Laughter: More than Inconsequence

     I always thought laughter was some inconsequential byproduct of an arbitrarily humorous event. Never did it occur to me that it is a subconscious construction designed for societal improvement. Even further than that, my understanding of knowledge would have been unlikely to obtain the notion that laughter could be used as a tool to appeal to the conscience of an audience, in order for them to see just how ridiculous or notwithstanding their perception of something might be. 

     In reexamining Lysistrata, it can easily be seen how laughter can be harnessed as the "spoonful of sugar" with which the medicines of social improvement and criticism can more easily go down. Obviously, nobody particularly enjoys being shown that their current understanding of things is wrong, and thus for this reason social criticisms can be difficult to convey to an uneager audience, just as medicine is often difficult to administer to those unwitting to its value. So, like the sugar to the medicine, the laughter that a comedy can invoke can serve as a lubricant to the delivery of a constructive message otherwise not as amicable to the audience. 

     Aristophanes utilizes many invocations of laughter to convey the point more easily to the audience. Take the scene where Kinesias uses the child between himself and Myrrhine as a means of luring into bed with him for example. In this scene, he tries to get her to give up her cause and return to the way of things before Lysistrata's female-led revolution. This scene exists only to serve as an exposition of the strength and resilience of the Athenian women, especially in contrast to the sexual, simple-mindedness of their counterparts. The Greek men watching this play probably wouldn't have recieved well the raw statement "women can be stronger than you men," between gender-roles associated with the society of their time as well as their arete, or sense of pride in manhood. However, when comic elements of the scene are in place, such as Kinesias's ridiculous, under-breath mutterings to his son for him to scream for his mother, the audience will more easily accept the message and all that comes with it- criticism included. The men can laugh at just how ridiculous and desparate Kinesias's methods are in getting his way, and in doing so are more likely to swallow the virtue of Myrrhine here as well. 

     Thinking of laughter as a form of social-improvement-lubricant, it's quite easy to see just how far off it would be to take laughter as merely an inconsequential by-product. Clearly laughter has both practical purpose as well as physical effect, and has been used for centuries to filter concepts into a language that nearly everyone can understand.

** Sorry for the length, but when I read "in-depth" for this assignment, I wasn't sure if that requirement had changed or not, so I played it safe and took my time developing my thoughts. Thanks for reading!**

The Beaver Coat- Scene Changes as a Confusion Tactic

The Beaver Coat is a text clearly best suited to stage performance, due to its need for utilizing scene changes as a means of allowing the audience to figure out what happened on their own without having to be explicitly told, which is in most cases a limitation of the classic novel or story. For the play to be interesting to the audience, it has to be able to hold their attention, and in the case of The Beaver Coat, Hauptmann takes an interactive approach.

When the play opens, there's a mildly entertaining, though initially seemingly drear, discussion underway between the members of some folks living in a village just outside Berlin. (Their rural lifestyle is made clear by their use of diction in the translation.) This theme continues (See what I'm saying about a boring scene?) until a conflict is established, though somewhat vaguely, in that the family doesn't have the firewood they're needing for the cold weather. The family's financial struggle combined with this need for heating during the cold weather allows for the introduction of the dramatic irony while Mrs. Wolff attempts to harmlessly remedy her situation. The interactivity begins here, with the audience wondering how the conflicts will end up being resolved.

The major reveal comes when the audience first finds out that Mrs. Wolff stole the wood, which could be at one of two places: 1. if the audience is clever enough to piece together both the attention given by Mrs. Wolff to the wood that Krüger has laying in front of his garden and the second scene consisting of the revelation that someone had indeed stolen said wood (Which, admittedly, isn't that difficult to be made aware of.) 2. when in the set in the third scene the wood is explicitly seen as a part of the set of the Wolff home. While the audience never explicitly sees the act of Mrs. Wolff taking the wood, as a result of the scene changes and omission of the act from what the audience sees, they're left hanging on and making their own determination, as the truth is fed to them bit by bit.

The second instance of interactivity is the sudden introduction of the linened package in scene four, as the audience knows nothing of its existence up to this point, and certainly no indication as to what it contains. This detail is another point that the audience can get fixated on, driving their interest, in what is almost a reverse-dramatic irony situation, where the audience doesn't have a clue what's going on, but the key characters on stage do.

With these two situations serving as simple examples, Hauptmann's play contains simple devices, merely in the construction and placement of abrupt and seemingly long scene changes, that nearly force the audience into paying attention, simply on the fixation on that which they have no capacity to know. In this way, it almost isn't fair, as a means of hopeless captivation.