comedy

comedy
comedial /keuh mee"dee euhl/, adj.
/kom"i dee/, n., pl. comedies.
1. a play, movie, etc., of light and humorous character with a happy or cheerful ending; a dramatic work in which the central motif is the triumph over adverse circumstance, resulting in a successful or happy conclusion.
2. that branch of the drama which concerns itself with this form of composition.
3. the comic element of drama, of literature generally, or of life.
4. any literary composition dealing with a theme suitable for comedy, or employing the methods of comedy.
5. any comic or humorous incident or series of incidents.
[1350-1400; ME comedye < ML comedia, L comoedia < Gk komoidía, equiv. to komoid(ós) comedian (kômo(s) merry-making + aoidós singer) + -ia -Y3]
Syn. 5. jesting, humor, pleasantry, banter.

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I
Genre of dramatic literature that deals with the light and amusing or with the serious and profound in a light, familiar, or satirical manner.

Comedy can be traced to revels associated with worship in Greece in the 5th century BC. Aristophanes, Menander, Terence, and Plautus produced comedies in classical literature. It reappeared in the late Middle Ages, when the term was used to mean simply a story with a happy ending (e.g., Dante's Divine Comedy), the same meaning it has in novels of the last three centuries (e.g., the fiction of Jane Austen). Compare tragedy.
II
(as used in expressions)

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▪ literature and performance
Introduction

      type of drama or other art form the chief object of which, according to modern notions, is to amuse. It is contrasted on the one hand with tragedy and on the other with farce, burlesque, and other forms of humorous amusement.

      The classic conception of comedy, which began with Aristotle in ancient Greece of the 4th century BC and persists through the present, holds that it is primarily concerned with man as a social being, rather than as a private person, and that its function is frankly corrective. The comic artist's purpose is to hold a mirror up to society to reflect its follies and vices, in the hope that they will, as a result, be mended. The 20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson (Bergson, Henri) shared this view of the corrective purpose of laughter; specifically, he felt, laughter is intended to bring the comic character back into conformity with his society, whose logic and conventions he abandons when “he slackens in the attention that is due to life.” Here comedy is considered primarily as a literary genre, but also is considered for its manifestations in the other arts. The wellsprings of comedy are dealt with in the article humour. The comic impulse in the visual arts is discussed in caricature and cartoon and comic strip.

Origins and definitions
      The word comedy seems to be connected by derivation with the Greek (Greek religion) verb meaning “to revel,” and comedy arose out of the revels associated with the rites (ritual) of Dionysus, a god of vegetation. The origins of comedy are thus bound up with vegetation ritual. Aristotle, in his Poetics, states that comedy originated in phallic songs and that, like tragedy, it began in improvisation. Though tragedy evolved by stages that can be traced, the progress of comedy passed unnoticed because it was not taken seriously. When tragedy and comedy arose, poets wrote one or the other, according to their natural bent. Those of the graver sort, who might previously have been inclined to celebrate the actions of the great in epic poetry, turned to tragedy; poets of a lower type, who had set forth the doings of the ignoble in invectives, turned to comedy. The distinction is basic to the Aristotelian (Aristotelianism) differentiation between tragedy and comedy: tragedy imitates men who are better than the average, and comedy men who are worse.

      For centuries, efforts at defining comedy were to be along the lines set down by Aristotle: the view that tragedy deals with personages of high estate, and comedy deals with lowly types; that tragedy treats of matters of great public import, while comedy is concerned with the private affairs of mundane life; and that the characters and events of tragedy are historic and so, in some sense, true, while the humbler materials of comedy are but feigned. Implicit, too, in Aristotle is the distinction in styles deemed appropriate to the treatment of tragic and comic story. As long as there was at least a theoretical separation of comic and tragic styles, either genre could, on occasion, appropriate the stylistic manner of the other to a striking effect, which was never possible after the crossing of stylistic lines became commonplace. The ancient Roman poet Horace, who wrote on such stylistic differences, noted the special effects that can be achieved when comedy lifts its voice in pseudotragic rant and when tragedy adopts the prosaic but affecting language of comedy. Consciously combined, the mixture of styles produces the burlesque, in which the grand manner (epic or tragic) is applied to a trivial subject, or the serious subject is subjected to a vulgar treatment, to ludicrous effect. The English novelist Henry Fielding, in the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), was careful to distinguish between the comic and the burlesque; the latter centres on the monstrous and unnatural and gives pleasure through the surprising absurdity it exhibits in appropriating the manners of the highest to the lowest, or vice versa. Comedy, on the other hand, confines itself to the imitation of nature, and, according to Fielding, the comic artist is not to be excused for deviating from it. His subject is the ridiculous, not the monstrous, as with the writer of burlesque; and the nature he is to imitate is human nature, as viewed in the ordinary scenes of civilized society.

The human contradiction
      In dealing with man as a social being, all great comic artists have known that they are in the presence of a contradiction: that behind the social being lurks an animal being, whose behaviour often accords very ill with the canons dictated by society. Comedy, from its ritual beginnings, has celebrated creative energy. The primitive revels out of which comedy arose frankly acknowledged man's animal nature; the animal masquerades and the phallic processions are the obvious witnesses to it. Comedy testifies to man's physical vitality, his delight in life, his will to go on living. Comedy is at its merriest, its most festive, when this rhythm of life can be affirmed within the civilized context of human society. In the absence of this sort of harmony between creatural instincts and the dictates of civilization, sundry strains and discontents arise, all baring witness to the contradictory nature of man, which in the comic view is a radical dualism; his efforts to follow the way of rational sobriety are forever being interrupted by the infirmities of the flesh. The duality that tragedy views as a fatal contradiction in the nature of things comedy views as one more instance of the incongruous reality that every man must live with as best he can. “Wherever there is life, there is contradiction,” says Søren Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard, Søren), the 19th-century Danish Existentialist, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), “and wherever there is contradiction, the comical is present.” He went on to say that the tragic and the comic are both based on contradiction; but “the tragic is the suffering contradiction, comical, painless contradiction.” Comedy makes the contradiction manifest along with a way out, which is why the contradiction is painless. Tragedy, on the other hand, despairs of a way out of the contradiction.

      The incongruous is “the essence of the laughable,” said the English essayist William Hazlitt (Hazlitt, William), who also declared, in his essay “On Wit and Humour” in English Comic Writers (1819), that “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.”

Comedy, satire, and romance
      Comedy's dualistic view of man as an incongruous mixture of bodily instinct and rational intellect is an essentially ironic view—implying the capacity to see things in a double aspect. The comic drama takes on the features of satire as it fixes on professions of virtue and the practices that contradict them. Satire assumes standards against which professions and practices are judged. To the extent that the professions prove hollow and the practices vicious, the ironic (irony) perception darkens and deepens. The element of the incongruous points in the direction of the grotesque, which implies an admixture of elements that do not match. The ironic gaze eventually penetrates to a vision of the grotesque quality of experience, marked by the discontinuity of word and deed and the total lack of coherence between appearance and reality. This suggests one of the extreme limits of comedy, the satiric extreme, in which the sense of the discrepancy between things as they are and things as they might be or ought to be has reached to the borders of tragedy. For the tragic apprehension, as Kierkegaard states, despairs of a way out of the contradictions that life presents.

      As satire may be said to govern the movement of comedy in one direction, romance governs its movement in the other. Satiric comedy dramatizes the discrepancy between the ideal and the reality and condemns the pretensions that would mask reality's hollowness and viciousness. Romantic comedy also regularly presents the conflict between the ideal shape of things as hero or heroine could wish them to be and the hard realities with which they are confronted, but typically it ends by invoking the ideal, despite whatever difficulties reality has put in its way. This is never managed without a good deal of contrivance, and the plot of the typical romantic comedy is a medley of clever scheming, calculated coincidence, and wondrous discovery, all of which contribute ultimately to making the events answer precisely to the hero's or heroine's wishes. Plotting of this sort has had a long stage tradition and not exclusively in comedy. It is first encountered in the tragicomedies of the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides (e.g., Alcestis, Iphigeneia in Tauris, Ion, Helen). Shakespeare explored the full range of dramatic possibilities of the romantic mode of comedy. The means by which the happy ending is accomplished in romantic comedy—the document or the bodily mark that establishes identities to the satisfaction of all the characters of goodwill—are part of the stock-in-trade of all comic dramatists, even such 20th-century playwrights as Jean Anouilh (in Le Voyageur sans bagage) and T.S. Eliot (in The Confidential Clerk).

