In The Death of Rabelais, her recent verse play, J.C. Scharl has created something rare: an excellent comedy about death. It is, moreover, not only a comedy about death, but a comedy about comedy’s relationship with it. But the most impressive thing is that the play manages to take death seriously and, at the same time, be very funny.

From the play’s outset, Scharl casts one of the play’s titular characters, Francois Rabelais, as a conflicted apologist for comedy. His opening speech asks one of the play’s central questions:

“I start to wonder if comedy is true,
or if the surface only of this world
is joy, and in the depths lies sorrow curled.”

This question—of whether the center of the universe is joy or sorrow, comedy or tragedy, turns over and returns throughout the play as Rabelais meets Death, switches garments with her (giving her a jester’s outfit), and continually swaps his jibes with her banalities. The question first returns when Rabalais meets the friar Renard. When Renard makes a crude joke, Rabelais rebukes him and gives something of his philosophy of comedy:

“That isn’t wit!
…
any man can, sneering,
smear this goodly world God’s made, and use
his holy gift of words to do so! But true
comedy—now that too few can do!”

Comedy, to Rabelais, is not laughter only—at least it is not the kind that comes from “smear”ing the world. When Renard presses further and says that “Humor…shows the truth. / Every laugh’s a window on the void,” Rabelais (after calling Renard some excellent names like “canker-sore / hot on every demon’s butt-cheek) elaborates:

“Comedy is farce! a wink, a snort,
a chortle and a kick somewhere below,
…
pleasure, precision, perception all become—
however bleak—by humor, chucklesome,
and in becoming so, become all one.”

To Rabelais (and, one suspects, to Scharl) humor is transformative. Similar to Resurrection or Epiphany, it turns “pleasure, precision, perception… however bleak” into something “chucklesome.” Jokes do not help cover up the bleakness at the bottom of all things. Jokes meet bleakness and invite it into part of the world’s great romp.

This danse macabre between Death and Rabelais has its great climax in the climax of the play. The plot of the play is very simply the players passing the time during a Twelfth Night feast until a storm passes. Throughout a series of games, the anxieties and secrets of the guests unravel. Then Death reveals herself, and tells the party that one of them must go with her, otherwise they will all perish. One of the group tries to lead the rest in physically overpowering Death to escape, but Rabelais protests because it is “less than sporting” for four adults to fight “a half-sprung girl.” Devout to the laws of chivalry, he cries: “Fight on, sweet Death! Your Jester / comes to you!” and punches the Friar in the chin. Even when Rabelais knows Death, he loves her, like a (somewhat silly) knight fighting for his lady.

Finally, when Death has claimed her victim and she and Rabelais are speaking, he makes her “laugh with a true laughter,” and in his final speech, says:

“…as Christ, the Laughter of the Father,
took laughter down to death, he made them brothers,
and raising one, he equal raised the other,
so even as he bears to God the marks
of death, he leaves in death the very sparks
of merriment!”

Scharl leaves us with the odd hope that Death itself, because of the descent which “the Laughter of the Father” made, can laugh, suggesting that the work of Christ is such a deep one of reconciliation that even Death and Comedy cannot but be friends.

There are too few comedies about death in the world. It is understandable that the heathen do not write them because, to the heathen, death is the most serious thing that exists. To them, laughing about death is only the last defiance of a despair that cannot be overcome. But Scharl reminds her readers that, to the Christian, that most serious thing in the world has become something to be winked at, because the Christian remembers that Christ has told the Great Joke of the Resurrection.

Brendon Sylvester is a poet and educator near Philadelphia, PA. His writing has appeared in Inkwell, Touchstone, the Amethyst Review and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the Anselm Society and runs Salt & Iron’s poetry workshop. You can read more of his writing on Substack.

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