Comic Theory Research Articles

The American Passion for Humor

The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America. By Daniel Wickberg. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. 267 pages. $35.00. Jonathan Swift once observed that "What Humor is, not all the Tribe / Of Logick-mongers can describe." Despite its apparent wisdom, Swift's admonition has done little to discourage philosophers, dramatists, social scientists, social critics and clergymen from investigating the nature of humor. Modern-day historians and American studies scholars, however, have been less willing to take up the challenge. Although multiple authors have addressed comic literature and film comedy, very few have attempted to define, as Constance Rourke did seventy years ago, humor's larger place within American culture. This fact makes Daniel Wickberg's ambitious cultural history--an adaptation of his doctoral dissertation--all the more welcome. The subject of Wickberg's study is the "sense of humor," that unique personality trait and cultural value that has obsessed Americans ever since the late nineteenth century. To explain how and why the concept of the sense of humor evolved, Wickberg traces the meaning of humor back to the Middle Ages. During this period, medical practitioners defined humors as those four fluids (blood, phlegm, choler and bile) whose balance or imbalance within the body determined the individual's temperament. Slowly, humor lost its physiological association and acquired meaning as an interiorized state of mind or feeling. By the nineteenth century, English dramatists and critics commonly represented humor as a subjective perception, a creative talent, a trait of one's distinctive perspective and personality. [End Page 151] As Wickberg correctly points out, the social acceptability of humor was facilitated in large part by the development of several new perspectives on laughter. For many centuries, the prevailing view held that laughter was triggered by the inherent ugliness or deformity of the object laughed at. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes departed from this Aristotelian view by relating an object's risibility to the subjective evaluation of the individual laughing. For Wickberg, the emphasis Hobbes placed on the psychological causes of laughter is particularly significant since it reinforced the process by which humor was evolving as a subjective passion. Enlightenment thinkers further elevated the intellectuality and, hence, respectability of laughter when they located its origins in the juxtaposition of incongruous elements or circumstances. The principle of incongruity sanitized laughter's "harmful and antipathetic elements" by "making laughter a result of abstract relations in the mind, by turning ridicule into a victimless game" (53, 57). Like other surveys of comic theory, most notably Stuart Tave's The Amiable Humorist, Wickberg's account concludes that by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries humor had become firmly yoked to the middle-class culture of benevolence and sympathy. 1 In 1827, Thomas Carlyle defined humor's sympathetic intent perfectly when he claimed that the essence of "true humour" was "sensibility," "tender fellow-feeling" and "love" (65). Middle-class Victorians who followed Carlyle's logic believed that humor in civilized society accentuated sympathy, not ridicule. In short, "true humor," as nineteenth-century Britons and Americans understood it, encouraged one to laugh "with" rather than "at" another person or object. By the 1840s, Wickberg contends, the idea of sympathetic laughter was so firmly established in Anglo-American culture that humor was elevated into one of the senses. By outlining the cultural formation behind the sense of humor, Wickberg has made several valuable contributions to historical scholarship. Few authors who have addressed this subject have worked through the thicket of comic theory as competently and skillfully as he has. Readers familiar with the voluminous literature on comic theory will particularly appreciate the manner in which Wickberg has historicized the terms "humor" and "laughter." Prior to now, most studies of the concepts of humor, wit, and the comic have paid little attention to the intellectual and cultural trends that influenced their evolution. No one, certainly, has taken such care to explain the relationship between the sense of humor and the emergence of the modern self. [End Page 152] Wickberg's primary...

