Funny but Not Funny

Funny but Not Funny

In the movie, Joker (2019), in one of the most tragic scenes (I will skip the detail of this scene for who have not watched this movie!), Arthur Fleck (also known as the Joker) says “I used to think that my life was a tragedy, but I realize that it’s a f-ing comedy!” Many audiences (perhaps!), including me, interpret this dialogue as the protagonist’s crossing the “mental” border from a naïve dream believing he will become a famous comedian to escape from what oppresses him (e.g., social health care system and severe poverty) to destructing and revolting that dream directly with his offensiveness and insanity by his own will.

Even though Joker is not a kind of migration narrative and black comedy focused film, the reason that the dialogue resonates in me when writing this analysis is that, in The Good Life Elsewhere, the narrative is all about the naïve dream of immigrants and their failure to achieve the dream. But differently from Joker’s case, they could never cross both “mental” and “physical” borderline to fulfill (or dismantle) their dream. And their frustration is described in its full of black-comedy events, much like this reversed dialogue of the Joker, “I used to think that my life was a comedy, but I realized that it’s an absurd tragedy!”

Scene 1:

This story is set in Moldova, where the poverty-brutality dominated land, which has a village, like Mingir “in the Hincesti region,” where residents “habitually trafficked in kidneys” (48). Ironically, in this brutal setting, their hope emerges, and every comic situation happens from the unachievable hope to migrate to Italy. When they are dreaming it, there is a great, saint euphoria; Italian dream; the promised land. In particular, for Serafim, one of the main characters, this dream is invaluable, as described as:

“Serafim, recalling with perfect lucidity how Rome looked in pictures in Echo of the Planet… the sun hadn’t yet lifted its veil from Rome to show them the city, that sleeping beauty, in her full glory… Rapture shone on all their faces, Serafim, for example, was already savoring his visits to the museums and theaters, and his sublime walks through the crooked streets of Rome… as a place where Lady Luck would finally flash them a smile… One way or another, they all had the same goal: Rome!”

However, unlike his celestial name symbolizes who works in heaven, Serafim cannot reach his saint Elysium even from the beginning of the fiction to the end. Eventually, when they believe they will cross the border and arrive in Italy soon, they arrive at the capital of Moldova, Chisinau as a fraud. Even though Serafim spends his fortune and 25 years to earn the expense for illegal immigration and to learn Italian, his dream fails. For some audience, this futile outcome (“Welcome to Chisinau!”) from his naïve-life endeavor might us cause to laugh and to feel sympathetic frustration at the same time, and yes, it was exactly me.

Scene 2:

Continuously, the Moldovans cannot escape their reality despite their struggling, and the tragic-comedy plot is repeated, again and again. The second scene that draws the audience’s complex sentiment is, again, in the poverty-stricken setting, the kidney. A man, who dreams to escape his poverty, Jan plans to sell his kidney, and laughably he also plans to return back his kidney in “an unusual way” like this:

He says that ”People who receive transplants from pigs sometimes acquire the physical characteristics of these animals,”…”I conducted one experiment with our biological ancestors, monkeys, involving the transplant of various pig organs… I postulate that something similar can happen with human beings” (50).

After then, he bought a piglet and wine by spending his pension and talk to the cute piglet, “I’ call you Sunrise, since you symbolize a new life”…“Just as the sunrise conquers the night, your kidney will postpone my death a prolong my life!” (51).

How naïve and tragic but very funny. However, much like Serafim’s absurd case, his idea is never fulfilled, and his goal and peace are never achieved. More tragically, he faces his death with missing “his gallbladder, half of his liver, one lung, two heart ventricles and for some reason his appendix had all gone missing…” (52). Again, how naïve! and tragic! but Funny!

Scene 3:

In the last chapter, the protagonist, Serafim also confronts his (physical or mental) death. After his recalling some remembrances of his life passage, after an (infeasible or feasible) explosion “on the outskirts of Larga,” a miraculous dream becomes unreal-real or real-unreal, as written as, “the slice of land on which Larga lay began to slowly slide into the river” and “began to float” (183). And Soon, the floating land “approached the sea,” and “The villagers came ever closer and seraphim went out to meet them, opening his heart and his arms. He smiled” (184).

Is this real? Is Serafim really meeting the villagers and enter the euphoric land? Actually, the fact does not matter. The important thing is, mostly for readers, the last part also means the repeated plot structure with nonsense events that make us laugh and have a sympathetic response from the character’s frustration, through all their absurd reality who desire to be immigrants in a promised land. Fortunately, Serafim, like his angelic name, with the villagers, it seems that he successfully migrate to the symbolic but actual promised land, the heaven, after losing physical or psychological himself. And then, finally, this absurd story ends.

The author, Vladimir Lorchenkov, barrows the format of tragic-comedy or absurd drama to show this ironic reality and enlighten audiences in terms of the useless and helpless of minor immigrants or refugees’ efforts in all directions and in terms of their physical, psychological, and material sacrifices if the refugee/immigrants successfully cross the border and settle their each promised land.

(LIke we watch every day from various media this kind of tragedy, frustration, and unrealistic black-comedy situations, these kinds of tragic-comedy happens on all borders around the world (see the Border Wall made by who has the world’s greatest power.)

Returning back to the movie, Joker (2019), Joker could cross the social and his mental border by taking all violent ways by his own will, thus he can say “I used to think that my life was a tragedy, but I realize that it’s a f-ing comedy!” But, for the Moldovans, even their stories are full of comic situations and end with laughing, but their dead bodies are left behind as victims through inevitable external violent tragedies that make them not cross the border.