Rule by Slapstick: Another Fine Mess by Donald Trump

[post 460]

An article about Trump's attack on Iran from the Financial Page in the highbrow New Yorker —Trump’s Inexcusable Unpreparedness for the Iranian Oil Crisis— was the last place I expected to find a discussion of Laurel & Hardy. But I think the writer, John Cassidy, nailed this one:

Nothing is certain, except the fact that the President is floundering, making conflicting statements from one day to the next about how long the war will last. As it continues, rule at the whim of a strongman seems to be giving way to rule by slapstick. Growing up in England, I spent countless hours watching the comedies of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, which the BBC showed all the time. In each show, the two nitwits would set out on some caper, which would inevitably go horribly wrong, leaving them broke, or tied up, or in jail, or hanging over a cliff, or some other situation of great peril. At which point, Ollie would turn to Stan and say, “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”

Trump is turning into Oliver Hardy.

Yep. 

And I am admittedly proud to point out that I have for a very long time been making the case that physical comedy (and by extension clowning) is inherently political in that it showcases human error and undercuts the delusional arrogance and inflated self-esteem that the high and mighty rely on to justify and perpetuate their position of power. In my 1987 article for Yale Theater, Zen and the Heart of Physical Comedy: The Revenge of Murphy's Law, I made a similar argument to Cassidy's:

A closer look at last year's hit parade of catastrophes offers compelling evidence that clown behavior has infiltrated its way into the highest echelons of society. The meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor is surely an example of Laurel & Hardy at their most mischievous. In an attempt to complete an experiment on the power capability of the reactor's steam-driven turbines, the plant's resident clowns cleverly executed a series of maneuvers that in effect dismantled the reactor's safety features one by one.

This Russian two-reeler is full of laughs as our fiercely determined technicians, Laurelovitch and Hardyofsky, find perfectly good reasons to turn off the emergency cooling system, remove all but a few control rods while leaving the reactor operating, and disengage all safety systems designed to implement automatic shutdown. When Mrs. Hardyofsky — in this version played by a Soviet nuclear expert — returns home, she is shocked beyond belief to learn that the menfolk have deliberately disabled so many safety and warning systems, then run the reactor in a very unstable condition. But they did, and our little tragi-comedy ends with the prospect of millions of people, even the unborn (politely referred to as third- and fourth party victims), paying the price in sequels yet unfilmed.

Another fine mess was created by NASA engineers and administrators who allowed the Challenger space shuttle to be launched although several warnings of potential danger had been sounded. NASA's need to perpetuate a public image of having effectively vanquished the hazards of space flight — to have rendered it so routine that they could now rocket a schoolteacher into orbit — guaranteed that their infallibility would be shattered.

This American silent movie classic opens with engineer Laurel frantically gesticulating as he tries to get the attention of his boss, a very busy and self-important Mr. Hardy. The subtitles tell us that Laurel wants to warn Hardy about the weakness of the o-ring seals. But we can see that a vain Mr. Hardy is too busy impressing his big-shot friends to listen. The final image is unforgettable, as the camera dissolves on a whimpering engineer Laurel, stammering through his tears. The subtitle reads, "But Ollie, that's what I was trying to tell you all along."

Finally, I never tire of quoting Henry Miller from his The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. He said it first (1959) and he said it better:

How little the public understood! To be a clown was to be fate's pawn. The life in the arena was a dumb show consisting of falls, slaps, kicks —an endless shuffling and booting about. And it was by means of this disgraceful rigolade that one found favor with the public. The beloved clown! It was his special privilege to reenact the errors, the follies, the stupidities, all the misunderstandings which plague human kind. To be ineptitude itself, that was something even the dullest oaf could grasp. Not to understand, when all is clear as daylight; not to catch on, though the trick be repeated a thousand times for you; to grope about like a blind man, when all signs point the right direction; to insist on opening the wrong door, though it is marked Danger!; to walk head on into the mirror, instead of going around it; to look through the wrong end of a rifle, a loaded rifle! —people never tired of these absurdities because for millennia humans have traversed all the wrong roads, because for millennia all their seeking and questioning have landed them in a cul-de-sac. The master of ineptitude has all time as his domain. He surrenders only in the face of eternity.. 

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• Hardy usually said "another nice mess," but they did make a film Another Fine Mess, and this has been more frequently copied as a catch phrase ever since. Take your pick... 
• I first asked Claude, the AI program from Anthropic —the company that actually stood up to Trump— if it would alter this Laurel & Hardy image to make it look like a worried Trump and Hegseth.  It declined: "Placing real people's faces — including public figures like Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth — into existing images or scenes is something I have to decline, as it creates potentially misleading or manipulative depictions of real individuals." Fair enough. Then before giving it any specifics, I asked ChatGPT if it would perform such an edit. It gave a qualified yes, but said that "I can’t create deceptive edits meant to impersonate real people in harmful ways." I said it wasn't deceptive and that it was obviously satirical and I sent the photo. And it did it! But I was worried people would not immediately recognize Hegseth from the image so I had it re-do it with Vance instead, as you can see above. And since these AI programs are always offering to do more, it of course wrote: "If you decide to use it for a blog post or talk—especially given your interest in physical comedy history—you could also play with a few small variations: removing the “BIG BUSINESS” title so the image reads more like a still from the film, aging the typography to match the original intertitle style, or even adding a silent-film style caption beneath it. The Laurel & Hardy visual grammar is surprisingly flexible. If you ever want to push the gag further—say, turning it into a fake 1920s lobby card or a newspaper-style still from a “lost Laurel & Hardy short”—that can be done too." It's endless....

• When I say "...physical comedy (and by extension clowning)..." what I am thinking is that most clowning is physical, the clown character's vulnerability is revealed through the body. So clowns are nearly always physical comedians but physical comedy moments can happen to anyone, and can be found in dance, opera, serious drama and film, etc. So (almost) all clowns are physical comedians but not all physical comedians are clowns.
• I don't know if The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder is a novella or a long short story, but it is my favorite piece of clown fiction. Sigfrido Aguilar and I even co-directed a student dramatization of it at Ohio University back in the mid-80s. But I mention loving the book because I see it only gets 3.6 stars on Goodreads (2,263 ratings), but if you read this blog, I'm betting you will have a much keener appreciation of it.