Twins, Toons, Humor and Instinct

[ssk7882]

No: HPFGUIDX 43271

Abigail wrote:

> I remain convinced that *it just doesn't matter* whether F&G are 
> bullies, because we were never meant to analyze their actions as 
> deeply as we do.

I'm sorry that you're not enjoying the discussion, Abigail, but 
really, I think it obvious that the issue does indeed matter to quite 
a number of people.  After all, if no one considered the question of 
any interest, significance or relevance, then the thread would likely 
have died out long ago, don't you think?

As for why it matters...well, we've had debates here in the past over 
whether or not Sirius Black suffers from PTSD.  Now, what does that 
matter?  Isn't it rather a silly discussion, when it comes right down 
to it?  After all, the wizarding world has probably never even 
*heard* of PTSD.  Sirius is not playing with a full deck in PoA -- 
that much is clear -- so why not just leave it at that?  Who really 
cares whether he does or does not fulfill the clinical criteria of a 
very specific real world personality dysfunction?

Well, lots of people do.  Many people find that topic an interesting 
one because it speaks to a question of character, and questions of 
character happen to be of great interest to a good number of people 
on this list.  We've also had discussions over whether or not 
Peter Pettigrew possesses *physical* (as opposed to moral) courage, 
whether or not Lupin is non-compliant, whether Hermione is gifted or 
merely driven, whether or not Ron and the twins are every bit as 
ambitious as Percy, whether Snape suffers from survivor's guilt, who
was kissing Florence behind the greenhouses, and so forth.  When 
these questions of character determine (as they often do with Snape, 
for example) how a character might behave himself when he is *not* in 
Harry's (and therefore the reader's) range of perception, then people 
often find them even more interesting -- perhaps in part because we 
realize that we'll likely never get to find out for sure.

I am sorry that such character discussions bore you, but honestly, 
there's really very little that I can do about that.  There are other 
threads, and if none of the topics currently on offer interests you, 
then you are always free to start one of your own.

I would like, though, to ask why you feel that my belief that the 
twins are canonically depicted as bullies is symptomatic of such a 
great depth of analysis.  A lot of people have expressed similar 
objections on this thread, and I've been having some real trouble 
understanding it.  What makes my reasons for believing that they act 
like bullies any more "deeply analyzed" than other people's reasons 
for believing that they do not act like bullies?

This came up in your response to the very first message that I wrote 
on this thread, too.  I stated that I didn't much care for the twins 
and that I thought they were bullies, and you wrote:

> You know, I've had the feeling for a long time that, as a group, we 
> tend to over-analize the Harry Potter books - at least past a 
> certain point.

Since you've now reiterated this claim, I'd like to ask you about it, 
because I must say that I'm finding it very difficult to understand.  
In what way is saying, "I don't like the twins at all.  I think 
they're bullies" over-analyzing the text?

After all, how much analysis does it really take to form a gestalt 
impression of a couple of fictional characters?  I wasn't aware that 
doing this was analysis at all, really.  I tend to think of it as 
just, well, *reading.*

Don't we all like or dislike certain minor characters due, in large 
part, to our impressions of the sort of people that they are -- 
impressions that we receive due to what we see them saying and doing 
in the text?  If called upon to explain our reasons for feeling, say, 
that Percy is pompous, or that Ginny is shy, couldn't any of us do 
that by citing canon?

That's what I've done on this thread.  I posted once saying "I don't 
like 'em.  I think they're bullies."  And then I posted again to 
provide some clarification, as well as some clinical definitions, 
because an awful lot of people jumped in to contest my claim that the 
twins act like bullies.  Since it seems quite *clear* to me that they 
are indeed depicted as rather stereotypical bullies, and since I 
thought that my arguments had been misunderstood, I posted a 
clarification.  But until now, that has been the full extent of my 
participation in this discussion.  Yet both times you have talked 
about "over-analysis," it has been in response to me in particular.

So that does make me feel compelled to ask: in what way do you feel 
that I have been engaged in such terribly deep analysis?  *Many* 
people over the course of the history of this list have discussed 
their feelings about the twins.  So what makes it "over-analyzing" 
when *I* do it?  

The obvious explanation that leaps to mind, of course, is that people 
just plain don't like what I have to say, and that they therefore 
feel compelled to dismiss it as irrelevant because in that way they 
hope they can make me stop saying it.  But surely that can't really 
be the case, can it?  That would imply that people find my reading 
somehow *threatening.*  How on earth could a simple observation about 
the behavior of a couple of minor characters in a work of fiction be 
so tremendously upsetting to a group of mature adults?  


