Irish L’humour Noir: Peter Foott’s The Carpenter and His Clumsy Wife

Abstract

In this essay I read Irish director Peter Foott’s short film, The Carpenter and his Clumsy Wife (2005), through Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic theory, “The Decay of Lying” (1891). I argue that Wilde’s critique of Realism as a “complete failure,” and as a corollary from this, that Lying “is the proper aim of art,” while convincing and useful, stops short of Grotesque Comic theory that combines the real and surreal. In grotesque comedy we encounter exaggerated, nightmarish lies; but beneath the surface there is a certain psychological realism – laughter is a coping mechanism. Foott uses grotesque humour to illicit confused laughter from his audience; he makes the vulgar beautiful and the real surreal. In other words, Foott blurs the boundary between life and art, thus undermining the fundamental ordering structures of society. In this article I focus on the boundary between Art and Nature, and between workspace and domestic-space. The carpenter’s wife moves from the domestic-space into the workspace; and the carpenter replaces his natural wife with an artificial recreation. Keywords: Peter Foott; Oscar Wilde; grotesque humour