The Banality of Comedy

At the age of three, George Tabori, a young boy growing up in Budapest (the year is 1917), goes to the circus for the first time. Drumrolls commence. A young girl climbs onto a fifteen-meter-high platform. She takes a step back, jumps, mis­ses both the trapeze and the safety net, and crashes onto the floor, finishing in a bloody, lifeless mess. “For se­veral years I thought that that was part of the performance,” he wrote. “When I go to the theatre nowadays, I still expect something similar, and I am a little bit disappointing when it doesn’t happen.”

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Sixty-three years later, in 1953, George Tabori and Al­fred Hitchcock go on a trip to the American Midwest to find locations for an unnamed film ­project. “There are parts of the American landscape which are so strange, so surreal, you just ­really want to build a film around them.”

Tabori and Hitchcock come across a number of enormous crop silos, scattered across the arid plains. Ta­bori suggests a chase sequence that would end with one of the villains falling into one of the silos from a great height. Hitchcock is skeptical about the idea.

Next, they visit a modern, automated abattoir. ­Cattle enter the slaughterhouse on an assembly line on one side and exit the factory at the other, the animal processed and pack­aged into tins. Tabori suggests a shot showing one of the villains falling into the abattoir from a great height—the next would show a pair of eyes rolling on the conveyor belt at the end of the assembly line. Hitchcock doesn’t like this idea either. Soon after, he calls off his collaboration with Tabori.

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The first half of George Tabori’s career was re­markable only for the consistently negative outcome of his ar­tistic endeavors. Born in 1914 in Budapest, Tabori moved to London at the age of twenty-two, where he worked for the Secret Service and the BBC. He wrote four novels: Beneath the Stone the Scorpion, Companions of the Left Hand, Original Sin, and The Caravan Passes, all ex­tremely ambitious his­torical novels which were mar­keted incongruously as spy thril­lers. None of them were par­ticularly successful.

From 1947 until 1969, George Ta­bori worked as a scriptwriter in Hollywood and New York, where he mingled with the rich and fa­mous. He joked with Charlie Chap­lin, smoked with Thomas Mann, canoodled with Greta Garbo, and talked literature with Mari­lyn Monroe. When one of his plays, Flight into Egypt (1952), fi­nally appeared on Broadway, it was di­­rected by the legendary Elia Ka­zan, who had made Tennessee Williams fa­mous with productions of A Streetcar Named Desire and ...