Jiří Suchý

Graduation date 23 May 2002

Lecture by Jiří Suchý  

Jiří Suchý
Humour as a Defence Mechanism

There are countless inhabitants on our planet – just humans add up to five billion! And each of those five billion thinks that being human is a kind of privilege that elevates him above the other inhabitants of our planet, such as hippos, mayflies, cats, sparrows… – I am not going to list them all here. Perhaps it truly is a privilege. Theologians speak of an immortal soul endowed only into a human being, and if they are right, it is indeed a strong argument for claiming the superiority of man over other beings.

I also believe that man has many privileges in this world, but they are not always deserved. As for the soul, I think, in concord with theologians, that I have it. It calls on me sometimes and its name is conscience. Other times it calls and I call it a feeling. When I make a good song, I call it talent. In short, it manifests itself in various ways, and that confirms its existence.

However, I know of another attribute of the human soul – something that is denied to other animals. It is laughter. The guffaw of the Black-headed Gull is about as close to laughter as a crow truly calling for a cow. A person’s laughter is also only a sound, but unlike in the seagull’s case, it is conditioned by a joke. You won’t make a seagull guffaw with an anecdote! According to Konrad Lorenz, some animals have a sense of humour, but the question is what we consider to be humour and what do they. (The animals.)

I will rely on my own experience, not because I consider myself an authority on humour, but because it is the experience I am best familiar with. I’ve been prone to laughter since I was a kid. Such people are called “gigglers”. I’m not educated enough to decide if it was a gift or a deviation, it could be both at the same time; endowed with this deviation, I wandered my life with obviously greater ease than the gloomy fellas. I laughed without giving any weight to it, but later came to realise that this quality has formed my worldview, which I then began to cultivate in a completely planned and conscious manner. And so I came to conclusions I would like to present to those willing to listen to me.

We don’t know the origin of laughter. It would certainly be interesting to find out who was the first to laugh, and it would be even more interesting to find out why. All we know is that the need for laughter manifested itself in humans in the distant past and it never went away. And now let’s ask the question: Does a person really need laughter to live? Is the ability to laugh necessary or dispensable? When I was young, me and my colleague Jiří Šlitr, we kept making one mistake: when it came to laughter, we were fundamentalists and we considered people who couldn’t honestly laugh to be a little inferior. Today, I know a number of serious people whom I have not seen laughing, and yet there are no doubts as to their mental qualities. Although – who knows what it really is about: General Laudon was said to have never laughed in public, but his loved ones noticed that when alone, he sometimes gave away a heathy laugh. But even if he didn’t laugh, there could be no doubt about his military qualities.

So we could conclude that the ability to laugh is something extra, a kind of pleasant but useless thing. This would be the case if there were no circumstances in which this ability becomes extremely important. So I’ll summarise them in an essay I called

Humour as a Defence Mechanism.

I believe that humour has significantly helped our nation to survive that chronic adversity of the past. And perhaps we owe the adversity for the gift of humour, a gift none can deny our nation wields. In the Semafor theatre, in the play My Heart is Zimmer frei, there is a German tourist complaining that his fellow citizens lack a sense of humour. And I say to that man: They probably don’t need it. It’s a one-liner that people sometimes laugh at, but I truly mean it.

Let’s look back to the times when the Czech nation was in deadly peril, but suddenly began to raise its head. Then, in those Austro-Hungarian times, humour turned into a weapon. Initially, the weapon was not abundant, but there was one cannon of considerable calibre: Karel Havlíček Borovský.

While their heresy
the Czechs tight kept
they had heaven in Bohemia
and hell after death.
Once the God has sent you
our dear Ferdinand
we have hell in Bohemia
and heaven after death.

This is one of the many epigrams Havlíček wrote to insult the nobility and bring laughter to those who would not dare to write such a thing themselves, but for whom Havlíček’s words spoke from the bottom of their hearts.

