What does the comedian do with this power? Get rid of bad people he knows. How far does he go with this power? After all, when Samir first uses it, he disappears his girlfriend’s nephew, an innocent 10-year-old boy who loves comedy. On the other hand, is it bad to get rid of a fellow comedian who, while driving drunk one night, killed a mother and child? How far will Samir take this Faustian power? Cue the shudders. Anyway, it’s “just fiction,” right? It’s not real (though of course the “actors” are “real” comedians, including the lead, Kumail Nanjiani, as well as the devilish tempter played by former SNL cast member Tracy Morgan).
“Real”-ness aside, novelist, essayist, and critic Ronald Sukenick says, “All fiction can be profitably regarded as argument.” I agree. “Argument” involves a rhetor (narrator, speaker, author, artist, composer, performer, singer — or all of the above and many more). This rhetor makes a case (a claim, an argument) or simply expresses a world view (rhetoric as meaning-making). That is, this fiction-as-rhetoric argues for, against, or with something. So yes, of course, “fiction” is argument. Fiction, that is, tries to persuade us (the audience) in some way, even if the aim is just to get us to laugh or cry (and renew our streaming-service subscription). Therefore, fiction is rhetoric, or at the very least, rhetorical, because there is a rhetor, an audience, and a text (visual, alphabetic, aural or some combination thereof); there is an end result in mind. In the text lies some kind of argument, situated between the rhetor and the audience.
Think of the above Twilight Zone episode. At one level, “The Comedian” relies on a classical purpose of rhetoric: to delight (the other two are to persuade and/or to teach). The original Rod Serling TZ was popular, award-winning, cutting-edge, seen by many generations in syndication and streaming after it ended in 1975. Its 2019 return and reimagining aims to delight, amuse, charm, and terrify (which is delightfully cathartic in an Aristotlean/Shakesperean way). The network/producer’s aim is also, of course, to get you to payfor that streaming service. But the original TZ also told “real” stories about human nature, human problems, and human questions: What is true beauty? (“Eye of the Beholder”). Who decides if you’re a good person thinking good thoughts? (“It’s a Good Life”). Can a convict sentenced to life alone on an asteroid love a robot? (or, what is love? — “The Lonely”). Can you ever, really,go home again? (“Walking Distance”). All of these episodes horrify-delight. Some of them also suggest or at least question some aspect of human morality (and/or what it meansto be human). All of these episodes let audiences fill in the answers to life, if there are any. I mean, what would you do if a little joke here and there would gain you adulation and laughter, while also getting rid of all the people who ever insulted, hurt, or otherwise bothered you? I’ve got a long list.
But … Sukenick playfully-seriously argues that if “fiction” imitates life, or we see it as “a form of make-believe … a way of lying to get at the truth,” well, thatline of thinking is “palpably stupid.” Making something up in order to express some kind of truth? Is that what narratives do? All those TZ stories are made-up, fantastical, supernatural, science-fictiony, imaginative, fake.Plato warned us about fake stuff (including rhetoric). We see and understand only the illusions visible to us on the shadows of our cave walls. We should instead seek truth, he argues. Plato communicates this message, however, via narrative and narrative structures, such as his infamous,fictionalized Socratic dialogues and a story here and there (Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and in Phaedrus, the horse-drawn chariot that rises higher and higher, closer and closer, to the Divine, to Truth).
With a hearty nod to Plato and his methods, Sukenick, in his book Narralogues, suggests that narrative is just a way of talking to someone (even if that “someone” is yourself). Narrative is “a way of getting at, adding to and communicating, among other things, what may be true while at the same time it’s just-talk.” He makes this point in Socratic-style dialogues that also tell a story (two men are out walking near Old Jerusalem in “Gorgeous,” Sukenick’s spin on Plato’s Gorgias). As “just talk,” conversation is a two-way passing of time and thought, but it is also naturally argumentative, he explains. By argument, Sukenick does not limit “talk” to judicial, for-and-against discussions; deliberative, choose-a-solution debates; or pass-the-time conversation (judicial, deliberative, and epideictic rhetoric, respectively. Sukenick means very broadly an exchange of ideas, which I understand as basic communication, basic language, and basic rhetoric. We are, after all, story-telling creatures.
In a fictional narrative, however, the layers get a little more complicated than a conversation. Rhetorican James Phelan puts it this way:
“… narrative can be fruitfully understood as a rhetorical act: somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened. In [fiction], the rhetorical situation is doubled: the narrator tells her story to her narratee for her purposes, while the author communicates to her audience her own purposes both that story and the narrator’s telling of it” (Experiencing Fiction, pp. 3-4).
Phelan, of course, refers to a single, simple layer of narrative. For example, the premier episode of the new TZ presents a fairly straightforward, 3rd-person, omnipotent narrator: the camera. Its view stays on the main character, with occasional, and creepy, close-ups of other characters (who knew that cherub-faced Tracy Morgan, for example, would look so ominous in close-up?). The “narrator” idea, however, gets more complicated when the series narrator, Jordan Peele, interprets, muses, and further creeps us out in a meta way.
What truth, then, arises from the argument made in “The Comedian”? For stand-up comics, “the truth” touches on what comics do and how they do it—what any artist, or human, for that matter, does when creating, sharing, talking, telling stories, living. I’m not the first to suggest that underneath the greatest, funniest comedy lies the tragedy of life. We laugh so that we don’t cry. Is that the argument, or case, being made by the episode’s writer-comic, Alex Rubens? Perhaps. What’s the argument being made by CBS, which expects me to keep paying for its streaming service? I mean, how else can I watch another updated narrative, Star Trek: Discovery? CBS makes the case that if I like this first TZ episode, I’ll keep watching. That’s profitable (or fruitful, in Phelan’s terms) for all of us.
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