October 16, 2006
Dissecting Frogs Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:45 AM EST Mr. Gordon writes that he prefers his frogs alive, meaning that he does not enjoy analyzing literature, and he especially deplores analyzing jokes. He quotes E. B. White: “Humor is like a frog, you can dissect it, but it dies in the process.” Mr. Gordon adds that “once you start teasing apart the characters and motivations and the author’s intent and whathaveyou, the magic fizzes away just as surely as the life of the frog.”
As it happens, I make part of my living taking apart frogs: I teach a course in the theories and forms of comedy. I think Mr. Gordon is making a very bad mistake, and I’ll try to show why, very quickly looking at one gag by one of the funniest characters in literature, Falstaff. In Henry IV, Part I, Act II, Scene 4, Falstaff makes a joke. Addressing Hal, he says, “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.”
If you do the thing Mr. Gordon disdains to do, which is analyze that joke, you may work out that there is first the visual joke—about Falstaff’s world-size gut—and then a deeper joke. One thinks of the worldliness symbolized by plump Jack's vast gut (“Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;/ Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape/ For thee thrice wider than for other men,” Henry IV, Part II, Act V, Scene 5). And if you look back on the joke when contemplating the Henriad as a whole, there is finally a much darker joke, about the looming prospect of Hal banishing all the human world, i.e., his own humanity, which will vanish when he becomes a Machiavellian king, and, inter alia, demands that Harfleur surrender lest “the blind and bloody soldier with foul hand/ Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;/ Your fathers taken by the silver beards,/ And their most reverend heads dash’d to the walls,/ Your naked infants spitted upon pikes..." (Henry V, Act III, Scene 3). Someone who threatens mass rape and mass murder may have indeed banished all the world. While Mr. Gordon prefers live frogs, the Henriad includes an awful lot of dead frogs, which is one reason that joke—that quick little joke about fat Jack—is worth analyzing. Its complexities do not all spring to view the first time we hear it in a theater, or even the first time we read it on the page.
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