ABSTRACT
Umberto Eco’s novel imagines a book on comedy, Aristotle’s lost sequel to Poetics. The book is at the heart of a monastic conspiracy to keep humour out of religion by suppressing the Aristotelian authority that lends comedy intellectual legitimacy, preventing ‘the operation of the belly’ becoming ‘an operation of the mind’ (Eco, 1983:474). Eco’s conspirators fear that if comedy were to be rehabilitated within respectable academic contexts, the conceptual order of things would be radically altered, and with it the social fabric that draws on its hierarchies, as ‘on the day when the Philosopher’s word would justify the marginal jests of the debauched imagination, or when what has been marginal would leap to the center, every trace of the center would be lost’ (Eco, 1983:475). To preserve the status quo, the book is infused with a poison that kills all who read it. While Eco’s conspiracy is entirely fictional, it is the case that comedy has been denigrated in the academy, especially in comparison with tragedy, due in part to the absence of an important treatment of it in the Classical tradition. Comedy is often perceived as ephemeral and lacking intellectual weight, or, in the protests of those who claim that explaining a joke kills it or that things are ‘just’ for laughs, is seen as an aspect of communication that is emphatically closed to study and interrogation.
