SENSE OF THE COMIC
The term “Comedy” designates
certain traits of man's
relationship with his fellows. More or less as fate
is
to the tragic hero, so society is to the comic hero. The
idea of
the comic, then, refers to some aspect of man's
conflict with his group
(political, familial, etc.) and its
conventions, mores, ideals. But the
same man is also
part of that society; hence, in struggling with it he
is apt to trip himself. Comedy, thus, is an ironic strug-
gle with society.
Comedy involves the failure to live up to an ac-
cepted standard, a failure which usually elicits a smil-
ing or laughing reaction. This article will not be con-
cerned with theories of laughter but only
with the form
and content of the kind of action which awakens the
sense of the comic.
The recorded lineage of comic action goes back to
the Margites (ca. ninth century B.C.).
Aristotle makes
reference to comic plays enacted in fifth-century
Megara. There are other early evidences of comic
mimes who, in their little
dramas, poked fun at mytho-
logical
characters or at self-important citizens. Some
scholars maintain that the
comic tradition, beginning
with these Greek sources, is continuous to
modern
times (cf. A. Nicoll, Masks, Mimes, and
Miracles, 1963).
The relation of comedy to tragedy has, since the
Greeks, appeared to be
complex. In a famous passage
of the Symposium (223D)
Socrates argued that the art
(τέχνῃ) of composing comedy is
the same sort of thing
as the art of composing tragedy. An ancient
tradition
ascribes to Aristotle an essay on comedy paralleling
the Poetics. The Tractatus
coislinianus (ca. 100 B.C.)
may have drawn upon such an essay,
for it formulates
a definition of comedy closely analogous to the
famous
definition of tragedy in Poetics VI, only it
remarks that
comedy effects the catharsis of “pleasure and
laughter.”
Perhaps an excessive or inappropriate pleasure
or
laughter was, by means of the comic action, thought
to be rendered
moderate, as measured by the political
and rational nature of man. However,
definitions of
these terms and the theory explicating their usage have
not come down to us. Other aspects of this Aristotelian
tradition are
mentioned by such writers as Iamblicus
and Proclus; it has been elaborated
in modern times
by Lane Cooper (1922) and by Elder Olson (1968).
Comic writings are loosely organized compared to
tragic writings;
nevertheless, there is sufficient unity
among them to warrant considering
the form of com-
edy in a single section. The use
of this form, however,
is varied and will later be considered under
several
headings.
1. The Form of Comic Action.
If, inclined by the
tradition mentioned above, we accept the view
that
comedy is analogous in certain respects to the Aris-
totelian account of tragedy, then the
discussion of the
formal structure of tragedy, its beginning, middle,
and
end—and the reference of the end back to the begin-
ning—will be relevant mutatis mutandum to comedy.
However, certain
differences should be emphasized.
The principles of likelihood and
necessity, which unite
the episodes of tragedy, become the principle of
comic
likelihood. Comic likelihood is not without its own
system, yet
its logic may be quite different from, often
the reverse of, tragic
likelihood. It is usually related
somehow to the socially actual, desired,
or desirable,
and by comparison with this standard its ridiculous,
absurd, or naturally unlikely character emerges. For
instance, a man for
whom life has become intolerable
jumps from a thirty-story building. On the
way down
he passes another man in a parachute.
“Sissy,” he
murmurs.
Surely also the comic catharsis is significantly differ-
ent from the tragic. Since the Tractatus coislinianus
fails to develop definitions of
“pleasure and laughter,”
it may be maintained that
the purgation of folly by
folly comes closer to describing the effect of
actual
comedies and comic situations. If the admired average
of human
kind is the careful worker or the grave
professional man, both seriously
concerned to act
creditably within their social roles, then we must
also
suppose them at least occasionally to resent the disci-
pline which their roles require and to
be restive under
the constant restraint which their reputations
impose.
Beneath the conformist, as Nietzsche insisted, there
lives the
satyr. Comedy tears off the foolish mask of
conformity and indulges for a
brief but relieving inter-
val the equally
foolish satyr. This catharsis yields an
insight into the less respectable
but ever present ani-
mal-like basis of the
human being. Thus it purges folly
by means of folly and brings man and his
milieu into
an easier and perhaps more fruitful harmony. Comedy
deprecates the traditional mores, and by means of this
permissive
irreverence it preserves them. Comedy, like
tragedy, is a self-corrective
action. Hence John
Meredith could speak of comedy as the
“ultimate
civilizer.”
