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The Commedia dell’arte as the Quintessence of Comedy Stanley Vincent Longman Laughter is peculiar to human beings. Other creatures do not indulge in it at all. A dog may be said to have a sense of humor as he tosses a ball in the air or invents games with his toys. We might say that tail wagging is canine laughter, but it is not the same as comic laughter. Comic laughter comes out of our awareness of the act of living , an awareness that is distinctly human. Living carries with it all sorts of difficulties and petty annoyances, but we carry on as best we can. Still, an abrupt recognition of something uncomfortable in another’s experience can produce a laugh. We are not directly involved in the discomfort in someone else’s experience (or in our own once we gain distance on it: “Someday we’ll laugh about all this!”), so we are pleased to let someone else do the suffering. And comedy really is about suffering. This goes some way to explain the rebuke a certain vaudevillian (some attribute it to Bert Lahr) made to his audience when he had them all rolling in the aisles in gales of laugher: he came down to the lip of the stage, glared at the audience until they came to a stop and then scolded them in no uncertain terms: “You can laugh if you like, but this is funny!” The Theatre Symposium this year (2007) has set itself the task of probing the nature of comedy and human laughter in all seriousness. Twentyfive hundred years ago there was another symposium at Agathon’s house, where Socrates and friends explored the nature of human love. Plato recorded the nightlong discussion in his dialogue The Symposium. He reports that toward morning, all the guests had left except Agathon, the writer of tragedies, and Aristophanes, the writer of comedies. It was at that point that Socrates “compelled the other two to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same with that of tragedy, and that the 10 S T A N L E Y V I N C E N T L O N G M A N true artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also. To this they were constrained to assent, being drowsy, and not quite following the argument . And first of all Aristophanes dropped off.”1 Socrates managed to put the great comic Aristophanes to sleep simply by bringing up the subject of comedy. After all, comedy, once thoroughly analyzed, is a very serious matter. So we will never know what Socrates thought of comedy. He was always a bit of a tease, anyway. In fact, he was something of a comic figure: he played the fool, asked annoying and simple-minded questions, feigned ignorance. Maurice Charney describes him as “uncouth, a notable drinker, convivial, hearty, bluff, candid and a man driven out of his home by a shrewish wife, Xanthippe.”2 One way in which we may see the nature of comedy all these years later is by examining the commedia dell’arte. It is part of a long tradition , with roots dating back at least to the time of Aristophanes and with new branches extending into our own time. That tradition of the commedia, as it developed in Italy in the sixteenth century and went on refining itself through the eighteenth, came to embody concisely and vividly the quintessence of comedy. It would be profitable to see how newer comedy and critics and theorists relate to the commedia. Fundamental to comedy and to the commedia is the portrayal of men and women as social beings, characters caught up in, and at odds with, society. In this sense the stage represents a miniature society, what L. J. Potts has called a “comic microcosm.”3 A couplet by William Blake sums up the difference between the tragic and the comic: “Great things are done when men and mountains meet; / This is not done by jostling in the streets.”4 “Jostling in the streets” is an apt description of the commedia. The characters of the commedia live in their own little city. It is a selfcontained city...

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