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Essay  The Comic View

from Eight Great Comedies

ed. by Sylvan Barnett

        "A fool lifteth up his voice with laughter," writes the author of Ecclesiasticus, "but a wise man doth scarce smile a little."  The ancient Hebrews strove to live righteously in Jehovah's eyes, and they felt that problems of good and evil were no laughing matter.  If they had seen a comic play, however, they might have granted that drama which evokes laugher is not wholly foolish.  The Greeks, people  of broader sensibilities than the Hebrews, honored their comic as well as their tragic dramatists.  There was something about comedy, the Greeks felt, which plumbed an essential human quality.  Greek philosophers usually defined him as the only animal who reasons, but Aristotle once defined him as the only animal who laughs.  And not only is man able to laugh; perhaps he must laugh if he is to remain a healthy specimen.  The beneficial effect of comedy has been variously stated for over two thousand years: comedy cures us of our folly by showing it to us on the stage; or, less extravagantly, comedy affords us a chance to laugh at our neighbors, and it is healthier for social an to laugh at his neighbors when he seems them on the stage when he meets them on the street.  Recently an eminent psychiatrist has suggested that a sense of humor may help us withstand great tensions and pressures: "The safety of the free world... seems to lie in the cultivation, not only of courage, more virtue and logic, but of humor:  humor which produces the well-balanced state in which emotional excess is laughed at as ugly and wasteful.

        Most of the great dramas of the Western world can be fitted into one of two classes, tragedy or comedy.  There seem to be two general lasses, tragedy or comedy.  There seem to be two general patterns of lie which most plays imitate: one culminates in a tragic defeat, usually death, and the other in a joyous procession or union, frequently a marriage (the Greek word komoidia or "revel-song" gives us our word "comedy").  And the comedies which dramatize (or, to use Aristotle's word imitate) the pattern of revelry may be derived ultimately from animal masquerades or from primitive fertility rituals.  The ancient people who lived around the Mediterranean enacted in ritual dances the power and fertility of a Vegetation Spirit, and celebrated in a ribald yet religious manner the miracle of generation.

        Primitive men usually enact ritual dances in order to make something happen:  if they want the crops to grow tall, they may imitate the desired growth by leaping high into the air.  If they want the land to be fertile, they may enact a celebration o the disappearance of winter and the coming of spring.  If they want the power or cunning of an animal, they may claim relationship with the beast, wearing its skins and imitating its gait.  But if and when the gradually realize that their rituals do not in fact bring something about, they may nevertheless continue imitative acts, partly (it seems) out of the same sheer delight that children get from imitating cowboys and Indians.  The primitive fear, for example, that perhaps, that winter will triumph and spring will not flourish fades away, and the villainous or threatening representative of winter is no longer fearful but grotesque, not a terrifying object but a comic figure who in these performances is unable to prevent the inevitably fruitful union of lovers.  Or perhaps even when the antagonist was still feared, he was abused and derided by representatives f the fertile force, in the hope that be jeering at him and treating him as laughable they would in fact cause him to become trivial and laughable.

        Aristotle suggests that man is instinctively imitative, and that the artist imitates the essential qualities of reality.  The word "imitation" (mimesis) is not pejorative; a Greek might say that a sculptor imitates men in marble, and we might say that Beethoven's Eroica imitates heroism (heroic action).  As Thomas De Quincey put it, though no one whistled at Waterloo, one could whistle Waterloo.  The drama, Aristotle says in the Poetics, imitates the actions of men; comedy , he says, imitates the actions of men worse than the average.  If, however, we bypass this specific statement about the subject matter of Greek comedy of the fourth century B.C., we can retain Aristotle's concept of imitation and say that most comedy imitates man's effort to stave off death and to renew life, even as the primitive rituals did.  Comedy often dramatizes the ejection of barrenness--obdurate parents who oppose their children's marriages either soften at the end or are laughed off the state--and the reassertion of fertility.  Shakespeare knew nothing of ancient rituals or ancient drama, yet his comedies, no less than those or Aristophanes, are rejections of impediments to joy and celebrations of life's abundance.  In As You Like It, for example, the reverence for a fertile community becomes explicit:

Wedding is great Juno's crown

O blessed bond of board and bed!

'Tis hymen peoples every town;

High wedlock then be honored.

