Comedy

The word comedy is derived ultimately from a Greek term denoting revelry. As such its origins were religious, associated with fertility rituals within the cult of Dionysus. In a seminal essay, Northrop Frye (1912–1991) described comedy as the “mythos of spring,” and the spirit of joy, renewal, and fecundity remains central to the European comic theatrical tradition that has now merged with native traditions of comic theater around the world, including the Japanese, Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tamil. Although the Greeks established two important comedic patterns within their drama festivals, namely the Old Comedy exemplified most richly by Aristophanes and the new comedy as developed particularly by Menander, the spirit of comedy spreads far wider than mere dramatic performance. Any literary or artistic genre involving character portrayal may take comic shape: This includes satiric poetry, humorous short stories, comic novels, caricatures, and spoofs (whether literary, visual, or practical—in art the entire Dada movement was profoundly comic in both intent and effect), along with subliterary genres such as the stand-up routine, the tall tale, witty or obscene graffiti, joke collections, and websites; as well as in the graphic arts, the comic strip and the newspapers' daily cartoon, and drama's direct descendants in radio, television, film, and video.

This list is scarcely exhaustive, but even so, it points up two trends in both comedy's theatrical tradition and its social origins. One can be defined as the satiric pattern, whereby the comedian purposefully uses his comic art to provoke thought, often with a view to social reform. The other relates back to revelry, and to varying degrees, privileges emotion ahead of reflection, intending to give relief from serious [Page 141]preoccupations and to celebrate life itself more than the moral values that civilization imposes on it. Famous comedies exemplifying these two polarities are Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and Samuel Beckett's absurdist play Waiting for Godot (1949). The first defies serious issues for all Wilde's ideological nihilism, while Beckett's theater remains obstinately life-affirming: However threatened and doom-laden, his characters do communicate, both with one another and with their audience, and particularly via their sense of humor.

This fundamental bipolarity of humor has helped ensure that great comic authors within the European tradition, such as Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, François Rabelais, William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Molière, Anton Chekhov, Wilde, and Mark Twain, have been subjected to deep analysis to facilitate and guarantee fresh approaches to their work. The same is true of great comic works in other traditions, such as the famous Honglou meng or Shitou ji, known in English as The Dream of the Red Chamber or The Story of the Stone, a 120-chapter novel by Cao Xueqin (ca. 1715–ca. 1763) and Gao E (ca. 1738–ca. 1815). Equally, given modern trends in reader-response criticism along with advances in humor theory, more recent studies have discerned comic patterns in less obvious places such as the work of Franz Kafka, Thomas Hardy, the Bible, or Daoist writings. This entry, however, reflects the roots of comedy, both East and West, by focusing on performative comedy, that is, comedy that continues to depend for its full effects on being physically acted, even though it is impossible to reconstruct fully the social context in which many pieces from the past were either mounted or received.

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