Reader in comedy: an anthology of theory and criticism

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South African Theatre Journal

ISSN: 1013-7548 (Print) 2163-7660 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rthj20

Reader in comedy: an anthology of theory and criticism

Anton Krueger

To cite this article: Anton Krueger (2017) Reader in comedy: an anthology of theory and criticism, South African Theatre Journal, 30:1-3, 82-85, DOI: 10.1080/10137548.2017.1409523

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2017.1409523

Published online: 07 Dec 2017.

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As an Artistic Director, I love doing extant plays because when you put a Deaf or disabled person into the fabric of the narrative, that’s not normally allowed for us, there is an embarrassment of riches, because we can add so many layers of meaning, of content.

The joy and possibility evident in her words encapsulate the spirit of Johnston’s book.

Jessica Parrott University of Warwick School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies, UK [email protected]

Reader in comedy: an anthology of theory and criticism, edited by Magda Romanska and Alan Ackerman, London and New York, Bloomsbury, 2017, $39.93 (pbk), ISBN: 978-1-4742-4788-7

I really enjoyed this selection of excerpts on comedy. In 64 extracts, this comprehensive anthology covers 2375 years of mainly philosophical texts in 375 dense pages. From 360 BCE (Plato’s Philebus) to just the other day (Romanska’s Disability in Tragic and Comic Frame[2015]), this is an immense resource covering a lot of ground. The extracts don’t all apply speciﬁcally to theatre, though this is where the discussion begins, with the ancients. Later on, as new genres emerge, there are also entries relating to prose, ﬁlm, story-telling and stand-up; but mainly, the writings have to do with laughter itself, and the role and function of comedy.

Writing about comedy can be a serious business and Susan Sonntag’s landmark essay on Camp continues Wilde’s insistence on the importance of being ‘serious about the frivolous and frivolous about the serious’ (p. 245). When choosing a theme like this, a motif to draw through history, it’s fascinating how many other aspects of personal, social and existential life begin to cohere around the topic.

What one wants from an anthology is breadth as well as detail; one wants the reach but also the speciﬁcs. What’s important is not only the selection, but making choices within the selection itself, knowing what to cut and paste. This anthology cer- tainly has the range and there were, for me, many new discoveries, such as links with religion, aesthetics and diversity politics.

It seems as though every key thinker has weighed in on ideas about laughter, which also reminds one of how important it is to human societies. There are many names here that one might have expected, from Plato to Bergson, Bakhtin, Twain, Freud and Shaw; but there are also many surprises, such as Aphra Behn and Virginia Woolf, as well as Dante, Kierkegaard and Derrida, writers one doesn’t immediately associate with comedy.

For myself, when thinking about theories on comedy, whatﬁrst comes to mind might be the stalwart Henri Bergson’sLaughter(1901) with its reference to incongruity and social conservativism. Bakhtin’s business with the carnival is also regularly trotted out, and now and then one mightﬁnd, in a drama curriculum, a smattering of Piran- dello and, of course, a module or two oncommedia dell’arte. But l had no idea, to take an almost random example, of Kierkegaard’s views on‘Humour as an Incognito for

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Religiosity’(1846), which discusses how“inwardness of mind”makes other religions appear comical to us. His view is also that what is“low”can never make something truly ‘higher’ appear ridiculous and thus comical (p. 195), so in a sense whatever can be ridiculed is not truly noble. For Kierkegaard, humour is everywhere, since life is everywhere and contradiction is everywhere in life.

The book is divided intoﬁve historical eras: Antiquity and the Middle Ages; the Renaissance; Restoration to Romanticism; the Industrial Age; and the Twentieth and early Twenty-ﬁrst Century. Each of these eras is introduced with a preface summarizing the main ideas emerging during the period, including the divergences of approach and opinion. Just reading the introductions to each of these sections gives one a good over- view of the history of ideas relating to the place of laughter in the world.