Abigail wrote:

> Fred and George Weasly, as the chief suppliers of comic relief in 
> the books, tend to be responsible for most of these actions, but I 
> find it hard to believe that we are meant to read any insight from 
> this into their character. 

But a good deal of the rest of your message was then taken up with 
explaining, in quite a lot of detail, exactly what *you* think about 
Fred and George!  You speculated as to their motivations, and you 
analyzed their relationship with Percy, their feelings towards 
Cedric, and their feelings towards Draco Malfoy.

So where did all of that come from, if it didn't come from their 
behavior as observed in the canon?  You didn't just make it all up 
out of thin air, did you?

No, of course not.  I rather imagine that what you did was to 
extrapolate it from the gestalt impression that you have received of 
the character of the twins from the sum of all of their canonical 
appearances over the course of four novels -- very many of which 
are indeed, as you yourself have pointed out, written as comedy.

Which is precisely what I did.  So I'm having a hard time 
understanding in what way my interpretation is "over-analyzing," 
while your own (I assume) is not.  What makes your reading less 
analytical than mine?  

What is bothering me a bit here, I think, is what I am perceiving as 
a decided tendency for people to believe that their own readings are 
somehow more genuine -- more honest, more spontaneous, more natural, 
more unself-conscious, more authorially sanctioned, more canonically
supported -- than those of people who happen to have reached 
different conclusions from precisely the same canonical evidence, or 
than those of people who happen to have had somewhat different 
emotional responses to the same things.
  
Surely we all realize that different readers do respond differently 
to the canon!  If they didn't, then this list would be a very boring 
place indeed.  So why must people assume that any deviation in 
response must be symptomatic of someone having "thought too hard" 
about it? Why does the assumption seem to be: "My response is 
spontaneous and emotional and natural.  *Your* response is forced and 
ratiocinated and over-intellectualized?"

Take humour, for example.

Abigail wrote:

> With almost no exception, the humor in the Harry Potter books tends 
> to be broad and on the slapstick side. . . . [involving] actions 
> which, if one looks too carefully into them, are actually quite 
> rude and insensitive, but when you don't think of them too much are 
> very funny.

Well, but surely you can see that this is highly subjective?  *You* 
may find those scenes very funny "when you don't think of them too 
much," but by no means everyone shares your response.  In fact, 
wasn't that where we first came in?  With Jenny describing her 
mother's instinctive reaction to the Toffee scene?  

I didn't get the impression that Jenny's mother mulled it over before 
she decided that the twins' behavior there had been cruel and 
insensitive.  She didn't need to *ponder* it to feel that way, 
surely.  From the way that Jenny described it, I had received the
impression that it had been her initial instinctive response, just 
like laughter was your initial instinctive response.  

Nor, it would seem, is it even all that *unusual* an instinctive 
response.  Debbie and Eileen both reacted negatively to the scene as 
well.  So, for that matter, did I.  It didn't make me laugh the first 
time that I read it.  It made me cringe.  But a cringe is every bit 
as natural and spontaneous a response as a laugh, is it not?  

When people don't laugh at a joke, I don't generally assume that it 
is because they have "looked too carefully into them," because 
there's just not enough *time* for that, is there, when you hear a 
joke?  You hear the joke, and then you either laugh or you don't 
laugh.  When people don't laugh, I always just figure that it must be 
because they didn't find that type of humor funny.  

Eileen wrote:

> The ton-tongue-toffee made me feel sick, just really sick. I 
> couldn't laugh at all. And that was an instinctive reading, as 
> instinctive as any hearty guffaw at the "hilarious" situation. 

Yes, precisely.  And that's an incredibly *visceral* response, isn't 
it?  To feel physically sick?  There's nothing at all analytical 
about a sense of nausea.  Nausea is about as instinctive as it gets.  

Forcing yourself to laugh when you *don't* find something funny, 
now.  *That* would be "over-analyzing."

Humour is a notoriously subjective phenomenon.  Sometimes JKR's sense 
of humor matches up with mine, and sometimes it doesn't.  Sometimes 
the laughs work for me, and sometimes they fall flat.  I suspect that 
everyone has pretty much that same experience, although which types 
of jokes work and which don't varies from person to person.

