Catastrophe, and What the Jokes Could Not Carry

Thirty-two days after a man she met in a London bar has flown home to Boston, a primary school teacher of forty-one phones him to say that she is pregnant. They have had six days together. That is the whole of what they share: a six-day fling, an ocean, and now this.

He gets back on a plane. In Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney’s Catastrophe, he proposes before he has bought a ring, and he stays. Two near strangers with a baby coming then begin to build a marriage out of the one thing they turn out to have in common from the start. It is not a history, and it is not a plan. It is a talent. They can say the rude thing to each other out loud, and laugh, and go on.

The talent is real, and the writing that gives it to them won its authors a BAFTA. It lets these two say, early and loudly, things that many couples take years to say, if they say them at all. But over four series Catastrophe is also honest about what the talent cannot carry. The sentences that come closest to breaking this marriage are not the rude ones. They are the ones with no joke in them: a lost pregnancy he never mentioned, a complaint made against him at work, a return to drinking after years without a drink. Those arrive late, through other people or under pressure. And when the marriage finally has to be decided, it is decided after the jokes have run out.

This essay argues that saying the rude thing is not the same as telling the hard one, and that a couple fluent in the first can go a long time without the second. It also follows something Horgan said about the last series, which suggests that the sentences this couple could not say plainly were not only the bad ones. One of them was tender, and they could not say that as a joke either.

None of that is a reason to distrust the jokes. They may be much of what kept these two together. They were not all of it, and the part they could not do is where Catastrophe has the most to say.

Catastrophe ran on Channel 4 from 19 January 2015 to 12 February 2019, in four series of six episodes, each a little under half an hour, and was made with Amazon. Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney created and wrote it, and they play the couple, Sharon Morris and Rob Norris, who carry their writers’ first names. Ben Taylor directed the first three series and Jim O’Hanlon the fourth. Ashley Jensen plays Sharon’s friend Fran, Mark Bonnar plays Fran’s husband, Chris, and Carrie Fisher plays Rob’s mother, Mia. In 2016 Horgan and Delaney won the BAFTA for comedy writing for the series.

Carrie Fisher died on 27 December 2016. The last episode of the third series is dedicated to her.

The title comes from a line in the 1964 film Zorba the Greek, in which Zorba says that he married because he is a man, and counts up what came with it: wife, children, house, everything, the full catastrophe. In Japan the series is listed under its English title alone.

Two notes before going further. The series was not screened for this essay. What happens in it comes from the published record of its episodes and from its makers’ interviews; lines of dialogue are paraphrased, never quoted as exact, and the makers’ own words are quoted only where they were read at source. And the essay discusses events from all four series, including the last episode. The ending begins in the section headed ‘The worst argument’, which says so at its head. A reader who would rather meet it on screen should stop there, and come back.

Merman, one of the companies that produced the series, sums it up as a comedy about an American man and an Irish woman who “make a bloody mess as they struggle to fall in love in London”. Struggle to fall in love: not before the pregnancy, the proposal and the wedding, but after them. The order is backwards, and the first series is built out of it. There are anxious scans. There is Rob’s mother, Mia, telling him from America to come home and forget the whole thing. There is Sharon’s family, and a short-lived plan of Rob’s to retrain as a vet, which Sharon talks him out of, and a wedding at a register office. They are arguing in their honeymoon hotel when her waters break.

This Library’s essay “Chosen Again, Not Chosen Once” argued that commitment is not made once, by a signature or a ceremony, but is a standing decision that has to be made again, in small and unphotographed ways, on ordinary days, and that the wedding is only a marker pointing at it. Catastrophe puts a hard case to that argument. Here there was no first choice to make again. Sharon and Rob committed to a pregnancy, not to each other. Whatever choosing they do has to be done for the first time from inside a marriage that already exists, with a baby on the way and hardly anyone around them approving.

That changes what everyday choosing looks like. In that essay, the small daily choice is a husband who asks, while he pours the morning coffee, a real question about something his wife said the night before. In Catastrophe the everyday version is ruder. It is a jibe, caught and thrown back.

It deserves to be taken seriously as a kind of choosing. You can only tease what you have noticed, and you can only answer if you were listening. For two people who began as near strangers, a steady trade in insults may be one of the fastest ways there is of learning each other. It is also a way of saying, many times a day and without ever saying it, that each of them is still here, and still playing.

