Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Comedia. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Comedia. Mostrar todas las entradas
sábado, 14 de septiembre de 2019
lunes, 18 de febrero de 2019
Retropost (18 de febrero de 2009): The Jane Austen Book Club
Hace poco me sacaron en Ibercampus mi artículo sobre la comedia romántica. Pues podemos añadir a la lista The Jane Austen Book Club, otra comedia romántica más que nos visionamos, y bien bonita que es para los literary-minded, sobre todo si ya han visto Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility.... o La joven Jane Austen, o Shakespeare in Love, que mucho tienen en común con este género cinematográfico libresco y desenfadado. Estamos a la espera de Persuasion—entre tanto nos conformamos con Possession. Aunque para una película austeniana que comentan los personajes de este club literario, resulta que es la Mansfield Park de Patricia Rozema, y lo hacen desfavorablemente, qué desagradecidas con su propio género, cuando precisamente en esta película van a hacer lo mismo, mezclando vidas y obras. No les gusta que Sir Bertram tenga esclavos, tampoco.
Bueno, es que no se dedican a las películas, el grupo de mujeres californianas protagonistas de este reading club, sino a las novelas. Jocelyn, una solteroncilla recalcitrante acaba de perder al compañero de su vida, un perro, y sus amigas organizan un club de lectura para consolarla. Entre pitos y flautas se va liando el argumento, hasta que la lectura de Jane Austen es a freakin' minefield: mientras la mejor amiga de Jocelyn, Sylvia, está en una cena romántica con el marido, éste le dice que tiene una amante, y que se separan. Parte de la comedia es que acabarán reunidos de nuevo, para alegría de todas las amigas y de la hija de ellos—una lesbiana impulsiva ésta, y aficionada a los deportes de riesgo, también miembro del club y frecuentemente accidentada en amores y en piñazos más tangibles.
Más austeniana, o en todo caso henryjamesiana (Henry es equivalente a Jane Austen) es la historia de Prudie, profesora de francés que sueña con ir a París, pero no se entiende con su marido futbolero ni para asuntos franceses ni románticos en general. Prudie es llorosa y seducible, una actriz genial. Tiene una madre hippie impresentable, con la que tampoco se entiende (—esta suegra despide al yerno cuando se va de viaje de negocios diciéndole "Have fun! Get some ass!"). Pero bueno, la pobre hippie añosa muere como el perro al principio, y vemos otro funeral atípico: el primero canino, éste flowerpower. Prudie está que no se tiene en casa (y la actriz, Emily Blunt, es excelente en sus pucheritos y medios gestos). Tras ser tentada para un pase por el motel por un aventajado estudiante suyo (en una escena teatral pecaminosa como las de Mansfield Park), Prudie hace honor, se lo piensa mejor—What would Jane Austen do? Huye del motel, y corre a casa: persuade a su marido para que lean juntos Persuasion y empiecen the beginning de nuevo.
Cada amiga se encarga de una novela para las reuniones mensuales secuenciadas en la película: February: Emma - March: Mansfield Park - April: Northanger Abbey - May: Pride & Prejudice - June: Sense & Sensibility - July: Persuasion. Y todas encuentran en las novelas algo en lo que proyectarse. La tesis humorística del libro en el que se basa la película es que cada lector selecciona de un libro según sus intereses, y proyecta en la lectura sus deseos, prioridades, y preocupaciones, una teoría que debe mucho a la escuela de Norman Holland supongo—aunque aquí no hace falta un psicoanalista para interpretar por qué cada amiga ve en la novela lo que ve. Los diálogos son muy ingeniosos, cada cual barriendo para casa de modo tan bien hilado que peca de exceso de ingenio. Aunque como nos tranquiliza Roger Ebert, "No, it is not necessary to have read the novels or seen all the Jane Austen movie adaptations, but that would add another dimension to your appreciation of this film."
El argumento central es el emparejamiento de Jocelyn, la amiga imposible de casar, la del perro muerto, con el galán ("Grigg", sí, Grigg), único miembro varón del club, un ingeniero digital ciclista y un poco metepatas con sus cosas de hombre, simpático y constructivo, pero que se le resiste la rubia del perro... —El plan de ella era que se líe el muchacho con su amiga la recién divorciada desconsolada. Pero bueno, al final las parejas acaban donde debían y hay celebraciones múltiples, como en una comedia de Shakespeare. Jocelyn se vuelve más flexible, y acepta las atenciones de Grigg, e incluso sus recomendaciones literarias (ciencia ficción, Ursula K. Le Guin). Hasta la lesbiana magullada, Allegra, liga en el hospital—con su traumatóloga china, la Dra. Yep.
Así que todos acaban emparejados y felices, todos menos Jane Austen—que sin embargo sí se dejó tentar una vez por una oferta de matrimonio sólo para romper el compromiso al día siguiente. Hay que decir que ya se lo debía haber pensado Jane Austen antes de aceptar, porque el nombre del pretendiente era todo un programa: Harris Bigg-Wither. Yep.
The Jane Austen Book Club. Written and dir. Robin Swicord. Based on the book by Karen Joy Fowler. Cast: Kathy Baker, Maria Bello, Marc Blucas, Emily Blunt, Amy Brenneman, Hugh Dancy, Maggie Grace, Jimmy Smits, Kevin Zegers, Lynn Redgrave. Music Aaron Zigman, music superv. Barklie K. Griggs. Ed. Maryann Brandon. Prod. des. Rusty Smith. Photog. John Toon. Co-prod. Kelly Thomas. Exec. prod. Marshall Rose. Prod. John Calley, Julie Lynn, Diana Napper. USA: John Calley-Robin Swicord / Mockingbird Pictures / Sony Pictures Classics, 2007. DVD UK: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2007.
—oOo—
martes, 5 de febrero de 2019
Retropost (5 de febrero de 2009): The Fundamental Things Apply
He estado en una conferencia sobre "estructura y
significado del
género de la comedia romántica" a cargo de Ledger
Grindon,
de Middlebury College (Vermont), invitado por nuestros
cinéfilos (de ese postgrado de nuestro
departamento al que sólo los Subvencionados acceden).
Es la comedia romántica un género al que soy bastante aficionado, y la conferencia me ha hecho recordar algunas de las muchas que he visto, y me he puesto ganas de ver otras. Le ha dado un repaso muy sistemático y bien organizado a las convenciones fundamentales del género de la comedia, partiendo de la estructura central que podríamos llamar arquetípica del género: chico conoce chica, superan obstáculos, y terminan emparejados en final feliz. Sobre esto ha descrito las muchas variaciones posibles que han ido explorando los cineastas, ya que la novedad y sorpresa, y el reflejo de condiciones contemporáneas del cortejo y el emparejamiento son cuestiones esenciales en la comedia, tan esenciales como la centralidad de los esquemas cómicos básicos y de los ingredientes deseables como optimismo, humor, ironía, mascaradas, sorpresas y finales felices.
Varía por ejemplo la naturaleza del tipo de relación que se establece—desde el matrimonio tradicional y quizá central, a formas de emparejamiento más relacionadas con lo que Giddens llama "confluent love", la pareja mientras dura podríamos decir. Ya le dicen a Woody Allen en Manhattan que igual no estamos pensados para una relación permanente sino para una serie de relaciones sucesivas; es la modernidad la que lo reconoce o (es más) lo vive como una vocación. También aparecen las relaciones homosexuales como una variante alternativa de la comedia romántica—y esto me recuerda que más allá de experimentos gaylésbicos muy concienciados como Go Fish, o de dramas románticos gay que poco tienen de comedia, como Brokeback Mountain, hace poco ví una comedia romántica "mainstream" bastante aceptable, Love and Other Disasters, que combinaba las aventuras de la chica (Brittany Murphy) buscando un hombre sensible que no fuera gay, con las aventuras de su compañero de piso, gay sensible buscando otro gay sensible. También veremos más de éstas, previsiblemente—y ya hace años hicieron una española en esta línea, Allegro ma non troppo. Otras variantes del argumento romántico aparecen cada vez con más frecuencia—el triángulo final, el final indeciso o con separación... Aquí me acordaba de In Good Company; todas estas las recomiendo.
Por cierto, hablando del trabajo, señala Grindon la importancia del doble argumento laboral/sentimental en muchas comedias, con los personajes teniendo que elegir muchas veces entre el amor y la dedicación a su carrera en busca del éxito profesional. De hecho hay todo un subgénero diría yo que es la comedia laboral, sobre actitudes en el trabajo, relaciones con los jefes y sus demandas, con los compañeros y sus puñaladas, etc.—por ejemplo, The Devil Wears Prada— y allí el argumento romántico puede ser tan secundario de hecho como en una de intriga o de espías. Working Girl es, supongo, una feliz conjunción de estos subgéneros. Muchas veces, el amor se descubre a la vez que se abandona una ética laboral, y vital, errónea (como en A Good Year). Tiene actualizaciones interesantes, esta línea de obstáculos, a medida que las mujeres se incorporan a nuevos puestos laborales y surgen nuevos conflictos muy de cada época y lugar.
Aparte del trabajo, la familia es una fuente tradicional de obstáculos: según Ledger, la historia tradicional es aquí el desafío a la autoridad paterna que elige pareja para el chico o la chica; el relevo generacional de la comedia conlleva el elegir uno mismo su propia pareja fuera del círculo de intereses controlado por la familia. Grindon veía aquí una especie de variante arquetípica del tabú del incesto—buscar pareja fuera del círculo familiar. Aunque supongo que también se puede invertir la cuestión y bien habrá un puñado de películas donde se busque la pareja demasiado cerca, aunque no pienso en El Graduado precisamente, claro, que allí se trata precisamente de huir de Mrs. Robinson. Sí sería el caso de Moonstruck. La búsqueda de pareja "lejana" se puede llevar hasta romper las barreras de la comunidad étnica (Mi gran boda griega), la nacionalidad (French Kiss, o A Good Year), los tabúes familiares (Moonstruck), la corrección política y el ojo público (Love, Actually) o la raza (la famosa de Sidney Poitier, Adivina quién viene a cenar)—aunque también hay "tragicomedias románticas" como Jungle Fever donde se muestra la fuerza del círculo social para imponer conformidad. A veces se elige la inautenticidad y la seguridad frente a las incertidumbres del erotismo (al) descubierto, como sucede en Vicky Cristina Barcelona. O, quizá, la historia que se frustra en una línea argumental fructifica a través de los alter ego de esos personajes, en otra línea argumental, como sucede en Possession.
