The problem with comedies

 

 I did a close reading of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure in college when I was assigned a scene from it for an acting class, and decided that it really shouldn't be a comedy. Like most Americans, I like my comedies to be funny: I've never really accepted the classic definition of a comedy as a story with a happy ending (preferably a wedding or two). In the case of Measure for Measure, I thought the story so grim (a major plot point has a young woman pressured to have sex with Vienna's ruler to save her brother's life) that its happy ending seemed forced and inappropriate. A more consistently written Measure, I thought, would have turned out tragically, perhaps with a Hamlet- or Macbeth-style bloodbath.

When we know everything will turn out all right, it's hard to credit the emotional struggles through which characters must journey on their way to that happy ending. That's clearly the case with the Hebrew midwives whom Pharaoh told to kill all baby boys (Exodus 1:15-16). In just a few verses, they deceive Pharaoh by turning his own deceitful premise against him and so are rewarded by God (Exodus 1:17-21). I'm tempted to think of them as plucky, clever and indefatigable, but upon reflection I'm not sure why. Their bravery is remarkable, but is made remarkable because they didn't know they were living in a comedy: for all they knew, Pharaoh would kill them when he discovered they hadn't killed any babies.

In some sense, of course, this wasn't a comedy because Pharaoh simply takes his genocidal impulses public in Exodus 1:22: "Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, 'Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live.'" I can't imagine anything about the episode seemed comic to Shiphrah and Puah. From the beginning, they must have been terrified that Pharaoh would see through their paper-thin deception. Then they had to live with even greater fear of what he might do to them once he had made his murderous intentions known to the world. Yes, God had given them families, but how long would they keep their own heads?

Perhaps that's the root of all anxiety: we don't realize we're living in a comedy. Jesus tells us anxiety is the sin of unbelief in Matthew 6:25-34, and it's one of the sins from which repentance is particularly difficult and signally uncommon. That may be because our time horizon is too short. We worry about tomorrow and the day after, forgetting that the deus ex machina which literally saved many a Greek hero and figuratively rescued the cast of Measure for Measure is an overly literal foreshadowing to the comedic end to this cosmic drama which we are all acting out.

Maybe we need more unfunny comedies. Life in a fallen world is rife with dread and struggle, and all too often we think that means it must therefore end badly. American Christians are particularly loathe to acknowledge the immense suffering of living in a fallen world because they fear that portends a tragic end. This is wrong, of course: I can say that God is good and my life is bad without any tension or contradiction. The Bible does have a few funny bits, but overall it's extremely unamusing. Nonetheless, its account of history is entirely comic.

Read this way, we can understand the experience of all believers from Shiphrah and Puah to our fellow congregants to ourselves, and how to survive that experience. We can get through the horrors of this life not on a reserve of innate cheerfulness, but on the basis of a Christian hope in the truths of comedy.