Love Song for the Life of the Mind: An Essay on the Purpose of Comedy

2. The Purpose of Comedy

2 The Purpose of Comedy Be you on your guard, nor surrender the bard; for his art shall be righteous and true. Rare blessings and great will he work for the state rare happiness shower upon you; Not fawning or bribing, nor striving to cheat with an empty unprincipled jest; Not seeking your favor to curry or nurse, but teaching the things that are best. Aristophanes, Acharnians 655–58 (Hadas) Let it be said what this practice of yours is that makes the same men equally courageous before sufferings and pleasures. Plato, Laws 634b 1. Formal, Material, and Efficient Causes The question of comedy’s telos, or final cause, is just one of the questions left open due to that most famous nonextant book in history, the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, and there have been not a few suggestions to fill the gap. Before we turn to them, let us begin by remembering the definition of tragedy, for its part the most well-known sentence in literary criticism: A tragedy is a mimesis of action that is serious, complete, and has magnitude; in language with pleasurable accessories, each brought in in various parts; in a dramatic, not 108 109 narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, through which a catharsis of such emotions is accomplished. (1449b 24–28) If we were to guess at a definition of comedy without any further investigation we could be sure of getting several things right. Since comedy is the sister art of tragedy, we should expect that its efficient cause—dramatizing not narrating—and its material causes—language and pleasurable accessories (meter, rhythm, melody, color, shape, et al.)—will be the same. In fact, we don’t have to leave the extant Poetics to get this far, since Aristotle joins tragedy and comedy twice in his discussion: once in speaking of those forms of mimesis that combine all the means of mimesis (1447b 23–26), and later in distinguishing the dramatic method of both from the nondramatic modus praesentandi of epic (1448a 25–29). So, Aristotle has already told us about the material and efficient causes of comedy. It is the formal and final causes that allow for questions, and indeed that is precisely where scholars disagree. With regard to the first question Aristotle himself is clear: where tragedy is a mimesis of an action that is spoudaiva" (serious), comedy is a mivmhsi" faulotevrwn (more vulgar, 1449a31). This distinction echoes the remark in chapter 2 that, [S]ince the objects of imitation are men in action, and it is necessary for these to be either spoudaivou" or fauvlou" (for h[qh aligns this way, badness [kakiva/] and excellence [ajreth'/] distinguish the h[qh of all), it follows that they must be better, or worse, or the same as we are. (1448a1–5) What is not clear is precisely how this should be taken. Leon Golden (Tragic and Comic) suggests that Aristotle considers “fau'lo" as the antonym of spoudai'o"”—which is exactly what Aristotle says—but then Golden treats the ridiculous, to; geloi'on, as the opposite of e[leo" kai fovbo"” (44n), pity and fear, suggesting that this is a correction of Plato’s misunderstanding of how comic mimesis works. His interpretation requires the most moralistic implication of the operative terms (spoudai'o"/fau'lo")—namely , good and evil. I think Aristotle is not doing that. While the large generic distinctions good and bad noted here in chapter 2 of Poetics may have beneath them the more specific kinds Nicomachean Ethics 2.3 itemizes as “the fine, the advantageous, and the pleasant, and their contraries the shameful (aijscrou'), the injurious, and the painful” (1104b30–32)—namely, those things about which the good (ajgaqoiv) choose correctly and the bad (kakoiv) The Purposeof Comedy 110 err—neither spoudai'o" nor fau'lo" are used in that more particularly ethical itemization in Nicomachean Ethics. Furthermore, in chapter 5 of Poetics he seems to turn these words touching upon ethos to more poetic and less moralizing concerns than we mean by ethics when he says of the mivmhsi" faulotevrwn, that the sense of the word does not refer to the wholly bad (pa'san kakivan), but rather the ludicrous , “a species of the ugly (tou' aijscrou'). It is an error or ugliness not productive of pain or harm,” like the comic mask (1449a31–33). So it seems Aristotle here is making...