Honor, high honor, and renown,

To Hymen, god of every town.

and the characters troop off "to a long and well-deserved bed."  Comedy from Aristophanes to Shaw imitates the joy of social life (and, correlatively, it imitates the follies of those who try to maintain their own foolish ways against the community), a joy usually signaled by a social act such as a marriage or a feast (or both) at the conclusion of the play.

        The dramas in this book are works of art, not primitive rituals, and we ought now to look less conjecturally at the chief pattern which they partly imitate, and consider generally the pleasure which comedy affords.  The examination must be general because, as E.B. White has observed, "humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."

        Although most tragedy assumes that there is something priceless in the struggles of a man who is, in a spiritual way, greater than the society around him, much comedy assumes that the norms of society ought to be respected, and that the individual who attempts to go beyond the confines of the world of his fellows is not noble but foolish or even vicious.  Comedy is this frequently critical of the individual; it accepts as valid the codes of society, and is amused to see individuals se themselves up as exceptional.  It finds laughable, for example, the amorous passion of an old man.  Though love is a fit activity for the young, old men ought to realize that their efforts to behave coltishly are grotesque.  The mistakes of the tragic hero arouse our sympathy--we admire him, and to a considerable degree we identify ourselves with him; the mistakes of the comic figure arouse our critical laughter--we observe him and his foibles with an intelligent awareness of their shortcomings.  We feel the importance and quality of the tragic figure's values and goals, but we perceive the gap between the comic figure's concept of life and life itself.  This gap or mistake often exists in the comic character's false evaluation of himself (the world of comedy abounds in the self-deceived), but it is also present in the disguises (a man as a woman, in Charley's Aunt) or mere mistaken identities which have been the stock in trade of comic writers for two thousand years.

        When we attend a comedy we have a godlike vision of the action, and we are amused by the bumbling fellows who are partially blinded to reality either by folly or by ignorance.  Homer's gods laugh, and Jehovah (the Old Testament tells us) holds fools in derision.  At a comedy, from our place overlooking the stage, we laugh at human absurdity.  Our laughter is only rarely derisive (we are seldom that detached from the humanity on the stage), but we are comfortably "above" the comic figures.  We may even regard these figures affectionately, for affection is sometimes based on an assuring, if unconscious, sense of superiority.  At a comedy we delight in the antics before us, and our delight ranges from derision to affection for fallible man, but in some degree we feel with Puck (a supernatural creature, incidentally), "What fools these mortals be!"  Puck's comment is not cruel, however, because in comedy folly is banished laughingly, and goodwill finally prevails.  We laugh at the "obstacle race to the altar," but we are pleased by the outcome: "Jack shall have Jill," Puck assures us midway in the play,

Nought shall go ill;

The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.

        "All shall be well."  The phrase  covers a multitude of comic plots.  Sometimes the central character is not absurd but rather is a shrewd manipulator of the absurdities of Others.  He may, for example, be a rogue whose exuberant chicanery amuses us when we contrast it with the stifling jealousy of a husband or the parsimony of a merchant.  Or perhaps we enjoy a rogue's deceits because his declaration that the world is his oyster which he will open with his sword expresses our rebellious desire to cast off impediments to life, to live fully, and not to be tyrannized by the boss.  And for a few minutes, in the theater at least, all is well.

        Perhaps comedy's best justification is that it refreshes or renews us and helps us face our daily world.  More exalted claims, however, are usually made for comedy.  Moralists and comic dramatists generally assert comedy's curative power.  In the preface to his Complete Plays, George Bernard Shaw summed up his job:  "If it makes you laugh at yourself, remember that my business as a classic writer of comedies is "to chasten morals with ridicule"; and if I sometimes make you feel like a fool, remember that I have by the same action cured your folly, just as the dentist cures your toothache by pulling out your tooth.  And I never do it without giving you plenty of laughing gas."  But is doubtful that people really go to the theater to be corrected, however entertaining the chastisement.  Shakespeare makes an apter, more modest, and no less important claim for comedy when he suggests that it induces a playful mood, and that such a mood may be life-giving:

Frame your mind to mirth and merriment,

Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.