      There is nothing necessarily inconsistent in the use of a calculatedly artificial dramatic design to convey a serious dramatic statement. The contrived artifice of Shakespeare's (Shakespeare, William) mature comic plots is the perfect foil against which the reality of the characters' feelings and attitudes assumes the greater naturalness. The strange coincidences, remarkable discoveries, and wonderful reunions are unimportant compared with the emotions of relief and awe that they inspire. Their function, as Shakespeare uses them, is precisely to give rise to such emotions, and the emotions, thanks to the plangent poetry in which they are expressed, end by transcending the circumstances that occasioned them. But when such artifices are employed simply for the purpose of eliminating the obstacles to a happy ending—as is the case in the sentimental comedy of the 18th and early 19th centuries—then they stand forth as imaginatively impoverished dramatic clichés. The dramatists of sentimental comedy were committed to writing exemplary plays, wherein virtue would be rewarded and vice frustrated. If hero and heroine were to be rescued from the distresses that had encompassed them, any measures were apparently acceptable; the important thing was that the play's action should reach an edifying end. It is but a short step from comedy of this sort to the melodrama that flourished in the 19th-century theatre. The distresses that the hero and heroine suffer are, in melodrama, raised to a more than comic urgency, but the means of deliverance have the familiar comic stamp: the secret at last made known, the long-lost child identified, the hard heart made suddenly capable of pity. Melodrama is a form of fantasy that proceeds according to its own childish and somewhat egoistic logic; hero and heroine are pure, anyone who opposes them is a villain, and the purity that has exposed them to risks must ensure their eventual safety and happiness. What melodrama is to tragedy farce is to comedy, and the element of fantasy is equally prominent in farce and in melodrama. If melodrama provides a fantasy in which the protagonist suffers for his virtues but is eventually rewarded for them, farce provides a fantasy in which the protagonist sets about satisfying his most roguish or wanton, mischievous or destructive, impulses and manages to do so with impunity.

Theories (aesthetics)
      The treatise (literary criticism) that Aristotle is presumed to have written on comedy is lost. There is, however, a fragmentary treatise on comedy that bears an obvious relation to Aristotle's treatise on tragedy, Poetics, and is generally taken to be either a version of a lost Aristotelian original or an expression of the philosophical tradition to which he belonged. This is the Tractatus Coislinianus, preserved in a 10th-century manuscript in the De Coislin Collection in Paris. The Tractatus divides the substance of comedy into the same six elements that are discussed in regard to tragedy in the Poetics: plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle. The characters of comedy, according to the Tractatus, are of three kinds: the impostors, the self-deprecators, and the buffoons. The Aristotelian tradition from which the Tractatus derives probably provided a fourth, the churl, or boor. The list of comic characters in the Tractatus is closely related to a passage in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, in which the boaster (the person who says more than the truth) is compared with the mock-modest man (the person who says less), and the buffoon (who has too much wit) is contrasted with the boor (who has too little).

Comedy as a rite
      The Tractatus was not printed until 1839, and its influence on comic theory is thus of relatively modern date. It is frequently cited in the studies that attempt to combine literary criticism and anthropology, in the manner in which Sir James George Frazer (Frazer, Sir James George) combined studies of primitive religion and culture in The Golden Bough (1890–1915). In such works, comedy and tragedy alike are traced to a prehistoric death-and-resurrection ceremonial, a seasonal pantomime in which the old year, in the guise of an aged king (or hero or god), is killed, and the new spirit of fertility, the resurrection or initiation of the young king, is brought in. This rite typically featured a ritual combat, or agon, between the representatives of the old and the new seasons, a feast in which the sacrificial body of the slain king was devoured, a marriage between the victorious new king and his chosen bride, and a final triumphal procession in celebration of the reincarnation or resurrection of the slain god. Implicit in the whole ceremony is the ancient rite of purging the tribe through the expulsion of a scapegoat, who carries away the accumulated sins of the past year. Frazer, speaking of scapegoats in The Golden Bough, noted that this expulsion of devils was commonly preceded or followed by a period of general license, an abandonment of the ordinary restraints of society during which all offenses except the gravest go unpunished. This quality of Saturnalia is characteristic of comedy from ancient Greece through medieval Europe.

      The seasonal rites (feast) that celebrate the yearly cycle of birth, death, and rebirth are seen by the contemporary Canadian critic Northrop Frye (Frye, Northrop) as the basis for the generic plots of comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony and satire. The four prefigure the fate of a hero and the society he brings into being. In comedy (representing the season of spring), the hero appears in a society controlled by obstructing characters and succeeds in wresting it from their grasp. The movement of comedy of this sort typically replaces falsehood with truth, illusion with reality. The hero, having come into possession of his new society, sets forth upon adventures, and these are the province of romance (summer). Tragedy (autumn) commemorates the hero's passion and death. Irony and satire (winter) depict a world from which the hero has disappeared, a vision of “unidealized existence.” With spring, the hero is born anew.

The moral force of comedy
      The characters of comedy specified in the Tractatus arrange themselves in a familiar pattern: a clever hero is surrounded by fools of sundry varieties (impostors, buffoons, boors). The hero is something of a trickster; he dissimulates his own powers, while exploiting the weaknesses of those around him. The comic pattern is a persistent one; it appears not only in ancient Greek comedy but also in the farces of ancient Italy (Italian literature), in the commedia dell'arte that came into being in 16th-century Italy, and even in the routines involving a comedian and his straight man in the nightclub acts and the television variety shows of the present time. Implicit here is the tendency to make folly ridiculous, to laugh it out of countenance, which has always been a prominent feature of comedy.

      Renaissance critics, elaborating on the brief and cryptic account of comedy in Aristotle's Poetics, stressed the derisive force of comedy as an adjunct to morality. The Italian scholar Gian Giorgio Trissino's (Trissino, Gian Giorgio) account of comedy in his Poetica, apparently written in the 1530s, is typical: as tragedy teaches by means of pity and fear, comedy teaches by deriding things that are vile. Attention is directed here, as in other critical treatises of this kind, to the source of laughter. According to Trissino, laughter is aroused by objects that are in some way ugly and especially by that from which better qualities were hoped. His statement suggests the relation of the comic to the incongruous. Trissino was as aware as the French poet Charles Baudelaire was three centuries later that laughter betokens the fallen nature of man (Baudelaire would term it man's Satanic nature). Man laughs, says Trissino (echoing Plato's dialogue Philebus), because he is envious and malicious and never delights in the good of others except when he hopes for some good from it for himself.

      The most important English Renaissance statement concerning comedy is that of Sir Philip Sidney (Sidney, Sir Philip) in The Defence of Poesie (1595):

comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which [the comic dramatist] representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one.

      Like Trissino, Sidney notes that, while laughter comes from delight, not all objects of delight cause laughter, and he demonstrates the distinction as Trissino had done: “we are ravished with delight to see a fair woman, and yet are far from being moved to laughter. We laugh at deformed creatures, wherein certainly we cannot delight.” The element of the incongruous is prominent in Sidney's account of scornful laughter. He cites the image of the hero of Greek legend Heracles, with his great beard and furious countenance, in woman's attire, spinning at the command of his beloved queen, Omphale, and declares that this arouses both delight and laughter.

Comedy and character
      Another English poet, John Dryden (Dryden, John), in Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay (1668), makes the same point in describing the kind of laughter produced by the ancient Greek comedy The Clouds, by Aristophanes. In it, the character of Socrates is made ridiculous by acting very unlike the true Socrates; that is, by appearing childish and absurd rather than with the gravity of the true Socrates. Dryden was concerned with analyzing the laughable quality of comedy and with demonstrating the different forms it has taken in different periods of dramatic history. Aristophanic comedy sought its laughable quality not so much in the imitation of a man as in the representation of “some odd conceit which had commonly somewhat of unnatural or obscene in it.” In the so-called New Comedy, introduced by Menander late in the 4th century BC, writers sought to express the ethos, or character, as in their tragedies they expressed the pathos, or suffering, of mankind. This distinction goes back to Aristotle, who, in the Rhetoric, distinguished between ethos, a man's natural bent, disposition, or moral character, and pathos, emotion displayed in a given situation. And the Latin rhetorician Quintilian, in the 1st century AD, noted that ethos is akin to comedy and pathos to tragedy. The distinction is important to Renaissance and Neoclassical assumptions concerning the respective subject of comic and tragic representation. In terms of emotion, ethos is viewed as a permanent condition characteristic of the average man and relatively mild in its nature; pathos, on the other hand, is a temporary emotional state, often violent. Comedy thus expresses the characters of men in the ordinary circumstances of everyday life; tragedy expresses the sufferings of a particular man in extraordinary periods of intense emotion.