War der Augsburger Reichstag von 1530 eine Komödie? Zur Verwendung dramentheoretischer Begriffe in den Briefen Luthers und Melanchthons

During the Diet of Augsburg Luther and Melanchthon discussed the political and religious developments in their extensive correspondence between Augsburg and Coburg. Strikingly, they used a complex metaphorical system of terminology, which is otherwise known only from the theory of ancient drama (comedy and tragedy). After explaining the terminology and its significance in its original context of dramatic theory (above all Donatus/Euanthius as the ancient inventor of the theory, but also Melanchthon himself in his commentaries on Terentius), the article analyzes Luther's and Melanchthon's use of the terminology. All in all, the terminology reflects a surprisingly clear view of the expectations of each of the correspondents in the course of events. While Luther uses all the terms of the concept of comedy (which means that he expected a happy ending), Melanchthon seems to organize his expectations around a concept of tragedy (which means that he feared an unhappy ending and did not want to be the tragic hero who makes the crucial mistake that leads to disaster). Only when some hope arises that things might still turn out well, does Melanchthon switch to the terminology of comic theory. From all this we can see that there was a highly developed system of communication, which was derived from the theory of drama and by which the correspondents could precisely express their views about the quality of a single event in the context of a whole course of events. In order to understand Luther's and Melanchthon's views and feelings about what was going on and to judge their behavior, it is indispensable to have a clear understanding of the linguistic and intellectual concepts that were underlying their approach to the world. One of these concepts was the ancient theory of drama.

Le rire dans la théorie de la comédie de l'Aufklärung (1725-1770)

Laughter in the comic theory of the Aufklärung (1725-1770). This article looks at the different conceptions of laughter in the Aufklärung' s theory of comedy. Gottsched instrumentalised an exclusive laughter aimed at forcing the individual to comply with the standards of behaviour that the other members of the group obeyed ; thus laughter has the role of control and (reeducation. For Möser, by relaxing the spectators, laughter creates subjects who are more able to fulfill their daily tasks in the service of the state and the interests of society. Far from having a diabolical origin, as the churches claimed, laughter was, according to Lessing, a human characteristic ; it reinforces social ties, shows how to overcome vanity and faults by helping others to rebuild themselves, not by means of humiliation or punishment but by a pedagogy of openness and relativity. These conceptions, which reflect each theorist's vision of humans, also reveal the type of human relationships they desired.

Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Shakespeare's Plays.

Journal Article Frances Teague, ed. Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Shakespeare’s Plays.Frances Teague. Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties. Get access Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Shakespeare’s Plays. Edited by Frances Teague. Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994. Pp. 190 $34.50 cloth.Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties. By Frances Teague. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1991. Pp. 222. $38.50 cloth. C. E. McGee C. E. McGee Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 48, Issue 3, Fall 1997, Pages 351–353, https://doi.org/10.2307/2871029 Published: 01 October 1997

Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity

Baudelaire's essays on caricature offered the first sustained defense of the value of caricature as a serious art, worthy of study in its own right. This book argues for the crucial importance of the essays for his conception of modernity, so fundamental to the subsequent history of modernism. From the theory of the comic formulated in De l'essence du rire to his discussions of Daumier, Goya, Hogarth, Cruikshank, Bruegel, Grandville, Gavarni, Charlet, and many others, Baudelaire develops not only an aesthetic of caricature but also a caricatural aesthetic--dual and contradictory, grotesque, ironic, violent, farcical, fantastic, and fleeting--that defines an art of modern life. In particular, Baudelaire's insistence on the dualism and ambiguity of laughter has radical implications for such emblems of modernity as the city and the flaneur who roams its streets. The modern city is the space of the comic, a kind of caricature, presenting the flaneur with an image of dualism, one's position as subject and object, implicated in the same urban experiences one seems to control. The theory of the comic invests the idea of modernity with reciprocity, one's status as laugher and object of laughter, thus preventing the subjective construction and appropriation of the world that has so often been linked with the project of modernism. Comic art reflects what Walter Benjamin later defined as Baudelairean allegory, at once representing and revealing the alienation of modern experience. But Baudelaire also transforms the dualism of the comic into a peculiarly modern unity--the doubling of the comic artist enacted for the benefit of the audience, the self-generating and self-reflexive experience of theflaneur in a communion with the crowd. This study examines his views in the context of the history of comic theory and contemporary accounts of the individual artists. Complete with illustrations of the many works discussed, it illuminates the history and theory of caricature, t

