“For me, it is this smile—deriding the having and the not having, the pleasure and the pain, the sublimity and suffering of the human situation—that is the essence of humour.”
—Simon Critchley, On Humour
Beckett’s work gets labeled or classified as absurd, possibly for good reasons. The scenarios he creates on the page, and the ways in which his characters handle the scenarios, are often farcical. Like this scenario from “The End,” which perfectly illustrates his propensity for the preposterous, along with his tangential obsession with poverty.
Nevertheless it was a roof over my head. I rested on a bed of ferns, gathered at great labour with my own hands. One day I couldn’t get up. The cow saved me. Goaded by the icy mist she came in search of shelter. It was probably not the first time. She can’t have seen me. I tried to suck her, without much success. Her udder was covered with dung. I took off my hat and, summoning all my energy, began to milk her into it. The milk fell to the ground and was lost, but I said to myself, No matter, it’s free. She dragged me across the floor, stopping from time to time only to kick me. I didn’t know our cows too could be so inhuman. She must have recently been milked. Clutching the dug with one hand I kept my hat under it with the other. But in the end she prevailed. For she dragged me across the threshold and out into the giant steaming ferns, where I was forced to let go. (48)
An absurd scenario indeed. One thing to notice about this passage is the dearth of Beckett’s usual complex sentences. There are many short, punchy sentences in a row, a departure from what much of Beckett’s prose is, even in this very story. This is where Beckett demonstrates his guile. He is always aware of what effect his style will have.
In moments like these, Beckett is showing balance. He is showing another form of control. In this moment, he is aware that the absurdity of the scenario outweighs his desire to employ his more typical anomalous style. Short punchy rhythms, in this scenario, create the beat of the quickening insurmountability of woes. Here, function outweighs form: the standard poetic, singsong prose of Beckett could detract from, and even mask, the humor of the situation.
Another example of Beckett reining in his style for the purpose of plot, specifically humor, comes only a page later. In this scene, our unnamed narrator is hoping to catch a ride down from the hellish sty he had found himself sharing with the surly cow, but no passersby seem willing to offer their good will:
I summoned them but they would not come. A mask of dirty old hairy leather, with two holes and a slit, it was too far gone for the old trick of please your honour and God reward you and pity upon me. It was disastrous. What would I crawl with in future? I lay down on the side of the road and began to writhe each time I heard a cart approaching. That was so they would not think I was sleeping or resting. I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was of polite conversation. My hour was not yet come and I could no longer groan. The last time I had cause to groan I had groaned as well as ever, and no heart within miles of me to melt. (49)
That section is similar to the first example. Short punchy sentences, often following longer ones. Still mostly a departure in style sentence by sentence from what is expected in his prose.
But here Beckett exhibits such an appreciation for the funny ways in which life can kick someone when they are down, and the lengths one will go to when one feels all other options have been exhausted: the writhing on the side of the road so that passersby would assume the narrator needed help and knew he wasn’t unconscious; the passersby only addressing him, a dirty sop on the side of the road, in the most cordial of tones; the fact that the last time he thought he needed to groan, he had had no problem groaning perfectly, but there hadn’t been a soul around to appreciate his most woeful groan, and now can’t muster up even half a groan as convincing as those. There is great humor in this irony.
There is another side to humor in Beckett’s prose. It is less scenario-based and more observational, and it too manifests itself in the form of his signature complex sentences. This humor goes hand-in-hand with the tension that Beckett’s syntactic trickery so finely creates, and, like the previous example, is borne of the expectation we develop following along with the sentence. From “First Love”:
The second and last or rather latter line limps a little perhaps, but that is no great matter, I’ll be forgiven more than that when I’m forgotten. Then with a little luck you hit on a genuine interment, with real live mourners and the odd relict trying to throw herself into the pit. And nearly always that charming business with the dust, though in my experience there is nothing less dusty than holes of this type, verging on muck for the most part, nor anything particularly powdery about the deceased, unless he happened to have died, or she, by fire. (62)
The passage at first seems terribly sad. Just before this passage, the narrator was talking of what would be on his own headstone: “Hereunder lies the above who up below / So sourly died that he lived on till now.” And if you take the second sentence in the excerpt, “Then with a little luck you hit on a genuine interment, with real live mourners and the odd relict trying to throw herself into the pit” at face value, we again find a heart-wrenching scene: elderly loved ones throwing themselves into the open graves of their deceased. I view that sentence through the eyes of the narrator, a cynical tone having been established early in the story, and glean from his every thought an unavoidable sarcasm regarding such circumstances.
But the real humor, the comedy which deafens any notion of genuine grief and tells us all we need to know about the narrator, comes in the form of the last sentence: “And nearly always that charming business with the dust, though in my experience there is nothing less dusty than holes of this type, verging on muck for the most part, nor anything particularly powdery about the deceased, unless he happened to have died, or she, by fire.”
