Introduction

In the case of comedy, the tendency is great to imagine the comic as outside of history, an essential force. On the one hand, the notion of comedy as transcendent celebration … imagines history is but a contingent pressure or resistance that the comic impulse can always overcome. On the other hand, the secular tradition … imagines that history always undoes pretension, that the pragmatic always triumphs over the idealistic. In both cases, comic tradition is imagined as self-contained, never losing its essential identity to the contingencies of a merely arbitrary history.