Comedy

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Comedy

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Comedy

• The word comedy comes from the Greek word
  Komos, or merrymaking, always part of the the
  Dionysian ritual.
• Comedies were popular during the Greeces Golden
  Age of drama (5th Century BCE).
• These old comedies relied largely on witty
  language and characters their point was to
  satirize something in society.
• Aristophanes, of course, is the well-known master
  of Old Comedy in ancient Greece Lysistrata,
  Birds, Frogs, Peace, Clouds, Wasps. All poke fun
  at war, peace, politicians, people and society.
• But Aristophanes is also credited with pioneering
  a transition period, Middle Comedy, between Old
  and New.

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Comedy

• The playwright Menander (342-291 BCE) is credited
  with creating New Comedy, which is based on the
  bizarre situations incited by human love.
• This particular form of comedy relies more on
  situational plot, stock characters, and visual
  humor, rather than on wit and complex ideas.
• The goal of new comedy was to amuse, not to
  instruct. In these, as many comedies, all
  difficulties ended in marriage. (Of course,
  often, this is where difficulties actually
  begin!)

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Comedy

• Stock characters in New Comedy include eager
  young lovers, coquettes, indignant fathers,
  jealous husbands, pompous asses, gullible
  victims, tricky servants, go-betweens, greedy
  con-men, and the like.
• These two basic forms of comedy moved through the
  ages, adapting to tastes and moral restraints,
  which as today comedy always strives to
  circumvent through limber use of pun,
  double-entendre, and mock.
• Bawdy comedy was alive and well in the supposedly
  pious middle ages, in the form of fabliaux and
  mimes and farcical plays.

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High and Low Comedy

• Comedy is often separated into two classes High
  and Low, which correlate in theory to Old and New
  Comedy
• High Comedy Words, wit and sophisticated
  characters and ideas are used to reveal
  ridiculous or destructive traits of human nature.
  Character and internal conflict march the mostly
  dynamic plots forward.
• Low Comedy Unruly plot, farce, bawdy jokes,
  sight gags, slapstick and stock characters reveal
  absurd aspects of human life. Often the purpose
  is sheer stupid fun as we laugh ourselves silly
  at ourselves. The plot is random and full of
  situational gags.

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Commedia dellArte

• Commedia dellarte (professional comedy, an
  ironic name) derived from Roman farce and emerged
  in force in Italy in the mid-16th century, and
  flowered through the ages, taking Low Comedy to
  its most outrageous extremes. (Its opposite was
  the commedia erudita.)
• The performances were largely improvisational,
  and relied on physical humor, using props such as
  pies, water buckets, beds, ladders, and the
  double paddle, called a slap stick, and sight
  gags.

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Commedia dellArte

• Often the plot, full of ridiculous situations,
  was interrupted by iazzi, (lazioni actions) or
  comic business, jokes, and witty byplay performed
  (Harlequin or Arlecchino) or other of the zanni.
  (Pedrolino or Pierrot) These plots are
  completely episodic in nature, and mostly
  repetitively absurd.
• Typical scenarios included lecherous old men,
  fools, young lovers, comic servants (zanni)
  braggarts, prudes, cuckolds and pundits.

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Commedia dellArte

• The actors playing these stock characters
  generally wore masks (except for the humble and
  sympathetic Pierrot) and the performances were
  rife with the obnoxious and obscene, full of
  vulgar visual jokes and farce.
• Medieval romance reflects these flat, stock
  characters, in their simplicity, and also in the
  seeming lack of depth of the love itself.

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Romantic Comedy

• Romantic comedy emerges from the middle ages as a
  parody of romance literature of the middle ages
  the word Romantic is a derivative of romance.
• Romantic comedies in the Renaissance, conversely,
  derive from New Comedy, and blend in elements of
  medieval romances.
• Conventions include Stock characters from Old
  Comedy blocking agents (those preventing the
  lovers from marrying) choric figures (detached
  figure who comments on the ridiculous situations)
  go-betweens (who try to defy the blocking agent)
  and all difficulties end in marriage.

