Tom Stoppard’s After Magritte: Artistry in the Use of Bad Puns

Reading Tom Stoppard’s play After Magritte is like being shoved unprepared into zero gravity: one is thrown out of kilter and does not quite know what to do to regain one’s bearings. The beginning scene description, for example, details a light fixture being counterbalanced with a basket of fruit, but offers no explanation as to why, and the rest of the play follows similarly, including dialogue. In the first couple of pages, the reader is also introduced to a tuba-playing mother with one buttery foot and another that was burnt by a clothing iron. Oddities like these continue throughout the short play, making it a very zany but enjoyable read.

One of the best features of the play comes in the dialogue, either in puns made by the characters or in misunderstandings in conversation between two characters. For example, one pun comes when Stoppard writes

Harris: (intrigued) You mean, semaphore? (51)

then later, as a response:

Harris: I never took semaphore as a sophomore, morse the pity. (51)

Another enjoyably bad pun comes when Stoppard writes

Foot: …you are up to your neck in the Crippled Minstrel Caper!
Thelma: Is that a dance?
Harris: My wife and I are always on the look-out for novelty numbers. We’re prepared to go out on a limb if it’s not in bad taste. (64)

Despite the puns, cleverness is very much apparent in Stoppard’s work, especially with subtleties like this one, which demonstrates a comedic misunderstanding:

Harris: Put the light on.
(Thelma independently depresses the light switch, and the red warm-up light on the iron comes on. Harris regards it skeptically.)
Most unsatisfactory. (51)

It is this kind of humor that riddles the entire play and makes it a literary Easter egg hunt, such that the reader never knows what play on words or unanticipated joke will come next.

Another source of humor in After Magritte comes from the reader imagining how the play must look actually being performed. One scene involves Harris hastily trying to balance the aforementioned fruit basket counterweight: he removes the bulb from the light fixture, causing the basket to descend as the light ascends, so he removes an apple from the basket, but this is too much weight and so the basket begins to ascend, causing Harris to quickly take a bite from the apple and replace it. This small piece of missing apple is enough to offset the weight of the missing bulb, thus evening out the delicate balance of the light fixture and the basket. This is such a comical scene to imagine, mostly because of how silly it seems to be balancing a light with a fruit basket in the first place. The description of Harris balancing the whole arrangement reads like a Rube Goldberg contraption on a smaller scale.

Harris’s balancing of the basket and light leads to Thelma’s comment that he could have used his handkerchief to balance it instead. This leads into the semaphore/Morse code pun mentioned earlier. This stringing together of concepts that seem unrelated at first glance–that is, handkerchiefs to semaphore to Morse code–also adds humor to the play. Semaphore acts as the connecting idea that links together handkerchiefs and Morse code, since semaphore is a communication system utilized by waving flags. Stoppard shows a deft hand at writing in connecting these items so smoothly.

One type of humor lost on those actually watching the play is in the description of scene setup. For example, Stoppard writes

This causes some confusion and cries of pain from Mother and cries of ‘Mother!’ from Thelma, who snatches up the iron and places it on the wooden chair, the fruit adjusting itself accordingly. (53)

The humor in this passage comes from the anthropomorphic tone to “the fruit adjusting itself accordingly,” as if it were an elderly lady adjusting her skirt rather primly amidst the confusion. This comes from “adjusting itself” being in the active voice for the fruit, as opposed to something like “causing the fruit to be adjusted accordingly.” However, more wit is shown in this passage than with the fruit; namely, when Stoppard writes “cries of pain from Mother and cries of ‘Mother!’ from Thelma,” which makes for an amusing sentence to read.

There is, of course, the obvious humor in the play, which comes from the zany scenes such as when Thelma turns on the iron resting against Mother’s foot, causing Mother to get burned later. Then also is Harris’s attempt to help Mother’s sore foot by slapping cold butter on the other, uninjured foot. More of this type of humor comes in dialogue, such as with

Foot: (without punctuation) I have reason to believe that within the last hour in this room you performed without anaesthetic an illegal operation on a bald nigger minstrel about five-foot-two or Pakistani and that is only the beginning! (62)

because clearly a “bald nigger minstrel about five-foot-two” is easily confused with a Pakistani. Another example of humor found in Stoppard’s dialogue is

Foot: I am Chief Inspector Foot.
(Harris rises to his feet with a broad enchanted smile.)
Harris: Not Foot of the Y– (59)

where Harris is obviously about to make the pun “Foot of the Yard,” referring to Scotland Yard. One final humorous dialogue selection is the small suffix alliteration found in “intrepid uniped” on page 64, as said by the character Foot.