La familia también puede tener taras especiales como en Meet the Fockers, o arrastrar el peso del pasado, como en La boda de Rachel—donde la comedia romántica está (acertadamente) apenas insinuada. Es una tendencia reciente, observa Grindon, que muchas veces el obstáculo social para la pareja lo marcan ahora el círculo de amistades más bien que la familia—se encuentra una pareja que "no pega" con Los amigos del novio, o con las amigas de la novia, y eso lleva a una crisis que admite distintas soluciones—como sucede con la separación de la pareja por cuestiones de edad en Prime (Secretos compartidos)—o quizá a un final en bonita amistad, o (más comúnmente) al tradicional emparejamiento del chico y la chica, dejando atrás el pasado, y que revienten los amigos y los ex. (Entre estos ex merece destacarse, para Grindon, la figura de la pareja inadecuada, que amenaza con llevar al[a] protagonista por los senderos ya trillados o atarla a falsos ídolos de respetabilidad y fortuna e hipocresía).
Así pues, más importante que lo del alejamiento del círculo familiar o social me parece la búsqueda de la autenticidad y la autorrealización, allá donde se hallen. Como sucede en muchas novelas (y no son las menores las de Jane Austen, ese paradigma de la comedia romántica en prosa), el protagonista ha de encontrar la pareja a la vez que se encuentra a sí mismo/a, recorriendo el camino que le pide el cuerpo, o el alma, más allá de las tentaciones de la comodidad, el acierto social, o el éxito profesional. Están llenas las comedias de esos momentos cruciales donde todo un curso vital parece depender de una elección crucial entre lo auténtico y lo inauténtico, de un momento vivido muchas veces a la carrera, como en El Graduado.
Señalaba Ledger que aparte del conflicto externo con el obstáculo social se halla el conflicto interno que debe librarse en la mente del protagonista o de los protagonistas (él y ella, aunque a veces haya más énfasis en uno o en otra, es otra variable). El enamoramiento lleva a, o procede de, una tensión interna, un conflicto sin resover, y la crisis social del personaje se corresponde con una crisis de personalidad que le lleva en direcciones inexploradas hasta entonces. También enlaza con eso el uso de la mascarada, ya magistralmente llevado en Shakespeare: la vida social es un juego de máscaras, y en el teatro o en el cine eso se subraya a veces mediante el disfraz, la superposición de identidades (Twelfth Night es el ejemplo arquetípico de comedia de disfraz, como La fierecilla domada o Much Ado About Nothing proporcionan el modelo de combate de los sexos que termina en emparejamiento). La cuestión es que el cortejo, conllevando como conlleva la exhibición y confesión del deseo, se presta mucho a la creación de situaciones de vulnerabilidad que pueden ser a la vez conmovedoras y risibles, según el punto de vista adoptado. Los enamorados adoptan papeles, aun cuando no se disfracen, para aparecer más deseables de lo que son, y muchas veces esas máscaras son sólo obstáculos que entorpecen la relación.
Otra tendencia reciente me parece a mí la introducción de elementos fantásticos como expresión de la distancia inicial de la pareja, elementos que suponen un obstáculo aparentemente incongruente, insuperable, o irritante. Así sucede si la chica es un Macintosh y él es un PC, como en Wall.E. O si ella es un fantasma intangible como en Ójala fuera cierto (Just like Heaven), si el chico viene del siglo XIX por una ventana temporal como en Kate& Leopold. O si están en años distintos y no hay manera de encontrarse acertadamente, como en The Lake House. Reese Witherspoon es la nueva Meg Ryan; en cuanto a Meg Ryan, añadió un toque de serial killing a sus argumentos de comedia romántica en In the Cut; varias películas de acción combinan de este modo el riesgo del enamoramiento y el riesgo del enfrentamiento a un desconocido peligroso que puede ser o puede no ser la persona amada (Twisted / Giro inesperado).
El género se disuelve y se combina bien, como digo. Podríamos decir que incluso desafía la ley de que si no acaba bien, no es comedia, siempre que el camino contenga amor, descolocamiento e ilusión, como Nicolas Cage en Leaving las Vegas...
¿Y por qué nos gustan las comedias románticas? Bueno, en parte porque todos hemos pasado por estas cuestiones, y es un placer revivirlas por persona interpuesta, y verlas desde la butaca, en terreno seguro, suave mari magno— porque las comedias son muy divertidas en la pantalla, pero en primera persona, love hurts.
Es la comedia romántica un género al que soy bastante aficionado, y la conferencia me ha hecho recordar algunas de las muchas que he visto, y me he puesto ganas de ver otras. Le ha dado un repaso muy sistemático y bien organizado a las convenciones fundamentales del género de la comedia, partiendo de la estructura central que podríamos llamar arquetípica del género: chico conoce chica, superan obstáculos, y terminan emparejados en final feliz. Sobre esto ha descrito las muchas variaciones posibles que han ido explorando los cineastas, ya que la novedad y sorpresa, y el reflejo de condiciones contemporáneas del cortejo y el emparejamiento son cuestiones esenciales en la comedia, tan esenciales como la centralidad de los esquemas cómicos básicos y de los ingredientes deseables como optimismo, humor, ironía, mascaradas, sorpresas y finales felices.
Varía por ejemplo la naturaleza del tipo de relación que se establece—desde el matrimonio tradicional y quizá central, a formas de emparejamiento más relacionadas con lo que Giddens llama "confluent love", la pareja mientras dura podríamos decir. Ya le dicen a Woody Allen en Manhattan que igual no estamos pensados para una relación permanente sino para una serie de relaciones sucesivas; es la modernidad la que lo reconoce o (es más) lo vive como una vocación. También aparecen las relaciones homosexuales como una variante alternativa de la comedia romántica—y esto me recuerda que más allá de experimentos gaylésbicos muy concienciados como Go Fish, o de dramas románticos gay que poco tienen de comedia, como Brokeback Mountain, hace poco ví una comedia romántica "mainstream" bastante aceptable, Love and Other Disasters, que combinaba las aventuras de la chica (Brittany Murphy) buscando un hombre sensible que no fuera gay, con las aventuras de su compañero de piso, gay sensible buscando otro gay sensible. También veremos más de éstas, previsiblemente—y ya hace años hicieron una española en esta línea, Allegro ma non troppo. Otras variantes del argumento romántico aparecen cada vez con más frecuencia—el triángulo final, el final indeciso o con separación... Aquí me acordaba de In Good Company; todas estas las recomiendo.
Por cierto, hablando del trabajo, señala Grindon la importancia del doble argumento laboral/sentimental en muchas comedias, con los personajes teniendo que elegir muchas veces entre el amor y la dedicación a su carrera en busca del éxito profesional. De hecho hay todo un subgénero diría yo que es la comedia laboral, sobre actitudes en el trabajo, relaciones con los jefes y sus demandas, con los compañeros y sus puñaladas, etc.—por ejemplo, The Devil Wears Prada— y allí el argumento romántico puede ser tan secundario de hecho como en una de intriga o de espías. Working Girl es, supongo, una feliz conjunción de estos subgéneros. Muchas veces, el amor se descubre a la vez que se abandona una ética laboral, y vital, errónea (como en A Good Year). Tiene actualizaciones interesantes, esta línea de obstáculos, a medida que las mujeres se incorporan a nuevos puestos laborales y surgen nuevos conflictos muy de cada época y lugar.
Aparte del trabajo, la familia es una fuente tradicional de obstáculos: según Ledger, la historia tradicional es aquí el desafío a la autoridad paterna que elige pareja para el chico o la chica; el relevo generacional de la comedia conlleva el elegir uno mismo su propia pareja fuera del círculo de intereses controlado por la familia. Grindon veía aquí una especie de variante arquetípica del tabú del incesto—buscar pareja fuera del círculo familiar. Aunque supongo que también se puede invertir la cuestión y bien habrá un puñado de películas donde se busque la pareja demasiado cerca, aunque no pienso en El Graduado precisamente, claro, que allí se trata precisamente de huir de Mrs. Robinson. Sí sería el caso de Moonstruck. La búsqueda de pareja "lejana" se puede llevar hasta romper las barreras de la comunidad étnica (Mi gran boda griega), la nacionalidad (French Kiss, o A Good Year), los tabúes familiares (Moonstruck), la corrección política y el ojo público (Love, Actually) o la raza (la famosa de Sidney Poitier, Adivina quién viene a cenar)—aunque también hay "tragicomedias románticas" como Jungle Fever donde se muestra la fuerza del círculo social para imponer conformidad. A veces se elige la inautenticidad y la seguridad frente a las incertidumbres del erotismo (al) descubierto, como sucede en Vicky Cristina Barcelona. O, quizá, la historia que se frustra en una línea argumental fructifica a través de los alter ego de esos personajes, en otra línea argumental, como sucede en Possession.
La familia también puede tener taras especiales como en Meet the Fockers, o arrastrar el peso del pasado, como en La boda de Rachel—donde la comedia romántica está (acertadamente) apenas insinuada. Es una tendencia reciente, observa Grindon, que muchas veces el obstáculo social para la pareja lo marcan ahora el círculo de amistades más bien que la familia—se encuentra una pareja que "no pega" con Los amigos del novio, o con las amigas de la novia, y eso lleva a una crisis que admite distintas soluciones—como sucede con la separación de la pareja por cuestiones de edad en Prime (Secretos compartidos)—o quizá a un final en bonita amistad, o (más comúnmente) al tradicional emparejamiento del chico y la chica, dejando atrás el pasado, y que revienten los amigos y los ex. (Entre estos ex merece destacarse, para Grindon, la figura de la pareja inadecuada, que amenaza con llevar al[a] protagonista por los senderos ya trillados o atarla a falsos ídolos de respetabilidad y fortuna e hipocresía).
Así pues, más importante que lo del alejamiento del círculo familiar o social me parece la búsqueda de la autenticidad y la autorrealización, allá donde se hallen. Como sucede en muchas novelas (y no son las menores las de Jane Austen, ese paradigma de la comedia romántica en prosa), el protagonista ha de encontrar la pareja a la vez que se encuentra a sí mismo/a, recorriendo el camino que le pide el cuerpo, o el alma, más allá de las tentaciones de la comodidad, el acierto social, o el éxito profesional. Están llenas las comedias de esos momentos cruciales donde todo un curso vital parece depender de una elección crucial entre lo auténtico y lo inauténtico, de un momento vivido muchas veces a la carrera, como en El Graduado.