Comic Theory from a Feminist Perspective: A Look at Jerry Lewis

Comic Theory from a Feminist Perspective: A Look at Jerry Lewis

Comic strips and theories of communication

Abstract Figure 1 is taken from the B.C. series by Johnny Hart. Clearly the source of the joke is the graphological arbitrariness of the English language, which is further complicated by substituting the numeral 4 for the grapheme ‘four’. The joke can hardly have been communicated as effectively as this in any other way than by making use of the mixed medium of the comic strip. In panel 1 the setting in which the unseen golf-player's tee-off has gone dangerously astray could have been presented in the medium of the written language. In order to do so, however, a number of discrete clauses in a set linear order would have been necessary. The syntactic and semantic structures of those clauses and the order in which they were presented to the reader would have determined the way in which the text is to be decoded and would have guided the reader's interpretative activity in a somewhat different direction. The same can be said of panel3.

Guilt and Glory. Studies in Margaret Drabble's Novels 1963-80 , and: Iris Murdoch's Comic Vision , and: The Divided Heroine: A Recurrent Pattern in Six English Novels (review)

Reviewed by: Guilt and Glory. Studies in Margaret Drabble's Novels 1963-80, and: Iris Murdoch's Comic Vision, and: The Divided Heroine: A Recurrent Pattern in Six English Novels Jean Pickering Susanna Roxman . Guilt and Glory. Studies in Margaret Drabble's Novels 1963-80. Stockholm: Almqvist, 1984. 227 pp. No price given. Angela Hague . Iris Murdoch's Comic Vision. Cranbury: Susquehanna UP, 1984. 164 pp. $19.50. H. M. Daleski . The Divided Heroine: A Recurrent Pattern in Six English Novels. New York: Holmes, 1984. 175 pp. $29.50. Conventional wisdom holds that dissertations rarely succeed as books. Having so many obligations—to demonstrate industry, to review the literature, to keep the peace amongst factious professorial committees—they often end up with the parts malproportioned and the intentions obscure. Roxman's is no exception. The book is divided into three main sections, which are, however, not discrete; "it has not always been possible," Roxman says, "to avoid overlaps." This apology articulates the source of all her problems, the preference for inclusiveness rather than focus. Any of the sections could have been developed into a full length work. The first, "Margaret Drabble and the Literary Background," discusses the literary influences on the first six novels, ending with The Realms of Gold. The section also seems to fulfill some kind of requirement to review the literature, for it includes references to most of the Drabble criticism to date. It describes the literary sources of plots, images, and allusions, without ever addressing the larger questions: why, for instance, did Drabble take the plot of The Waterfall from The Mill on the Floss? What does this insight add to our understnding of the writer? of the novel? The second section, "Moral and Other Philosophical Problems in Margaret Drabble's Fiction," is subdivided into two parts, the first, "Fate, Chance, Retribution, and the Problem of Privilege," including all Drabble's novels. The second subsection, "Deontological morality vs. utilitarianism in The Needle's Eye," comes at the named novel from another angle. Roxman comes to no conclusions about the precise nature of any of these concepts and their relations with each other. "Privilege" in particular seems to be exceptionally inclusive, finally coming to mean all those differences either social or genetic that confer a survival advantage. The third section, "Imagery in Three Novels by Margaret Drabble," discusses The Waterfall, The Middle Ground, and The Realms of Gold. In many ways the most original, it is also the most disjointed, consisting of short, numbered discussions of individual passages. Apart from a disconcerting tendency to label images in the terminology of classical rhetoric, Roxman does a good job here. Her discussions of the sewer and pollution images in The Middle Ground are especially noteworthy, although they would have been more useful if they had included some general statement justifying the selection of these particular passages. Roxman's ability to analyze individual passages is far greater than her ability to unify her perceptions into an overall reading of Drabble's work. Nonetheless, if the reader can struggle through the redundancy and lack of focus to the genuine insights, Guilt and Glory might still be an asset to those with a scholarly interest in Drabble. A similar problem with focus undermines Angela Hague's book. In contrast to theoreticians of tragedy, which is more clearly defined, theoreticians of comedy have always had some difficulty in coming to grips with their topic. Hague fails [End Page 375] to negotiate the traditional dilemma; unable to decide whether the essence of comedy is an attitude or a structure, she discusses both alternatives without trying to establish the relationship between them. Although acknowledging the problem of defining the comic, she then evades it by summarizing the ideas of the most influential comic theorists from Freud to Frye. This lengthy Introduction adds nothing to the literature of comic theory and has little bearing on the ensuing discussion of Murdoch's work. The second section, "Iris Murdoch's Comic Vision: Theory and Practice," deals in a similar way with critical commentary on Murdoch as a comic writer and with Murdoch's own "opinions about comedy." Although Hague's method is inclusive and descriptive, this discussion presents...

