Institute for Travesty,
Comedy, and Humor Studies
Comedic Subgenres
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White Christmas:
A Preliminary Definition of Christmas Comedy
A working draft for Christmas, 2024
By Paul Grawe and Robin Jaeckle Grawe
Work in progress
© 2024
It’s been 70 years since the first showing of White Christmas in 1954. The Bing Crosby-Danny Kaye production became an instant extravaganza success so typical of the Big Band Musical Comedies of film’s first Golden Age. But White Christmas became something much more, one of the Holiday Classics, one of the must-sees of American culture. Still today a perennial rerun favorite in the Christmas time, it is this season scheduled for re-release in some theatres (Brie Stimson, Fox News, December 21, 2024.)
Hollywood had learned long before White Christmas that Black Friday applies to the theatre world as it applies to the retail world. The best talents and the highest budgets were earmarked every year for the same season, and when television came along, television reserved time for the repeated Holiday Specials that eventually accumulated the greatest mass audiences of theatre history.
It is entirely fitting, then, in trying to understand Comedy as the Great Box-office genre, the genre that affirms success and survival, to attempt to define what special kind of Christmas Comedy evolved in the Mass-Media Era. Inherent in that idea is the premise that the Mass-Media Era is something now past, superseded by much more niched media playing to the ideas and demands of much smaller, more specialized and limited audiences,
Throughout the twentieth century, some critics found it easy to criticize the film industry for foisting secular ideas on a fundamentally religious celebrational season. However, it could also be argued that the Holiday Specials did preserve something of religious significance while simultaneously meeting the challenges of box-office receipts success.
Occasionally it also happened that a show which had a very different genesis was nevertheless adopted into the Holiday Classics repertoire. Such, for example, was the case of The Sound of Music, arguably the most successful Christmas Comedy of all times though originally not conceived as particularly appropriate to the holidays. Presumably such adoptions indicated that Christmas Comedy properly defined would include works that never mentioned Christmas at all.
Comedic Sub-genres
In a series of articles in recent years, the Institute for Travesty, Comedy, and Humor Studies (ITCHS) has published at ITCHS.org “three-disc” definitions of a number of comedic sub-genres. Each disc is based on a quadrilateral of four analytics and subsequent syntheses of the analytics. The methodology of these sub-genre definitions is followed below in a first attempt to define Christmas Comedy à la White Christmas.
To define Christmas Comedy, we will need to define its characteristic three discs: its “Special Language,” its characteristic “Other (or Oppositional) Plot Forms,” and its characteristic “Spirit.”
Christmas Comedy’s Special Language
We begin then with Special Language. Traditional light comedy’s special language is humorous language. Other more specialized sub-genres of Comedy-in-general typically deviate from this norm by creating special language which is not inherently funny but is appropriate to the restricted sub-genre. Thus, war comedy can be funny (say in Hogan’s Heroes) but often isn’t (for example, The Monument Men). Instead, special language particularly appropriate to comedy about war is substituted as its highlighted and definitive special language.
What, then, is definitive special language appropriate for Christmas Comedy? We posit an answer that the special language is language appropriate to consideration of gift. Specifically, we posit a fourfold division of the gift theme into Giving per se, Receiving, and Sharing.
That, of course, is only three, not four analytic subheads within Gift. It would be easy to argue that there are only three, that the three cover the whole universe of Gift, and that a quadrilateral analysis is thus both impossible and irrelevant. It is important to underscore this way of looking at things.
But for our purposes, there is indeed a fourth analytic, and from the above argument, it should be easily apparent that if there is a fourth, it is much harder to recognize and when combined with any of the three already mentioned, it will easily become invisible, and its partner will seem to be purely itself. This proclivity in combination to disappear is the ideal of quadrilateral emphasis on a “Natural Intensifier,” a fourth element that is real but not immediately apparent and thus in combination is easily ignored.
Our Natural Intensifier analytic we call Transcendence. Its adjectival form is probably Transcendental, and that gets it easily confused with other philosophical and religious technical terminology. The Transcendence we are positing, therefore, needs to be carefully defined not to be confused with these other uses of the word.
Key to understanding our use of Transcendence (note capitalized as a word being used with a specific, non-dictionary, proprietary technical definition) is its etymology which depends on the Latin prefix, trans. In many other philosophical and religious contexts, the trans- in transcendental is defined as “beyond.” And in fact, in Latin, trans- often can be understood that way.
Our meaning of Transcendence stresses going across some border rather than beyond some border. At the philosophical level, our Transcendence means crossing over from one dimension to another dimension.
And it turns out that getting across the border between dimensions is necessary for completed giving. I can sit in my own world with perfect magnanimity and give for all I’m worth. But if I don’t get across a dimensional border that simply leaves the gift sitting with me in my own isolated dimension. Think about my writing checks on my own bank account. But if it turns out the bank I’m drawing the check on accepts and distributes checks only in my dimension, then I can write and cash checks, but no one else can receive them. To Give, to Receive, or to Share requires some crossing of a border somewhere unless the parties to the gift already share a dimension for the gift to pass through. Someone having an account in my bank would be an example of a shared dimension, thus allowing a receiving transfer of checks.