The idiom is set early. When Sharon’s friend Fran kisses Rob in a park and he pushes her away, Sharon’s response, as the episode record has it, is to tease him about it. In the second series the two of them check with each other, plainly, that neither has ever been unfaithful. They quarrel often and about nearly everything, and much of the comedy is made of the quarrels.

What the rudeness does goes beyond the jokes. It keeps them level, because each can hit back. It skips the language of romance, which neither of them has had time to earn, and goes straight to a language they can both use. And it lets them say in the first months what in many marriages comes out only years later, if it comes out at all: that the other one is irritating, vain, unfair, wrong.

Set beside this Library’s reading of Alain de Botton’s novel, they look like model students. That essay, “The Course of Love Begins Where Most Love Stories End”, argued that being loved does not mean being understood without having to explain, and that adult intimacy asks for a less magical and more vulnerable skill: making the need speakable. Nobody in Catastrophe waits to be understood without explaining. Sharon and Rob explain constantly, at volume, often unkindly. It can look as if nothing between them is unsayable.

And yet the series keeps showing us things that were. That is the turn this essay wants to make. Speakable is not the same as spoken. A couple can have a voice for almost everything and still not use it for the few things that matter most, and a voice this fluent, this constantly in use, can pass for complete candour. It is not the same thing as telling.

Look at what, across four series, goes unsaid until something forces it out.

The first comes early. In the first series Sharon learns, from Rob’s mother, that a former girlfriend of his once lost a pregnancy that was theirs, and that he has never mentioned it. It is worth noticing where this falls. This is a relationship whose whole existence began with a pregnancy. If there was ever a time to say that he had stood here before, and that it had ended in a loss, it was this one. In a relationship where almost everything else gets said, this did not.

The second belongs to the second series. Bored at work and short of sleep, Rob is drawn to a French colleague, Olivia. She later accuses him of sexual harassment, and he denies it. This essay decides nothing about the complaint, either way, and nothing that follows makes light of it. What the essay follows is only what the complaint brings into the open at home. Until it left him no choice, Rob had told Sharon nothing about the situation with Olivia, and when he does, she is furious.

The third begins in the same weeks. Rob moves out, and in a hotel room he drinks for the first time in years. He comes home, the marriage mends, and he goes on drinking in secret.

None of these is a sentence that could have been said as a joke, and that is the pattern. Each asks the listener for something a joke never asks for: to grieve, to believe, to worry, to decide. And each reaches Sharon late: the first through his mother, the second only once a complaint has been made, the third in a car, when a breath test was about to say it for him.

This Library’s essay on another comedy that began on Channel 4, “Feel Good, and the One Person Who Hears It Last”, followed the route a truth takes and found that the person it concerns is, again and again, the last to hear it. Catastrophe bears that out. But it raises a question that comes before the route: in what voice could these things have been said at all? This couple had a voice for nearly everything. It was not a voice for these.

The third series ends on the night it all comes out at once. Sharon’s father, Des, has had a stroke and died. After the funeral, with Rob’s mother staying in their house, Rob goes to collect Sharon from a bar, where she has been drinking. She wants pizza, so he drops her off and drives on to find somewhere to park, and another car hits his. Bleeding, he tells her that he has been drinking again, and that the breath test the police will give him is going to show it.

In a Channel 4 press interview for the last series, Horgan called it “a secret he’d been keeping for an entire series”, and said it came out just as Sharon had reached the point of telling him that neither of them works on their own any more. In another interview she looked back on what else had been said in that car. Sharon had told Rob how much she loved him, and Horgan called the way she said it “sort of drunk and slightly thrown-away”.

So two sentences with no joke in them came out in that car on one night. Hers was tender, and it needed drink to get out. His was a confession, and it needed a crash. Neither was said in the voice this marriage used for everything else, and neither could have been.

In the fourth series Rob is convicted of drink-driving and sentenced to community service and to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. The series does not tidy any of this away, and this essay will not either. Nor will it do what essays are tempted to do with a character who drinks, which is to diagnose him. Rob is a man who did not drink for years, drank again, hid it, was exposed by a car crash and was sentenced. The marriage has to take that in, and the series follows what it costs.

The point for this essay is narrower. Of all the news a marriage may have to hear, the news that one of you is drinking again may be the kind that least allows a joke. It cannot be thrown back, only received. A couple whose whole fluency lies in sentences that can be thrown back may find they have nowhere to put it. That is no excuse for keeping it secret. It may be part of how a secret like that can live for a whole series inside a marriage that seems to talk about everything.