Señalaba Ledger que aparte del conflicto externo con el obstáculo social se halla el conflicto interno que debe librarse en la mente del protagonista o de los protagonistas (él y ella, aunque a veces haya más énfasis en uno o en otra, es otra variable). El enamoramiento lleva a, o procede de, una tensión interna, un conflicto sin resover, y la crisis social del personaje se corresponde con una crisis de personalidad que le lleva en direcciones inexploradas hasta entonces. También enlaza con eso el uso de la mascarada, ya magistralmente llevado en Shakespeare: la vida social es un juego de máscaras, y en el teatro o en el cine eso se subraya a veces mediante el disfraz, la superposición de identidades (Twelfth Night es el ejemplo arquetípico de comedia de disfraz, como La fierecilla domada o Much Ado About Nothing proporcionan el modelo de combate de los sexos que termina en emparejamiento). La cuestión es que el cortejo, conllevando como conlleva la exhibición y confesión del deseo, se presta mucho a la creación de situaciones de vulnerabilidad que pueden ser a la vez conmovedoras y risibles, según el punto de vista adoptado. Los enamorados adoptan papeles, aun cuando no se disfracen, para aparecer más deseables de lo que son, y muchas veces esas máscaras son sólo obstáculos que entorpecen la relación.
Otra tendencia reciente me parece a mí la introducción de elementos fantásticos como expresión de la distancia inicial de la pareja, elementos que suponen un obstáculo aparentemente incongruente, insuperable, o irritante. Así sucede si la chica es un Macintosh y él es un PC, como en Wall.E. O si ella es un fantasma intangible como en Ójala fuera cierto (Just like Heaven), si el chico viene del siglo XIX por una ventana temporal como en Kate& Leopold. O si están en años distintos y no hay manera de encontrarse acertadamente, como en The Lake House. Reese Witherspoon es la nueva Meg Ryan; en cuanto a Meg Ryan, añadió un toque de serial killing a sus argumentos de comedia romántica en In the Cut; varias películas de acción combinan de este modo el riesgo del enamoramiento y el riesgo del enfrentamiento a un desconocido peligroso que puede ser o puede no ser la persona amada (Twisted / Giro inesperado).
El género se disuelve y se combina bien, como digo. Podríamos decir que incluso desafía la ley de que si no acaba bien, no es comedia, siempre que el camino contenga amor, descolocamiento e ilusión, como Nicolas Cage en Leaving las Vegas...
¿Y por qué nos gustan las comedias románticas? Bueno, en parte porque todos hemos pasado por estas cuestiones, y es un placer revivirlas por persona interpuesta, y verlas desde la butaca, en terreno seguro, suave mari magno— porque las comedias son muy divertidas en la pantalla, pero en primera persona, love hurts.
—oOo—
jueves, 22 de noviembre de 2018
miércoles, 15 de agosto de 2018
Retropost (14 de agosto de 2008): Los amigos del novio
Aquí en Viveiro hay un video club muy simpático, de baja intensidad, donde se niegan a pronunciarse sobre cuándo hay que devolver las películas prestadas: "Bueeeno.... unos días, non sé". Y allí encontramos esta comedia ambientada en un barrio residencial de Nueva York, aunque casi parece esto un pueblo. Está centrada en un grupo de amigos y sus actitudes ante la boda de uno de ellos, que se va a casar de penalti. El novio tiene dudas ante la boda, o al menos se las ve la novia, y lo pone firmes, haciéndole elegir entre sus amigos y ella (como suelen hacer las novias), aunque sin renunciar totalmente a ellos. Otros amigos se dan cuenta de la importancia de tener una familia con hijos, ya adentrándose en los treinta y something; hay crisis con parejas y ex-parejas, una sorpresa con un viejo amigo perdido de vista durante años, que vuelve para la ocasión y resulta ser gay, para sorpresa de algunos... Y en fin, una historia de personajes que están dejando atrás los años de su juventud a la vez que están marcadísimos por ellos, y tienen que seguir avanzando. Alguno parece que se va a quedar anclado allí, y viviendo en casa como a los quince años: de esos hay siempre alguno, y cada vez más, dicen. En fin, que está muy recomendable, con personajes genialmente retratados y vivísimos, conversaciones divertidas y para nada increíbles, y unas crisis y tensiones a la hora de madurar y sentar cabeza que muchos reconocerán sin duda en su experiencia propia. O en la de ese grupo de amigos heredados del instituto, que todos deberíamos tener, puesto que lo reconocemos como si fuera nuestro, aunque el nuestro se nos haya perdido por el camino—exactamente como si nos hubiéramos vuelto gays.
Los amigos del novio. Comedy. Written and dir. Edward Burns. Cast: Edward Burns, Heather Burns, Donal Logue, Jay Mohr, John Leguizamo, Brittany Murphy, Matthew Lillard, Shari Albert, Jessica Capshaw, Arthur Nascarella, John O'Donohue, Spencer Fox. Music by Tracy McKnight, Robert Gary, O.T. Walkley. Photog. William Rexter II. Ed. Jamie Kirkpatrick. Prod. Des. Dina Goldman. Exec. Prod. David Gorton, Karinne Behr, Walter Josten. Prod. Philippe Martinez. Prod. Margot Bridger, Edward Burns, Aaron Lubin. USA: Bauer Martinez Studios / Defender Films / Marlboro Road Gang, 2005. Spanish DVD: Los amigos del novio. SAV / DeAPlaneta.
—oOo—
viernes, 20 de mayo de 2016
sábado, 7 de febrero de 2015
"The Fundamental Things Apply"—La comedia romántica: Renovarse y vivir
Un artículo mío sobre la comedia romántica en el cine:
Reference Info: Ibercampus (Feb. 12, 2009)
Aparece también en estos repositorios y revistas temáticas de la SSRN:
Date posted: January 30, 2015
http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2557366
'The Fundamental Things Apply'
— La comedia romántica: renovarse y vivir
Se
trata de una introducción a la comedia romántica cinematográfica y a su
fundamentación en la estructura de las relaciones personales y de la
identidad social, comentando la panorámica ofrecida por Leger Grindon y
complementándola con ejemplos específicos y análisis de comedias
románticas contemporáneas.
'The Fundamental Things Apply' — Romantic Comedy: Renewing
Oneself in Order to Survive
An
introduction to romantic comedy in film and to its grounding on the
structure of personal relationships and social identity, commenting on
the overview provided by Leger Grindon and complementing it with
specific examples and analyses of contemporary romantic comedies.
'The Fundamental Things Apply' — Romantic Comedy: Renewing Oneself in Order to Survive
An introduction to romantic comedy in film and to its grounding on the structure of personal relationships and social identity, commenting on the overview provided by Leger Grindon and complementing it with specific examples and analyses of contemporary romantic comedies.
Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.
Reference Info: Ibercampus (Feb. 12, 2009)
Aparece también en estos repositorios y revistas temáticas de la SSRN:
Date posted: January 30, 2015
http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2557366
| eJournal Classifications |
AARN Subject Matter eJournals |
| AARN Subject Matter eJournals |
| CSN Subject Matter eJournals |
| PRN Subject Matter eJournals |
_____. "The Fundamental Things Apply." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 5 Feb. 2009.
http://garciala.blogia.com/2009/020502-the-fundamental-things-apply.php
2009
_____. "La comedia romántica: Renovarse y vivir (The Fundamental Things Apply)." Ibercampus (Vanity Fea) 12 Feb. 2009.*
http://www.ibercampus.es/articulos.asp?idarticulo=14444
2013
_____. "'The Fundamental Things Apply'—La comedia romántica: renovarse y vivir ('The Fundamental Things Apply'—Romantic Comedy: Renewing oneself in order to survive." SSRN 30 Jan. 2015.*
https://ssrn.com/abstract=2557366
2015
Psychological Anthropology eJournal 30 Jan. 2015.*
http://www.ssrn.com/link/Psychological-Anthropology.html
2015
Cultural Anthropology eJournal 30 Jan. 2015.*
http://www.ssrn.com/link/Cultural-Anthropology.html
2015
Cognition & the Arts eJournal 30 Jan. 2015.*
http://www.ssrn.com/link/Cognition-Arts.html
2015
Aesthetics & Philosophy of Art eJournal 30 Jan. 2015.*
http://www.ssrn.com/link/Aesthetics-Philosophy-Art.html
2015
_____. "The Fundamental Things Apply." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 7 Feb. 2015.*
http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2015/02/the-fundamental-things-apply.html
2015
_____. "'The Fundamental Things Apply'—La comedia romántica: Renovarse y vivir." Academia 9 July 2016.*
https://www.academia.edu/26852641/
2016
_____. "The Fundamental Things Apply'—La comedia romántica: Renovarse y vivir." ResearchGate 9 July 2016.*
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305072452
2016
_____. "The Fundamental Things Apply'—La comedia romántica: Renovarse y vivir." Net Sight de José Angel García Landa 4 Jan. 2023.*
https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/lacomediaromantica.pdf
2024
—oOo—
viernes, 28 de noviembre de 2014
TWELFTH NIGHT or What You Will
Twelfth Night
from the Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:
Twelfth Night, or What You Will, a comedy by
*Shakespeare probably written 1601. John *Manningham saw a performance of it in
the Middle Temple in February 1602; it was frist printed in the *Folio of 1623.
Shakespeare's immediate source for the main plot was 'The History of Apolonius
and Silla' in Barnabe *Rich's Riche His
Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581). This is derived from Belleforest's
version, which by way of *Bandello can be traced back to a Sienese comedy Gl'Ingannati (The Deceived), written and
performed 1531.