But there was another man who used Austria-Hungary as a source of great fun: Jaroslav Hašek. We consider Karel Havlíček Borovský a hero and pay homage to his moral qualities, but with Hašek, things get more problematic. He fought the monarchy in pubs, and sober as a judge he was not. And yet he was a genius. He created the character of Josef Švejk, a cunning man who used in the Czech struggle against the oppressors methods familiar to the Czech mentality, methods we can be both proud of and ashamed. We, who have lived through several kinds of oppression, know that our man, when he has nothing else left, defends himself by making fun of the enemy. And it was Josef Švejk who became a symbol of this Czech approach to harsh reality.

Yes, another hero of the Czech anti-Austrian defiance was made up. The character was created sometime after 1910 – on paper. But in the person of Jaroslav Hašek, that character had already lived for much longer. Let me give an example:

In a restaurant – because where else – there was once a debate about whether or not the night porter in the U Valšů inn was an informer. Jaroslav Hašek took it to find out. At that time, Russian troops launched an offensive near Galicia, and the Prague public reacted by spreading a rumour that Russian could already be heard as close as Náchod. Jaroslav Hašek then decided to stay in that inn U Valšů and registered himself as a merchant, born in Kiev and coming from Moscow. The police came to take him that very night, so the porter’s jig was clearly up. During the interrogation, Hašek justified his actions just as Josef Švejk would: “I wanted to make sure that the registration of foreigner was properly carried out in these war times.” He then spent five days in prison for this prank.

Who else could have created the tragicomic character of Josef Švejk, a small Czech man pretending to be a total simpleton, lying, using trickery, feigning loyalty and not really caring at all. With such moral armament, Švejk fights the gigantic Austrian military machinery, fights for survival and eventually succeeds in his struggle. I do take up the task of deciding whether the Czech national character bears certain features of Josef Švejk – this is still controversial to this day – but it remains a fact that the centuries of adversity have not yet overwhelmed our nation. Sorbs don’t have a Švejk – and look at them today!

Jaroslav Hašek was a master of belittling. Our people were also rather crafty belittlers. Let’s recall that famous incident – Emperor Franz Joseph on the just opened Prague bridge. A photograph of this event was published by a Czech magazine with the subtitle A stroll on the bridge, and since then Franz Joseph became been called Franz Stroll – the story is still remembered as a proof of Czech folk humour. That’s the Švejk in us. In times of oppression, it is useful to act like Švejk – it helps us survive. However, in times of freedom, it is a bit of a disaster. It’s a tax – a tax paid by the nation to Josef Švejk for our ability to survive.

When Austria was on fire and a comedy magazine joked: “How are you, Austria?!!!” and an echo answered: “Not good, not good…”, even former Austrian helped assisted in its demise. In Vienna, he was one of the comic characters, such as Larifari, Stabrl, Lipprl. It was Kasprl, who became the Revolutionary Jester in Pilsen, acting under the direction of the puppeteer Josef Skupa:

Vienna beats Bohemia
like a hooper beats his hoop,
Vienna keeps wondering
why we won’t stay out of loop…

… the jester sang in a charitable puppet theatre. And then there was Karel Hašler, a patriot who did not hesitate to resort to humour during the demolition of Austria-Hungary. All these jokettes spread faster than the serious issues, and the nation laughed and it worked out to its advantage. It made it, October 28 came and the nation survived.

But soon, another threat appeared on the horizon. Adolf Hitler and his fanatics. Czechoslovakia was in jeopardy and a war loomed. Every day, new unhappy news stirred people’s consciousness, the army was about to take up arms and fulfil its mission, and on the stage of the Liberated Theatre, two clowns tried to make people laugh at the desperate situation.

Starting something, take this one
You were big and I was brave
Take a look at the Goliath…

… sings Little David from the Book of Samuel of the Old Testament in their jazz song. A little later, this song of theirs was heard on the Voice of America, but with different lyrics:

Ammunition, guns that slay
Must be firmly kept at bay
Stop the railway!

Voskovec and Werich were other fighters who used their humour as a weapon. With regard to inscriptions locomotives: Räder müssen rollen für den Sieg, they responded with a song Stop the railways. They managed to disappear to the United States in time and continued what they started back at home. However, their pre-war songs remained here and they were like a support line for those who applauded them in theatres. People sang them, gramophones played them and the Voice of America broadcasted them.

However, our people were self-sufficient in humour, and that the crucial message here. During the war, an incredible number of anecdotes emerged among the folk. It is not known who thought of them first.

