The Man Who Pulled the Plug
In mid-October, I was on my way for a swim at Bruggerhorn in St. Margrethen, a small lake with a campsite near the Austrian border. It was one of those autumn days when the swimming season has long been over for most people, but not quite for me. Near the campsite, I came across an elderly man, perhaps in his mid-seventies. He had a reddish face and the sort of appearance that makes it difficult to tell whether it comes from a long life, a fondness for good wine, or a general dissatisfaction with humanity.
Before I could say anything, he called out that he had pulled the plug. There was no water left in the lake.
I hadn't asked him anything. I simply wanted to go swimming. But apparently I looked like someone who ought to be informed that an entire lake had just been drained.
"Well," I said, "I suppose I'll have to swim without getting wet."
He laughed. Evidently, he had expected a response, though perhaps not that one. We had never met before, yet within seconds we had created a little comedy. He had suspended the laws of the world for a moment, and I saw no particular reason to restore them.
As I walked on, it occurred to me how much the man resembled W. C. Fields. Not merely because of his red face. There was that peculiar mixture of mischief, insolence, and grumpy dignity that made Fields so unmistakable. As though life had just presented him with another inconvenience, one he thoroughly disapproved of but found entirely unsurprising.
W. C. Fields has always been one of the greatest comedians in my eyes. Chaplin could move an audience to tears. Buster Keaton could challenge the laws of physics without moving a muscle in his face. Peter Sellers could become an entirely different person. Fields needed none of that. He was Fields. A man who, with a single glance, a raised eyebrow, or a muttered "Godfrey Daniel!" could reveal more about human nature than some writers manage in three hundred pages.
And as I continued towards the lake, a thought occurred to me that I had never really pursued before. Perhaps Fields was not merely a comedian. Perhaps he was a philosopher.
Not one of those philosophers who tell us how we ought to live, constructing elaborate systems that other philosophers must subsequently spend their lives dismantling. Fields had no doctrine, no school of thought, and, as far as I know, not the slightest intention of improving humanity. He simply showed us people as they are. Vain, selfish, cowardly, boastful, occasionally drunk, frequently ridiculous, and remarkably skilled at convincing themselves that they are the only sensible person in a world populated entirely by idiots.
What makes this interesting is that Fields did not mock his characters from some position of moral superiority. He himself was the greatest nuisance on the screen. He placed himself right in the middle of human inadequacy and made himself comfortable there. His characters were no moral examples, nor did they aspire to be. They were busy with their weaknesses, their petty deceptions, their vanities, and their desperate attempts to get through life with a reasonable degree of comfort.
And that made me think of Michel de Montaigne.
At first glance, a sixteenth-century French nobleman and an American comedian with a fondness for alcohol, card games, and dubious excuses have little in common. Montaigne sat in his tower and wrote about himself, friendship, fear, habit, vanity, and death. Fields stood in front of a camera and made a fool of himself. But perhaps they were closer than one might imagine.
Montaigne regarded humanity with an almost affectionate scepticism. He understood that we are contradictory creatures, that our convictions often arise by accident, that we overestimate ourselves, and that we rarely understand our own motives entirely. And he explicitly included himself in these observations. His essays are not the writings of a man who had somehow overcome human nature. They are the observations of a man who had to live with it and eventually decided to find it interesting.
That is an enormous difference.
Much of philosophy, religion, and now psychology concerns itself with the question of how we might become different. Better, more rational, more balanced, more moral, more self-aware. Everywhere, people seem to be waiting for us to become the correct version of ourselves. We are expected to work on ourselves, overcome our weaknesses, question our habits, and develop our personalities. Even leisure has become another opportunity for self-improvement.
Montaigne would probably have found this rather curious. Not because he opposed learning or change. He was curious about almost everything. But he did not treat human imperfection as a scandal. One did not first have to become a better person to earn the right to be a person at all.
Fields went a step further. He demonstrated that our weaknesses are not merely tolerable but can be enormously entertaining. He was, in a sense, Montaigne without the tower, but with a top hat and considerably fewer inhibitions about bad behaviour.
Of course, Montaigne was the kinder of the two. Fields could be malicious, petty, and downright unbearable. But there was something disarming about his malice because he never exempted himself from it. Watching Fields, we are not invited to feel morally superior to him. Instead, we recognise something we might rather not recognise. And then we laugh.
I suspect there is an underrated kind of freedom in that.
We take ourselves terribly seriously. We take our opinions seriously, our wounded pride, our social roles, and our ideas about how the world ought to behave. When something fails to meet our expectations, we immediately begin searching for explanations. Someone must be responsible. Something must have gone wrong. The world has evidently failed to follow the rules we had so thoughtfully laid down for it.
Yet every now and then, we might simply acknowledge that the world is a rather funny place.
This does not mean that nothing matters. Montaigne was no fool, and Fields, for all his comic licence, was hardly proof that human behaviour has no consequences. But between indifference and relentless moral seriousness lies a rather large territory that we seem remarkably reluctant to explore. It is a place where we may observe things without immediately feeling obliged to correct them. Where not every weakness needs to be cured, every absurdity explained, or every encounter turned into a lesson.
Perhaps that is the real art of humour: to give up, if only for a moment, the ambition of improving the world.