Week # 1- Serious Clowning in "The Boat"

There is no better personification of the playful aesthetic this class aims to investigate than the work of Buster Keaton and, more broadly, slapstick comedy in general. Slapstick seems to find it's comic power in the ability to find humor in extremely precarious situations. In Keaton's case, it's usually his body that he puts in constant danger for comic effect. I thought about this while watching The Boat and I asked myself, why do I find this so funny? Why am I laughing at a man who is putting himself and his family in such danger? And the only two reasons I can of is just my awareness that it is a performance and the fact that I can enjoy these simulated acts of violence from the comfort of my chair, as an act of catharsis.

I also think there is a relevant point to make from Freud's article where he talks about jokes and their relation to the comic. There is a point he makes about how the comic is concerned with manifestations of that which is ugly and how a certain caricature arises from this type of joking. He cites Kuno Fischer: "If what is ugly is concealed, it must be uncovered in the light of the comic way of looking at things; if it is noticed only a little bit or scarcely at all, it must be brought forward and made obvious, so that it lies clear and open to the light of day....in this way caricature comes about." To me, this is precisely what Keaton does in his films; taking a grim situation and exposing it to laughter. Taking another look at The Boat, it's a fairly grim story if you look at it without the comic way of seeing things. A man destroys his house trying to launch a boat into the water, which almost ends up in his son being seriously injured. When they are out at sea, everything that can go wrong does including the boat flooding and sinking. Now because we are familiar with the Buster Keaton styled caricature of comedy, we can laugh at this situation. But what I think really gives this film its appeal is the use of the family in it. By using this grim backdrop of a shipwreck, we get an intimate look at how the family functions. We can tell Buster is a strict father by the way he constantly carries his sons around by the seat of their pants but also that he shares a bond with the boys when they all secretly discard the bad dinner Buster's wife has cooked. And though it appears that Buster is willing to "go down with his ship" at the end of the film, we are pleased to see his head pop up from the water and watch him swim back to his family. So through the use of physical humor and family nuances, Keaton is able to bring laughter to the ugliest of situations.