Why we should favour comedy over tragedy.
O Ozymandias, O Orestes!
There they are, that long line of tragic heroes, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and even Macbeth, how the mighty do fall, that being the essence of Aristotelian tragedy. From Greek tragic drama to Shakespearean tragic drama, the person of noble mind, or at least noble birth, makes a mistake of judgement arising from some personal flaw such as one of your seven deadly sins. No escape, each recognises the error too late to save the hero from an inevitable tragic fate.
There’s irony in tragedy since we, like some perceptive chorus, early on can see the hero’s self deception, which so often turns out to be hubris. Take Hamlet as example, it’s why Shakespeare had to create The Soliloquy, to accommodate Hamlet’s endless meditating on self. Here’s the opening lines of his first soliloquy … one of seven in the Play: O, that this too too solid flesh would melt/Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! /Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d/ His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!/ How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,/ Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Perhaps the prevailing pride of your tragic hero is brought about as the great man gets to take the crowd’s subservience for a genuine reflection of his worth, maybe a case of mistaken identity. Consider those fatal initial acts in tragic drama, often acts of intractable vanity. There’s Oedipus and his father, ill-met at the crossroads and neither would give way to the other, a petty reason for an honour killing. Lear and Hamlet, so self centred, yes I know we are overcome with pity at Lear’s tragic fate… but what about Macbeth, he’ll stop at nothing to be top man, only fits the tragic formula because he’s promoted to be thane of Cawder. There’s something somewhat specious about your Aristotelian tragedy though it does make for a grand theatrical experience.
But comedy, I suggest, is a more down to earth rendering of our human condition. Consider that ascent of man image depicting our evolution from ape to man.
The Long Ascent… …
From ape to man, you know its a longer ascent than that. Why, our lineage can be traced back further even than our fishy ancestors, back to single celled organisms, the origin of all life. Know we carry that ancestry within us – gods we are not.
Part of the herd but sometimes not. Picture this… A flock of birds in the sky, one ascends in a sudden burst from its midst and rises higher – sometimes a human does this too – an insightful dramatist, your great composer of symphonies, a far-seeing scientist or engineer, an agronomist or even a modest doctor. How many lives did Dr John Snow save when he located the source of London’s cholera outbreak in the 1850’s?
There is human behaviour from various cultural settings and epochs that has been impressive, even rational, but a study of the human record in history is not reassuring, recognise our groupi-ness, our predisposition to predatory behaviour – our genes are always with us, constantly challenging the good intentions to which we might aspire. Comedy is less pitying than Tragedy, it views us at our evolutionary worst.
The Divine Comedy concerning Non-Divine Behaviour.
It tis said that only humans laugh – so why do we laugh and what do we laugh at? Henri Bergson, in his essay, ‘Laughter – An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,’ argues that we laugh at human intransigence, ‘rigidity is the comic and laughter s the correction.’ We laugh at a certain inelasticity of mind that is closely akin to absent-mindedness.’
Human laughter is a survival mechanism we’ve evolved to remind us always to be on the alert. We should and do laugh when someone slips on a banana skin. We laugh at the frozen expression, a grimace, on the face of a cartoon character when life is demanding mobility and adaptability. We laugh at comic language, those malaprops made due to lapses of attention or as witty responses in language that are a deliberate play on careless thinking. Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll provoke us in this way:
‘The lack of money is the root of all evil,’ quips Mark Twain.
‘I say what I mean,’ says Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland’ ‘at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing you know.’
‘
‘Not the same thing a bit,’ said the Hatter, ‘You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see.’ ‘
‘You might just as well say,’ added the March Hare, ‘ that ‘ I like what I get ‘ is the same thing as ‘ I get what I like.’
Scene – change and sea – change.
Transposing the natural into another key is a mode of comedy that jolts our tendency to stereotype-thinking. Shift the solemn into the familiar, making small things large and large things small are ways that comedy reminds us of our human thoughtless -ness. Parody, satire, buffoonery are potent techniques in the armoury of comedy.
In Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,’ two animals in a farm – yard, Chanticleer and Pertelote, discuss meaningful life issues from their perch in the poultry yard, an ironical parody on our own limited perspective.