The first thing to note about the last sentence, and really all three of these sentences, is that we are back to the complex structures more common in Beckett’s prose. There are elements of hypo– and parataxis, as well as anacoluthon, not to mention some lovely alliteration. Beckett uses the complexity of the third and final sentence of this excerpt to great effect.
We see that at the beginning of the third sentence we will be getting the narrator’s opinion on open graves, possibly how unappealing they are: a standard thought for this narrator, a self-absorbed pessimist, to have. But, in the same thought, the sentence takes a turn toward the dastardly, and eventually we get comparisons between those unfortunate enough to have been burned to death (or lucky enough to be burned after death) and the dust that may or may not comprise much of that deceased’s grave.
It is the twist, the surprise, which causes the humor. It is as if the narrator is having a conversation with himself, dithering on (making the “or she” so brilliant), and he is naturally drawn to the morbid side of things.
Going back quickly to the “or she” in that sentence. Why is it so brilliant? I believe there are two reasons, and both of them are in reference to the way the humor manifests, and manifests in a multidimensional way.
For one, it humanizes and characterizes our narrator. It’s as if he is scolding himself for thinking so closed-mindedly (It’s not only men who may fall victim to incineration, you fool!), which also seems uncharacteristic of this narrator: a rakish bum. The interjection reveals a self-consciousness. It says something oddly antithetical about what we thought we knew about this narrator, which opens the character up, for the reader, to new possibilities.
And two, it breaks up the sentence even more, adds one more pause, which increases the tension dramatically. When the sentence is read aloud, that clause all but puts a halt on the dictation. It’s clunky, awkward. At first glance, one might even say that it is misplaced. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.
It is exactly that awkward switch and labored pause which adds to the final revelation’s effect. The resolution of the entire sentence, as it is written, depends entirely on the final two words: “by fire” acts like a punchline of sorts, and the longer it takes to get there, the more the tension is allowed to build, adding to the end humor. Here, form and function meet in the middle.
The previous examples demonstrate Beckett’s wit, intelligence, and understanding of the human condition, along with all the oddities, specifics, and eventualities that make life so bizarre. But we would be remiss not to appraise one of his more on-the-nose instances of humor, one that demonstrates another side to the writer; again, from “First Love”: “She lit an oil-lamp. You have no current? I said. No, she said, but I have running water and gas. Ha, I said, you have gas.” (74)
It is important to note that this is a piece of characterization, the consciousness of a flaneur. The narrator is of course traditionally immature, or rather, somewhat of a self-centered dirt-bag: this has been revealed throughout the story by the way he treats his “wife” [“I used the word marriage, it was a kind of union in spite of it all.” (79)] who prostitutes herself to take care of him as he whiles away under the unseen pressures of his modern, flaneur lifestyle.
It is also important to think about Beckett both as a writer and as a person when looking at this joke, as it “characterizes” him just as it does the character which he has created. Is this line satirizing Beckett’s idea of the character, or what was expected from him? Beckett, again, found humor in the darkest of places. This line is so lighthearted that it’s hard not to imagine Beckett finding as much respite in its creation as his reader finds in its surprising appearance.
We find another bout of this famous Beckett scatological humor earlier in the story, but this example stands out because of what follows. The scatological humor comes when the narrator returns to his room after using the “necessary house.”
One day, on my return from stool, I found my room locked and my belongings in a heap before the door. This will give you some idea how constipated I was, at that juncture. It was, I am now convinced, anxiety constipation. But was I genuinely constipated? Somehow I think not. Softly, softly. And yet I must have been, for how otherwise account for those long, those cruel sessions in the necessary house? (64)
The humor of this particular excerpt comes from its digressive nature. The narrator has been kicked out of his boardinghouse, is likely facing homelessness, and can only think about the difficulty he had, or has had of late, using the facilities.
But this excerpt is followed directly by one of Beckett’s sprawling and rhythmically ambitious sentences. The sentence discusses the narrators lavatorial reading habits:
At such times I never read, any more than at other times, never gave way to revery or meditation, just gazed dully at the almanac hanging from a nail before my eyes, with its chromo of a bearded stripling in the midst of sheep, Jesus no doubt, parted the cheeks with both hands and strained, heave! ho! heave! ho!, with the motions of one tugging at the oar, and only one thought in my mind, to be back in my room and flat on my back. (64)
It is almost as if Beckett is mixing this obvious toilet humor into such a poetically beautiful (“with its chromo of a bearded stripling in the midst of sheep”) sentence as a sort of joke that he is playing. But the joke isn’t being played on the reader, for Beckett alone to snicker at, but is being told with and for the attuned reader, for their parallel edification and pleasure.
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