Introduction: Comedy and the Comic

Abstract

In a recent book on comedy Professor Moelwyn Merchant remarks on the paucity of good criticism of comedy and, in particular, that ‘no authoritative and definitive work has been written on Shakespeare’s comedies’.¹ In spite of a great deal of debate on the subject of comedy I think this is essentially true. There seem to be three main reasons why critical discussion of comedy (and the comic) has been comparatively unsuccessful. First, both comedy and the comic have popularly been identified with the unserious. The reasons for this are obvious. Comedy, we assume, exists to make us laugh and when we laugh we are not in a serious mood. But it does not follow from this that the ideas which cause us to laugh are without serious implication. Comic satire, for instance, uses the comic to convey serious moral ideas. The critic is concerned not with analysing the mood that a work of literature evokes as such, but with the structure of ideas that has given rise to that mood, and, as we shall see, the intellectual implications of comic ideas can be very serious indeed. We are no more bound to give an account of laughter in comedy than we are bound to give an account of tears in the criticism of tragedy. Laughter is merely an indication of how successfully comic ideas are being used; it does not by itself tell us how these ideas are to be interpreted.