In Alexander Pope’s satirical poem, ‘ An Essay on Man,’ Pope attacks human hubris that allows us to adopt an ego-centric view of the universe:
Canto V-
Ask for what end the heav’nly bodies shine,
Earth for whose use? Pride answers, ” ‘Tis for mine:
For me kind Nature wakes her genial pow’r,
Suckles each herb, and spreads out ev’ry flow’r;
Annual for me, the grape, the rose renew,
The juice nectareous, and the balmy dew;
For me, the mine a thousand treasures brings;
For me, health gushes from a thousand springs;
Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise;
My foot-stool earth, my canopy the skies.
In Jonathan Swift’s satirical travel tale, Gulliver’s Travels,’ Gulliver, as a giant in the land of Lilliput, appears gross and clumsy to the tiny inhabitants. Later, when he is marooned on the island of Brobdingnag, which is inhabited by giants, Gulliver himself is insignificant and weak.
Regarding the human condition, there’s some truth in both these points of view.
Consider we humans trampling thoughtlessly across a patch of meadow-land, partly demolishing a colony of ants as we go, only to be decimated in out turn, at some other time and place, by cosmic forces, tempest, earth-quake, flood, these beyond our puny human control.
‘What fools these humans be.’
– Robin Goodfellow.
Lots of buffoonery in Shakespeare’s ‘ Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ a romantic triangle concerning four fraught young lovers who are fittingly lost in the woods, the shifting alliances of these young lovers made more confusing by the machinations of the forest fairy folk who use their magic tricks to intervene in the lovers’ affairs. There’s a social hierarchy at work in the play involving the upper-class lovers, themselves subject to rule by Theseus, Duke of Athens; there are the lower class rustics, tradesmen about to rehearse a play, itself a burlesque, ‘The Tragedy of Pyramis and Thisbe,’ in honour of the nuptials of the Duke of Athens and his bride to be, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. Then there’s the world of the fairies ruled by the fairy king Oberon and his wife Titania. In between being engaged in their own domestic disputes and infidelities, the fairies intervene in the human lovers’ drama and also the play rehearsal of Bottom the Weaver, Nick the Joiner and the other trades folk.
‘Oh what fools these humans be!’ declares Robin Goodfellow, Oberon’s main performer of trickery. And they are. No one in this world of changing alliances and power plays could be said to be a paragon of good sense. Nor paragons of virtue either.
Demetrius has discarded his first love, Helena to pursue Hermia, who loves Lysander. Helena, though a long time friend of Hermia, is quite prepared to betray her friend’s confidences if it will gain her some short-term approval from the surly Demetrius. Nor does the history of the Duke of Athens and his bride bear scrutiny, there’s been some violence there…
The buffoonery of the rustics makes us laugh. Bottom the Weaver’s instructions on the art of the play are a parody of Hamlet’s instructions to players in Shakespeare’s later tragic play. But here’s the thing. When Oberon plays a trick upon his wife, and makes her fall in love with Bottom, who, thanks to Puck’s mischief-making now wears the head of an ass, Bottom is offered anything he desires by Titania, but unlike Macbeth, Bottom’s wishes are not megalomaniac and his requests courteously framed:
Mounsieur Cobweb, good mounsieur, get you your
weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipped
humble-bee on the top of a thistle; and, good
mounsieur, bring me the honey-bag. Do not fret
yourself too much in the action, mounsieur; and
good mounsieur, have a care the honey-bag break not;
I would be loath to have you overflown with
honey-bag, signior.
What fools, and knaves, these humans be, and yet there’s something unassuming and quite benign about Bottom the weaver, he’s not the stuff of tragedy, nor of satire, more the Jacques Tati kind of clown. We laugh at Jacques Tati’s naivety in ‘Mon Oncle’ and ‘Playtime,’ as we laugh at almost every one else in those films, but not too harshly. O what fools these humans be as they stumble through life, sometimes captivated but always confused by modern technology and the bureaucratic world that seeks to manage it.
Then there are Fellini’s clowns!
That’s all folks.
beththeserf 