Why is comedy more painful than tragedy?

You should write book synopses professionally. Just shorter :

“So there’s this bit by Aristotle. Why do good people like to watch bad things happening to good people, so long as it’s fictional? We don’t have a positive thesis about this.

More puzzling: why is comedy more painful than tragedy?

Why do we squirm more in our seats at some awkward sit-com misunderstanding than at a lot of blood and gore and murder? We can watch tons of movies in which the world ends without being very affected. Meh.

We obviously have some way of processing Big Tragedy onstage without suffering too badly. So why do Small Tragedies slip straight past our suspension of disbelief defenses? Why doesn’t whatever allows us to watch dozens of people be gunned down at a wedding, without crying, allow us to watch a single person trip and fall at a fictional wedding, without wincing? It’s the social stuff. Always the social stuff. It hits us like … well, like somebody fell down at a wedding.

This leads to the next question: why do we enjoy comedies, if we can’t distance ourselves from events in them? We wouldn’t like to be at a real wedding where someone fell down. It would be awkward. If the fictional wedding gets to us, like it’s real, why do we like it? It’s relatively obvious why we can watch people die like flies. We can suspend disbelief. But watching them live like fools? Given that we can’t suspend disbelief, at the level of my feelings, how can we stand it?

Adam Kotsko answers all these question and more in his new book Awkwardness. It’s awesome”

typo – *my own* not you

I’ve never understood why anyone enjoys watching either horror movies or people embarrassing themselves. My first uniformed guess would be either a lack of, or lack of development of, mirror neurons, but then I realize that since I seem to be the abnormal one it’s probably another symptom of my social anxiety disorder.

The main point of reading a novel or watching actors, for me, is to involve myself vicariously in the characters. In the case of dramas, I root for my favorite characters to succeed, but understand it’s not realistic that the bad guys always lose, so I accept the occasional downer for the sake of verisimilitude – and because the lessons of failure can be more useful than the lessons of success. I’ve never felt any wish to see King Lear. I hear it’s a real downer, despite all the useful lessons it probably contains.

“Surely if you can explain why it’s fun to watch Lear die, you can explain anything hereabouts! (That seems to be the thought.) I don’t think so. More puzzling: why is comedy more painful than tragedy?”

I think you must have gone to a very poor production of King Lear if at the end you were thinking “what fun!” We studied the play in year 9 and went to a good production of it, and I was definitely not thinking at the end that Lear’s death was fun or that it was a fun play overall. More like harrowing.

I suppose perhaps you wrote “fun” but mean a different sort of concept instead, and could be asking the question that came up on Maria’s soldier funeral post about why humans make aesthetic representations of terrible events. But as that is not what you have actually asked, I had better not digress about it.

I do not find US cringe comedy very funny, usually just mean, so I mostly avoid watching these movies or television shows. The accidentally pricking ones finger and bleeding on a damask cloth example is not overly cringeworthy for me — it does remind me of something that could happen in the Gilmore Girls which might be why you find it cringeworthy ;-)

I have not read much comedy from the classical world, but are you sure it is so similar to contemporary cringe comedy?

I quite like older comedy like musical comedy or screwball comedy or buster keaton. There was a funny Australian comedy series a while ago called Sea Change which was pleasantly comic. I do not know why comedy has gone so downhill.

The reference by JimV @7 to mirror neurons is interesting, since I just a saw a ref to them the other day. One does wonder whether some neurobiological empathic response has been temporarily switched off or otherwise muffled, allowing a lot of people (though not me) to enjoy horror movies.

“As to horror, it might be worth noting that at least some of us watch horror films because they don’t scare us and sometimes they make for genuinely good cinema…”

I think horror movies are mostly in the trash genre. Being trash means aesthetically they are so poor that it is hard to find them very affecting – but then the events they portray are so awful – so it is like a see-saw between trash representational forms that work to produce a feeling of distance in the audience and then the awful thing being represented which produces scarey-ness – but you don’t get stuck in the scarey-ness because of the trashiness.

I do not watch horror movies anymore though (unless doctor who counts?) so this is more how they affected me, I suppose people who watch them regularly might feel differently.

