Comedy

• 1. Introduction

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  Comedy is a genre of dramatic works built on a deceptively simple promise: make people laugh. But behind that promise lies more than two thousand years of argument, invention, and cultural collision. Aristotle defined it as an imitation of men worse than the average, but only insofar as they are ridiculous. Plato thought it dangerous enough to regulate. And somewhere between those two positions, an enormous human tradition took shape.

  The word itself carries the fingerprints of ancient Greece. Dean Rubin traces "comedy" to the Classical Greek kōmōidía, a compound of kômos, meaning "revel", and ōidḗ, meaning "singing" or "ode". It passed through Latin comoedia and Italian commedia before arriving in English, shifting in meaning at nearly every stop. In the Middle Ages, it attached itself to narrative poems with happy endings. Dante used it in exactly that sense when he named his poem La Commedia. By the 20th century, it had broadened to mean virtually any performance intended to cause laughter.

  What drove those shifts? What did Aristophanes understand about power and ridicule that still shapes a comedy special today? And how did a form born in phallic processions and fertility festivals become one of the most globally distributed art forms in history? Those are the questions this documentary pursues.

• 2. Born in Ribaldry

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  Starting from 425 BCE, Aristophanes wrote 40 comedies for the ancient Athenian stage, 11 of which survive. He developed his approach from an older form called the satyr play, which Aristotle, writing around 335 BCE in his Poetics, described as the probable origin of comedy itself. Those satyr plays were often highly obscene. The surviving examples are by Euripides, and they are late enough in the tradition to be unrepresentative of the rawer original form.

  Aristotle was specific about what that origin looked like: comedy grew from phallic processions and the light treatment of the base and ugly. He also noted, with some candor, that the origins of comedy are obscure precisely because it was not treated seriously from the start. It was not the kind of thing anyone kept careful records of.

  Yet comedy had its own Muse. Her name was Thalia, and her domain was not the heroic or the tragic but the light, the low, and the lucky. Aristotle himself taught that comedy was generally positive for society, since it produces happiness, which he considered the ideal state and the final goal of any activity. He divided comedy into three subgenres: farce, romantic comedy, and satire. Plato disagreed sharply. In The Republic, he argued that violent laughter provokes a violent reaction and undermines rational self-control. The guardians of his ideal state, he wrote, should avoid it entirely.

  Aristotle also placed comedy within his larger scheme of literature. He defined four original genres: verse, drama (which included comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play), lyric poetry, and epic poetry. Comedy ranked as the genre most divorced from mimesis, or true imitation of life. Tragedy was the truest mirror; comedy sat furthest from it. A comedy, in his account, begins with low characters seeking insignificant aims and ends with those aims accomplished in a way that either lightens their initial baseness or exposes how trivial the aims were.

• 3. Meaning in Motion

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  Greek and Roman writers confined the word "comedy" to stage-plays with happy endings. The adjective "comic" meant strictly that which relates to comedy, though in modern usage it has narrowed to mean simply laughter-provoking. That contraction tells part of the story of how the concept traveled.

  After the Latin translations of the 12th century, "comedy" gained a more general meaning in medieval literature. But the path was not always straight. In the medieval Islamic world, Arabic writers and Islamic philosophers including Abu Bishr and his pupils Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes translated and elaborated Aristotle's Poetics. They disassociated comedy entirely from Greek dramatic representation and identified it instead with Arabic poetic forms, particularly hija, a tradition of satirical poetry. For these thinkers, comedy was simply the art of reprehension. Happy endings and light-hearted events played no part in their definition.

  In the Middle Ages more broadly, the term "comedy" became synonymous first with satire and later with humour in general. By the late 20th century, many scholars preferred to abandon genre labels like comedy, satire, irony, and the grotesque altogether. They proposed instead the broader term "laughter" to cover the full range of the comic, sidestepping the definitional arguments that had accumulated over centuries.

  Northrop Frye framed the essential shape of comedy as a conflict between a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old". A revised reading narrows this further: comedy at its core pits a relatively powerless young person against the social conventions blocking his hopes. Lacking authority, he resorts to ruses, which create dramatic irony, which provokes laughter. That structural engine, identified in Greek theater, still drives romantic comedy and farce today.

• 4. Punch, Grimaldi, Karno

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  The Punch and Judy show has roots in the 16th-century Italian commedia dell'arte. The figure of Punch derives from the Neapolitan stock character of Pulcinella, and the figure who would become Mr. Punch made his first recorded appearance in England in 1662. Professor Glyn Edwards describes what happened next: the British changed Punch's name, transformed him from a marionette into a hand puppet, and he became "a spirit of Britain, a subversive maverick who defies authority, a kind of puppet equivalent to our political cartoons." Edwards attributes his immediate appeal to the Restoration audiences who were, in his words, "fun-starved after years of Puritanism".

  In early 19th century England, pantomime acquired its present form, which includes slapstick comedy and features the first mainstream clown, Joseph Grimaldi. Comedy routines also featured heavily in British music hall theatre, which became popular in the 1850s. Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel, and Dan Leno were among the comedians who honed their skills in music hall sketches.

