A comedy on the stage may obviously contain individual jokes, humorous characters, and comic situations. Usually a comedy is funny and makes its audiences laugh, although at least one study warns us, in all solemnity, not to consider this affective response to be an intrinsic aspect of the genre.But funny or not, we recognize certain conventions of structure and content without which a play cannot seem, in the normal sense, a comedy. In a complex and on-going historical process, these conventions enter into our experience of comic drama, acting upon performers and spectators alike; and part of our enjoyment of comedy springs from the intricate fulfillment of our conventionalized expectations.
Classical and neoclassical criticism of comedy, a tradition beginning with Plato and Aristotle, accelerating in late antiquity and extending through the Renaissance and beyond, has examined the comedies of a handful of dramatists with a pedantic thoroughness that evokes a sense of comic incongruity when compared with its object.Even the earliest interpretations of comedy must themselves be interpreted with a rich sense of ambiguity. Comedy, argues Aristotle at the beginning of the critical tradition, aims at representing men as worse than in actual life, and is an imitation of characters of lower type (Aristotle 13).The phrasing suggests how this deceptively simple formulation could later be explained in terms of social class, even though Aristotle makes clear he is speaking in an ethical sense. The moral agents within the comic mirror and beneath our own level of goodness, below that level of everyday morality we presumably recognize in ourselves.Aristotle’s argument assumes a general consensus on ethical values which allows a certain subtlety to the description: comic characters possess some defect orugliness, though they are not “in the full sense of the word bad” (233).
Since this is approximately how we all see ourselves, we may find it difficult to distinguish between comedy as thus described and a type of drama that presents characters “as they are” in real life (11). Aristotle really seems to be suggesting that the moral average of comic characters is lower; that we may assume we will meet in comedy those defects that we may chance to meet in life.Aristotle’s argument does not imply an analogous condemnation of comedy as performance. To a modern commentator, the Poetics represents a specific defense of the imitative arts intended to answer the harsh criticism of Aristotle’s great philosophic rival.
Plato’s discussion of the drama, conversely, culminates in a profound philosophic rejection of mimesis itself, but it begins by assuming, with Aristotle, that comedy portrays those actions that are unworthy of a free citizen.The stern, magisterial tone of passages like these emphasizes what must have been the vitality and subversive power of ancient comedy. Even Aristotle, in a nonliterary context, abandons his mysterious doctrine of katharsis with its implication that drama could have a positive, therapeutic effect on a body of citizens.He prescribes that the legislator should not allow youth to be spectators of iambi or of comedy until they are of an age to sit at the public tables and to drink strong wine; by that time education will have armed them against the evil “influences of such representations” (Aristotle 164).The implied analogy between comedy and intoxication manages, curiously, to glance backwards at comedy’s patron deity, and forward to a long tradition of religious and moral diatribe. The suspicion about comedy’s effect on society and the individual would influence the later history of comedy no less than those formal and structural rules that later playwrights and critics discovered, or believed they discovered, in the Poetics.
There is one final ambiguity that clings to Aristotle’s basic idea throughout its long history. The same Renaissance critics who spent most of their time carefully imitating the ancients eventually managed to change what had been a moral and aesthetic idea into a political one.Aristotle himself refers to the presumed rustic origins of comedy, mentioning a traditional explanation that the earliest comedians were performers who wandered from village to village, being excluded “contemptuously from the city” (Aristotle & Butcher 1997).In the brevity of Aristotle’s remarks on the form, as well as in their specific purport, a certain note of condescension is clear: he argues that comedy is the instinctive art form of “the more trivial sort”of people (4.7) and that ithas had no history, because it was not at first taken seriously” (5.2).
