This is a guest post from the winner of our inaugural Graduate Student Essay Contest on her writing process, paper inspiration, and central thesis. Kate is working on her doctorate in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto.
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My paper “Ape Assassins: The Fractured Limit Between the Human and Nonhuman Animal in Contemporary Comedy” came together from a trifecta of inspirations: Simon Critchley’s statement that, “what makes us laugh is the reduction of the human to the animal or the elevation of the animal to the human;" my so-called “guilty pleasure” films; and my relationship with my cat Vincent, which continually confounds me as I struggle to understand how we are not the same species.
While Vincent did not make it into the final version of the paper, his snaggle-toothed face haunts the paper regardless.
In the paper, I argue that in contemporary comedy films, humour is often derived from situations in which the slippery boundary between human and nonhuman animal is made apparent. Laughter erupts in the explosion of any easy distinction between humans and other species. I examine a trio of films written and/or directed by John Hamburg: Meet the Parents (Jay Roach, 2000), Along Came Polly (2004, John Hamburg), and Why Him? (John Hamburg, 2016).
I chose these films because they all feature animals as intrinsic plot devices, as foils to human competence, or as mirrors that reflect the human's animality back at them.
In the paper, I analyze a scene from Why Him? in which this porous boundary between the human and nonhuman animal is foregrounded in an excessive body gag. Throughout Why Him?, the viewer sees personal assistant Gustav (Keegan-Michael Key) training tech millionaire Laird (James Franco) in evasive “parkour,” an athletic practice that involves climbing, jumping, vaulting, and running that has been adopted to suit an urban environment. As a millionaire who wants to avoid employing bodyguards to defend him, Laird must be able to deftly outrun any potential attackers.
In one scene, Gustav ambushes Laird in order to hone his reflexes, and as Laird is feeding his chickens, Gustav jumps out from the bushes behind him. Laird immediately throws a chicken at him and swiftly shifts gear into escape-mode.
He dives and rolls away from Gustav, and swings on to a set of monkey bars, and springs lightly across them, pausing just long enough to throw a chuckle over his shoulder at Gustav. Laird is transformed through the display of bodily dexterity into something more apelike than human. His agility portrays a fluid, lithe spectacle of physicality that is more often seen in monkeys in nature documentaries.
In “Is Humour Human?,” Simon Critchley states that, “If being human means being humorous, then being humorous often seems to mean becoming an animal. But, paradoxically, what becoming an animal confirms is the fact that humans are incapable of becoming animals.”[1]
But, humans are not incapable of becoming animals; humans are already animals. This bestial nature comes to the fore in comedy most prominently in toilet humour in which the particularly human traits of decorum and propriety disappear, and inhibitions are unleashed. However, in some moments of slapstick, I want to suggest that humans seem most animal-like in their grace right before a fall.
When Laird attempts to jump from the monkey bars on to an adjacent sculpture, he misjudges his step, smacks into the metal artwork, and tumbles to the ground.
And it is this misstep that causes the eruption of laughter from the viewer. In a counter to Critchley’s point that humour results from the “reduction of the human to the animal,”[2] I want to argue that the human is not reduced to the animal, but has the ability to evoke its underlying animal (here, simian) nature to elevate its physical prowess and abilities. In comedy, however, the human body is often unable to sustain such bodily aptitude, and it succumbs to its clumsy human nature in a comedic crash.
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[2] Ibid., 29.