Playacting: A Theory of Comedic Performance (original) (raw)

Introduction to Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism (with Alan Ackerman)

Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Bloomsbury Press , 2016

Comedy is difficult to define, though the word has been in active use for thousands of years. In ancient Greek, komoidia and, in classical Latin, comoedia referred to amusing stage-plays. In fourteenth-century French, there was comedie, and the frst recorded use of ‘comedye’ in English dates to Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde in 1374. Today, if you go to ‘Genres’ on any movie database, you will and ‘Comedy.’ But if you click on ‘Subgenres’, you will discover more than a dozen options, including ‘Dark Comedies’, ‘Mockumentaries’, ‘Romantic Comedy’, ‘Satires’, ‘Slapstick’, ‘Stand-up Comedy’, and more. Send-ups of politicians, jokes about sex, love stories that end in marriage, and old people making themselves ridiculous by pretending to be young are all forms of comedy that have a long history. Political humour, satire, farce, burlesque, sketch comedy, comedy of character, and comedy of manners – these many kinds of comedy employ different styles and make fun of diverse targets. Is it possible to generalize across this diversity?

Discussing Comedy--An Interrogative Approach

Cea Forum, 2012

During the last ten years before I retired in 2009, I often taught a course in narrative and dramatic comedy. I justified my affection for comedy by lamenting the usually heavy stuff in undergraduate English fare-tragedy and the literature of victimage. I admit I may well be a trivial person. Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes appeared the same year as The Great Gatsby; Mary Chase's Harvey had its premier the same year as The Glass Menagerie. If only one text from each year could survive, I'm not sure how I would vote. My course was organized somewhat historically: students always read, beside Loos and Chase, a few Plautus plays, Twelfth Night, and The Importance of Being Earnest. I also assigned a changing assortment of texts (by, e.g., Aristophanes, Molière, Hrabal, Nabokov, Flann O'Brien, Thurber). We took account of contemporary plotted comedy with class reports on comedies that students themselves selected, usually from television and film, though there was the occasional book (Catch-22). For these reports, incidentally, the most popular and soughtafter topic was Seinfeld. But beyond that, selections were surprisingly varied and I never had to go back to students for more choices beyond the three they initially submitted. Theory of comedy in the class came in small doses, with glimpses of Bakhtin, Bergson, Frye, Susanne Langer, and James Wood. I also provided input with a handout, "Tools for analyzing comedy." This began as a simple list of questions and later became a more discursive, though still largely interrogative, handout. That is the origin of the present writing (thanks to THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2012 79 WWW.CEA-WEB.ORG Kristin Bovaird-Abo and Theresa Buchheister for help with the early handout). Rather than pose a single theory of comedy here, I assemble the kinds of questions one can raise whether in class or just in thinking about comedies. This can be considered a tool or heuristic for those who take comedy seriously and want to go beyond "why is this funny?" in the work of analysis. Needless to say, every viewpoint quoted in what follows can become a question for discussion. When leading a class discussion of a tragedy, teachers often find it useful to fall back on criteria or "rules" offered in Aristotle's Poetics (hubris, "tragic flaw," reversal or peripety, fall from greatness, etc.). Aristotle's book on comedy does not survive (see Eco's Name of the Rose for speculation as to its fate), but other smart people since have come up with good and applicable theories and valid questions. It seems useful to consider undertaking the formal analysis of this genre especially if, as James Wood has claimed, the very heart of modernity has been characterized by an interest in "irresponsible" comedy (Wood 16-18). Questions that comedy shares with other genres: 1. Historical, Biographical, and Literary Historical Données The usual historical, biographical, and literary historical données and what can be inferred from them. Questions arise about the times, reception history, sources, authorial obsessions, and textual interrelations. In this category, a special problem for comedy might concern the historical determinants of humor: a comic moment can depend on class differences no longer understood, or on differences no longer seen as laughable. Sir Philip Sidney says in An Apology for Poetry that "we" laugh at cripples. A more civilized era finds Henry Fielding, in the preface to Joseph Andrews, declaring that it uncivilized to laugh at the unfortunate. Ugliness or lameness, he says, is no laughing matter, unless the ugly person would pretend to be beautiful or the lame person to be agile. Then there are matters of social class no longer evident. In Plautus's Asinaria (memorably staged in

Comedy as Performance

The Object of Comedy, 2020

Comedy is a genre of repetition. However, a comic repetition is not merely a reiteration of an original process, form or person. Rather, a comic repetition always includes an element of what is typical for performance art: what is repeated is actually only produced in the act of repetition which manifests it. This chapter looks at the examples of such performative repetition in three seemingly unrelated examples of the popular comic art of the 1990’s: in a clown routine in Vyacheslav Polunin’s Slava’s Snow Show and in the television sit-coms Coupling and 3rd Rock from the Sun. The chapter concludes by recalling J. L. Austin’s formulation of performative utterances and argues that they are to be regarded as constituting parts of legal or moral ceremonies, inscribed in what Louis Althusser described as ideological apparatuses. Both comedy and ideology proceed as performance in the described sense – though this does not imply that comedy is necessarily ideological.

LAUGHTER AND LITERATURE: A PLAY THEORY OF HUMOR

Philosophy and Literature 28 (2004): 1–22, 2004

Humor seems uniquely human, but it has deep biological roots. Laughter, the best evidence suggests, derives from the ritualized breathing and open-mouth display common in animal play. Play evolved as training for the unexpected, as creatures put themselves at risk of losing balance or dominance so that they learn to recover. Humor in turn involves play with the expectations we share—whether innate or acquired—in order to catch one another off guard in ways that simulate risk and stimulate recovery. An evolutionary approach to three great literary humorists, Shakespeare, Nabokov and Beckett, shows that a species-wide explanation not only digs deeper but in no way diminishes individual difference.

Comic Agents: From a Poetic to an Anthropological Paradigm of Comedy (Aristotle and Alfred Gell)

Aristotle was concerned with the comedy genre as a kind of poetry. Its creators, the comic poets, interested him only marginally. This genological approach to its subject-matter dominated the theory and philosophy of art for subsequent centuries as evidenced by the subsequent elaborations of interpretations of Aristotle's catharsis. The alternative approach focused instead on subjects as creators of art. As a consequence of the long-term development of anthropocentrism in the humanities, however, this approach took over. The "performative turn" represents its more recent version. It allows one to interpret Poetics and other classical works not in the context of an object (comedy), but in the context of the acting subject. I claim that social anthropology further explores the concept of comedy and itself presumes it in its conceptual foundations and research approach. I elaborate the argument on the basis of the concept of the "spirit of comedy" coined by Alfr...