Fears of a clown

Thus proclaims the great comedian as he backs off in distaste from his own talent. The year is 1920 and the speaker is Charlie Chaplin, at that moment the most famous, even beloved living human being on Planet Earth. He can do no wrong. It is not enough. Charlie will not rest until the world accepts him as a serious artist.

Here is where it begins: The figure of the funnyman for whom “funny” curdles in the harsh light of success. Within Chaplin’s high-flown locutions is the DNA of every subsequent comic genius who has insisted he’s more than that, from Jerry Lewis to Woody Allen to Robin Williams to Jim Carrey.

The current specimen is Judd Apatow, the writer-director of “Funny People.” Apatow’s 2004 breakthrough, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” was about a 40-year-old virgin (Steve Carell). “Funny People” is about a comedian with cancer. This is what the culture calls artistic progress.

Perhaps the culture is mistaken, though. Or is it the comedian who errs? Who decides that laughter is a lesser response than the sigh or the sob? Why isn’t the gift of transfixing audiences with delighted surprise, with forging new connections from the absurdities of life, with undercutting pretentiousness and reminding us of the shock of the real, not considered a profound thing?

Perhaps the answer lies in a comedian’s psychological profile. The stereotype, of course, is of the class clown who will do anything for a laugh, with laughter standing in for attention and attention standing in for love. The competitive drive that fuels a racing mind can mask deep insecurity, always feeding, always hungry.

That drive can create great comic art out of isolation, resentment, and self-pity: Think of all the “little men,” before and after Chaplin, who have gotten laughs from exacting revenge on the pompous and complacent. The jesters of popular culture, comedians speak truth to power, but they can still hate themselves for not fitting in. That self-loathing can be expressed thusly: If I’m good at this, it must not be worth doing. Thus the bid for respect; thus Richard Pryor making “Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling.”

The more self-aware comic artists have made the desire to be unfunny their subject from time to time, with mixed results. Allen’s 1980 “Stardust Memories” remains one of his ugliest works, with the filmmaker painting as Diane Arbus-like freaks those fans who spurned his vapid Ingmar Bergman imitations (by which I mean “Interiors”) and clamored for the “old, funny Woody” to return.

The great 1940s writer-director Preston Sturges, on the other hand, channeled the urge into “Sullivan’s Travels” (1941), a serious comedy about a comedy director who wants to be taken seriously. As the title character, Joel McCrea disavows his box-office smashes (“Hey-Hey in the Hayloft”) to make a “true canvas of the suffering of humanity” - a drama about the poor called “O Brother, Where Art Thou.” After his travels land him on a chain gang, where he witnesses convicts laughing uproariously at a Mickey Mouse short, Sullivan experiences pop satori: Comedy is necessary. It’s an insight Woody Allen swiped for the climax of “Hannah and Her Sisters,” when his character finds his hypochondria washed away by the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup.”

The Marxes, by the way, never seemed to care whether they were geniuses; they and their lowbrow cousins, the Three Stooges, remain the true subversives of classic Hollywood comedy. Groucho and Harpo were adored by the intelligentsia of their day, but for whatever reason the praise never affected what they did on-screen. Perhaps being a brother act (as were the Horwitz/Howard siblings of the Stooges) kicked pretension out of the rumpus room early. That said, it was Groucho who codified the comic’s first rule of self-hatred: “I’d never belong to any club that would have me as a member.”

In fact, many of the comics who’ve gone serious have been loners, starting with Chaplin, who had partnered with his half-brother Sydney during their impoverished youth but who in America was on his own. There were successful funnymen before Chaplin, of course, but none with the unprecedented global delivery medium of the cinema and certainly none with the fawning admiration of all levels of society. When George Orwell calls you “a concentrated essence of the common man,” how does that not go to your head?

The mold was set by Chaplin but the rigidity of the Hollywood studio system, in which moguls owned their stars outright, kept comedians in their place. Those who tried to break out learned the hard way, as when silent star Harry Langdon tried to imitate Chaplin’s pathos and saw his career dry up overnight.