Guided by suggestions offered by Aristotle in the
Poetics, F. M. Cornford (1914) holds that comedy,
like
tragedy, evolved from the ancient ritual slaying of the
old king
or scapegoat for the sake of the continued
survival and fertility of the
tribe. The agon between
the old king and the young pretender, which
often
ended in the death or mutilation of the former, con-
tinued beyond the tragically relevant part usually to
a triumphal procession (the komos), a feast, and a
marriage. The procession, feast, and marriage com-
prised the portion which became the source of comedy.
Or perhaps
comedy is the whole ritual action perceived
from the point of view of the
komos, feast, or marriage.
In any event, this
account of the ancient ritual provides
a likely story of the beginning of
comedy, its continued
preoccupation with political and sexual matters,
and
its ambiguous combination of opposites: cruelty and
celebration,
penance and festival, the serious and the
irreverent. Comedy, then, is a
forgetting of the tragic
and bloody renewal in a careless, happy release.
Yet
a note of anxiety often still runs beneath its ridiculous
and
jovial surface.
Doubtless no human value is absolute, and no human
act or role is as
significant as it may at the time be
thought to be. The insight of comedy
is directed upon
the meaningless aspect of human values and upon the
absurdity inherent in all human acts, roles, and projects.
Yet it is
sometimes not without the suggestion of a
vision beyond such foolishness.
Illustrating this comic pattern on the generic scale
is Homer's Odyssey. Although the story begins with
the tragedy
of the Trojan War, the epic continues with
Ulysses' journey back to Ithaca,
his arrival disguised
as a beggar, his energetic restoration of order, and
his
repairing to bed with Penelope. All these events come
off in a
manner basically in accord with the comic
spirit; thus life was restored
and traditional or ideal
values were affirmed.
2. The Content of Comic Action.
Taking comedy
seriously for a moment, we can imagine the comic
hero
asking why man is involved in a Kafkaesque labyrinth
of
institutional red tape, conventional values, and con-
flicting ideals. The comic spirit responds that the
evil
of this situation is not an evil in itself. It is not a
function
of fate nor of cosmic order; rather it is a
function of human and social
order. Comedy manipu-
lates this situation
so that the hero appears as ridiculous
(more or less harmlessly excessive)
and could reform,
or society appears as ridiculous and perhaps might
be
reformed, or the hero and his society become self-
aware, self-critical, and appropriately reaffirm
their
common ideals. Comedy, thus, tends to adjust the
individual
toward the actual, or the actual toward the
possible, or both toward the
ideal. These three alterna-
tives point to
the three kinds of content which are
enlivened by the comic vision of life.
We shall briefly
illustrate and consider each kind.
(a) Aristophanes often speaks strongly for an indi-
vidual's accepting the ancient order of things. In the
Frogs, for instance, he stages a kind of mock
contest
between Euripides, representative of liberal social re-
form, and Aeschylus, representative of
traditional wis-
dom and order; although
Aeschylus is pictured as
laughably excessive in his traditionalism, he wins
the
contest hands down. And in the Clouds, Socrates
is
presented either as impiously searching out knowledge
about the
moon and clouds or else as teaching a de-
structive and rather foolish sophistry. In the end old
Strepsiades,
who had apprenticed himself to Socrates,
returns chastened to the old ways
and Socrates' “think-
tank” is burned to the ground. Shakespeare is often
moved
to make comedy of excess and admonishment.
The newly crowned King in the
second part of King
Henry the Fourth represses the
irrepressible Falstaff
and strongly suggests that he act his age. In Measure
for Measure the good Duke gives over the
rule to the
self-righteous Angelo. Angelo sets up a Puritanical
society, but then his ordinary human weaknesses get
the better of him. His
not unusual use of office for
egotistical sexual ends is mercilessly
exposed.
Molière is deeply devoted to the norms of his culture.
Comedy for
him is the “mirror of society” in which
a man of his
time could see the excesses for which
society could and would make him suffer. Molière
portrays the ridiculous attempts of the bourgeois “gen-
tleman” to deck himself out in
aristocratic finery, to
acquire fashionable arts and wit, and to marry off
his
daughter above her station. In
L'Avare,
Harpagon
sacrifices everything for money and in the end he gets
only
that, but only a little of that. Excessive anxiety
about death, exaggerated
fear of cuckoldry, misan-
thropy, religious
hypocrisy, all these and more are
limned by Molière against the
backdrop of the honest
normalcy of middle-class seventeenth-century mores.
Tom Jones, hero of Fielding's famous novel, lacks
social
prudence—“the duty which we owe to our-
selves,” as Squire Allworthy explains.
