Vaudeville and Bellow: Together at last

Vaudeville is usually not the first association one makes when examining the works of Saul Bellow. While Bellow's comedic work is clearly funny, the comedy appears to emanate from the situations in which his characters find themselves. They frequently deal with the "crises of life" as in The Adventures of Augie March or the indignities of age suffered by a Holocaust survivor as in Mr. Sammler's Planet or the suffered indignities of the frailty of the human body that we see in Ravelstein. His treatment of uncomfortable situations frequently invokes a chuckle and an "aha" moment when the reader identifies with the plight of the character simply because the humor of the telling pulls us in to the character's inner circle, a place both familiar but yet far removed from our own personal experiences.;It is that very treatment of everyday situations and the "crisis of life" that was both the hallmark of vaudeville and Saul Bellow's comedy. Vaudeville took the everyday situations and drama of life in America at the turn of the 20th century and exposed it to examination, jokes and ridicule. It allowed newly arrived immigrants and middle class Americans to find inexpensive family fun and to find their commonality in the midst of diversity. Saul Bellow exploited those same themes in his comedic writing.;In The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow uses the vaudevillian devises of ethnic humor, comic sketches and monologues to create a story rich in the nuance of life in the America of the 1920s and 1930s. He used broad ethnic stereotypes juxtaposing of rich versus poor, stupid versus canny, smart versus dumb to illustrate the thinking of the day.;As the years advanced Bellow maintained much of his basic style of utilizing vaudeville devices in his comedy. His works continued to be infused with ethnic humor and the oppositional pairings so prevalently used in his earlier writings and in vaudeville comedy. However, the world had changed. The problems of assimilation experienced by the European American at the turn of the century gave way to the social upheavals of the 1960s and the problems of AIDS and the distribution of wealth and education in the 1990s and into the 21 st century.;Bellow continued to employ his hallmark style of simultaneously exposing differences and similarities through humor and biting wit. His methods of exposing truth through the jokes and "turns" of the vaudeville stage remained unchanged. Bellow's humor is more than just ethnic "schtick." His scenes utilizing monologues, comic images, slap stick humor and irony allowed Bellow to explore types and personalities in much the same way vaudeville did over one hundred years ago.;Bellow used the "joyful noise" he had seen in vaudeville to teach and inform. Through his unique sense of comedy combined with enlightenment, Bellow, like vaudeville, taught us the lessons of life and we didn't even know it was happening.