Sebastian and Viola, twin brother
and sister and closely resembling one another, are separated in a shipwreck off
the coast of Illyria. Viola, brought to shore in a boat, disguises herself a
youth, Cesario, and takes service as page with Duke Orsino, who is in love with
the lady Olivia. She rejects the duke's suit and will not meet him. Orsino
makes a confidant of Cesario and sends her to press his suit on Olivia, much to
the distress of Cesario, who has fallen in love with Orsino. Olivia in turn
falls in love with Cesario. Sebastian and Antonio, captain of the ship that had
rescued Sebastian, now arrive in Illyria. Cesario, challenged to a duel by Sir Andrew
Aguecheek, a rejected suitor of Olivia, is rescued from her predicament by
Antonio, who takes her for Sebastian. Antonio, being arrested at that moment
for an old offence, claims from Cesario a purse that he had entrusted to
Sebastian, is denied it, and hauled off to prison. Olivia coming upon the true
Sebastian, takes him for Cesario, invites him to her house, and marries him out
of hand. Orsino comes to visit Olivia. Antonio, brought before him, claims
Cesario as the youth he has rescued from the sea; while Olivia claims Cesario
as her husband. The duke, deeply wounded, is bidding farewell to Olivia and the
'dissembling cub' Cesario, when the arrival of the true Sebastian clears up the
confusion. The duke, having lost Olivia, and becoming conscious of the love
that Viola has betrayed, turns his affection to her, and they are married.
Much of the play's comedy comes
from the sub-plot dealing with the members of Olivia's household: Sir Toby
Belch, her uncle, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, his friend, Malvolio, her pompous
steward, Maria, her waiting-gentlewoman, and her clown Feste. Exasperated by
Malvolio's officiousness, the other members of the house make him believe that
Olivia is in love with him and that he must return her affection. In courting
her he behaves so outrageously that he is imprisoned as a madman. Olivia has
him released and the joke against him is explained, but he is not amused by it,
threatening, 'I'll be reveng'd on the whole pack of you.'
The play's gentle melancholy and
lyrical atmosphere is captured in two of Feste's beautiful songs, 'Come away,
come away, death' and 'When that I was and a little tiny boy, / With hey, ho,
the wind and the rain'.
Twelfth Night (1996 film version, dir. Trevor Nunn):
Twelfth Night, dir. Kenneth Branagh:
—oOo—
martes, 26 de noviembre de 2013
Comedy (Timothy J. Reiss)
Comedy
By Timothy J. Reiss.
I. DEFINITION
II. ANCIENT
III. RENAISSANCE AND MODERN EUROPEAN
IV. RELATION TO TRAGEDY
I. DEFINITION. Like tragedy (q.v.), the Western tradition of comic theater is considered to have begun with the ancient Greeks. Such a claim is however less clear than that made on behalf of tragedy, if only because no known culture appears to lack some form of comic performance. This fact has inspired various speculative theses concerning laughter—like reason and speech—as one of the defining characteristics of humanity. As in the case of tragedy, therefore, we need to distinguish with some care between speculative generalizations about the "comic spirit," and that more precious historical description needed to annlyze the function of comedy in society. We must also discriminate between such description and attempts to analyze the "psychology" of laughter, because the event of comedy and the eruption of mirth are by no means the same. (I should add that althought the term "comedy" has been applied to any literary genre that is humorous, joyful, or expresses good fortune, what follwos will concern above all the theater, even if some observations have a broader application.)
The name "comedy" comes from Comus, a Greek fertility god. In ancient Greece "comedy" also named a ritual springtime procession presumed to celebrate cyclical rebirth, resurrection, and perpetual rejuvenation. Modern scholars and critics have thus taken comedy to be a universal celebration of life, a joyous outburst of laughter in the face of either an incomprehensible world or a repressive socio-political order. Carnival, festival, folly, and a general freedom of action then indicate either an indifference to and acceptance of the first, or a resistance to the second. But scholars have taken such notions yet further: if tragedy represents the fall from some kind of "sacred irrationality," comedy on the contrary becomes the triumphant affirmation of that riotous unreason, marking some ready acceptance of human participation in the chaotic forces needed to produce Life. The comic protagonist's defeat is then the counterpart to the tragic protagonist's failure, both versions of some ritual cleansing by means of a scapegoat—in this case one representing life-threatening forces. Such speculations have been advanced in one form or another by classicists (F. M. Cornford, Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray), philosophers (Mikhail Bakhtin, Susanne Langer), and literary critics (C. L. Barber, Northrop Frye), not to mention anthropologists and even sociologists.
How much these theories help us understand what comedies are is another, and perhaps a different, question. For in the last resort such arguments depend on the assumption that beneath all and any particular comedy is some kinde of profound universal "carnival", a common denominator of the human in all times and places. Recalling Nietzsche's Gay Science, Jean Duvignaud has thus spoken of 'laughter that for a fleeting moment pitches humans before an infinite freedom, eluding constraints and rules, drawing them away from the irremediable nature of their condition to discover unforeseeable connections, and suggesting a common existence where the imaginary and real life will be reconciled" (229-30). But theories of this sort depend upon the idea that one can obtain the deepest comprehension of comedies by removing them from their distinct historical moment and social environment. They forget that such carnival and such laughter aree themselves the creations of a particular rationality, just as Dante's Divine Comedy universalized a particular theology. Even so seemingly fantastic a theater as that of Aristophanes (ca. 485-385 B.C.) is misconstrued by a theory that neglects comedy's essential embedding in the social and political intricacies of its age and place (Athens during the Peloponnesian Wars).
Setting aside these broad metaphysical speculations, then, we must look at accounts of laughter as a human reaction to certain kinds of errors. By and large, these may be divided into two theories. The one asserts that laughter is provoked by a sense of superiority (Hobbes' "sudden glory"), the other that it is produced by a sudden sense of the ludicrous, the incongrous, some abrupt dissociation of event and expectation. The theory of superiority is the more modern one, developed mainly by Hobbes, Bergson, and Meredith. It presumes our joy in seeing ourselves more fortunate than others, or in some way more free. Bergson's notion that one of the causes of laughter is the an abrupt perception of someone as a kind of automaton or puppet, as though some freedom of action had been lost, is one version of this.
The theory of comedy as the ludicrous or as the dissociation of expectation and event has a longer pedigree. It begins with Aristotle and has come down to us via Kant, Schopenhauer, and Freud. In the Poetics, Aristotle mentions another work on comedy, now lost; what remains are a few comments. In Poetics 5 Aristotle remarks that comedy imitates people "worse than average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others" (tr. Bywater). Similar remarks exist in his Rhetoric and in a medieval Greek manuscript known as the Tractatus Coislinianus, Aristotelian in argument and possibly even an actual epitome of Aristotle's lost writing on comedy (ed. Janko, 1984). Save for suggesting some detail of dissociative word and action, this text adds little to what may be gleaned from extant texts of Aristotl. It does make a parallel between comedy and tragedy, however, by saying that catharsis (q.v.) also occurs in comedy "through pleasure and laughter achieving the purgation of like emotions." The meaning of such a phrase is not at all clear, although it suggests comedy as an almost Stoic device to clean away extremes of hedonism and to root out any carnivalesque temptations.
Although both theories involve the psychology of laughter, the superiority theory seems less particularly applicable to comedy than that of incongruity, for the latter seeks both to indicate devices specifically provocative of laughter and to explain their effect on a spectator. The "Aristotelian" analyses suggest several matters. First, their kind of laughter requires oddness, distortion, folly, or some such "version of the ugly," but without pain. Such laughter thus depends on sympathy. Second, although this theory is kinder than that of superiority, it too has its part of cruelty, just because of the touch of ugliness. Third, theories of superiority and of incongruity both take laughter as means, as commentary upon or correction of what we may call the real or even "local" world_unlike metaphysical theories, which make mirth an end in itself and an escape into some "universality." Fourth, both these theories (which supplement rather than oppose one another) require the laughter to be aware of some disfiguring of an accepted norm. Comedy and laughter imply a habit of normality, a familiarity of custom, from which the comic is a deviation. It may indeed be the case that comedy, like tragedy, shows the construction of such order, but above all it demonstrates why such order must be conserved.
II. ANCIENT. The fourth theory would at least partly explain why comic competition was instituted at the Athenian Dionysia some 50 years after that for tragedy (in 486 B.C.). Aristtle has told us the first competition was won by Chionides, who with Magnes represented the first generation of writers of comedy. Around 455 a comic victory was won by Cratinus, who with Crates formed a second generation. Many titles have survived and some fragments, but these constitute near the sum total of extant facts about Athenian comedy until Aristophanes' victory with Acharnians in 425. We know that in this competition Cratinus was second with Kheimazomenoi, and Eupolis third with Noumeniai. These names tell us little, but we may perhaps assume that Aristophanic comedy was fairly typical of this so-called Greek "Old Comedy": a mixture of dance, poetry, song, and drama, combining fantastic plots with mockery and sharp satire of contemporary people, events, and customs. Most of his plays are only partly comprehensible if we know nothing of current social, political, and literary conditions.
Aristophanes did not hesitate to attack education, the law, tragedians, the situation of women (though it is clearly an error to take him for a "feminist" of any kind), and the very nature of Athenian "democracy." Above all he attacked the demagogue Cleon, the war party he led, and the war itself. This says much about the nature of Athenian freedoms, for Aristophanes wrote during the struggle with Sparta, when no one doubted at all that the very future of Athens was in question. Aristophanes' last surviving play (of 11, 44 being attributed to him) is Plutus (388), a play criticizing myth, but whose actual themes are avarice and ambition. Quite different in tone and intent from the preceding openly political plays, Plutus is considered the earliest (and only extant) example of Greek "Middle Comedy."
The situation of comedy was, however, quite different from that of tragedy, for anothe powerful tradition existed. This was centered in Sicilian Syracuse, a Corinthian colony, and claimed the earliest comic writer, Epicharmus, one of the authors at the court of Hieron I in the 470s. We know the titles of some 40 of his plays. Othe comic poets writing in this Doric tradition were Phormis and the slightly younger Deinolochus, but the Dorians were supplanted by the Attic writers in the 5th c. and survive only in fragments. The best known composer of literary versions of the otherwise "para-" or "ub-" literary genre of comic mime was another Sicilian, Sophron, who lived during the late 5th c. From the 4th c. we have a series of vase paintings from Sicily and Southern Italy which suggest that comedy still throve there. The initiative had largely passed, however, to the Greek mainland. Plutus is an example of that Middle Comedy whose volume we know to have been huge. Plautus' Latin Amphitruo (ca. 230 B.C.) seems to be a version of another one, and, if so, one characteristic was the attack on myth. (Aristophanes' earlier Frogs [405], attacking Euripides and Aeschylus, tried in the underworld, may well be thought a forerunner.)
