COMEDYA TIME FOR LAUGHTER

from Discovering Literature, Ch. 30, pg.1371-1373Hilltop High SchoolAP English LiteratureMrs. Demangos

COMEDY

“Comedy takes us into a golden world of liberating laughter. Tragedy makes us face our limits. It brings men and women up against the boundaries of human hope and endeavor. Comedy celebrates the renewal of hope.”

SATIRE

“Comedy intersects with reality when it makes us laugh at attitudes that stand in the way of a more humane world. Wielding humor as a weapon, the comic playwright uses satire to do battle against callousness, stinginess, or hypocrisy.”

TECHNIQUES USED IN SATIRE

1.Outrageous exaggerations2.Deadpan understatements3.Warped Logic (absurdities

dressed up as common sense)

4.Improbable Situations5.Ridiculous Names

STOCK CHARACTERSThe miser, the hypochondriac, and the malcontent—forever dissatisfied with everything—have long been stock characters that audiences delight in seeing on the stage again and again.

Think-Pair-Share: can you think of any stock characters you are familiar with?

TRAGICOMEDY

“The alternative to tragedy and comedy as separate forms is to mix laughter and tears, as they mix in real life.”Tragicomedy: mixed genre in which the tragic and the comic visions contend.

Shakespeare’ tragicomedies usually have improbable and complex plots; characters of high social class; contrasts between villainy and virtue; love of different kinds at their center; a hero who is saved at the last minute after a touch-and- go experience; surprises and treachery. The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline are two plays that fit that tragicomical pattern. http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/shakespeare-plays/play-types/tragicomedy-plays/

The Merchant of Venice can be seen as a tragicomedy. It has a comic structure but one of the central characters, Shylock, looks very much like a tragic character. The play has a comedy ending with the lovers pairing off but we are left with taste in the mouth of the ordeal of Shylock, destroyed by a combination of his own faults and the persecution of the lovers who enjoy that happy ending. The feeling at the end of the play is neither joy nor misery.

WHAT MAKES US LAUGH?

We laugh, or smile, when something delightful happens.

We also laugh when we find something, or someone, ridiculous. We laugh at the opposite of what is desirable or agreeable to human nature.

We laugh at what is rigid, mechanical, unnatural—the opposite of what is natural or organic in human life.

Hard-nosed theory: we laugh at shortcomings that make us feel superior to others—we laugh with relief: bumblers, clumsy lovers, waiters who drop heavy trays, foreigners wrestling with the English language.

Defensive theory: humor as a shield, or armor. It is a mask we may put on to fend off prying or pity.

THE SOUL OF COMEDY

Chase of Wit: quick witty dialogue, characters trading quick pointed remarks.

Word play: see 10 Types of Word Play

Puns: see Puns in Literature

PARODYA parody imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work in order to make fun of those same features. The humorist achieves parody by exaggerating certain traits common to the work, much as a caricaturist creates a humorous depiction of a person by magnifying and calling attention to the person's most noticeable features.

The term parody is often used synonymously with the more general term spoof, which makes fun of the general traits of a genre rather than one particular work or author.

Often the subject-matter of a parody is comically inappropriate, such as using the elaborate, formal diction of an epic to describe something trivial like washing socks or cleaning a dusty attic.

In Shamela (1741), Henry Fielding makes a parody of Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela by turning the virtuous serving girl into a spirited and sexually ambitious character who merely uses coyness and false chasteness as a tool for snagging a husband.

FARCE

Frowned upon by critics but beloved by the multitude.A farce is a form of low comedy designed to provoke laughter through highly exaggerated caricatures of people in improbable or silly situations.

TRAITS OF FARCE

(1)physical bustle such as pratfalls, horseplay, insults, crude jokes—slapstick

(2)sexual misunderstandings and mix-ups

(3)broad verbal humor such as puns.

Many of Shakespeare's early works, such as The Taming of the Shrew, are considered farces.

MORE ON COMEDY

AP Central, Comedy and Its Characteristics

Quizlet, Comedy Literary Devices