The running gag is a favorite comic device, and Beagle makes good use of it. Speaking disparagingly about the power of Mommy Fortuna’s magic, Schmendrick says: “She can’t turn cream into butter.” A few pages later, Rukh tells Schmendrick: “You can’t turn cream into butter.” When Schmendrick later meets Molly Grue, she cheerfully deflates his ego by asserting the same thing: “You can’t turn cream into butter.” And finally, King Haggard, speaking to the Lady Amalthea about Schmendrick, quite independently comes to the not-so-surprising conclusion: “I don’t think he could turn cream into butter.” The running gag has run its course, each iteration delighting the reader more than the last.
By far the most important mode of humor used in the novel is anticlimax—a sudden drop from the dignified or important in thought or expression to the commonplace or trivial. Beagle uses this technique literally dozens of times, beginning on the first page with the description of the unicorn: “and the long horn above her eyes shown and shivered with its own seashell light even in the deepest midnight. She had killed dragons with it, and healed a king whose poisoned wound would not close, and knocked down ripe chestnuts for bear cubs.” While perhaps not the most hilarious example that could be chosen, it certainly indicates that this will be a novel that does not take itself too seriously.
Schmendrick is responsible for many of the anticlimactic lines, which seems perfectly appropriate since the character resembles an out-of-work stand-up comic down on his luck. For example, when he introduces himself to the unicorn, he says: “…For I too am real. I am Schmendrick, the magician, the last of the red-hot swamis, and I am older than I look.” Speaking of their destination, Schmendrick explains its origins like this:
“Haggard’s fortress…Haggard’s dire keep. A witch built it for him, they say, but he wouldn’t pay her for her work, so she put a curse on the castle. She swore that one day it would sink into the sea with Haggard, when his greed caused the sea to overflow. Then she gave a fearful shriek, the way they do, and vanished in a sulphurous puff. Haggard moved in right away. He said no tyrant’s castle was complete without a curse.”
Approaching Hagsgate, Schmendrick seems surprised: “It must be Hagsgate, and yet there’s no smell of sorcery, no air of black magic. But why the legends, then, why the fables and fairy tales? Very confusing, especially when you’ve had half a turnip for dinner.”
We can always count on Schmendrick to break the mood. Having had too much to drink, he sounds as if he could be on The Tonight Show:
“‘You don’t know what a real curse is. Let me tell you my troubles.’ Easy tears suddenly glittered in his eyes. ‘To begin with, my mother never liked me. She pretended, but I knew—’”
Later, when the questing group is followed out of Hagsgate, Schmendrick tries to figure out why: “Perhaps Drinn has started to feel guilty about underpaying his poisoner.… Perhaps his conscience is keeping him awake. Anything is possible. Perhaps I have feathers.” Finally, at what could be a tender moment, Schmendrick advises the Lady Amalthea: “You are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact.”
But anticlimax is not limited to Schmendrick’s speech. Molly, too, can change the mood with a word or two. After Schmendrick has turned the unicorn into the Lady Amalthea, he is explaining how he carries the true magic: “I am a bearer.… I am a dwelling, I am a messenger.” Without missing a beat Molly says: “You are an idiot.” Speaking about the need for wine to fulfill the riddle that will finally lead them to the Red Bull, Molly says to Schmendrick: “I thought if you had some water to start with…Well, it’s been done. It’s not as though you’d have to make up something new. I’d never ask that of you.”
The Lady Amalthea even gets into the act, as unlike that sweet and beautiful lady as that may sound. Trying to mislead King Haggard she says: “The Red Bull. But why do you think I have come to steal the Bull? I have no kingdom to keep, and no wish for conquest. What would I do with him? How much does he eat?” In a rare moment of candor, Prince Lír, too, uses anticlimax with the Lady Amalthea: “I became a hero to serve you, and all that is like you. Also to find some way of starting a conversation.”
Minor characters as well use this comic device to good effect. Captain Cully, for example, wants to pump Schmendrick for news about Cully’s reputation in the wide world. He phrases his dinner invitation this way: “Come to the fire and tell us your tale. How do they speak of me in your country? What have you heard of dashing Captain Cully and his band of freemen? Have a taco.” The cat who tells Molly how to get to the Red Bull seems very mysterious—until the last line:
“‘When the wine drinks itself,’ he said, ‘when the skull speaks, when the clock strikes the right time—only then will you find the tunnel that leads to the Red Bull’s lair.’ He tucked his paws under his chest and added, ‘There’s trick to it, of course.’”
Naturally, the skull the cat spoke of speaks, and just as naturally it uses anticlimax. When speaking to Schmendrick, the skull remarks: “Matter can neither be created nor destroyed.… Not by most magicians anyway.” And while sounding the alarm for King Haggard, the skull shrieks: “Help ho, the king! Guards, to me! Here are burglars, bandits, moss-troopers, kidnapers, housebreakers, murderers, character assassins, plagiarists! King Haggard! Ho, King Haggard!”
It seems clear that this comic device is not being used for character delineation but simply for humorous effect. This belief is confirmed by the number of uses of anticlimax in narrative and expository passages where there is no dialogue. For example, the confrontation between the followers from Hagsgate and Schmendrick and company goes like this: “The magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock.”
A typical evening in King Haggard’s castle is described as follows: “And in the evenings, before she went to bed, she usually read over Prince Lír’s new poems to the Lady Amalthea, and praised them, and corrected the spelling.” Finally, Molly’s typical day is described:
“Molly Grue cooked and laundered, scrubbed stone, mended armor and sharpened swords; she chopped wood, milled flour, groomed horses and cleaned their stalls, melted down stolen gold and silver for the king’s coffers, and made bricks without straw.”
All of these uses of humor have a common effect: they break the empathic bond that the reader might form with the characters by drawing attention to themselves as devices of the author. There is no subtlety here, but a purposive and carefully planned exaggeration. The mechanics of the form are being laid bare, and the writer’s technique revealed. The basic critical question must by why, and the answer can be found in one final pattern of incongruity existing in the text: a consistent pattern of self-parody. The Last Unicorn is cast in the form of a fairy tale, and throughout the novel the various characters (but especially Schmendrick) make observations about the form and how their story fits it.
For example, in Hagsgate Drinn describes Prince Lír’s birth like this:
“‘I stood by the strange cradle for a long time, pondering while the snow fell and the cats purred prophecy.’ He stopped, and Molly Grue said eagerly, ‘You took the child home with you, of course, and raised it as your own.’ Drinn laid his hands palm up on the table. ‘I chased the cats away,’ he said, ‘and went home alone.… I know the birth of a hero when I see it,’ he said, ‘Omens and portents, snakes in the nursery. Had it not been for the cats, I might have chanced the child, but they made it so obvious, so mythological.’”
Molly, talking to Schmendrick about the apparent cruelty of leaving the child to die in the snow, says: “They deserve their fate, they deserve worse.