It was thought at the end of primary school/start of high school that watching horror movies or reading Stephen king was very adult, so it was the thing to do. This was a silly idea, but nevertheless…

A very interesting question. My thoughts right now are confused, so I can’t quite muster an answer as of yet.

Just wanted to note that your ‘oh no my finger is bleeding at this fancy event and I have no way to not bleed on everything’ scenario really gets me. After watching a good bit of Game of Thrones, I am fairly desensitized to blood and gore and even at this point torture (was all that really necessary HBO?). But the image of being gross at a fancy dinner without a way to stop the slow drip of social faux pax is actually harrowing to me. I have had nightmares that are similar.

Reading this back make me think ‘gosh gianni, you really are deranged’.

“on the now apparently huge smear he’s made on an otherwise pristine white space and it’s just excruciating to watch. (Well, ok, maybe I need to send that scenario to rewrite, but you see the point.)”
Actually, you more or less just described the only funny scene in the 1981 Chevy Chase movie “Modern Problems”

I think it may have a lot to do with our ability to put ourselves in the mind of the characters. In classical tragedy the characters are so obviously from almost forgotten times with strange speech and odd (to moderns) social customs, so we just can’t really feel “there but for the gace of the deity go I). I suspect thats going to be true of most modern horror too, its so over the top that we can laugh at the over-the-top-ness, and not get a sense that that could happen in the real world.

Now, when you combine the two, -ability to project ourselves into the characters/situation and terrible violence, I find it does affect me. I had to stop watching the Tudors, and even though I love it, the same may happen with Vikings, because the violence was just too awful. Whereas watching a guy in a rubber Godzilla suit destroying Tokyo is just over-the-top silly fun.

“More puzzling: why is comedy more painful than tragedy? Why do I squirm more in my seat at some awkward sit-com misunderstanding than at a lot of blood and gore and murder?”

I don’t think this is demonstrably true for all values of “I”. Young girls weep like babies and grown women weep like young girls – everyone weeps – when Leonardo DiCaprio dies in a movie.
However, if one does accept the premise, then a possible explanation might be that the median person can expect to find herself in an embarrassingly comedic wodehouse like situation several times in the normal run of their life. Almost no one, tending to zero, will ever suffer a zombie attack ever. In fact, since the subject is Tragedy, we can safely assert that almost no one will ever have to avenge the death of their father at the hands of their uncle for the throne of Denmark. And yet even so people weep when Mel Gibson shuffles off the mortal coil.

So it is the intensity of the occurrent feelings that counts. And the thing is that comedy can generate the greater intensity. Sort of like fingernails raking down a blackboard is a minor thing in fact, but extraordinarily teeth-setting-on-edge excruciating. You can torture somebody with comedy, but not tragedy.

I hate to be obvious, but I have to be: comedy concerns the normal, tragedy the extraordinary. I’ve been through the deaths of my grandparents, my parents and a sister-in-law. None of those events were tragic. Comedy, however, is something I often encounter visiting my 7yo nephew, and if it isn’t there I can manufacture it. I’m teaching him how to tell jokes. He’s an avid student, and I’ve found that I can use The Force to tickle him, hands-free. Their dog has a different response.

I won’t go so far as to say that tragedy isn’t realistic, but it’s not a term I’d apply to any of the people I’ve known who’ve died.

I am offended by the notion that females necessarily cry at Leonardo DiCaprio movies. The movie with him in spoiled Romeo and Juliette for me, and even though the Zefferrelli(sp?) one is better, it is still one of Shakespeare’s plays I esteem less well (not as less well as Pericles though).

The same goes for Mel Gibson, when we had to study Hamlet for year 10 we had to watch his version and none of my friends thought it very good, and Mel Gibson was too old for the character given it is a cinematic production not a theatrical production. The age is important because Hamlet is such a young man character . I saw a good filmed theatre version last year with an actor who was possibly slightly too old too, but since he captured the character with insight and very well age did not matter as much as it did with Mel Gibson.