Combination of Dominant Pairs
So we now have the required four analytics of a quadrilateral: Giving, Sharing, Receiving, and Transcending. Quadrilateral analysis, the combination of independent variables, takes it from there.
Taken two at a time, four analytics produce exactly six synthetic combinations. These six can be used to produce circle diagrams, each with six separate sections representing one of the system’s two-unit combinations. Three of the four analytics can each be graphed in a half circle. But the fourth analytic is then best drawn in alternating segments. We choose to put the Natural Intensifier, in this case Transcendence, in alternating slots, and the result can look like Fig. 1.
Christmas Comedy Special Language Circle
Fig. 1
Note that Fig. 1 also posits what we call “Rubrics.” Each Rubric is put adjacent but outside the section to which it corresponds. Our Rubric is what we think best summarizes the combined pair which is indicated inside the section.
Synthetic Dominant Pairs within Special Language
As we turn to the six alternatives within Special Language dominant pairs, it is well to give particular attention to Transcendence as the Natural Intensifier that can often fail entirely to be seen for itself. Transcendence again is the crossing over into a new dimension.
We have already presented the Special Language Circle of Gift in Figure 1, along with Rubrics for the circle’s six sections. The Transcendent possibilities are in alternating sections. Transcending is found in Enhancement (Sharing and Transcending), Elegance (Giving and Transcending), and Appreciation (Receiving and Transcending).
Beginning with Enhancement, one can share something, and the sharing is nothing more. Two college graduates share a two-bedroom apartment, thus being able to share the rent. There’s nothing wrong in just sharing, but by itself, Sharing can seem a little thin. We can make the sharing more valuable by adding that both roommates can thus afford a more upper-class location than either could afford alone. Such a secondary purpose is often called synergy. The same energy not only cuts the individual’s bill but also allows a more prestigious living space. Sharing has become less thin.
But now, let us consider Transcending occurring as an equal partner with Sharing. One partner or the other crosses over some boundary. For example, the two roommates were also roommates in college. One comes from an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York, while the other is from small-town mid-America. The New Yorker is convinced that given her friend’s talents, living in a nice New York neighborhood is the necessary key to her success. The New Yorker has lived in posh circumstances, but now she chooses to move across a boundary separating posh from non-posh. She also accepts a much lower monthly rent than she can afford.
Clearly, the new combination has become considerably more dramatic, and the drama is largely provided by the decision to cross a border.
The combination of Sharing and Transcending we have given the Rubric, Enhancement. Things have been enlarged and become more valuable than the simple decision to share. Probably the risks have been enhanced as well, and one hopes that the faith behind the New Yorker’s decision is fully justified.
Similarly, Giving alone is just Giving. But now we move on to the synthetic combination of Giving and Transcending. If someone crosses over a boundary in order to be able to give, the Gift has been increased in cost to the Giver. Presumably the Giver has chosen carefully or more carefully than just giving would indicate. And things that have been carefully and well chosen exhibit Elegance, our Rubric for this combination.
It may be suggested that sometimes someone can choose with care and yet not choose well, perhaps because of ignorance of some important factor. Even in such a case, it is the result that may be inelegant. The gift and the giving themselves remain elegant because the giver has bothered to cross into a new dimension.
Consider an ardent young man giving his beloved an engagement ring which happens to be a family heirloom in his family. There is, of course, the excitement of romance. But our young man hasn’t stepped over any boundary; he may even have carefully abstained from crossing a boundary given that his mother has demanded use of the heirloom from her family.
Consider instead an elderly old guffer who determines to use a jewel he got on sale when some tourist-town jeweler went of business. So far, for all we know, nothing across a boundary here.. He’s always thought the blue was a wonderful match for his wife’s eyes. Great, synergy, but not boundary crossing.
But what if the old duffer has always considered his wife’s hands beautiful. But now with age the family tendency toward arthritis is making itself apparent. So never having thought of rings as an appropriate gift between oldsters, he now crosses that border. Maybe no one will ever know. But if his wife suspects the special care involved in crossing the border, the ring has taken on a new dimension of value and to that extent has become an elegant gift.
We move then to the third transcendent possibility, Appreciation, the synthesis of Receiving and Transcending. In a recent rendition of Mayflower, Priscilla Mullins briefly advocates to Rose Standish that receiving is also blessed. It is perhaps an ironic moment for American culture in that Americans after the Mayflower have always been proud to be self-sufficient, and that tends to make them poor at receiving any gift.
In literary history, of course, Priscilla Mullins is best known for a 19th century narrative poem in which she appears. Rose Standish has died and Miles Standish has become stricken with Priscilla. So he asks his friend, John Alden, to act as a go-between, an awkward decision since John has admired Priscilla evidently for some time.