      In dealing with men engaged in normal affairs, the comic dramatists tended to depict the individual in terms of some single but overriding personal trait or habit. They adopted a method based on the physiological concept of the four humours (humour), or bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, choler, melancholy), and the belief that an equal proportion of these constituted health, while an excess or deficiency of any one of them brought disease. Since the humours governed temperament, an irregular distribution of them was considered to result not only in bodily sickness but also in derangements of personality and behaviour, as well. The resultant comedy of humours (humours, comedy of) is distinctly English, as Dryden notes, and particularly identified with the comedies of Ben Jonson.

The role of wit
      Humour is native to man. Folly need only be observed and imitated by the comic dramatist to give rise to laughter. Observers as early as Quintilian, however, have pointed out that, though folly is laughable in itself, such jests may be improved if the writer adds something of his own; namely, wit. A form of repartee, wit implies both a mental agility and a linguistic grace that is very much a product of conscious art. Quintilian describes wit at some length in his Institutio oratoria; it partakes of urbanity, a certain tincture of learning, charm, saltiness, or sharpness, and polish and elegance. In the preface (1671) to An Evening's Love, Dryden distinguishes between the comic talents of Ben Jonson, on the one hand, and of Shakespeare and his contemporary John Fletcher, on the other, by virtue of their excelling, respectively, in humour and wit. Jonson's talent lay in his ability “to make men appear pleasantly ridiculous on the stage”; while Shakespeare and Fletcher excelled in wit, or “the sharpness of conceit,” as seen in their repartee. The distinction is noted as well in Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay, where a comparison is made between the character of Morose in Jonson's play Epicœne, who is characterized by his humour (namely, his inability to abide any noise but the sound of his own voice), and Shakespeare's Falstaff (Falstaff, Sir John), who, according to Dryden, represents a miscellany of humours and is singular in saying things that are unexpected by the audience.

      The distinctions that Hazlitt (Hazlitt, William) arrives at, then, in his essay “On Wit and Humour” are very much in the classic tradition of comic criticism:

Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.

      The distinctions persist into the most sophisticated treatments of the subject. Sigmund Freud (Freud, Sigmund), for example, in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious (1905), said that wit is made, but humour is found. Laughter, according to Freud, is aroused at actions that appear immoderate and inappropriate, at excessive expenditures of energy: it expresses a pleasurable sense of the superiority felt on such occasions.

Baudelaire (Baudelaire, Charles) on the grotesque
      The view that laughter comes from superiority is referred to as a commonplace by Baudelaire, who states it in his essay “On the Essence of Laughter” (1855). Laughter, says Baudelaire, is a consequence of man's notion of his own superiority. It is a token both of an infinite misery, in relation to the absolute being of whom man has an inkling, and of infinite grandeur, in relation to the beasts, and results from the perpetual collision of these two infinities. The crucial part of Baudelaire's essay, however, turns on his distinction between the comic and the grotesque. The comic, he says, is an imitation mixed with a certain creative faculty; the grotesque is a creation mixed with a certain imitative faculty—imitative of elements found in nature. Each gives rise to laughter expressive of an idea of superiority—in the comic, the superiority of man over man, and, in the grotesque, the superiority of man over nature. The laughter caused by the grotesque has about it something more profound and primitive, something much closer to the innocent life, than has the laughter caused by the comic in man's behaviour. In France, the great master of the grotesque was the 16th-century author François Rabelais (Rabelais, François), while some of the plays of Molière, in the next century, best expressed the comic.

Bergson's (Bergson, Henri) and Meredith's theories
      The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) analyzed the dialectic of comedy in his essay “Laughter,” which deals directly with the spirit of contradiction that is basic both to comedy and to life. Bergson's central concern is with the opposition of the mechanical and the living; stated in its most general terms, his thesis holds that the comic consists of something mechanical encrusted on the living. Bergson traces the implications of this view in the sundry elements of comedy: situations, language, characters. Comedy expresses a lack of adaptability to society; any individual is comic who goes his own way without troubling to get into touch with his fellow beings. The purpose of laughter is to wake him from his dream. Three conditions are essential for the comic: the character must be unsociable, for that is enough to make him ludicrous; the spectator must be insensible to the character's condition, for laughter is incompatible with emotion; and the character must act automatically (Bergson cites the systematic absentmindedness of Don Quixote). The essential difference between comedy and tragedy, says Bergson, invoking a distinction that goes back to that maintained between ethos and pathos, is that tragedy is concerned with individuals and comedy with classes. And the reason that comedy deals with the general is bound up with the corrective aim of laughter: the correction must reach as great a number of persons as possible. To this end, comedy focusses on peculiarities that are not indissolubly bound up with the individuality of a single person.

      It is the business of laughter to repress any tendency on the part of the individual to separate himself from society. The comic character would, if left to his own devices, break away from logic (and thus relieve himself from the strain of thinking); give over the effort to adapt and readapt himself to society (and thus slacken in the attention that is due to life); and abandon social convention (and thus relieve himself from the strain of living).

      The essay “On the Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit” (1877), by Bergson's English contemporary George Meredith (Meredith, George), is a celebration of the civilizing power of the comic spirit. The mind, he affirms, directs the laughter of comedy, and civilization is founded in common sense, which equips one to hear the comic spirit when it laughs folly out of countenance and to participate in its fellowship.

      Both Bergson's and Meredith's essays have been criticized for focussing so exclusively on comedy as a socially corrective force and for limiting the scope of laughter to its derisive power. The charge is more damaging to Meredith's essay than it is to Bergson's. Whatever the limitations of the latter, it nonetheless explores the implications of its own thesis with the utmost thoroughness, and the result is a rigorous analysis of comic causes and effects for which any student of the subject must be grateful. It is with farce that Bergson's remarks on comedy have the greatest connection and on which they seem chiefly to have been founded. It is no accident that most of his examples are drawn from Molière, in whose work the farcical element is strong, and from the farces of Bergson's own contemporary Eugène Labiche. The laughter of comedy is not always derisive, however, as some of Shakespeare's greatest comedies prove; and there are plays, such as Shakespeare's last ones, which are well within an established tradition of comedy but in which laughter hardly sounds at all. These suggest regions of comedy on which Bergson's analysis of the genre sheds hardly any light at all.

The comic as a failure of self-knowledge
      Aristotle said that comedy deals with the ridiculous, and Plato, in the Philebus, defined the ridiculous as a failure of self-knowledge; such a failure is there shown to be laughable in private individuals (the personages of comedy) but terrible in persons who wield power (the personages of tragedy). In comedy, the failure is often mirrored in a character's efforts to live up to an ideal of self that may be perfectly worthy but the wrong ideal for him. Shakespearean (Shakespeare, William) comedy is rich in examples: the King of Navarre and his courtiers, who must be made to realize that nature meant them to be lovers, not academicians, in Love's Labour's Lost; Beatrice and Benedick, who must be made to know that nature meant them for each other, not for the single life, in Much Ado About Nothing; the Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night, who is brought to see that it is not Lady Olivia whom he loves but the disguised Viola, and Lady Olivia herself, who, when the right man comes along, decides that she will not dedicate herself to seven years of mourning for a dead brother, after all; and Angelo in Measure for Measure, whose image of himself collapses when his lust for Isabella makes it clear that he is not the ascetic type. The movement of all these plays follows a familiar comic pattern, wherein characters are brought from a condition of affected folly amounting to self-delusion to a plain recognition of who they are and what they want. For the five years or so after he wrote Measure for Measure, in 1604, Shakespeare seems to have addressed himself exclusively to tragedy, and each play in the sequence of masterpieces he produced during this period—Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus—turns in some measure on a failure of self-knowledge. This is notably so in the case of Lear, which is the tragedy of a man who (in the words of one of his daughters) “hath ever but slenderly known himself,” and whose fault (as the Fool suggests) is to have grown old before he grew wise.

      The plots of Shakespeare's last plays (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest) all contain a potential tragedy but one that is resolved by nontragic means. They contain, as well, an element of romance of the kind purveyed from Greek New Comedy through the plays of the ancient Roman comic dramatists Plautus and Terence. Children lost at birth are miraculously restored, years later, to their parents, thereby providing occasion for a recognition scene that functions as the denouement of the plot. Characters find themselves—they come to know themselves—in all manner of ways by the ends of these plays. Tragic errors have been made, tragic losses have been suffered, tragic passions—envy, jealousy, wrath—have seemed to rage unchecked, but the miracle that these plays celebrate lies in the discovery that the errors can be forgiven, the losses restored, and the passions mastered by man's godly spirit of reason. The near tragedies experienced by the characters result in the ultimate health and enlightenment of the soul. What is learned is of a profound simplicity: the need for patience under adversity, the need to repent of one's sins, the need to forgive the sins of others. In comedy of this high and sublime sort, patience, repentance, and forgiveness are opposed to the viciously circular pattern of crime, which begets vengeance, which begets more crime. Comedy of this sort deals in regeneration and rebirth. There is always about it something of the religious, as humankind is absolved of its guilt and reconciled one to another and to whatever powers that be.

