Comedy: A Critical Introduction by Eli Rozik (review)

The contemporary resurgence in theorizing about comedy as a genre began with Erich Segal’s The Death of Comedy (2001), which argued that the classical tradition of comedy died with the advent of the absurdist movement. Two books followed that developed the path Segal established of examining longitudinally the field of comedy: Andrew Stott’s Comedy (2005), part of Routledge’s New Critical Idiom series, and Eric Weitz’s The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy (2009). While both books have their disadvantages, they are instrumental in explaining early theoretical work, delineating the various forms and subgenres of comedy, and offering potential new areas to study. Eli Rozik’s new book, Comedy: A Critical Introduction, unfortunately neither helps the reader comprehend comedy nor offers clear insights into the genre.

Concerned that comedy is typically defined in opposition to tragedy, Rozik’s main purpose is to find a new way to define comedy. Thus, he first establishes how the two forms are similar: they both involve hamartia (he misunderstands the term to mean “flaw” as opposed to “mis-step”), they both share “structures of action,” and they both elicit laughter from spectators. Rozik posits that both tragedy and comedy offer “holistic catharsis” in purging the spectator of unsettling emotions. But after admitting that purging “pleasure and laughter” might be unwarranted (71), Rozik explains that comedy rouses and purges “anxiety” during the final peripeteia (71). He subsequently characterizes the defining elements of comedy as the “comic mood” and the creation of a fictional world, as well as an “absolute preference for an archetypal structure of action” (81). The “sub-species” of comedy, according to Rozik, are farce, romance, and sketch comedy, while the fields that are not comedy but are “tangential” to it consist of satire, grotesque, and stand-up. That satire and grotesque are distinct from the category of comedy is an interesting perspective—as these kinds of comedy evolved from Aristophanic, or Old Comedy, whereas farce, romantic and festive comedy, and sentimental and social comedy developed from the New Comedy of Menander—but Rozik does not pursue this trajectory further. His discussion of satiric laughter provides an area of potential exploration, for he persuasively argues that laughter cannot work toward social correction if we laugh at the on-stage character without identifying those characters with ourselves.

Like a taxonomist, Rozik dissects the multiple layers of comedy. He argues that the deep structure of any fictional world can be divided into seven layers, but he does not cite any foundational theory for this classification (such as the work of narrative structuralists like Gérard Genette) and quotes only from his own, earlier works. The seven layers—the personified, mythical, praxical, naïve, ironic, aesthetic, and modal—provide the means by which to analyze any fictional comedy; furthermore, the same seven layers can be applied to the analysis of comedic characters. However, the value of such a framework is implicitly limited when the only examples he offers to demonstrate such application are from Molière’s plays, The School for Wives, in particular. Toward the end of the book, he criticizes other scholars for theorizing about comedy without offering any practical application to dramatic texts, but in chapter after chapter, Rozik summarizes the plots of a few comedies without applying his corresponding analysis.

The book jacket touts this study as useful for undergraduate education, but the obtuse prose would prohibit such use. Oftentimes the circular nature of Rozik’s sentences make them redundant, “A fictional world should thus be seen as a mechanism that manipulates the audience into a preconceived perspective on a fictional world” (48–49), or tautological, “a character is a fictional construct and the result of a process of personification that reflects the spontaneous creativity of the psyche; i.e., the basic and essential trait of a character is its humanity. This trait justifies the interpretation of its behavior as human” (99). The book’s usefulness is further limited by its lack of diverse examples, as well as by...