John Holbo,

I just mentioned Hamlet would work better if your were making an horror-farce adaptation because the murder of Polonius was largely accidental so it would go with your plot about mounting up inadvertant killings, even the final killings sort of happen in hot blood. Macbeth is more premeditated.

If you want to keep Shakespeare’s verses though I am not sure how you would do this as a comedy? I suppose you could have the actors play everything so poorly it would have a comic aesthetic due to bad acting, this seems rather pointless though.

I think you would need to make this division between plot and the aesthetic qualities that mediate the plot.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream sort of parodies Romeo and Juliet with the rude mechanicals production of Pyramus and Thisbe (although Shakespeare does it very well to leave you in two minds because as the audience you watch the Greek audience in the play watching and critiquing Pyramus and Thisbe and the Greek’s are rather heartless and Shakespeare gives Bottom a nice speech that references Corinthians and In Praise of Folly).

Anyway that sums up the trouble – in a representation the plot is not really enough it has to be matched with either the writer/player having high and suited aesthetics, or kindness on the part of the audience to be moved by poor writing/acting etc.

Neither of these are necessarily forthcoming due to variable talent levels and variable kindness levels.

Also in the 20th C there was such a proliferation of confessional writing of variable quality – so because it is confessional you are sort of put in the position as the audience that you have to be as sympathetic to these confessions as you would if your friend confided such-and-such to you — except it is not your friend it an artistic representation which you would normally be allowed to judge by aesthetics, except if someone makes it confessional or copies out their wife’s angry letters like Robert Lowell it becomes not just a question of aesthetics — it escapes the frame.

Although I guess this was always the case to some degree, the collapse of formal literary and artistic forms in the 20th C and invention of mass media and mass literacy did alter things somewhat I would say. I find it problematic.

I had a related experience watching “From Beyond” (not bad for a certain kind of horror, spoilers follow). My friends and I, all teen boys, were delighted by all the impossible gore and ick and monsters – not bothered at all – until in the closing moments a character falls a few stories and breaks their knee on landing.

We gave a collective groan and flinched. The wound was not graphic at all, but convincingly done and I could easily imagine doing it, and how it would feel.

There is much comedy I can’t sit through; like John it makes me squirm. Laurel and Hardy comes to mind for me: it’s too well written and acted for me to be able to suspend empathy.

On the other had, a badly written tragedy, or ham acting, makes it impossible to suspend disbelief enough to have any empathy at all with the fictional characters. B-movie horror can be particularly bad, and then the banality becomes hilarious! :)

But the comedy can be real and in the real. Imagine you see someone sneeze all over their entree, and see the look of horror cross their face. Noone knows but you, and you watch them eat the entree (the boss is there). Same excruciating squirm in the seat as watching it on stage. So not sure about the “if it were real” idea.

“Perhaps I’ve spent too much time in hospitals to understand tragedy. In business, crushed dreams are the norm. It’s probably true of every endeavor. Misery is everywhere, if you care to notice it.”

I do not think tragedy is really the same as misery or sadness – I am not really sure how to differentiate it if you are talking about real life rather than representations. Representations are formal and aesthetic , so they are different from real life.

In my shire I can think of two public events that are tragedies

One was when I was small and I do not remember it so well but in my memory the local policemen who was a likeable man was called out one night to an incident and was shot , and it was found his wife had a lover and they devised this plot between them.

The other was more recent and a revenge tragedy where a young man was killed in a drink driving accident and his father stewed and stewed in his grief… It was very heartbreaking for the dead boy’s mother and others and very much rocked the shire.

I would think it’s pretty obvious: You haven’t experienced having your family gunned down in your wedding, or your school taken over by brainwashing parasites, etc. You have probably experienced the odd embarrassing social situation. It hits closer to home, gets harder to distance yourself from emotionally. It’s not comedy vs. tragedy as such, there’s just a lot more in comedies than in tragedies that you can relate to as a healthy, reasonably happy person.

In the same vein as phil above: teh difference is less between comedy and tragedy in themselves, but in the particular instances we encounter.

