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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PROBLEM OF THE SOUND COMEDY
The conceptual, rational quality of the word makes the sound-film comedy a rather special problem. The distortion of visual forms appears as a distortion only if we remember the original form of which it is a distortion and recognize it in the caricature. Unless this is so, we would be seeing just another form with no relation to any other living thing. The caricature is the more effective, the more it resembles its original. But a sound, as we have already said, is not capable of varied angles. Any change in a sound simply produces another sound which has no connection with the previous one.
Of course the analogy to a shape is not a single sound but a sound picture or melody, and caricatures of melodies are within the range of possibility. But how can one distort the voice of a living being or the noises of nature in such a manner as to keep them still recognizable?
Are improbable sounds, fantastic or grotesque noises possible at all? We can imagine fairies or witches or ogres or dragons and other fairy-like characters and draw them too — but fairy-tale sounds, fairy-tale voices and noises . . . what are they like? We can invent all sorts of non-existent and impossible things but we cannot invent impossible sounds, that is sounds which could not be heard in reality, for we must produce them if we invent them. A picture being an image, an illusion, may be the image of something non-existent and merely imagined. The sound in a film is on the contrary not an image of a real sound, but a repetition, a re-voicing of the real sound itself. In other words it is impossible to invent an impossible sound.
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