The History of Comedy, Part 1

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Humor isn’t the same as comedy. Webster’s dictionary defines “humor” as “the quality of being funny.” Humor makes people laugh. Comedy, on the other hand, is a form of drama, the opposite, essentially, of tragedy. In a comedy, the main character ends up better off than he or she began, but the story in which the protagonist is involved need not be humorous. For example, despite the elements of horror and terror of which it’s composed, Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” is a comedy because the main character is rescued at the end of the narrative before his death sentence can be carried out.

The word “comedian” originally referred to “a professional performer who tells jokes and performs comic acts” or to “an actor in a comedy,” Webster’s dictionary points out, but, gradually, comic skits were abbreviated or eliminated entirely, with the comedian becoming more like the court jester of old. The term “humorist” is more general in its application; according to Webster’s dictionary, anyone who “acts, speaks, or writes in an amusing way” is a humorist.

According to Aristotle, comedy, as a dramatic form, began as an adjunct to the fertility rites of the ancient Greek cult of Dionysus. The historian Will Durant, in The Life of Greece, writes at some length of ancient Greek drama, including comedy:

Comedy, says Aristotle, developed “out of those who led the phallic procession.” A company of people carrying sacred phalli, and singing dithyrambs to Dionysus, or hymns to some other vegetation god, constituted, in Greek terminology, a komos, or revel. Sex was essential, for the culmination of the ritual was a symbolic marriage aimed at the magic stimulation of the soul; hence in early Greek comedy, as in most modern comedies and novels, marriage and presumptive procreation form the proper ending of the tale (230-231).

Durant explains that once the chorus was “developed for mimetic action” but “one thing was needed to turn these choral representations into dramas, and that was the opposition of an actor, in dialogue and action, to the chorus” (232).

Ancient Greek comedy divides into three periods: Old Comedy, Middle Comedy, and New Comedy. They’re represented, respectively, by the works of Aristophanes, Athenaeus of Naucratis, and Philemon and Meander.

Old Comedy focused on social criticism, political satire, humor regarding bodily processes, the caricature of famous persons, and sex. The Clouds, a comedy by Aristophanes, is well known for its burlesque parody of the philosopher Socrates, and, according to Durant, “the comic drama of Greece remained till Meander obscene because of its celebration of reproductive powers, and sexual restraints were in some measure removed” (231).

In describing Aristophanes’ comedy, Durant gives a succinct account of Old Comedy’s subject matter, techniques, and character:

Aristophanes is an unclassifiable mixture of beauty, wisdom, and filth. . . . His dialogue is life itself, or perhaps it is swifter, racier, more vigorous than life dares to be. . . . His plots are ridiculous, and are put together with an almost extempore carelessness; sometimes the main theme is exhausted before the play is half through, and the remainder limps forward on the crutches of burlesque. The humor is generally of a low order; it cracks and groans with facile puns, drags itself out to tragic lengths, and too often depends upon digestion, reproduction, and excretion. In The Acharnians we hear of a character who eases himself continuously for eight months; in The Clouds the major forms of human waste are mingled with sublime philosophy; every second page offers us rumps, wind, bosoms, gonads, coitus, pederasty, onanism; everything is here. He charges his old rival, Cratinus, with nocturnal incontinence. He is the most contemporary of ancient poets, for nothing is so timeless as obscenity. . . .

If we are good conservatives we can stomach all this on the ground that Aristophanes attacks every form of radicalism, and upholds devotedly every ancient virtue and vice. He is the most immoral of all Greek writers known to us, but he hopes to make up for it by attacking immorality. He is always found on the side of the rich, but he denounces cowardice; he lies pitilessly about Euripides,living and dead, but he assails dishonesty; he describes the women of Athens as unbelievably coarse, but he exposes Euripides for defaming them; he burlesques the gods so boldly that in comparison with the pious Socrates we must picture him as an hilarious atheist--but he is all for religion, and accuses the philosophers of undermining the gods. . . . . . .

His excesses of pornography and abuse were partly responsible for the law forbidding personal satire; and although the law was soon repealed, the Old Comedy of political criticism died before the death of Aristophanes (385), and was replaced, even in his later plays, by the Middle Comedy of manners and romance (428-429).

Despite--or, perhaps because of--the excesses to which Aristophanes’ comedy was given, he made a mark upon the history of humor that neither his contemporaries nor his followers, practicing Middle Comedy and New Comedy, were able to match, and, in Durant’s estimation, “the vitality of the Greek comic theater disappeared along with its extravagances and brutality”:

Philemon and Meander rose and passed and were forgotten, while Aristophanes
survived all changes of moral and literary fashions to come down to our own time with eleven of his forty-two plays intact. . . and, if we hold our noses, we can read him with profane delight” (429).

Middle Comedy, by contrast, was more sedate than Old Comedy. It “lost its taste or courage for political satire precisely when politics needed a ‘candid friend,’” Durant writes:

Possibly such satire was forbidden or the audience was weary of politics now that Athens was ruled by second-rate men. The general retirement of the fourth-century Greek from public to private life inclined his interest from affairs of state to those of the home and the heart. The comedy of manners appeared; love began to dominate the scene, and not always by its virtue; the ladies of the demimonde mingled on the boards with fishwives, cooks, and bewilderedphilosophers--though the honor of the protagonists was always saved by a marriage at the end. These plays were not coarsened by Aristophanes’ vulgarity and burlesque, but neither were they vulgarized by his exuberance and imagination (482-483).

According to Durant, “The New Comedy molded itself upon his [i. e., Euripides’] dramas, and grew out of them” (419), and “the mood of Hellenistic Athens, like ours today, preferred the lighthearted, lightheaded, sentimental, happy-ending stories of the New Comedy”:

. . . . The high concerns of state that aroused Aristophanes are in the New Comedy put aside as too perilous for the literary neck; usually the theme is domestic or private, and traces the devious roads by which women are led by generosity, and men nevertheless to matrimony. Love enters upon its triumphant career as master of the boards; a thousand damsels in distress cross the stage, but achieve honor and wedlock in the end. The old phallic dress is abandoned, and the old phallic bawdiness; but the story circles narrowly about the virginity of the leading lady, and virtue plays as small a role in it as in our daily press. Since the actors wore masks, and the number of masks was limited, the comic dramatist wove his plots of intrigue around a few stock characters whom the audience was always delighted to recognize--the cruel father, the benevolent old man, the prodigal son, the heiress mistaken for a poor girl, the bragging soldier, the clever slave, the flatterer, the parasite, the physician, the priest, the philosopher, the cook, the courtesan, the procuress, and the
pimp (606).

Next: Medieval comedy