Comedy

Andrew Stott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134454044
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This new edition of Andrew Stott's Comedy builds on themes presented in the first edition such as focusing on the significance of comic 'events' through study of various theoretical methodologies, including deconstruction, psychoanalysis and gender theory, and provides case studies of a number of themes, ranging from the drag act to the simplicity of slipping on a banana skin. This new edition features:

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• updates to reflect new research the field
• new chapters on Women in Comedy and Race and Ethnicity
• a broader range of literary and cultural examples.

Written in a clear and accessible style, this book is ideal introduction to comedy for students studying literature and culture.

1

COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY

And this book – considering comedy a wondrous medicine, with its satire and mime, which would produce the purification of the passions through the enactment of defect, fault, weakness – would induce false scholars to try to redeem the lofty with a diabolical reversal: through the acceptance of the base … this is what we cannot and must not have.

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco’s novel imagines a book on comedy, Aristotle’s lost sequel to Poetics. The book is at the heart of a monastic conspiracy to keep humour out of religion by suppressing the Aristotelian authority that lends comedy intellectual legitimacy, thus preventing ‘the operation of the belly’ from becoming ‘an operation of the mind’ (Eco, 1983: 474). Eco’s conspirators fear that if comedy were to be rehabilitated within a respectable context, the conceptual order of things would be radically altered and with it the social fabric that draws on its hierarchies, as ‘on the day when the Philosopher’s word would justify the marginal jests of the debauched imagination, or when what has been marginal would leap to the center, every trace of the center would be lost’ (Eco, 1983: 475). To preserve the status quo, the pages of the book are infused with a poison that kills those who read it.

While Eco’s conspiracy is entirely fictional, it is certainly true that comedy has enjoyed less prominence within the academy, especially in comparison to tragedy. While this is due in part to the absence of an important critical treatment of it in the classical tradition, comedy has also been perceived as ephemeral and lacking in intellectual weight, or, as in the protests of those who claim that explaining a joke kills it, as a kind of communication that is closed to study and interrogation. While earlier writers like Congreve and Meredith had stood up for the corrective merits of comedy, it is only in the twentieth century that we meet critics who are prepared to ‘redeem’ it as a culturally rich and critically significant form within a rigorous intellectual context. This chapter will consider some of the reasons for the place of comedy in the academy, and the work of some of its most important critics.

PLATO AND ARISTOTLE

The generic codification of drama in ancient Greece laid the foundations for the subsequent disparagement of comedy in relation to tragedy. In Hellenic philosophy, comedy was thought to belong to the lower human instincts, and, as such, was to be avoided by the man of reason. Indeed, it became one of the measures against which a rational identity could be formed. The contaminating qualities of comedy are first asserted in Plato’s Republic (c.370 BC):

If there are amusing things which you’d be ashamed to do yourself, but which give you a great deal of pleasure when you see them in a comic representation or hear about them in private company – when you don’t find them loathsome or repulsive – then isn’t this exactly the same kind of behaviour as we uncovered when talking about feeling sad? There’s a part of you which wants to make people laugh, but your reason restrains it, because you’re afraid of being thought a vulgar clown. Nevertheless, you let it have its way on those other occasions, and you don’t realize that the almost inevitable result of giving it energy in this other context is that you become a comedian in your own life.

(Plato, 1994: 360)

Here, Plato establishes an historically dogged distinction that opposes the vulgarity of laughter and clowning with the sovereignty of reason. Comedy is a force outside the guiding authority of reason that exerts a powerful anti-rational allure. Prolonged exposure to such thoughts or performances can result in the transformation of the subject into a comedian, as we ‘irrigate and tend to those things when they should be left to wither, and … [make] them our rulers when they should be our subjects’ (Plato, 1994: 360). Plato’s denigration of comedy in Republic exists within the context of his broader project to categorise and index subjectivity for the purposes of cultivating the ideal person in the ideal state. Unhealthy or counter-productive thoughts, emotions, and behaviours are restrained by an act of will and reason is promoted above all other things.

