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Tom asked (a great question!):
For everyone who got so upset over Snape's treatment of Hermione: were you equally upset when Crouch/Moody turned Malfoy into a ferret and started bouncing him around?
Upset?
Oh, I found the ferret bouncing incident far more upsetting. The reason, though, had nothing to do with either the moral positioning of the actors or my personal fondness for the characters involved.
Instead, it had everything to do with the author's perceived moral positioning, and how that differed from my own.
I thought Snape's comment to Hermione was ghastly. Perfectly ghastly. It was gratuitously cruel, unconscionable, a totally vicious thing to say to an adolescent girl (and I agree with Shaun, by the way, that the long silence indicated to my mind that it was also a most calculated and deliberate act of verbal cruelty). It was an abuse of his power and his authority. Not nice behavior at all.
But I didn't feel that the author wanted me to read it any other way. It was therefore not particularly upsetting to me. I thought that Snape had been a right bastard, I felt a bit of vicarious indignation on Hermione's behalf, and I winced a little imagining myself in Hermione's shoes. But really, I experienced nothing too extreme in the way of emotional response there. Mainly, I just read it as Snape being Snape. (I am very fond of Snape, you know, but I would never try to argue that he is not profoundly unkind.)
Now, ferret bounce was ghastly as well, and also gratuitous and cruel, and also an abuse of Crouch/Moody's power and authority. It was not Okay Behavior. Not IMO, at any rate. And it was also, to my mind, rather painfully described, with all of that lashing about and squealing that Ferret!Draco was doing. Yet the authorial voice gave the impression of moral approval.
This made it upsetting to me as a reader in a way that "I see no difference" simply was not. It is always upsetting to me when I feel as if my own moral compass and the author's are rather severely misaligned.
I don't know why this should be so upsetting, mind you. Heaven knows that the books for which this isn't the case are few and far between! And yet, somehow, it still always does have the power to annoy and upset me.
-----------------
The conversation then moved on, however, to the question of which of the two scenes readers found more funny.
Hmmm. Well, clearly (as per usual) I seem to be in the minority here. I really didn't find the ferret bouncing scene at all amusing the first time around (although on re-read, knowing who "Moody" is, I do find it rather funny). Snape's "I see no difference" line, on the other hand, I found quite risible.
Why?
Well, because the types of humor on which Ferret Bounce relies are slapstick, physical sadism, and "comeuppance humor," none of which are forms of humor that usually do a whole lot for me. What can I say? That's just not my sense of humor.
"I see no difference," on the other hand, is humor based in psychological and verbal sadism, which is a type of humor that I almost always find very funny indeed.
Ferret Bounce becomes funny for me on re-reading because once you know what's really going on, the humor of the scene becomes rooted in dark irony, which similarly is a type of humor that I almost always enjoy.
I would like to point out, though, that whether or not something strikes one as funny does not necessarily have any bearing at all on whether or not one finds it moral. I didn't personally consider either Snape's behavior OR Crouch/Moody's in the slightest bit ethical or justified or acceptable or "good." Not at all. Not in the least.
But since when has comedy ever been moral?
Shaun wrote:
It was funny. It was also totally unacceptable.
Yes! Thank you, Shaun!
I think that's a really important distinction to keep in mind. Humor is notoriously subjective, and it is also quite amoral. Most forms of comedy involve the idea of somebody being hurt or humiliated or otherwise discomfited. There are exceptions—puns, whimsy, some types of wordplay—but for the most part, comedy is cruel. Farce, black humor, ghetto humor, "comeuppance humor," insult humor...they're all about people either behaving badly or having bad things happen to them (or both), aren't they?
This issue came up a while back, actually, in regard to the Ton-Tongue Toffee scene, when as now, people started feeling a bit defensive over the perceived need to justify their enjoyment of "comeuppance humor" on moral grounds. Interestingly enough, "I see no difference" came up as an example in that discussion, too; although there it was being contrasted with Ton-Tongue, rather than with Ferret Bounce, the fundamental question—when do people find depictions of cruel and abusive behavior being perpetrated on the weak by the strong a source of humour?—was the same.
