The Meanings of Comedy* - Shakespeare Navigators

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of his sense of what is "evil," "sinful," or fearful. This elemental
self-awareness-this consciousness of shame at one's flesh-sets one of
the lowest margins for civilizationl and, conversely, a hypenensitivity
to what is "obscene" is a mark of a decadent society. The paradox
in comic filth was madly intensified in the satire of Jonathan Swift,
that puritan pornographer, who wrote in his notebook that "A nice
man is a man of nasty ideas." Swift forces comic obscenity to its
extremes in Gulliver's disgust at the Yahoos; his fastidiousness is
insane when Gulliver is frightened by the red-haried female Yahoo
who stands gazing and howling on the bank, inflamed with desire to
embrace his naked body.
As we move "up" the scale of comic action, the mechanisms become
more complex but no more "comic." Physical mishaps, pratfalls,
and loud collisions are the crudest products of Bergson's comic
"automatism." It is hard to distinguish these pleasures from our glee
at physical deformity; and here we detect the cruelty inherent in
comedy, which may perhaps be another form of the cruelty inherent
in tragic disaster. Essentially our enjoyment of physical mishap or
deformity springs from our surprise and delight that man's motions
are often absurd, his energies often misdirected. This is the coarsest,
most naive, comedy of manners. Another sort of mechanical comedy
is the farce-mistaken identities, coincidences, mistimings-which can
be a very complicated engine of plot devices. In this range of comedy
the characters need only be puppets moved from the outside, as events
require. There is the right key to the wrong door, or the wrong key
to the right door; and it does not matter very much who is inside,
provided it is the unexpected figure. In these comic vehicles fate
takes the guise of huppy or unhappy chance, which is, of course, only
a tidy arrangement of improbable possibilities. On this sort of artificial
framework comedy displays some of its most glittering designs.
Or comedy can be a mechanism of language, the repartee that
sharply levels drama and life to a sheen of verbal wit. Congreve's
cool, negligent persons like Fainall are beings who have a uerbal
existence, of extremely delicate taste, and able to refine all their pleasures
to raillery: "I'd no more play with a man that slighted his ill
fortune than I'd make love to a woman who undervalued the loss of
her reputation." The transparent Mrs. Fainall lives and moves in the
same dry atmosphere and speaks with the same brittle tongue: "While
I only hated my husband, I could bear to see him; but since I have
The "scale" of comic effects is arranged in Alan Reynolds Thompson: Tfta
Anatomy of Drama, 1942, Chapter VI. I have modified Thompson's scale in
certain ways.