Walter Kerr, in addition to being the husband of humorist Jean Kerr, was a theater critic for the New York Herald Tribune and later on for the New York Times. During his time as a critic, he gave absolute raves to fluffy musicals such as Hello, Dolly!, and he consistently panned everything that Stephen Sondheim wrote. He spent an entire Sunday column explaining how the songs in Sweeney Todd were antithetical to musical conventions, though he did concede that there was some wit in the song “A Little Priest”.
One might almost say that he had a fondness for light, frothy comedy.
One would be right.
He wrote a book entitled Tragedy and Comedy in which he compared and contrasted the two forms, and he wrote:
Why did I want to write a book about comedy? For a simple and most unprofound reason. I love comedy immoderately.
[…]
I have been a helpless prisoner of the form since I first saw Buster Keaton sink bravely to his death in three feet of water; and whenever the comic pressure becomes intense enough, I cry. Not everyone I know misses half his pleasure for weeping. That is a partial distinction. I also find that I am incapable of choosing among clowns. My acquaintances include those who admire Jack Benny but do not like Bert Lahr, who cherish Nichols and May but never could stomach Ed Wynn, who give Groucho Marx his due but remain indifferent to Phil Silvers. I love them all. Not admire. Love. There is a difference. Any fool can sit through a good routine, and laugh at it, the first time he sees it. It takes a fool of particular quality to sit through it five times, ten times, twenty times, long after he knows the laughs as well as the clown does and the trick of surprise has become an empty sleeve. I possess that quality, and can subsist on affection alone when the jests have ceased being jests and have become the things that of course this man does. I have seen Chaplin’s film The Gold Rush not fewer than forty times, and naturally I no longer laugh at it. It simply warms me.
(One does wonder if he loved comedy so much, why his wife Jean was heard on more than one occasion chastising him for not laughing while he was viewing a comic play that he was there to review.)
One of the points that he made in the book was that comedy was a higher form of art and a more realistic one than tragedy. Where tragedy tries to show humanity striving to be better, reaching for something that is forever out of one’s grasp, comedy is the form that shows humans as they really are. Where tragedy might be about a man trying to responsibly divide his estate among his three daughters and making an utter mess of it, comedy might be about that same fellow and showing that the whole time his belt was unfastened and his shoes were untied, so no wonder his pants kept falling down and he kept tripping all over himself.
I’m reminded of Kerr’s book when I think about two of David E. Kelley’s television series that were set in Boston, The Practice and Boston Legal.
The first one was dark, it was even photographed in dark hues, and took itself very seriously, although there was an occasional bit of humor here and there. The second can best be characterized as a farce, as it didn’t take anything seriously. The two series did have two characters in common, as Alan Shore and Denny Crane, portrayed by James Spader and William Shatner, were introduced towards the end of the first series and carried over into the second.
Here’s an excerpt from Boston Legal that shows how irreverently it takes every topic it introduces, in this case the abduction of a child. I hasten to add that it’s not the abduction itself that’s used as fodder for humor, but the investigation, and it uses outrageous humor to make a serious point. In this case the very straight-laced and uber-conservative Brad Chase (Mark Valley) along with Denise Bauer (Julie Bowen) have been coached by an FBI agent as to what the FBI cannot do in an investigation, but as Brad and Denise are private citizens, the rules do not necessarily apply to them. So armed with fake FBI badges and a fake warrant, Brad and Denise proceed to, well, that’s the video.
Given that Shatner and Spader are the nominal stars of the show, I did not want to leave them out of the video clip, even though they aren’t involved in this particular plot thread. So the video begins with Denny Crane, who has spent the night at Alan Shore’s house because Alan has been experiencing night terrors.
Oh, by the way, if you’re a very devout Catholic, you might not want to watch this. You have been warned.