Back then, I wrote (excerpted from message #43422):
Yet this whole humour issue really seems to be upsetting people, and I'm still trying to understand the reasons for that. Let me try this as a proposal, just to see if it resonates with people.
Dicey has identified a type of slapstick which takes as its operative principle: "Only if the victim isn't realistically enough depicted for us to take his pain too seriously is it funny."
Could it be, perhaps, that there is a related form of humour, one which takes as its operative principle: "Only if the aggressor is morally clean is it funny?"
In other words, is it true that for some people the morality or ethics of the characters really does have direct bearing on whether or not they find a scene that involves violence amusing? Is THAT why people were conflating the issues of whether the twins are funny and whether their behavior is bullying?
I hadn't realized that there were people who held that view of humour. In my conception of comedy, the moral positioning of the actors doesn't really have very much to do with whether or not something is funny (although the moral positioning of the author sometimes can: a dark comedy about the Klan, for example, I really would consider funny or not in large part based on what I perceived the author's attitude on the subject to be).
Immoral actions can be (and very often are) portrayed in a humorous light. Very many forms of comedy involve some form of harm or discomfiture. Nor is "Danger Averted" comedy the only type of humour out there. Sometimes things are funny not because no harm is done, but because in fact a great deal of harm is being done.
So I think that we might want to be careful about saying that it's not okay to laugh at certain things when we see them depicted in fiction. If we were to declare all forms of comedy which involve people being unkind each other or people getting hurt off-limits, then that really wouldn't leave us with very much to laugh at, would it?
But surely the question of humour is a different one from the question of characterization, isn't it? That Voldemort's actions are occasionally played for very dark humour doesn't make him any less of a sadist. That Snape's verbal abuse is often quite funny doesn't make him any less of a bully. That the Dursleys' locking Harry in the cupboard beneath the stairs or feeding him on nothing but watery soup is a comedic depiction of child abuse doesn't make the Dursleys admirable models of good parenting.
What the characters' behavior reveals about them is a completely different issue than that of whether or not we find them funny.
Sorry to quote myself like this, but it was either that or write it all over again, and I'm lazy. ;-)
Part of the reason, I think, that I always feel such a need to emphasize this distinction is because I myself have a really really sick sense of humor. So you can imagine that I'm not altogether comfortable with the idea that finding something humorous implies moral approval! If I were to do that, then there would really be just no hope for me.
You see, I thought the funniest scene in GoF was Graveyard.
So when Alla asks:
Am I allowed to be amused and at the same time very bothered by that accident?
My instinctive response is: "Good lord. I certainly hope so!"
Another reason I feel the need to draw the distinction gets back to what I was saying last week, about the perils of assuming things about how people might treat others in real life based on their emotional reactions to the text.
John Wall touched on that when he wrote:
I'll confess my guilty pleasure right now - I don't want to see Malfoy redeemed in any way, shape, or form. I want to see him lose. A bit immature on my part? Probably, but again, these books are works of fiction - probably the most entertaining works of fiction I've ever read. So I allow myself the guilty pleasure of the double standard - it's ok when Crouch/Moody does this to Malfoy, but it's not ok when Snape does it to Hermione.
Yup. It tends not to bother us nearly so much when bad things happen to characters we don't like. What a shocker there, eh? ;-)
I don't think that anyone needs to feel guilty about this, though. Really, don't we all sometimes take a bit of vindictive satisfaction in seeing characters we really dislike have bad things happen to them? It doesn't make anyone a vindictive or mean-spirited person in real life. I believe that fiction exists, in large part, to serve as an outlet for just that sort of emotion. I don't consider it at all immature, myself. I think that it's just...well, normal.
When discussing the behavior of characters on moral grounds, I do try not to let favoritism sway my judgement too much, although perhaps this is a losing battle. I do, at least, genuinely try to recognize and acknowledge my biases. But trying to look at least somewhat dispassionately at the characters' ethics doesn't mean that I feel the same emotion in regard to their behavior, or in regard to the victims of their misdeeds. (It's really hard for me to feel much of anything for a character like Dudley Dursley, for example. YMMV.) It just means that I'm trying to evaluate the question on the basis of different criteria than I would be if the question were one of reader sympathy, engagement, identification or affection.
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on January 31, 2003 2:44 AM
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