It is the business of comedy to represent all the defects of men, and above all, men of our own time.
— Moliere, L’Impromptu
This all gets down to what Bruno is trying to accomplish, how that is different from what other comedies try to accomplish, and, in turn, what comedy in general is trying to accomplish.
It’s pretty uncomfortable that Bruno is a huge gay stereotype and a ridiculous person for most of the movie. It is much more uncomfortable that Bruno is a huge gay stereotype and a ridiculous person at the end of the movie. Within the bourgeois corner of world Overthinking It occupies, as in Renaissance Europe during the days of Moliere, we are often trained that, if a social group is under the tacit moral protection of genteel society, you can only mock that group’s faults if, in the end, such a group either teaches a moral lesson and recovers its dignity or actively subverts a specific social wrong.
You can make fun of a corrupt priest if in the end the priesthood in general is able to reassert itself and show the comic priest character was an outlier, a bad apple who needed reform. An oversexed noblewoman who reveals the hypocrisy of her unfaithful husband is a clever moralist, but an oversexed noblewoman who implies something about the character of noblewomen in general is unacceptable.
A childhood bully can be sent home with a bucket of paint on his head, but there must always be hope for him to rejoin active society and become an actuary or something. He certainly can’t just be on the street the next day still being an angry, domineering idiot and still beating up children. That would say something unacceptable about children. And our sensibilities that are so moralized by their civility will not abide it (however true it might be). It causes real pain, and portraying fictional faults for laughs runs the risk of spreading unacceptable falsehoods about people whose dignity must be preserved.
I would even put marriagable, educatable men in as a protected group. This isn’t about political correctness – it’s about legitimacy; that people persist in their collective identities under the protection of polite society. It is okay for a married man’s alcoholic bowling buddy to continue to be a screw-up, but the married man must reform, because polite society has expectations and hopes for these sorts of people – blueprints – that it feels uncomfortable damaging. Seth Rogan’s friends can keep smoking pot, but Seth Rogan has to stop, because it is not okay for dads of people who matter to be stoners.
It’s like when Harvey Pekar points out the hypocrisy of Revenge of the Nerds in American Splendor. Anthony Edward’s happy ending doesn’t give him the right to stand up to true outcasts, because he is protected from encountering real hardship or being a real outcast.
I like this post a lot. It makes me want to see Bruno more than I did before. But I don’t know if I agree with it. Of course, what follows comes only from my having read a bunch of reviews, and NOT from seeing the movie, so take it with about a quarter-tablespoon of salt.
The master plot of the comedy is basically as follows:
(I got this from reading Erich Segal’s “The Death of Comedy,” although I don’t know if it’s his theory or just my half-baked response to his theory.)
1) Status quo
2) Protagonist transgresses against the status quo by trying to do something… anything.
3) Protagonist realizes that his/her (but usually his, alas, if we’re honest) goal is inappropriate, and restores the status quo
4) Protagonist gets some kind of prize – might be love, might be money, might be a giant rack of spare ribs. Sometimes, confusingly, it’s whatever he/she was violating the status quo in order to obtain.
So if you look at American Pie (a pretty formulaic comedy, right?) it goes
1) Everyone is a virgin
2) Everyone starts trying to have sex
3) Each of the characters, crucially, stops trying to have sex. They ALL do this, without exception.
4) Everyone gets a prize, in this case, sex.
Look at Dave, a much more formulaic example
1) Dave is not president
2) Dave becomes president
3) Dave realizes that he has got to stop being the president
4) Dave gets a prize, in this case, Sigourney Weaver
Even in something like Talladega Nights, which SEEMS to have a very different message,
1) Ricky Bobby wins all his races thanks to the efforts of his support staff
2) Ricky Bobby tries to go it alone, and fails
3) Ricky Bobby wins the final race thanks to the efforts of his support staff
4) Everyone goes off to Applebees to eat a giant rack of spare ribs
And wouldn’t Bruno fit this model perfectly well?
1) Bruno starts the movie gay and not famous
2) Bruno tries to become famous by not being gay anymore
3) Bruno accepts that being true to his gayness is more important than fame
4) ?? (At this point, my not having actually seen the movie gets in the way. Maybe gay makeouts are supposed to be their own reward.)
This is interesting because it forces you to accept as an axiom that gayness and fame are mutually exclusive. It’s doubly interesting because it establishes gayness (of a certain stereotypically flamboyant variety) as *part* of the status quo. But it doesn’t strike me as fundamentally different from the more mainstream comedies. To tie back in to Fenzel’s post a little more: is Bruno’s acceptance of his sexual identity NOT supposed to be redemptive?
