Aristotle
- The Poetics
Comedy
Comedy is an imitation of characters of a
lower type- not bad. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not
painful or destructive. To take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and
distorted but does not imply pain. The roots of comedy lie in satirical verse
as those of tragedy in epic poetry. As tragedy following its parent forms, epic
poetry and hymns, represents men as worse as nobler than they are, so comedy
also following its parent forms, satirical verse and songs represents men as
worse than they are. While the satire however ridicules personalities, comedy
ridicules general vices- the one the ‘sinner’ the other the ‘sin’. By
characters worse than the average Aristotle does not mean who are wicked or vicious
but merely men who have ‘some defect or ugliness which is not painful or
destructive’. What they do is defective or ugly, too, provoking laughter, but
leads to no harm or pain either to themselves or to others. Nor are they
despicable, for no one whom we hate can put us into good humor. They are merely
ludicrous and no more. By excluding personal attacks that form the
subject-matter of the satire and the possibility of pain to the comic character
we laugh at, Aristotle rules out malicious pleasure as the basis of comedy. For
when the pleasure arises not from a personal but a general weakness and causes
no pain whatever either to the victim or to the spectator, there can be no
malice in it.
Law
of Universality
Comedy
is able to give artistic expression to certain types of character which can
hardly find a place in serious art. Aristotle draws no distinction between the
universality which is proper to tragedy and comedy respectively. Each of these
embodies the type rather than the individual and to this extent they have a
common function. Aristotle indicates the distinction between comedy proper
which playfully touches the faults and foibles of humanity and personal satire.
The one kind of composition is a representation of the universal, the other of
the particular. All great poetry and art fulfill this law of universality, but
none perhaps so perfectly as the poetry and art of the Greeks. The heroines of
Homer and of the tragedians are broadly and unmistakably human. In real life
woman is less individual than man.
Comedy-Power
of Poetry
Comedy
shares the power of poetry. It equally represents not what has happened but
what may happen: what is probable in a given set of circumstances. With the characters
and conditions such as it chooses, the result it says is likely to be what it
states. This is borne out by its choice of a general and not an individual
foible for its object. The very names it gives to its characters suggest a
section of humanity rather than particular men. So, they represent more or less
universal rather than individual frailties, not how so -and -so behaved but how
all men of the same type will behave in the same circumstances.
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