Comedy
Comedy
• The word “comedy” comes from the Greek word Komos,
or merrymaking, always part of the the Dionysian ritual.
• Comedies were popular during the Greece’s Golden Age
of drama (5th Century BCE).
• These “old comedies” relied largely on witty language and
characters; their point was to satirize something in society.
• Aristophanes, of course, is the well-known master of Old
Comedy in ancient Greece: Lysistrata, Birds, Frogs,
Peace, Clouds, Wasps. All poke fun at war, peace,
politicians, people and society.
• But Aristophanes is also credited with pioneering a
transition period, Middle Comedy, between Old and New.
Comedy
• The playwright Menander (342-291 BCE) is credited with
creating New Comedy, which is based on the bizarre
situations incited by human love.
• This particular form of comedy relies more on situational
plot, stock characters, and visual humor, rather than on wit
and complex ideas.
• The goal of new comedy was to amuse, not to instruct. In
these, as many comedies, all difficulties ended in marriage.
(Of course, often, this is where difficulties actually begin!)
Comedy
• Stock characters in New Comedy include: eager young
lovers, coquettes, indignant fathers, jealous husbands,
pompous asses, gullible victims, tricky servants, gobetweens, greedy con-men, and the like.
• These two basic forms of comedy moved through the ages,
adapting to tastes and moral restraints, which – as today –
comedy always strives to circumvent through limber use of
pun, double-entendre, and mock.
• Bawdy comedy was alive and well in the supposedly pious
middle ages, in the form of fabliaux and mimes and
farcical plays.
High and Low Comedy
• Comedy is often separated into two classes: High and Low,
which correlate in theory to Old and New Comedy:
• High Comedy: Words, wit and sophisticated characters and
ideas are used to reveal ridiculous or destructive traits of
human nature. Character and internal conflict march the
mostly dynamic plots forward.
• Low Comedy: Unruly plot, farce, bawdy jokes, sight gags,
slapstick and stock characters reveal absurd aspects of
human life. Often the purpose is sheer stupid fun as we
laugh ourselves silly at ourselves. The plot is random and
full of situational gags.
Commedia dell’Arte
• Commedia dell’arte (professional comedy, an
ironic name) derived from Roman farce and
emerged in force in Italy in the mid-16th century,
and flowered through the ages, taking Low
Comedy to its most outrageous extremes. (Its
opposite was the commedia erudita.)
• The performances were largely improvisational,
and relied on physical humor, using props such as
pies, water buckets, beds, ladders, and the double
paddle, called a “slap stick,” and sight gags.
Commedia dell’Arte
• Often the plot, full of ridiculous
situations, was interrupted by
iazzi, (l’azioni: actions) or
comic business, jokes, and witty
byplay performed (Harlequin or
Arlecchino) or other of the
zanni. (Pedrolino or Pierrot)
These “plots” are completely
episodic in nature, and mostly
repetitively absurd.
• Typical scenarios included
lecherous old men, fools, young
lovers, comic servants (zanni)
braggarts, prudes, cuckolds and
pundits.
Commedia dell’Arte
• The actors playing these stock
characters generally wore
masks (except for the humble
and sympathetic Pierrot) and
the performances were rife with
the obnoxious and obscene, full
of vulgar visual jokes and farce.
• Medieval romance reflects
these flat, stock characters, in
their simplicity, and also in the
seeming lack of depth of the
love itself.
Romantic Comedy
• Romantic comedy emerges from the middle ages as a
parody of romance literature of the middle ages; the word
“Romantic” is a derivative of “romance.”
• Romantic comedies in the Renaissance, conversely, derive
from New Comedy, and blend in elements of medieval
romances.
• Conventions include: Stock characters from Old Comedy:
blocking agents (those preventing the lovers from
marrying) choric figures (detached figure who comments
on the ridiculous situations) go-betweens (who try to defy
the blocking agent) and all difficulties end in marriage.*
Romantic Comedy
• Romantic comedies follow a dynamic plot sequence,
common to high comedy, although problems or
complications, are often created whimsically and solved
abruptly.
• Note: This is the inverse pattern of tragedy: at the climax
of rising action in a comedy, it seems as if all is lost to the
lovers; in tragedy, it seems briefly as if the hero will reach
his or her goal.
• Characters in Renaissance comedy, as in New Comedy,
tend to be well-developed, and erudite: In Shakespeare,
notably, the character of Rosalind in As You Like It and
Beatrice and Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing, and
Alceste in Molière’s, The Misanthrope.
Romantic Comedy
• Many of Shakespeare comedies contain elements of medieval
romance. Tokens of Medieval romance are evident in the presence of a
“green world” where magic solves the problems of the lovers. (As You
Like It; Midsummer Night’s Dream) In medieval romances, the quest
often involves encounters with magical or mystical places and beings.
• Some of Shakespeare’s plays in themselves are called romances, rather
than comedies, due to the healing nature of the green world: The
Tempest; The Winter’s Tale, As You Like It, Cymbeline, and Pericles.
In these plays, the theme of love and its foibles is secondary to
redemption and forgiveness.
• Shakespeare’s romance plays use magic, the supernatural, and the idea
of a journey to an unknown and mystical place where wounds are
healed or the spiritual answer to a profound question is discovered.
Romantic Comedy
• The connections to fertility ritual
is also a subtext in medieval
romance.
• The wedding festival is victory of
spring over winter, renewal of
humanity, and of the earth.
• Generally, Renaissance romantic
comedies, for their sophistication,
are placed in the High Comedy
category, especially those of
Shakespeare. The characters who
are mocked, are generally, static,
and these resemble Low Comedy
figures.