@jordan
I wouldn’t use that master plot for all of comedy. Moliere’s comedies are a bit different and don’t have those kinds of endings.
But more importantly, while I’d understand why a reviewer would identify that as the plot of bruno (it helps assuage guilt over laughing at the gay jokes), the “not being gay” isn’t the point of the movie, and it isn’t introduced until late in the second act, at the earliest.
Also, being gay again isn’t bruno’s victory. His victory is getting on the news for causing a big civil disturbance.
The plot of Bruno is more like
1. Bruno’s life is disrupted when he is kicked off his TV show for his bad behavior.
2. Bruno tries various ways to get famous other than his bad behavior (being straight is just one of them. The others are acting in hollywood, making a sex tape, and being a philanthropist)
3. Bruno fails at all of them because, every time, he reverts to his bad behavior.
4. Bruno eventually gets on the news for his bad behavior, which he takes as a victory and proof he is famous again.
So in the end, the thing that is restored is not so much a positive status quo, but the ridiculous way the world tolerates the main character’s failures. The character doesn’t actually change at all during the story. The only thing that changes is his relationship to the world.
It’s sort of like your template, but has very different implications.
So, yeah, I’d add this rubric as an alternative
1. Protagonist exhibits a bad behavior that the world tolerates or rewards
2. Circumstances pressure the protagonist to give up the bad behavior
3. The protagonist essentially does not change in response to these pressures
4. The world rewards the protagonist by embracing him again
This only works with comedies that are fairly pessimistic about people’s ability to change and that think social norms are essentially ridiculous.
A good example of this would be the teen summer camp sex comedy, where the camp across the lake that is all proper must be defeated by the protagonist camp that is full of misfits. Comedies like this with balls don’t make their horndog protagonists into monogamists, they make the world reward them for being horndogs.
A great example is Police Academy. The status quo here is that the people becoming police officers are really not supposed to be police officers. They all have huge problems with their behavior. Does anybody believe Commandant Lassard is fit to run a real police academy? Of course not. He’s sympathetic, but he’s incompetent and probably has advanced dementia.
So, the plot is about the attempts to improve the police academy, and the solution is, no, having ridiculous incompetent cops is the way things are, and that’s not changing, so let’s all laugh about the crazy world we live in.
Mahoney’s own plot is a bit more conventional (the sequels are better examples than the original), but nobody watches Police Academy for Mahoney.
And for the triple post, I want to clarify that I think your template is 100% right for most comedies. That kind of comedy is ancient and conventional. And you identified the movies it applies to perfectly. And the template I offered is clearly a variation on it rather than a whole new structure. And you could probably build a big enough box to fit everything. But I think these differences in comic structure are there and are important for how different comedies function differently.
I don’t think Moliere-style comedies would work nearly as well if they weren’t juxtaposed against conventional ones. The expectations and norms need to be there if you’re going to satirize them.
and just to clarify your example of reform in regards to Borat. . .
“still does not make apologies for himself or go hug a Jew at the end of the film.”(original text)
Borat’s story line is that he is a kazakastani reporter trying to learn more about america, and it slowly evolves into him finding a wife. the anti-sematism is just an example of this ass-backwardsness(not a bruno reference)
keeping with the fenzelian formula, the movie goes like this
1.Borat goes from a old world village to modern american life
2.His old world ways are shocking and non-sequitur
3.through trial, tribulation, and naked wrestling he learns the god fearin’ MERICAN way
4.Borat’s village recieves culture “we christian now!”(tongue in cheek)
his resolution is much more big picture than him hugging a jew,not negating your premise at all but fitting it to the formula a little tighter.
riveting article, cheers!
I was just so disctracted by the lack of coherence in Bruno its hard for me to embrace it. I feel the Borat had a plot and structure that both worked and supported the mockumentary feel of the film. He was sent to research America, but has his own side agendas, and so he’s followed by a film crew.
In Bruno is simply doesn’t make sense that he’s being followed by a film crew, there is no plausible basis for that within the plot of the film. He’s fired and friendless except for his personal assistant, so who is filming him?
Bruno is just so randomly thrown together, nothing seemed to have anything to do with what came before or after it. No I want a baby, no I’m hunting, no I’m wrestling. I also prefer the look and attitude of Bruno on the show over the one in the movie, he looks and acts more like what I’d imagine a Austrian fashion reporter to be like than the too silly movie version.