Discussion Of Comedy Research Articles

“Distinguishing Form”: Shakespeare, Perspective and the Heartlessness of Comedy

ABSTRACT Any discussion of comedy as a dramatic form is rendered difficult by the fact that the term “comedy” has two quite separate meanings: a work that is intended to make spectators laugh and a work that has a happy ending. In the early modern period, literary theorists were eager to make clear distinctions between the two definitions – in large part, because of the contemporary suspicion regarding the ethics of laughter, which was commonly seen as being related to cruelty. Theorists like Philip Sidney argued that we laugh at those to whom we feel superior, whereas a true comedy should aim to produce the rather different emotion of “delight”. Modern critics are similarly prone to make distinctions between the “elevated” comedy of delight and the “low” comedy of laughter: the one rooted in an audience’s sympathy towards the play’s characters; the other in its amusement at those characters’ follies. However, this essay will offer a different perspective. Through a consideration initially of The Winter’s Tale, but also Shakespeare’s earlier romantic comedies and problem plays, I will argue that the kind of ‘delight’ provoked by the end of much Shakespearean comedy often discourages a sense of true sympathy towards its subjects, and, indeed, may seem to share some of the heartlessness that Sidney saw as inherent in the comedy of laughter.

A man and his mic: Taking Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle to teacher’s college

Taking seriously Donnell Rawling’s advice that we need to interrogate our own “inner racism”, this paper begins by examining work on anti-racism in North American education. Arguing that the narratives of diversity, equity, and social justice have paradoxically risen in prominence among educational researchers while their attempts to address equity issues in schools have simultaneously been resisted (Chase 2010), this paper advocates for the continued need to make discourses of race and racism explicit in educational settings (Lindo 2007, 2010, 2015; Solomon & Levine-Rasky 2003; Bell 2009; Earick 2009). To this end, this paper presents and describes the work of “Race Comics” qua anti-racist educators and introduces the benefits of incorporating the comedic material of comedians like Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle in teacher education classrooms. Drawing on personal reflections of this pedagogical strategy in Canadian teacher education classrooms in Ontario (Canada) and Prince Edward Island (Canada), this paper teases out the ways in which these comedic texts in particular provided developing teachers with an opportunity to reflect upon their own normalised racial discourses, highlighting how these interfered with their ability to be the “perfect teacher”. This paper concludes with a discussion of comedy’s ability to help those devoted to developing socially just educational pedagogies to speak freely about their own normalised prejudices. In this way, “the man and his mic” facilitate explicit discussion of social inequities that, as critical race theorists like Derek Bell (1992; 2009) and Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995; 2009a; 2009b) have suggested, ensure that conversations about discourses of race and racism remain central in contemporary discussions about equity.

An Attack of the Clowns: Comedy, Vagrancy, and the Elizabethan History Play

Serious treatment of the relationship between the nobility and the classes dominated by it cannot avoid portrayal of conflict that undermines the premises of the national history play. Dramatists interested in interclass relations but committed to patriotic appeal must accordingly choose between two alternatives, neither of them entirely satisfactory. They must either deny the reality of class struggle and posit social unity instead...or view popular rebellion in relatively unsympathetic light.-Walter Cohen, Drama of NationIn Drama of Nation, Walter Cohen argues that representations of class conflict were threat to the seriousness of the national history play in early modern England (223).1 Contemporary playwrights solved this problem by either eliding the importance of popular action or depicting it in negative terms, as the work of an archetypal mad multitude. On the surface, the history plays written and produced in the last decade of Elizabethan rule appear to fulfill Cohen's hypothesis in that they frequently present their lower-class characters as ignorant, violent, and anarchically opposed to hierarchically ordered body politic. This essay focuses on three such enactments of lower-class rebellion: The Life and Death of Jack Straw, 2 Henry VI, and George a' Greene. Performed between 1591 and 1594, the plays chronicle the reigns of Richard II, Henry VI, and Edward I, respectively, and focus on how weak monarchs, corrupt princes, aggressive foreign powers, and rebellious peasants could endanger the stability of the emerging nation-state. But unlike the first three categories, which focus on the political threat wielded by discontented nobility, peasant rebellion focuses on lower-class grievances, and is most often represented in comic terms. In this essay, I suggest that, instead of disabling class conflict, peasant rebellion's comic framework enabled critique of social and economic inequality within the precincts of the national history play.While recent studies have drawn attention to popular voice in the histories, literary-critical discussion on the subject has, by and large, presented lower-class insurrection as antithetical to articulations of genuine social protest.2 In her investigation of Shakespeare's first tetralogy, Phyllis Rackin writes: Segregated by restrictions, the plebeian characters . . . can rebel against their oppression, but they can never finally transcend the conventions of comic representation that keep them in their social place and mark their separation from the serious historical world of their betters (221). As opposed to the high political demands of the aristocracy, plebeian complaints are disregarded because of their comic tenor. Rackin thus posits generic restrictions as an insuperable obstacle to subversive portrayal of rebellion from below. This critical devaluation of comic characters appears to derive from neoclassical theories that were deeply influenced by Aristotle's brief discussion of comedy in Poetics. In that text, Aristotle traces comedy's etymological origins to dispute between the Dorians and Athenians:For the Dorians say that they call the suburbs comae whereas the Athenians call them demes, and from this fact the Dorians argue that the word comodoi (comedians) came not from the verb comazein (to revel) but from the wandering of the comedians among the comae, since they were held in low esteem and were driven out of the city. (3)Since comic performances were limited to the comae or villages, its practitioners were automatically equated with the lower classes.3 Sanctified in the Poetics, Aristotle's commentary had profound influence on medieval and Renaissance interpretations of the ludic.4In Elizabethan England, the association of comedy and rusticity was embodied in the term clown. Thought to have originated in the Latin colonus, or tiller of the soil, the term was synonymous with a countryman, rustic, or peasant. …