Though such examples of humor are enjoyable, they are almost expected in a comedy, and it is really the more subtle jokes that make After Magritte so enjoyable. They give evidence that a real intelligence is behind the play, constructing words and actions so cleverly that they all weave together in unexpected ways. It helps that Stoppard does not lead the readers along by the hand with his writing, but rather drops a joke or a pun and then carries on with the plot, expecting the readers to get the joke on their own.

The entire plot of the play is based on Stoppard’s cleverness with weaving together a footballer, a “chap in striped pyjamas” (54), a blind old man with a tortoise and a white stick, and other equally disconnected and amusing descriptions. This interesting character is debated hotly by Thelma and Harris as either having a white beard or alternately being covered in shaving foam. Humor is also introduced in the degree to which Thelma and Harris escalate their argument; it is evident that they are very upset with one another about the other’s shortsightedness in determining the appearance of the stranger:

Thelma: He was a young chap.
Harris: (patiently) He had a white beard.
Thelma: Shaving foam.
Harris: (leaping up) Have you taken leave of your senses?

There is also comedy found in this exchange:

Thelma: Who said he was blind? You say so–
Harris: (heatedly) He had a white stick, woman!
Thelma: (equably) In my opinion it was an ivory cane.
Harris: (shouting) An ivory cane IS a white stick!! (This seems to exhaust them both. Thelma irons placidly, though still rebellious. After a while…)

Stoppard somehow manages to construct a story involving lots of people arguing about the existence of this other person, and just what that other person might have been doing with an object that was either a tortoise or a football. When the reader reaches the end of the play, Stoppard has explained everything and the facts behind the ridiculous anonymous character have been made clear. This is evidence of Stoppard’s skill as a writer: he leaves no loose ends, no matter how very confusing said ends might have been in the middle of the play.

More comedy comes from the authority figures in After Magritte since they are rather bumbling and seem to forget their authority. This is evident when Thelma drops a needle and commands that everyone stand still while she tries to find it. Stoppard describes the scene with

Mother and Foot dutifully get down on their hands and knees with Thelma. Harris remains standing on the table. Mother and Foot are head-to-head.

It is not very authoritative of the inspector to immediately disregard his duties and begin instead looking for his suspect’s needle. The bumbling aspect is shown with the following passage:

(Holmes enters excitedly with the ironing board.)
Holmes: Sir!
Foot: That’s an ironing board.
Holmes: (instantaneously demoralized) Yes, sir.

By the end of the play, the reader has learned that the elderly football player in pyjamas with his tortoise was actually the inspector himself, the tortoise/football was really the inspector’s wife’s handbag, and the ivory cane/white stick was really the inspector’s wife’s parasol. This is just as humorous, after having read the entire play, as the initial suggestions as to what the man was carrying, and it is an ending that does not disappoint. It also very neatly wraps up the play, not by introducing some new mystery character at the last minute to tie up loose ends, but rather by believably using a character with whom the reader is already familiar. This shows Stoppard’s skill as a storyteller that he did not have to resort to a cheap ending, namely, one that used a never-before-seen character as the mystery man with a tortoise-cum-handbag.

Because of Stoppard’s cleverness in assembling a plot and creativity with scenery details, After Magritte was a joy to read. Bad puns are made funny again because of the characters voicing them and the situations in which they are spoken. The play induces chuckles in the reader throughout, and leaves one feeling amazed that such a ridiculous storyline actually had an explanation, let alone one that made sense.

Works Cited

Stoppard, Tom. “After Magritte.” In The Real Inspector Hound and Other Plays. By Tom Stoppard. New York: Grove, 1996. 45-72.