Otherwise he is
brimful of the most acceptable natural virtues. He is
tricked by the hypocritical prig, Blifil, out of his name,
his inheritance,
and a possible fortunate marriage. As
an outcast he wanders amiably but
unthinkingly into
various situations, mostly amorous. Finally he
discovers
himself apparently in the Oedipus predicament. In the
end,
though, the predicament proves to be illusory.
Tom acquires a modicum of
prudence, discovers his
real parentage, and of course marries the girl.
Blifil
is unmasked and gets his due. The norms of good British
society
are once more reasserted and Fielding has
realized his purpose of helping
“to laugh mankind out
of their favorite follies and
vices.”
The tradition of the clown, the fool, and the mime,
though appearing in
other comic roles, as a recollection
of the Fool in King
Lear will indicate, is often utilized
by this species of comedy.
The medieval clown, like
the modern, possessed the usual human
appurtenances
and attitudes but to a laughably exaggerated degree.
Punch, for instance, like many comic-strip characters,
is berated and
beaten for the thousand petty preten-
tions
and foibles to which socialized man is heir.
(b) Comedy not only finds grist to its mill in the
task of converting the
deviant or the crackpot individ-
ualist
into the reliable citizen; it also engages in the
movement toward social
betterment. Aristophanes'
Lysistrata, written shortly after the disastrous
Sicilian
expedition, presents a simple plan for converting
Athens from
a warlike imperialist power into a peace-
ful
city: the women plan to go on a sex-strike until
the men agree to give up
war. After some little diffi-
culty in
reaching unanimity among the ill-disciplined
and lusty Athenian women,
peace is achieved and all
ends happily in bed.
Many of the Socratic dialogues are comic or utilize
comic devices. The Euthydemus, to take one instance,
offers the
spectacle of two Sophistic clowns challenging
the bystanders in the Lyceum
to verbal battle. They
easily defeat the boy, Cleinias, much to their
delight,
but then they seem to be unaware of being tripped
and thrown by Socrates. In the Meno, Meno, a
notable
general, comes off less well in his dialectical struggle
with
Socrates than his slave boy. And at the end
Anytus, taking the part of all
right-thinking Athenian
gentlemen, is offended upon being shown by
Socrates
that he knows nothing of the virtue to which he lays
claim,
and cares less. Socrates himself, with his uncon-
ventional manners, his appearance, and his ironic
style,
is as much a comic as a tragic character. Often, as
in Gorgias (485ff.), by drawing ridicule upon his
strange
ways, he was able to turn it back upon popular con-
ventions and values.
With gentle humor Chaucer set the men and women
of his own day into contrast
with a society or a life
symbolized by the Canterbury Pilgrimage. And
Rabelais, in a manner which Falstaff himself could not
better, exploited
the same contrast.
Much of English Restoration comedy expresses dis-
gust with the customs of the times and a longing for
reform.
Jonson's Volpone, like his Alchemist, exposes
the lust after gold which seemed to infect
everyone
with greed and duplicity, vices which are only thinly
disguised by the ceremonies of civilized life. The elab-
orate plot and counterplot of Volpone are uncovered
in the end not by the officers of justice but
by the
plotters themselves who fall to noisy recrimination.
Moreover,
the world, it is suggested, is as rapacious
and as deceptive as Volpone
himself. Wycherly's
comedies likewise depict a life which is nasty,
brutish,
and if not short, certainly hypocritical. Indeed much
of
Restoration comedy may be characterized as the
presentation of a
consciously dissembling world. Its
manners become the comic mask and, like
Swift's bitter
satire, suggest by negation a society quite opposite
from the actual. No less does Huxley's Brave New
World make the same suggestion.
Jean Anouilh's comedy, on the other hand, fre-
quently takes the opposite tack. As if in opposition
to an
exaggerated and impractical idealism, Creon of
Anouilh's Antigone, like the Grand Inquisitor of
Dostoevski's Brothers Karamazov, freely admits that
systematic
injustice and clever manipulation, masked
if need be by sophistry and
ceremony, offer the only
means to maintaining a modicum of social order.
And
in his Waltz of the Toreadors a due concern for
forms
and ceremony is said not only to keep society going
but to
provide a convenient and probably defensible
screen for a modest
self-indulgence. Still Anouilh's
personages often seem more or less
genuinely to long
for an order where the ideal would be pursued for
its
own sake and where the individual and the common
goods would be at
one.
(c) Another species of comedy turns upon the point
where the humorous and
the tragic seem to blend and
where the harsh actualities and deception of the world
are
somehow transformed by a lively faith. This point
of turning is admirably
illustrated in much of Chekhov.
It is developed at length for their
respective worlds
by Dante in the
Divine Comedy and
by Goethe in the
two parts of
Faust.
