Make the People Laugh
A forgotten Marion Short comedy
Her Alienated Affections by Marion Short
Some things really benefit from being read quickly. Just as some podcasts, some interviews, some films, even, are better, more enjoyable, if you speed them up. (The same is less often true of songs, but anyone who has ever used Audacity will say that one can produce some intriguing effects by changing tempos of others’ instrumental work, and songs sung in languages they can’t speak.) But I must return to the topic at hand.
I rattled through this short comedy as fast as I could go, and I was rewarded with three or four real, sincere laughs. I imagine if I’d seen it performed as it may have been in the 1930s, I would not have chuckled half as much. The delivery would have been too heavy, too caricaturish. But if you read these things so fast your conscious brain is not thinking hard, you can still be smacked in the head with things that are funny. That’s my tip to you.
The premise of this play is very simple. A man has come to court because his wife has apparently deserted him. He’s suing the other guy. The husband is a foreigner, a German confectioner now living in the United States, and his wife is the most flirtatious, the most absurd thing you can imagine. While the man for whom she left her husband is a glamorous, exciting aviator. The kind of man Robert Redford played in Waldo Pepper.
Back to the situation of this situation comedy in a second, but I’d like first to talk a little about juries. They’re useful in real life, I suppose, but they’re more useful in fiction. They can be grey-suited and impassive if you want drama. And they can be dysfunctional if you want outrage. In comedy, they are the sweetest canvas you could possibly have because they might be, just might be, a bunch of oddballs so different you can try out all of your stereotypes, all of your canned jokes — if desired. Judges and clerks and bailiffs, too, are apt to be funny. In this play, the judge has terrible hay fever and keeps sneezing, and he is completely bowled over by the woman whose desertion is at issue in this case.
And the clerk is so perfunctory and bored in his duties that he gets a smile or two out of me.
The jurors are, some of them, funny.
We have the deaf woman who is always mishearing: she’s of a type you’ve seen before and so not all that amusing. What’s slightly funnier is another jurywoman: the younger girl whose job it is to interpret for the hard of hearing. But alas, the younger woman generally cannot follow what’s going on; she’s often lost, poor thing; and so it is like hearing a football match narrated, at great distance, by Mrs Malaprop.
Another man in the jury box is constantly asleep. The judge tries fruitlessly, quite often, to rouse him. And when he finally looks like succeeding, one of the jurywomen — a smart young type — says that she would regret it if the man were to wake, because she is an amateur composer and the deep bass notes of his snoring ‘almost complete the motif of my latest jungle rhapsody, and should he desist too soon, like a lost chord my opus may be hopelessly crippled.’
That got a real laugh from me, I must confess it.
We have elderly ladies who have no interest in the case itself but are more than willing to gossip about it and matters adjacent. (At one moment, they break off excitedly to discuss needlework.) And, to round off the assembly, one or two sober, boring men who say nothing of note.
The real drama of the occasion is, of course, the question of why the woman ran away and whether the flyboy is to blame. This piece is, in many ways, the weakest part of the whole. Too much of the cross-examination relies upon the Cherman-accentedt tinks sedt by za scorned husbandt. It’s not completely to my taste and I didn’t laugh.
The judge’s sneezing, too, I could take or leave. Once or twice is funny. More than that drags on.
Some of the flirtation the flighty wife engages in with the judge, also, is not too good. Although her suggestion that, because she has been prescribed a course of exercises by a doctor, she must bat her lashes and wink and roll her eyes, is quite good and got a smirk.
Plays like this are ephemeral. They don’t last. They’re relics, preserved on online libraries filled with scanned books no one has checked out of a physical depository in decades.
Why read them? Because they might be amusing, because they might be a little different from the slop forced down your throat by your own age. And because they remind us of other eras in writing, where there were avenues open to authors that do not exist now — a time when there were mass paying audiences eager for all manner of written work, and when it was still possible to make a decent living with your pen, and in trying to make the people laugh.