Is Moby Dick a comedy?

DiscoZombie

So I've been reading (well, listening to on CD) Moby Dick, and it's pretty hilarious. I always assumed it was a dramatic piece of literature, but it seems like practically a straight-up comedy so far. Am I reading it wrong? Am I missing something? Here's the plot so far:

dude gets the urge to go out to sea
dude finds an inn with a whale bone over the bar
innkeeper says dude is going to have to share a bed with a "harpooner"
innkeeper has a lot of fun at dude's expense with this knowledge
dude finally meets the harpooner. He's a crazy big scary painted shrunken head peddling cannibal.
dude freaks out
dude and cannibal wind up fast friends, cuddling in the morning
dude and cannibal go to a church with a pulpit shaped like a ship's prow, with a rope ladder and everything
priest gives a long-winded nautical-themed sermon
everyone looks at dude and cannibal funny for being friends
cannibal throws some guy ten feet in the air for being rude, winds up saving same guy from drowning
the pair wind up at another equally comical inn, sneak chowder from the kitchen, etc.
dude tries to get cannibal to open their room at the inn, cannibal doesn't answer, dude freaks out and gets the whole staff of the inn, figuring the cannibal is apoplectic
cannibal is just celebrating a pagan holiday by balancing a wooden idol on his head for 24 hours.
they get ready to go out to sea. cannibal sits on some sleeping guy's ass as if he was furniture. this is apparently normal in his culture.

so yeah, sort of a random place to stop but that's as far as I've gotten. There hasn't been any drama to speak of, really. It all seems rather slapstick and cartoonish. I'm not complaining, it's just not what I expected. Does it get super cereal later on?

LoveIsUnity

It's not so much that it's a comedy but that it subverts our expectations of what we expect from Moby Dick, that big fucking book that people are afraid of and only professors and shit read. I was talking to my friend about this recently (in the interest of full disclosure, we both teach college English), and we think there's a lot of Mel Brooks type moments in the book. You're not alone in finding humor in the text. The scene in which he has to share a bed is pretty hilarious...

Evil Multifarious

moby dick is not a comedy. it's just a really strange book. keep in mind that you're an anachronistic reader; your expectations of tone and narrative and style are not in line with Melville's time and context, even when authors were pushing literary boundaries.

it's usually not the brooding, serious mythological epic that most people perceive it to be.

Santa Claustrophobia

Evil Multifarious wrote: »

moby dick is not a comedy. it's just a really strange book. keep in mind that you're an anachronistic reader; your expectations of tone and narrative and style are not in line with Melville's time and context, even when authors were pushing literary boundaries.

it's usually not the brooding, serious mythological epic that most people perceive it to be.

Pretty much this. Try reading Don Quixote and understand it was satire through-and-through.

Khavall

Yeah, I mean.... it's not exactly a comedy, but the retarded idea that anything "artistic" or anything people read in english class is "serious" is erroneous as well.


Keep in mind that the post-modernistic art is formulated based on the ideas of dadaism, which is basically nonsense made art. There's more to it than that but I mean... the most influential piece of art is a urinal turned on its side with a joke name scrawled on it.


The way I think of it(as a musician) is that people are always surprised that, for instance, in the entirety of music history, music has been about sex, joking about sex, or about God. And when it's about God sometimes it's about sex too. It's super-obvious, but for some reason, people think that "Classic" means "Classy"

Essentially, People had a sense of humor back then too. It's not a comedy, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have humor or subversion.

Paladin

It's a pretty surefire way to endear yourself to the characters

Zombiemambo

Are humorous situations not allowed in surrius books?

Scalfin

Ishmael survives. Therefor, it is a comedy.

In other news, genre distinction are all Greek to me.

Trillian

DiscoZombie wrote: »

So I've been reading (well, listening to on CD) Moby Dick, and it's pretty hilarious. I always assumed it was a dramatic piece of literature, but it seems like practically a straight-up comedy so far. Am I reading it wrong? Am I missing something? Here's the plot so far:

dude gets the urge to go out to sea
dude finds an inn with a whale bone over the bar
innkeeper says dude is going to have to share a bed with a "harpooner"
innkeeper has a lot of fun at dude's expense with this knowledge
dude finally meets the harpooner. He's a crazy big scary painted shrunken head peddling cannibal.
dude freaks out
dude and cannibal wind up fast friends, cuddling in the morning
dude and cannibal go to a church with a pulpit shaped like a ship's prow, with a rope ladder and everything
priest gives a long-winded nautical-themed sermon
everyone looks at dude and cannibal funny for being friends
cannibal throws some guy ten feet in the air for being rude, winds up saving same guy from drowning
the pair wind up at another equally comical inn, sneak chowder from the kitchen, etc.
dude tries to get cannibal to open their room at the inn, cannibal doesn't answer, dude freaks out and gets the whole staff of the inn, figuring the cannibal is apoplectic
cannibal is just celebrating a pagan holiday by balancing a wooden idol on his head for 24 hours.
they get ready to go out to sea. cannibal sits on some sleeping guy's ass as if he was furniture. this is apparently normal in his culture.

so yeah, sort of a random place to stop but that's as far as I've gotten. There hasn't been any drama to speak of, really. It all seems rather slapstick and cartoonish. I'm not complaining, it's just not what I expected. Does it get super cereal later on?

Yeah, this book's totally Grape-Nuts.

SideAffects

IIRC, there is a part where they talk about farting at the front of the boat and everyone towards the back gets to smell it as the pass through it

Improvolone

Scalfin wrote: »

Ishmael survives. Therefor, it is a comedy.

In other news, genre distinction are all Greek to me.

RUNN1NGMAN

Improvolone wrote: »

Scalfin wrote: »

Ishmael survives. Therefor, it is a comedy.

In other news, genre distinction are all Greek to me.

Spoiler tags! WTF! Way to ruin the ending!

:P

L Ron Howard

I'm not an English Major or professor or anything, but IIRC, didn't Melville write lots of satires and comedies? I remember reading quite a few things from him here and there in my earlier lit classes in college that were actually quite funny, even in this day and age.

Delzhand

Scalfin wrote: »

Ishmael survives. Therefor, it is a comedy.

In other news, genre distinction are all Greek to me.

The forums need an "I see what you did there" emote.

DiscoZombie

Thanks for the thoughts, peeps. I guess it does just subvert my expectations. I find it funnier than a lot of books that are supposed to be comedies through and through. I guess that's one of the reasons it's such a well-known classic - if it can still be dramatic and poignant without sacrificing any humor. Just haven't gotten to anything particularly dramatic yet. I'm sure the audiobook actor's coloring my perception, too. He has a charismatic reading voice, but he makes it sound more like a campfire story so it's harder to take things seriously.

TychoCelchuuu

It's not a comedy but if you actually understand the book and then read it again only you pretend that it's a farce where everyone is an idiot except for Queequeg, the only half-competent person in the story, it's pretty hilarious. But no, it's not a comedy, it's a masterpiece and it's just hard for some modern readers tog et their head around it especially if they haven't read much Melville or his contemporaries.

DiscoZombie

Well, I get the morose state of mind that caused Ishmael to set out on his little journey to begin with, and I definitely related to that and didn't think it was funny. That was Chapter 1 though. The following 20 chapters have been zany hijinks with cartoonish characters. They're about to go out to sea though, I imagine there's plenty of opportunity for woe and misfortune ahead.