The Art of Laughter and Human Contradiction

Comedy, type of drama or other art form the chief object of which, according to modern notions, is to amuse. It is contrasted on the one hand with tragedy and on the other with farce, burlesque, and other forms of humorous amusement.

The classic conception of comedy, which began with Aristotle in ancient Greece of the 4th century bce and persists through the present, holds that it is primarily concerned with humans as social beings, rather than as private persons, and that its function is frankly corrective. The comic artist’s purpose is to hold a mirror up to society to reflect its follies and vices, in the hope that they will, as a result, be mended. The 20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson shared this view of the corrective purpose of laughter; specifically, he felt, laughter is intended to bring the comic character back into conformity with his society, whose logic and conventions he abandons when “he slackens in the attention that is due to life.”

Here comedy is considered primarily as a literary genre. The wellsprings of comedy are dealt with in the article humour. The comic impulse in the visual arts is discussed in the articles caricature and cartoon and comic strip.

Origins and definitions

The word comedy seems to be connected by derivation with the Greek verb meaning “to revel,” and comedy arose out of the revels associated with the rites of Dionysus, a god of vegetation. The origins of comedy are thus bound up with vegetation ritual. Aristotle, in his Poetics, states that comedy originated in phallic songs and that, like tragedy, it began in improvisation. Though tragedy evolved by stages that can be traced, the progress of comedy passed unnoticed because it was not taken seriously. When tragedy and comedy arose, poets wrote one or the other, according to their natural bent. Those of the graver sort, who might previously have been inclined to celebrate the actions of the great in epic poetry, turned to tragedy; poets of a lower type, who had set forth the doings of the ignoble in invectives, turned to comedy. The distinction is basic to the Aristotelian differentiation between tragedy and comedy: tragedy imitates men who are better than the average and comedy men who are worse.

For centuries, efforts at defining comedy were to be along the lines set down by Aristotle: the view that tragedy deals with personages of high estate, and comedy deals with lowly types; that tragedy treats of matters of great public import, while comedy is concerned with the private affairs of mundane life; and that the characters and events of tragedy are historic and so, in some sense, true, while the humbler materials of comedy are but feigned. Implicit, too, in Aristotle is the distinction in styles deemed appropriate to the treatment of tragic and comic story. As long as there was at least a theoretical separation of comic and tragic styles, either genre could, on occasion, appropriate the stylistic manner of the other to a striking effect, which was never possible after the crossing of stylistic lines became commonplace.

The ancient Roman poet Horace, who wrote on such stylistic differences, noted the special effects that can be achieved when comedy lifts its voice in pseudotragic rant and when tragedy adopts the prosaic but affecting language of comedy. Consciously combined, the mixture of styles produces the burlesque, in which the grand manner (epic or tragic) is applied to a trivial subject, or the serious subject is subjected to a vulgar treatment, to ludicrous effect.

The English novelist Henry Fielding, in the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), was careful to distinguish between the comic and the burlesque; the latter centres on the monstrous and unnatural and gives pleasure through the surprising absurdity it exhibits in appropriating the manners of the highest to the lowest, or vice versa. Comedy, on the other hand, confines itself to the imitation of nature, and, according to Fielding, the comic artist is not to be excused for deviating from it. His subject is the ridiculous, not the monstrous, as with the writer of burlesque; and the nature he is to imitate is human nature, as viewed in the ordinary scenes of civilized society.

The human contradiction

In dealing with humans as social beings, all great comic artists have known that they are in the presence of a contradiction: that behind the social being lurks an animal being, whose behaviour often accords very ill with the canons dictated by society. Comedy, from its ritual beginnings, has celebrated creative energy. The primitive revels out of which comedy arose frankly acknowledged man’s animal nature; the animal masquerades and the phallic processions are the obvious witnesses to it. Comedy testifies to physical vitality, delight in life, and the will to go on living. Comedy is at its merriest, its most festive, when this rhythm of life can be affirmed within the civilized context of human society. In the absence of this sort of harmony between creatural instincts and the dictates of civilization, sundry strains and discontents arise, all bearing witness to the contradictory nature of humanity, which in the comic view is a radical dualism; efforts to follow the way of rational sobriety are forever being interrupted by the infirmities of the flesh. The duality that tragedy views as a fatal contradiction in the nature of things, comedy views as one more instance of the incongruous reality that everyone must live with as best they can.

