The Meanings of Comedy* - Shakespeare Navigators

28 TIIE SPIRIT OF COMEDY
IV, Hal, Ifotspur, and Falstaff Can we honestly claim that Shakespeare
reveals more about life in the tragedy of Lear than in the
conflicts between Henry and his wild son Are not many of the prob-
Iems raised in the great tragedies solved in the great comedies
Mme. de StaEI continues: "The imagination without much difficulty
can represent what often appears-the features of sorrow. Tragic
characters take on a certain similarity that blurs the finer distinctions
between them, and the design of a heroic action determines in advance
the course they must take." (Whereas Bergson claims it is
comedy that deals with types.) Surely the comic action is more unpredictablg
and delight is an emotion quite as individual as grief,
remorse, or guilt.
Further, and illogically, "low" comedy is as legitimate as "high."
In fact, the Iower the range, the more authentic the comedy may be,
as we know when we behold the Wife of Bath, that slack daughter
of Eve, or Falstaff, that ruffian always on the point of untrussing. At
the bottom of the comic scale-where the human becomes nearly
indistinguishable from the animal and where the vibration of laughter
is longest and loudest-is the "dirty" joke or the "dirty" gesture. At
this depth comedy unerringly finds the lowest common denominator
of human response, the reducing-agent that sends us reeling back
from our proprieties to the realm of old Pan. The unquenchable
vitality of man gushes up from the lower strata of Rabelais' comedy,
inhabited by potbellied monsters who tumultuously do as they wish
in a rvorld built entirely with the apparatus of a gargantuan pedagogy.
There we drop the mask which we have composed into the
features of our decent, cautious selves. Rabelais strips man of his
breechesl he is the rnaral sans-culotte. Psychologists tell us that any
group of men and women, no matter how "refined," will, sooner or
later, laugh at a "dirty" joke, the question being not whether they
will laugh but when, or at precisely what "dirty" joke; that is, under
exactly what co-efficient of stress a code of "decency" breaks apart
and allows the human being to fall steeply down to the recognition
of his inalienable flesh.
Yet laughter at the obscenest jest forever divides man from animal,
because the animal is never self-conscious about any fleshly act whateverl
whereas man is not man without being somehow uneasy about
the "nastiness" of his body. One of the deepest paradoxes in comedy
thus reveals itself in obscenity, which is a threshold over which man
enters into the human condition; it is a comic equivalent to the religious
state of original sin or of tragic "error," and man may as justly
be thought human because of his sense of what is "dirty" as because