Because of its many different purposes, effects and techniques, coming up with an all-inclusive deﬁnition of comedy is particularly difﬁcult. When considering the diversity of style and content in‘political humour, satire, farce, burlesque, sketch comedy, comedy of character, and comedy of manners’, the editors ask whether it is possible to

‘generalise across this diversity’(p. 1). No single definition seems both inclusive and exclusive enough, and Romanska and Ackerman make a good point that part of the problem of definition– ‘define’meaning to limit –is that by its nature comedy is excessive, it breaks boundaries and offers a liberation from routine and restriction.

Also, as soon as one can deﬁne comedy too speciﬁcally and strictly, it tends to lose its impact, so a constant search for innovation becomes part of comedy’s trajectory.

There are forms of comedy that have a long history, such as‘satires on politicians, jokes about sex, love stories that end in marriage, and old people making themselves ridiculous by pretending to be young’(1). And yet, possibly more than other forms, comedy is very much of its time and place (i.e.‘you had to be there’), and few other genres date as quickly. Although there are periodic returns to ancient models, each changing historical condition creates distinct shifts. The genre does seem suited speciﬁcally to custom, culture, community. (Virginia Woolf, for example, in her

‘analysis of pleasure’ [p. 262], provides an account of how ‘Englishness’ itself can give cause for laughter).

Looking across such a vast stretch of history, one realizes that some debates between contradictory views have been trundling along for millennia. These include basic questions such as whether comedy is good for a society or not; whether it encourages liberation or constraint; whether it serves‘as integrative or disintegrative force’ (p. 249). So, for example, Aristotle saw many beneﬁts in comedy. (We know this from the existing citations, even though his major work on comedy has been lost, possibly due to an anti-humour conspiracy in the medieval church, which Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose references.) On the other hand, Plato warned about taking too much pleasure in‘comic representation’, which he saw as fostering irrationality and vulgarity. He warned that revelling too much in foolishness could lead to your becoming‘a comedian in your own life’ (p. 3). Plato also claimed that comedy rests on feelings of superiority (making fun of what is beneath one), which is why it doesn’t serve as a social good. One sees this ably demonstrated in programmes like the British showMock the Week, though other comedians like Stewart Lee prefer to rather‘punch up not down’.

Jeremy Collier also saw the stage as‘harmful to the public good’, since it shows

‘misbehaviour…with respect to morality and religion’(p. 132). But there are many other views on the matter, so the editors point out that although for Plato‘comedy

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was vulgar and irrational…for Meredith, in the nineteenth century’, it is seen as‘civi- lising’(p. 5). George Meredith writes about comedy as a way of enlivening other activi- ties, a spirit which can rejuvenate one from ‘a humanity crushed by modern mass culture’(p. 3).

Onefinds, then, completely antithetical ideas. For some, like Schiller,‘the goal of comedy was a state of perfect freedom and equilibrium…the highest thing man has to strive for’(p. 180); while for others, comedy is precisely that which brings one down to the earthly. Yet far from seeing this as a failing, this bringing down and humanizing can become its greatest value. For example, Kenneth Burke sees the value in comedy precisely in that it situates people in the world, in society, not in a cosmic or supernatural sense. In this way it strengthens social commitments. Or as Henri Bergson puts it: ‘We laugh not at immorality but at unsociability’ (p. 185). A similar thought might be found in Peter Brook’s definition of ‘Rough Theatre’(one of the few omissions from the anthology), which describes rough comedy as having to do with things of the flesh, the body, what is natural, rather than lofty spiritual ideals. Similarly, for Bergson, when we are‘diverted from the spiritual to the physical or material realm, we generate laughter’(p. 189).

Within religion itself, one alsoﬁnds radically diverse views. For example, in the High Christian era, according to Liutprand of Cremona, comedy was seen ‘as a refreshment needed when only studying philosophic and religious doctrines’(p. 48);

but in later years Puritan propagandists‘waged a rhetorical war against all kinds of theatre and condemned comedy as a vice-promoting genre, which stirred ungodly pas- sions’(p. 59).

