It can be funny to see someone gleefully ransack the minor social conventions the rest of us are so careful to observe.
There are many theories of comedy, and no shortage of academic approaches to it. As the cliché goes, it’s a serious subject. My favorite theory of humor in dramatic settings proposes that our impulse to laugh flows from observing settings where individual actions violate normative expectations. We watch a play or film. The character that an actor is playing seems to be a recognizable type, perhaps a businessman, a young suitor or a priest. Comedy is often born in these surroundings when earnest characters fail to enact social scripts they have supposedly mastered. The actions usually can’t be dire or cruel. But when a puffed up socialite gliding through a hotel lobby slips on a banana peel, that’s funny. If the same thing happens to a child, not so much. The humor lies in the punctured dignity of the socialite’s pratfall. It reminds us of the distance between who someone aspires to be and the mortal that they are.
This is the set-up facing an earnest and tuxedoed Henry Fonda in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1949). He has dressed to be the perfect suitor for a shrewd young woman he wants to impress. The setting of a party is the right place to make the impression. But he just can’t quite pull it off.
Sometimes its words rather than behaviors that can be the source of violated expectations. When Rowan Atkinson’s Father Gerald tries to perform his first nuptials in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) it becomes clear that the nervous priest has come up short in finding for the exact language needed to help the equally jittery groom:
Father Gerald: I call upon those persons here present to witness... that I, Bernard... Delainey...
Bernard: I call upon those persons here present to witness... that I, Bernard Delainey...
Father Gerald: take thee Lydia Jane Herbert... to be my awful wedded wife.
Bernard: take thee Lydia Jane Herbert... to be my *lawful* wedded wife.
Father Gerald: That's right... That's right. May Almighty God bless you all in the name of the Father, the Son, & the Holy Spigot... *Spirit*.
Another variation on the mismatch between a scene action is to introduce into familiar surroundings a character who is physically or temperamentally out of place. Charlie Chaplin continually put his scruffy Tramp in reasonably affluent settings that emphasized the pathos of a kind little man facing a much tougher world. The contrast was greatest when he costars where beautiful women such as Virginia Cherrill in City Lights (1931) and Paulette Goddard in Modern Times (1936). The effect of his efforts to romance them is funny and always sentimental.
Groucho Marx and Robin Williams created types defined more by their manic times. The often brilliant stream-of-consciousness riffs of Williams were at least echos to the wisecracks and double entendres that poured out of Groucho. In both cases there is comic power in characters who could leave the occupants in a well-ordered room looking like they just survived a tornado.
And, of course, that’s the point. Dramatic comedy may seem at first to be only a source of passing amusement. But it is also a form of discourse that reminds us of how much social life relies on prescribed rules of conduct.
At the beginning of the American Century most citizens believed that social mobility was possible if a person was bold and audacious enough to seek it.
In a professional baseball game a pitcher’s arm may only last 50 or 60 pitches. But playing the game of American life may require that we never stop. To each other we pitch for charities, business ideas, book proposals, movies, advertising campaigns and political contributions. Most of us know the rules. Make the best case you can in a compact time period you are given. And never get caught throwing curve balls.
One kind of pitch is the fundraiser. It’s perhaps a function of our times that we are flooded with invitations to attend events designed to raise money for causes that are worthy, but starved for support. A recent fundraiser at a posh country club was raising funds for a non-profit organization that provides basic housing and life skills for the developmentally disabled. Amidst the brie and smoked salmon a room of well-healed people joined an auction to bid on weekend getaways and meals at 4-star restaurants, with all of the money going to the cause. Similarly, local newspapers regularly feature heartrending attempts to crowd-source the costs of an essential medical treatment that a community member cannot otherwise receive. Only in America do we seem to miss the irony of ubiquitous pitches made by neighbors to find dollars to fund services that other advanced societies provide to all.
A friend in London notes that she mostly encounters sidewalk pitches for non-profit organizations. But the appeals are usually to benefit distant populations suffering from famine or other scourges. The goal is to make a quick plea for a worthy cause, with a follow-up request asking the listener to immediately text the money to the needy group. Another friend in Denver confirms a similar pattern, but for more local charities. She cautions that a walk up busy 16th Street at the center of downtown is done more easily if pretending to talk on a phone. That apparently keeps those who are ready to pounce at bay.
We have also institutionalized pitches. Candidates meet with potential donors mostly in private to make the case that they alone can rescue the nation. Presidential politics has now become a fully commercialized enterprise. PBS television stations have similarly turned their once-gentle requests for funds into sometimes gaudy infomercial extravaganzas. Television has even enshrined the act of making a pitch in shows like CNBC’s Shark Tank, where the proposals of budding entrepreneurs function as a kind of entertainment. We get to see how potential investors react to a “hard-sell” made by a dreamer claiming to have invented the next big thing.
The man “on the make” is an American type, enshrined in such social science classics as Daniel Boorstin’s The Americans (Vintage, 1973) and David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (Yale, 1961). As members of a younger and still unformed society our forbearers knew that social mobility was possible if a person was bold and audacious enough to seek it. This kind of up-by-your-bootstraps optimism marked the dominant style of early MGM films such as Babes in Arms (1939), and has been lovingly caricatured in the Coen Brother’s Hudsucker Proxy (1994). The brashness of American hype is a fantasy about ourselves that we still celebrate.
What makes a good pitch for a new product or service? Circumstances require different approaches, but as a general rule the presenter can usually rely on a few elemental guidelines.
1. Be brief and to the point. Explain the concept quickly. Then move on to the comparative advantages that make the new idea superior to competing products or services.
2. Explain the unmet need that is satisfied with the new product.
3. Put the audience in the picture. How might they or a family member use the service?
4. Sell your experience and know-how as part of the deal. It's true of investors that they want the expertise of the pitch-maker as much as they want the product or service.
No business school today could be without courses that require sales and marketing students to storm their classes with a blizzard of hypothetical opportunities too good to pass up. That is one of many possible reminders of why a cultural milestone like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) remains not just a sad family saga, but a quintessential American tragedy.