Nevertheless, John accepts the task and takes Priscilla aside to make Standish’s plea. This is one of the great moments in American romantic history, and presumably it has everyone’s close attention, but so far, it is just a proposal, and Priscilla has a simple choice of receiving or rejecting.
Priscilla, however, goes beyond and crosses a clear, demure boundary. Her reply, “Speak for yourself, John” has become an American commonplace. The first gift was rejected, but crossing a strong decorum border, Priscilla received in advance, a complication which hundreds of thousands of Americans can cherish as their inheritance as descendants of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins.
There is a sparkle in transcendent things. Describing the non-transcendent combinations is much more prosaic.
Non-Transcending Pairs
Sharing and Giving can both be seen as gifty.
Giving a gift is obvious.
Sharing isn’t quite so obvious. If sharing is just cutting a loaf of bread in two and each taking half, that sharing doesn’t particularly count as a gift at all. But if sharing means two people deciding to interact with one another year after year with similar expectations of success and failure, each is definitely giving something of value in agreeing to share.
With giftiness in both analytic partners, Liberality is an appropriate Rubric for Sharing with Giving.
Receiving and Giving have always been seen as creating reciprocity. Reciprocation is apt as a Rubric.
Receiving and Sharing can both be forms of receiving, making Acceptance a good Rubric.
Again, just cutting a loaf of bread in two doesn’t make the sharing and receiving. But agreeing to share the future with someone for good or ill is as important in receiving the gift as in giving it. Proverbially, it has always been known that two hands make for lighter work and two heads are better than one, a gift that keeps on giving and a receipt that keeps on receiving.
As the Special Language Circle for Christmas Comedy, the Gift circle strongly advocates that issues of gift will always steal the Christmas Comedy show from any humor dimension that may also exist in the same play. Christmas Comedy can have a humorous dimension—note especially Danny Kaye’s antics in White Christmas—but that dimension is totally gratuitous for the definition of the sub-genre. Christmas Comedy without a Special Language feature focused on Gift is simply not Christmas Comedy at all, however interesting or humorous.
A Special Consideration for the Gift Circle
Technically, all we have done with the Gift Circle is to divide it into potentially dominant pairs of analytics. We can describe a particular Christmas Comedy then as one of six alternative approaches to handling gift issues.
From an entirely separate perspective, we can also consider the Special Language dominant pair as a suggested formula for comedic success. Thus, in the Enhancement variation of Christmas Comedy, Sharing and Transcending are a recommended success formula.
The Second Disc, Other or Oppositional Forms of Action
We will now be going on to discuss the Other Forms, or Grinch Circle, forms of action that work toward defeating Christmas Comedy success. The Special Language Circle becomes a success formula circle for Christmas Comedy while the Other Forms circle becomes a circle of potential ways to defeat Christmas success.
Aristotle’s definition of tragedy in the Poetics does not leave a place for such analysis of opposing plot elements, but in recent centuries, drama routinely provides important space for counter trends against the main plot and action direction.
Opposed Plot Forms move in other directions than the direction of comedic success and/or survival. Since we are talking about Christmas Comedy, which of course has its origin in religion, we can take a major clue from historical Christianity’s tendency in favor of the phrase “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil,” (a redaction of Ephesians 2:2-3) as the routine opponents of the godly life.
If we accept this clue, we again have a triad rather than a quadrilateral, and again that seems to suggest that there is no fourth alternative and that we are on a false trail leading nowhere.
But again, we can remember that Natural Intensifiers tend to be recognizable only with much increased attention and that in combination with any other analytic of their respective sets, Natural Intensifiers tend to disappear allowing us to think that we are looking only at a very pure form of its synthetic partner.
What then could be the routinely overlooked fourth analytic of this quadrilateral set? At the philosophical level, we are more likely to be able to detect that the greatest and most insidious of oppositions is precisely the opposition of the Self that thinks it is running the righteous or appropriate offense against the determined defense of Opposition. How often has it been insisted on that someone is their own worst enemy?
The full quadrilateral then is The World, The Flesh, The Devil, and The Self.
And like the Gift quadrilateral, this Opposition quadrilateral, can be graphed as a circle (See Fig. 2). We will call this the Grinch Circle. The named is self-explanatory in the phrase, “The Grinch who stole Christmas” (Dr. Seuss). The Grinch Circle contains the philosophic syntheses representing six main ways Christmas can be stolen.
Grinch Impulses of Christmas Comedy Circle
Fig.2
Synthetic Ways to Steal Christmas
The World and the Flesh: This combination, if it wins, typically results in a victim who wanted a Christmas success instead getting the coal-in-the stocking alternative of becoming Secularized. Forget every insistence of Christmas as anything ideal. If you have to, just go through the secular motions of buying gifts, attending the office party, getting together with relatives you really don’t like and really don’t intend to try to like, etc. If the victim mainly loses to the Flesh, there are all kinds of alternatives from sheer gluttony on Christmas cookies to sheer orgies after or during the office party.
