a society’s inability to recognize an ironic joke
by
Douglas Messerli
Jaromil
Jireš (screenplay, after the novel by Milan Kundera, and director) Zert (The
Joke) / 1969
Czech
film director Jaromil Jireš' Zert (The Joke), based on the fiction by
Milan Kundera, is generally described as the last film of the Czech New Wave
movement. Although its making benefited from the Prague Spring uprising of 1968
and its opening in 1969 was an immediate success in the theaters, the new Czech
authorities after the return of the Soviets, pulled the film from distribution,
not permitting The Joke to be shown again to Czech audiences for 20 years,
by which time much of its satiric sting and wit had been lost.
For decades now, I have argued that beginning
in the 1980s, perhaps even earlier, the concept of irony had disappeared. I
first saw it in the young students I was teaching. After being asked to read
Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, the vast majority of my students were
outraged by his suggestion that the British might dine on Irish Catholic
children to alleviate poverty. I attempted to explain to them how irony worked,
and tried to reveal the absurd exaggeration he was using in this particular
case, all to no avail. They were angry that I had even put it on my syllabus,
even though the work was featured in their Freshman English textbook.
Soon after I began seeing the same
phenomena in the adult commentary. Today it seems almost impossible to imagine
irony in a time when the outrageous has become so commonplace that we cannot perhaps
recognize that it once stood for an exaggeration of truth. Try using irony in
your posts of Facebook; I doubt you will last long without a series of highly critical
responses.
And if you cannot any longer recognize
irony, I’d argue, seeing Jireš’ significant film today will not provide much
laughter. For, it is irony presented as satire that is at the heart of The
Joke. Tired of all the embracement of ethnic Czech culture, its costumes,
dancing, the “anti-hero” of Jireš’ work, Ludvík Jahn (Josef Somr) is even more perturbed
by the new embracement through music (he is, we later discover, a musician as
well) prescribed by Soviet ideology in the late 1940s and 1950s during the
Stalinist era, songs such as "We are building a bright new world" and
"No more masters, no more slaves."
Soon
after, Ludvick is interviewed in his university office by a young journalist,
whose questions he answers so circuitously that she is left with hardly
anything on either tape or notebook.
Our self-described ladies’ man, however,
does get her name, Helena Zemánková (Jana Dítětová), who, he quickly discovers
is married to a former friend, who represents both the love of the ethnic past
and now the brave new world of Stalin’s program, Pavel Zemánek (Luděk Munzar).
Ludvik is even more frustrated by the fact
that his would-be girlfriend, Markéta Pospíšilová (Jaroslava Obermaierová) is soon
to marry a man more outwardly loyal to Communist doctrines, and that she,
herself, is on her way to an indoctrination camp. As what he later describes as
a “joke,” he writes her a postcard saying, in a grand string of ironic twists
of Marx, Stalin, and previous threats to the current dogma of Communism: “Optimism
is the opium of mankind. A ‘healthy spirit’ stinks of stupidity. Long live
Trotsky.”
The more than literal-minded Markéta immediately turns over his postcard to the
authorities, and before Ludvik can even blink he finds himself before the
university committee where he is deemed a enemy of the state, stripped of his
Communist Party membership and sentenced to 6 years of “reeducation,” involving
a period in prison, army service under the tutelage of a drill sergeant who
makes the word Sadist sound like a Papal blessing (one young loyal communist,
tortured because of his continued belief in the cause is almost forced into
suicide), and, finally, a year or more in the mine pits.
Perhaps just to underline his ironic and
satiric structures, the director, somewhat overstates the issue with an
alteration of youths singing "No more masters, no more slaves" while
these most middle-aged slaves of their new totalitarian masters are forced to
swing their axes into rocks.
Ludvik, quite amazingly, survives these
six long years (some of his fellow prisoners even found their imprisonment
extended) in fairly good health. Yet, as film critics such as Michael Koresky
have observed, Ludvik has also been infected by the totalitarianism he has just
survived.
Returning to the small city in which he
grew up, a place he has long wanted to leave behind, he now plans revenge
against those who helped put him in the “reeducation” program, particularly
Pavel, who has promised to vote against Ludvik’s expulsion from the party, but
along with Markéta, voted against him.
That town is about to celebrate what is
described as the “King’s Ride,” a celebration that draws people from across the
country to participate in its equestrian parades, and in the food, wine, and
performances of local musicians, young and old.
To this event, 15 years after first
having met her, Ludvik invites Pavel’s wife Helena, whom in seducing believes
he might wreak havoc upon his rival.
Helena does indeed willingly join Luvick
in bed, and after claims she loves him, only gradually revealing that, although
she is still married to Pavel, they have now both gone their own ways, he
having taken up with a 20-year old. Although Ludvick finally meets up with his enemy
of the past—now admitting that at the time of Ludvick’s trial he knew the
postcard commentary was “a joke”—the would-be avenger suddenly perceives that
nothing he has done will any longer matter. Pavel might even be happy that
Helena has been removed from his life.
Now Ludvick must deal with the woman he
has seduced, who claims to be desperately in love with him; his attempts to
explain to her that he is not interested in a relationship results with her, locked
away in a public loo, claiming she has taken an entire bottle of pills.
Her cameraman, secretly in love with
her (as a journalist she is also attending the King’s Ride event), reports that
he has refilled it only with laxatives, so the now seemingly unloved reporter
will be locked away all day.
The cameraman now vows revenge and goes
looking for Luvick, finding him now playing the old songs he has previously eschewed, threatening
him with a beating. Unable to ignore him, Luvick quickly pummels and brutally
slaps the handsome young man with the muscles he has long-ago developed while
working in the mines, lamenting “You fool. You are not the one I wanted to beat
up.”—perhaps the most bitterly ironic statement of the entire film.
Los
Angeles, July 12, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2020).
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