But why would the question of whether or not the reader starts 
yukking it up the instant that the authorial LAUGH sign lights up be 
relevant to the question of whether or not we think that the twins 
are depicted as bullies?

Surely the claim here is not that if the readers find it funny, then 
it can't really be bullying behavior?  Surely not.  I can't see how 
that would make sense.  I mean, I personally find Crouch Jr.'s 
behavior throughout GoF incredibly amusing.  Yet I don't claim that 
this means that he isn't really sadistic.  I find Voldemort pretty 
funny in the graveyard, too.  But I don't claim that this makes 
Voldemort a nice fellow.  And not only do I find Draco's exasperated 
and sneering running commentary on Hagrid's classes quite 
entertaining as a reader, I also suspect that I would appreciate it a 
great deal as a by-stander.  I mean, if I were a student stuck in 
that awful class, feeding bits of lettuce to the flobberworms, then I 
would *love* listening to Draco voice all of the same things that I 
would be thinking about what a total waste of time it was.  But I 
still think that Draco's a mean little snob (not to mention a bully), 
and that Hagrid would be well within his rights and his authority to 
discipline him for mouthing off in class like that.  

So I'm not quite sure how the question of whether or not something 
strikes the reader as funny really relates to anything much other 
than...well, than to whether or not the reader happens to like or 
dislike certain types of humour.  

One argument, if I'm understanding this correctly, is that we cannot 
really deduce *anything* about a character's personality from a scene 
that is written comedically -- or perhaps this is only true if the 
scene is written as very *broad* comedy.  Dicentra has suggested, for 
example, that so long as the characters involved in a scene 
are "Toons," then we are meant to read the characters' actual 
behavior in that scene as in no way significant to their actual 
*character.*  

This, too, is very difficult for me to understand.  After all, a 
great deal of the series *is* written as rather broad comedy.  The 
Dursleys are Roald Dahl grotesques, and their treatment of Harry is 
ridiculously over-the-top -- and yet we still persist in reading 
them as abusive guardians, and Harry himself as someone who has 
suffered from an abusive upbringing.  The ferret-bouncing scene is a 
piece of slapstick comeuppance humor -- and yet we still read it (in 
retrospect) as a telling piece of characterization for Crouch Jr.  
The Fat Lady is not only figuratively but even *literally* two-
dimensional -- and yet we still view the slashing of her portrait as 
evidence that Sirius Black is angry, violent, impulsive and 
dangerous.  Lockhart is a cartoonish buffoon -- and yet when he 
threatens to leave innocent children to die, it still chills the 
blood.  All Magic Dishwashers notwithstanding, many people do read 
Voldemort in the graveyard as Toon Evil Overlord posturing before all 
of his Toon Worthless Minions -- yet they still feel comfortable 
drawing certain conclusions about Voldemort's character from his 
behavior in that scene.  JKR consistently depicts Pettigrew's fear 
in a rather cartoonishly overdone manner -- and yet we still view the 
question of what is to become of him in the Shrieking Shack as 
absolutely *vital* to the spiritual condition of the other characters 
involved.  And swaggering little Draco Malfoy and his two silent 
henchmen are pretty toonish themselves -- yet we read them as 
*bullies.*

Why should the twins alone be exempted from this dynamic?  

Even if one argues that they are themselves "Toons," don't the 
toonish scenes then just depict them as *toonish* bullies?  The TTT 
scene, for example, is definitely cartoonish.  It is not in the least 
bit realistic.  It's completely exaggerated, totally over the top, 
with Dudley backed against the wall and clutching his backside and 
whimpering, and then Fred and George coming into the living room and 
catching sight of him there, and immediately flashing a pair of "evil 
grins."  

The entire sequence is exaggerated for comedic effect, sure, and both 
Dudley and the twins are *definitely* written as pure Toon in that 
scene.

They are written as Toon Victim and Toon Bullies.

I don't see how the fact that the entire scene is written as a 
cartoon changes at all the nature of what is actually being 
depicted.  If anything, I would say that far from negating that 
depiction, the scene's exaggerated, iconic, and archetypical 
qualities *reinforce* it.  


Dicentra wrote:

> I think that reading HP without taking into account that some 
> characters are Toons ends up distorting the story. 

I think that it would distort the story even more if we were to 
assume that only the realistically portrayed scenes have any real 
significance or can be assumed to convey anything about character.
 
