The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy (review)

What do we talk about when we talk about comedy? With apologies to Raymond Carver, this question appears at the heart of Eric Weitz's The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy as he engages with the field of dramatic comedy. Do we define comedy as the levity in the dialogue, the presence of prototypically comic characters such as clowns or fools, or the structural element of the happy ending (the inevitable aberration to this rule being a Beckett play)? Others prefer to break down comedy into its varied subgenres, noting categorical differences between farce, satire, or comedy of wit, while another school traces the foundational influences, such as folk rituals or commedia dell'arte, on comic theater.

The field of comedy is so wide-ranging and unwieldy that any well-balanced attempt to map the terrain should be applauded, and Weitz unifies an impressive variety of scholarship, literature, and criticism in this text aimed at high school and college students. His introductory chapters, "Thinking about Comedy" and "Reading Comedy," are instructional in detailing the myriad slip roads and cul-de-sacs of comedy studies: its psychological basis in human play and regenerative impulses, the way the genre is "coded" to signal comedy to a reader or audience member, and how comedy is more closely situated within culture than tragedy because of its ties to a particular place and time. But in his attempts to be all-encompassing, that is, to discuss comedy, performance, and humor studies, the conversation becomes slightly unfocused in the book's second half.

Weitz's goal for the book is twofold: first, to illustrate the historical connection between our contemporary shows and movies and the classical comedies of Aristophanes and Shakespeare, and second, to encourage a reading practice that takes into account performance elements. Weitz is genuinely invested in students appreciating the historical precedents of contemporary comedy and frequently alludes to The Simpsons or The Office while discussing older works (it is questionable how well these references will hold up ten years from now). He includes large sections devoted to the practical staging aspects of ancient Greek and Roman drama ("Comedy's Foundations"), which survey the works of Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, and Terence, while he remains continually aware of a contemporary reader's frustration with elements that appear foreign, such as the role of the chorus or the reasons behind the parabasis. To this end, he demonstrates how deepening our anthropological knowledge of theater illuminates the comic aspects of many scenes, and provides some close readings of such moments in plays: for instance, a character questioning Lysistrata's scowling eyebrows would have earned laughs because of the audience's awareness that the actor's brow was a fixed feature on his mask.

The second goal—demonstrating how the comic taps into the psychic unity of body, mind, and feeling—is harder to attain, for as much as Weitz emphasizes repeatedly how actors use their voices or gestures to enhance a certain scene, unless readers have a background in theater studies, they may not be able to visualize the comic inflections that an actor might bring to a farce or how he or she could undercut an otherwise tragic moment. He reminds us that dramatic scripts "do not proffer formal jokes so much as situational confections awaiting the addition of body, voice, energy and, it might be said, a comic aptitude for outlining, all conjured in the moment of performance" (101), implying that comedy is often extradiegetic, and thus not found necessarily in the dialogue or stage directions. To support this idea, Weitz provides three "case studies" at the end of one chapter, where he draws upon theater reviews to relate the portrayals of certain characters, such as a production of Moliere's Don Juan that reversed the roles between servant and master, and Bert Lahr's incorporation of a "broad comic style and instinct for music-hall repartee" (169) in his depiction of Estragon.

However, if students are to be capable of recognizing the "promising textual conditions for...