The Incarnations of Comedy

Abstract

By an informal but influential critical consensus we are made to take our tragedy systematically—Aristotle's structure of an action leading circuitously but inevitably to Frye's conception of a hero—and our comedy piecemeal, wherever we can find it. No coherent theory of comedy has yet gained wide critical acceptance. Often there seems little hope of reconciling the conflicting claims of the psychologists, ritualists, and mechanists, who study the sources of comedy in human behaviour and reader response, with those of the literary structuralists whose chief concern is the form of imaginative literature. This basic problem with comic theory appeared very early, in classical times, and was transmitted to modern English theory by the medieval schoolmen and the revivalist literary critics of the Renaissance. Typical humanist definitions describe comedy in terms of its subject (the follies of ordinary men and women) and its structure (the movement from adversity to prosperity).