        The entire problem of comic theory is complicated by the fact that analyses of laughter are not necessarily analyses of comedy.  Freud, for example, in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, distinguishes between comedy, humor, and wit (twenty-three varieties), an never discusses dramatic comedy.  While a comedy is expected to evoke laughter, not all laughter is comic.  We laugh, of course, when tickled, when subjected to laughing gas, and sometimes when nervous or hysterical.  And a comic drama is not merely a play with jokes; Hamlet contains witticisms, but is not a comedy.  It is impossible to conceive of a great comedy as a mere collection of jokes however funny each hike might be  Jokes may be appropriate and even necessary to the action of a comedy, but they do not of themselves make a comedy.  The relative importance of wit is suggested in a story told about Menander, a Greek comic dramatist.  Asked by a friend how his play was progressing, he replied that he had finished it, though he had not yet written the dialogue--and indication that comedy consists not of a mere exhibition of wit but of characters in action.

        The characters who amuse us in comedy are usually mildly abnormal figures to whom we feel superior, for by their folly they set themselves against the judgment of society.  But because society's norms change, comedy often loses its appeal to later generations.  We might note, by way of contrast, that because men have over the centuries suffered in much the same way, and or much the same things, great tragedy is highly communicable.  Its problems are still our problems, its lamentations and exultations are still ours.  Comedy, too, of course, often deals with universal characters--the avaricious, the boastful, the foolhardy, but it is more likely than tragedy to focus on a peculiarly local problem, and thus it may write its own closing notice.  That is, because comedy assumes the validity of a particular society's code of behavior, it is easily dated.  Things laughable to the Renaissance may not amuse us, for Renaissance common sense is not always the same as ours.  Witty jibes at Jews, for example, do not always delight us today, for we do not all believe that Jews are funny by being in some ways apart from a dominant Christian society.  We tend to understand and to sympathize with Shylock and therefore we lose a great deal of the humor of The Merchant of Venice.

        A word about the ending of comedies is relevant at the end of this introduction.  Though comedy usually concludes happily, at least for the "good" characters, only in a superficial view is comedy purely optimistic.  Just as close study suggests that tragedy is not merely pessimistic but partakes, by virtue of its affirmation of the human spirit, of optimism, so similar study may show a touch of pessimism in comedy.  Comedy touches on pessimism when it notes (as it generally does) the melancholy fact that men of ideals--men who seek to live by some one principle--are frequently ridiculous because of their inadequate view of reality.  When, for example, Moliere's Miser attempts to order and reduce to money the complexity of the world, his efforts are laughable.  Similarly, the puritan, the businessman, the philosopher, the clergyman--anyone who attempts to arrange experience into a meaningful pattern--runs the risk of straitjacketing existence.  And because existence cannot be straitjacketed because life is so complex that it eludes the pattern which even the most sophisticated would impose on it, the one-sided effort is mistaken and comic.  "The progress of humane enlightenment," Kenneth Burke says in Attitudes toward History, "can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken.  When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy."

TOPIC FOR CLASS DISCUSSION.  PREPARE TO SHARE YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON THE FOLLOWING:

How does comedy make it possible for humans to live more successfully, more positively?  Specifically, how does comedy help men and women to deal with folly, emotional excess, fear, and humility?

Assignment

The Comic View Group Topics

Mr. Platt

AP Language and Composition

Discuss the following they pertain to the article The Comic View.  In some cases, you will have to synthesize, interpret, or extend the position of the article’s author to address the topic.  Don’t be afraid to think!  It won’t hurt! J  Be prepared to share your conclusions with the class.

Group 1:  “The safety of the free world… seems to lie in the cultivation, not only of courage, more virtue and logic, but of humor:  humor which produces the well-balanced state in which emotional excess is laughed at as ugly and wasteful.”

Group 2:  The history of comedy:  To what extent are the vestiges of this history found in what we currently consider comedy in the modern world?

Group 3:  Comedy as that which banishes fear.  Discuss.

Group 4:  Comedy and mimesis.  Discuss. 

Group 5:  Comedy vs. tragedy.  Discuss.

Group 6:  The audience response to comedy.  Discuss. 

Group 7”All shall be well.” Explain.

Group 8:  Laughter vs. comedy.  Discuss.

Group 9:  Is comedy timeless, or does it change according to the changing generations?  Explain.

Group 10:  Is comedy necessarily optimistic?  Explain

Group 11:  Horace Walpole (1717-1797) said, “The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”  Discuss. 

Group 12:  Peter Ustinov (1921-2004) said, “Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.”  Discuss.

Group 13:  Pico Iyer of Time Magazine said, “Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.”  Discuss.

Group 14:  Heny Ward Beecher said, “A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs.  It’s jolted by every pebble in the road.”  Discuss.