'They give birth astride of a grave," says Pozzo in Waiting For Godot. "The light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." Close your eyes and picture yourself giving birth astride of a grave. You shiver and moan. Your baby, once you've squeezed it out, drops six feet onto the ground. Oh yes, your mother was right. You should have gone private.
Beckett's magnificent line is an example of feelbad. Feelbad confronts you with the darkness, futility and awfulness of existence, but does it with such imagination, bravado, soul and wit that you find yourself exhilarated. Feelbad is The Smiths, feelgood The Smurfs. I rest my case.
Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York is a feelbad classic. I've seen it twice and urge you to do the same. Both times it gave me a mid-life crisis. But that's a recommendation. I'm 56. A mid-life crisis means I'll live to 112. It's a masterpiece of anti-formulaic, genre-busting, unmarketable feelbad art, one that deserves the most off-putting advertising strapline to convey its uncompromising, uningratiating vision. I offer up, in all humility: "Delay your suicide two hours to see this film."
If you haven't seen it, look away now, as I'm about to divulge the plot. Here goes: a guy dies. That's it. And, as the film makes clear, that's not just the story of the guy in the film, it's the story of everyone. Everyone dies. That's the only story there is. Thank you, Charlie Kaufman. Thank you, Sammy Beckett.
En route to the Big D, our hero, a depressed, self-obsessed director and hypochondriac, conceives an epic theatre piece on the subject of (wait for it, wait for it) the brutal awfulness of human life. But he never finishes his theatre piece. Of course he doesn't. This is feelbad. He just can't get to the end, what with constant interferences from life itself – which have to be included in the piece – and his own dissatisfaction and decline. Decades pass without his completing his work. The film's a sort of writer's blockbuster.
You may have heard that it's relentlessly bleak. This is not true. Feelbad doesn't preclude warmth or a sly and delicate humour. (That's why the ladies love Leonard Cohen.) I'm a professional comedy writer, so feelbad humour is a subject very close to my heart, which, of course, is just a few inches away from my wallet. I make my living supplying amusing stuff for popular consumption. I started my career writing jokes for the Two Ronnies, at a time when likeable, unchallenging, diminutive chaps like Ronnie Corbett and Ernie Wise were the giants of BBC Light Entertainment. You were instructed, when writing comedy, to provide three laughs a page. You were instructed, when performing it, to go out there and make them laugh. In other words, your motivation was to make the audience feel good, with comedy of a kind your maiden aunt would enjoy.
But Light Entertainment has transmuted, over the last three decades, into Heavy Entertainment. Darker it's got and darker. Basil Fawlty had rage but was still unmistakably farcical and funny. David Brent? There were times when his awfulness was so real you had to cover your eyes. And Brent was nothing compared with the gallery of grotesques in The League of Gentlemen, or the savagery in the collected works of Chris Morris, or the cruelty in Nighty Night. It is as if the smile has been wiped off comedy's face, to be replaced with an expression that's darker but somehow more truthful.
We're supposed, in these difficult times, to be crying out for comfort, for blandness, for kindness, for the smiley love of our mummies. But it doesn't quite look like that from where I'm sitting. For a start, nobody has a maiden aunt any more. She's doing unspeakable unmaidenly things with your bi-curious bachelor uncle, in the very living room where the telly's broadcasting Psychoville. "I've done a bad murder," runs a typical line from this series, now running on BBC2 as part of Thursday's comedy night. Logically, that means there are good ones.
Feelbad is here to stay. People want bleakness, darkness and depression. They crave unpalatable extremes. Where's it going to end, you ask. We all know the answer. It's going to end in death. Enjoy.