Encountering Plautus in the Renaissance: A Humanist Debate on Comedy*

AbstractHistorians of comedy can profit from a study of the sixteenth-century debates regarding the merits of Plautus (ca. 254–184 BCE), most of whose works were unknown before the late fifteenth century. Early performances and editions led to contemporary theories regarding laughter, language, and morality, often in the context of a comparison with the plays of Terence (d. 159 BCE), who was sometimes viewed as superior by upper-class audiences. From the conflicting opinions of Andrea Navagero and Francesco Florido, to the neoclassical strictures of Daniel Heinsius, this study pursues learned opinion on Plautus as he became a principal author in the European canon. Plautus’s variances from Aristotelian and Horatian precepts created a lively and lasting ferment in discussions of comedy.

Dickens and the Idea of the Comic Novel

The idea of comedy inherited by Dickens and his contemporaries derived from classical, medieval, and Renaissance traditions, in which comedy dealt with 'low-life' subjects and exposed the 'ludicrous' in human actions, but which also allowed for happy endings, rewards for the virtuous, punishments for 'bad' characters, and, following the Shakespearian model, the celebration of human love. This essay argues that although Dickens was sometimes dismissed as a humorist by Victorian critics, his work should be seen in the mainstream of the English tradition of comic fiction. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are explored in the light of these arguments. ********** In the preface to his edition of Shakespeare of 1765 Samuel Johnson complained that Shakespeare's first editors, Heming and Condell, seemed not to have distinguished between the genres of comedy, history, and tragedy 'by any exact or definite ideas'. Johnson went on to describe what he saw as the vague notion of comedy which was acceptable to Jacobean audiences: 'An action which ended happily to the principal persons, however serious or distressful through its intermediate incidents, constituted a comedy.' (1) Largely thanks to the example and the subsequent influence of Shakespeare's comedies over the span of English literature this loose definition has taken on some intellectual weight. Indeed, if we balance it with the splendidly bland theory of fiction expressed by Miss Prism in the second act of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, it can be seen as having shaped a good number of moral, but not necessarily exclusively 'comic', novels. For Prism, fiction simply 'means' that 'the good ended happily, and the bad unhappily' (though Cecily Cardew nicely protests that the theory 'seems very unfair'). (2) If we were to superadd Shakespeare's concern with the significance of love and marriage to what Johnson describes as Heming and Condell's idea of 'comedy', we might safely arrive at a very loose definition of what is often called 'romantic comedy'. This 'romantic comedy' is, of course, at odds with the 'classical' idea of what constituted the comic. For Plato the comic spirit was rooted in the representation of self-ignorance. In the Philebus he has Socrates argue that 'those [...] who combine their delusion with weakness and incapacity to be revenged on a scoffer you may truly call comic figures [...] In the strong, ignorance of self is odious and repulsive [...]. Where it is weak, we see the proper place and true character of the comic.' (3) This notion is echoed by Aristotle, with a new stress on social status, in his definition of the 'ludicrous': Comedy is [...] an imitation of characters of a lower type--not, however, in the full sense of the word, bad; for the Ludicrous is merely a subdivision of the ugly. It may be defined as a defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. Thus, for example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not cause pain. (4) Despite our lack of Aristotle's larger treatise on comedy, it has been assumed that these Greek principles came to influence Roman comedy and, beyond the ancient world, the comic dramas and stories of medieval and Renaissance Europe. The medieval comic tale seems to have retained many of the elements outlined by Aristotle. Commenting generally on the traditions of comic storytelling, and on audience responses to comedy, which held sway until the late eighteenth century, Derek Brewer has written: No general study of humour was made in the Middle Ages. It is an interesting question whether such a quality, or entity, was even recognised. There was some discussion of comedy and tragedy, usually of a learned and rather muddled kind, based on an inadequate study of classical sources. Discussions of comedy rarely do more than imply humour [...] the kind of funniness enjoyed in the Renaissance was very similar to the traditional and medieval forms. …

EVERYDAY ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS AS COMEDY & STORY:A COLLAGE