Interview-Review: Robert B. Martin

The following is an interview-review with Robert Bernard Martin, author of the recent biography Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart. New York: Ox ford University Press, 1980. 643 pp. $29.95. Professor Martin currently holds the Citizen's Chair in English at the University of Hawaii, and he is Professor Emeritus of English at Princeton University. His biography of Tennyson has won the Christian Gauss Award, the Duff Cooper Memorial Award, the James Tait Black Prize for Biography, and the Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award. He is author of some dozen other books, including studies of Charlotte Bronte, Charles Kingsley, and Victo rian comic theory. Under a pseudonym, Professor Martin writes detective novels and thrillers. Presently, he is at work on a biography of Edward FitzGerald, the translator of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and two thrillers. This interview, conducted by Stephen Canham, Assistant Profes sor of English at the University of Hawaii, reviews the methodology, the ory, and more practical concerns which gave rise to Professor Martin's bi ography of Tennyson.

The Incarnations of Comedy

By an informal but influential critical consensus we are made to take our tragedy systematically—Aristotle's structure of an action leading circuitously but inevitably to Frye's conception of a hero—and our comedy piecemeal, wherever we can find it. No coherent theory of comedy has yet gained wide critical acceptance. Often there seems little hope of reconciling the conflicting claims of the psychologists, ritualists, and mechanists, who study the sources of comedy in human behaviour and reader response, with those of the literary structuralists whose chief concern is the form of imaginative literature. This basic problem with comic theory appeared very early, in classical times, and was transmitted to modern English theory by the medieval schoolmen and the revivalist literary critics of the Renaissance. Typical humanist definitions describe comedy in terms of its subject (the follies of ordinary men and women) and its structure (the movement from adversity to prosperity).

The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century

Part 1 The dramatic types in theory and practice: What is "restoration" drama theories of comedy the nature of the comic drama theories of serious drama. Part 2 The development of the play types 1660-1710: The establishment of Carolean drama 1660-1669 sex, horror, farce, and the heroic inclination in the 70s the political 80s the double tradition of the 90s the emergence of Augustan drama 1697-1710.

“Their Form Confounded”: Studies in the Burlesque Play from Udall to Sheridan by Robert F. Willson, Jr

