{"id":168,"date":"2011-03-14T17:45:38","date_gmt":"2011-03-14T15:45:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=168"},"modified":"2011-03-14T17:45:38","modified_gmt":"2011-03-14T15:45:38","slug":"missing-the-punch-line-terry-johnstons-hysteria-and-ben-traverss-farce-rookery-nook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2011\/03\/14\/missing-the-punch-line-terry-johnstons-hysteria-and-ben-traverss-farce-rookery-nook\/","title":{"rendered":"MISSING THE PUNCH LINE: TERRY JOHNSON\u2019S HYSTERIA<\/em> AND BEN TRAVERS\u2019S FARCE ROOKERY NOOK<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\tLast week we witnessed in class the struggle, brilliantly solved, of four students \u2013Sara, David, Carla and, secondarily, Mar\u00eda\u2013 with Terry Johnson\u2019s demanding intellectual farce Hysteria<\/em> (1993). They made the most of a plot which narrates Freud\u2019s morphine-induced circular dream (or nightmare); in it, his subconscious or, rather, his conscience embodied by a naked woman, nags him mercilessly about his complicity with the male child abusers in his bourgeois circle, casting serious doubts about what Freud actually did to \u2018cure\u2019 his patients. The eccentric Dal\u00ed, who visited Freud in 1938, also features prominently, perhaps in an attempt to defuse with farcical humour the seriousness of the accusations (first shed by Jeffrey Masson in 1984).<\/p>\n

\tI failed to locate an academic source that could help us with Hysteria until too late, once the scenes were performed \u2013I\u2019m not sure whether this was due to my thickness or to the new MLA platform, which, ironically given its name (CSA Illumina…), seems somehow more opaque than usual. I relied instead on Spanish, UK and US reviewers, who also seemed quite baffled about what kind of achievement this play is. A US reviewer called it, basically, a glorious mess and this is what my students felt it was. The academic article by Luc Gilleman I finally read sheds precious light on the play, explaining practically everything<\/em> about it, including its being inspired by Ben Travers\u2019 once very popular Aldwych farces. Luckily for me, a reviewer mentioned them and even more luckily, Christopher Innes makes generous room in his Modern British Drama<\/em> for Travers, so my students got some inkling about the main intertext in Johnson\u2019s hysterical play: Travers\u2019 Rookery Nook<\/em> (1926) This is even mentioned by Freud, twice if I\u2019m not mistaken. Gilleman points out that \u201cFreud\u2019s inability to see the relationship to what is happening to him and the play he has just seen is not just hilarious; it is also sinister \u2013indicative of the blind spots in his vision\u201d (2008: 115). Em… and in ours.<\/p>\n

\tThe point I want to make here is that the level at which Travers operated very successfully as a playwright, shall we call it the \u2018popular mainstream\u2019?, usually falls below our literary radar and is particularly difficult to grasp by foreign audiences. I did mention Benny Hill as Travers\u2019s most likely inheritor, and it turns out that Johnson wrote right after Hysteria<\/em> a play, Dead Funny<\/em>, which begins with Hill\u2019s death and has certainly plenty to do with his dubious brand of humour. My class of Spanish students, with a high component of foreign Erasmus students, some of them English, recognised at once Hill\u2019s name but Travers meant nothing either to them or to me. TV, of course, has an international impact that theatre can never have. I assume that a British teacher of Spanish Theatre might also feel mystified by a contemporary literary play using elements from the revistas<\/em> of El Molino or La Latina, or the plays by Carlos Arniches.<\/p>\n

\tWe did manage to enjoy Hysteria<\/em> nonetheless but, clearly, we missed Johnson\u2019s joke on Travers. Freud wrote a famous book, Jokes and the Relation to the Unconscious<\/em>, which his conscience in the play \u2013Jessica\u2013 criticises, arguing he has no sense of humour. To prove her wrong, Freud replies that he laughed \u201cthree or four times\u201d at the last play he had seen, Rookery Nook<\/em>. We don\u2019t laugh: we can\u2019t. And, as everyone knows, the surest way to kill a joke is to explain it… Naturally, Johnson should not worry about his audience\u2019s limitations, much less about ours as foreign readers, but this a reminder of how hard it is to cross cultural barriers when it comes to humour. Yes, we tend to miss the punch line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week we witnessed in class the struggle, brilliantly solved, of four students \u2013Sara, David, Carla and, secondarily, Mar\u00eda\u2013 with Terry Johnson\u2019s demanding intellectual farce Hysteria (1993). They made the most of a plot which narrates Freud\u2019s morphine-induced circular dream (or nightmare); in it, his subconscious or, rather, his conscience embodied by a naked woman, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-studies","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}