The Beatles Comedy

”Rabbi Winkler wrote: The Zohar says “There is no wisdom as wholesome as that wisdom that comes out of silliness. Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.”

What they did best was nuttyness, a distinction without a difference perhaps. I have seen Yellow Submarine (in the theater at the time of its release so I don’t remember all that much!). I remember an early “music video” in which The Beatles are playing leapfrog over a well-dressed gentleman leaning over something on the sidewalk. It has no particular meaning but it’s amusing as is their capering on an anonymous beach in striped vintage bathing dress. These had nothing whatsoever to do with the songs. But you watch it and you enjoy their enjoyment of what they are doing.

I have to suppose that outside of The Beatles’ natural style of wisecracking, the style of physical comedy demonstrated in the clips and movies may have been more the idea of Sir George Martin then anyone else. Martin was the head of the Parlophone record label who offered The Beatles a recording contract after they had been turned down by just about everyone else. Although he was a trained musician (piano, oboe), he went to work for EMI record company, where he recorded such comedians as Peter Sellers and Spike Mulligan. Sellers as well as a very broad assortment of music from light pop to symphonic. I know he did a good bit of intellectual comedy but also indulged in what I call “romps”; a special way of handling mostly physical comedy without much attention to plot, continuity or, indeed, story at all.

The Beatles at that time were barely older then schoolboys and you can see in A Hard Days Night comedy recalling a kid grabbing someone’s hat and playing keep-away. Adolescent boy fun is funny, so long as it’s not your cap! Added in was as lovely a Keystone Cops sequence as anyone’s ever seen and Ringo’s threnody on the canal is way beyond criticism. Was Ringo consciously playing the Little Tramp? He says he was so hung over that morning that merely walking took all his time so I can suppose it was simply one of those miracles

]Not that The Beatles film depends on either physical comedy or on adolescent boy fun, the writing in some places in A Hard Days Night is delicious. John’s conversation with the plump lady in the hall wherein the “him” John does or doesn’t look like is left undefined is surely a triumph of underwriting – so terribly hard to do! However, it took the eye of an artist (or a really good cameraman) to see the possibilities of 4 skinny young men in black clothes romping in a mowed field. Is it funny? Not exactly; but it makes you feel good and feel good about the actors.

It’s very amusing to read the slightly offended surprise of the movie critics reviews. (Both in the original release and the more recent re-release to theaters.) While some of the sources say that the script was carefully written to be easy for inexperienced non-actors, Ringo’s “hiding behind a smokescreen of bourgeois clichés” isn’t my idea of an easy line! I have seen the I Am the Walrus cut in Magic Mystery Tour and it lacks the spontaneity and fun which are not entirely absent from the rest of the piece. It seems to me that there was too much self-consciousness and an attempt to get some sort of message across. I do find the lyrics of Walrus over studied and artificial. I feel sure that Ringo is right in that by broadcasting it in black and white the BBC ensured it’s critical disaster. On the other hand, the particular magic that made The Beatles is beginning to fail because the group is beginning to fail to be a group. Even in Sgt. Pepper you can see that there’s a bit of a hitch in their interpersonal harmony. It comes back here and there but many of the clips show three bored session musicians trying to get the ‘great one’ through one last take.

The Beatles comedy at its best a combination of innocent fun and sophisticated badinage that transport the viewer to the world of everyone’s dreams, one which never existed. I find reviews that name it as archtypical of its time and yet it survives to this time and people without my memories enjoy it now.