Comedy

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Comedy

• The healing power

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On comedy

• All tragedies are finished by death, all
  comedies are ended by a marriage. Lord byron

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Comedy Definition

• an amusing play with a happy ending-unlike
  tragedy, it does not stress the noble conception
  of life.

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Comedy Definition

• Instead it pleasantly satirizes human follies and
  incidents

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Comedy Definition

• Aristotle- Comedy represents men as worse than
  in actual life Comedies are meant to make us
  laugh at ourselves as human beings in all our
  absurdity.

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Humor- The Failure of Language

• irony
• Puns
• simple misunderstandings
• double-entendres
• monologues (in place of dialogues)
• clichés
• repetitions of synonyms

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Humor- The Failure of Language

• inability to find the right words
• "telegraphic style"
• (shouting of commands or ideas,
• loss of grammar)
• nonsense
• literalization
• hyberbole

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Humor through Character

• mistaken identity
• coincidences
• mistimings (discovery scenes)
• incongruity (violating social taboos)
• reversals
• surprise

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Humor through character

• Women as strong, stable, assertive, decisive,
  civilizing force
• Men as wild, wayward, fickle in love, easily
  fooled, doofusEs

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Humor Through Plot Devices

• Storms and shipwrecks
• Twins (or twin-like characters)
• Mistaken identity, characters in disguise
• Women in pants
• Bad brothers as villains

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The Ladder of Comedy

• low Comedy
• Farce
• Comedy of Manners
• comedy of Ideas

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Low comedy

• Fart jokes
• slapstick
• physical mishaps
• pie in the face
• Deformity jokes
• obscene sexual jokes
• bodily function jokes

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Farce

• Full of coincidences
• mis-timings
• mis-understandings
• mistaken identities
• characters are puppets of fate
• loss of identity because of fate or birth or an
  accident

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Comedy of Manners

• Verbal with
• skillful use of language to elicit humor
• amorous intrigues among upper class
• drawing room comedy of clever speech and witty
  language

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Comedy of Ideas

• Characters argue about ideas
• Use wit and clever language to mock
• use of satire to laugh at that which is
  dearfamily, friends, religion, politics, etc.

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Tragicomedy

• Tragicomedy is a common genre in post-World War
  II British theatre, with authors as varied as
  Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, John Arden, Alan
  Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter writing in this
  genre.

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Introducing Beckett and the Absurd!
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Theater of the Absurd

• Developing out of the cultural reaction to World
  War II,  absurdist drama took the basis of
  existential philosophy and combined it with
  dramatic elements to create a style of theatre
  which presented a world which can not be
  logically explained, a world in which life is
  absurd.

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• A theater of ritual and ceremonial (like the
  theatre of ancient Greece) presupposes a valid
  and vital body of beliefs and myths. This is
  precisely what our own civilization lacks

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• it does not expound a thesis or debate
  ideological propositions, it is not concerned
  with the representation of events, the narration
  of the fate or adventures of characters, but
  instead with the presentation of the individuals
  basic situation.
• Martin Esselin

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• absurd
• having no meaning ridiculously unsound or
  incongruous not adhering to the patterns of
  logic or reason.

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absurd environment/absurd action

• absurdist literature portrays a world in which
  existence is fragmented, pointless. There is no
  truth so the search for truth is futile or
  abandoned.
• plots often deviated from the more traditional
  episodic structure, and seem to move in a circle,
  ending the same way it began.

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Absurd action

• Action moves outside of the realm of causality to
  chaos. Absurdists minimalize the sense of place
  and characters are forced to move in an
  incomprehensible, void-like realm.
• The action in a play of the theater of the absurd
  is not intended to tell a story, but to
  communicate a pattern of poetic images.

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Theater of the Absurd

• Since it is trying to present a sense of being,
  it can neither investigate nor solve problems of
  conduct or morals.

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Theater of the Absurd

• It is a theatre of situation as opposed to a
  theatre of events in sequence, and therefore it
  uses language based on patterns of concrete
  images rather than argument and discursive speech.

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• Language is reduced to a bantering game where
  words obfuscate rather elucidate the truth.
• In a world that is defined by language, the loss
  of meaning and purpose is intimately linked to
  the breakdown of language. Dialogue becomes a
  mere game to pass the time.

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Absurdist Theater Example

• Do you ever wonder what Rosencrantz and
  Guildenstern were up to while they weren't
  front-stage during the play Hamlet? How did they
  spend their time in between scenes until they
  were summoned to do the bidding of King Claudius?
  How were they to occupy their time while waiting
  to be thrust back on to the stage into the action
  of Hamlet?

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Rosencrantz Guildenstern Contd

• It turns out they did a whole lot of
  nothing--leading them to contemplate the very
  meaning of their existence and the trouble that
  comes with being trapped in someone else's play.
• This comical absurdist rendition of "what could
  have happened" during Hamlet is one of Tom
  Stoppard's masterpieces. Rosencrantz and
  Guildenstern Are Dead explores existential themes
  while pushing the limits of fiction and theatre.