Divine comedies in the West and East
      The 4th-century Latin grammarian Donatus (Donatus, Aelius) distinguished comedy from tragedy by the simplest terms: comedies begin in trouble and end in peace, while tragedies begin in calms and end in tempest. Such a differentiation of the two genres may be simplistic, but it provided sufficient grounds for Dante to call his great poem La Commedia (The Comedy; later called The Divine Comedy (Divine Comedy, The)), since, as he says in his dedicatory letter, it begins amid the horrors of hell but ends amid the pleasures of heaven. This suggests the movement of Shakespeare's last plays, which begin amid the distresses of the world and end in a supernal peace. Comedy conceived in this sublime and serene mode is rare but recurrent in the history of the theatre. The Spanish dramatist Calderón's (Calderón de la Barca, Pedro) Vida es sueño (1635; “Life Is a Dream”) is an example; so, on the operatic stage, is Mozart's Magic Flute (1791), in spirit and form so like Shakespeare's Tempest, to which it has often been compared. In later drama, Henrik Ibsen's Little Eyolf (1894) and August Strindberg's To Damascus (1898–1904)—both of which are among the late works of these Scandinavian dramatists—have affinities with this type, and this is the comic mode in which T.S. Eliot's last play, The Elder Statesman (1958), is conceived. It may represent the most universal mode of comedy. The American philosopher Susanne K. Langer (Langer, Susanne K.) writes:

In Asia the designation “Divine Comedy” would fit numberless plays; especially in India (Indian literature) triumphant gods, divine lovers united after various trials [as in the perennially popular romance of Rama and Sita], are the favourite themes of a theater that knows no “tragic rhythm.” The classical Sanskrit (Sanskrit literature) drama was heroic (heroic poetry) comedy—high poetry, noble action, themes almost always taken from the myths—a serious, religiously conceived drama, yet in the “comic” pattern, which is not a complete organic development reaching a foregone, inevitable conclusion, but is episodic, restoring a lost balance, and implying a new future. The reason for this consistently “comic” image of life in India is obvious enough: both Hindu (Hinduism) and Buddhist (Buddhism) regard life as an episode in the much longer career of the soul which has to accomplish many incarnations before it reaches its goal, nirvana. Its struggles in the world do not exhaust it; in fact they are scarcely worth recording except in entertainment theater, “comedy” in our sense—satire, farce, and dialogue. The characters whose fortunes are seriously interesting are the eternal gods; and for them there is no death, no limit of potentialities, hence no fate to be fulfilled. There is only the balanced rhythm of sentience and emotion, upholding itself amid the changes of material nature. (From Feeling and Form; Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953.)

Kinds of comedy in diverse historical periods

Old and New Comedy in ancient Greece
      The 11 surviving plays of Aristophanes represent the earliest extant body of comic drama; what is known of Greek Old Comedy is derived from these plays, the earliest of which, The Acharnians, was produced in 425 BC. Aristophanic comedy has a distinct formal design but displays very little plot in any conventional sense. Rather, it presents a series of episodes aimed at illustrating, in humorous and often bawdy detail, the implications of a deadly serious political issue: it is a blend of invective, buffoonery, and song and dance. Old Comedy often used derision and scurrility, and this may have proved its undoing; though praised by all, the freedom it enjoyed degenerated into license and violence and had to be checked by law.

      In New Comedy, which began to prevail around 336 BC, the Aristophanic depiction of public personages and events was replaced by a representation of the private affairs (usually amorous) of imaginary men and women. New Comedy is known only from the fragments that have survived of the plays of Menander (c. 342–c. 292 BC) and from plays written in imitation of the form by the Romans (ancient Rome) Plautus (c. 254–184 BC) and Terence (195 or 185–159 BC). A number of the stock comic characters survived from Old Comedy into New: an old man, a young man, an old woman, a young woman, a learned doctor or pedant, a cook, a parasite, a swaggering soldier, a comic slave. New Comedy, on the other hand, exhibits a degree of plot articulation never achieved in the Old. The action of New Comedy is usually about plotting; a clever servant, for example, devises ingenious intrigues in order that his young master may win the girl of his choice. There is satire in New Comedy: on a miser who loses his gold from being overcareful of it (the Aulularia of Plautus); on a father who tries so hard to win the girl from his son that he falls into a trap set for him by his wife (Plautus' Casina); and on an overstern father whose son turns out worse than the product of an indulgent parent (in the Adelphi of Terence). But the satiric quality of these plays is bland by comparison with the trenchant ridicule of Old Comedy. The emphasis in New Comic plotting is on the conduct of a love intrigue; the love element per se is often of the slightest, the girl whom the hero wishes to possess sometimes being no more than an offstage presence or, if onstage, a mute.

      New Comedy provided the model for European comedy through the 18th century. During the Renaissance, the plays of Plautus and, especially, of Terence were studied for the moral instruction that young men could find in them: lessons on the need to avoid the snares of harlots and the company of braggarts, to govern the deceitful trickery of servants, to behave in a seemly and modest fashion to parents. Classical comedy was brought up to date in the plays of the “Christian Terence,” imitations by schoolmasters of the comedies of the Roman dramatist. They added a contemporary flavour to the life portrayed and displayed a somewhat less indulgent attitude to youthful indiscretions than did the Roman comedy. New Comedy provided the basic conventions of plot and characterization for the commedia erudita—comedy performed from written texts—of 16th-century Italy, as in the plays of Machiavelli and Ariosto. Similarly, the stock characters that persisted from Old Comedy into New were taken over into the improvisational commedia dell'arte, becoming such standard masked characters as Pantalone, the Dottore, the vainglorious Capitano, the young lovers, and the servants, or zanni.

Rise of realistic comedy in 17th-century England
      The early part of the 17th century in England saw the rise of a realistic mode of comedy based on a satiric observation of contemporary manners and mores. It was masterminded by Ben Jonson (Jonson, Ben), and its purpose was didactic. Comedy, said Jonson in Every Man Out of his Humour (1599), quoting the definition that during the Renaissance was attributed to Cicero, is an imitation of life, a glass of custom, an image of truth. Comedy holds the mirror up to nature and reflects things as they are, to the end that society may recognize the extent of its shortcomings and the folly of its ways and set about its improvement. Jonson's greatest plays—Volpone (1606), Epicœne (1609), The Alchemist (1610), Bartholomew Fair (1614)—offer a richly detailed contemporary account of the follies and vices that are always with us. The setting (apart from Volpone) is Jonson's own London, and the characters are the ingenious or the devious or the grotesque products of the human wish to get ahead in the world. The conduct of a Jonsonian comic plot is in the hands of a clever manipulator who is out to make reality conform to his own desires. Sometimes he succeeds, as in the case of the clever young gentleman who gains his uncle's inheritance in Epicœne or the one who gains the rich Puritan widow for his wife in Bartholomew Fair. In Volpone and The Alchemist, the schemes eventually fail, but this is the fault of the manipulators, who will never stop when they are ahead, and not at all due to any insight on the part of the victims. The victims are almost embarrassingly eager to be victimized. Each has his ruling passion—his humour—and it serves to set him more or less mechanically in the path that he will undeviatingly pursue, to his own discomfiture.

      English comedy (manners, comedy of) of the later 17th century is cast in the Jonsonian mold. Restoration (Restoration literature) comedy is always concerned with the same subject—the game of love—but the subject is treated as a critique of fashionable society. Its aim is distinctly satiric, and it is set forth in plots of Jonsonian complexity, where the principal intriguer is the rakish hero, bent on satisfying his sexual needs, outside the bonds of marriage, if possible. In the greatest of these comedies—Sir George Etherege's (Etherege, Sir George) Man of Mode (1676), for example, or William Wycherley's (Wycherley, William) Country-Wife (1675) or William Congreve's (Congreve, William) Way of the World (1700)—the premium is on the energy and the grace with which the game is played, and the highest dramatic approval is reserved for those who take the game seriously enough to play it with style but who have the good sense to know when it is played out. The satiric import of Restoration comedy resides in the dramatist's awareness of a familiar incongruity: that between the image of man in his primitive nature and the image of man amid the artificial restraints that society would impose upon him. The satirist in these plays is chiefly concerned with detailing the artful dodges that ladies and gentlemen employ to satisfy nature and to remain within the pale of social decorum. Inevitably, then, hypocrisy is the chief satiric target. The animal nature of man is taken for granted, and so is his social responsibility to keep up appearances; some hypocrisy must follow, and, within limits, society will wink at indiscretions so long as they are discreetly managed. The paradox is typical of those in which the Restoration comic dramatists delight; and the strongly rational and unidealistic ethos of this comedy has its affinities with the naturalistic and skeptical cast of late-17th-century philosophical thought.

