COMEDY

1COMEDY IN THE ACADEMYAnd this book—considering comedy a wondrous medicine,with its satire and mime, which would produce thepurification of the passions through the enactment of defect,fault, weakness—would induce false scholars to try toredeem the lofty with a diabolical reversal: through theacceptance of the base…this is what we cannot and mustnot have.Umberto Eco, The Name of the RoseUmberto Eco’s novel imagines a book on comedy, Aristotle’s lostsequel to Poetics. The book is at the heart of a monastic conspiracy tokeep humour out of religion by suppressing the Aristotelian authoritythat lends comedy intellectual legitimacy, preventing ‘the operation ofthe belly’ becoming ‘an operation of the mind’ (Eco, 1983:474). Eco’sconspirators fear that if comedy were to be rehabilitated withinrespectable academic contexts, the conceptual order of things would beradically altered, and with it the social fabric that draws on itshierarchies, as ‘on the day when the Philosopher’s word would justifythe marginal jests of the debauched imagination, or when what has beenmarginal would leap to the center, every trace of the center would belost’ (Eco, 1983:475). To preserve the status quo, the book is infusedwith a poison that kills all who read it.While Eco’s conspiracy is entirely fictional, it is the case that comedyhas been denigrated in the academy, especially in comparison withtragedy, due in part to the absence of an important treatment of it in theClassical tradition. Comedy is often perceived as ephemeral and lackingintellectual weight, or, in the protests of those who claim that explaininga joke kills it or that things are ‘just’ for laughs, is seen as an aspect ofcommunication that is emphatically closed to study and interrogation.