It is worth being exact about why the rude register is safe, because it does not sound safe. An insult sounds like a risk. Between these two it is the opposite. It happens inside a frame both of them know, which is that this is play. It can be returned, which keeps them level. It proves that someone was paying attention, without asking for anything in exchange. And it survives being wrong, because a joke that misses can be laughed off.

The hard sentence has none of those protections. It has no frame. It cannot be returned, only answered. It asks for something: forgiveness, patience, worry, a decision. And if it lands badly, nothing can be laughed off. So the more fluent two people become in the first kind of sentence, the more the second may sound like a different language, and the more it may cost to switch into it, in a kitchen, on an ordinary night, with nothing forcing the switch.

This Library’s essay “Fleabag, and the Audience That Was Her Hiding Place” read that series’ asides to the camera as a hiding place that looks like a confession: an audience that receives whatever its heroine chooses to tell it and can never ask anything back. Catastrophe is built the other way round. Its jokes are addressed to somebody who answers, and that is why they are intimacy rather than hiding. But the two devices share one property. Each is so good at sounding like openness that it can take up the room where the plain sentence would have gone.

This is not a complaint about humour. Humour may be how this marriage survived its first year at all. It is a description of a boundary. A form that can carry anything that can be played with will, for exactly that reason, fail to carry what cannot.

The secrets in this series are mostly Rob’s, and it would be easy to read Catastrophe as a story about a man who hides things and a wife who is simply honest. It is not quite that, and the difference matters for how the series puts a woman on screen.

Sharon is forty-one, Irish, a primary school teacher in London, and pregnant after a fling that was as much hers as his. She is rude, often unfair, and funny about all of it. Horgan once described her, in an interview for the American radio programme Fresh Air, as a good person who is prone to selfish acts. She gets very drunk. In the fourth series she is caught switching price tags in shops. Through all of it she stays at the centre of the story.

Many stories ask a difficult woman, sooner or later, to become likeable, or punish her until she is, or redeem her through suffering. Sharon stays exactly as difficult as she is, and the story stays with her. Horgan wrote this woman under her own first name and plays her, and that may be why her worst moments are written from the inside.

And the sentence she could not say was of another kind from his. His secrets were failures. Hers, by Horgan’s account, was her happiness: how happy Rob made her, a thing that until the last series she had managed to say only drunk, and half thrown away. The rude voice could not carry the worst news in this marriage, and it could not carry the best news either. That symmetry is the series’ fairness to its heroine. In place of an honest wife and a lying husband, it gives us two people with the same blind spot, facing different ways.

The way this marriage began is not unusual in Japan. The health ministry’s special report on births for the 2021 fiscal year estimates how many first children born within marriage arrive sooner after the marriage began than a pregnancy takes, counting a marriage from the wedding or from when the couple began living together, whichever came first. In 2019 it was 18.4 per cent, about seventy thousand of some three hundred and eighty thousand first births. The share peaked at 27.9 per cent in 2002 and has fallen since. Among mothers aged thirty and over it was about one in ten. The report is careful about what the figure is. It is a share of first births within marriage, not of marriages. And it is an estimate built on stated assumptions; because the length of a marriage is recorded only to the month, the report says the true figure could be somewhat higher or lower.

Japanese has more than one name for this. A standard dictionary gives dekichatta-kon, a colloquial word for marrying because a pregnancy has begun, and beside it gentler ones: omedeta-kon, a marriage of happy news, and sazukari-kon, a marriage of something given. The softer names turn an accident into a gift. The English series goes the other way and calls the whole undertaking a catastrophe. Both are exaggerations, one polite and one rude, and both walk around the same plain sentence: we did not plan this, and now we have to choose it.

There is also a proverb: even a dog will not eat a married couple’s quarrel. The same dictionary explains it: the two will make up soon enough, so an outsider who steps in is a fool. Most of Sharon and Rob’s quarrels are exactly that kind, and it would be foolish to step into them. The proverb has less to say about the quarrel that never starts, because the sentence that would start it is never said.

None of this is a claim about how couples in Japan talk, or whether they joke more or less than couples in London. The statistic counts births, not conversations. What travels is narrower: a beginning that nobody chose, and the work of choosing it afterwards.