Sentimental comedy of the 17th and 18th centuries
      The Restoration comic style collapsed around the end of the 17th century, when the satiric vision gave place to a sentimental one. Jeremy Collier's (Collier, Jeremy) Short view of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage, published in 1698, signalled the public opposition to the real or fancied improprieties of plays staged during the previous three decades. “The business of plays is to recommend Vertue, and discountenance Vice”: so runs the opening sentence of Collier's attack. No Restoration comic dramatist ever conceived of his function in quite these terms. “It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of humankind,” Congreve had written a few years earlier (in the dedication to The Double-Dealer). Though Congreve may be assumed to imply—in accordance with the time-honoured theory concerning the didactic end of comedy—that the comic dramatist paints the vices and follies of humankind for the purpose of correcting them through ridicule, he is, nonetheless, silent on this point. Collier's assumption that all plays must recommend virtue and discountenance vice has the effect of imposing on comedy the same sort of moral levy that critics such as Thomas Rymer were imposing on tragedy in their demand that it satisfy poetic justice.

      At the beginning of the 18th century, there was a blending of the tragic and comic genres that, in one form or another, had been attempted throughout the preceding century. The vogue of tragicomedy may be said to have been launched in England with the publication of John Fletcher's Faithfull Shepheardesse (c. 1608), an imitation of the Pastor fido, by the Italian poet Battista Guarini. In his Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry (1601), Guarini had argued the distinct nature of the genre, maintaining it to be a third poetic kind, different from either the comic or the tragic. Tragicomedy, he wrote, takes from tragedy its great persons but not its great action, its movement of the feelings but not its disturbance of them, its pleasure but not its sadness, its danger but not its death; from comedy it takes laughter that is not excessive, modest amusement, feigned difficulty, and happy reversal. Fletcher adapted this statement in the address “To the Reader” that prefaces The Faithfull Shepheardesse.

      The form quickly established itself on the English stage, and, through the force of such examples as Beaumont (Beaumont, Francis) and Fletcher's (Fletcher, John) Phylaster (1610) and A King and No King (1611) and a long sequence of Fletcher's unaided tragicomedies, it prevailed during the 20 years before the closing of the theatres in 1642. The taste for tragicomedy continued unabated at the Restoration, and its influence was so pervasive that during the closing decades of the century the form began to be seen in plays that were not, at least by authorial designation, tragicomedies. Its effect on tragedy can be seen not only in the tendency, always present on the English stage, to mix scenes of mirth with more solemn matters but also in the practice of providing tragedy with a double ending (a fortunate one for the virtuous, an unfortunate one for the vicious), as in Dryden's Aureng-Zebe (1675) or Congreve's Mourning Bride (1697). The general lines separating the tragic and comic genres began to break down, and that which is high, serious, and capable of arousing pathos could exist in the same play with what is low, ridiculous, and capable of arousing derision. The next step in the process came when Sir Richard Steele (Steele, Sir Richard), bent on reforming comedy for didactic purposes, produced The Conscious Lovers (1722) and provided the English stage with an occasion when the audience at a comedy could derive its chief pleasure not from laughing but from weeping. It wept in the delight of seeing virtue rewarded and young love come to flower after parental opposition had been overcome. Comedy of the sort inaugurated by The Conscious Lovers continued to represent the affairs of private life, as comedy had always done, but with a seriousness hitherto unknown; and the traditionally low personages of comedy now had a capacity for feeling that bestowed on them a dignity previously reserved for the personages of tragedy.

      This trend in comedy was part of a wave of egalitarianism that swept through 18th-century political and social thought. It was matched by a corresponding trend in tragedy, which increasingly selected its subjects from the affairs of private men and women in ordinary life, rather than from the doings of the great. The German dramatist Gotthold Lessing (Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim) wrote that the misfortunes of those whose circumstances most resemble those of the audience must naturally penetrate most deeply into its heart, and his own Minna von Barnhelm (1767) is an example of the new serious comedy. The capacity to feel, to sympathize with, and to be affected by the plight of a fellow human being without regard for his rank in the world's esteem became the measure of one's humanity. It was a bond that united the fraternity of mankind in an aesthetic revolution that preceded the political revolutions of the 18th century. In literature, this had the effect of hastening the movement toward a more realistic representation of reality, whereby the familiar events of common life are treated “seriously and problematically” (in the phrase of the critic Erich Auerbach (Auerbach, Erich), who traced the process in his book Mimesis [1946]). The results may be seen in novels such as Samuel Richardson's (Richardson, Samuel) Pamela and Clarissa and in middle-class tragedies such as George Lillo's (Lillo, George) The London Merchant (1731) in England; in the comédie larmoyante (“tearful comedy”) in France; in Carlo Goldoni's (Goldoni, Carlo) efforts to reform the commedia dell'arte and replace it with a more naturalistic comedy in the Italian theatre; and in the English sentimental comedy, exemplified in its full-blown state by plays such as Hugh Kelly's (Kelly, Hugh) False Delicacy (1768) and Richard Cumberland's (Cumberland, Richard) West Indian (1771). Concerning the sentimental comedy it must be noted that it is only in the matter of appropriating for the bourgeoisie a seriousness of tone and a dignity of representational style previously considered the exclusive property of the nobility that the form can be said to stand in any significant relationship to the development of a more realistic mimetic mode than the traditional tragic and comic ones. The plots of sentimental comedy are as contrived as anything in Plautus and Terence (which with their fondness for foundling heroes who turn out to be long-lost sons of rich merchants, they often resemble); and with their delicate feelings and genteel moral atmosphere, comedies of this sort seem as affected in matters of sentiment as Restoration comedy seems in matters of wit.

      Oliver Goldsmith (Goldsmith, Oliver), in his “A Comparison Between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy” (1773), noted the extent to which the comedy in the England of his day had departed from its traditional purpose, the excitation of laughter by exhibiting the follies of the lower part of mankind. He questioned whether an exhibition of its follies would not be preferable to a detail of its calamities. In sentimental comedy, Goldsmith continued, the virtues of private life were exhibited, rather than the vices exposed; and the distresses rather than the faults of mankind generated interest in the piece. Characters in these plays were almost always good; if they had faults, the spectator was expected not only to pardon but to applaud them, in consideration of the goodness of their hearts. Thus, according to Goldsmith, folly was commended instead of being ridiculed. Goldsmith concluded by labelling sentimental comedy a “species of bastard tragedy,” “a kind of mulish production”: a designation that ironically brings to mind Guarini's comparison of tragicomedy in its uniqueness (a product of comedy and tragedy but different from either) to the mule (the offspring of the horse and the ass but itself neither one nor the other). The production of Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's (Sheridan, Richard Brinsley) Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777) briefly reintroduced comic gaiety to the English stage; by the end of the decade, Sheridan's dramatic burlesque, The Critic (first performed 1779), had appeared, with its parody of contemporary dramatic fashions, the sentimental included. But this virtually concluded Sheridan's career as a dramatist; Goldsmith had died in 1774; and the sentimental play was to continue to govern the English comic stage for over a century to come.

The comic outside the theatre
      The great comic voices of the 18th century in England were not those in the theatre. No dramatic satire of the period can exhibit anything comparable to the furious ridicule of man's triviality and viciousness that Jonathan Swift provided in Gulliver's Travels (1726). His Modest Proposal (1729) is a masterpiece of comic incongruity, with its suave blend of rational deliberation and savage conclusion. The comic artistry of Alexander Pope (Pope, Alexander) is equally impressive. Pope expressed his genius in the invective of his satiric portraits and in the range of moral and imaginative vision that was capable, at one end of his poetic scale, of conducting that most elegant of drawing-room epics, The Rape of the Lock (1712–14), to its sublimely inane conclusion and, at the other, of invoking from the scene that closes The Dunciad (1728) an apocalyptic judgment telling what will happen when the vulgarizers of the word have carried the day.

