This mini-lecture is designed to put you in the mood for comedy and to introduce the terms upon which our discussions will focus.

We'll start out by looking at a wonderful piece by Henri Bergson entitled: Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic

Bergson begins his famous work by stating that laughter is "strictly HUMAN":

A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression. You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it,--the human caprice whose mould it has assumed. (Bergson, 1.I)

The second attribute of laughter Bergson mentions is that it speaks to intellect rather than emotion. "To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart." The third attribute is that the "natural environment" of laughter is society and that its function is social. "Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a SOCIAL signification." (Bergson, 1.I)

Given these three attributes, he goes on to examine selected comic situations and the underlying aspects of the comic.

First example is what might be called a pratfall.

A man, running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by burst out laughing. They would not laugh at him, I imagine, could they suppose that the whim had suddenly seized him to sit down on the ground. They laugh because his sitting down is involuntary. (Bergson, 1.II)

Underlying this involuntary tripping up, however, is the idea of rigidity or momentum, the fact that the man could not stop the movement that led him to fall due to either the force of his motion or his inability (or unwillingness) to respond with adequate flexibility to a sudden obstacle or change in situation. Bergson calls this mechanical elasticity. (Bergson, 1.II)

We may use this concept to explain not only slapstick or physical humor, but intellectual or emotional rigidity or momentum: a character who is so fixed on a goal that he is blinded to oncoming disaster or is merely unable to stop his momentum in time to avoid the crash; or a character who is so preoccupied with an idea that she does not see that which is obvious to everyone else, for example, the absentminded professor or the misguided lover.

With regard to comic appearances, Bergson speculates that laughter at the 'ugly' is not really a value judgment on physical aesthetics as much as recognition of an excess or lack of proportion, as in the case of caricature, where one particular characteristic or feature is excessively prominent. (Bergson, 1.III)

With regard to gestures of movements, those that are humorous may often be seen to be mechanical in nature, repetitions that produce the effect of mechanical, rather than considered behavior. This kind of behavior is often an element of farce, for example. In low comedy, we may see a merely physical inelasticity, while in high comedy, we may see a rigidity of intellect, as well as one of body.

Isolating those Bergsonian concepts that will be particularly interesting to our examination of comedy in Lysistrata, we have the following:

Mechanical repetition: This will include the kind of involuntary repetition by an individual character of an error or inappropriate or involuntary behavior; or the repetition of such by a series of characters who are in some way interchangeable. It will also include comic repetitions within the structure or dialogue or events of the play of which only the audience is aware. As Bergson puts it...

Our present problem no longer deals, like the preceding one, with a word or a sentence repeated by an individual, but rather with a situation, that is, a combination of circumstances, which recurs several times in its original form and thus contrasts with the changing stream of life. (Bergson, 2.II)

We can see from the above the possible heightening of a slapstick repetition into an intellectual or philosophical repetition of much deeper significance. The key idea here involves a rigidity of perception that does not allow the character to see the subtlety of a 'changing stream of life' but who remains stuck in a particular moment or thought or feeling. If this 'getting stuck' happens to a character, we may retain comic distance, as Bergson deems necessary for laughter to occur; however, if the 'getting stuck' occurs to several characters and by transference or identification to us as spectators, we may move into a tragicomic, absurd worldview in which laughter may become painful. The brilliance of this manner of describing comic effect is that, unlike more straightforward categories, such as satire or parody, this concept reveals something about the nature of light to dark humor and the seamless move from slapstick to tragedy...an uncanny aspect of laughter and the comic genre.

Comic inversion: This will involve 'turning the world on its head' aspect of comedy, where the comic spirit defies the rational, everyday routine of social reality, where servants are cleverer than their masters, daughters outwit their fathers, the allegedly feeble-minded are those who speak the most wisdom. It is the reversal of our 'official' perception of the social world and, perhaps even the spiritual or philosophical.

Reciprocal Interference: Bergson's own description of this concept is probably the most succinct:

A situation is invariably comic when it belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time.

This may involve a dramatic irony, in which the character sees a situation in one way, the audience in another. Or it may involve a conflict of perspectives from the points of view of two characters, two storylines, two themes. In general, it creates a sense of equivocal meanings in all that is said or done, a discrepancy, and may lead to characters 'talking past one another' or 'missing a point.'

Other than this we also remark on some of the more common elements from comedy:

1. Satire
2. Parody
3. Irony
4. Slapstick
5. Farce
6. (Comic) taunts and invectives*
7. (Comic) reversal*
8. (Comic) analogy*

If you are not completely clear about the above terms, look them up in one of the following resources:

1. Bedford St. Martin's: Meyer Literature Glossary of Literary Terms

Concise but slightly expanded definitions, helpful examples included in definitions.

2. McGraw Hill Online Learning Center: Glossary of Drama Terms

3. Literary Vocabulary

The individual pages take awhile to load, but that's because they have so many entries! Very helpful for those terms that you don't find in other works.

*You probably will not find these terms. If you don't, then look up the individual words. Tip: Reversal refers back to Aristotle! Analogy, taunt and invective are used in their everyday sense and so may be found in a general, rather than literary dictionary. We'll be discussing these terms as we use them, so you're just getting enough of an idea to begin your examination of Lysistrata!
 

Copyright by Deborah Griggs. Free for use in educational activities with proper citation.