Japan also has a stage form for a married couple being rude to each other in public: meoto manzai, the husband-and-wife comic double act. One of its best-known pairs, Miyako Chocho and Nanto Yuji, began performing as husband and wife in 1948, in an act sold as a comedy in which the wife had the upper hand. From 1955 the two of them presented a programme called Meoto Zenzai, first on radio and later on television, in which members of the public took part. One later account calls it a forerunner of Shinkon-san Irasshai!, whose title welcomes newlyweds.

Their marriage ended in divorce. Their act did not. Japanese biographical dictionaries record that the pair went on working together after it, and that from 1963 the former married couple presented the television version of Meoto Zenzai.

It is hard to find a cleaner demonstration of what this essay has been saying. A couple’s banter is an act with a life of its own. It can be brilliant, it can be affectionate, it can be the very thing an audience loves them for, and it can carry on after the marriage it seemed to express has ended. What an audience hears is the act. The marriage is somewhere else, in sentences that are not performed.

Catastrophe shows the same gap inside a marriage that is still going, with nobody watching but us. For a whole series, its comedy and its heaviest secret ran side by side.

From here, this essay describes how the series ends.

The last series follows Rob’s conviction, his community service and his meetings, and Sharon’s price tags, and then takes the family to Boston for a holiday. They learn on arrival that Mia has died. Walking back from a memorial by the sea, Sharon and Rob have the worst argument of their marriage. Rob tells Sharon that he does not like her. He tells her that he has been offered a job in Boston, and that he wants to take it.

It is worth being exact about what is new in that. These two have traded insults since the first episode. This is not a jibe. It is not thrown to be caught. Asked what they had wanted to say in the last series that they could not in the first three, Horgan named two things. The second was this: “Rob getting to the point where he told Sharon he doesn’t like her. We’ve never done that before. It was pretty brutal.”

The first thing she named was tender. The last series lets Sharon tell Rob how happy he makes her, this time as what Horgan called “a real, genuine outpouring”, where the version in the car had been drunk and half thrown away. And she said what had made it possible: “I think we could only do it because we’d been so awful to each other.”

That is the makers’ own account of their last series, and it is this essay’s argument turned the right way up. For four series the rude voice carried everything except the two sentences that mattered most, the worst one and the best one. In the last series both are finally said plainly, by two people who have run out of jokes, and by Horgan’s account the tender one could come only after they had been so awful to each other. Sharon, opposed at first, agrees that Rob should take the job, and that she and the children will move to Boston with him.

Then the beach. The children are asleep in the car. Sharon tells Rob that she is pregnant again. She strips to her underwear and walks into the sea. Rob sees a sign warning of riptides and forbidding swimming, and swims out after her. They kiss, and the camera pulls away until they are small and far from the shore.

The series began with that sentence. Thirty-two days after a six-day fling, Sharon phoned Boston to say she was pregnant, and Rob crossed an ocean to reach her. It ends with the same sentence, said on a beach, and a man going into an ocean after her. The first time, the news made the marriage. The second time, it is said inside a marriage that has just come through its worst argument, and the answer to it is not a proposal. It is to follow her into the water, past a sign that says not to.

This is where “Chosen Again, Not Chosen Once” meets its hardest case. In that essay, choosing again is small and daily, and its practical test is a day on which nothing goes wrong and nothing is asked. Catastrophe’s choosing again happens on the worst day, after a death and a plain sentence of dislike, and it is not small. Nor is it a promise. Asked on a BBC chat show in January 2020 whether the two of them die, Horgan said the ending was meant to be ambiguous: “It’s supposed to be both and to give you hope as well as fear for their future.” Delaney, in an interview the two gave together, said that at the end they are saying that they love each other, and added: “That doesn’t mean that everything will be OK.”

So the ending stays where the series leaves it. It is not a drowning: the last image is of the two of them together in the water, far out. It is not a rescue: nobody is seen reaching the shore, and the children are asleep on it. What it shows is a choice made against a warning, by two people who have run out of jokes and cannot know how it will turn out.

Zorba’s line, the one that named the series, is a man’s joke about marriage as a disaster: wife, children, house, everything, the full catastrophe. The series ends with a man going into the full catastrophe on purpose, with a third child on the way. In a way it is still a joke. It is the first one in the series that is also, plainly, a vow.

The ending turns on a crossing, and a reader whose own marriage crossed a border into Japan may feel it most. Neither of these two was at home in London. Sharon is Irish. Rob flew back across the Atlantic for a pregnancy and stayed, in a country that was not his, through two children, a funeral and a conviction. In the last episode his unhappiness with his life in London comes out in the same argument as the worst sentence of the marriage, and the answer to it is Sharon’s. This time she will be the one who moves.