“Wherever there is life, there is contradiction,” says Søren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish existentialist, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), “and wherever there is contradiction, the comical is present.” He went on to say that the tragic and the comic are both based on contradiction but “the tragic is the suffering contradiction, comical, painless contradiction.” Comedy makes the contradiction manifest along with a way out, which is why the contradiction is painless. Tragedy, on the other hand, despairs of a way out of the contradiction.

The incongruous is “the essence of the laughable,” said the English essayist William Hazlitt, who also declared, in his essay “On Wit and Humour” in English Comic Writers (1819), “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.”

Comedy, satire, and romance

Comedy’s dualistic view of the individual as an incongruous mixture of bodily instinct and rational intellect is an essentially ironic view—implying the capacity to see things in a double aspect. The comic drama takes on the features of satire as it fixes on professions of virtue and the practices that contradict them. Satire assumes standards against which professions and practices are judged. To the extent that the professions prove hollow and the practices vicious, the ironic perception darkens and deepens. The element of the incongruous points in the direction of the grotesque, which implies an admixture of elements that do not match. The ironic gaze eventually penetrates to a vision of the grotesque quality of experience, marked by the discontinuity of word and deed and the total lack of coherence between appearance and reality. This suggests one of the extreme limits of comedy, the satiric extreme, in which the sense of the discrepancy between things as they are and things as they might be or ought to be has reached to the borders of tragedy. For the tragic apprehension, as Kierkegaard states, despairs of a way out of the contradictions that life presents.

As satire may be said to govern the movement of comedy in one direction, romance governs its movement in the other. Satiric comedy dramatizes the discrepancy between the ideal and the reality and condemns the pretensions that would mask reality’s hollowness and viciousness. Romantic comedy also regularly presents the conflict between the ideal shape of things as hero or heroine could wish them to be and the hard realities with which they are confronted, but typically it ends by invoking the ideal, despite whatever difficulties reality has put in its way. This is never managed without a good deal of contrivance, and the plot of the typical romantic comedy is a medley of clever scheming, calculated coincidence, and wondrous discovery, all of which contribute ultimately to making the events answer precisely to the hero’s or heroine’s wishes. Plotting of this sort has had a long stage tradition and not exclusively in comedy. It is first encountered in the tragicomedies of the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides (e.g., Alcestis, Iphigeneia in Tauris, Ion, Helen). Shakespeare explored the full range of dramatic possibilities of the romantic mode of comedy. The means by which the happy ending is accomplished in romantic comedy—the document or the bodily mark that establishes identities to the satisfaction of all the characters of goodwill—are part of the stock-in-trade of all comic dramatists, even such 20th-century playwrights as Jean Anouilh (in Traveler Without Luggage, 1937) and T.S. Eliot (in The Confidential Clerk, 1953).

There is nothing necessarily inconsistent in the use of a calculatedly artificial dramatic design to convey a serious dramatic statement. The contrived artifice of Shakespeare’s mature comic plots is the perfect foil against which the reality of the characters’ feelings and attitudes assumes the greater naturalness. The strange coincidences, remarkable discoveries, and wonderful reunions are unimportant compared with the emotions of relief and awe that they inspire. Their function, as Shakespeare uses them, is precisely to give rise to such emotions, and the emotions, thanks to the plangent poetry in which they are expressed, end by transcending the circumstances that occasioned them. But when such artifices are employed simply for the purpose of eliminating the obstacles to a happy ending—as is the case in the sentimental comedy of the 18th and early 19th centuries—then they stand forth as imaginatively impoverished dramatic clichés. The dramatists of sentimental comedy were committed to writing exemplary plays, wherein virtue would be rewarded and vice frustrated. If hero and heroine were to be rescued from the distresses that had encompassed them, any measures were apparently acceptable; the important thing was that the play’s action should reach an edifying end. It is but a short step from comedy of this sort to the melodrama that flourished in the 19th-century theatre. The distresses that the hero and heroine suffer are, in melodrama, raised to a more than comic urgency, but the means of deliverance have the familiar comic stamp: the secret at last made known, the long-lost child identified, the hard heart made suddenly capable of pity. Melodrama is a form of fantasy that proceeds according to its own childish and somewhat egoistic logic; hero and heroine are pure, anyone who opposes them is a villain, and the purity that has exposed them to risks must ensure their eventual safety and happiness. What melodrama is to tragedy, farce is to comedy, and the element of fantasy is equally prominent in farce and in melodrama. If melodrama provides a fantasy in which the protagonist suffers for his virtues but is eventually rewarded for them, farce provides a fantasy in which the protagonist sets about satisfying his most roguish or wanton, mischievous or destructive, impulses and manages to do so with impunity.