By the mid 4th c., so-called "New Comedy" held the stage. Among its poets the most celebrated and influential was unquestionably Menander (c. 342-290 B.C.). His "teacher" was a certain Alexis of Thurii in southern Italy, so we can readily see how the "colonial" influence continued, even though Alexis was based in Athens. He is supposed to have written 245 plays and to have outlived his pupil. We know of Philemon from either Cilicia or Syracuse, of Diphilos from Sinope on the Black Sea, and of Apollodorus from Carystos in Euboea—worth mentioning as illustrating the great spread of comedy. Until the 1930s, however, only fragments seemed to have survived. Then what can only be considered one of the great literary discoveries turned up a papyrus containing a number of Menander's comedies, complete or almost so. These plays deal not with political matters or criticism of myth, but with broadly social matters (sometimes using mythical themes). The situations are domestic, the comedy is of manners, the characters are stock.
The widespread familiarity of comic forms helps explain why comedy was soon diffused once again over the Greek and roman world. By the mid 3rd c., not only had itinerant troupes spread from Greece throughout the Hellenistic world, but already by 240, Livius Andronicus, from Tarentum in southern Italy, had adapted Greek plays into Latin for public performance. Like Gnaeus Naevius and later Quintus Ennius, this poet composed both tragedy and comedy. From the 3rd c. as well dates Atellan farce (named from Atella in Campania), using stock characters and a small number of set scenes, and featuring clowns (called Bucco or Maccus), foolish old men, and greedy buffoons. These farces were partly improvised, on the basis of skeletal scripts, much like the commedia dell'arte of almost two millennia later. The influence of Etrurian musical performance, southern Italian drama, Greek mime, New Comedy and Atellan farce came together in the comedies of Titus Maccius Plautus, who wrote in the late 3rd c. (he is said by Cicero to have died in 184). By him 21 complete or almost complete comedies have survived. A little later Rome was entertained by the much more highbrow Publius Terentius Afer (Terence), by whom six plays remain extant. These two authors provided themes, characters, and style for comedy as it was to develop in Europe after the Renaissance (though farces, sotties, and comic interludes [q.v.] were widely performed in the Middle Ages).
III. RENAISSANCE AND MODERN EUROPEAN. As in the case of tragedy comedy was rediscovered first in Italy. While humanist scholars published and then imitated both Plautus and Terence (see IMITATION), vernacular art developed alongside wuch efforts. The early 16th c. saw the publication of much school drama in both Latin and Italian, while just a little later there developed the commedia dell'arte, wholse influence was to be enormous.This was a comedy of improvisation, using sketchy scripts and a small number of stock characters—Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, the Doctor and others—placing these last in various situations. These plots were as frequently derived from antiquity as they were from folk art. Later on, these two forms of comedy tented to feed one another; the popular Comédie italienne of the late 17th-c. France was one outcome. The Commedia's influence was equally visible in Marivaux (1688-1763) and Goldoni (1707-93), though in the case of the first, the Italienne was just as important. The Commedia survives vividly in our own time in the theater of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which has put the old characters to work in the service of powerful political satire.
Apain vied with Italy on its development of comedy, starting with the late 15th-c. Celestina of Fernando de Rojas, written in Acts and in dialogue but never really intended for performance. By the late 16th c., Spain's theater was second to none in Europe. Lope de Vega (1562-1635), Calderón (1600-81) and a host of others produced a multitude of romantic and realistic comedy, dealing mainly with love and honor. They provided innumerable plots, themes, and characters for comic writers of France and England. These two countries started rather later than the South, but, like them, benefited from both an indigenous folk tradition and the publication of Latin comedy. The influence of Italian humanist comedy was significant in both nations during the 16th c., and that of Spain particularly in France in the early 17th c.
In France, humanist comedy gave way in the late 1620s to a romantic form of comedy whose threefold source was the prose romance and novella of Spain, Italy, and France, Spanish comedy (especially that of Lope and Cervantes), and Italian dramatic pastoral. The first influential authors in this style were Pierre Corneille (1606-84) and Jean de Rotrou (1609-50). Thew were followed by many, including Cyrano de Bergerac, Thomas Corneille , and the poet whom many consider the greatest writer of comedy of all times, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière (1622-73). He wrote an enormous variety, in verse and prose, rangin from slapstick farce to something approaching bourgeois tragic drama. Comédie ballet, comedy of situation, of manners, of intrigue, and of character all flowed from his pern. He did not hesitate to write on matters that provoked the ire of religious dévots or of professional bigots, nor did he shirk the criticism of patriarchy, and many of his plays have political overtones. Having begun his theatrical career as leader of a traveling troupe, Molière made full use of folk tradition, of provincial dialect, of Commedia and of farce, as well as of Classical example. Many of his characters have become familiar types in French tradition (e.g. the "misanthrope," "tartuffe," "don juan"); many of his lines have become proverbial. While his plays do contain the now familiar young lovers, old men both helpful and obstructive, wily servants both female and male, sensible wives and mothers (whereas husbands and fathers are almost always foolish, headstrong, cuclolded, or downright obstructive); they bear chiefly upon such matters as avarice, ambition, pride, hypocrisy, misanthropy, and other such extreme traits. What interests Molière is how such excess conflicts directly with the well-regulated and customary process of ordered society.
Having followed a similar trajectory to that of its southern neigbours in the first half of the 16th c., England created a comic trad. unique in variety and longevity. The extraordinarily diverse comedies of Shakespeare (1564-1616) and the so-called comedy of humors (q.v.) favored by Jonson (1573-1637) seemed about to create two distinct comic traditions. Shakespeare wrote in almost every mode imaginable: aristocratic romance, bitter and problematic farce, comedy of character, slapstick farce, and the almost tragic Troilus and Cressida. If any comedy may be analyzed with some "metaphysical" theory it is no doubt Shakespeare's, with its concern for madness and wisdom, birth and death, the seasons' cycles, alove and animosity. Yet Shakespeare's comedies remained unique, and he had no successor in this style. Jonson's more urbane comedy of types and of character, satirizing manners and morals, social humbug and excess of all kinds, and falling more clearly into the forms already seen, was soon followed by the quite remarkable flowering of Restoration comedy, with a crowd of authors, including Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve, Behn, and Centlivre, among many others. They produced a brittle comedy of manners and cynical wit whose major impression is one of decayand an almost unbalanced self-interest. They were in turn suceeded by a widely varied 18th-c. comedy from the staunch complacency of Steele through the political satire of Gay to the joyous and mocking cynicism of Goldsmith, Inchbald, and Sheridan. This tradition was pursued thorugh the late 19th and early 20th centuries by a series of great Irish dramatists: Shaw, most notably, then Wilde, Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey.
During this period France was equally productive, but with few exceptions failed to attain the quality represented by the names just mentioned. At the turn of the 17th c., Regnard produced serious and significant social satire, as did Lesage (esp. in Turcaret, 1706). Marivaux dominated the first half of the 18th c., as Voltaire did the middle and Beaumarchais the end. If any new form appeared it was doubtless the comédie larmoyante, a sentimental drama whose main (and stated) purpose was to draw the heartstrings; in a way, it did for comedy what the later melodrama did for tragedy. In the 19th c. Musset produced his delicate comedy of manners, while Dumas fils and others strove to produce a comedy dealing with society's ills. This culminated on the one hand in Scribe's "well-made play," on the other in the "realist" drama of Zola and Antoine at the end of the century.
In other European lands, authors tended to be isolated: in late 19th-c. Norway, Ibsen, in early 20th-c. Russia, Chekhov; slightly later in Italy, Pirandello. To mention them so briefly is to be unjust, for they were all major creative figures. In many ways they foreshadowed that breakdown of traditional comedy that marks the mid to late 20th c. Laughter tends to become mingled problematically with that sense of discomfort in the world and uneas in the self which is perhaps a principal sign of our age. Among representative authors one might mention such as Witkiewicz, Mrozek, and Gombrowicz from Poland; Brecht, Dürrenmatt, and Handke from Germany; Switzerland, and Austria; Adamov, Ionesco, Arraabal, and Beckett in France; Capek, Fischerova, Havel, and Kohut in Czechoslovakia; Pinter, Arden, Bond, Stoppard, Benton, Hare, and Churchill in England; and Hellman, Albee, Baraka, and Simon in America. All have been writing plays that sport ironically with the political, social, and metaphysical dimensions of the human condition. Usually such issues are no longer held separate, and all are fair game for an ambiguous, perplexed, and uncertain derision. Such theater is now widely distributed, as strong in Latin America as in Czechoslovakia, in Italy or Spain as in Nigeria. It is almost as though comedy had lost a sense of that social norm to which we referrred at the outset, as if it were increasingly imbued with an inescapable sense of the tragic.
IV. RELATION TO TRAGEDY. Comedy had from the start a rather ambiguous relation to tragedy, and it was never difficult to see in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusai an inversion of Euripides' Bacchae, for example. A celebrated passage at the end of Plato's Symposium has Socrates obliging Agathon and Aristophanes to agree that comedy and tragedy have the same source. Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard has been played as both comedy and tragedy; so has The Merchant of Venice. Even the elements compounding the confrontation may be identical, as in Macbeth, Jarry's Ubu Roi, or Ionesco's Macbett. When the comic protagonist acquires attributes of typicality or of some absolute, then comedy may take on overtones of tragedy. A critic of Molière's Tartuffe (1667) remarked that whaterver "lacks extremely in reason" is ridiculous: anything contrary to a predictable reaction or an expected and habitual situation is absurd. This is of course straight from the Aristotelian tradition, but the emphasis on excess is significant. It shows just how close comedy always was to tragedy, explaining such comedies as Dom Juan or Le Misanthrope. Both focus on an idealism either misplaced or preposterous. Don Juan's ideal self is misplaced because it serves a violent and injurious sexuality; Alceste's self-righteous scorn becomes comic when he refuses even the most innocent concession, and his responses become inappropriate to his urbane surroundings. Yet if he lowered his tone to suit his milieu he would fall short of his ideal: the dilemma is that of dissonance between the dieal and the situation where it is expressed—incongruity again. The excessive ideal in this case contradicts society's needs and fails its norm.
