COMEDY

CONCLUSION 141fashioned from it a theological truth, that humanity was perpetuallylooking at the world with doubled vision and a refined understanding ofits own simplicity. From this perspective, traditional endings likemarriages are a practical way of restoring reason and closing offnonsense, acting as a barrier between the field of potentially radicalinterpretive alternatives that comedy opens up, and the rest of the worldthat needs to make sense if it is to carry on working.Finally, we return to the difficult question of genre. Comedy’sdenigration in academic study is a product of its populism, itsassociation with the lower bodily stratum, and its problematic resistanceto generic definition. While the generic label continues to represent ameaningful and practicable brand, priming us for certain kinds of actionand alerting us to a different type of dlscourse, the deracinated nature ofcomic effect and the permeability of generic boundaries means that wecan no longer be satisfied by the Aristotelian concepts of form thatpersist in most understandings of what comedy is. Traditional genericdefinitions belonged to the theatre and, as its popularity has declinedover the course of the twentieth century, different types of comedy haveemerged in new contexts and media that often mingle with other modesand tones of narrative. Perhaps then we need to stop trying to definecomedy on a generic level, and think of it instead as a series of more orless connected effects, traditions, and modified themes treated with theaim of opening up understanding for the purposes of laughter.