COMEDY

COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY 37of Malvolio in Twelfth Night may serve as an illustration. The gulling ofMalvolio and the presentation of him as an extravagant lover‘crossgartered’, is a festive castigation of the sour puritan stewardwhose very name means ‘ill-will’. Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Feste, andMaria ridicule Malvolio’s pretensions to marry the wealthy Olivia, andthen continue to torment him until he is perceived to be mad. Festivitytherefore pursues authority, which is ridiculous because it is inflexible,and forces it to adapt to the demands of the community.Comedy’s perceived association with a kind of folk politics hastherefore given it legitimacy in modern academic discourse. FollowingCornford’s literary anthropology and reading it through Bakhtin’sconcept of carnival, comedy becomes useful to academia as a literarycounterweight to strict regimes, an expression of a communal life forcethat inverts the social order and offers short-term liberation fromauthoritarian pressure. By associating it so clearly with plebeian culture,however, modern critical interest is guilty of retaining the elitist genericdivisions that once denigrated comedy, keeping it as the working-classcousin of aristocratic tragedy and other ‘serious’ forms.