The Devil and the Self: (Placed opposite Secularized in the Grinch Circle). The Devil is of course a fierce advocate for not doing whatever is better than the worst. He’s the famous Father of Lies but also the infinitely creative mischief-maker who can turn the inevitable success into the unavoidable disaster at the drop of a hat. The Self tends to be best in calling a spade something other than a shovel. Put the two together, and they are one of the most fearsome fighting pairs in history. And their strongest attack is routinely a seemingly plausible argument which becomes a constant, nagging Challenged condition that blocks Christmas. The Challenged life never gets anywhere, but it doesn’t just give up either. Instead, it remains in constant fighting tension.
The Devil and the Flesh: Placed above Challenged on the Grinch Circle, Endured represents a somewhat different defeat in which the victim manages a stiff upper lip but little more. The synthetic combination of the Devil and the Flesh is two exterior enemies who separately or together are routinely thought of as fiery and fierce. The victim of the two combined will almost inevitably argue that in light of the fierceness and fearfulness of the attack, endurance was really quite an achievement in itself. But it won’t be a victory.
The World and the Self: Opposite the Grinch Circle from Endured is Surrendered. The two are opposite because one has the stiff upper lip and the other hasn’t. The surrendered victim has done just that, surrendered and given up to the “inevitable”. The oppositional forces involved are the World and the Self, the great impersonal outside foe and the great absolutely centrally internal foe combined in struggle against Christmas success. How can one win against such an attack all the way along the line from internal subjective to external objective opposition?
That leaves two synthetic forms, the opposites Devil and World and Flesh and Self.
The Devil and the World: Loss to the Devil and World is perhaps epitomized in Accommodation. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em is something else, namely Secularized. If you can’t win, adjust is the watch word of Accommodation. Victory is not contemplated against the Devil and the World, two very powerful but both external forces. Much easier to blame it on these objective others and then accommodate.
The Flesh and the Self: And finally, the victim can lose to the joint attack of the Flesh and the Self, both of which appeal to internal subjective factors. For some, the Flesh is a blonde, for others it’s a brunette, and for some it’s a redhead. There’s no accounting for taste, other than to say that it depends on the Self. Losing to the Flesh and the Self routinely looks like a very easy and fulfilling victory, and it is therefore labeled the Self-Fulfilled defeat of a possible Christmas Comedy.
With normal human psychology, all six of these routes to defeat are typically recast as something other than defeat, normally recast to some variation of the idea that it was the best that could be done given the opposition. Going on the offensive, human psychology quickly turns the argument on its head and accuses anyone thinking that these are defeatist routes as religiously biased.
We would rather avoid this imbroglio, which can be avoided if we recognize that we are defining Christmas Comedy, that comedy in all its sub-genres celebrates success and survival and is always on the look-out for oppositional forces opposing the comedic success. If there is Christmas Comedy, there has to be the possibility of Christmas defeat and failure.
The Third Disc, Spirit
And that leaves only the Spirit disc to be articulated for our three-disc definition of Christmas Comedy. This discussion is a preliminary sketch precisely because we will not be completing the Spirit disc! Of all three discs, Spirit is overwhelmingly likely to be the most controversial and contentious.
The question of the quadrilateral range of Christmas Comedy’s Spirit would be in any case a matter of extraordinarily fine critical judgment. There are just too many nominees for slots in the quadrilateral. Does the Spirit of Christmas Comedy have analytic of Awe, Wonder, Love, Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Peace, Joy, Exaltation, Grace, Mercy, Hope—or have we forgotten one or more others?
And again, we come up against the thought that we’ve done all the work for nothing, because, of the three discs, it is the Spirit which is the great abiding thought-feeling of any work within the sub-genre. How then can we just turn our backs on the whole question of Spirit. Special Language provides moment by moment high points in the development of the work as a whole. Opposition provides tensions that make the dramatic work in fact dramatic. But it is Spirit that is the key in which the whole is written, the foundation of the melody that remains often throughout a lifetime after viewing a great dramatic work. Without Spirit we are lost, asking after the film is over, “What’s it all about, Alfie.
But we have come this far. And happily, there is a solution for understanding White Christmas as Christmas Comedy. As long as the final quadrilateral has as one of its analytics Peace, we need go no further. For Peace is definitely the Spirit of White Christmas and its deep abiding interest in American cultural history.
And unlike the other two quadrilateral discs, it is routine for the Spirit disc not to look for a synthetic pair but only for a single, dominant Spirit. Spirits are not compromisers. They are typically quintessentially themselves and just themselves.
