Photo by Karen Eliot
What is comedy?
Let’s try to get our arms around comedy. From Britannica Online Encyclopedia:
The classic conception of comedy, which began with Aristotle in ancient Greece of the 4th century BC and persists through the present, holds that it is primarily concerned with man as a social being, rather than as a private person, and that its function is frankly corrective. The comic artist’s purpose is to hold a mirror up to society to reflect its follies and vices, in the hope that they will, as a result, be mended.
I promised to keep Aristotle out of this but this is harder than I thought. Comedy, it seems, is a weighty topic. I was thinking about comedy as being all laughter and diversion from the complexity of life. Now I am finding that it incorporates social commentary and, dare I say it, morality. It’s all very perplexing.
Reading further, I find that comedy in modern times referr to a story that has a happy ending, like Dante’s Divine Comedy or the novels of Jane Austin. This seems out of tough in the 21st century. We in post modern times seem to demand more than a happy ending. We want yuks, belly laughs and copious amounts of bad language to embellish our idea of comedy.
Reading further, I learn that laughter doesn’t have much to do with comedy at all. Researchers have determined that laughter is actually tied to human relationships. It is the glue that holds relationships together. Instead ob being a part of language, laughter is more like punctuation or a pause for breath in normal speech. In fact, it seems that laughter originated in primates as panting.
Why is it that we enjoy comedy?
It isn’t so simple to understand what comedy is. Neither is it simple to explain how and why something is funny. Laughter often accompanies comedy but it actually serves another purpose entirely. What is it than about comedy that we like? Part of the answer goes back to our definition and the social commentary function. One of the appealing things about comedy is its ability to make us feel better when we observe the failings of others. We are drawn to these opportunities to be amused at others limitations and feel better when we can feel superior.
Another pleasure from comedy is the element of surprise. Humor is often created by the surprising association of two unexpected elements.. Often the punch line of a joke twists our minds from the direction we thought the story was going to a completely different and unexpected destination. One aspect of the surprise is finding that after feeling superior to the inferior characters in a comedy, the tables are turned and we find that we are the no better than they.
What is your take?
