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93 5 Form Follows Function No mask like open truth to cover lies, As to go naked is the best disguise. —William Congreve, The Double Dealer If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win. That’s what they do so well; they seduce people. But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter—they can’t win. —Mel Brooks A play is a machine that produces meaning. As the blueprint for that machine, the script of the play has to actually work—in other words, it has to be performable . All good scripts have that characteristic in common. Outside of that, however, a script can take as many forms as the human imagination allows, and not all of those forms are well served by a classical Aristotelian analysis. Aristotle wrote his Poetics primarily for the analysis of Athenian tragedy and only peripherally for other forms. It is true that the great majority of successful writers intentionally imitate Athenian tragic structure, and so Aristotle’s analysis is widely useful from neoclassicism to romanticism to realism. But humans are complex creatures and produce complex art forms. Where free experimentation is valued, form follows function as playwrights try new ways to reach audiences. As a result, there is a lot of drama out there for which climactic analysis is not going to be useful, and for those texts, we need to have other tools in our toolbox. Below are three broad generalizations about genres of scriptwriting that confound (sometimes intentionally) traditional Aristotelian analysis, and some suggestions about how, as a dramaturg, you might approach them. ANALYSIS 94 Comedy It is possible that Aristotle wrote two books of Poetics; the one on tragedy we know, the other, on comedy, is presumably lost forever. But we do have a sense of Aristotle’s ideas on the topic of comic drama from references, tantalizingly fleeting, that he makes in Poetics. He notes that comedy has great versatility and employs all kinds of poetic devices (book 1); that it is mimetic (although tragedy represents men as better than they really are, and comedy as worse, as said in book 2); that is was invented and developed in the outlying villages (kommai) of Greece by wandering troupes who were not sufficiently sophisticated for the city audiences (hence, comedy was played for the kommoi, “commoners,” book 3 relates); that it is for poets who prefer satire and lampooning, and like tragedy it was initially improvisational (book 4); that the nature of comedy is the mocking of “low persons,” ugliness, and defects that are not painful or destructive, and that it has no clear recorded history because it was never taken seriously (book 5); that it is more artificially constructed than tragedy (which is based on history), because it deals more primarily with the probable rather than the possible (book 9); and finally, that comedy may have multiple plots and different catastrophes for different characters and that everything is resolved in the end (book 12). Aristotle’s writings lead to the conclusion that the different pleasures of tragedy and comedy both result from watching a character violate an important social rule. Of course, they do so for very different reasons. In tragedy, the characters know the rule is inviolable, but they violate it anyway (consciously or unconsciously) because they must—something in their noble nature demands it, and then they must pay the terrible consequences. The Aristotelian view of comedy suggests that its pleasure derives from watching a character violating an important rule after succumbing from ignorance, lust, greed, or some other human failing to a low, bestial nature. The katharsis of tragedy, he says, is a result of the spectator’s fear that he or she, too, could be profoundly affected by the tragic protagonist’s choices; in comedy, for Aristotle, the stakes are a lot lower, so we are free to enjoy it without fear. To a modern eye, it seems that Aristotle is really missing a lot of comedy’s potential for engaging in dialectics, at least in this writing. But Aristotle’s lifelong project was to set down “first principles” for the study of human and natural things, and comedy, by its very nature, resists reduction into first principles. The most important aspect of comedy, as a very old vaudeville joke goes, is timing, and this is as true for the delivery of an individual joke as it is for jokes that traverse the millennia. The struggles and...

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