In Freud’s theory laughter offers a relief from tension, a release from the anxiety provoked by incongruity. In this way it’s seen as playing an important psychological function. On the other hand, Kant’s view is that comedy ultimately doesn’t achieve anything at all, since the heart of laughter resides in the‘evaporation of expectation into nothing’(p. 12).

Another ongoing debate concerns the political function of laughter and whether it is liberating or constraining. Bernard Shaw was one of the most famous authors to deliberately use laughter as a social corrective. Once he’d made his life-changing con- version to the Fabians, he geared his life’s work towards the improvement of society and his comedies all bore a strong sense of social commitment. For Shaw, comedy must ‘promote social justice by exposing hypocrisy and combating evil’ (p. 190).

This was not a new point of view, since, as the editors point out, most Renaissance the- orists of comedy‘considered it a tool to correct improper behaviour through humour and derision’, claiming that‘[i]f tragedy educates its audience through fear and pity, comedy educates through ridicule and derision’(p. 53).

Simon Critchley, on the other hand, sees humour as both subversive and conserva- tive, writing that it offers an escape from routine and structure and hierarchy, but at the end of it one must return to a world of shared practices (p. 12). In this way it also reinforces hierarchy. In a similar vein, Judith Butler evokes earlier debates about the didactic, corrective role of comedy, ﬁnding that laughter can be a weapon against oppression, or it can in itself become a form of oppression (p. 242). If comedy deals with and examines‘psychologically threatening stereotypes’and is meant to ultimately be reassuring, Butler asks the question‘who is it reassuring?’(p. 243). Likewise, Milan Kundera talks of a kind of laughter that enforces the status quo, that humiliates the victim, that becomes a tool of oppression. In other words, the often-repeated

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assumption that comedy is inherently liberating is not always true. Other, more recent, feminist critiques examine the relationship between laughter and power. The critical studies turn is here applied to theories on Jewish humour, black humour, feminist humour and humour by people with disabilities.

Another interesting reflection concerns the links between an era’s perceptions of self in the world, and with changing forms of identity, and how this perception is reflected in its comedy. For example, Pirandello is of his time when he feels that modern comedy has to do with the‘decentred self’(p. 241). Also, Kierkegaard reflects on how humour and irony have become dominant modes, since the modern age is characterized by‘indivi- dualism, fragmentation and isolation’(p. 181). This fragmentation grows even more extreme in later eras, the notion of the self not as monolithic‘but multiple, decentred, fragmented’(p. 240). In fact, for Derrida, the deconstructive method itself is a form of laughter, a kind of inversion. Taking this to an extreme, he comes up with the startling insight that‘only laughter can produce self-knowledge’(p. 244).

Also, whereas comedy previously dealt in what was‘spontaneous, organic, primi- tive’, during the industrial age a whole new object for laughter was found‘in mechan- ical reproduction itself’ (p. 240). There is something intrinsically funny about technological modernity and around this time the content of comedy began to turn to the materials themselves– ‘language, canvas, stage, camera, celluloid’(p. 240).

This rich compendium got me thinking in all sort of directions, about intersections between the transgressive expectations of comedy, and yet the insistence on a return to ideals of an authentic, moral selfhood. The self-confessional mode of contemporary stand-up, for example, is only palatable if audiences feel they can distance themselves from the reality of a comedian’s actual behaviour. (The recent implosion of the career of Louis C.K. is a case in point.)

Looking through this collection also made me think about the direction comedy is taking in South Africa, and our ongoing paucity of irony. In the last decade there’s been a rising tide of new stand-up, and there’s always been plenty of slapstick to go around, but so much of our comedy still seems to lack subtext. The eiron – the ironist, the ﬁgure who, like Socrates, wanders naively through the landscape, like the Good Soldier Schweik or Bosman’s Oom Schalk Lourens–is still a rare creature.

Now that there seems to be a distinct shift back to a polemical, politicized theatre, there seems even less of a gap for ambiguity and irony between the overt assault of the stand-up comic and the rallying cry of the revolutionary.

Anton Krueger Department of Drama, Rhodes University, South Africa [email protected]