Low Comedy

The term low comedy is usually paired with the term high comedy. Both are general categories usually applied to stage comedy and are performed by actors using either a full or partial script. Like high comedy, low comedy describes both the material (characters, actions, and dialogue) included and its performance style. However, it can also be used figuratively to describe real-life events or concepts that seem broadly to share that spirit or flavor of comedy, as when a comic novel or painting includes scenes of low comedy, such as the vignettes of pratfalls and mishaps included in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs (1559) or the well-known footage in Modern Times (1936) of a hapless Charlie Chaplin being slowly spun through the massive cogs of an industrial machine.

The 2002 online version of the Oxford English Dictionary links low comedy to farce, defining it as “comedy in which the subject and treatment border upon farce,” but in theatrical usage it refers more precisely to episodes or characters that raise cheap laughter requiring little skill on the part of the performer, who usually relies on the simple breaking of taboos, gratuitous references to what Mikhail Bakhtin (1968)—or at least his translator—delicately termed the material bodily lower stratum (meaning digestive, sexual, and excretory functions), slapstick as in pratfalls, and physical humiliations such as on-stage beatings. Low comedy can thus occur within a farce, but a farce may be high or low, depending on how cleverly wrought it is.

As it has an ancient heritage, the term slapstick deserves particular attention. The slap-stick is a stage prop traditionally used by clowns to produce the appearance and sound of hitting someone while not actually causing them bodily harm. In the Renaissance commedia dell’arte, it is the special prop for the masked character called Arlecchino (ancestor to the modern Harlequin, but minus the tearfulness associated with that mask). Usually from Bergamo in northern Italy, a town famous for its commercial to-and-fro, Arlecchino was a cunning, agile, and speedy servant, who, like a cat, successfully twisted [Page 465]his way out of trouble. His slapstick was made from two thin strips of wood that could be held as one, but, being separated at the handle by a short length of leather, could also be smartly slapped together to produce the appropriate cracking noise. Thus slapstick comedy refers specifically to low comedy that includes physical beatings.

Even in 5th century BCE Athens, the distinction between high and low in comedy was familiar to Aristophanes; for example, in the Prologue to The Wasps, the slave Xanthias says:

Not surprisingly, the play proceeds to serve up much knockabout fun.

Despite their antique origins, the distinction between low and high in comedy seems only to have been explicitly recognized in the early 17th century, when dramatists aspired to and discussed the suitability of classical models. Thus the Greek New Comedy of Menander was considered “higher” than the farcical burlesque of Aristophanic Old Comedy, George Puttenham in his Arte of English Poesie (1589) describing New Comedy as “more ciuill and pleasant a great deale” than “This bitter poeme called the old Comedy” (1.14.25). Aristophanes’s trenchant satire and juxtaposition of low comedy with high has discomfited many a critic.

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