Metaphysical Poets
• One could include in the
high comedy category,
some of the Metaphysical
poems of the 17th century,
which revolve around wit,
or intellectual poetic
conceit to make a point,
often humorous in its
nature due to the long
stretch from literal to
figurative in the central
metaphor.
Comedy of Manners
• Comedy of Manners is a term that is generally
applied to Restoration* Comedy and Neoclassical
Comedy – both forms existing in the postRenaissance world of England and France.
(Molière, William Congreve, Oliver Goldsmith,
Richard Sheridan, William Wycherley).
• These plays include elements of Romantic comedy
and satire. They tend to mock the relations and
intrigues of people in the upper classes, rely
largely on words and wit, and are often
sophisticated and refined.
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18
Century Satire
• Satires Mock: human institutions, including religions,
politics and political systems, social or other classes,
philosophy or ideas, social practices or codes of behavior,
groups of any sort, individuals of any sort – in fact, the
entire human race!
• How important is it for us to be able to excoriate
ourselves? Satire can be considered as a genre, as an
important element of a work, or as a motif within a work.
Satire is didactic literature used to make an ideological
point.
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18
Century Satire
• Satire points out a problem,
but offers no solution!
(Remember, therefore, to keep
it out of your intimate life!)
Debates in satires mock the
very attitudes and viewpoint
they profess, by revealing
faulty logic to the extreme.
The 18th century’s new
openness, brought on by
Enlightenment thought, made
this century ripe for satires.
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18
Century Satire
• This type of satire is ripe in England, mostly
during the Age of Enlightenment. Voltaire,
notably, envied the English for their liberty to
express dismay and astonishment of the foibles of
political, religious, and world institutions, in
satire.
• Satirical notables include: Samuel Richardson,
Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding,
Tobias Smollett, Laurence Stern, and of course,
the radical Frenchman, Voltaire.
Elements of Satire
• Satire works like caricature: it highlights faults until they’re
completely absurd, so no one can miss them.
• Sarcastic Language:
• irony, understatement, and hyperbole*
• sardonic (cynically mocking) language (Eliot’s The Hollow Men)
• cruel, biting jokes
• use of ridicule (sarcasm) and invectives
• malapropisms and other variations on diction
• Tonal variations all pointing to general outlandishness: Satires can
move from the ridiculous to the absurd to the surreal to the grotesque
– and go into very dark realms. They are not always “funny” in a way
that is lightly humorous.
Elements of Satire
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Faulty Logic to Mock Faulty Logic
The Absurd
Ridiculous Coincidences or Crazy Contradictions Juxtaposed
Caricatures, especially eccentrics and pedants
An “Innocent” Observer or Narrator
Capricious Journeys of a Rogue Character (picaresque novels)
Other Miscellaneous plot forms in generally episodic narration: These
are called Menippean satires, for example, Alice in Wonderland
• Humor or Dark Humor (A Clockwork Orange)
• Use of Farce: Slapstick humor, physical and situational humor, high
sexual content
• Use of Burlesque: Parody or Travesty
Elements of Satire
• 1. Parody is a work that mixes high form and low content,
such as Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, which
uses high diction and lofty epic poetry with the rather low
subject of a girl’s hair, cut as a prank. Trapped in the
Closet, by R. Kelly is a really nice example of parody.
(Where would you file, Blazing Saddles?)
• 2. Travesty is a work that mixes low form with high
content: The film Cabaret, for example, uses travesty in
the “MC scenes” made famous by Joel Grey in the film,
where Weimar Republic dance-hall acts depict malignant
racism about to erupt into the Holocaust. Also, the film
Airplane could be considered travesty. What about Borat?
Absurdist Literature and Theater
of the Absurd
• The Absurdist movement is a
reaction to stuffy, formal and
moralistic Victorian literature.
It is part of the Modern and
Existential movements of the
20th century.
• Absurdist fiction centers on the
behavior of absurd characters,
situations or subjects. While a
great deal of Absurdist fiction
is humorous, the point is the
study of human behavior under
circumstances that are highly
unusual, but nonetheless,
created by humankind.
Absurdist Literature and Theater
of the Absurd
• For example, this might
include nuclear disaster,
craving a deity for salvation,
misery imposed on each other
for petty or lustful reasons, and
human strife caused by
humans in general.
• Absurdist fiction does not
judge characters or their
actions: the task is left to the
readers.
• It is mostly episodic in
structure, and there is usually
no explicit moral.
Comedy
• Comedy has the power to take fear and nobility out of the
object opposed, and in doing so, functionally diffuses
tension.
• This allows humans to critically view what might be
unbearable, or merely uncomfortable, and find solutions,
comfort, or solace in situations that could otherwise be
unfathomably heinous or merely humiliating.**
• Opposing forces and culturally different enemies can find
common ground in laughter.
• And mostly, comedy gives us the uncanny ability to
humbly see fault within ourselves, and to change
accordingly, without need for defensive repercussions.
Definitions
• Situational Comedy: The more convoluted the set up for the pay off
scene, the funnier it is. Situational comedy uses elements of suspense
and situational irony.
• Realistic Comedy: This modern term describes comedies that have
tender or even tragic moments.
• Bowdlerize: In 1815, the Reverend Thomas Bowdler tidied up
Shakespeare. In his Family Shakespeare, he omitted whatever he
thought was unfit to be read by a gentleman in the company of ladies.
(Expurgation of the indecent)
• Malapropism: From the play, The Rivals, by Richard Sheridan, after a
character, Mrs. Malaprop, who consistently uses words
inappropriately, in a misfired effort to sound sophisticated: “If I
reprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue,
and a nice derangement of epitaphs!”
• Digressive Comedy: In the mode of Seinfeld, or The Simpsons*