Whereas Plato creates a distinction between comedy and reason as a means of policing the self, Aristotle’s Poetics (c.330 BC) establishes the fundamental structure through which the literary distinction between comedy and tragedy has been made. Poetics, the most influential work of literary theory in Western culture, implicitly establishes the idea that comedy is a type of drama with specific rules, character types, and outcomes. Both comedy and tragedy, Aristotle argues, seek to represent the world as it truly is, but whereas tragedy ‘is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and possesses magnitude’ (Aristotle, 1996: 10) set among people of substance, comedy deals with people who are ‘low’ by nature:

Comedy is (as we have said) an imitation of inferior people – not, however, with respect to every kind of defect: the laughable is a species of what is disgraceful. The laughable is an error or disgrace that does not involve pain or destruction: for example, a comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not involve pain.

(Aristotle, 1996: 9)

For Aristotle, comedy is the imitation of the ridiculous or unworthy aspects of human behaviour, where little of real significance passes on stage and ‘inferiority’ amounts to a failure to uphold moral virtues. Ideally, tragedy depicts the decline in fortune of an individual which ‘is not due to any moral defect or depravity, but to an error of some kind’ that inevitably leads to a death or to the experience of ‘something terrible’ (Aristotle, 1996: 21). Comedy, on the other hand, ends happily and conflicts are resolved: ‘In comedy even people who are the bitterest enemies in the story … go off reconciled in the end, and no one gets killed by anybody’ (Aristotle, 1996: 22). The brief discussion of comedy in Poetics is not intended as a dismissal, but as a counterpoint to tragedy in the contrast between genres, the one form representing ‘high’ ideals, the other ‘low’, for the purposes of producing a symmetrical literary system that reflects a conception of humanity as an amalgamation of two competing facets of character.

It is widely assumed that Aristotle intended, or had already written, a companion volume to Poetics that concentrated on comedy, but this text, if it ever existed, is now lost. A brief document entitled the Tractatus Coisilinianus, which outlines the construction of jokes and catalogues types of comic character, may offer an insight into its content, but its own provenance is uncertain, being ‘variously hailed as the key to Aristotle’s views on comedy and denounced as a sorry Byzantine fabrication’ (Janko, 1984: 1). To what extent the existence of a comic Poetics would have improved the reputation of comedy in academic or scholarly circles is impossible to know, but as it is, Aristotle’s passing remarks have shaped generic thinking to a degree that is difficult to overstate: ‘On this Aristotelian basis,’ writes M. S. Silk, ‘all subsequent Western theory has been founded, most explicitly in the shape of a series of syntheses, late Greek, Graeco-Roman or Renaissance, but explicitly or implicitly in all ages’ (Silk, 2000: 54).