What compelling argument forces Peae as a Christmas Comedy Spirit? The original Christmas story is predominantly found in the Gospel of St. Luke along with Matthew and John. Luke, called by the Apostle Paul the Beloved Physician was clearly of the Greek intellectual elite of the first century. And as a Greek, he is of course also the only non-Jewish author of New Testament scripture.
Later Christianity repeated Luke’s account verbatim at Christmastide. Moreover, the Crèche scene, based largely in Luke’s Gospel became the pictorial version of the Christmas story. Crèche scenes are still perhaps the most typical of Christian statuary, with the baby Jesus in the cradle, with Mary and Joseph, with the ox, the ass, and the donkey, and less centrally with typically three wise men of the East.
Many will object that we have left out important figures. And of course, we have. Crèche scenes routinely also feature shepherds and angels. But Luke’s account focuses on these characters first not at the stable but on a Judean hillside. The shepherds are the audience, and above the hilltop the angelic choir is giving its most prestigious premiere performance.
And the word for that performance before shepherds is the great public proclamation: Peace. Shepherds had almost no social status of their own, but as audience for the original transcendent proclamation, they stand in as proxies for humanity in general.
Crèche scenes recall that the original story is technically tense, divided between quiet, private adoration and absolutely spectacular public proclamation to a world that had never known what it had always sought, Peace.
So Peace is in the Great Tradition of Christmas Spirits, and we’ll bet on Peace in the final four Spirits of Christmas Comedy.
Practical Embodiment in White Christmas
Great art conceals art, and there is a great deal in White Christmas that conceals its relationship to our definition of Christmas Comedy. But with respect to Spirit, there is nothing about White Christmas that conceals White Christmas’ Spirit of Peace and steady insistence on Peace as an abiding concern in American affairs. We then start where we normally finish, with Spirit rather than with Special Language.
The opening scene of White Christmas is set in ravaged, snow-covered Europe on December 24, 1944. For the original American audience, a decade later in 1954, the scene remained vividly and hauntingly alive with a great many men in the audience being able to recall a similar scene in their own lives.
Artillery flashes along the horizon intermingle with the crash of shells much closer in. The men of the 151st Division are seated in a bombed-out auditorium to listen to Bing Crosby in the role of Capt. Wallace singing on a ramshackle stage.
Clearly Peace is the last thing one can find, and yet at the same time and just as clearly, “White Christmas” (from Holiday Inn, 1942) delivered in the Crosby croon style is in music Peace personified. According to his nephew, Howard Crosby, his uncle recalled that 1944 performance as “the most difficult thing [he] ever had to do [in his] career,” fighting “to get through the song with 15,000 guys in tears and not break up myself.” (Brie Stimson, Fox News, December 21, 2024).
Crosby had by this time established himself as an American institution, quite explicitly an American institution of confident yet humble, unruffled matter-of-factness that could easily stand for Peace in a world at war. In my German-American family, he was known as “Der Bingle,” the nickname affectionately given him by his German fans and eventually adopted by the general public. (The “le,” or simply “l” ending as in my cousin Ernstl, the son of Ernst or Liesl in The Sound of Music, simply means “little.” Note the relationship to the humble aspect of Crosby’s art.)
Crosby’s “White Christmas” has never been out of American fashion since.
Within the first scene, White Christmas clearly points backward to an American Peace disengaged from Europe: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas Just like the ones I used to know.” And as the camera pans the soldier audience, it is clear that every soldier—the 151st is scheduled for deployment at the front the next day, Christmas—is looking for that inner Peace as its own personal salvation through the hell of combat to come.
And simultaneously “White Christmas” looks forward past the hell of battle and carnage, and in fact it is that looking forward that has been the signature of American involvement from the beginning: “May your days be merry and bright And may all your Christmases be white.”
By 1954, the world had been technically at peace for nine years—except, of course, for the Korean War, except for the Iron Curtain, except for the Soviet Union establishing itself as a second atomic-weapon super-power, except for the uneasy post-colonial rumblings throughout “third-world countries” and particularly in Viet Nam.
Americans in the ‘50’s under a President who had been Commander-in-Chief in Europe in December 1944 were keenly aware that Peace was still allusive, and they responded wholeheartedly to the sense of soldiers seeking their own inner Peace whatever the external circumstances.
“White Christmas” is the keynote, and the film plot from there is simply the working out of finding what one can of that inner Peace. The challenges are many. For the Haynes girls, Peace will require transition from the successful professional sisters act they have perfected to a double family success that probably scares them as much as it attracts them. For Wallace, the search for Peace has already found profound and extensive professional entertainment success, but his closest associate is convinced that it has left him miserable. For the close associate, Davis played by Danny Kaye, there is a similar dilemma of professional success, inner insecurity matched with a quite conscious insecurity to do anything more than flirt with chorus girls. And for the beloved major general commander of the 151st, who was recalled stateside effective December 25, 1944, there has been a long day’s search for self beyond command that so far has only revealed inadequacy and resignation closely akin to the surrender we have already considered as a fundamental defeat of the Grinch Circle.
