This world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to
those that feel.
Horace Walpole (1717-1797)
The test of true comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful
laughter.
George Meredith, “Essay on Comedy” (1877)
We laugh at “something mechanical encrusted on the living.”
Henri Bergson, Laughter
(1900)
Comedy is an art form that arises naturally wherever people
are gathered to celebrate life, in spring festivals, triumphs, birthdays,
weddings, or initiations. For it
expresses the . . . delight man takes in his special mental gifts that make him
the lord of creation; it is an image of human vitality holding its own in the
world amid the surprises of unplanned coincidence.
Susanne
K. Langer, “The Comic Rhythm” from Feeling and Form (1953)
What normally happens is that a young man wants a young
woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition [that is, the blocking
force], ususally paternal, and that near the end of the play some twist in the
plot enables the hero to have his will.
In this simple pattern there are several complex elements. In the first place, the movement in comedy
is usually a movement from one kind of society to another.
There are two ways of developing the form of comedy: one is to throw the main emphasis on the
blocking characters; the other is to throw if forward on the scenes of
discovery and reconciliation. One is
the general tendency of comic irony, satire realism, and studies of manner; the
other is the tendency of Shakespearean and other types of romantic comedy.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy
of Criticism (1957)
Unlike the tragic figure, the comic figure is to all intents
and purposes undivided; that is, he is not caught in a basis cross-fire of
desires and values that makes the primary demand upon his psychic energy and
hence upon ours. . . . The comic achievement is the integration of all elements
in action rather than the domination of one element in the self which leads to
the rebound of another neglected one, as in tragedy.
Robert B.
Heilman, The Ways of the World:
Comedy and Society (1978)
What is the comic view of life? All comedy celebrates humankind’s capacity to endure; it
dramatizes the fact that no matter how many times we may get knocked down or
fall short, we somehow manage to pull ourselves up and keep going. There is something almost biological about
the comic—and this is the source of its energy as well as its appeal to
audiences. It reveals the unquenchable
vitality of our impulse to survive. the
central intuition of comedy is an innate and deeply felt trust in life.
Robert W.
Corrigan, Comedy: Meaning and Form (1981)
Where tragedy is primarily the dramatization of the single
life that ripens and then can only rot, that reaches its fullest and then is
destroyed, comedy is primarily the dramatization of the renewing of the self
and of social relationships. the tragic
figure is isolated from society, partly by his different nature, and partly by
his tragic act; comedy suggest that selfhood is found not in assertion of
individuality, but in joining in the fun, in becoming part of the flow of
common humanity.
Sylvan Barnet, Morton Berman, and William Burto, Types of
Drama (1981)