The Meanings of Comedy* - Shakespeare Navigators

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rrm MEANTNcs oF coMEDY 97
If the authentic comic action is a sacrifice and a feast, debate and
passion, it is by the same token a Saturnalia, an org'y, an assertion
of the unruliness of the flesh and its vitality. Comedy is essentially
a Carrying Away of Death, a triumph over mortality by some absurd
faith in rebirth, restoration, and salvation. Originally, of course, these
carnival rites were red with the blood of victims. The archaic seasonal
revel brought together the incompatibles of death and life. No logic
can explain this magic victory over Winter, Sir5 and the Devil. But
the comedian can perform the rites of Dionysus and his frenzied
gestures initiate us into the secrets of the savage and mystic power
of life. Comedy is sacred and secular.
Thus it happens that from the earliest time the comic ritual has
been presided over by a Lord of Mismle, and the improvisations of
comedy have the aspect of a Feast of lJnreason, a Revel of Foolsa
Sottie. Comedy is a release, a taking off the masks we have put on
to deal with others who have put on decent masks to deal with us.
The Church herself knew how salutary is this comic rite of unmasking,
for near the season of Lent the monks used to appoint one of
their number to be Lord of IJnreason and chant the liturgy of Folly,
during which an Ass was worshiped and the mass parodied in a
ceremony no iess religious, in its profane way, than the Dionysian
and Saturnalian revels of Greece and Rome.1o During these ludi
inhonesti the monks at vespers gave the staff of office to a Lord of
Misrule while they chanted "deposuit potentes de sede, et exultauit
humiles." In performing the mock mass the celebrants brayed the
responses. The first Herod of the mystery plays may have been Rex
Stultorum, and we know that medieval drama never excluded the
comic from its religious ritual. Those in the thrall of carnival come
out, for a moment, from behind the fagade of their "serious" selves,
the fagade required by their vocation. When they emerge from this
fagade, they gain a new perspective upon their official selves and thus,
when they again retire behind their usual personae, they are more
conscious of the duplicity of their existence. That is why Freud
thought of the comic as an "unmasking," a mechanism that allows,
whether we watch or play it, a "free discharge" of impulses we daily
have to repress. The carnival is an hour when we are permitted to
recover our "lost infantile laughter" and to rejoice again with the
pleasure of a child. ft redeems us from our "professional" life.
Aristotle said that tragedy works a purgation or "catharsis" and
carries off harmful passions by means of an allowed public cleansing
10 This parody is described in A. P. Rossiter: English Drama ftom Early
Times to the Elizabethans, 1950.