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createserenity · 6 months

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Silliness and why it’s important

Crowley and Aziraphale are so silly and it’s something I really love about them and it’s something I think is really important to them because they can be silly with each other in a way they can’t with anyone else.

Both of them are silly – Aziraphale displays this side of himself much more readily and more often than Crowley does, but Crowley is silly too. Even present day Crowley who often seems to get labelled as dark and jaded and traumatised is actually still really quite silly.

Quick note - this post is part of a series which contains my opinions on Crowley and Aziraphale’s relationship dynamics. I already wrote one on what they ask of each other (click to read it!). This one is silliness, by which I mean the funny things they do to amuse themselves and each other and also to a lesser extend the times when they are just a bit weird, because they are both slightly bonkers sometimes, for no other reason than they want to behave like that.

(By the way, if you make it to the end of this post without the word silly becoming, well, silly, then I applaud you!)

Why is being silly with each other important?

Can you imagine them being silly with any of the other demons or angels? There’s no way Aziraphale could display his silly side in heaven, the archangels are serious and wouldn’t understand the silliness, they’d just think Aziraphale was mad. Same for Crowley, the demons of hell just wouldn’t get it, they’d be scornful or dismissive at best, and also probably think he was mad (in fact we know they would because Aziraphale later utilises this idea when they body swap). In addition for both of them silliness around humans is something they can and do indulge in, but they don’t get a lot out of it because humans probably just think they’re a bit odd. Aziraphale for example isn't as socially unaware as he first appears, unless he’s playing a character (for example when he’s the magician or reporter), he tends towards being basically affable around humans, because that’s the sort of persona he wants to cultivate. Crowley generally wants to look suave so silliness around most humans is out for him too. It’s not that they are never silly around humans (see 1601 for just one example) but usually they aren’t. That leaves them with each other.

Crowley’s silliness

Taking them one at a time, let’s look at their silliness and what it says about them. I’m starting with Crowley because his is less obvious. Crowley doesn’t seem to be super silly at first glance. His silly streak is overshadowed by Aziraphale’s and also his tendency not to smile and be so overt whilst doing silly things. It’s partly why he looks like he’s lost a lot of his joy in life, but I’m not so sure that’s true. Crowley is optimistic and continues to be optimistic right up to season two – he also continues to be silly.

Let’s look at some examples of Crowley’s silliness through the ages:

Firstly angel Crowley is obviously a bit inclined towards the ridiculous – look at the weird and wonderful noises and faces he makes whilst creating the nebula. Aziraphale is utterly charmed (and so are we all).

Next another obvious one – Bildad the Shuite. This whole persona is just silly. From the odd facial hair to the weird things he does, Crowley is just having quite a lot of fun here. His ridiculous summarisation of the permit (“hugs and kiss, God”), more weird noises and faces as he fireballs the goats, his over-exaggerated setting everything aflame in the house (here some of his silliness is for a different purpose – to test Aziraphale’s trust in him), and then ending with his farcical cobbler/obstetrician doing a fake child-birth, complete with ridiculous over-acting for the benefit of the angels. For a lot of the Job incident Crowley is indulging his own silliness for a serious end.

After that we have to skip right to 1826 for the next bout of blatant silliness on Crowley’s part. For a start he’s ricocheting through Scottish accents, sometimes changing from one sentence to the next. He’s having fun with the persona he’s created for himself and he really doesn’t care who notices. He also banters with Aziraphale, Elspeth and Dr Dalrymple here in a way I really love, “bet you left your loom on your farm!”, “more murders, I’ll drink to that!”

There’s a lot of silliness in 1941 and I really don’t need to list it all – the middle name that’s just a J, the weird American accent, his very genuine laugh of delight at the snakes in a can trick, and more. This isn’t a demon that’s so jaded he isn’t still having fun.

So then we get to the modern day. There’s limited opportunities for super overt silliness because the situation is serious in both seasons, but there’s still some there:

In series one instead of miracling the guy with the paintball gun to sleep he literally turns himself into a monster and then declares “that was fun!” It’s ridiculous behaviour if you think about it, but Crowley enjoys himself.

The way he drinks the coffee in S2E1. Seriously. Why does no one talk about this? He gulps it down and then hisses/pulls a really stupid face. Maybe it gets overlooked because it’s sort of a bit sexy too, but honestly, it’s pure ridiculousness and he knows it.

