Comedy

1. The demeaning of comedy

Although comedy and tragedy grew up together, and many dramatists from Sophocles to Shakespeare wrote both, tragedy is usually thought superior to comedy, and is often judged the only important dramatic form. Tragedy is called ‘serious’ drama, comedy ‘light’ drama. The low status traditionally held by comedy is revealed by two meanings that arose for the word ‘comical’: ‘befitting comedy; trivial, mean, low; the opposite of tragical, elevated, dignified’ and ‘of persons: low, mean, base, ignoble or clownish’.

The demeaning of comedy, and of humour generally, began with Plato. Four main charges are traditionally offered. One is that comedy, which had its origins in animal masquerades, phallic processions and similar revelry, emphasizes the animal side of human nature. Plato found the Old Comedy of his time still wild and vulgar. In his mind the licence of comedy encouraged the undermining of our rationality by our lower physical nature. When laying down rules for the education of the young guardians in his ideal state, Plato insisted that they must not be prone to laughter and that the literature they read should not show the heroes and gods laughing too heartily.

Comedy is also charged with encouraging irreverence toward leaders and institutions. A society, like an individual, needs rational control, and that requires respect for leaders and traditions. But comedy can make fun of anything; Greek comedy even lampooned the gods. Plato was probably especially resentful of the ridicule his teacher Socrates suffered in the comedy of Aristophanes.

Throughout history, opposition to comedy and laughter has been strongest in societies which emphasize physical restraint, decorum and conformity. Many medieval monastic orders had statutes forbidding laughter. The Puritan and Victorian eras saw many condemnations of comedy and laughter. The more authoritarian the regime, the greater its suppression of comedy. Hitler even set up ‘joke courts’ to punish those who made fun of his regime – one Berlin cabaret comic was executed for naming his horse Adolf.

The third charge against comedy, and humour generally, is that laughter is inherently mean-spirited. According to Plato, the object of laughter is vice, and specifically people’s ignorance about themselves. Dramatic characters and real people are comic to the extent that they think of themselves as wealthier, better-looking, more virtuous or wiser than they really are. Our laughter at their self-ignorance involves a kind of malice towards them – a ‘pain in the soul’, as Plato called it – that is not only antisocial but harmful to our own character.

Aristotle agreed with Plato that the essence of laughter is ridicule. Most people carry humour too far, he claimed, not worrying about hurting the feelings of those at whom they laugh. This view of laughter was later called the superiority theory. Its most famous proponent was the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who said that the cause of laughter is the sudden glory we feel when we judge ourselves to be doing better than someone else. Those who laugh the most, according to Hobbes, are those who are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves. They have to search out the imperfections of others in order to feel good about themselves.

The last charge against comedy is that it is full of gluttons, drunkards, liars, adulterers and other base characters, who are bound to have a bad influence on our own morality. Aristotle said that comic characters are worse than real people and warned that children should not be allowed to attend comedies because they would be led to imitate the vices they saw on the stage. The purported danger of comedy to morality has been cited many times. It was part of the English Puritans’ rationale for outlawing drama. Rousseau used it against the comedies of Molière. The weight attached to it can be judged from the number of writers and critics who felt obliged to argue that in laughing at immoral behaviour, we reject it, so that comedy discourages rather than encourages vice. Ben Jonson, Sir Philip Sidney, John Dryden, Henry Fielding, George Meredith, Henri Bergson and dozens of others defended comedy by citing its moral utility in this way.