ABSTRACT
As we have already indicated, laughter, humour, and the comic are by no means synonymous with comedy, and have by no means always functioned as primary generic criteria. Ben Jonson, for instance, wrote:
Jonson’s view is part of a tradition that stretches back to Plato and forward into the twentieth century. Christopher Herbert has spoken of the ‘persistence with which modern commentators deny the significance of laughter in comedy’:
We need to distinguish here between a range of different attitudes and theories: those that view laughter as characteristic of comedy and those that do not, those that view laughter as definitive of comedy and those that do not, and those that approve of laughter (whether characteristic, definitive, or otherwise) and those that do not. For Potts, Knights, and Meredith, laughter is a characteristic product of comedy. But it is unstable, unpredictable, and frivolous. It is neither definitive nor important enough to be worth sustained attention. For Gerald Mast, on the other hand, comedies are characteristically funny and funniness is a good thing. However, he does not discuss it directly at all.3 For Ben Jonson, laughter is neither characteristic, nor central, nor something of which he can approve. The neoclassical cultural context that produced an attitude like Jonson’s viewed laughter as always potentially unseemly because ‘it was a sign of disturbed bodily control’.4 It was thus particularly improper for courtiers, aristocrats, and gentlemen. This is partly why the period gave rise to so many plot-based discussions of comedy. A little later, once modified in particular by a middle-class view that laughter, especially scornful laughter, required a suppression of the sensibilities, and was thus in potential conflict with the increasingly influential ideologies of sympathy and sensitivity, comédie larmoyante was born; this was a form of comedy shorn of any attempt to produce any kind of laughter.