From this point on Crowley’s silliness tends towards being more quiet silliness, rather than over the top silliness like Aziraphale’s is (with one notable exception). In the pub scene he orders the drink with a joke about Aziraphale, and then proceeds to intimidate Mr Brown in a not at all normal voice. He later asks Nina stupid questions about awnings and sudden rain – he must know these are silly questions from her perspective, but he does it anyway because he’s got a plan and he’s just a bit daft and doesn’t mind appearing weird around humans if need be. Later in the bookshop he throws the books around – honestly he could just place them down, he will know he’s being silly when he chucks them all over the place, but he does it anyway. In between this we have Muriel, which is a delightful moment of them both being a bit silly together at Muriel’s expense, except they’re both really quite kind about it as well. Then we get the exception - in the magic shop he dons a fez and messes about with a crystal ball – really do I need to say more about how obviously overtly silly this is?

I’m sure I’ve missed plenty of other examples as well (I've not even mentioned how silly the apology dance is!), these are just the ones I can think of right now.

So all this to say that Crowley is silly and most of his silliness is when he’s around Aziraphale. We as the audience don’t see Crowley being super silly very often, but we can extrapolate from what we do see that throughout the history we don’t see he must display his silly side to Aziraphale reasonably regularly. The biggest piece of evidence for the idea that Crowley is a lot sillier than we tend to see him is when we glimpse him through Aziraphale’s eyes. We know he sees Crowley as someone who does funny things and that this is something Crowley continues to do right up to the present day because when they body swap and Aziraphale takes his place in hell what are the two main characteristics of Crowley that he plays up? Sarcasm and silliness.

So what does Aziraphale think of Crowley’s silliness? Well, he doesn’t actually react much to it (see later for one reaction he does tend to give). He definitely seems to expect it though, he takes it as a given part of Crowley’s personality and I think we can safely assume he likes it, since he likes Crowley. Is Crowley aware of his own silly streak? Absolutely. How do we know? Again because of how Aziraphale sees him. The first thing he tells Crowley about on his return is how silly he was: “I asked them for a rubber duck!” and Crowley laughs along with him, delighting in the silliness of it all. This reaction is a tacit acceptance of what Aziraphale has done yep, that’s totally the sort of thing I would have done, angel, I know I’m sometimes silly like that and I’m delighted that you see that and that you are also silly.

Aziraphale’s silliness

Aziraphale’s silliness is so overt that I’m not even going to list examples of it. We all know how silly Aziraphale is, right? We’ve all seen his stupid behaviour in the magic shop and his daft attempts at speaking French because he’s somehow wiped his ability to speak proper French from his memory (anyone got a meta about how he’s achieved this because I don’t think it gets enough attention?)

Basically Aziraphale is quite often as mad as a box of frogs and Crowley adores him for it. Sometimes he teases him about it, but a lot of the time he doesn’t even do that, he just shakes his head a bit and looks at Aziraphale like he can’t believe what he’s hearing or seeing and like he thinks Aziraphale is absolutely insane. This is a massively important part of their relationship dynamic. Aziraphale is silly and Crowley fake rolls his eyes at him – it’s what they do.

Why is this so important? Well firstly Aziraphale’s silliness is something that he gives to Crowley. And he only gifts it to him after he starts to trust him – Aziraphale’s silliness is a symbol of trust and Crowley knows it. If you made a graph of their silliness around each other through time then Crowley’s would stay fairly consistent, maybe even drop off a bit, (as he gets more worried about their situation), but Aziraphale’s would be a massive upward curve probably starting sometime around the arrangement (which is around 1020AD according to the book). This is another reason Crowley falsely looks super morose and jaded by S2. At the beginning of their relationship Crowley is the only silly one and he’s overtly silly fairly often (and probably this continues in meetings we don’t see), whilst Aziraphale is anxious and serious a lot of the time (there’s no real silliness from Aziraphale during the Job incident) because he’s struggling with his own morals and his own place in relation to heaven and God’s will.

Over time though he starts to trust Crowley and once he does he unleashes the silliness and this becomes a basic part of his personality. For the audience 1601 is the first time we see this, but it’s clear by that point that Crowley knows he’s silly and isn’t surprised by it. Once Aziraphale starts being silly around Crowley he does it with increasing regularity and by the time the events of S2 come around he’s silly so often and so wildly ridiculous about it that it makes Crowley look serious and maudlin by comparison (even though he’s more-or-less maintained his original silly streak at least up to the point where he drinks the coffee).

The second reason this is so important is linked to the first. Sometime after Aziraphale starts being silly this becomes how they flirt without flirting. Aziraphale is silly and it delights and surprises Crowley (surprises in terms of he doesn’t know how Aziraphale is going to be silly today, he’s not surprised by the fact that he is silly).