A marriage between two countries may keep an account that a marriage inside one country never has to open: who crossed, what they left behind, what they are owed for it. It is exactly the kind of account that banter handles badly. It can be teased around for years and never once opened. In Catastrophe it comes out after a death has made going home feel urgent, and it comes out in anger. A reader who has crossed for someone, or been crossed for, may recognise both the teasing and what lay under it.

And if the marriage runs in a language one of you did not grow up speaking, the rude register may be where that shows most. A jibe meant as affection has to land a hand’s width from an insult, and the width is judged by an ear trained in childhood. In a language learned at a desk, the plain sentence may arrive before the playful one. That can feel like a lack. After four series of Catastrophe it is worth asking what kind of lack it is. Sharon and Rob had the playful register in abundance, and the plain sentences were what they could not find.

There are at least five ways this reading could be wrong.

First, the candour is written. Horgan and Delaney are comedy writers who won a BAFTA for this dialogue, and a viewer may be admiring a script rather than a marriage. Real couples get no second draft, and no editor to cut the line that did not land. The narrow answer is that this essay has not offered the banter as a model to copy, only as a register with a boundary, and the boundary shows even in the written version.

Second, rudeness can be something worse than rudeness. What is charming when both people can hit back becomes something else when only one of them can. The insults in this series run both ways, and that may be nearly the whole of why they read as love. A reader whose partner’s rudeness runs one way only, or whose own replies are not allowed, owes this marriage no resemblance to hers. If that is closer to home than a comedy should be: the Cabinet Office counts shouting and belittling words among the forms partner violence takes, and its DV Hotline Plus answers the phone in Japanese around the clock on 0120-279-889.

Third, the ending may make a risk look beautiful. Two parents swim out past a sign that forbids it while their children sleep in a car. The makers’ own words, hope as well as fear, concede as much. This essay has read the swim as a vow, and that may be the reading a comedy’s last scene invites and a parent’s eye refuses. A reader who sees only recklessness on that beach is seeing something that is there.

Fourth, the essay may be kind to Rob’s confession. He spoke when a breath test was about to speak for him, and calling that a confession may flatter it. The complaint at work, meanwhile, stays exactly where the essay left it, undecided. This essay has followed that complaint only for what it forced into the open between a husband and a wife, which is the angle of a story told from inside a marriage. It has not got outside that angle, and it should say so.

Fifth, and perhaps the one a tired reader will feel most: the ending can be read as a woman’s surrender. Her husband tells her he does not like her and wants to take a job back in his own country, and she agrees to leave the country where she has made her life and follow him. The narrow answer is that the last move is hers. She brings the news, she walks into the sea, and he follows her. But the asymmetry is real. She is the one who will move, and a reader who hears capitulation in her yes is not wrong to.

Three things, and none of them is a rule.

Saying everything is not the same as telling. A marriage can be fluent, frank and very funny, and still keep the few sentences that matter most for a year at a time. Being fluent in one voice can take up the room where the other would have gone.

The joke cannot carry the worst news, and it cannot carry the best. In this marriage the sentences that could not be played with were his failures and her happiness. Both needed a plainer voice, and both, in the end, found one.

And choosing again is not only a small kindness on a good day. Sometimes it is done on the worst day, after the worst sentence, with nobody promising it will turn out well. Catastrophe ends there, far out, and it does not dress that up as safety.

So, once, to you, if yours is a funny marriage. If the kitchen at eleven at night, after the children are finally down, is where the best jokes of your week happen, that is not nothing. It may be much of what holds the two of you together, and nothing in this reading asks you to give it up. But you might notice what the two of you have never said to each other plainly: the hard thing one of you has been carrying, and the tender thing that has only ever come out with a joke in front of it. Neither should have to wait for a crash, or a bad enough night. Neither has to be funny.

This is a reading of a television series. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real. It gives no advice about drinking or about anyone’s marriage, and it decides nothing about the complaint made against a character in the story. Its one statistic is the Japanese health ministry’s estimate for first births, used only for what it counts.

What can the two of you say to each other as a joke that you have never said plainly?

Is there a sentence with no joke in it that one of you has been carrying for the other?

When did you last tell someone how happy they make you, without dressing it up?

If your marriage began with something neither of you chose, what have the two of you chosen since?

Who crossed what to be where the two of you are now, and has that ever been said out loud?