(the) American (Novel of)

10 Nickolas Pappas
And it is possible to spell out what made comedy respectable.
Richard Janko has argued persuasively that the medieval Greek manuscript
known as the Tractatus Coislinianus (TC) is a condensation of the
lost second book of the Poetics, on comedy. 1 And the Tractatus distinguishes
comedy from abuse—marking comedy off as superior by reason
of this difference—as a genre that suggests the laughable qualities of
people instead of naming them. 2
In other words, comedy in general improves on abuse, as the
Ethics says that recent comedy improves on its older form, that is, as the
tactful wit improves on the buffoon. The evolution of comedy, which
for Aristotle means its progress toward a perfected state (see Poetics
1449a15 on the progress of tragedy and Politics 1252b32 on natural
growth in general), consists in an improvement in its manners from
raillery to dig.
The Tractatus Coislinianus too speaks of older and newer comedies,
and brings the Ethics to mind when it does: “[The kinds] of comedy
are (a) old, which goes to excess in the laughable; (b) new, which
abandons this, and inclines toward the grand; and (c) middle, which is
mixed from both” (TC 18). 3 It does not matter precisely what the
Tractatus means by “old comedy” (almost certainly not what that phrase
means today), as long as old comedy is the same thing here as in EN
IV.8, namely the genre abandoned to the dustbin of literary history for
its rudeness.
The Etiquette of Comedy
In another sense all comedy, old and new, has rudeness for its subject.
The Poetics says that comedy’s characters are worse than real human
beings and a fortiori worse than comedy’s spectators (1448a17)—not
worse with respect to every trait, but only in those ways that make the
characters funny. What is laughable, says Aristotle, is the kind of ugliness
that causes no pain (1449a32–35), which is to say minor moral failure.
The Tractatus Coislinianus explains comic ugliness. The characters
that comedy depicts are the buffoon, the ironist, and the braggart (TC
12). Notice that these are all traits that EN II.7 has called excessive:
irony for its untruthful understatement and the brag for its untruthful
exaggeration, buffoonery in its intemperate pursuit of the pleasure of