      When the voice of comedy did sound on the 18th-century English stage with anything approaching its full critical and satiric resonance, the officials soon silenced (censorship) it. John Gay's (Gay, John) Beggar's Opera (1728) combined hilarity with a satiric fierceness worthy of Swift (who may have suggested the original idea for it). The officials tolerated its spectacularly successful run, but no license from the lord chamberlain could be secured for Gay's sequel, Polly, which was not staged until 1777. The Licensing Act of 1737 ended the theatrical career of Henry Fielding, whose comedies had come under constant fire from the authorities for their satire on the government. Fielding's comic talents were perforce directed to the novel, the form in which he parodied the sentiment and the morality of Richardson's Pamela—in his Shamela and Joseph Andrews (1742)—as brilliantly as he had earlier burlesqued the rant of heroic tragedy in Tom Thumb (1730).

      Comedy of the sort that ridicules the follies and vices of society to the end of laughing them out of countenance entered the English novel with Fielding. His statement in Joseph Andrews concerning the function of satire is squarely in the Neoclassic tradition of comedy as a corrective of manners and mores: the satirist holds

the glass to thousands in their closets, that they may contemplate their deformity, and endeavour to reduce it, and thus by suffering private mortification may avoid public shame.

      Fielding's scenes of contemporary life display the same power of social criticism as that which distinguishes the engravings of his great fellow artist William Hogarth (Hogarth, William), whose “Marriage à la Mode” (1745) depicts the vacuity and the casual wantonness of the fashionable world that Fielding treats of in the final books of Tom Jones. Hogarth's other series, such as “A Rake's Progress” (1735) or “A Harlot's Progress” (1732), also make a didactic point about the wages of sin, using realistic details heightened with grotesquerie to expose human frailty and its sinister consequences. The grotesque is a recurrent feature of the satiric tradition in England, where comedy serves social criticism. Artists such as Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson worked in the tradition of Jonson and the Restoration dramatists in the preceding century.

      The novel, with its larger scope for varied characters, scenes, and incidents, rather than the drama, afforded the 19th-century artist in comedy a literary form adequate to his role as social critic. The spectacle of man and his society is regularly presented by the 19th-century novelist in comedic terms, as in Vanity Fair (1848), by William Makepeace Thackeray or the Comédie humaine (1842–55) of Honoré de Balzac, and with the novels of Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and George Meredith.

20th-century tragicomedy
      The best that the comic stage had to offer in the late 19th century lay in the domain of farce. The masters of this form were French, but it flourished in England as well; what the farces of Eugène Labiche and Georges Feydeau and the operettas of Jacques Offenbach were to the Parisian stage the farces of W.S. Gilbert and the young Arthur Wing Pinero and the operettas that Gilbert wrote in collaboration with Arthur Sullivan were to the London stage. As concerns comedy, the situation in England improved at the end of the century, when Oscar Wilde (Wilde, Oscar) and George Bernard Shaw (Shaw, George Bernard) turned their talents to it. Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is farce raised to the level of high comic burlesque. Shaw's choice of the comic form was inevitable, given his determination that the contemporary English stage should deal seriously and responsibly with the issues that were of crucial importance to contemporary English life. Serious subjects could not be resolved by means of the dramatic clichés of Victorian melodrama. Rather, the prevailing stereotypes concerning the nature of honour, courage, wisdom, and virtue were to be subjected to a hail of paradox, to the end of making evident their inner emptiness or the contradictions they concealed.

      Shaw dealt with what, in the preface to Major Barbara (1905), he called “the tragi-comic irony of the conflict between real life and the romantic imagination,” and his use of the word tragicomic is a sign of the times. The striking feature of modern art, according to the German novelist Thomas Mann (Mann, Thomas), was that it had ceased to recognize the categories of tragic and comic or the dramatic classifications of tragedy and comedy but saw life as tragicomedy. The sense that tragicomedy is the only adequate dramatic form for projecting the unreconciled ironies of modern life mounted through the closing decades of the 19th century. Ibsen (Ibsen, Henrik) had termed The Wild Duck (published 1884) a tragicomedy; it was an appropriate designation for this bitter play about a young man blissfully ignorant of the lies on which he and his family have built their happy life until an outsider who is committed to an ideal of absolute truth exposes all their guilty secrets with disastrous results. The plays of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov (Chekhov, Anton), with their touching and often quite humorous figures leading lives of quiet desperation, reflect precisely that mixture of inarticulate joy and dull pain that is the essence of the tragicomic view of life.

      A dramatist such as August Strindberg (Strindberg, August) produces a kind of tragicomedy peculiarly his own, one that takes the form of bourgeois tragedy; it lacerates its principals until they become a parody of themselves. Strindberg's Dance of Death (1901), with its cruelty and pain dispensed with robust pleasure by a fiercely battling husband and wife, is a significant model of the grotesque in the modern theatre; it is reflected in such mid-20th-century examples of what came to be called black comedy (black humour) as Eugène Ionesco's Victims of Duty (1953) and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Almost equally influential as a turn-of-the-century master of the grotesque is Frank Wedekind (Wedekind, Frank), whose Earth Spirit (1895) and its sequel, Pandora's Box (written 1892–1901), though both are termed tragedies by their author, are as much burlesques of tragedy as The Dance of Death. Their grotesquerie consists chiefly in their disturbing combination of innocence and depravity, of farce and horror, of passionate fervour issuing in ludicrous incident that turns deadly. Wedekind's celebration of primitive sexuality and the varied ways in which it manifests itself in an oversophisticated civilization distorts the tragic form to achieve its own grotesque beauty and power.

      The great artist of the grotesque and of tragicomedy in the 20th century is the Italian Luigi Pirandello (Pirandello, Luigi). His drama is explicitly addressed to the contradictoriness of experience: appearances collide and cancel out each other; the quest of the absolute issues in a mind-reeling relativism; infinite spiritual yearnings are brought up hard against finite physical limits; rational purpose is undermined by irrational impulse; and with the longing for permanence in the midst of change comes the ironic awareness that changelessness means death. Stated thus, Pirandello's themes sound almost forbiddingly intellectual, but one of his aims was to convert intellect into passion. Pirandello's characters suffer from intellectual dilemmas that give rise to mental and emotional distress of the most anguished kind, but their sufferings are placed in a satiric frame. The incongruities that the characters are furiously seeking to reconcile attest to the comic aspect of this drama, but there is nothing in it of the traditional movement of comedy, from a state of illusion into the full light of reality. Pirandello's characters dwell amid ambiguities and equivocations that those who are wise in the tragicomic nature of life will accept without close inquiry. The logic of comedy implies that illusions exist to be dispelled; once they are dispelled, everyone will be better off. The logic of Pirandello's tragicomedy demonstrates that illusions make life bearable; to destroy them is to destroy the basis for any possible happiness.

      In their highly individual ways, both Samuel Beckett (Beckett, Samuel) and Ionesco have employed the forms of comedy—from tragicomedy to farce—to convey the vision of an exhausted civilization and a chaotic world. The very endurance of life amid the grotesque circumstances that obtain in Beckett's plays is at once a tribute to the human power of carrying on to the end and an ironic reflection on the absurdity of doing so. Beckett's plays close in an uneasy silence that is the more disquieting because of the uncertainty as to just what it conceals: whether it masks sinister forces ready to spring or is the expression of a universal indifference or issues out of nothing at all.

      Silence seldom reigns in the theatre of Ionesco (Ionesco, Eugène), which rings with voices raised in a usually mindless clamour. Some of Ionesco's most telling comic effects have come from his use of dialogue overflowing with clichés and non sequiturs, which make it clear that the characters do not have their minds on what they are saying and, indeed, do not have their minds on anything at all. What they say is often at grotesque variance with what they do. Beneath the moral platitudes lurks violence, which is never far from the surface in Ionesco's plays, and the violence tells what happens to societies in which words and deeds have become fatally disjunct. Ionesco's comic sense is evident as well in his depiction of human beings as automata, their movements decreed by forces they have never questioned or sought to understand. There is something undeniably farcical in Ionesco's spectacles of human regimentation, of men and women at the mercy of things (e.g., the stage full of chairs in The Chairs or the growing corpse in Amédée); the comic quality here is one that Bergson would have appreciated. But the comic in Ionesco's most serious work, as in so much of the contemporary theatre, has ominous implications that give to it a distinctly grotesque aspect. In Ionesco's Victims of Duty and The Killer (1959), as in the works of his Swiss counterparts—Der Besuch der alten Dame (performed 1956; The Visit, 1958) and The Physicists (1962), by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and The Firebugs (1958), by Max Frisch—the grotesquerie of the tragicomic vision delineates a world in which the humane virtues are dying, and casual violence is the order of the day.