Comedies can go all-out in enticing the squirm of normal-day situations, because most people can take even the most extreme squirm enticable. But (mainstream) tragedies will rarely do the same. They could push much harder on realism, on identification, on making you really feel it. And the audience would quit

I don’t have an answer, but the other day I came across a possible word for it: Fremdschämen. At any rate it describes my tendency to over-identify massively with someone being humorously humiliated on screen. As far as I’m concerned, Frasier is a weekly horror series.

The answer sort of lying on the table is that squirmy comedies don’t effect katharsis. This makes a kind of sense, especially if you take katharsis to mean *not* a ‘getting rid of something’ but an ‘elevating into a purer form of something’. The squirmy comedies don’t raise up awkwardness into an object of contemplation, but distill it in order to burrow in, and let fester.

Some comedies do have a kathartic effect, however. Some of Aristophanes, As You Like It, It Happened One Night… come to think of it, even Superbad is sort of kathartic.

Comedy often seems to involve an element of fear, whether it’s small fears (social anxieties) or major ones.

I offer as an extreme example Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. It clearly has the right structure to be a comedy if you track down one of “history’s greatest monsters” and discover that they’re a rather weak individual. A very dark comedy.

Is it perhaps that the victims of tragedy somehow deserve what happens to them, but the victims of comedy don’t?

The ‘somehow’ is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but my rough idea would be that we know that the tragic hero is tempting fate by being so heroic, whereas the victims of comedy are just ordinary people being dumped on by extraordinarily bad circumstances. We’re OK with the tragic hero dying at the end because that’s basically the plot of the new testament and we’ve had about 2000 years to get used to it, but it’s really not obvious why Adam Sandler’s life needs to be so full of mishap.

This fits with the fact that the cringe-comedies that I can watch are the ones where dislikeable people suffer – Fawlty Towers, The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm – all of which feature characters who are both dislikeable and in possession of such enormous self-regard that they are somewhat immune to suffering any psychological consequences for even their worst mistakes. Adam Sandler seems to be able to tap in to our general dislike of Adam Sandler such that we can enjoy watching bad things happen to him even if it’s not justified by his character’s actions, and this makes it OK.

Having got to the end of this I have realised that what I’m saying is that I like watching things where status reversals happen, which is not quite the same thing as (dis)likeability. The Office, Fawlty Towers and CYE all feature a modestly powerful straight white male who thinks he knows how the world works (or should work) being confounded by it not working like that at all. Comedies I don’t like generally involve a loser character who continues to experience further bad luck with only minimal redemption (which would explain why I never really liked Mr. Bean). This also applies to tragedies – the Red Wedding was basically one big giant status reversal too, and GoT generally deals very effectively in status reversals.

Since Vietnam, I also do not watch violent movies: first in a long time was GONE GIRL, and still flashing to the murder scene. But I distinguish between terror and violence: the scene in M of the child’s balloon flying away, or of Nicholson at his typewriter in THE SHINING, terrified and entranced me. Re cringemaking comedies, a second should out for THE TROUBLE WITH MARY. For guys the moment when Ben Stiller gets his junk caught in the zipper is unforgettable….and terrifying.

JG

Maybe part of the reason it’s easier to suspend disbelief while watching actors get shot than it is when watching them embarrass themselves is that we know that the actors getting shot are in no way *actually* getting shot, whereas when David Brent does the horribly cringe-inducing arm-waving dance (in an episode of the British “Office”), the real person Ricky Gervais really is *actually* doing that embarrassing dance in front of all those other peoople.

David Brent/Ricky Gervais humiliating himself:

My family has long mocked me for my reaction to “the comedy of embarrassment”.
Take for example, The Family Man. I found that to be the most excruciating film experience I ever had.
I am glad that other people have the same reaction, if not as severe.
As far as what Jud Apatow or the Farrelly brothers produce, I am not sure I would dignify that by calling it comedy.
But isn’t definition always the problem.
For example, what falls into the broad category, “Horror”? Do we include classic psychological thrillers like the original Cat People? Torture porn like Saw, supernatural horror like Paranormal Activity, teen slasher like Friday The Thirteenth?
Is Alien horror or science fiction or both?