For one thing, if the "Toonish" scenes have no meaning that relates 
to the rest of the text, then what on earth are they *for?*  I really 
don't think that the story works very well if we discount all of the 
toonish bits as irrelevant comic interludes, included for no other 
purpose but to give us all a nice laugh before we move on to the rest 
of the story.  If that were really the case, then I don't think 
that the books would really be very, well, *good.*  

Part of what does make the books so good, IMO, is that the narrative 
succeeds in sliding across such a very wide spectrum 
of "toonishness," yet still keep the characterization and the 
thematic focus relatively consistent no matter where on that spectrum 
any given scene happens to fall.

Take the immediate aftermath of TTT, for example.  We've just had 
Toon Bullies and their prank on Toon Victim, complete with Toon 
Dahlesque Dursleys screaming and throwing vases at Toon Well-Meaning-
But-Ineffectual Dad, who keeps trying to make things better while 
only succeeding in making them worse.  It's very broad, over the top 
humor, down to flying vases and all of the shrieking.  It's a Toon 
scene, to be sure.

Then, immediately thereafter, we have Arthur Weasley coming home and 
berating his sons for having engaged in an action that could quite 
reasonably be construed as "Muggle baiting" -- and then Fred 
responding with an indignation that I've always read as sincerely 
startled.  The twins *were* Muggle baiting, whether they realized it 
or not, and I've always read Fred's indignation as proof that they 
*hadn't* consciously realized what their behavior really 
constituted.  It's an important scene too, IMO, because it will soon 
be followed by the Muggle Baiting at the QWC, in which plenty of 
wizards other than the Death Eaters themselves join.  The aftermath 
of TTT is in some sense a prelude not only to the QWC, but also to 
the Penseive sequences much later on.  It's one of the earliest hints 
of the moral darkening of the series as a whole.

TTT is pure Toon, but its aftermath is not.  The scene 
shifts "genres" there, so to speak.  Yet the characters are the same 
*characters,* and the event being referred to is the same *event* as 
the one that was written as pure Toon.  Frankly, I don't think that 
the sequence holds together at all -- it just doesn't make any 
narrative *sense* -- if you don't recognize that what the twins did 
in the Toonish sequence really *is* significant, that it really does 
serve as a legitimate expression of their character, that it really 
*matters.*  It happened.  It signified.  It *counted.*

Much of the series works in just this way, IMO.  If you discount the 
toonish stuff, then the other stuff starts not making any sense.  I 
just don't see how the story can hold together at all if you try to 
read the things that are cartoonish depicted as "not really 
counting," or as not relevant, or as in some other way divorced from 
the rest of the series.


> For one thing, you don't enjoy the jokes. 

I don't think that enjoying jokes is really dependent on viewing the 
behavior of the characters as insignificant or lacking in 
ramification.  I can get a good giggle out of Pettigrew's "I was 
a good pet" line in Shrieking Shack while still recognizing what is 
going on in that scene as fundamentally quite serious.


> For another, it adds dimension to characters where none exists--
> mostly negative dimensions--so you don't enjoy the characters. 

Mmmm.  Well, you know, Dicey, I really do take some exception to this 
notion that *I'm* the one who has been adding negative 
dimension "where none exists" to the twins here.  I wasn't the one 
who wrote them with bullying traits.  JKR was.  If that dimension to
their character really didn't exist, then do you honestly think that 
people would have become so hot and bothered by my bringing it up?  

Oh, no.  I really don't think so.  This debate as I've read it has 
mainly been one in which people have been arguing over what to *call* 
that negative dimension, or trying to excuse it, or trying to 
discount it, or pointing out all of the more positive dimensions 
which they feel mitigate it.  But adding dimension "where none 
exists?"  Oh, no.  I don't think that's what's really been going on 
here at *all.*

What I'm beginning to think is *really* going on here, actually, is 
that some people just don't feel that they would still be able to 
enjoy the twins as characters, or to find their scenes funny, or to 
feel personal reader affection for them anymore if they were to 
acknowledge out loud that the twins exhibit classic bullying behavior 
patterns.  

But I just don't know what to do about that, honestly.  I really 
don't.  I don't get it at all.  Why must characters be perfect to be 
liked?  Why must people feel compelled to defend an action *morally* 
just because they thought that it was funny?  Can't we acknowledge 
that actions can still be funny even if they are not good actions?  
After all, sometimes things that are downright *evil* can be funny 
(especially to me, as I have a very black sense of humour).  Can't 
people still enjoy characters even if they have been portrayed 
with some negative dimensions?  

It is mystifying to me.



-- Elkins