– After a great naval battle in the Baltic, where the German fleet suffered heavy losses, two sharks meet. One raises his fin and shouts: Heil! The second one goes: Have you lost your marbles? – I am sorry, that’s all the German meat in me.

It was a great pleasure to use the shade of swastikas to make fun of those who put them up. Anecdotes played a large part in keeping the nation from becoming faint-hearted. And there was another strange phenomenon: the more eccentric youth began to engage in very absurd deeds, calling their actions recese, a type of eccentric joke based on shocking the public with senseless behaviour. It was a bit like Dadaism of the First World War, which made it possible for a while to forget about the war. Writing nonsensical short stories, visiting castles in historical costumes, unveiling a memorial plaque to a man who had never lived – this was shocking the public and the recesists felt good about it, and good feelings were scarce at the time.

The war is over, freedom is here, but alas, it has not lasted for long. Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was aware that the communist bloc would not be complete without Czechoslovakia, and what followed is all too well known. And there was another golden age for anecdotes, for which the Ministry of the Interior announced a Golden Bars competition, as it was then called. But the anonymous authors of the anecdotes were not afraid to have at it with the almighty police, who then gave themselves a kinder name – Security. There were so many jokes about the Security that perhaps a new one was thrown on the market every day. This inflation of jokes turned the dreaded police into simpletons wandering the streets of Prague in trios: one who could read, one who could write, and the third fella, an illiterate moron guarding the two intellectuals. Their relatively high income was explained by our people in a humorous way: it was said that the police were receiving special benefits – “laughing-stock allowance”.

The recruitment of new members was described as follows: The newcomer is stand in front of a wall, in which there are two holes – one round, the other square. He is given two objects: a sphere and a cube. His task is to get these two objects to the other side of the wall. Depending on how he does this, he is then classified as a smart policeman or a strong policeman.

People were making illegal copies of the Black Barons novel, watching Horníček and Werich, until the latter was banned from creative activity, and there were many rumours circulating that there were five enemies of socialism: spring, summer, autumn, winter and kulaks. Karel Marx apologises: Proletarians of all countries, I am sorry. Finally, the party’s secretary-general joins the country’s most successful entertainers – his legendary speech is passed hand to hand around the republic in the form of flimsy, secretly made recordings. Any respect is gone and the nation is having fun.

However, I would hate to skip one important moment in the life of our nation – a moment when humour was faced directly with tanks, with combat technology. If I had not yet convinced you of the power of humour and its importance for a nation’s survival, 21 August 1968 will perhaps be the strongest argument I will make here.

Armoured columns are wandering around Czechoslovakia. They wander because people have switched the street signs and station signs, thus making the maps completely useless. Dead people start falling to the ground, but thousands of signs and leaflets appear on the walls and the nation laughs. No army has ever encountered something like this before. Nobody is shooting at them, everyone simply laughs at them. This was another great moment in the history of Czechoslovakia – they sometimes happen in our history, but, sadly, then soon disappear again. Doesn’t that resemble Švejk and his way of fighting the Austro-Hungarian armed forces?

But as usual, the military machinery combined with the betrayal of our then political leaders eventually won, humour was made illegal, but in illegality, it flourished with unprecedented force. The anonymous creators of the anecdotes and jokes had it all the easier because the objects of their attacks were ridiculous in themselves:

– Do you know what the best two-component lacquer is? Biľak – quer.
The bastard just clings on for dear life.

This is how the Czech public reacted to the unpopular Vasiľ Biľak. For the next twenty years, the nation nurtured the hope of freedom with humour until the freedom came. It was November 1989. And once again, beautiful inscriptions popped up everywhere:

– Teacher, you won’t have to lie anymore.

– Saint Agnes, protect us from the Czech Women’s Union!

– The saying “he lies through his teeth” was paraphrased by a well-known author as “the television lies like the Rudé právo newspaper”.

However, this time, the party without humour lost. In those tense times, newspapers were full of all sorts of ideas and suggestions for where to go next. And they had humour as well. I remember someone fighting against the Žižkov Television Tower, tarnishing the panorama of Prague, and another chap was fighting the new Smíchov tunnel, which he considered useless. And then there was this third opinion. An opinion beautifully Czech in its nature: the TV tower should be cut and stuffed into the tunnel.

