The Incoherent Self in Contemporary Comedy

Abstract

Through the many changes in sensibility, culture, and literary practice during. the past two thousand years, comedy has normally been inhabited by low characters, some clever and some foolish, who move through various confusions to a happy ending, often in marriage and a communal feast of social reconciliation and self-affirmation. Past societies found these characters "low" because they were not the gods, monarchs, and noble warriors of tragedy, and some of the prejudice that equates socio-economic class with status in the presumed hierarchy of nature still lingers. Beyond that, comic characters are low because they lack spiritual aspiration and are concerned with their material well-being, with cash, comfort, food, and sex. They are also low in their indecorous behavior, and perhaps in so far as they entertain us by their wit or folly rather than enlighten us by their wisdom or ennoble us by their grandeur. But however "low" they may be, comic characters repeatedly assert their right to be happy and to impose themselves on the world around them.