GENRE TROUBLE

While comedy may have been of a lower order, in the ancient world, at least, it was relatively well defined. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c.254–184 BC) and Terence (c.190 or 180–159 BC), commonly known as ‘New Comedy’, consisted of a series of recurring characters and plots that were so similar that for modern readers the genre seems narrow and formulaic. From another perspective, however, this tells us how coherent and specialised the concept of comedy was at this time. During the medieval period, for example, the identity of comedy became far more confused and its boundaries blurred. The drama that conformed to Aristotle’s formulae or directly emulated the writers of classical antiquity had disappeared from literary culture with the fall of the Roman Empire and the depletion of the theatres, not to re-emerge until the fifteenth century. Aristotle’s definitions were kept alive by generations of medieval grammarians who used them to annotate the texts of Greek and Roman authors, while the distinctions between comedy and tragedy were upheld in commentaries and treatises by writers such as Diomedes, Evanthius, and Donatus. Yet all this was done in a vacuum, since while these authors continued to transmit Hellenic ideas about comedy, they had little or no first-hand experience of what they were writing about. And so two parallel streams emerged: the classical definition of comedy maintained in medieval scholarship, and actual comedic practice. In the medieval period, comedy, which had previously been conceived solely as a type of drama, began to appear in both prose and verse as a distinguishable mode or tone rather than a specific genre. As Paul G. Ruggiers writes, ‘the forms of tragedy and comedy inherited from classical antiquity had no real impact upon the like modes of experience … in the Middle Ages’, resulting in considerable diversity and discontinuity amongst comic forms (Ruggiers, 1977: 7; Shanzer, 2002: 25). Amongst other things, there developed alternative prose types to which ‘were attached the considerations of their serious and non-serious biases, and of the subject matter and vocabulary once reserved for the dramatic forms, but now applied inadvertently to the narrative fictions’ (Ruggiers, 1977: 7). This is the ultimate source of the problems of definition and confusion that inevitably arise in discussions of comedy, where ‘comedy’ can describe at once a dramatic genre, a literary mode, or instances of humour real or fictional. Both Boccaccio (1313–1375) and Chaucer (c.1343–1400) were interested in the textures and possibilities of comedy and tragedy, yet neither was a dramatist. The clearest example of the broadening of the term in the medieval period is the title of Dante’s Divine Comedy (begun c.1314), a poem that, for the most part, contains little that may be described as humorous. Structurally, however, Dante’s poem, like Greek and Roman comedy before it, moves out of ignorance to understanding and towards a happy conclusion, or in terms of its theological framework, from despair to eternal life. In a letter to his friend Can Grande, Dante further explains his choice of title by indicating that it is written in what he calls ‘an unstudied and low style’ (Dante, 1984: 31). Medieval mystery and morality plays similarly incorporated comic elements in accordance with these principles, where ‘comedy’ represents a condition of ignorance prior to eventual salvation. The Vice figure of the drama was often intentionally humorous, an inversion of the ideal qualities of humanity presented in the didacticism of the principal narrative.

With the rise of Humanism, the Renaissance educational movement that devoted itself to the study of classical authors and the pursuit of pure literary style, Aristotelian standards of generic difference were reintroduced to literature. Humanist scholars returned to their sources in Greek and Roman texts, the reputation of these volumes having flourished since the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the re-introduction of otherwise overlooked authors that this event occasioned in Western Europe, and sought to

emulate their language, plots, and structures. Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1552), for example, widely recognised as the first comic drama in English, proudly proclaimed its classical heritage:

The wyse poets long time heretofore,

Under merrie Comedies secretes did declare,

Wherein was contained very virtuous lore,

With mysteries and forewarnings very rare.

Such to write neither Plautus nor Terence dyd spare,

Which among the learned at this day beares the bell;

These with such other therein dyd excel.

(Udall, 1984: Prologue, ll.15–21)

Udall, headmaster at Eton, saw his play as an Anglicised Latin comedy, affording it both academic and moral integrity. When, in 1588, Maurice Kyffin translated Terence’s Andria in a version principally to be used in schools, he prefaced the text with praise of Terence’s style, clearly revealing the influence of the comic theory of Donatus:

Among all the Romane writers, there is none (by the judgement of the learned) so much available to be read and studied, for the true knowledge and purity of the Latin tong, as Pub. Terentius: for, sith the cheefest matter in speech, is to speak properly and aptly, and that we have not a more conning Craft-master of apt and proper speech than Terence, well worthy is he then, even will all ease and diligence, to be both taught and learned before any other.

(Kyffin, 1588: sig. A1, Recto)

As early-modern scholarship favoured classical models for the purity of their form and style, Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry (1579–1580), complained of the disregard theatre practitioners had for generic boundaries, particularly taking them to task for their

Gross absurdities, how all their plays be neither right tragedies, nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in the clown by head and shoulders to play a part in majestical matters with neither decency nor discretion, so as neither the admiration and commiseration, nor the right sportfulness, is by their mongrel tragic-comedy obtained.