What to say in conclusion? People tell political jokes and anecdotes even today. However, they have lost the special charm of the forbidden fruit and they feel a little awkward. A good political joke seems to require oppression. After all, in the 1950s, the satirical weekly Dikobraz spewed hundreds of political jokes against Konrad Adenauer, President Eisenhower, capitalist imperialism, the American potato beetle, kulaks and manufacturers – but they were jokes even their authors couldn’t laugh at. A political joke for royalties and made to order simply doesn’t work. Dikobraz experienced an unprecedented success just that one time. It was when cartoonist Malák made a rather toothless joke on the title page, but the more attentive reader did not miss the fact that all the figures – and there were a lot of them – had heads strongly reminiscent of members of the then government. Zdeněk Nejedlý in particular, with his wooden leg and a barrel organ, was met with a great response. That issue was immediately sold out, proving how quickly such a thing would spread. And also proving how important it is that a joke be created contrary to the wishes of the powerful. Such a joke then fulfils its purpose – the purpose I call Humour as a defence mechanism.

I end with a memory of Jan Masaryk, a politician whose wonderful sense of humour gave him something no other politician had: he was loved by people of all mindsets and from all parties. Jan Masaryk once said: I’m happy when people laugh. And he added: We are the best when we are at our worst.

Nowadays, we sing a song in the Semafor theatre, which would be worth remembering in this context:

When evil times slash us with a dull sabre
We stop fighting as if commanded,
There will be peace and the nation will quietly tame
And we are wondering what is to come
We love each other, drinking from the same bottle
Suddenly, we rediscover our love
And once we realise the farce is over
The idyllic moment end with a blow to the head
Because we are always at our best
When thunder and misery are pounding at us
And so praise every danger
As it returns love to our souls…

I hope that you, me, all of us, we do not have use humour as a defence mechanism anymore, but rather nurture it just for fun.

Laudatio delivered by prof. Ivo Osolsobě  

HUMBLE ASTONISHMENT OVER A FEW SENTENCES OF JIŘÍ SUCHÝ

Delivering a laudatio is not the most grateful task – let us be warned by failure of the Beethoven-Schiller tandem, who dared to record a laudatio on joy, spark of the gods, but achieved something rather pontifically gloomy instead of a Dionysian, Apollinically joyful piece. We are about to sing an ode, yes, an ode to joy, the joy of music and the joy of theatre, even a joy of doing, discovering this and that, the contagious joy that has been here for… – I am afraid to count it out of superstition! – a joy meditated to us by Jiří Suchý.

Just to be sure, let us start with something more serious, a quote from one of the greats. ARTISTIC COGNITION IS THE HIGHEST OF HUMAN COGNITIONS, says one of the constitutional truths that inspired the very foundations of this school. It was vested into this school, perhaps directly into the stones of its central, oldest building, a building whose atmosphere he once breathed, the man whose statue now occupies this square. At that time a young student still, but already passionate, and at the same time an analytical reader, a reader of Musset, Byron, but also Mácha, and Dostoevsky soon, Plato, Hume, Comte and others, and of course Goethe’s Faust – Suchý’s Faust and Urfaust were not yet readily available – and he discovered this truth in one of the works of his youth, in his treatise ON THE STUDY OF POETICAL WORKS. This treatise, soon joined by the author’s other study, SPECIFIC LOGIC, this time focused on purely scientific cognition, thus predetermined much of what the arts and sciences were about to discover later, once they matured.

