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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | Idea of Comedy: History, Theory, Critique
ISBN# 08386409466
Reviewed by: Chronique
2008 |
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Joan Rivers, who ought to know, says that if you tell a joke to a professional comedian, he never laughs. Instead, he points a finger at you and says, "That's funny." Most people have the basic five senses, some a sixth sense, but few an honest-to-god seventh sense: the sense of humor. None of this has prevented the production of ponderous books (one even by Freud, who obviously completely laced a sense of the riduculous) on laughter and comedy. Now here is "history, theory, critique" by Jan Walsh Hokenson with a sober and industrious survey of the way comedy is defined and redefined in the context of changing times and places. Shakespeare is shown as just another example of the superior looking at the follish or eccentric and not questioning what modern jargonists call the "meganarrative" of his society. Shakespeare is never as bitterly funny as is Beckett ("there is nothing funnier than unhappiness") nor mean and caustic as leading British satirists of our time such as Tom Sharpe and Martin Amis. Shakespeare can be witty in the sometimes tiresome mode of Lyly but more often bawdy in the more vulgar mode of dirty limericks and pantomime dames, putting down and (as the British say) sending up extravagant characters because he is well aware of the stereotypes and the standards of his audience. The author here is serious and she is convinced that "contemporary comic theory is sweeping many slates clean." Who today findes The Comedy of Errors a barrel of laughs? I find it not a play that ends happily but one that, eventually, happily ends. Shakespeare is less keckhanded later: who does not smile (but not guffaw) at Henry V's nimble courting of Katherine? Who today does miss most of what The Fool is up to in both Shakespeare's comedy and tragedy, or fail to find Falstaff and Shylock quite as ridiculous as Shakespeare wanted us to do? There are some truly effective moral correction and some hilarious moments in Shakespeare but I fear we laugh at his comedies politely, more because we are told to do so rather than because we cannot help doing so. We are somewhat uneasy, as when we laugh at the boss' jokes. We ordinarily laugh at ingenuity and in embarrassment or surprise and sadistically and for many other reasons. A survey of the explanations of our behavior, as the old radio show used to say, "ain't funny, McGee."
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