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Romantic Comedy

• Romantic comedies follow a dynamic plot sequence,
  common to high comedy, although problems or
  complications, are often created whimsically and
  solved abruptly.
• Note This is the inverse pattern of tragedy at
  the climax of rising action in a comedy, it seems
  as if all is lost to the lovers in tragedy, it
  seems briefly as if the hero will reach his or
  her goal.
• Characters in Renaissance comedy, as in New
  Comedy, tend to be well-developed, and erudite
  In Shakespeare, notably, the character of
  Rosalind in As You Like It and Beatrice and
  Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing, and Alceste
  in Molières, The Misanthrope.

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Romantic Comedy

• Many of Shakespeare comedies contain elements of
  medieval romance. Tokens of Medieval romance are
  evident in the presence of a green world where
  magic solves the problems of the lovers. (As You
  Like It Midsummer Nights Dream) In medieval
  romances, the quest often involves encounters
  with magical or mystical places and beings.
• Some of Shakespeares plays in themselves are
  called romances, rather than comedies, due to the
  healing nature of the green world The Tempest
  The Winters Tale, As You Like It, Cymbeline, and
  Pericles. In these plays, the theme of love and
  its foibles is secondary to redemption and
  forgiveness.
• Shakespeares romance plays use magic, the
  supernatural, and the idea of a journey to an
  unknown and mystical place where wounds are
  healed or the spiritual answer to a profound
  question is discovered.

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Romantic Comedy

• The connections to fertility ritual is also a
  subtext in medieval romance.
• The wedding festival is victory of spring over
  winter, renewal of humanity, and of the earth.
• Generally, Renaissance romantic comedies, for
  their sophistication, are placed in the High
  Comedy category, especially those of Shakespeare.
  The characters who are mocked, are generally,
  static, and these resemble Low Comedy figures.

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Metaphysical Poets

• One could include in the high comedy category,
  some of the Metaphysical poems of the 17th
  century, which revolve around wit, or
  intellectual poetic conceit to make a point,
  often humorous in its nature due to the long
  stretch from literal to figurative in the central
  metaphor.

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Comedy of Manners

• Comedy of Manners is a term that is generally
  applied to Restoration Comedy and Neoclassical
  Comedy both forms existing in the
  post-Renaissance world of England and France.
  (Molière, William Congreve, Oliver Goldsmith,
  Richard Sheridan, William Wycherley).
• These plays include elements of Romantic comedy
  and satire. They tend to mock the relations and
  intrigues of people in the upper classes, rely
  largely on words and wit, and are often
  sophisticated and refined.

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18th Century Satire

• Satires Mock human institutions, including
  religions, politics and political systems, social
  or other classes, philosophy or ideas, social
  practices or codes of behavior, groups of any
  sort, individuals of any sort in fact, the
  entire human race!
• How important is it for us to be able to
  excoriate ourselves? Satire can be considered as
  a genre, as an important element of a work, or as
  a motif within a work. Satire is didactic
  literature used to make an ideological point.

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18th Century Satire

• Satire points out a problem, but offers no
  solution! (Remember, therefore, to keep it out of
  your intimate life!) Debates in satires mock the
  very attitudes and viewpoint they profess, by
  revealing faulty logic to the extreme. The 18th
  centurys new openness, brought on by
  Enlightenment thought, made this century ripe for
  satires.

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18th Century Satire

• This type of satire is ripe in England, mostly
  during the Age of Enlightenment. Voltaire,
  notably, envied the English for their liberty to
  express dismay and astonishment of the foibles of
  political, religious, and world institutions, in
  satire.
• Satirical notables include Samuel Richardson,
  Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding,
  Tobias Smollett, Laurence Stern, and of course,
  the radical Frenchman, Voltaire.

