Essay on "Comedy"_Literary forms & Criticism

Unit-II
Drama
“Comedy”

We use the words 'comedy' and comic to describe something that is funny in our everyday lives. These include a joke, or a fantastic story that is full of nonsense, or an absurd appearance that makes us giggle, smile or laugh. Comedy is not inherent in things or people but the way things/people are perceived. Comedy is a deliberate presentation of events/experiences drawn from real life but not the same with real life. We should therefore not expect dramatic comedy to be the same as real life. In the most common literary application, a comedy is a fictional work in which the materials are selected and managed primarily in order to interest and amuse us: the characters and their discomfitures engage our pleasurable attention rather than our profound concern, we are made to feel confident that no great disaster will occur, and usually the action turns out happily for the chief characters. The term “comedy” is customarily applied only to plays for the stage or to motion pictures and television dramas; it should be noted, however, that the comic form of plot, as just defined, also occurs in prose fiction and narrative poetry. Within the very broad spectrum of dramatic comedy, the following types are frequently distinguished:

1. Romantic comedy was developed by Elizabethan dramatists on the model of contemporary prose romances such as Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590), the source of Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599). Such comedy represents a love affair that involves a beautiful and engaging heroine (sometimes disguised as a man); the course of this love does not run smooth, yet overcomes all difficulties to end in a happy union. Many of the boy-meets-girl plots of later writers are instances of romantic comedy, as are romance novels and many motion pictures, from The Philadelphia Story to Sleepless in Seattle. In Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye points out that some of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies manifest a movement from the normal world of conflict and trouble into “the green world”—the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, or the fairy-haunted wood of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—in which the problems and injustices of the ordinary world are dissolved, enemies reconciled, and true lovers united. The three unities are carelessly thrown to the win there is a free mingling of the comic and the tragic, the serious and the gay, for Shakespeare instinctively realized that life is a mingled yarn of joys and sorrows, and it would be unnatural to separate them. Its aim is not corrective, or satiric, but innocent, good natured laughter. Follies are, no doubt, exposed and ridiculed, but the laughter is gentle and sympathetic, and there is no moral indignation, or the zeal of a reformer. The dramatist sympathizes even when he laughs. We laugh with people and not at them.

2. Satiric comedy ridicules political policies or philosophical doctrines, or else attacks deviations from the accepted social order by making ridiculous the violators of its standards of morals or manners. The early master of satiric comedy was the Greek Aristophanes, whose plays mocked political, philosophical, and literary matters of his age. Shakespeare’s contemporary, Ben Jonson, wrote satiric or (as it is sometimes called) “corrective comedy.” In his Volpone and The Alchemist, for example, the greed and ingenuity of one or more intelligent but rascally swindlers, and the equal greed but stupid gullibility of their victims, are made grotesquely or repulsively ludicrous rather than lightly amusing.

3. The comedy of manners Their plays dealt with the vicissitudes of young lovers and included what became the stock characters of much later comedy, such as the clever servant, old and stodgy parents, and the wealthy rival. The English comedy of manners was early exemplified by Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado about Nothing. The Restoration deals with the relations and intrigues of men and women living in a sophisticated upper class society, and relies for comic effect in large part on the wit and sparkle of the dialogue—often in the form of repartee, a witty conversational give-and-take which constitutes a kind of verbal fencing match—as well as on the violations of social standards and decorum by would-be wits, jealous husbands, conniving rivals, and foppish dandies. Excellent examples are William Congreve’s The Way of the World and William Wycherley’s The Country Wife. The realistic, often satirical, comedy of the Restoration period, as written by Congreve and others. The term is also used for the revival in modified form, of this comedy a hundred years later by Goldsmith and Sheridan, as well as for a revival late in the nineteenth century. In the stricter sense of the term, the type is concerned with the manners and conventions of an artificial, highly sophisticated society. The characters are more likely to be types than individualized personalities. Plot, though often involving a clever handling of situation and intrigue, is less important than atmosphere and satire. The prose dialogue is witty and polished.

1. Introduction

Comedy is a form of drama that is intended to amuse the spectator. It ends happily. It is a play or narrative which has a pleasant atmosphere and a happy ending. Since comedy strives to amuse, both wit and humor are utilized. In this context M.H. Abrams says, the most common literary application, a comedy is fictional work in which the materials are selected an managed primarily in order to interest and amuse us: the characters and their discomfiture engage our pleasurable attention rather than our profound concern, we are made usually the action turns out happily for the chief characters".

2. Purpose of comedy

The purpose of comedy is to supply us with imaginary objects on which to exercise our cruelty, without harming others and without shocking our own moral sense. Aristotle's theory of Catharsis also applies to comedy. The really great comic characters-Cervantes’s' Don Quixote, Shakespeare's Falstaff. Dickens's Mr. Pickwick are basically lovable and we may laugh at them and laugh with them.

3. History

There are three distinct periods in classical Greek comedy old, middle and new. Aristophanes (448-380 B.C) belonged to the old period and his comedies were marked by buffoonery, satire and social commentaries. The most important writer of the middle period was Antiphanes (408-334 B.C) During that period, the plays were noted for burlesque. Meander (341-290 B.C) belonged to the new period and was the most influential of the Greek comedy writers. The new comedy focused on the amorous intrigues of young lovers and did not bother with social issues. In England, comedy began by imitating the classical style of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister is considered to be the first English comedy.

4. Features of comedy

Comedy refers to that kind of play which includes mirth, anxiety, and sparkling wit. It treats familiar and domestic occurrences. It deals with the middle section of Society. It is based upon the democratic principle of the quality of status as in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing where the action is shared equally among Claudio and Hero, Benedick and Beatrice, Leonato and Antonio and Dogberry and Verges. Comedy deals with types and classes. Comedy depends on the insensibility on the part of the audience. The comic spirit is possible once we feel sympathy for them. Shylock is an example of this sort Comedy is problem free. It presents the world of unreality Nicoll says: "No comedy can be true comedy unless there is presented alongside of the humorous situation, words or character, something that is more or less ordinary. A comedy full of eccentric types ceases largely to be a cause of merriment".

5. The Nature of Laughter

There are various sources of comic laughter. They are degradation, automatism, incongruity, and insolubility. Physical incongruity or in sociability can be the least productive of comic laughter as one can laugh at the ridiculous dress of Malvolio. Mental deformity is also the source of comic laughter. Mrs. Malaprop is an example of this sort.

6.2. Comedy of Humors

It is a special type of realistic comedy developed in the closing years of the sixteenth century by Ben Jonson and George Chapman. Comic interest is derived largely from the exhibition of "humorous" characters; that is, persons whose conduct is controlled by some on characteristic or "humour". Some single exaggerated trait of character gave each important figure in the action a definite bias of disposition and supplied the chief motive for his actions. Jonson's Every Man in his Humour is example. The comedy of humours owes something to earlier vernacular comedy imitating the classical comedy of Plautus and Terence.

6.4 Sentimental Comedy

A kind of drama that appeared in the early years of the eighteenth century in reaction to what was regarded as the immorality of the Restoration comedy of manners in the sentimental comedy, dramatic reality was sacrificed in an attempt to instruct through an appeal to the spectator's emotions. The characters were either so good or so bad that they became caricatures. Virtue always triumphed. Richard Steele is generally regarded as the founder of sentimental comedy. His plays The Funeral, The Lying Lover and The Tender Husband reflect the development of the form. Thus comedy took various forms to entertain, satirize, to make fun at people's follies and provoke laughter in the audience.