Tragedy appears to require a world view such that a recognized human quantity may be pitted against a known but inhuman one (variously called Fate, the gods, the idea of some Absolute, etc.), permitting the "limits" of human action and knowledge to be defined. Comedy seems rather to oppose humans to one another, within essentially social boundaries. And if, as both the superiority and the incongruity theories hold, comedy is essentially a social phenomenon, then wherever humans are will be somehow conducive to it; whereas tragedy seems to signify a moment of passage from one sociocultural environment to another. That social nature of comedy may be why its characters sem to us so down-to-earth, pragmatic, and familiar. Even where a theater's real (and external) social context is very different, we can still recognize creatures of a social order. That is also why comedies are in league with their audience, obtaining their spectators' sympathy for what are given as the dominant social interests. Volpone menaces that order, as do Shylock, Tartuffe, and Philokleon (Aristophanes, Wasps). Volpone and Shylock are defeated in the name of the Venetian Republic, as is Tartuffe in that of the King, and Philokleon in that of a city longing for peace. In Palutus' Epidicus, the eponymous slave—archetypal outsider for 3rd c. Rome—is absorbed into and becomes a part of the social system. In Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, the actors remain at loose ends because they are unable to situate either themselves or a social order. Similarly, Beckett's two tramps remain despairingly expectant at the end of Waiting for Godot. Comedy has always emphasized the conservation of an order it may well have helped construct. When we can no more grasp or even envisage that order, then derisive irony may make us laugh, but it also leaves us painfully disturbed. See also BURLESQUE; DRMATIC POETRY; FARCE; GENRE; GREEK POETRY, Classical; PARODY; TRAGICOMEDY.
—oOo—
G. Meredith, An Essay on Comedy (1877; ed. W. Sypher, 1980); F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882); H. L. Bergson, Laughter (1912; ed. W. Sypher, 1980); F. M. Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914); S. Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1916); L. Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy (1922); M. A. Grant, The Ancient Rhetorical Theories of the Laughable (1924); J. Harrison, Themis (1927); K. M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, 2 v. (1934); J. Feibleman, In Praise of Comedy (1939); M. T. Herrick, Comic Theory in the 16th C. (1950), Italian Comedy in the Renaissance (1960); G. E. Duckworth, The Nature of Roman Comedy (1952); W. Sypher, Comedy (1956); Frye; S. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd ed. (1957); A. Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, tr. M. C. Richards (1958); C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive C. (1959); E. Welsford, The Fool (1961); J. L. Styan, The Dark Comedy (1962); A., Nicoll, A History of English Drama, 1660-1900, 6 v. (1952-59), The World of Harlequin (1963); Theories of Comedy, ed. P. Lauter (1964); N. Frye, A Natural Perspective (1965); H. B. Charlton, Shakespearean Comedy (1966); W. Kerr, Tragedy and Comedy (1967); M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. H. Iswolsky (1968); E. Olson, The Theory of Comedy (1968); E. Segal, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus (1968); L. S. Champion, The Evolution of Shakespeare's Comedy (1970); G. M. Sifakis, Parabasis and Animal Choruses: A Contribution to the History of Attic Comedy (1971); W. M. Merchant, Comedy (1972); K. J. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (1972); M. C. Bradbrook, The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy, 2nd ed. (1973); R. b. Martin, The Triumph of Wit: A Study of Victorian Comic Theory (1974); A. Rodway, English Comedy: Its Role and Nature from Chaucer to the Present Day (1975); M. Gurewitch, Comedy: The Irrational Vision (1975); F. H. Sandbach, The Comic Theatre of Greece and Rome (1977); A. Caputi, Buffo: The Genius of Vulgar Comedy (1978); E. Kern, The Absolute Comic (1980); R. Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (1980); R. W. Corrigan, Comedy: Meaning and Form, 2nd ed. (1981); Trypanis; Fowler; K. H. Bareis, Comoedia (1982); D. Konstan, Roman Comedy (1983); E. L. Galligan, The Comic Vision in Literature (1984); R. Janko, Aristotle on Comedy (1984); J. Duvignaud, Le Propre de l'homme: histoire du comique et de la dérision (1985); K. Neuman, Shakespeare's Rhetoric of Comic Character (1985); E. W. Handley, "Comedy," CHCL, v. 1; R. L. Hunter, The New Comedy of Greece and rome (1985); W. E. Gruber, Comic Theaters (1986); T. Lang, Barbarians in Greek Comedy (1986); T. B. Leinward, The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603-1613 (1986); E. Burns, Restoration Comedy: Crises of Desire and Identity (1987); H. Levin, Playboys and Killjoys (1987); L. Siegel, Laughing Matters: Comic Traditions in India (1987).
By Timothy J. Reiss.
From the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
I. DEFINITION
II. ANCIENT
III. RENAISSANCE AND MODERN EUROPEAN
IV. RELATION TO TRAGEDY
I. DEFINITION. Like tragedy (q.v.), the Western tradition of comic theater is considered to have begun with the ancient Greeks. Such a claim is however less clear than that made on behalf of tragedy, if only because no known culture appears to lack some form of comic performance. This fact has inspired various speculative theses concerning laughter—like reason and speech—as one of the defining characteristics of humanity. As in the case of tragedy, therefore, we need to distinguish with some care between speculative generalizations about the "comic spirit," and that more precious historical description needed to annlyze the function of comedy in society. We must also discriminate between such description and attempts to analyze the "psychology" of laughter, because the event of comedy and the eruption of mirth are by no means the same. (I should add that althought the term "comedy" has been applied to any literary genre that is humorous, joyful, or expresses good fortune, what follwos will concern above all the theater, even if some observations have a broader application.)
The name "comedy" comes from Comus, a Greek fertility god. In ancient Greece "comedy" also named a ritual springtime procession presumed to celebrate cyclical rebirth, resurrection, and perpetual rejuvenation. Modern scholars and critics have thus taken comedy to be a universal celebration of life, a joyous outburst of laughter in the face of either an incomprehensible world or a repressive socio-political order. Carnival, festival, folly, and a general freedom of action then indicate either an indifference to and acceptance of the first, or a resistance to the second. But scholars have taken such notions yet further: if tragedy represents the fall from some kind of "sacred irrationality," comedy on the contrary becomes the triumphant affirmation of that riotous unreason, marking some ready acceptance of human participation in the chaotic forces needed to produce Life. The comic protagonist's defeat is then the counterpart to the tragic protagonist's failure, both versions of some ritual cleansing by means of a scapegoat—in this case one representing life-threatening forces. Such speculations have been advanced in one form or another by classicists (F. M. Cornford, Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray), philosophers (Mikhail Bakhtin, Susanne Langer), and literary critics (C. L. Barber, Northrop Frye), not to mention anthropologists and even sociologists.
How much these theories help us understand what comedies are is another, and perhaps a different, question. For in the last resort such arguments depend on the assumption that beneath all and any particular comedy is some kinde of profound universal "carnival", a common denominator of the human in all times and places. Recalling Nietzsche's Gay Science, Jean Duvignaud has thus spoken of 'laughter that for a fleeting moment pitches humans before an infinite freedom, eluding constraints and rules, drawing them away from the irremediable nature of their condition to discover unforeseeable connections, and suggesting a common existence where the imaginary and real life will be reconciled" (229-30). But theories of this sort depend upon the idea that one can obtain the deepest comprehension of comedies by removing them from their distinct historical moment and social environment. They forget that such carnival and such laughter aree themselves the creations of a particular rationality, just as Dante's Divine Comedy universalized a particular theology. Even so seemingly fantastic a theater as that of Aristophanes (ca. 485-385 B.C.) is misconstrued by a theory that neglects comedy's essential embedding in the social and political intricacies of its age and place (Athens during the Peloponnesian Wars).
Setting aside these broad metaphysical speculations, then, we must look at accounts of laughter as a human reaction to certain kinds of errors. By and large, these may be divided into two theories. The one asserts that laughter is provoked by a sense of superiority (Hobbes' "sudden glory"), the other that it is produced by a sudden sense of the ludicrous, the incongrous, some abrupt dissociation of event and expectation. The theory of superiority is the more modern one, developed mainly by Hobbes, Bergson, and Meredith. It presumes our joy in seeing ourselves more fortunate than others, or in some way more free. Bergson's notion that one of the causes of laughter is the an abrupt perception of someone as a kind of automaton or puppet, as though some freedom of action had been lost, is one version of this.
The theory of comedy as the ludicrous or as the dissociation of expectation and event has a longer pedigree. It begins with Aristotle and has come down to us via Kant, Schopenhauer, and Freud. In the Poetics, Aristotle mentions another work on comedy, now lost; what remains are a few comments. In Poetics 5 Aristotle remarks that comedy imitates people "worse than average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others" (tr. Bywater). Similar remarks exist in his Rhetoric and in a medieval Greek manuscript known as the Tractatus Coislinianus, Aristotelian in argument and possibly even an actual epitome of Aristotle's lost writing on comedy (ed. Janko, 1984). Save for suggesting some detail of dissociative word and action, this text adds little to what may be gleaned from extant texts of Aristotl. It does make a parallel between comedy and tragedy, however, by saying that catharsis (q.v.) also occurs in comedy "through pleasure and laughter achieving the purgation of like emotions." The meaning of such a phrase is not at all clear, although it suggests comedy as an almost Stoic device to clean away extremes of hedonism and to root out any carnivalesque temptations.
Although both theories involve the psychology of laughter, the superiority theory seems less particularly applicable to comedy than that of incongruity, for the latter seeks both to indicate devices specifically provocative of laughter and to explain their effect on a spectator. The "Aristotelian" analyses suggest several matters. First, their kind of laughter requires oddness, distortion, folly, or some such "version of the ugly," but without pain. Such laughter thus depends on sympathy. Second, although this theory is kinder than that of superiority, it too has its part of cruelty, just because of the touch of ugliness. Third, theories of superiority and of incongruity both take laughter as means, as commentary upon or correction of what we may call the real or even "local" world_unlike metaphysical theories, which make mirth an end in itself and an escape into some "universality." Fourth, both these theories (which supplement rather than oppose one another) require the laughter to be aware of some disfiguring of an accepted norm. Comedy and laughter imply a habit of normality, a familiarity of custom, from which the comic is a deviation. It may indeed be the case that comedy, like tragedy, shows the construction of such order, but above all it demonstrates why such order must be conserved.