We see this in 1601 with Aziraphale shouting inappropriately silly things to Hamlet and looking at Crowley whilst doing it. He’s offering Crowley his silliness as a sign of trust and something more, the subtext is, You know how to be silly, I’ve seen you be silly, I know you love silly things and I’m silly too. Crowley reacts with a look we will see from him a lot in the future, you’re being ridiculous angel. He knows it’s silly, he knows Aziraphale knows he’s silly and he knows why Aziraphale is doing it. He doesn’t laugh though because they’re already on their way to established roles in their relationship, Aziraphale is silly and Crowley rolls his eyes at it whilst secretly delighting in it (it works the opposite way too – see the fez scene where Aziraphale is the one who reacts, you can just see the start of a, “seriously, what are you doing, Crowley?” expression before the camera cuts away to Crowley’s mad moment).

The dynamic later evolves into more overt flirting. By the time Gabriel turns up Aziraphale is very definitely using his silliness to flirt. The car scene (which I’ve written more about in another post) is the most overt example of this. Crowley isn’t being walked all over here, he’s playing up to Aziraphale very obviously flirting to get his own way, and by doing so is encouraging him to keep doing it. Aziraphale starts the scene off being silly about the clue and “investigating” because he knows Crowley likes it, and then he ramps up the silliness with his voice and hand gestures the more Crowley reacts with grumpiness and refusal. That this is all an act becomes very obvious when it continues inside after Crowley has removed the plants from the car. Clearly the car borrowing is already happening at this point but Crowley continues to protest and Aziraphale continues to flirt over the issue, right up until Crowley playfully pulls the car keys away from him at the last second and turns the tables by indirectly flirting with Aziraphale via his conversation with Muriel.

One interesting question here is, do they even know they are flirting? And you know what, I’m not entirely sure. I doubt they’d describe it like that to an outsider, but what they do understand is the effect their actions have on the other one, particularly Aziraphale. He knows flirting-using-silliness is a good way to get his own way on minor issues and Crowley, possibly sub-consciously, but definitely willingly, falls into his role in that dynamic providing it’s something he feels he can give (see my other post for more on that).

So is Crowley jaded by life in season two?

Tricky one! I can see some evidence of it and I do think he’s drifting a bit aimlessly this season, with no real home, no direction and feeling generally a bit lost about his place in the world. But I also see him being quite silly, sarcastic and generally amusing throughout the season as well, and he’s definitely still enjoying Aziraphale’s silliness, right up until the ball when Aziraphale won’t listen to him because he’s too busy being giddy. Also though he literally shares a joke with Mrs Sandwich when he’s rescuing the humans from the demons and he laughs in delight when he finds out Aziraphale has blown up his halo. He’s fed up about some things, but he’s not so fed up that he’s completely lost his sparkle.

Why does Crowley seem different though? Well, Crowley, whilst definitely very much inhabiting the ‘thin dark duke’ persona in the present-day scenes, still retains a lot of his sense of humour, it’s just changed over the years. He’s more likely now to channel his silliness into sarcasm, which makes total sense – he tends to keep up with the modern world a lot more than Aziraphale does and he’s lived in Britain for a very long time and British humour is very inclined towards sarcasm, which is basically a more grown-up form of silliness. Crowley hasn’t become jaded, he’s adapted his humour to the modern British world, but also still retained some of his original inclination to just behave in bizarre and unpredictable ways (Coffee drinking! Fez wearing!) He also doesn’t need to be as silly himself now because he’s got Aziraphale, who is more than silly enough for the both of them, and Crowley loves him for it. “I say something brilliant, he says something unintentionally funny. It’s great!”

Conclusion?

Yes, sort of! The whole thing can basically be summarised by something @ineffabildaddy said in response to my previous post. “Aziraphale and Crowley don’t just love each other, they like each other, too.” They haven’t hung around each other for 6000 years and fallen in love against their will because it’s fate or some nonsense like that – they liked each other first. They’ve always liked each other from the moment they met as angels and they have grown to like each other more at every meeting since. They like each other’s personalities, conversation, sense of humour, silliness and so much more. These are the things that bind them together.

We the audience only see their big moments, times when something happens that pushes their relationship forward (1941) or changes their sense of who they are (Job). In S1 we see them face a huge challenge together and come out the other side. What we don’t see and so what we can sometimes forget as the audience is that there is a massive amount of time in their history where these things weren’t happening, where they just met up and had normal conversations and hung out because it was fun for them to spend time together. To spend 6000 years hanging out together and still be able to find the other person interesting and funny and just generally worth being around is pretty impressive and show just how strong their relationship really is. I hope that no matter how big and dark things get in season three that we at least get some chance to watch them be silly together some more, I think they deserve it after all they’ve been through!

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