The moral force of comedy

The moral force of comedy

The characters of comedy specified in the Tractatus arrange themselves in a familiar pattern: a clever hero is surrounded by fools of sundry varieties (impostors, buffoons, boors). The hero is something of a trickster; he dissimulates his own powers, while exploiting the weaknesses of those around him. The comic pattern is a persistent one; it appears not only in ancient Greek comedy but also in the farces of ancient Italy, in the commedia dell’arte that came into being in 16th-century Italy, and even in the routines of late-night television comedians and their straight men. Implicit here is the tendency to make folly ridiculous, to laugh it out of countenance, which has always been a prominent feature of comedy.

Renaissance critics, elaborating on the brief and cryptic account of comedy in Aristotle’s Poetics, stressed the derisive force of comedy as an adjunct to morality. The Italian scholar Gian Giorgio Trissino’s account of comedy in his Poetica, apparently written in the 1530s, is typical: as tragedy teaches by means of pity and fear, comedy teaches by deriding things that are vile. Attention is directed here, as in other critical treatises of this kind, to the source of laughter. According to Trissino, laughter is aroused by objects that are in some way ugly and especially by that from which better qualities were hoped. His statement suggests the relation of the comic to the incongruous. 

Trissino was as aware as the French poet Charles Baudelaire was three centuries later that laughter betokens the fallen nature of man (Baudelaire would term it the Satanic nature). Man laughs, says Trissino (echoing Plato’s dialogue Philebus), because he is envious and malicious and never delights in the good of others except when he hopes for some good from it for himself.

The most important English Renaissance statement concerning comedy is that of Sir Philip Sidney in The Defence of Poesie (1595):

Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which [the comic dramatist] representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one.

Like Trissino, Sidney notes that, while laughter comes from delight, not all objects of delight cause laughter, and he demonstrates the distinction as Trissino had done: “We are ravished with delight to see a fair woman, and yet are far from being moved to laughter. We laugh at deformed creatures, wherein certainly we cannot delight.” The element of the incongruous is prominent in Sidney’s account of scornful laughter. He cites the image of the hero of Greek legendHeracles, with his great beard and furious countenance, in woman’s attire, spinning at the command of his beloved queen, Omphale, and declares that this arouses both delight and laughter.