All these challenges artfully intertwine and in characteristic dramatic fashion seem increasingly unresolvable—only to all meet in drought-stricken, 49-degree Fahrenheit Vermont on December 24 some indeterminate year possibly as late as 1954.
But the 151st has reassembled itself in typical GI, can-do fashion at the General’s near-bankrupt inn. Back in dress uniforms, they have come together to make the general’s dream at least a one-night realty. And, of course miraculously, the world plummets into the whiteness of a normal Vermont Christmas.
Critics have always considered it typical Hollywood schmaltz.
The alternative is to see it as a consistent Spirit of Peace, never in this world achieved in more than temporary stays against confusion but nevertheless so palpably real that a whole nation’s efforts can be summarized in the single word—a word whose meaning stretches from the pastoral America of 1910 to American graveyards stretching from Normandy to the North German Plain to grade schools of the 1950’s intermingling air-raid drills with the longer-established curriculum.
Peace then is the pervasive and still-abiding Spirit of White Christmas even 70 years down the pike of the American Experiment. Presumably Americans insisting on seeing White Christmas again and again are again refreshed to think they can still share the Spirit.
Turning Back to Special Language
Spirit is the overriding burden of the particular comedy as a work of art. And as such Spirit is in some sense a constant presence but it can only be apprehended by the audience as a progressive development from moment-by-moment realities of the script and directorial embellishments. The moment-by-moment development is largely accomplished through specially highlighted momentary aspects of the play, which we generally refer to as special language.
In light comedy, the Special Language tends strongly to center in particular word units which we may call jokes or even punch lines. The special language of Christmas Comedy tends to be much more complex. Instead of punch lines, Christmas Comedy contemplates issues of gift, and the real issue in a particular giving situation may be intricate and far from obvious at the moment it is dramatized.
Let’s start by considering each of the four analytics of the Gift Circle without trying for the moment to make the more advanced decision which of the four are the dominant pair. In White Christmas, as in much Christmas Comedy, there is something to be said for all four analytics.
Giving looks from the outset to be quite central to White Christmas’s concerns. The action beyond the flashback introduction to war-torn Europe on Christmas 1944 very quickly resolves itself to a decision to give. An old army buddy of Wallace and Davis’ has written a letter asking the now-prosperous producer-entertainers to look in on his sisters who are performing in a nightclub nearby in Florida.
The request oddly comes from a soldier nicknamed Dogface, and we even get to see a snapshot of him as a very ordinary and undistinguished guy. It is something of a shock then that his two sisters are extraordinarily put-together, attractive, and talented entertainers. What started out as something of a grudging gift quickly becomes a welcome diversion for executives a little too focused on each other’s weaknesses.
Getting the girls out of a jam with the local sheriff soon follows as the kind of gallant gift that qualifies a budding romantic hero. And that conveniently leads to the two guys and girls hopping the same train to New York, again something of a gallant gift of the two executives deciding on a joy ride instead of confronting their more serious disagreements directly. While their action can be seen as more gallantry, it also has a significant amount of male willingness to share this new experience with one another and more importantly to share at some significant inconvenience with the girls.
Romantic giving and sharing, becomes progressively assumed and subordinated in the rest of the film, but in between, there is the additional gift that the guys do not get off in New York but rather end up accompanying the girls to their new gig in Vermont.
And at that point, the romantic giving theme backs off in favor of giving to General Waverley, the men’s division commander on Christmas Eve 1944. Waverley has not adjusted well to civilian life, having poured his life’s savings into a rural inn which by the fifties has failed to become the tourist destination the General had hoped. He is reduced to the role of janitor-handyman trying to make ends meet and desperately hoping for times to improve.
It is only a short distance from recognizing the challenge to Wallace finding the answer in arranging a full-scale variety show at the inn with the entire 151st division (something like 15,000 men) to attend on Christmas Eve. If not all 15,000 will attend, the publicity of the announcement on television in New York may nevertheless decisively advertise the inn among affluent New Yorkers.
And that becomes the crux of complication to the extent that such a showbiz extravaganza can afford to have complication. It is possible to reinterpret the publicity to be for the benefit of Wallace and Davis, and one of the girls, Betty Haynes, has heard such a rumor from the phone-call-overhearing inn housekeeper.
It must be noted that we are still dealing with the gift issue. But the issue is now addressed from the possibility of shrewd, self-interested masquerade. Betty breaks off what seemed a promising relationship with the almost-confirmed bachelor, and Wallace is left without a clue why this is happening to him. Happily, he is thoroughly committed to the gift and its full implementation and his bachelor habits allow him to move forward seemingly imperturbably.
Other than Giving
Reviewing the same aspects of plot, we should be easily able to see significant amounts of Sharing and even of Receiving. The 151st collectively shared Christmas Eve and the horrors after it as 1944 turned to 1945. The same 151st now shares doing something for “the old man.” And in doing so, they reestablish the camaraderie sharing of the previous decade. Wallace and Davis share of themselves and of their mission with the girls who have become more than playthings.
