ABSTRACT
Providing a simple formula to answer the question ‘what is comedy?’ is not so easy. On the one hand, comedy is a reasonably graspable literary form, most properly applied to drama, that uses stock character types in a scenario where some kind of problem must be resolved. Comedies end happily, often concluding with a communal celebration such as a feast or a marriage. We might add that we would expect a comedy to be funny, and that during the course of its action no one will be killed. But this definition is fine just so long as we understand comedy in its strictest and most restrictive sense within literary history. In his study of five centuries of English stage comedy, Alexander Leggatt notes the relative stability of this formula across generations of writers, describing it as our most consistent literary genre, ‘surviving centuries of cultural change with its basic conventions stubbornly intact’ (Leggatt, 1998:1). Yet any consideration of what we think of as comedy in the modern day exposes numerous anomalies and deviations from this pattern, and a diversity of linguistic and performance practices. As a label, ‘comedy’ can be applied across a range of styles, including traditional categories such as pastoral comedy, farce, burlesque, pantomime, satire, and the comedy of manners; yet it also applies to more modern subdivisions: cartoons, sitcom, sketch comedy, slapstick cinema, stand-up, some game shows, impressionists, caricatures, and even silly walks. Applying a single uniform definition or methodological approach to such a mixture would be highly unsatisfactory. This terminological range is a product of the fact that comedy is as much a tonal quality as a structural one. While there is a long-standing literary tradition of comedy, ‘the
comic’ is an identifiable mode or tone of writing that manifests itself in a multitude of media, genres, and forms that are not necessarily synonymous with comedy. The mixture of comic with tragic and other elements in writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Dickens, Ibsen, Samuel Beckett, Carol Churchill, or Martin Amis, for example, is indicative of what W.Moelwyn Merchant called the ‘permanently recurring affront to the purity of comedy and tragedy as dramatic categories’ (Merchant, 1972:1). In postmodernism, parody, burlesque, and satire-notably ‘comic’ techniques-are used in the service of serious critiques of Enlightenment philosophy. In practice, then, generic definitions show themselves to be porous, and we often see comic business appearing in contexts structurally inconsistent with that form. This might lead us to suggest that what we call comedy is really humour, a specific tone operating free from generic restraints, which, while not the exclusive property of comedy is closely associated with it. Similarly, laughter, the most immediate meter of comedy’s success or failure, does not belong to it uniquely, and is equally induced by humour but also embarrassment, fear, guilt, tickling, or laughing gas.