More obviously, Cervantes' Don Quixote belongs to
this species of comedy. The Don's foolish and romantic
idealism needs to be
brought low and awakened to the
realities of the real world. But what is
this real world?
As embodied in Sancho Panza, it halfway credits the
Don's imaginary realm, and in any event it is unwilling
to risk losing the
opportunity to profit from Don
Quixote's possible discoveries. If the
Knight of the
Mancha is the wild adventurer and explorer, his squire
is no less the egotistical exploiter. The gaming, crimi-
nal, ribald real world of Sancho Panza is quite as
disproportionate in its own way as Don Quixote's.
Society continually
unhorses the Knight for his non-
conformity, but this is such a society as needs to be
spurred into
movement. Still in the end Sancho Panza
achieves some insight into his
limitations and is re-
signed to being himself
and to caring for his crops and
his family. Likewise at his journey's end,
Don Quixote
acquires a certain wisdom. He sees that all men are
equal
in death, and are equally purged of their folly
and illusions.
Nowhere, though, is this kind of comedy more
clearly and beautifully set
forth than in Shakespeare's
later plays, the tragicomedies such as The Winter's Tale
or The
Tempest. The action in the latter play takes
place on the island to
which a tempest had borne the
dispossessed Duke. Here Ariel balances
Caliban; Pros-
pero foils and forgives the
unjust manipulations of his
brother, and the magic of the world, its
cloud-capped
towers and gorgeous palaces, all give way to the young
lovers. Prospero is a comic Lear; he calms rather than
defies the tempest,
and he gives himself to wisdom and
his daughter to Ferdinand rather than
both to death.
Recent tragicomedy is differently keyed. In Samuel
Beckett's Waiting for Godot, two bums, reminiscent
of
Rouault's sad clowns, stand aside from the endless
sadomasochistic
spectacle of the passing world. They
wait, for whom or what they know not.
Call it Godot.
They savor the passage of time, waiting absurdly for
the unintelligible object of their faith. Time passes.
They consider
suicide. A tree buds. Is it the tree of
life? Is it Godot himself? Who can
say? At least they
reach a vague recognition of their indeterminate plight.
The note struck by this kind of comedy is some sort
of reconciliation. This
is the comic spirit discovering
in itself a tincture of seriousness and
idealism. This
spirit originated in the tragic world, but here it is
caught at the moment at which it dissolves into com
edy, even as the autumn moves around to vernal excess
and as
springtime moves on to the fall dance, feast,
and festival. The two
complement each other and form
a unity. Perhaps indeed the seeming two arts
of tragedy
and comedy may at this point become parts of one
and the
same whole.
The comic sense, in sum, is an awareness of the ironic
character of man's
involvement in social evil. In form
it may most briefly be described as the
catharsis of
folly by folly. Comic action has been regarded as a
means
for disciplining the foolishness inherent in pre-
tentions to social respectability by exhibiting and in-
dulging the foolishness of the
“lower” and disreputable
self. Consequently it
depends upon the possible unity
of the traditional duality of
“that amphibious crea-
ture,” man. This unity may be seen in the tendency
of the
comic sense to bring the deviating individual
into accord with social
norms, or to bring the deviating
society to awareness of the ideal, or,
finally, to recon-
cile the individual and his
social milieu with the ideal
by way of a productive and unifying insight
into a more
authentic vision of human possibilities.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
E 
. M. Blistein, Comedy in Action (Durham, N.C.,
1964),
biblio. pp. 131-39. A. Cook, The Dark Voyage
and the
Golden Mean (New York, 1949). L. Cooper, An Aristotelian
Theory of Comedy (New York,
1922), biblio. pp. xv-xxi. F. M.
Cornford, The Origin
of Attic Comedy (London, 1914). M.
Eastman, The Enjoyment of Laughter (New York, 1936). E .
Lauter, Theories of Comedy (New York, 1964). A. Nicoll,
The Theory of Drama (New York, 1931), pp. 175-243;
sug-
gestions for reading, pp.
245-56. A. Nicoll, Masks, Mimes,
and Miracles
(New York, 1963). E . Olson, The Theory of
Comedy
(Bloomington, Ind., 1968). H. T. E . Perry, Masters
of
Dramatic Comedy and their Social Themes (Cambridge,
Mass.,
1939), biblio. pp. 409-17. L. J. Potts, Comedy
(London, 1948), biblio. pp. 168-71.
EDWARD G. BALLARD
[See also Art and Play; Catharsis;
Classification of the
Arts; Motif;
Satire; Tragic Sense; Wisdom
of the Fool.]
