Order of the Phoenix: Page 633
Fred and George's Fireworks Factory, who the series targets with comedy, and how the four founders are sort of like the author.
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Page 633 of Order of the Phoenix starts with a classic humor scene: Fred and George’s fireworks are blowing up a hallway, and Filch and Umbridge trying to put them out, Umbridge by casting stunning spells on them. Predictably, this doesn’t work: her stunning spell causes a firework to spectacularly explode, sending the inhabitant of a painting running for her life. Thus, the page starts mid-sentence:
-squashed into the painting next door, where a couple of wizards playing cards stood up hastily to make room for her.
“Don’t stun them, Filch!” shouted Umbridge angrily, for all the world as though it had been his suggestion.
I’ve long believed that some of the best material of the entire series is when Rowling gets one of those rare opportunities to write pure humor fiction. The best example of that, I think, comes at the beginning of this book, in Harry’s argument with the Dursleys about watching the news; the Dursleys are a gold mine for Rowling’s humor stylings. But this is a great scene too: Filch makes a fantastically bumbling comedic villain, and Umbridge is so easy to hate that basically any time she does anything remotely wrong, you can’t avoid laughing.
I’ve noticed, however, that Rowling’s style of humor writing doesn’t change that much, even when she’s making jokes about different characters. There are basically two sub-genres of Potter humor: hero and villain. On the hero side, of course, you’ve got Fred and George, but also the jokes that Ron makes from time to time, and Hermione’s jokes (often at Ron’s expense), and the weird things that Dumbledore says. On the villain side, meanwhile, it’s mostly jokes at the expense of the Dursleys (especially Uncle Vernon and Dudley), Umbridge, and Fudge. What do those three have in common? They’re all short, corpulent, brittle people who often fly completely off the handle and say things that are completely ridiculous, but all with a paper-thin veneer of normalcy and virtue. These seem to be the targets Rowling most enjoys making look silly: those who use the appearance of authority to disguise the fact that they’re just really bad at what they’re doing.
As we move down the page, Filch attempts to put out the fireworks with his broom, which of course immediately catches fire. Filch: there’s another guy who uses a thin veneer of authority to be, when you think about it, weirdly fascistic and authoritarian for a castle caretaker. Harry, meanwhile, ducks behind a door that he knows is hidden behind a tapestry. Fred and George are hiding there too.
It’s not outlandish to think that Harry might have known about the door being there. Maybe he ran into the door as he wandered around the castle in the invisibility cloak, or maybe he saw it on the Marauder’s Map; it’s easy enough to think of some kind of explanation. The question is, what is that door doing there in the first place? It’s not like the Room of Requirement, which can appear and change and move its entrances and exits all on its own; this is just a secret room that Harry already knows is there. Presumably, since Harry knows the location, it hasn’t moved. Who built it? Why? Do the characters ever stop and think that they’re in a secret room behind a tapestry that doesn’t have any discernible purpose, and they should probably think about what the room is doing there?
The real answer, of course, is that the founders probably built the room — I don’t know about you, but it’s really difficult for me to imagine that Hogwarts has been through any major renovations after the initial construction; “steer clear of the ground-floor corridor today, because they’ll be sandblasting from 11:00 to 3:00” — but in a much more real sense, J.K. Rowling built the room. The founders, when you think about it, were basically the J.K. Rowling of their time. In their different ways of creating Hogwarts (Rowling literally; the founders literarily), they went around the castle adding ridiculous touches just for the sake of seeming magical. The door to the Gryffindor Common Room could have just been a door. The headmaster’s office didn’t need to be up a rotating staircase behind a gargoyle. The candles in the great hall didn’t need to float. But the founders made those things happen within the story, and Rowling made them happen within the books themselves, because why have a magical school if you’re not going to have some magical fun with it?
As he talks to Fred and George behind the tapestry, Harry also learns and/or reveals that the fireworks aren’t store-bought; they’re Fred and George’s own inventions. “You’ll put Dr. Filibuster out of business, no problem,” Harry says, to which Fred responds “I hope she tries vanishing them next...they multiply by 10 every time you try.”
So Fred and George have been manufacturing fireworks, which...when? Where? One big opportunity that I think Rowling missed was to reveal that Fred and George have some sort of giant prank facility, either hidden in the forest or in a secret passage or an abandoned classroom or something, fully stocked with pranks so that they can continue making trouble even after they’re gone. Obviously, there’s that great scene after Fred and George make their escape in which pandemonium reigns and the school is completely gripped by pranks, with a bunch of different students competing to be the next Fred and George, but it might have been even better to see the trio coordinate some sort of large-scale release of gag items that Fred and George left behind for them.
Just think about that: Fred and George have been manufacturing and testing fireworks. That’s a fact, textually established. That’s also a process that must be loud and explosive. They’re also manufacturing all their other products — skiving snackboxes, canary creams, headless hats, not to mention all the other stuff that shows up at Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes in book six — which must at least take up the space of a few cauldrons, ingredients, shelves, tables, space for testing, etc, and all far enough from prying eyes that they won’t be discovered. So basically, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say it must be canon that Fred and George have established a secret prank factory at or around Hogwarts, which is pretty awesome to think about — but also, as I said, a giant opportunity missed for an incredibly funny sequence. It also could have been a huge twist that absolutely nobody saw coming when Hermione led Umbridge into the forest on a search for Dumbledore’s nonexistent weapon: they come upon an enchanted stump or something, and Umbridge accidentally taps it with her wand, and the next thing you know she’s being attacked from all sides with fireworks and boxing glove telescopes.
As the page continues, we move quickly to the rest of the day: the fireworks continue spreading around the school, blowing up and causing chaos, but the teachers don’t seem to mind.
“Dear, dear,” we see Professor McGonagall say sardonically. “Miss Brown, would you mind running along to the headmistress and informing her that we have an escaped firework in our classroom?”
This comes back to Rowling’s comedic style: her characters often have funny ways of moving. They don’t just walk; they bustle, they barge, they amble, they stroll, they charge. Here, as the page ends, we see Umbridge running breathlessly around the school from one firework to another. Umbridge has just taken over as headmaster — she and Fudge have basically deposed Dumbledore — and for an outlook that seemed so bleak just the previous evening, it’s now such a joy to be alive. That’s the power of comedy, in the series and in real life. It’s why this whole sequence of book five, when the entire castle is awash in pranks, is one of my favorite moments of the entire series: it’s a celebration of the power of comedic dissent, which is a fantastic way of reaching fellow dissenters who might otherwise not be interested. Some ambivalent Hufflepuff might not see much of a difference with Umbridge in charge as opposed to Dumbledore, but now that one side is having fun and laughing and the other side is trying to shut the laughter down, it’s obvious which side is better.
It’s also why, as good as this scene is, a second scene, a little bit later, in which the remainder of Fred and George’s prank factory was unleashed on the castle after they’d left could have been even better. Imagine Filch knocking at Umbridge’s door a few days after the Weasleys had left, and Umbridge coming to the door irritably, then noticing that Filch’s hair is charred and his tailcoat looks like it’s singed.
“Headmistress, you’re not going to believe this,” Filch would say, patting the top of his head to extinguish the sparks in his hair. “It happened again.”