No viewing/reading event has ever been more painful for me than seeing “Jude” with Christopher Eccleston. The depth of the tragedy and my expectation I had been watching a typical denatured TV “drama” made the climax seem like a personal betrayal.

****

As for Something About Mary’s comic brilliance the peak for me has to be the binoculars or Matt Dillon’s teeth.

re: 70 “favorite horror movies”

Spoorloos

Nothing else is even close.

/Genuine horror.

“Spoorloos

Nothing else is even close.

/Genuine horror.”

Jesus Christ man! I just read the wiki on that film. No way I would ever be able to make it through that movie. I like my horror unrealistic.

Violence and gore don’t bother me; ghost stories do.

And it’s sad ghosts rather than malicious ones that really chill me to the bone.

The sound of weeping in the night.

Fuck that – I’d take on an army of zombies rather than stay in a house with sobbing coming from the nursery.

Shorter J. Thomas: “I hate Ralph Macchio! I hate him, hate him, hate him! He is not the Karate Kid! The Karate Kid was William Zabka, star pupil of the Cobra Kai Dojo, who this monster defeated with a cheap, illegal head-kick in the most tragically haunting film ending of all time.”

/I realize that this joke is totally impenetrable to anyone who is not a How I Met Your Mother Fan.
//My apologies
///http://how-i-met-your-mother.wikia.com/wiki/The_Bro_Mitzvah

MASH – the movie – hasn’t aged well.

It might have been irreverent and taboo busting at the time but now it just comes across as misogynistic and homophobic.

The TV series is far superior to the film or book.

Additional question, why are creepy little kids so scary? Is it because we expect them to be cute and friendly so when they are evil it is playing with our expectations?

Twins are scarier. In movies, not in real life.

Scariest thing I ever saw I didn’t actually ‘see ‘.

There’s a scene in Robert Wise’s The Haunting when the camera tracs slowly towards a wall behind which you can hear an argument although the words are incomprehensible. The pattern on the wallpaper looks like a face.

The original novel by Shirley Jackson is awesome too .

you have to make an audience laugh if you want to make them cry later

Perhaps that’s why King Lear is so much fun. At the beginning, Lear is demanding obsequies from his daughters–though he is no nowhere near dead, yet. How embarrassing for everyone is that? And are not Goneril and Regan a most hilarious pair of wicked sisters? And is not the Fool, in this play, genuinely funny for a change. And hath not the fool much piss to taketh out of his master, Lear? What about Lear turning up at Goneril’s castle with a hundred knights expecting to be fed and bedded? And then running to cry royally at Regan’s—only to get the bum’s rush from her? And is not Edmund a cap full of laughs? The typos of Blackadder’s paler impress? And it goes on and on..

@71:

The Vanishing is amazing (the original, obviously), but do people really find it scary? This is a genuine question–I haven’t seen it in a long time, and I remember really liking it… And I was going to say I don’t remember finding it scary, but now I’m recalling a couple of seriously unsettling scenes. (Hm, maybe I should watch that again.)

Getting somewhat more back on topic: I’m inclined to agree with Phil @48, and to add that tragedy (broadly defined) can be deeply affecting, though of course not in the squirm-inducing way. A couple of random data points from my own life:

I have sometimes not been able to think totally straight for a day or more after finishing a Faulkner novel. And I didn’t react this way, but I know someone who was down for a few days after reading Gatsby (I know, it does seem a bit extreme). And with film, if you think less Suspiria and more Tokyo Story or Rules of the Game,I don’t know, at least in my life those have tended to be pretty affecting experiences. La Règle du jeu is interesting in this context because it has lots of comedy, and I think a lot of that comedy is good, but it’s not squirm inducing, whereas the ending is devastating, like really actually sad-making. (Tho there is something almost sit-com-y about the lead-up to the tragedy, since in a sense, it’s just a series of small misunderstandings and failed communications.)

Jim Buck @83
Speaking of Shakespeare and the mixing of light and dark moments: Henry IV Pts 1 and 2. The first part is one of my favorite plays, though I can’t say I’ve ever seen a fully satisfying performance of it (and I’ve seen more than one over the years).