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Elements of Satire

• Satire works like caricature it highlights
  faults until theyre completely absurd, so no one
  can miss them.
• Sarcastic Language
• irony, understatement, and hyperbole
• sardonic (cynically mocking) language (Eliots
  The Hollow Men)
• cruel, biting jokes
• use of ridicule (sarcasm) and invectives
• malapropisms and other variations on diction
• Tonal variations all pointing to general
  outlandishness Satires can move from the
  ridiculous to the absurd to the surreal to the
  grotesque and go into very dark realms. They
  are not always funny in a way that is lightly
  humorous.

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Elements of Satire

• Faulty Logic to Mock Faulty Logic
• The Absurd
• Ridiculous Coincidences or Crazy Contradictions
  Juxtaposed
• Caricatures, especially eccentrics and pedants
• An Innocent Observer or Narrator
• Capricious Journeys of a Rogue Character
  (picaresque novels)
• Other Miscellaneous plot forms in generally
  episodic narration These are called Menippean
  satires, for example, Alice in Wonderland
• Humor or Dark Humor (A Clockwork Orange)
• Use of Farce Slapstick humor, physical and
  situational humor, high sexual content
• Use of Burlesque Parody or Travesty

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Elements of Satire

• 1. Parody is a work that mixes high form and low
  content, such as Alexander Popes The Rape of the
  Lock, which uses high diction and lofty epic
  poetry with the rather low subject of a girls
  hair, cut as a prank. Trapped in the Closet, by
  R. Kelly is a really nice example of parody.
  (Where would you file, Blazing Saddles?)
• 2. Travesty is a work that mixes low form with
  high content The film Cabaret, for example,
  uses travesty in the MC scenes made famous by
  Joel Grey in the film, where Weimar Republic
  dance-hall acts depict malignant racism about to
  erupt into the Holocaust. Also, the film
  Airplane could be considered travesty. What about
  Borat?

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Absurdist Literature and Theater of the Absurd

• The Absurdist movement is a reaction to stuffy,
  formal and moralistic Victorian literature. It
  is part of the Modern and Existential movements
  of the 20th century.
• Absurdist fiction centers on the behavior of
  absurd characters, situations or subjects. While
  a great deal of Absurdist fiction is humorous,
  the point is the study of human behavior under
  circumstances that are highly unusual, but
  nonetheless, created by humankind.

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Absurdist Literature and Theater of the Absurd

• For example, this might include nuclear disaster,
  craving a deity for salvation, misery imposed on
  each other for petty or lustful reasons, and
  human strife caused by humans in general.
• Absurdist fiction does not judge characters or
  their actions the task is left to the readers.
• It is mostly episodic in structure, and there is
  usually no explicit moral.

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Comedy

• Comedy has the power to take fear and nobility
  out of the object opposed, and in doing so,
  functionally diffuses tension.
• This allows humans to critically view what might
  be unbearable, or merely uncomfortable, and find
  solutions, comfort, or solace in situations that
  could otherwise be unfathomably heinous or merely
  humiliating.
• Opposing forces and culturally different enemies
  can find common ground in laughter.
• And mostly, comedy gives us the uncanny ability
  to humbly see fault within ourselves, and to
  change accordingly, without need for defensive
  repercussions.

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Definitions

• Situational Comedy The more convoluted the set
  up for the pay off scene, the funnier it is.
  Situational comedy uses elements of suspense and
  situational irony.
• Realistic Comedy This modern term describes
  comedies that have tender or even tragic
  moments.
• Bowdlerize In 1815, the Reverend Thomas Bowdler
  tidied up Shakespeare. In his Family Shakespeare,
  he omitted whatever he thought was unfit to be
  read by a gentleman in the company of ladies.
  (Expurgation of the indecent)
• Malapropism From the play, The Rivals, by
  Richard Sheridan, after a character, Mrs.
  Malaprop, who consistently uses words
  inappropriately, in a misfired effort to sound
  sophisticated If I reprehend anything in this
  world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a
  nice derangement of epitaphs!
• Digressive Comedy In the mode of Seinfeld, or
  The Simpsons