It wasn’t until the rise of Jerry Lewis in the 1950s and early 1960s - the solo, post-Dean Martin Jerry - that slapstick turned ambitious again. “The Nutty Professor” (1963) was a manic comedy laced with real anger and hurt; within the decade, Lewis would embark on the infamous “The Day the Clown Cried,” still never publicly screened, about a death camp comedian leading children to the gas chambers. (It would take Roberto Benigni and 1997’s “Life is Beautiful” to render the concept palatable and Oscar-worthy, if still immensely tasteless to many.)

The persecution of stand-up artist Lenny Bruce at the hands of censors and the law in the 1960s gave the culture its comedian-martyr, suffering for our sins of repression, and many of the ambitious comics since have worked from his template. Melding Bruce and Jonathan Winters, Robin Williams erupted on late-70s TV sitcoms and in performance like a volcano of the Id. On a stage, Williams can be a modern Mozart of comedy, free-associating with a wit, a quickness, and an unsentimental ferocity for which no word but “genius” seems appropriate.

In his films, though, Williams has often embraced sentiment to the point of sludge. The insightful comic acting of, say, “Good Morning, Vietnam” has been outweighed by the likes of “Patch Adams,” “Bicentennial Man,” and “Jakob the Liar” - Williams’s own “The Day the Clown Cried.” It’s not that the star can’t or shouldn’t do drama: films from “Moscow on the Hudson” to “The Birdcage” argue otherwise. But a movie like “Jack,” in which Williams plays a boy in the body of a man, is a mawkish cry for respect and, more than that, a bid to be loved.

In his footsteps, with somewhat more artistic success, have followed Jim Carrey (“The Truman Show”), Adam Sandler (“Punch-Drunk Love”), and others. If there’s a secret to making the leap from comedy to drama, it may lie in choosing directors who are mavericks rather than hacks. Bill Murray’s careful and very conscious move into arthouse territory has been managed through working with such singular filmmakers as Sophia Coppola (“Lost in Translation”), Wes Anderson (“Rushmore”), and Jim Jarmusch (“Broken Flowers”).

Judd Apatow is a writer and director, so he’s more in the Preston Sturges vein than a performer like Adam Sandler. Like Sturges, he takes a meta-stance in “Funny People,” fashioning a story about the people who make us laugh during their serious moments. As the Hollywood star George Simmons, Sandler turns in a perfectly fine dramatic performance, one that’s observant, truthfully bleak, and not much interested in whether we like him or not.

“Funny People,” in fact, is at its strongest showing how comedians can use comedy to nullify feeling, building walls between themselves and the rest of the world. (This is why Seth Rogen’s character will probably never be successful: He’s too invested in others.) There is, in fact, a tragedy to be told about the funny man, one that films as diverse as “The Entertainer” (1960), “Punchline” (1988), “Mr. Saturday Night” (1992), and Chaplin’s own “Limelight” (1952) have struggled to put on screen.

It is the tragedy of gifted selfishness, and “Funny People” wrestles with it, too. Yet it remains a difficult thing to pull off because the focal planes are almost impossible to resolve. The question remains: Why don’t funny people think being funny is important?

It is, of course. Great comedy and great drama both spring from the delusions of fictional characters, but they point in opposite directions. Tragedy makes small characters big, magnifies mistakes until they’re epic, flatters our own daily disasters by equating them with Fate. Think of heroes from Oedipus to Lear to Willy Loman.

Comedy, at its best, does the reverse: It cuts the powerful down to size and gives the common man a voice. Moliere’s Bourgeois Gentleman is revealed to be an officious twit, the generals and presidents of “Dr. Strangelove” are misguided buffoons, a Will Ferrell newscaster can be a blowhard marvel. The idiot savant is ennobled: the Nutty Professor and Happy Gilmore and Ace Ventura insist that surrealism and studied rudeness are the only sane responses to an insane world.

It’s through this endless clash between lowbrow and high, in fact, that culture itself comes - that standards are established and values assigned across boundaries of class and power. Of course comedy matters. If comedians themselves ever realize that, they may yet have the last laugh.

Ty Burr is a movie critic for the Globe. He can be reached at tburr@globe.com.