II. ANCIENT. The fourth theory would at least partly explain why comic competition was instituted at the Athenian Dionysia some 50 years after that for tragedy (in 486 B.C.). Aristtle has told us the first competition was won by Chionides, who with Magnes represented the first generation of writers of comedy. Around 455 a comic victory was won by Cratinus, who with Crates formed a second generation. Many titles have survived and some fragments, but these constitute near the sum total of extant facts about Athenian comedy until Aristophanes' victory with Acharnians in 425. We know that in this competition Cratinus was second with Kheimazomenoi, and Eupolis third with Noumeniai. These names tell us little, but we may perhaps assume that Aristophanic comedy was fairly typical of this so-called Greek "Old Comedy": a mixture of dance, poetry, song, and drama, combining fantastic plots with mockery and sharp satire of contemporary people, events, and customs. Most of his plays are only partly comprehensible if we know nothing of current social, political, and literary conditions.
Aristophanes did not hesitate to attack education, the law, tragedians, the situation of women (though it is clearly an error to take him for a "feminist" of any kind), and the very nature of Athenian "democracy." Above all he attacked the demagogue Cleon, the war party he led, and the war itself. This says much about the nature of Athenian freedoms, for Aristophanes wrote during the struggle with Sparta, when no one doubted at all that the very future of Athens was in question. Aristophanes' last surviving play (of 11, 44 being attributed to him) is Plutus (388), a play criticizing myth, but whose actual themes are avarice and ambition. Quite different in tone and intent from the preceding openly political plays, Plutus is considered the earliest (and only extant) example of Greek "Middle Comedy."
The situation of comedy was, however, quite different from that of tragedy, for anothe powerful tradition existed. This was centered in Sicilian Syracuse, a Corinthian colony, and claimed the earliest comic writer, Epicharmus, one of the authors at the court of Hieron I in the 470s. We know the titles of some 40 of his plays. Othe comic poets writing in this Doric tradition were Phormis and the slightly younger Deinolochus, but the Dorians were supplanted by the Attic writers in the 5th c. and survive only in fragments. The best known composer of literary versions of the otherwise "para-" or "ub-" literary genre of comic mime was another Sicilian, Sophron, who lived during the late 5th c. From the 4th c. we have a series of vase paintings from Sicily and Southern Italy which suggest that comedy still throve there. The initiative had largely passed, however, to the Greek mainland. Plutus is an example of that Middle Comedy whose volume we know to have been huge. Plautus' Latin Amphitruo (ca. 230 B.C.) seems to be a version of another one, and, if so, one characteristic was the attack on myth. (Aristophanes' earlier Frogs [405], attacking Euripides and Aeschylus, tried in the underworld, may well be thought a forerunner.)
By the mid 4th c., so-called "New Comedy" held the stage. Among its poets the most celebrated and influential was unquestionably Menander (c. 342-290 B.C.). His "teacher" was a certain Alexis of Thurii in southern Italy, so we can readily see how the "colonial" influence continued, even though Alexis was based in Athens. He is supposed to have written 245 plays and to have outlived his pupil. We know of Philemon from either Cilicia or Syracuse, of Diphilos from Sinope on the Black Sea, and of Apollodorus from Carystos in Euboea—worth mentioning as illustrating the great spread of comedy. Until the 1930s, however, only fragments seemed to have survived. Then what can only be considered one of the great literary discoveries turned up a papyrus containing a number of Menander's comedies, complete or almost so. These plays deal not with political matters or criticism of myth, but with broadly social matters (sometimes using mythical themes). The situations are domestic, the comedy is of manners, the characters are stock.
The widespread familiarity of comic forms helps explain why comedy was soon diffused once again over the Greek and roman world. By the mid 3rd c., not only had itinerant troupes spread from Greece throughout the Hellenistic world, but already by 240, Livius Andronicus, from Tarentum in southern Italy, had adapted Greek plays into Latin for public performance. Like Gnaeus Naevius and later Quintus Ennius, this poet composed both tragedy and comedy. From the 3rd c. as well dates Atellan farce (named from Atella in Campania), using stock characters and a small number of set scenes, and featuring clowns (called Bucco or Maccus), foolish old men, and greedy buffoons. These farces were partly improvised, on the basis of skeletal scripts, much like the commedia dell'arte of almost two millennia later. The influence of Etrurian musical performance, southern Italian drama, Greek mime, New Comedy and Atellan farce came together in the comedies of Titus Maccius Plautus, who wrote in the late 3rd c. (he is said by Cicero to have died in 184). By him 21 complete or almost complete comedies have survived. A little later Rome was entertained by the much more highbrow Publius Terentius Afer (Terence), by whom six plays remain extant. These two authors provided themes, characters, and style for comedy as it was to develop in Europe after the Renaissance (though farces, sotties, and comic interludes [q.v.] were widely performed in the Middle Ages).
III. RENAISSANCE AND MODERN EUROPEAN. As in the case of tragedy comedy was rediscovered first in Italy. While humanist scholars published and then imitated both Plautus and Terence (see IMITATION), vernacular art developed alongside wuch efforts. The early 16th c. saw the publication of much school drama in both Latin and Italian, while just a little later there developed the commedia dell'arte, wholse influence was to be enormous.This was a comedy of improvisation, using sketchy scripts and a small number of stock characters—Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, the Doctor and others—placing these last in various situations. These plots were as frequently derived from antiquity as they were from folk art. Later on, these two forms of comedy tented to feed one another; the popular Comédie italienne of the late 17th-c. France was one outcome. The Commedia's influence was equally visible in Marivaux (1688-1763) and Goldoni (1707-93), though in the case of the first, the Italienne was just as important. The Commedia survives vividly in our own time in the theater of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which has put the old characters to work in the service of powerful political satire.
Apain vied with Italy on its development of comedy, starting with the late 15th-c. Celestina of Fernando de Rojas, written in Acts and in dialogue but never really intended for performance. By the late 16th c., Spain's theater was second to none in Europe. Lope de Vega (1562-1635), Calderón (1600-81) and a host of others produced a multitude of romantic and realistic comedy, dealing mainly with love and honor. They provided innumerable plots, themes, and characters for comic writers of France and England. These two countries started rather later than the South, but, like them, benefited from both an indigenous folk tradition and the publication of Latin comedy. The influence of Italian humanist comedy was significant in both nations during the 16th c., and that of Spain particularly in France in the early 17th c.
In France, humanist comedy gave way in the late 1620s to a romantic form of comedy whose threefold source was the prose romance and novella of Spain, Italy, and France, Spanish comedy (especially that of Lope and Cervantes), and Italian dramatic pastoral. The first influential authors in this style were Pierre Corneille (1606-84) and Jean de Rotrou (1609-50). Thew were followed by many, including Cyrano de Bergerac, Thomas Corneille , and the poet whom many consider the greatest writer of comedy of all times, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière (1622-73). He wrote an enormous variety, in verse and prose, rangin from slapstick farce to something approaching bourgeois tragic drama. Comédie ballet, comedy of situation, of manners, of intrigue, and of character all flowed from his pern. He did not hesitate to write on matters that provoked the ire of religious dévots or of professional bigots, nor did he shirk the criticism of patriarchy, and many of his plays have political overtones. Having begun his theatrical career as leader of a traveling troupe, Molière made full use of folk tradition, of provincial dialect, of Commedia and of farce, as well as of Classical example. Many of his characters have become familiar types in French tradition (e.g. the "misanthrope," "tartuffe," "don juan"); many of his lines have become proverbial. While his plays do contain the now familiar young lovers, old men both helpful and obstructive, wily servants both female and male, sensible wives and mothers (whereas husbands and fathers are almost always foolish, headstrong, cuclolded, or downright obstructive); they bear chiefly upon such matters as avarice, ambition, pride, hypocrisy, misanthropy, and other such extreme traits. What interests Molière is how such excess conflicts directly with the well-regulated and customary process of ordered society.
Having followed a similar trajectory to that of its southern neigbours in the first half of the 16th c., England created a comic trad. unique in variety and longevity. The extraordinarily diverse comedies of Shakespeare (1564-1616) and the so-called comedy of humors (q.v.) favored by Jonson (1573-1637) seemed about to create two distinct comic traditions. Shakespeare wrote in almost every mode imaginable: aristocratic romance, bitter and problematic farce, comedy of character, slapstick farce, and the almost tragic Troilus and Cressida. If any comedy may be analyzed with some "metaphysical" theory it is no doubt Shakespeare's, with its concern for madness and wisdom, birth and death, the seasons' cycles, alove and animosity. Yet Shakespeare's comedies remained unique, and he had no successor in this style. Jonson's more urbane comedy of types and of character, satirizing manners and morals, social humbug and excess of all kinds, and falling more clearly into the forms already seen, was soon followed by the quite remarkable flowering of Restoration comedy, with a crowd of authors, including Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve, Behn, and Centlivre, among many others. They produced a brittle comedy of manners and cynical wit whose major impression is one of decayand an almost unbalanced self-interest. They were in turn suceeded by a widely varied 18th-c. comedy from the staunch complacency of Steele through the political satire of Gay to the joyous and mocking cynicism of Goldsmith, Inchbald, and Sheridan. This tradition was pursued thorugh the late 19th and early 20th centuries by a series of great Irish dramatists: Shaw, most notably, then Wilde, Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey.
During this period France was equally productive, but with few exceptions failed to attain the quality represented by the names just mentioned. At the turn of the 17th c., Regnard produced serious and significant social satire, as did Lesage (esp. in Turcaret, 1706). Marivaux dominated the first half of the 18th c., as Voltaire did the middle and Beaumarchais the end. If any new form appeared it was doubtless the comédie larmoyante, a sentimental drama whose main (and stated) purpose was to draw the heartstrings; in a way, it did for comedy what the later melodrama did for tragedy. In the 19th c. Musset produced his delicate comedy of manners, while Dumas fils and others strove to produce a comedy dealing with society's ills. This culminated on the one hand in Scribe's "well-made play," on the other in the "realist" drama of Zola and Antoine at the end of the century.
