Martin Scorsese’s only comedy was a complete accident: “Hmm, I guess it’s funny”
Martin Scorsese is maybe not a filmmaker that you would associate with light-hearted movies, with the director being known for his grungy style that revolves around gangsters, criminals and the very worst of humanity. From Taxi Driver to Raging Bull, each story tends to focus on men with very fractured egos and notions of morality, becoming completely broken in their pursuit of greatness, connection or notoriety, sometimes destroying themselves and those around them in the process.
While they certainly have their comedic moments, from the drunken scene in The Wolf of Wall Street as Jordan Belfort tries to climb into his car or the ridiculous number of times that the characters talk about micro-processors in The Departed, ‘funny’ is perhaps not the key describing word you would use to describe his work. But even still, he manages to find humour in the darkest moments, something that surprised him after an unexpected reaction to one of his short films.
Once you make a film and release it into the world, it begins to take on a life of its own, evolving in meaning through each person who watches it and the many differing interpretations of its meaning. It could be something like Mother!, with the themes being widely debated as people interpret it as an allegory on climate change, misogyny and the act of creation. Or it could be the ending to Cache, with audiences endlessly puzzling over the hidden meaning of the final interaction that changes everything you just saw.
But for Scorsese, his 1967 short film The Big Shave had a similar effect, with the director being unable to make the first screening and being startled by the feedback that people had found it to be very funny. When discussing this, Scorsese said, “Taking myself very seriously, I made this six-minute film called The Big Shave. It was for the avant-garde film festival in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, and they gave us some money for it. It was 1967, the war was on. And I had this fellow shaving himself, and he starts to cut himself and bleed everywhere, but he keeps going, and then finally cuts his throat”.
Now, the plot sounds fairly dark, but also given that the darkness comes from a shaving mishap, you can see how people would find it funny. But Scorsese was surprised by just how funny people found it, with none of the darkness landing at all.
He explained: “Now, this is what Amos Vogel told me when he showed it at Knokke-le-Zoute. I wasn’t there. He said the reaction was amazing. People were angry. People were laughing, and I think laughing out of the horror of it, maybe. And then finally we showed it at the New York Film Festival here with the Godard film Weekend. And again, the reaction was hilarity. And I said, hmm, I guess it’s funny”.
There’s nothing better than discovering undiscovered qualities in something you created, with people finding something that even Scorsese couldn’t see in his work. Sometimes the most satisfying kind of success comes from something that was never expected to land, or lands in a completely different way than intended, showing that art can reach people in ways we never predicted.
