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Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.
—Sholom Aleichem
The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.
—Miguel de Cervantes
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
—Aldous Huxley |
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As hyper-intelligent consumers of literature, we've all seen things labeled "comedy" that aren't funny. For example, Dante's Divine Comedy.
The origin of the word "comedy," insofar as I've been able to trace it, dates back to ancient Greece. The etymology, as is so often the case, stops there, as if all concepts suddenly appeared, fully formed like Athena from Zeus's noggin, in Grecian antiquity. Originally, it could, but didn't have to, contain humorous elements; what made something a comedy (smiling face mask) rather than a tragedy (wailing face mask) was that a comedy had a happy ending.
Those face masks were, I'm convinced, the ancient world's equivalent of today's laugh tracks and somber musical scores. They told the audience what their reaction should be.
And that seems to be the sense that Dante Alighieri used. Now, I haven't read the whole thing (according to Wikipedia, it contains over 14 thousand lines), but I get the impression it was serious fanfiction. Still, I suppose the narrator surviving his tour of the mythological afterlife was a happy ending... at least for a little while. Which is why it was called a comedy at that time (late 15th century).
I'm of the considered opinion that there's no such thing as a happy ending; there are only stories that wrap up too soon.
But I digress. Anyone who was forced to skim the Cliff's Notes for Shakespeare in school knows that Billy wrote three kinds of plays: comedies, tragedies, and histories. I suspect the histories were mostly tragedies, but I'm ignoring them for our purposes today and because I never actually read them. Every time I try, I start out with "Once more into the breach, dear friends!" and end up with "Lord, what fools these mortals be."
I had a drama teacher who pointed out that the difference between a Shakespearean comedy and tragedy is that the comedy starts with a death and ends with a marriage, while the tragedy starts with a marriage and ends with a death. Or several deaths, like in Romeo and Juliet, which I am firmly convinced was meant as satire.
In any case, I'd put anything that ends in a marriage into the "Horror" genre, but I may be biased.
Humorous works of art (plays, music, poetry, etc.), of course, started long before Shakespeare; the Greeks probably claimed to have invented that, too. But I think it was Shakespeare that cemented the association between "comedy" and "humor." Oh, wait, he was British: "humour."
But even today, when you see the word "comedy," or something like it, don't always assume you're going to laugh your ass off, especially if the thing in question is classic literature. Listen for the laugh track. |
Some funnies for your reading pleasure:
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Last time, in "Death" , I noted that death can drive comedy.
YugiohPKMN  : …what happened to the cat? It sounds like it didn’t make it….
As this is the Comedy newsletter and not the Tragedy newsletter, I purposely left that part out.
So that's it for me for October! See you next month. Until then,
LAUGH ON!!!
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Comedy: October 12, 2022 Issue [#11603]
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