General Waverley is at the epicenter of Receiving, and he does it with a grace befitting his rank. And reviewing his troops in Vermont as he reviewed them in Europe, he demands that they accept from him his profound gratitude and pride in them and in their accomplishments.
The Dominant Pair
But if we ask overall what is the dominant gift circle language of White Christmas, the obvious answer is Giving closely followed by Sharing: Sharing deadly combat and “White Christmas” hope, sharing looking up girls who are Dogface’s sisters, sharing escaping out a window and sharing Vermont, sharing concern for a has-been General, sharing a show, sharing the camaraderie of the 151st—maybe we’d even have to reverse the order: Sharing and Giving.
In either order, Sharing and Giving comes under the Rubric, Enhancement. Everything in White Christmas is enhanced: the special Christmas Eve of ’44, the meteoric rise of Wallace-Davis, the romantic conquest of both, the 151st love and respect for Waverley, his reciprocal love and respect, and even snow on Christmas Eve as a totally gratuitous miracle.
There’s still, of course, Transcending, and White Christmas has some of that too, rounding out the full Special Language Circle and adding at least a little of its own sparkle.
The 151st has crossed the boundary between sea and land and passed boundaries so routinely since as to not notice them.
Their commander, Major General Waverley, has long since passed the boundary of dealing with men rather than reading a rule book. Sergeant Davis has passed over the boundary separating the enlisted ranks from officers in order to work with Wallace. And each of these boundary violations has been meant as a gift and not a mean one, as an elegant and costly gift.
Later in the film, Wallace and Davis cross one professional boundary after another in giving through entertainment. They get sidetracked to Vermont in a series of gifts that required their entering new territory. And in Vermont, they decide on a bizarre and costly gift for their former commanding officer, depending for success not only on their crossing into new relationship but also carrying the 151st with them.
All told—which hasn’t been here—we confidently choose Giving and Sharing as the dominant pair of White Christmas’ Special Language. All four of the Gift analytics are prominent, and individual viewers of the film may add up the relative dominance somewhat differently than we do. But if Giving and Sharing win out, as they do in our analysis, then the synthetic texture of Special Language for White Christmas is Enhancement.
Opposed Forms of Action
And that brings us at length to Opposed Forms. Compared to establishing the synthetic combination of dominant Special Language analytics, Opposed Forms can be short work.
The Flesh, the World, the Devil (the conventional triangle) plus the Self. Of the four Opposed Forms (The Flesh, the World, the Devil, and the Self), can we dismiss any as hardly relevant to White Christmas?
We’d propose The Devil. There are a certain number of Devil May Care moments in White Christmas but the master demon himself never makes a personal appearance nor are there Devil surrogates like the Grinch or Scrooge.
Is there a second unlikely nominee? We’d suggest Flesh.
Yes, a good deal of the early parts of White Christmas exhibits a certain amount of female flesh. But that kind of flesh is rather impersonally professional in the girls themselves. In Wallace, that kind of flesh is dismissed almost with contempt, and with Davis, it is smirkingly admired but going nowhere.
We get to see a number of tables at high-end night clubs which presumably employ top-flight chefs. But significantly, the tables we see are typically empty. We can forget Flesh as Gluttony. A liverwurst sandwich is more the hallmark of consideration for the gastronomical needs of the Flesh.
And similarly, if we go through the seven deadly sins or our personal equivalents thereto, we may almost find their antitheses. How about a fleshly compulsion? Try that against Danny Kaye as Davis considering proposing to Vera-Ellen as Judy Haynes. Don’t try too hard, especially on Davis’ side.
If we turn to the General, we don’t find a man addicted to anything, rather a clear-eyed realist who has commanded men in battles from Anzio to a bombed-out auditorium somewhere near the Rhine. He is on the edge or over the edge of surrender, but he is not consumed by anything of the Flesh, not even tempted to final athletic prowess by making a ringer in horseshoes.
And the men in dress uniform in the Vermont dining hall are men with a shared camaraderie and purpose which simply reflects those non-fleshly concentrations of 1944.
Which of course leaves us with The World and The Self as the two dominant Opposed Form possibilities for White Christmas.
Without ceremony, the film opens with a world at war. It is a World that can be ironically cruel, here a world that sends men to the front for battle on Christmas Day itself, a world in which the beloved commanding general is arbitrarily relieved of his command just as his men are preparing to go forward, a world in which the general is chastised by his own superior for not preparing men at this late hour on December 24 when in fact the men are preparing themselves at the characteristic and deepest level of American fighting forces in World War II.
The World continues to be itself back home in America, providing a winter wonderland of Florida beaches where people’s lives can continue in their own climate-unrelated confused ways.