In Section I, I provide a brief historical sketch of tragedy and its relationship to Socratic philosophy and comedy. II focuses on one aspect of tragedy, namely, its view that morality transcends natural limitations. Thisunderstanding of morality is with us still. III presents the central concerns of the world religions as evidence of a widespread feeling of alienation from the sacred and the wild, and contrasts world religions with indigenous spirituality. IV moves us away from the understanding of philosophy as argument and counterargument and toward an ecosystemic, or wild, conception of philosophy as story in the mode of comedy. V offers a Buddhist understanding of tragic alienation that sees it as expressive of something deeply problematic about humans. This something is actualized throughout Western culture but seems to exist only as a potentiality in indigenous cultures. This is reason enough to take indigenous cultures and comedy seriously. VI brings us back to earth with a sketch of comedy in the lives of dear friends. VII sketches some of the attributes of functional communities that give support to comedy. I also point out a number of features of indigenous so-called worldviews that would greatly enhance the ability of comedy to displace tragedy in the West. VIII portrays picaresque comedy as exemplifying the lessons of comedy taught by wilderness. Examples from indigenous cultures of Africa and Gary Snyder's Practice of the Wild underscore the importance of picaresque strategies and understandings of comedy. A look at Tom Birch's enigmatic statement, wilderness treats us like human beings, setting it alongside some lines from Thoreau's Walden, rounds out my discussion of comedy. IX poses a challenge: Can we survive The News that pours in upon us from tragic seats of power?.

Everyday Environmental Ethics as Comedy and Story: A Collage

In Section I, I provide a brief historical sketch of tragedy and its relationship to Socratic philosophy and comedy. II focuses on one aspect of tragedy, namely, its view that morality transcends natural limitations. This understanding of morality is with us still. III presents the central concerns of the world religions as evidence of a widespread feeling of alienation from the sacred and the wild, and contrasts world religions with indigenous spirituality. IV moves us away from the understanding of philosophy as argument and counterargument and toward an ecosystemic, or wild, conception of philosophy as story in the mode of comedy. V offers a Buddhist understanding of tragic alienation that sees it as expressive of something deeply problematic about humans. This something is actualized throughout Western culture but seems to exist only as a potentiality in indigenous cultures. This is reason enough to take indigenous cultures and comedy seriously. VI brings us back to earth with a sketch of comedy in the lives of dear friends. VII sketches some of the attributes of functional communities that give support to comedy. I also point out a number of features of indigenous so-called worldviews that would greatly enhance the ability of comedy to displace tragedy in the West. VIII portrays picaresque comedy as exemplifying the lessons of comedy taught by wilderness. Examples from indigenous cultures of Africa and Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild underscore the importance of picaresque strategies and understandings of comedy. A look at Tom Birch's enigmatic statement, "wilderness treats us like human beings," setting it alongside some lines from Thoreau's Walden, rounds out my discussion of comedy. IX poses a challenge: Can we survive "The News" that pours in upon us from tragic seats of power?

The Comic Dissolution of Art: The Last Act of Hegel's "Aesthetics"

It is perhaps unfortunate that well-meaning disciples of Hegel decided to publish the transcriptions of his lectures on fine art, the Aesthetics. That he did not publish these lectures himself may indicate in what light he thought of them. Intended as performance, they are nothing if not a comedy which might be called The Dissolution of Art. Of the publication of plays Hegel had this to say: Indeed, in my opinion, no play should really be printed but should remain, more or less as the case was in antiquity, in manuscript for the theatre's repertory and get only an insignificant circulation.' He might well have said the same for his lectures. That he makes use of certain dramatic and especially comic techniques reinforces the implied connection between his discussion of comedy in the Aesthetics and the comedy which is the Aesthetics.

Morose and His Tormentors

In theoretical discussions of comedy, one of the situations most frequently noted is the casting out of a 'humour' figure who is crabbed and anti-social. In Shakespeare, figures as diverse as Shylock, Don John, Jaques, and Malvolio have been seen in this way. Though their fates are as diverse as their characters (and one may remark that Jaques and Malvolio deliberately exile themselves from a society that wishes to include them) they are all in some way out of tune with the figures who have joined hands in the traditional, festive comic ending – a celebration of marriage. Most comedies strive towards a cementing of social bonds, and in the process they mock those whose eccentricity or egotism makes them incapable of social intercourse. All this is familiar enough, and at first glance its application to Jonson's Epicoene may seem obvious: Morose is the 'humour' figure, the crabbed egotist who must be punished for his egotism, and then flung aside. In fact Jonson, with his more overt interest in the theoretical side of art, has made this aspect of Morose more explicit than it is in Shakespeare's corresponding figures. At his first appearance, Morose announces, 'all discourses, but mine owne, afflict mee, they seeme harsh, impertinent, and irksome' (II.i.4–5). His dislike of noise is infact a rejection of social life, a refusal to let other people have anything to do with him. When he attempts marriage – that basic image ofthe pleasures and pains of the social bond – he does so only on terms assuring his complete mastery, and the lady's submission. He does not mind the sound of Epicoene' s voice when she is expressing obedience to him: 'How lady? pray you, rise a note' (II. v .83).