- Comedy is human: we laugh at people or the things they do
- Laughter seems to require a certain detachment or emotional distance from the object of laughter
- Laughter has a social function
I think society is always evolving. Examples such as the legalization of marijuana, prohibition (alcohol) and the revocation of prohibition, and the controversey over same -sex marriages are just a few reminders of how basically everything evolves, and society has a tendency of forcing those changes, no matter the individual's feelings. It’s almost as if ’society’ is its own entity, causing changes that are mostly uncontrollable by individuals. Many of the texts we have read in this class do not seem that funny because the humor is lost on us, an evolved society that already has more widely accepted civil rights for women, men and children. Many of the ideas introduced by comedy, i.e. women protesting the government in Lysystrata or Adam, the judge, trying to assault a young girl in the Broken Jug and actually being reprimanded for the act, were just unreal notions the author used too provoke laughter. I find this more than a little disturbing. Did the authors know exactly what they were doing? I really think so. I hate to take the ‘laughter’ out of comedy, but if these authors (Ibsen, Von Kleist, Goldoni) had not found a way to introduce these new and crazy ideas to an evolving society, we may never have experienced the checks and balances today’s media such as movies, plays, news stations, and documentaries provide. Transparency of the government through comedy (which seems funny just writing this) seems to have slithered by all the corrupt governments' censorship and out into the mainstream of the public through the ages over and over. These writings seem to have their own small civil rights’ movements encapsulated in each story, and I think that is amazing. It appears that comedy and laughter can break down barriers for society as its own entity. I know that laughter can help make friends, but I feel the big picture of laughter can help improve society in an amazingly tangible and viable way. Maybe I am giving too much credit to comedy, but many of these stories allude to civil rights we all take for granted in 2014.
I agree. The progressive society we see today can be seen in all of the stories we have read. I also sometimes find it hard to see the comedy in these plays because the actions seem so trivial to us.
ReplyDeleteI think you're absolutely right. I reflect to our class discussion of Carnivalesque, and how for a moment there was an extreme "anything goes" attitude concerning the material of the plays, to an extent that one might be hard-pressed to find in many a regime throughout history. In other words, the transparency of comedy, or even, the delivery of a message under the mask of comedy, as I would state it, has been a progressive tool for a long time. In my post, I used Lysistrata, partially to prove the point of the long-time existence of the political motive that has existed in comedy over the centuries.
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