      The radical reassessment of the human image that the 20th century has witnessed is reflected in the novel as well as in drama. Previous assumptions about the rational and divine aspects of man have been increasingly called into question by the evidences of man's irrationality, his sheer animality. These are qualities of human nature that writers of previous ages (Swift, for example) have always recognized, but hitherto they have been typically viewed as dark possibilities that could overtake humanity if the rule of reason did not prevail. It is only in the mid-20th century that the savage and the irrational have come to be viewed as part of the normative condition of humanity rather than as tragic aberrations from it. The savage and the irrational amount to grotesque parodies of human possibility, ideally conceived. Thus it is that 20th-century novelists as well as dramatists have recognized the tragicomic nature of the contemporary human image and predicament, and the principal mode of representing both is the grotesque. This may take various forms: the apocalyptic nightmare of tyranny and terror in Kafka's (Kafka, Franz) novels The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926); the tragic farce in terms of which the Austrian novelist Robert Musil (Musil, Robert) describes the slow collapse of a society into anarchy and chaos, in The Man Without Qualities (1930–43); the brilliant irony whereby Thomas Mann represents the hero as a confidence man in The Confessions of Felix Krull (1954); the grimly parodic account of Germany's descent into madness in Günter Grass's (Grass, Günter) novel The Tin Drum (1959). The English novel contains a rich vein of the comic grotesque that extends at least back to Dickens and Thackeray and persisted in the 20th century in such varied novels as Evelyn Waugh's (Waugh, Evelyn) Decline and Fall (1928), Angus Wilson's (Wilson, Sir Angus) Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), and Kingsley Amis' (Amis, Sir Kingsley) Lucky Jim (1954). What novelists such as these have in common is the often disturbing combination of hilarity and desperation. It has its parallel in a number of American novels—John Barth's (Barth, John) Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s (Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr.) Slaughterhouse Five (1969)—in which shrill farce is the medium for grim satire. And the grotesque is a prominent feature of modern poetry, as in some of the “Songs and Other Musical Pieces” of W.H. Auden.

The comic in other arts

The visual arts
      The increasing use of the affairs of common life as the subject matter of dramatic comedy through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is also seen in painting of that time. Scenes from medieval mystery cycles, such as the comic episodes involving Noah's stubborn wife, have counterparts in medieval pictures in the glimpses of everyday realities that are caught through the windows or down the road from the sites where the great spiritual mysteries are in progress: the angel Gabriel may appear to the Virgin in the foreground, while a man is chopping wood in the yard outside. Medieval artists had never neglected the labours and the pleasures of the mundane world, but the treatment of them is often literally marginal, as in the depiction of men and women at work or play in the ornamental borders of an illuminated manuscript page. The seasonal round of life, with its cycle of plowing, sowing, mowing, and reaping interspersed with hawking, hunting, feasts, and weddings (the cycle of life, indeed, which comedy itself celebrates), is depicted in series after series of exquisite miniatures, such as those in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. By the mid-16th century, however, in Pieter Bruegel's (Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder) famous painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” mundane reality has taken over the foreground; the plowman tills the soil, and the shepherd attends his flock, while, unnoticed by both, the legs of Icarus disappear inconspicuously into the sea. Bruegel is not a comic artist, but his art bears witness to what all great comic art celebrates: the basic rhythm of life. “Peasant Wedding” and “Peasant Dance” (see ) endow their heavy men and women with an awkward grace and dignity that bear comparison with Shakespeare's treatment of his comic characters. Paintings like Bruegel's “Children's Games” and his “Fight Between Carnival and Lent” are joyous representations of human energy. The series of “The Labours of the Months”—“Hunters in the Snow” for January, “Haymaking” for July, “Harvesters” for August, “Return of the Herd” for November—give pictorial treatment to a favourite subject of the medieval miniaturists. Finally, allusion must be made to Bruegel's mastery of the grotesque, notably in “The Triumph of Death” and in the “Dulle Griet,” in which demons swarm over a devastated landscape.

      It is through the art of caricature that the spirit of comedy enters most directly into painting. The style derives from the portraits with ludicrously exaggerated features made by the Carracci, an Italian family of artists, early in the 17th century (Italian caricare, “to overload”). In defiance of the theory of ideal beauty, these portraits emphasized the features that made one man different from another. This method of character portrayal—the singling out of one distinctive feature and emphasizing it over all others—is not unlike the practice of characterizing the personages of the comic stage by means of some predominant humour, which Ben Jonson was developing at about the same time in the London theatre. The use of exaggeration for comic effect was as evident to painters as it was to dramatists. Its usefulness as a means of social and political satire is fully recognized by Hogarth. Hogarth's counterpart in mid-19th-century Paris was Honoré Daumier (Daumier, Honoré). His caricatures portray a human comedy as richly detailed and as shrewdly observed as the one portrayed in fiction by his contemporary Balzac. But Daumier's sense of the comic goes beyond caricature; his numerous treatments of scenes from Molière's plays and, most notably, his drawings and canvases of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza attest to the pathos that can lie beneath the comic mask.

      Modern art has abstracted elements of comedy to aid it in the representation of a reality in which the mechanical is threatening to win out over the human. Bergson's contention that the essence of comedy consists of something mechanical encrusted on the living may be said to have achieved a grotesque apotheosis in the French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp's (Duchamp, Marcel) painting “Bride” (1912), in which the female figure has been reduced to an elaborate piece of plumbing. The highly individual Swiss Expressionist Paul Klee's (Klee, Paul) pen-and-ink drawing tinted with watercolour and titled “Twittering Machine” (1922) represents an ingenious device for imitating the sound of birds. The delicacy of the drawing contrasts with the sinister implications of the mechanism, which, innocent though it may appear at first glance, is almost certainly a trap.

      The grotesque is a constant stylistic feature of the artist's representation of reality in its brutalized or mechanized aspects. The carnival masks worn by the figures in the painting “Intrigue” (1890), by the Belgian James Ensor (Ensor, James, Baron), make manifest the depravity and the obscenity that lurk beneath the surface of conventional appearances; Ensor's paintings make much the same point about the persistence of the primitive and the savage into modern life as Wedekind's plays were to do a few years later. German artists after World War I invoked the grotesque with particular power, depicting the inhuman forces that bear upon the individual, as in George Grosz's (Grosz, George) savage cartoon titled “Germany, a Winter's Tale” (1918), in which the puppet-like average citizen sits at table surrounded by militarist, capitalist, fatuous clergyman and all the violent and dissolute forces of a decadent society. The mutilated humanity in Max Beckmann's (Beckmann, Max) “Dream” (1921) and “Departure” (1932–33) is a further testament to human viciousness, 20th-century variety.

      Rather more explicitly comic is the element of fantasy in modern paintings, in which seemingly unrelated objects are brought together in a fine incongruity, as in the French primitive Henri Rousseau's (Rousseau, Henri) famous “Dream” (1910), with its nude woman reclining on a red-velvet sofa amid the flora and fauna of a lush and exotic jungle. The disparate figures that float (in defiance of all the laws of gravity) through the paintings of the Russian Surrealist Marc Chagall (Chagall, Marc) are individually set forth in a nimbus of memory and in the landscape of dream. But fantasy can take on a grotesquerie of its own, as in some of Chagall's work, such as the painting “I and The Village” (1911).

      The purest expression of the comic in modern painting must surely be Henri Matisse's (Matisse, Henri) “Joy of Life” (1905–06), a picture that might be taken as a visual expression of the precept that the rhythm of comedy is the basic rhythm of life. But Matisse's painting was not to be the last word on the subject: “Joy of Life” produced, as a counterstatement, Pablo Picasso's (Picasso, Pablo) “Demoiselles d'Avignon” (1906–07), in which the daughters of joy, in their grim and aggressive physical tension, stand as a cruel parody of the delight in the senses that Matisse's picture celebrates. “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” and such a later Picasso masterpiece as the “Three Dancers” (1925) suggest that, for the visual as well as the literary artist of the 20th century, the joy of life tends to issue in grotesque shapes.

      Given the wide range of imitative sounds of which musical instruments and the human voice are capable, comic effects are readily available to the composer who wants to use them. At the simplest level, these may amount to nothing more than humorous adjuncts to a larger composition, such as the loud noise with which the 18th-century Austrian composer Joseph Haydn surprises his listeners in Symphony No. 94 or the sound of the ticking clock in No. 101. The scherzo, which Ludwig van Beethoven (Beethoven, Ludwig van) introduced into symphonic music in the early 19th century, may be said to have incorporated in it a musical joke but one of a highly abstract kind; its nervous jocularity provides a contrast and a commentary (both heavy with irony) on the surrounding splendour. A century after Beethoven, the jocularity grew more desperate and the irony more profound in the grim humour that rises out of the grotesque scherzos of Gustav Mahler (Mahler, Gustav). A more sustained and a more explicit musical exposition of comic themes and attitudes comes when a composer draws his inspiration directly from a work of comic literature, as Richard Strauss (Strauss, Richard) does in his orchestral variations based on Don Quixote and on the merry pranks of Till Eulenspiegel.

