Comedy and Grace

Prof. Andy Pederson

Associate Professor of English
Concordia University Chicago
 Why Study Comedy?
“Analyzing humor is like
dissecting a frog. Few
people are interested
and the frog dies.”
- E.B. White
Defining Comedy
All Definitions of Comedy End Up
Being Failures:

Ignore whole
Too Narrow Too Broad areas of
comedy
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down
an open sewer and die.”
- Mel Brooks
Henri Bergson
“The first point to which attention should be called is that the
comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly
HUMAN. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and
sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable.
You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have
detected in it some human attitude or expression.”
- From Laughter (1901)
Robert Coover
From Critique, Vol. 11, Issue 3, 1969

"I tend to think of tragedy as a kind of

adolescent response to the universe
the higher truth is a comic response.”
“Comedy is a man in trouble.”
- Jerry Lewis
Tragedy + Time = Comedy
Aristotle’s Poetics
Aristotle on Comedy
From Poetics – Translated by S.H. Butcher

“The same distinction marks off Tragedy from Comedy; for

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as
better than in actual life.” (Section 2)

“The successive changes through which Tragedy passed,

and the authors of these changes, are well known, whereas
Comedy has had no history, because it was not at first
treated seriously.” (Section 5)
Louis Kronenberger
From Cavalcade of Comedy (Simon and Schuster, 1953)

“What distinguishes the finest tragedy from the finest

comedy is a sort of glowing paradox: in tragedy we are
left with the sense of how noble is man in failure; in
comedy, we see how petty, or at any rate unheroic, he
is in success.”

“Where tragedy exacts of us tears of homage, comedy

evokes a sad fraternal smile of recognition.”
 Andrew Stott
“Like water in rocks, comedy has a particular talent
for finding the cracks in the world and amplifying
them to the point of absurdity, rendering life, in the
words of John Bruns, ‘strange and open’.”
- From Comedy: The Critical Idiom, 2nd Edition (Routledge, 2014)
Theories of Comedy

Superiority

Release Incongruity
Superiority Theory
• Plato
• Saw comedy as a vehicle of
“possible malice”
• Thomas Hobbes
• “Sudden Glory”
Superiority Theory
Incongruity Theory
Soren Kierkegaard – from Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1848)
• The comic is present at every stage of life. – “wherever there is life,
there is contradiction”
• The comic exists by way of “contradiction”
• The inner person/the outer world are at odds – contradiction
• Our expectation vs. our experience
• The contradiction is “painless”
• The comic is linked to maturation – a heightened sensitivity of the
impasse of the inner and outer worlds.
Release Theory
Elder Olson, from The Theory of Comedy (Indiana University Press, 1968)

Katastasis: release of anxiety when we recognize

that the characters will come to no harm, no matter the
violence and outrageousness of their actions.
 Comedy is:

Restorative Communal Full of Grace

Northrup Frye
From Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1964)
“Happy endings do not impress us as true, but as desirable, and they
are brought about by manipulation. The watcher of death and tragedy
has nothing to do but sit and wait for the in evitable end; but something
gets born at the end of comedy, and the watcher of birth is a member of
a busy society.”

“The tendency of the comic society to include rather than exclude is the
reason for the traditional importance of the parasite, who has no
business to be at the final festival but is nevertheless there. The word
"grace," with all its Renaissance overtones from the graceful courtier of
Castiglione to the gracious God of Christianity, is a most important
thematic word in Shakespearean comedy.”
Erich Segal
From Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus (Harvard Univ. Press, 1968)

“Laughter is an affirmation of shared values.”