COMEDY

COMIC IDENTITY 51anarchists Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, the bogus civil servantKhlestakov in Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector (1836), or themute and infuriating Harpo Marx. In Roman New Comedy, tricksterfigures inhabit the skin of the ingenious slave character. In Plautus’Pseudolus (c. 191 BC), the slave Pseudolus, his name itself meaning‘false one’, addresses the audience with a proclamation:Now let all take notice—and let none say he has not receivednotice—all adults here present, all citizens of this city, all friendsand acquaintances of mine, are hereby warned and advised, thisday…to be on their guard…gainst me…and not to trust a word Isay.(Plautus, 1984:221)Pseudolus’ low social status gives him the freedom to move acrosssocial boundaries, which includes awareness of the fictive nature of hisexistence, operating both within the frame of the fiction and without it,addressing the audience and acknowledging the fact of theperformance, and at one stage even admitting to being an actor. Withinthe play, his trickster mobility makes him an intermediary between thelover, the patrician parent, the pimp and prostitute, between illicit andlegitimate love and respectable and shameful liaisons. In the end,Pseudolus forges domestic harmony from sexual and financial scandaland consolidates the system by flouting it.Shakespeare’s Puck is similarly the counter-intuitive provider ofsolutions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Puck, also known as RobinGoodfellow, is a genius of minor mischief and domestic upsets, a‘merry wanderer of the night’ devoted to practical jokes and turningsentiment into laughter:The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me;Then I slip from her bum, down topples she,And ‘tailor’ cries, and falls into a cough,And then the whole quire hold their hips and loffe,And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swearA merrier hour was never wasted there.(Shakespeare, 1989:2.1.50–57)Puck is in fact a collation of a number of spirits, including hobgoblins,changelings, and incubi. In the generations immediately prior to