2 - Domestic Comedy and Theatrical Heterotopias

Summary

…a comic character is generally comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself.

—Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic

On the face of it, the categories of refugee and comedy appear to be segregated into an incompatibility that has ethical or moral basis. Certainly, there is little to be found in prevailing conditions and definitions of a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ that would warrant the characterization of comic. But even that sentence seems wry. Theories of comedy and humour have identified incongruity as an important ingredient in the juxtaposition of meaning and outcome that makes something funny. The other most commonly identified mode of comedy, that of laughing at the victim or victims of a joke, is explicated by so-called superiority theories —which perhaps underscores why refugee comedy might be at once out of order and entirely, subversively, in order. While the plays examined in the previous chapter were confined by their relationship to true stories to a certain spectrum of tone, characterized by greater or lesser degrees of solemnity, the plays under discussion in this chapter, Victoria Carless's The Rainbow Dark (2006) and Ben Eltham's The Pacific Solution (2006), open up a different range of possibilities for representing and responding to the topic of asylum. These one-act plays had their premiere productions within weeks of each other in 2006 at Brisbane's Metro Arts Theatre, an inner-city space that, as noted in the previous chapter, has become prominent in the development and staging of works by new and emerging performance makers. Both Carless and Eltham were first-time playwrights in their twenties when the plays were produced.

It is certainly the case that comic theatrical approaches to refugee narratives are uncommon, but a handful of other Australian productions have engaged with humour in this context. Certainly, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) (2004), discussed in the previous chapter, integrated very many comic elements.