COMEDY

COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY 19comic thoughts or performances can result in the debasedtransformation of the subject into a comedian, as we ‘irrigate and tendto those things when they should be left to wither, and…[make] themour rulers when they should be our subjects’ (Plato, 1994:360). Plato’sdenigration of comedy in Republic exists within the context of a broaderproject to categorize and index subjectivity for the purposes ofcultivating the ideal person in the ideal state. Unhealthy orcounterproductive thoughts, emotions, and behaviours are restrained byan act of will and reason is promoted above all other things.The generic distinctions that Aristotle lays out in his Poetics (c. 330BC) represent the fundamental pattern through which the oppositionbetween comedy and tragedy has been understood in literary culture.Poetics, the most influential work of literary theory in Western culture,implicitly establishes the idea that comedy is a type of drama, withspecific rules, character types, and outcomes. Both comedy and tragedy,Aristotle argues, seek to represent the world mimetically, but whereastragedy ‘is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete andpossesses magnitude’ (Aristotle, 1996:10) set in the world of people ofsubstance, comedy deals with people who are ‘low’ by nature:Comedy is (as we have said) an imitation of inferior people—not,however, with respect to every kind of defect: the laughable is aspecies of what is disgraceful. The laughable is an error ordisgrace that does not involve pain or destruction: for example, acomic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not involve pain.(Aristotle, 1996:9)Aristotle’s laws of narrative distinction contain unambiguous valuejudgements that echo Plato’s. His comedy is a non-violent formconceived primarily in terms of derogation: inferiority, ‘error’, and‘disgrace’. Comedy is an imitation of the ridiculous or unworthy aspectsof human behaviour, where little of real significance passes on stage and‘inferiority’ amounts to a failure to uphold moral virtues. Ideally,tragedy depicts the decline in fortune of an individual which ‘is not dueto any moral defect or depravity, but to an error of some kind’ thatinevitably leads to a death or to the experience of ‘something terrible’(Aristotle, 1996: 21). Comedy, on the other hand, ends happily andconflicts are resolved: ‘In comedy even people who are the bitterestenemies in the story…go off reconciled in the end, and no one getskilled by anybody’ (Aristotle, 1996:22). The brief discussion of comedyin Poetics is not intended as a dismissal, but as a counterpoint to tragedy