Vilém Mathesius, the founder of the famous Circle, who made a major contribution to this maturation in the coming years, say in the years of maturation, demanded, in the spirit of this programme, that the work of any such true discoverer or creator, just as rare in art as in the sciences, his struggle for knowledge, was stared at WITH RESPECT, WONDER and TENSION. It was worth staring, even in our case, or perhaps precisely in it, because exactly such a struggle, not only for knowledge, but for the very right to such knowledge, free even in unfree times, was led by Jiří Suchý. It was a struggle truly worthy of its legendary patron, St. George, a struggle with a hundred headed dragon, a duel conducted with the ease, naturalness and elegance of Cyrano de Bergerac, persevering and tireless. Well remembering the wise teachings of the other two of his great patrons, Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich, although less legendary, but closer to our times, the teaching DON’T LET US GET DISCOURAGED, – he heard that teaching when he saw this pair, not yet split, for the first and the last time as a spectator – he decided to follow it in all circumstances. Every time he was more than a little angry and would have liked to give up, he thought of those who would see his surrender as another triumph, thus making them very happy. No, Jiří Suchý never cared about handing out this joy to those people. By doing so, on the contrary, he handed out great joy to those of us who watched his struggle from a distance, watched him more closely WITH RESPECT, WONDER AND TENSION, and the celebration today is our way of expressing our joy and great respect, albeit somewhat clumsy, as our expressions tend to be.

If Jiří and Jan, and of course Jaroslav, Jaroslav Ježek, helped us survive with their songs and their five-minute contributions on the Voice of America, then Suchý, Suchý and Šlitr, Suchý and Havlík, and once again Suchý and Molavcová and everyone else, helped us survive what was to come next. It meant living sometimes in the dark or in the cold, but with good friends it was manageable to endure, albeit not always unscathed, and it was Jiří Suchý who helped us to find all those good friends completely outside the list of recommended acquaintances, and he helped us and those acquaintances rile up crowds of others. This was and remains the cornerstone of Jiří Suchý’s theatrical mission.

Jiří Suchý has long since earned his place in reading books, school curricula and even compulsory school reading. He has to come to terms with that, and he in fact already did. Fortunately, he is not alone in this, he was preceded long ago by Karel Hynek and, after all, by his co-author Karel Jaromír, and we must not forget Jan and Jiří as well. At least today we do not have to explain who Jiří Suchý was to any school-boy – especially not at this school. After all, in those times when freedom was scarce, candidate theses were written about him, and today, when exactly those theses are a thing of the past, he became a subject of doctoral theses. Either way, all those theses, in the past and today alike, culminated in a quote of an introspective statement – a perfectly concise and convincing analytical passage – from the work of Jiří Suchý himself. And such passages have always been more accurate and, with all the brevity and wit, deeper than the laborious and complex conclusions of theorists. “I am literally making a lot of mess and you could say that I am a scientist of my own literature,” said Jiří Suchý himself. However, he completely omitted that his highly professional competence is far from being limited to his own work as a topic that is closest to him for purely technical reasons. Even when he writes about other things or people and not only in those cases where he excellently characterises his closest collaborators, but also where he has immersed himself in more distant history and of course in theory as well, for example when searching for the ancestors of Czech musicals in his memorable Gramotingltangl programme, he knew how to say a lot in just a few words. A character theorist should well write down and read his definitions of the symbol promptly. And the author of the book The Theatre That Speaks, Sings and Dances should publicly admit, under the weight of evidence, that he borrowed this title shamelessly, or rather stole it, from some ancient programme of one of Jiří Suchý’s early plays, and that for him the title, the exact term, was simply a revelation when he read it there.

You are too au courant for me to remind you that “modern philosophy, hand in hand with general linguistics, research, etc., etc.,” were the words once written by Roman Jakobson to Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich, and we could send them a similar letter today, and if not to these two, then to their successor, Jiří Suchý. After all, if Roman Jakobson, as a linguist and polyglot, thought about alternating and switching codes, Jiří Suchý practiced, and not only practiced, but also theoretically justified the essentially bilingual principle of transitioning from one sub-code to another where he peppered his anxiously literary, cultivated and sometimes even subtly archaic expression with a colloquial, perhaps even a vulgar point, a suffix borrowed from dialect or a rhyme – we could find all the countless examples if we wanted. Wait: all countless examples? That makes no sense. Nevertheless, if Karel Čapek once convicted Vítězslav Nezval in his Arrest Warrant on Robert David of his own unique ability to swing in the crown of speech like a happy monkey, always sure that it could grab on the right branch mid-flight, then Jiří Suchý honed this monkey’s skill to virtuosity. He swings not only in the crown of speech, but in the crown of the whole galaxy, a universe of stories: condensed into the singularity of a single word, they explode through the potential infinity of the big bangs. We are then surprised that Jiří Suchý, an encyclopaedist – which he was a long time ago before even thinking about publishing his Encyclopaedia – uses words almost dictionary-like, not only versological, poetological, artistically-scientifical, theatrological, but also cosmological, almost theological, fortunately not seriously meant as they could almost be declared heretical. What else are his Chesterton trips to ortho-, hetero- and para-doxy, to the almost thomistic contemplation of major sins, to angelology, the study of angels, and angelmatics, the study of messengers and messages, including mystical postal deliverymen with a stamp affixed at the forehead, and into diabolic demonology in the already quoted Doctor Johann Faust, Prague II, Charles Square 4O, and in his truly devilishly conceived Mephistopheles!

