The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1933-10-06
The World of the Theatre

ject: everyone will laugh and the sub
ject will not have been touched, and
what is more important, the audience
will not have been touched by the
subject. The fun is never built upon
the truth of these themes-which is
a legitimate and mature process-but
is always beside it-a juvenile means
of escape. The comedy of these plays
is the equivalent of that of the wise
cracker who can break up any con-
versation by remark entirely irTel-
evant to it. Thought, experience,
knowledge, understanding, are I'M
necessary for the appreciation of
these plays. They substitute slap
stick, high-jinks, puns, acrobatic
stunts.
This is the cream Of travelling
salesman comedy, a comedy which
contains no element of contact be-
tween the comedian who cracks the
joke and the object about which the
joke is cracked, and no real contact
either between the person who hears
the joke and the one who makes it.
Most representative Of this type of
comedy at its best are Marx brothers
who begin and end their fun-making
without subject, and reduce every
thing to sheer nonsense. They SYM
bolize the big-city middleman always
glibly selling something he has no
respect for to someone who has no
need of it. The sum total of such
comedy in human content is zero.
Two plays produced recently ex-
emplify this tendency of Broadway
comedy in different ways; "Kultur,"
at the Mansfield Theatre, and Sailor
Beware" at the Lyceum. "Kultur"
has been called propaganda play"
by some of the dailies, but it is ad-
vertised as "the most amusing play
in town." Here is play that is pre-
sumably satire on the anti-Semitic
aspect of Hitlerism and the whole af-
fair is brought down to a few senti-
mental jokes about the chancenors
life being saved by Teuton giant Of
purest Aryan blood who turns out to
be a converted Jew. The whole agony
of the situation is set aside. its So
cial and human connotations never
enter into the question at all, and
few foolish laughs are the end of
the whole matter.
But this play is so primitive and
guileless in writing and production
that it becomes fairly harmless. But
plays like Sailor Beware" which get
good notices, make money, and are
finally distributed through the
movies, are more injurious than they
seem.
The play is supposed to be "Ra-
belaisian comedy" about the occu-
pations Of U. S. navy sailors in peace
time, in other words, about the sex
exploits Of the gobs. Rabelaisian in
deed Rabelais was a great writer,
man of learning, true satirist,
rebel Sailor Beware" is a collection
of cigar-store jokes, only less obscene
and less funny than those one might
hear in a cigar-store; its figures are
not comic characters but simply
"stooges" for each others come
backs; its atmosphere removed from
any reality whatsoever. It's rowdiness
has no virility in 1t, its lustiness has
no sex, its bawdiness is just mice
clean dirt" (Otherwise it might Of
fend the customersD And finally it
has less to do with the U. S. Navy
than barber shop, Every ingredient
of the play is sham; SO that
rough comedy about sailors is nothing
more than a frolic of undeveloped
high-schcol boys, dangerously inno-
cent and unbslieysblv ignorant. Can
an audience that relishes such stuff
as comedy know ANYTHING at all about
the world in which it lives? Can it
ever grow mature? A theatre such as
this seems to have no other purpose
but to perpecuate imoscility,
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