Shifting northward to Vermont, the World has the possibility of busybodies listening in on phone calls they know they shouldn’t listen in to and mishearing because they are ashamed enough not to listen carefully to the whole conversation.
The World provides for rumor, for misunderstanding, for heat without light, and for failure where success seemed obviously waiting around the corner.
It is all ingeniously interwoven as art, but the art is largely in making such routine expectations of the World interesting enough to see even the first time through.
The World is writ very large in White Christmas.
And since it is paired with Self, the Natural Intensifier of the system, it would be easy to write that World—and nothing but World—dominates White Christmas’ Opposed Forms.
Self as Opponent
Self nevertheless remains the main opponent. Self was the opponent to conquer before moving out on December 25,1944. Self is the opponent who is making Wallace empty rather than fulfilled by professional success. Self has Davis advocating chorus girl relationships at the same time he himself is terrified of commitment. A self-righteous Self gets in the way of Betty Haynes’ ability to believe in Wallace. And Self has gotten the General head over heels in debt as he flounders around with a Self that has lost its sense of direction with its loss of command rank.
Plot and character are both slimly sketched in White Christmas, which can easily be passed off as a song and dance extravaganza. But to the extent the show centers on Christmas Comedy, its synthetic Opposed Form is Challenged.
Summing Up White Christmas
It is thus quite straight forward to find the three discs centrally at work in White Christmas from Enhanced (Giving/Sharing) at the Special Language, momentary level; Challenged (World and Self) at the oppositional level; to Peace at the Spirit level.
Putting it all together formally, White Christmas is Christmas Comedy. But that starts with its being comedy, which is the assertion through a repetitive pattern of a faith in the success and survival of humanity. In White Christmas that comedy is the great shared comedy of America coming through the Second World War as a united people bent on Peace. Peace is the goal in bombed-out Europe. Peace was the goal in the always white and snowy pastoral America. And Peace is still the object in a multifarious and increasingly complicated world of responsibilities after the war. The repeated pattern is of Peace achieved as a temporary stay against the Challenging confusions of the World and the Self in that complicated world.
We have only one move left to have full-blown Christmas Comedy, special Language to provide the building blocks for success from moment to moment. All four of the Gift analytics become building blocks of the work as a whole, and we might leave it at that. Or at least in our own estimation, we can go further and say that the basic texture of Special Language as key to success is Enhancement.
With equal emphasis on four strong analytics, we arrive at the conclusion that White Christmas is a Christmas Comedy building on the Special Language interest in all aspects of Gift to achieve success, recognizing challenging opposition whether on the battlefields of Europe at Christmas in 1944 or in America at home in the 1950’s, but moving with determination in the search for Peace as a private and a social American reality.
Alternately, with acceptance of the dominant pair of Giving and Sharing, we arrive at the conclusion that White Christmas is a Christmas Comedy building on the centrality of Giving and Sharing and thus for Enhanced living for success, even when strongly and consistently challenged, moving with determination in the search for Peace as a private and social American reality.
A note on The Sound of Music
It is easily possible for a particular film to be analyzed successfully within more than a single comedic sub-genre.
We have earlier suggested that The Sound of Music is a Christmas Comedy. Yet, ITCHS has published an analysis of The Sound of Music as Spring Vitalist Comedy. The movie was released in March 1965, and thus was released at a season appropriate for the analysis already presented. Yet it has become a perennial Christmas season favorite, airing on ABC yearly since 2002.
Since it is useful in considering any definition of a sub-genre to have at least two members of the sub-genre with seemingly different emphases to check the definition against, consider Sound of Music as also a Christmas Comedy.
As Christmas Comedy, consider Sound of Music in Special Language emphasizing Giving and Transcending, and thus being Elegant. Consider that its Oppositional Forms are the Devil (in the form of the Third Reich and its Anschluss of Austria) and the Self (in Capt. Von Trapp’s case the wounded Self, unable to cope with his wife’s death, in Maria’s case the Self that has wanted so much to be a good bride for Christ when her calling is actually quite the reverse.)
Spirit is again a special problem if we refuse to assert the full quadrilateral. But the film’s Spring Vitalism is closely related to the concept of Joy: in Spring the world joys itself in rebirth. In Sound of Music, Maria’s inherent joy in Christ puts the convent’s tranquility to shame and forces the question of what to do about Maria. It turns out that Maria let out in the world, brings joy everywhere and converts hardened opponents to their own forms of joy.
In a nutshell then, as Christmas Comedy, consider Sound of Music as Elegantly opposed by challenging forces of Self and the Devil, which challenged state is unable to mitigate Joy, the Spirit of the film.
Other sub-genres of Comedy considered by ITCHS:
Stagecoach, John Wayne, and Redemption Comedy
Romantic Comedy: John Ford/John Wayne’s Hondo
A League of Their Own: Reconciliation Comedy
Dark Comedy: Comedy in a New Mood
Four Seasons: Variations in American Vitalist Film Comedy