354 Comparative Drama complex concepts with clarity, concepts that frequently are misunder­ stood, misconceived, and even missed altogether by many writers on dramatic theory. The book provides a thoughtful, cogent, provocative, and useful beginning for a systematic way of viewing the processes essential to the meaningful transformation of “drama” into “theater.” We should firmly recommend that The Actor’s Freedom become standard reading for any serious student of drama and theater, and we should fervently hope that Professor Goldman will be prompted to complete what he has so admirably begun—a viable theory of drama. ROBERT L. SMITH Western Michigan University Robert F. Willson, Jr. "Their Form Confounded”: Studies in the Bur­ lesque Play from Udall to Sheridan. The Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1975. Pp. 170. 48 Dutch Guilders. Well-intended, written in a meticulous and pleasant style, providing a useful survey of some six plays, this study is also a perfect example of just what is wrong, of what is so expendable in a good deal of literary scholarship. And, of course, I point the accusing finger at myself, when­ ever applicable. Mr. Willson traces the conventions of the burlesque play, a fairly distinct dramatic genre which, as he sees it, mocks serious literary and dramatic forms for purposes both moral and aesthetic. He includes for discussion Udall’s Rafe Roister Doister, two of Shakespeare’s comedies (A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Love’s Labour’s Lost), The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and three later plays, Buckingham’s The Re­ hearsal, Fielding’s The Tragedy of Tragedies, and Sheridan’s The Critic. Though he talks about the dramatic origins of burlesque in the Italian theater, the genre’s larger context—the political, sociological, cultural, psychological, anthropological dimensions— is not examined in any depth. Mr. Willson lists the conventions of burlesque—exaggeration, mockery of the language and characters of romantic drama, caricature, parody, mock-heroes, and the like. He offers a history of the growth and decline of the genre, as well as a chapter by chapter portrait of the emergence of burlesque’s mock-hero. He suggests that the “sources” of characters such as Bottom and of his wretched Pyramus and Thisby were earlier burlesques by Shakespeare and other hands. I must add that once a play is designated as burlesque, or as having elements of burlesque in it, we then get a minute examination of the “evidence.” But when all is said, one has to ask: what have we learned? What is the product of this well-intentioned effort? If these chapters were grad­ uate student papers, I would have often scribbled in the margins, “Plot rehash” or “I know this already” or “Besides telling me what happens in the play, where are you leading us?” With a definition of burlesque that is alternately loose (and hard to separate from a definition of comedy) or strict as fits the purpose, with a sometimes suicidal attempt Reviews 355 to pull burlesque apart from such a complex subject as comedy gen­ erally, with little sense of these plays as pieces meant to be performed before audiences (many of Mr. Willson’s general conclusions could apply equally well to, say, Fielding’s Tom Jones), Mr. Willson ultimately gives us readings of the plays. But these swamp his gimmick— carving out a genre—and we are left with plot rehashes, characters seen as case studies, and morals educed from what was to have been “living theater.” When a critic plies a bias—James Calderwood talking about Shake­ speare’s portrait of the artist and his theater, Thomas McFarland push­ ing a particular comic theory through five of Shakespeare’s plays, and so on—at the very least we get a critical performance, the clear response of one “spectator,” a diary of the interaction between play and audience that goes on the market-place to be sold or rejected. But when a cate­ gory is pursued as if it were a theory, readings of the plays taken as “evidence” in some court trial of definitions, then we gain, most often, not more than what we had before taking up the book. This search-and-destroy method of scholarship—if I may borrow...

The Development of Comic Theory in Germany during the Eighteenth Century.

The Development of Comic Theory in Germany during the Eighteenth Century.

COMIC II in the Automotive Industry

The new Colorant Mixture Computer (COMIC II) has been designed as a tool for use in matching and controlling color production. It does not replace a trained colorist, but frees him of routine color matching problems. Some of the theory and practice of COMIC II applications in the automotive industry are described.

The use of comic theory in the study of silent screen comedy

A revival of interest in the silent screen comedy has now made many works by some of the best clowns of this century available to the general public. Both the stage and, the film director of today will find that the analysis of these films will assist them in their direction. An examination of comic theories which furthers the understanding of the silent film comedy may, therefore, throw light on comic drama in general.

The Amiable Humorist. A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.

The Amiable Humorist. A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.

The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

The Amiable Humorist. A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

The Amiable Humorist. A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.

The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.

Satiric and Comic Theory in Relation to Fielding

Satiric and Comic Theory in Relation to Fielding