In other European lands, authors tended to be isolated: in late 19th-c. Norway, Ibsen, in early 20th-c. Russia, Chekhov; slightly later in Italy, Pirandello. To mention them so briefly is to be unjust, for they were all major creative figures. In many ways they foreshadowed that breakdown of traditional comedy that marks the mid to late 20th c. Laughter tends to become mingled problematically with that sense of discomfort in the world and uneas in the self which is perhaps a principal sign of our age. Among representative authors one might mention such as Witkiewicz, Mrozek, and Gombrowicz from Poland; Brecht, Dürrenmatt, and Handke from Germany; Switzerland, and Austria; Adamov, Ionesco, Arraabal, and Beckett in France; Capek, Fischerova, Havel, and Kohut in Czechoslovakia; Pinter, Arden, Bond, Stoppard, Benton, Hare, and Churchill in England; and Hellman, Albee, Baraka, and Simon in America. All have been writing plays that sport ironically with the political, social, and metaphysical dimensions of the human condition. Usually such issues are no longer held separate, and all are fair game for an ambiguous, perplexed, and uncertain derision. Such theater is now widely distributed, as strong in Latin America as in Czechoslovakia, in Italy or Spain as in Nigeria. It is almost as though comedy had lost a sense of that social norm to which we referrred at the outset, as if it were increasingly imbued with an inescapable sense of the tragic.
IV. RELATION TO TRAGEDY. Comedy had from the start a rather ambiguous relation to tragedy, and it was never difficult to see in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusai an inversion of Euripides' Bacchae, for example. A celebrated passage at the end of Plato's Symposium has Socrates obliging Agathon and Aristophanes to agree that comedy and tragedy have the same source. Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard has been played as both comedy and tragedy; so has The Merchant of Venice. Even the elements compounding the confrontation may be identical, as in Macbeth, Jarry's Ubu Roi, or Ionesco's Macbett. When the comic protagonist acquires attributes of typicality or of some absolute, then comedy may take on overtones of tragedy. A critic of Molière's Tartuffe (1667) remarked that whaterver "lacks extremely in reason" is ridiculous: anything contrary to a predictable reaction or an expected and habitual situation is absurd. This is of course straight from the Aristotelian tradition, but the emphasis on excess is significant. It shows just how close comedy always was to tragedy, explaining such comedies as Dom Juan or Le Misanthrope. Both focus on an idealism either misplaced or preposterous. Don Juan's ideal self is misplaced because it serves a violent and injurious sexuality; Alceste's self-righteous scorn becomes comic when he refuses even the most innocent concession, and his responses become inappropriate to his urbane surroundings. Yet if he lowered his tone to suit his milieu he would fall short of his ideal: the dilemma is that of dissonance between the dieal and the situation where it is expressed—incongruity again. The excessive ideal in this case contradicts society's needs and fails its norm.
Tragedy appears to require a world view such that a recognized human quantity may be pitted against a known but inhuman one (variously called Fate, the gods, the idea of some Absolute, etc.), permitting the "limits" of human action and knowledge to be defined. Comedy seems rather to oppose humans to one another, within essentially social boundaries. And if, as both the superiority and the incongruity theories hold, comedy is essentially a social phenomenon, then wherever humans are will be somehow conducive to it; whereas tragedy seems to signify a moment of passage from one sociocultural environment to another. That social nature of comedy may be why its characters sem to us so down-to-earth, pragmatic, and familiar. Even where a theater's real (and external) social context is very different, we can still recognize creatures of a social order. That is also why comedies are in league with their audience, obtaining their spectators' sympathy for what are given as the dominant social interests. Volpone menaces that order, as do Shylock, Tartuffe, and Philokleon (Aristophanes, Wasps). Volpone and Shylock are defeated in the name of the Venetian Republic, as is Tartuffe in that of the King, and Philokleon in that of a city longing for peace. In Palutus' Epidicus, the eponymous slave—archetypal outsider for 3rd c. Rome—is absorbed into and becomes a part of the social system. In Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, the actors remain at loose ends because they are unable to situate either themselves or a social order. Similarly, Beckett's two tramps remain despairingly expectant at the end of Waiting for Godot. Comedy has always emphasized the conservation of an order it may well have helped construct. When we can no more grasp or even envisage that order, then derisive irony may make us laugh, but it also leaves us painfully disturbed. See also BURLESQUE; DRMATIC POETRY; FARCE; GENRE; GREEK POETRY, Classical; PARODY; TRAGICOMEDY.
—oOo—
G. Meredith, An Essay on Comedy (1877; ed. W. Sypher, 1980); F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882); H. L. Bergson, Laughter (1912; ed. W. Sypher, 1980); F. M. Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914); S. Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1916); L. Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy (1922); M. A. Grant, The Ancient Rhetorical Theories of the Laughable (1924); J. Harrison, Themis (1927); K. M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, 2 v. (1934); J. Feibleman, In Praise of Comedy (1939); M. T. Herrick, Comic Theory in the 16th C. (1950), Italian Comedy in the Renaissance (1960); G. E. Duckworth, The Nature of Roman Comedy (1952); W. Sypher, Comedy (1956); Frye; S. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd ed. (1957); A. Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, tr. M. C. Richards (1958); C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive C. (1959); E. Welsford, The Fool (1961); J. L. Styan, The Dark Comedy (1962); A., Nicoll, A History of English Drama, 1660-1900, 6 v. (1952-59), The World of Harlequin (1963); Theories of Comedy, ed. P. Lauter (1964); N. Frye, A Natural Perspective (1965); H. B. Charlton, Shakespearean Comedy (1966); W. Kerr, Tragedy and Comedy (1967); M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. H. Iswolsky (1968); E. Olson, The Theory of Comedy (1968); E. Segal, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus (1968); L. S. Champion, The Evolution of Shakespeare's Comedy (1970); G. M. Sifakis, Parabasis and Animal Choruses: A Contribution to the History of Attic Comedy (1971); W. M. Merchant, Comedy (1972); K. J. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (1972); M. C. Bradbrook, The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy, 2nd ed. (1973); R. b. Martin, The Triumph of Wit: A Study of Victorian Comic Theory (1974); A. Rodway, English Comedy: Its Role and Nature from Chaucer to the Present Day (1975); M. Gurewitch, Comedy: The Irrational Vision (1975); F. H. Sandbach, The Comic Theatre of Greece and Rome (1977); A. Caputi, Buffo: The Genius of Vulgar Comedy (1978); E. Kern, The Absolute Comic (1980); R. Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (1980); R. W. Corrigan, Comedy: Meaning and Form, 2nd ed. (1981); Trypanis; Fowler; K. H. Bareis, Comoedia (1982); D. Konstan, Roman Comedy (1983); E. L. Galligan, The Comic Vision in Literature (1984); R. Janko, Aristotle on Comedy (1984); J. Duvignaud, Le Propre de l'homme: histoire du comique et de la dérision (1985); K. Neuman, Shakespeare's Rhetoric of Comic Character (1985); E. W. Handley, "Comedy," CHCL, v. 1; R. L. Hunter, The New Comedy of Greece and rome (1985); W. E. Gruber, Comic Theaters (1986); T. Lang, Barbarians in Greek Comedy (1986); T. B. Leinward, The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603-1613 (1986); E. Burns, Restoration Comedy: Crises of Desire and Identity (1987); H. Levin, Playboys and Killjoys (1987); L. Siegel, Laughing Matters: Comic Traditions in India (1987).
sábado, 22 de diciembre de 2012
The Importance of Being Earnest
From The Oxford Companion to English Literature:
The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, a play by Oscar Wilde, first performed at the St James's Theatre, London, on 14 Feb. 1895.
Wilde's most dazzling and epigrammatic work, it describes the courtships and betrothals of two young men about town, John Worthing (Jack) and Algernon (Algy) Moncrieff, who are in pursuit respectively of Gwendolen Fairfax (Algy's cousin) and Jack's ward, Cecily Cardew. Both young men lead double lives, in that Jack is known in town under the name of Ernest, while representing to his ward Cecily in the country that he has a wicked brother Ernest. Algy, to cover his own diversions, has created a fictitious character, the sickly Bunbury, whose ill health requires a visit whenever engagements in town (particularly those with his formidable aunt Lady Bracknell) render his absence desirable. After many confusions of identity, during which it transpires that Cecily's governess, Miss Prism, had once mislaid Jack as a baby in a handbag at Victoria Station, it is revealed that Jack and Algy are in fact brothers, and that Jack's name is indeed Ernest. All objections, both financial and genealogical, to both matches, are thus overcome and Gwendolen's addiction to the very name of 'Ernest' is satisfied, so all ends happily.
—oOo—
BBC TV production, 1986 (Full movie). Subtitled, in sections:
The Life and Loves of Oscar Wilde:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiQMDNYpqeI
The Way of the World
From The Oxford Companion to English Literature:
The Way of the World, a comedy by Congreve, produced 1700.
Mirabell is in love with Millamant, a niece of Lady Wishfort, and has pretended to court the aunt in order to conceal his suit of the niece. The deceit has been revealed to lady Wishfort by Mrs Marwood to revenge herself on Mirabell, who has rejected her advances. Lady Wishfort, who now hates Mirabell 'more than a quaker hates a parrot', will deprive her niece of the half of the inheritance which is in her keeping if Millamant marries Mirabell. The latter accordingly contrives that his servant Waitwell shall impersonate an uncle of his, Sir Rowland, make love to Lady Wishfort, and pretend to marry her, having, however, first married Lady Wishfort's woman Foible. He hopes by this deception to force Lady Wishfort to consent to his marriage to her niece. The plot is discovered by Mrs. Marwood, and also the fact that Mirabell has in the past had an intrigue with Mrs Fainall, daughter of Lady Wishfort. She [Mrs. Marwood] conspires with Fainall, her lover, and the pretended friend of Mirabell, to reveal these facts to Lady Wishfort, while Fainall is to threaten to divorce his wife and discredit Lady Wishfort, unless he is given full control of Mrs Fainall's property and Millaman's portion is also handed over to him. The scheme, however, fails. Mrs Fainall denies the charge against her and brings proof of Fainall's affair with Mrs Marwood, while Mirabell produces a deed by which Mrs Fainall, before her last marriage, made him trustee of her property. Lady Wishfort, in gratitude for her release from Fainall's threats, forgives Mirabell and consents to his marriage to Millamant.
Congreve enlives the action with a fine gallery of fools, including Sir Willful Witwhould, Lady Wishfort's boisterous and good-natured country nephew; they serve to highlight the central contrast between the passionate and grasping relationship of Fainall and Mrs Marwood and the delicate process by which Mirabell persuades Millamant that even in such a mercenary society, love can survive into marriage. The dialogue is exceptionally brilliant, and many critics also consider the play a study of the battle between good and evil, rather than of the characteristically Restoration conflict between the witty and the foolish.
—oOo—
The Country Wife
A comedy by William Wycherley, 1675. A BBC production with Helen Mirren, 1976:
The china scene:
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