      It is, however, opera that provides the fullest form for comedy to express itself in music, and some of the most notable achievements of comic art have been conceived for the operatic stage. High on any list of comic masterpieces must come the four principal operas of Mozart (Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus): Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), Così fan tutte (1790), and The Magic Flute (1791), and there are countless others worthy of mention. Operatic comedy has an advantage over comedy in the spoken theatre in its ability to impose a coherent form on the complexities of feeling and action that are often of the essence in comedy. The complex feeling experienced by different characters must be presented in spoken comedy seriatim; operatic comedy can present them simultaneously. When three or four characters talk simultaneously in the spoken theatre, the result is an incoherent babble. But the voices of three or four or even more characters can be blended together in an operatic ensemble, and, while most of the words may be lost, the vocal lines will serve to identify the individual characters and the general nature of the emotions they are expressing. The complexities of action in the spoken theatre are the chief source of the comic effect, which increases as the confusion mounts; such complexities of action operate to the same comic end in opera but here with the added ingredient of music, which provides an overarching design of great formal coherence. In the music, all is manifestly ordered and harmonious, while the events of the plot appear random and chaotic; the contrast between the movement of the plot and the musical progression provides a Mozart or a Rossini with some of his wittiest and most graceful comic effects. Finally, it should be noted that operatic comedy can probe psychological and emotional depths of character that spoken comedy would scarcely attempt. The Countess in Mozart's Figaro is a very much more moving figure than she is in Beaumarchais' play; the Elvira of Don Giovanni exhibits a fine extravagance that is little more than suggested in Molière's comedy.

Television and cinema (motion picture)
      When comedy is dependent on the favour of a large part of the public, as reflected in box-office receipts or the purchase of a television sponsor's product, it seldom achieves a high level of art. There is nothing innocent about laughter at the whims and inconsistencies of humankind, and radio and television and film producers have always been wary of offending their audiences with it. On radio and television, the laughter is usually self-directed (as in the performances of comedians such as Jack Benny or Red Skelton), or it is safely contained within the genial confines of a family situation (e.g., the “Fibber McGee and Molly” radio show or “I Love Lucy” on television). Much the same attitude has obtained with regard to comedy in the theatre in the United States. Satire has seldom succeeded on Broadway, which instead has offered pleasant plays about the humorous behaviour of basically nice people, such as the eccentric family in George S. Kaufmann and Moss Hart's You Can't Take It with You (1936) or the lovable head of the household in Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse's Life with Father (1939) or the indefatigable Dolly Levi in Thornton Wilder's Matchmaker (1954) and in her later reincarnation in the musical Hello, Dolly!

      The American public has never been quite comfortable in the presence of comedy. The calculated ridicule and the relentless exposure often seem cruel or unfair to a democratic public. If all men are created equal, then it ill becomes anyone to laugh at the follies of his fellows, especially when they are follies that are likely to be shared, given the common background of social opportunity and experience of the general public. There is an insecurity in the mass audience that is not compatible with the high self-assurance of comedy as it judges between the wise and the foolish of the world. The critical spirit of comedy has never been welcome in American literature; in both fiction and drama, humour, not comedy, has raised the laughter. American literature can boast an honorable tradition of humorists, from Mark Twain to James Thurber, but has produced no genuinely comic writer. As American social and moral tenets were subjected to increasing critical scrutiny from the late 1950s onward, however, there were some striking achievements in comedy in various media: Edward Albee's American Dream (1961) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), on the stage; novels such as those of Saul Bellow and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961); and films such as Dr. Strangelove (1964).

      This last example is remarkable, because comedy in the medium of film, in America, had been conceived as entertainment and not much more. This is not to say that American film comedies lacked style. The best of them always displayed verve and poise and a thoroughly professional knowledge of how to amuse the public without troubling it. Their shortcoming has always been that the amusement they provide lacks resonance.

      If films have seldom explored comedy with great profundity, they have, nonetheless, produced it in great variety. There have been comedies of high sophistication, the work of directors such as Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor, Frank Capra, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and Billy Wilder and of actors and actresses such as Greta Garbo (in Lubitsch's Ninotchka, 1939), Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant (in Cukor's Philadelphia Story, 1940), Bette Davis (in Mankiewicz' All About Eve, 1950), Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert (in Capra's It Happened One Night, 1934), Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur (in Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 1936), and Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon (in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, 1959). There have been comedies with music, built around the talents of singers and dancers such as Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell and Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire; there are the classic farces of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and, later, of W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy; and there is a vast, undistinguished field of comedies dealing with the humours of domestic life. The varieties of comedy in Hollywood films have always been replicas of those on the New York stage; as often as not, they were products of the same talents: in the 1930s, of dramatists such as Philip Barry or S.N. Behrman and composers such as Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Irving Berlin; in the 1960s, of the dramatist Neil Simon and the composer Burt Bacharach.

      European film makers, with an older and more intellectual tradition of comedy available to them, produced comedies of more considerable stature. Among French directors, Jean Renoir (Renoir, Jean), in his The Rules of the Game (1939), conveyed a moving human drama and a profoundly serious vision of French life on the eve of World War II in a form, deriving from the theatre, that blends the comic and the tragic. His disciple François Truffaut (Truffaut, François), in Jules and Jim (1961), directed a witty and tender but utterly clear-sighted account of how gaiety and love turn deadly. Though not generally regarded as a comic artist, the Swedish film maker Ingmar Bergman (Bergman, Ingmar) produced a masterpiece of film comedy in Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), a wise, wry account of the indignities that must sometimes be endured by those who have exaggerated notions of their wisdom or virtue. The films of the Italian director and writer Federico Fellini (Fellini, Federico) represent a comic vision worthy of Pirandello. La strada (1954), with its Chaplinesque waif (played by Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina) as central figure, is a disturbing compound of pathos and brutality. Comedy's affirmation of the will to go on living has had no finer portrayal than in Giulietta Masina's performance in the closing scene of Nights of Cabiria (1956). La dolce vita (1960) is a luridly satiric vision of modern decadence, where ideals are travestied by reality, and everything is illusion and disillusionment; the vision is carried to even more bizarre lengths in Fellini's Satyricon (1969), in which the decadence of the modern world is grotesquely mirrored in the ancient one. 8 1/2 (1963) and Juliet of the Spirits (1965) are Fellini's most brilliantly inventive films, but their technical exuberance is controlled by a profoundly serious comic purpose. The principals in both films are seeking—through the phantasmagoria of their past and present, of their dreams and their delusions, all of which seem hopelessly mixed with their real aspirations—to know themselves.

Cyrus Henry Hoy

Additional Reading
C.L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (1959), Shakespearean comedy considered in relation to archetypal patterns of folk ritual and games; Lane Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy, with an Adaptation of the Poetics and a Translation of the Tractatus Coislinianus (1922), the only modern text of the Tractatus, with an introductory essay relating it to Aristotle's theory of tragedy, and a conjectural reconstruction of the lost treatise on comedy based on the example of the Poetics; F.M. Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914; ed. by T.H. Gaster, 1961), an account of the development of Greek comedy from primitive fertility rites, and of the survival of traces of these ceremonials in the extant plays of Aristophanes; Cyrus Hoy, The Hyacinth Room: An Investigation into the Nature of Comedy, Tragedy, and Tragicomedy (1964), an examination of the plays of Euripides, Shakespeare, Jonson, Molière, Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello, Beckett, and Ionesco; J.W. Krutch, Comedy and Conscience After the Restoration (1924, reprinted with a new preface and additional bibliographic material, 1949), a study of the decline of Restoration comedy and the rise of sentimental comedy at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century; K.M. Lynch, The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy (1926), the best available account of the relation of the plays of Dryden, Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve, and their contemporaries to their social milieu; A.W. Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb, Tragedy, and Comedy (1927; 2nd ed. rev. by T.B.L. Webster, 1962), and The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (1953; 2nd ed. rev. by J. Gould and D.M. Lewis, 1968), the definitive accounts of the origins of Greek comedy and tragedy; and F.H. Ristine, English Tragicomedy: Its Origin and History (1910), the only full-scale account of the subject through the 17th century.

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Universalium. 2010.

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