About ten years ago, a book was published, the subtitle of which is better not mentioned, purely out of fear that we would overshoot the upper notes of our hymn. The book was written by Howard Gardner, a professor of cognitive psychology, the psychology of knowledge, at Harvard University, and in it he subjected to anatomy — and in part to vivisection — a fairly random selection of “exemplary” scientific and artistic creators. The selection included Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot, Martha Graham – and one other creative spirit outside these categories, although hopefully the most important – Mahatma Gandhi. Of course, the author, narrowly limited by his Harvard-centric view and, after all, his linguistic inadequacy, did not include Jiří Suchý among his anatomical subjects. He certainly wouldn’t be wrong if he did. All the features of these “exemplary creators” Professor Gardner lists there are a great rhyme to our laudatio. Let us at least be content with one single, characteristic feature used by Professor Gardner, which he calls childlike vision, the ability to see reality through the eyes of a child. “Exemplary creators”, that is every single one of them, draw inspiration from their ability to see their field with intellectual innocence, that is, free of intellectual heritage. Einstein himself, if we are to choose the intellectual creator of the heaviest calibre, discovered his theory of relativity only because he was able to play in a childish, naive manner with two concepts hitherto considered the most terrifying intellectual spells, space and time.

We have long known that the child’s naive vision is a defining characteristic of poetry. FOR EXAMPLE, POETRY IS EVERYTHING THAT MAKES THE CHILDREN LAUGH – this is how Jiří Suchý defines poetry. We have also long known that naive poetry is higher than reflective poetry. Even naive poetry can be reflective in all naivety, and reflective poetry, with all its reflection, or even by it and it, can be naive – that is what only Jiří Suchý discovered. And the fact that the naive, stubbornly poetic vision of children is the very basis of all discoveries is constantly confirmed.

It is almost blasphemous to remind at this school that, like Einstein once relativised the notions of space and time, so did Jiří Suchý – at the very beginning of his theatrical, acting career, he relativised another powerful spell, even a static calculus, on which until then laid the rock-solid foundation of theatre education, the very concept of professionalism. With his disarming, childish sincerity, admitting his own artistic skills and shortcomings – and that is the root of everything – he forced all practitioners and theorists to rethink and deepen the very foundations of their own field, of our field. Let us no longer engage in any sophisms and hear only the idea of Jiří Suchý himself, who recently revisited the topic at this year’s Thalia Awards when accepting a special Award:

Our theatre is perhaps really going down the drain if they have to give awards to me. As an actor, I am only able to play myself. I entered the world of theatre as an absolute dabbler, and all my credit lays in matters beyond my control. I only did what I enjoyed, what gave me satisfaction, not thinking of specific consequences. But I guess I brought a new tone to the theatrical events in our country, because otherwise, the Semafor theatre would not be such a popular topic of conversation. But I found that out only later, from the theorists’ reviews – I did not strive for it (the new tone). There were a lot of theatre buffs who came up with a new concept – I just wanted to be a comedian, I did the best I could and apparently I inadvertently started something new.

Either way – ARTISTIC COGNITION IS THE HIGHEST OF HUMAN COGNITIONS, especially if this cognition is also the knowledge of the cognition itself, and moreover, if it spreads joy, the miraculous joy of knowledge. Which is the case, if you haven’t guessed it yourself, of Jiří Suchý.

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