The Comic ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque.

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ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

Taking Comedy

Seriously

The Earlier Meaning of

Comedy—Ending

HappilyENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:

The Grotesque

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Comedy Theory

Notoriously incomplete and lacking in definitive answers. May well be a “fourth tray”* phenomenon.

Plessner’s thesis in Laughing and Crying.

* “A Civil Servant used to keep four trays on his desk to put his papers in. The first was marked Incoming, the second Outgoing, the third Pending, and the fourth Too difficult.”--Owen Barfield

Helmuth Plessner, author of Laughing and

Crying


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Comedy Theory

Three basic camps

Superiority--laughter reinforces social power.

Incongruity--humor the result of the “clash of incompatible discourses.”

Relief--the comic as a vent for repression.


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Key Questions: Do we laugh at or with?

Is comedy innately subversive?

Is comedy congenitally offensive/politically incorrect?

What is the connection between the body and the comic?


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Arthur Koestler on Humor

Humor results from a collision between two different frames of reference.


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[T]o analyze humour is a task as delicate as analyzing the chemical composition of a perfume with its multiple ingredients—some of which are never consciously perceived, while others, sniffed in isolation, would make us wince.—Arthur Koestler in Janus.


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If we could change our moods as quickly as we jump from one idea to another, we would be acrobats of emotion; but since we are not, our thoughts and emotions frequently become dissociated. It is emotion deserted by thought that is discharged in laughter.—Arthur Koestler, Janus


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Henri Bergson


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“elan vital”

Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.

—Horace Walpole, 18th Century


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Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. —William James


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Humor does not diminish the pain–it makes the space around it get bigger. —Allen Klein


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Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain. —Edward de Bono


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For your race, in its poverty, has

unquestionably one really effective

weapon—laughter. Power, money,

persuasion, supplication, persecution

these can lift at a colossal humbug—

push it a little— weaken it a little,

century by century; but only laughter

can blow it to rags and atoms at a

blast. Against the assault of laughter

nothing can stand.

—from Mark Twain’s The Mysterious

Stranger


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Everything human is pathetic. The

secret source of humor itself is not

joy but sorrow. There is no humor

in heaven.

--Mark Twain


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Humor is reason gone mad. —Groucho Marx


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If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. — Mohandas Gandhi


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Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is. —Francis Bacon


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One doesn't have a sense of humor. It has you. —Larry Gelbart


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Everything that makes us laugh is close at hand, all comical creativity works in a zone of maximal proximity. Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically.

Mikhail Bakhtin, "Epic and Novel"


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The One-LinerRodney Dangerfield | Steven Wright | Mark Twain


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“I don’t get no respect.”


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I tell ya, my wife likes to talk during sex. Last night, she called me from a motel.


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I tell ya, my family were always big drinkers. When I was a kid, I was missing. They put my picture on a bottle of Scotch.


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My high school football team was so tough that after they sacked the quarterback they went after his family.


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From the movie Back to School

My psychiatrist told me I was crazy. I told him I want a second opinion. He said okay you're ugly too.


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What a childhood I had. My mother never breast-fed me. She said she liked me as a friend.


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What a childhood I had. Once on my birthday my ol' man gave me a bat. The first day I played with it, it flew away.


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When I was a kid I got no respect. When my parents got divorced there was a custody fight over me ... and no one showed up.


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I could tell my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.


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I come from a stupid family. During the Civil War my great uncle fought for the west.


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When I played in the sandbox, the cat kept covering me up.


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Steven Wright


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I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.


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I intend to live forever. So far, so good.


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I put instant coffee in a microwave oven and almost went back in time.


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I saw a sign in a restaurant that said breakfast anytime. I went in and ordered French toast during the Renaissance.


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I stayed in a really old hotel last night. They sent me a wake-up letter.


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Somebody asked me if I slept OK. No, I answered. I made a couple of mistakes.


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I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.


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I wrote a few children's books . . . not on purpose.


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I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.


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If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do all the rest have to drown too?


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If you shoot at mimes, should you use a silencer?


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Is it weird in here, or is it just me?


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My friend has a baby. I'm recording all the noises he makes so later I can ask him what he meant.


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When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction.


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When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only child . . . eventually.


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Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.


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Long Form Jokes

Go to the Grotesque Blog

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http://thegrotesqueblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/jokes.html


The Sitcom/Sketch

Comedy

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The Sitcom

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Little Britain (BBC Three and One, 2003-2006). Created by David Walliams (l) and Matt Lucas (r).


Videos

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http://thegrotesqueblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/little-britain.html


Philip Thomson on the comic & the grotesque.

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http://www.davidlavery.net/Grotesque/Major_Artists_Theorists/theorists/thomson/thomson4.html#comic



The Comic ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque.

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