(Sidney, 1991: 67)

Sidney’s exasperation with mixed modes stems from a desire to impose conformity and uniformity on the drama of the Elizabethan stage, and to lend it some order and legitimacy. Yet, as Stephen Orgel tells us, comedy was not ‘simply the opposite of tragedy, but … the largest condition of drama’ during this period (Orgel, 1994: 36). There is some anecdotal evidence that the comic aspects of Renaissance drama may have been amongst the most prominent for contemporary audiences. London doctor and astrologer Simon Forman, for example, records his presence at a performance of The Winter’s Tale on 15 May 1611. His report differs considerably from modern readings of the play as it concentrates almost exclusively on the clown character of Autolycus, which leads him to conclude that the play is about ‘feigned beggars or fawning fellows’ (Rowse, 1976: 310). Similarly, the Swiss tourist Thomas Platter, in the playhouse for a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at the Globe in 1599, mentions little about the tragedy aside from the ‘jig’ that followed it, which was performed ‘exceedingly gracefully, according to their custom, two in each group dressed in men’s and two in women’s apparel’ (quoted in Shakespeare, 1998: 1).

Throughout the medieval and Renaissance periods, therefore, it seems that a scholarly definition of comedy, loyal to the Aristotelian blueprint, existed separately from popular plays, poems, and other vehicles for humour. The academy’s apparent distance from popular culture is confirmed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is concomitant with the rise of professional English literary studies. Inspired by the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), and largely concerned with what Chris Baldick calls ‘questions of literature’s social function’ (Baldick, 1987: 18), the view of comedy in the universities at this time is best summed up by a footnote in F. R. Leavis’s study of the novel, The Great Tradition (1972 [1948]), that calls the work of eighteenthcentury satirist Laurence Sterne ‘irresponsible’, ‘nasty’, and ‘trifling’ (Leavis, 1972: 10). As Baldick says elsewhere, critical opinion held that ‘the author’s quality of mind [was] reflected in the quality of the literary work: to speak of the maturity or integrity of one is to commend the other’ (Baldick, 1996: 164). Comic themes were thought to be parochial and vulgar, antithetical to a vision of art that believed in its ability to communicate beyond the specific moment of its creation. A passage from A. C. Bradley’s prestigious British Academy lecture of 1912 expresses this idea. ‘Most of the great tragedies’, he writes,

leave a certain imaginative impression of the highest value … What we witness is not the passion and doom of mere individuals. The forces that meet in tragedy stretch far beyond the little group of figures and the tiny tract of space and time in which they appear. The darkness that covers the scene, and the light that strikes across it, are more than our common night and day.

(Bradley, 1929: 75)

It was the view of the literary establishment that comedy did not belong in such profound and cultured company, and that ‘Comedy and satire should be kept in their proper place, like the moral standards and social classes which they symbolize’ (Frye, 1990: 22).

FERTILITY AND THE ‘ÉLAN VITAL’: CORNFORD, BERGSON, LANGER

‘The history of literary criticism is also the history of attempts to make an honest creature, as it were, of comedy’, writes David Daniell (1997: 102). The first significant modern attempt to make comedy a ‘serious’ object of study appeared in 1914, written by a scholar of Ancient Greece. Francis Macdonald Cornford’s The Origin of Attic Comedy is a combination of literary criticism and anthropology that attempts to reconstruct the sources and forms of the original comic entertainments. Cornford was part of a Cambridge-based movement of anthropological classicists known as the ‘Cambridge Ritualists’, a group of scholars who examined the ceremonies and beliefs of primitive communities in an effort to see their influence on modern thinking and social organisation. Like James George Frazer’s famous anthropological survey The Golden Bough (1890–1915), Cornford’s Origin of Attic Comedy is interested in the ceremonial, seasonal, and ritual roots that lie at the heart of Greek Old Comedy, and his text argues for an aboriginal relationship between comedy and the religiously sanctioned revel and fertility beliefs that stemmed from Dionysiac and Phallic ritual (Cornford, 1914: 3). The study describes how agrarian rituals, beginning with simple work-chants and songs, developed in form and complexity until they had become invested with significance that led to prepared and stylised activities growing up around them. A characteristic ritual of this type was the phallic procession, a parade of phallic symbols that used profanity and sexual and scatological imagery as a kind of benevolent magic to protect the community. As he writes,

Besides the distribution of benign influence … these processions have also the converse magical intent of defeating and driving away bad influences of every kind. The phallus itself is no less a negative charm agains...