The son of a seamstress and a mechanic, whose formal education was impaired by war, is dead.
Rodolfo Vera Quizon, Dolphy to all of us, did not merely portray the Filipino Everyman, he lived the Everyman and found him everywhere. He lived the hard life: polishing shoes, working the piers as porter, selling peanuts in theaters. He found joy in theater early on and theater embraced him as a dear son.
Grace Poe Llamanzares half-startled a TV host yesterday when she described Dolphy as a patriot. The ace comedian, she said, not only entertained but also created many jobs in the industry in which he so excelled.
I fully agree with Grace’s characterization — but for entirely different reasons.
Nationhood is not so much the outcome of a community acquiring a common language as it is acquiring a common idiom. By his brilliance as well as by his sheer longevity in the public eye, Dolphy was a key broker in the forging of the shared idiom that makes us feel like a nation.
More than any other national society, ours is one whose worldview is most shaped by the world of entertainment. This may be because whatever intelligentsia we had used the language and the idiom of our colonizers. The political elite that ruled us was constantly prone to betrayal.
By contrast, the world of entertainment was constantly faithful to the masses. It had to be, for here the masses were the patrons.
Besides, our entertainment tradition had truly subversive roots. From Dasalan at Tuksuhan to the impertinent zarzuelas, the sphere of entertainment was the true public square, the forum where the idiom of our true popular culture was forged. Think Amado V. Hernandez and Atang de la Rama.
The reason Dolphy is so uniquely salient in national memory is the ease with which he moved from one dominant medium to the next: from the stage to radio to movies and then to television. These were the media that, in their respective periods of dominance, incubated the popular culture. Dolphy was always in the right medium at the right time. He was a key impresario of the popular culture.
The officially designated arbiters of the national culture — be they the academic guardians of Filipino nationalism or the officious jurors of national awards — did not look kindly at the actual practitioners of the art of the zarzuela in all its reincarnations. They chose to characterize the actual practitioners as too banal or simply Philistine, a cultivated prejudice akin to the way the illustrados chose to view Andres Bonifacio and his ilk.
The officially designated arbiters, however, never truly shaped the popular culture. Facifica Falayfay and John Puruntong did.
The officially designated arbiters of the popular culture are dead and forgotten. Dolphy lives.
Dolphy obviously loved Charlie Chaplin, the man who sent in the clowns when all was down. The characters he used, the comedic techniques he applied, the slapstick movement, were all supremely Chaplinesque.
Chaplin, if we need reminding, hardly wrote. Appearing in silent movies, he obviously never spoke. Yet, in his crude times, the sophisticated comedian was politically persecuted — attesting to the fact that, in mime, Chaplin was a compelling philosopher. A people’s philosopher, who inconvenienced the ruling class by looking at the world through the magical everyday experiences of Everyman.
The commonplace is the life-world everyone lives. It is the real arena where we all wage the all-too-real struggles we must win to survive. It is here where we must be our own heroes. It is here where we must all speak our existential truths. It is here we wield the idiom we truly own.
The genius of Chaplin and Dolphy lies in the ability to uncover joy in the drabness of the everyday, to find comedy in the ashes. Entertainment becomes the prism through which we draw contrasts and find meaning. We laugh in order to understand.
We might be poor but we can still be outlandish. We might be ordinary but we can still be heroic to those we hold dear. We might be afflicted but we can still love — and love to heroic proportions.
Comedy without insight has no power. It cannot cause the burst of laughter that is the craft’s constant reward. Sure, timing is important in comedy — but it is only half as important as insight.
Comedy without insight is fleeting. Comedians without insight come and go. Unlike them, Dolphy stayed and stayed to inflict his laughter on generations.
I submit that staying power rests on Dolphy’s ability to draw out the joy latent in ordinary experiences, to deliver the idiom that the popular culture is pregnant with, to hold up a clear mirror on all of us so that we learn to laugh at ourselves. There is genius there, beginning from the ability not to take ourselves too seriously.
Dolphy did not moralize and never bore on us with cumbersome self-righteousness. He was self-deprecating as he was brilliant. He was a supremely generous spirit during times of paucity. He never appointed himself guardian of our consciences. The last joke was always at his expense.
This is why his presence in our lives was light as it was constant. He was never an imposition on anyone as much as he never let others impose on him. He lived his life with unbridled independence, reinventing himself and his loves at will, never allowing any authority to trap him in a box.
He is our Chaplin, also our Sartre.