Ha Ha: funny movies, funny poems

A little over a month ago I was at Mass Moca with Veronica and some friends.  I had given the galleries a once over and was feeling disappointed because I usually find at least one, if not more, really great exhibitions at this small museum. Then I went back and took a second look at a retrospective of short films by Guy Ben-Ner that was playing in a few of the rooms.

The first film I watched all the way through was Ben-Ner's adaptation of Moby Dick shot entirely in his kitchen with a cast of two: himself and his 6-year-old daughter.  This film, like all the others in the retrospective, was playful and hilarious.

At first I was attracted to Ben-Ner's work because it was at once artful and funny, but thinking about him and viewing the few clips of his work available on Youtube over the last few weeks I've realized that I am drawn to the work for another reason as well. I'm completely taken with his themes and how adeptly he deploys them. Ben-Ner is able to make movies about happy families without being cloying, and movies about the adorable without being cute.

Film is an art form with a long established history, from Charlie Chaplain to Woody Allen, of comedy being  taken seriously.  Poetry, unfortunately has not been so lucky. The occasional reader of poetry, let alone the general public, would hardly know that American poetry has spent the last 50 years learning the lessons of Modernism and busting a gut in the process.  There are any number a very talented very funny poets writing today. Among my favorites: James Tate, Zachary Schomberg, Rae Armantrout, Dean Young, Rachel B Glaser, Dorothea Lasky, Eugene Ostashevsky. 

In his essay "Poets Wary of Poetry", Charles Simic zeros in on why within the Modernist aesthetic "the comic sense" and "the poetic imagination"  are so appropriately wedded. "They depend on juxtaposition of unlikely elements, the joining of two distant realities whose resemblance has not been grasped till that very moment." (though, let's be fair, this observation applies to all the arts in the Modernist period equally - have you every really looked at Ruaschenberg?)

I try to write poems that take part in this equation.  But often, and I think it is also the case with some but not all of the poets I mention above, I find my themes to be heavy and my jokes to be dark.  I think Ben-Ner has shown me another set of themes.  He demonstrates that work that is both artful and funny can be made without a skull hidden the picture.