  English music hall comedian and theatre impresario Fred Karno took things further in the 1890s, developing a form of sketch comedy without dialogue. Chaplin and Laurel both worked for his company. Stan Laurel later said in his biography: "Fred Karno didn't teach Charlie and me all we know about comedy. He just taught us most of it." Film producer Hal Roach was equally emphatic: "Fred Karno is not only a genius, he is the man who originated slapstick comedy. We in Hollywood owe much to him."

  Across the Atlantic, American vaudeville emerged in the 1880s and remained popular until the 1930s. It produced comedians including W. C. Fields, Buster Keaton, and the Marx Brothers, each of whom would carry their skills into the expanding medium of film.

• 5. Absurdity as Art

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  Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland gave readers hookah-smoking caterpillars and croquet matches played with live flamingos as mallets. Edward Lear's 1871 story The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World describes an island "made of water quite surrounded by earth", and a single tree 503 feet high. These are early markers of a comedic instinct that would find its name in the 20th century: surreal humour.

  Surreal humour, also described as absurdist humour, is built on deliberate violations of causal reasoning. Its appeal comes from the ridiculousness and unlikeliness of a situation rather than from a logical analysis of it. The genre has roots in Surrealism in the arts, and in the early 20th century several avant-garde movements including the dadaists, surrealists, and futurists began arguing for art that was random, jarring, and illogical. Their goals were, in some sense, serious. They wanted to undermine what they saw as the solemnity and self-satisfaction of the contemporary artistic establishment.

  Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, created in 1917, placed an inverted urinal in an art exhibition and signed it "R. Mutt". It became one of the most famous and influential pieces of art in history and one of the earliest examples of the found object movement. It was also, the source is clear, a joke: it relied on the inversion of the item's function and the incongruity of its presence where it didn't belong.

  After the Second World War, Britain's Goon Show brought surreal humour to radio, and its influence spread to the American radio and recording troupe the Firesign Theatre. Australian satirist Barry Humphries, whose comic creations include the housewife and "gigastar" Dame Edna Everage, was described by biographer Anne Pender in 2010 as not only "the most significant theatrical figure of our time" but "the most significant comedian to emerge since Charlie Chaplin".

• 6. Comedy as Argument

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  George Meredith proposed a test: "One excellent test of the civilization of a country... I take to be the flourishing of the Comic idea and Comedy, and the test of true Comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter." That phrase, thoughtful laughter, points toward a function of comedy that goes beyond entertainment.

  American literary theorist Kenneth Burke described what he called the "comic frame" in rhetoric as "neither wholly euphemistic, nor wholly debunking". In his account, it offers a charitable attitude toward people while maintaining shrewdness about their simplifications. The comic frame makes fun of situations and people while simultaneously provoking thought. It does not aim to vilify but to rebuke foolery.

  Burke pointed to Jon Stewart's Daily Show as a working example. In one segment on President Obama's trip to China, Stewart addressed America's debt to the Chinese government while also acknowledging the two countries' weak relationship. After laying out that dismal situation, Stewart shifted to address Obama directly, calling on him to "shine that turd up." Introducing coarse language into serious political commentary created the comic frame Burke described: a serious underlying tone carried by a comedic surface.

  Satire and political satire operate on a related principle. They use comedy to portray people or institutions as ridiculous or corrupt, creating distance between the audience and the object of the joke. Parody works differently: it subverts popular genres and forms, critiquing those forms without necessarily condemning them. Thomas Hobbes captured something adjacent when he described laughter as "sudden glory", a moment when the laughing person feels superior. The psychologists who later studied the phenomenon agreed that incongruity and shock are the predominant characteristics of what provokes laughter, with a feeling of superiority often mixed in.

• 7. Comedy Without Borders

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  By 200 BC, Bharata Muni's Natya Shastra had already codified humour as one of the nine nava rasas, or principle emotional responses an audience can experience. The rasa of humour was associated with the bhava of laughter and mirth, called hasya. Well-known comedic plays from Indian classical drama include Mṛcchakatika by Shudraka and Ratnavali.

  China has many traditions of comedy. Xiangsheng, also known as crosstalk, is usually a rapid dialogue between two people emphasizing word play and allusions. Japan developed Rakugo, a form of comic storytelling in which a single seated performer narrates humorous tales using dialogue, vocal variation, and minimal props. Rakugo grew from medieval setsuwa literature and Buddhist preaching and became a popular professional performance art during the Edo period.

  The advent of cinema in the late 19th century and then radio and television in the 20th century extended the reach of all these traditions. Charlie Chaplin, through silent film, became one of the best-known faces on Earth. The silent tradition lived on well into the late 20th century through mime artists like Marcel Marceau and the slapstick of Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean. Hollywood attracted international talents including British comics Peter Sellers, Dudley Moore, and Sacha Baron Cohen, Canadian comics Dan Aykroyd, Jim Carrey, and Mike Myers, and Australian comedian Paul Hogan, famous for Crocodile Dundee.

  American television series including MAS*H, Seinfeld, and The Simpsons built followings around the world. British television produced quintessential works including Fawlty Towers, Monty Python, Dad's Army, Blackadder, and The Office. Other centres of creative comic activity included the cinema of Hong Kong, Bollywood, and French farce. The Edo period Rakugo performer and the 1890s music hall clown were, it turns out, working on the same ancient problem from very different starting points.