.

And here I would stipulate another quality that I find indispensable to the comic spirit – that of good nature. I am aware that this is a debatable point and that it may well be a personal idiosyncrasy of my own, but to me comedy is inextricably bound up with kindliness. As soon as a comment on character is inspired by contempt or anger it becomes tragic and loses the light of laughter. Irony, satire even, must be charitable and compassionate at heart of they stray into the realm of serious comment.

Can you apply any of this to your friend’s performance of Anatol for a start? Was he regarding Anatol in the glancing light that heightened his character, or was he immersed in and perhaps swamped by his realization of the whole character? In that little play, he should have picked out lightly certain gay frivolities and irresponsibilities about Anatol that adorned his deeper character. He should have slightly distorted one side of his nature – exaggerated the aspect of him that he wished to show us. For comedy is bound up with lack of proportion. It is technically dependent on accents of emphasis. It is not concerned with presenting a balanced whole. It consists in sharpening the angles of the complete character. Perhaps Mr. Eager had only got to the stage in studying Anatol of seeing him as a whole, and had not yet found the particular aspects of him that needed comment. Does this suggest anything to him, I wonder? Shall I say that comedy should upset the balance of a character and that he, perhaps, had only seen it in proportion to life, not slightly distorted?

This is only a rough suggestion of what I think may have been wrong with Mr. Eager’s performance; and I await with some trepidation your own reactions to my idea of the principles which underlie the playing of comedy.

Yours ever,

Athene

Summary

Stephen asks for help when an actor is not gifted in comedy. Athene responds that a distinct comic attitude eschews total immersion in a role, in favor of very specific perspectives on the situation, the audience and the character.

Concepts

Revue comedy: What is now often called stand-up or sketch comedy, wherein the performer shoots one liners at an audience or takes part of a brief satiric scene. Athene stresses that her ideas do not relate to this format, which favors an entirely different approach, but rather to fully scripted characters created by playwrights.

Non-comic acting: Losing oneself in the role, total absorption, complete identification, little or no thought of audience reaction, an approach that can be effective in realistic drama (and that Stephen’s friend was likely to have been taking), but which tends to kill comedy.

Comic foundation: The need, prior to layering in comic values, for truth and real understanding of character (“waters running deep underneath”), so that the performance is grounded, prior to then adorning this depth with “certain frivolities and irresponsibilities.”

Comic spirit: An attitude on the part of the actor, based on kindliness, compassion and charity, eschewing contempt and anger, and one which an audience will find irresistibly contagious.

Distorted truth: Comedy is a comment on life from outside. It is based on lack of proportion and is not concerned with a balanced whole. There will always be something offbeat, off kilter, out of whack and to some degree distorted.

Comic state of mind: A part of the actor stands outside a character or situation and then proceeds in pointing out his delight in certain aspects of either or both. This creates a subtle psychological bond between actor and audience, a sort of conspiracy of shared delight and potential elation.

Exercises

1. Comic Perspective

• Try to recall a time when you had an unpleasant experience that quite troubled you when it happened, but has now become a funny story you sometimes tell. What happened? At some point you stopped feeling the sad victim and the absurdity or grotesqueness of the situation, the audacity of the behavior of someone involved, the sheer confluence of coincidences or some other element, took precedence. Time and distance gave you comic perspective.
• Go back to just after it happened and try to tell it as you would in the full tragic bloom of victimhood.
• Now give your best current rendition when you are surrounded by enthusiastic listeners.
• What is specifically different about your timing and your line delivery? How do comic spirit, state of mind and most importantly a sense of distorted truth play into it?

2. Adding Delight

• Select one of the scenes or monologs offered at the end of the text.
• Ground the character in truth through some basic analysis about his or her likely personal history and a genuine appreciation of the character’s humanity. Read the material with a foundation of honesty as your intention.
• Now find two characteristics of the character which you find particularly delightful when you are in a place of full compassion. These might be his or her absolute denial of facts, great love of language, hopeless optimism, impressive stub-bornness or any of a myriad of qualities from which you are choosing to derive delight. Your delight most definitely does not need to come from traditionally admirable qualities. Read the material with the idea of subtly sharing your own pleasure.
• Do the same with the situation, setting or context wherein the character is caught.
• How has your presentation shifted or changed for layering in joyous connection?

2

Tight-Rope Walking

Stephen writes to Athene June 17, 1939 and she replies on June 30.

17th June 1939

Dear Athene,

Your extremely interesting and prompt reply leads me to hope that this correspondence may develop into a spirited epistolary bombardment; I only hope I shall be able, with scarcely more than a couple of unremarkable stage cannon for my defense, to hold my own against your accurate and quick-firing comedic guns. Perhaps I’d better take each shot as it comes.

Yes: I agree that emotional acting of a serious part involves losing oneself in the character, but I had not realized that comedy acting involved ‘standing out-side’ a character to the extent which you imply. I had imagined that this method was only right for farce, and that for comedy one should be as ‘lost’ in the character as one is in tragedy, and that the very fact that one was so ‘lost’, so convinced of the character, was what created laughter – provided that the character was in itself a humorous one. The comic characters of Chekhov – Yepikhodov in The Cherry Orchard, for instance – seem to me to need complete reality in their acting; any ‘standing outside’ them would, I should have said, tend to destroy the spectator’s belief in them and therefore his delight in their absurdity. On the other hand, I quite see that the method of complete sincerity cannot be right for the characters of, say, The School for Scandal or The Importance of Being Earnest.

I suppose the truth is that there are many different kinds of comedy acting, ranging from the unconscious humour of an Yepikhodov to the ‘conscious’ humour of a George Robey,¹ and that the art of acting comedy consists in choosing just the right balance between the conscious and the unconscious which each character demands.

I have little experience of acting comedy myself, but I know from life the difference between causing laughter by relating something which is in itself amusing (comedy through situation), and so exaggerating the relation of some perfectly ordinary experience as to create laughter at the manner of telling it (comedy through character?).

Then, too, there is the comedy of being ‘out of character’. On the few occasions when some frivolous remark of mine has made you laugh you have observed that the remark was ‘out of character’. You consider me to be a serious-minded person and so the remark surprised you. Translated into terms of the stage this would be equivalent to leading the spectator ‘up the garden path’: he is keyed up to expect one thing and is suddenly presented with another. This sort of comedy could apply to both character and situation, I suppose, as in the case of the mock-conjur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Distorted Truth
• 2 Tight-Rope Walking
• 3 Just Do It
• 4 Trust and Confidence
• 5 Rhythm
• 6 Comedy of Manners
• 7 Delicate Decadence
• 8 The Acting Profession
• Appendix A Selyer's Second Thoughts
• Appendix B Fans, Trains and Stays
• Appendix C Plays Referenced and Scenes for Practice
• Appendix D Video Clips
• Appendix E Tribute by Prunella Scales
• Appendix F Additional Sources – Comedy Books