Look at the movie listings and count the comedies. Dr. Boli just did that; for mainstream movies playing in Pittsburgh and suburbs aimed at adults, the number of comedies he came up with was zero. He may have misinterpreted some of the advertising, so the number could be as high as one. You can find a few movies with jokes in them, most of them featuring comic-book characters in ridiculous costumes. But the jokes are mostly sarcasm, which is about the only form of humor we can stomach. We take our comic-book characters too seriously to laugh at them very much.
Look at the “humor” section in the bookstore. If you are old enough, you remember when it was filled with all kinds of good literature—P. G. Wodehouse, Max Shulman, James Thurber. If you are lucky enough to have a very good bookstore nearby, you may still find Wodehouse in the humor section; but Wodehouse died half a century ago, and we have not raised up any replacements for him.
Dr. Boli has watched the rise and fall and rise of all kinds of literature and entertainment for a long time, so he is not such a fool as to believe that anything in literature today is the way it will be henceforth for all time. The wheel will turn. What he does believe, though, is that the barrenness of the humor section and the absence of movie comedies is a small symptom of a large phenomenon, a trend that has been obvious for decades, a long fad that is perhaps reaching its peak now and therefore soon to start down the long slope toward the valley of oblivion. He will not presume to dictate what we should call this fad, but its main characteristic is that we take everything seriously. There is no light entertainment: whatever entertainment we consume, we insist that it must be worthy of serious attention. It is usually not worthy of serious attention, of course, but we must pretend that it is, and it must bear none of the trappings of light entertainment. Being worthy of serious attention is the only reason we can think of for liking something. This is how we have come to live in a world where the comic-book adventures of heroes in ridiculous outfits are taken seriously as literature.
The writers who provide our entertainment know we expect it to be serious: “Transformers writer Ron Friedman says he took inspiration from Shakespeare in regards to writing villains, not only in Transformers, but G.I. Joe as well,” says some random thing on the Internet. Here’s a little game you can play, in fact: pick the most trivial form of drama you can find—say, an entertainment franchise designed to market a line of toys—and see how many pages you can read about it on the Internet before someone compares it to Shakespeare.
Now, if everything must be worthy of serious attention, then whatever has no purpose but to entertain us must be rejected. That is a stupid rule, but it does seem to be the rule. Shakespeare himself would find it meaningless, since his only purpose was to entertain his audiences. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to entertain readers and make us laugh; if we reject these goals, we must reject Cervantes. Yet over the course of centuries, the world has determined that Don Quixote is worthy of serious attention. How did that happen?
It probably happened because Cervantes was trying to entertain us. Many a work that set out with no other goal than entertainment has become part of the world’s permanent treasury of worthy literature, and we may assert with confidence that no work has entered that hallowed fane without being entertaining. This is why the world has held on to A Midsummer Night’s Dream so tenaciously, while the garbage dump of drama is piled high with plays that set out to save the world.
The lesson for the writer of drama or screenplays is not obvious. Your audience of today wants you to be serious. You may indulge in sarcasm, a form of humor that is still approved for the consumption of respectable persons, but every higher form of humor will be rejected, and farce will make today’s audiences furious. On the other hand, the audiences of the future will be bored stiff by what pleases the audiences of today. If you write for those future audiences, they may prefer it if one of your characters has an ass’s head.
It has always been this way: the crowd-pleasers of today will be forgotten tomorrow. The entire nineteenth century in English drama has been wiped out of the collective memory, up to the point when Gilbert & Sullivan and Oscar Wilde rose up to show the world what could be accomplished by remembering that all art is quite useless. Yet the theaters of those forgotten years were filled with people watching plays that were good for them.
To write for the present or to write for all time: this is the choice writers of all sorts have been faced with since the first hack discovered he could make a living with his pen. Blessed are the writers whose tastes match the public’s, for they shall prosper. But twice blessed are the writers who see beyond the moment, who catch hold of what is worthy and permanent, for they shall feel smug.