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comedy, 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 BCE and persists through the present, holds that it is primarily concerned with humans as social beings, rather than as private persons, 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 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.”
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Here comedy is considered primarily as a literary genre. The wellsprings of comedy are dealt with in the article humour. The comic impulse in the visual arts is discussed in the articles caricature and cartoon and comic strip.
Origins and definitions
The word comedy seems to be connected by derivation with the Greek verb meaning “to revel,” and comedy arose out of the revels associated with the rites 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 differentiation between tragedy and comedy: tragedy imitates men who are better than the average and comedy men who are worse.
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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.
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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 humans as social beings, 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 physical vitality, delight in life, and the 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 bearing witness to the contradictory nature of humanity, which in the comic view is a radical dualism; 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 everyone must live with as best they can.
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“Wherever there is life, there is contradiction,” says Søren Kierkegaard, 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.
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The incongruous is “the essence of the laughable,” said the English essayist William Hazlitt, who also declared, in his essay “On Wit and Humour” in English Comic Writers (1819), “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 the individual 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 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 Traveler Without Luggage, 1937) and T.S. Eliot (in The Confidential Clerk, 1953).
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 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
The treatise 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 James George Frazer 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 that celebrate the yearly cycle of birth, death, and rebirth were seen by the Canadian critic Northrop Frye 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, in the commedia dell’arte that came into being in 16th-century Italy, and even in the routines of late-night television comedians and their straight men. 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 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 the 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 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, 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 person 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 BCE, writers sought to express the ethos, or character, as in their tragedies they expressed the pathos, or suffering, of humankind. This distinction goes back to Aristotle, who in the Rhetoric distinguished between ethos (natural bent, disposition, or moral character) and pathos (emotion) displayed in a given situation. And the Latin rhetorician Quintilian, in the 1st century CE, 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 person and relatively mild in its nature; pathos, on the other hand, is a temporary emotional state, often violent. Comedy thus expresses human character in the ordinary circumstances of everyday life, and tragedy expresses the sufferings of a particular individual in extraordinary periods of intense emotion.
In dealing with persons 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, 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 is distinctly English, as Dryden notes, and particularly identified with the comedies of Ben Jonson.
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The role of wit
Humour is native to humankind. 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 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 in 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 Epicoene, who is characterized by his humour (namely, his inability to abide any noise but the sound of his own voice), and Shakespeare’s Falstaff, 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 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, 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 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 the human notion of one’s own superiority. It is a token both of an infinite misery, in relation to the absolute being of whom humans have 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, and 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 human behaviour. In France the great master of the grotesque was the 16th-century author François Rabelais, while some of the plays of Molière in the next century best expressed the comic.
Bergson’s 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, 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-Marin 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 that particular character. Shakespearean 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; 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 1603–04, 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 the 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.
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Divine comedies in the West and East
The 4th-century Latin grammarian Donatus 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), 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 Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Life Is a Dream (1635) is an example; on the operatic stage, so 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 writes:
In Asia the designation “Divine Comedy” would fit numberless plays; especially in India 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 drama was heroic 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 and Buddhist 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 BCE. 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 about 336 BCE, 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 BCE) and from plays written in imitation of the form by the Romans Plautus (c. 254–184 BCE) and Terence (195 or 185–159 BCE). 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’s 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, 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 Niccolò Machiavelli and Ludovico 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, 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), Epicoene (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.
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English comedy of the later 17th century is cast in the Jonsonian mold. Restoration 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 Man of Mode (1676), for example, or William Wycherley’s Country-Wife (1675) or William Congreve’s 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 the 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.
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