The Orson Welles movie version, Chimes at Midnight, which I saw not all that long ago (somewhat by accident; long story) gave me a headache. I was sitting too close and the soundtrack was too loud, but I think it prob would have given me a headache anyway. The battle scene is absurdly long and overchoreographed, with pointlessly long shots of horses pawing the mud while bugles blow in the background. A fairly good performance by some of the cast members; John Gielgud is in it; Welles himself as Falstaff is a bit uneven perhaps, but not bad as I recall. Then, as if everyone didn’t have a headache already, there was a longish post-film (with interviews) about the movie’s complicated production history.

As I see it, “awkwardness” in a comedic setting tends to come from a character in a familiar social setting taking an unusual and immoral/amoral/poorly thought out course of action in order to avoid some everyday-type consequences, thus leading them into an even more high-stakes and embarrassing situation that is now entirely their own fault (for example, every single George Costanza plot from Seinfeld).

I can see why it’s supposed to be funny (familiar/relatable setup > twist > unexpected but in retrospect somewhat logical result), but I never really find it that funny because 1. it’s used so commonly that the end is never that surprising 2. I hate the idea of risking larger problems to avoid short-term, relatively minor consequences, thus these jokes are an affront to my personal sensibilities and 3. the combination of the two just makes me angry, as I have a hard time believing that Constanza didn’t see all of this coming.

As for watching horror movies, maybe it’s the endorphin rush?

Could it be that the death of the world is less affecting because, as Stalin noted, “one death is a tragedy but a million deaths is a statistic?”

Not that either is necessarily funny, of course…

Kotsko assuredly does not answer this.

Edmund Kean’s last words are said (without any credible attribution) to have been, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.”

“The Vanishing is amazing (the original, obviously), but do people really find it scary?”

I don’t think so. It’s one Edgar Allen Poe moment could have even been omitted. But it is s horror movie. Raymond’s a perfect little Eichmann. And he not only prospers, he’s loved and admired. It’s horror beyond Grand Guignol.

The re-make is so inferior that it seems to me to be a calculated insult.

floofmeister: Some horror scenes are scarier for knowing that they’re real. The roo hunting scene from Wake in Fight – truly horrifying

‘Ave a drink, mate!

Even hospitality can be oppressive.

Wake in Flight is brilliant. Anyone who hasn’t seen it should grab the recently restored Blu-Ray.

What is the thing we fear most? I think it is embarrassment, social shame, to think of yourself as an object of ridicule or contempt. What we think others think of us is I believe a far more powerful motivator than any species of fear that can arise in the context of tragedy.

Unlike tragedy, comedy involves taking this primary fear head-on, in performance, at the mercy of the wisdom or the madness of the crowd, a tightrope with abysses either side. When it works there’s nothing better, for performer and audience, but when it fails there is nothing worse. We in the audience are involved, along for the ride, in a way that is foreign to tragedy, in which generally external events power the action and the behaviour of the protagonists.

The protagonists in tragedy have volition alright, and make choices, usually bad – hence tragedy. But those choices are forced by events, or at least the protagonist believes them to be. Comedy is a choice, and a huge risk in terms of social approval. We can and do imagine ourselves in this position, which implicitly invokes great admiration for those with the stones to get up and stand up.

I could not count the number of times over the years I have felt a powerful urge to change the channel when a live comedian begins to die on stage, chat show, etc. The excruciation factor is unique to comedy, I think because of this intimate connection we feel, but also because our love of comedy points more accurately to what we all want out of life – happiness and joy. It is hard to see how either of these can be attained without laughter, so anyone who can create such a gift sui generis is something special. Very often the effort involved ends up providing more tragedy than comedy.

Tragedy points to death, comedy to life. We view tragedy with fortitude and resignation, knowing that in the end we cannot avoid it, but anticipate laughter with keen avidity, searching for it like water in the desert. When it turns out to be a mirage, the loss is more painful than the desert heat, which we expect and have factored into our calculations. Hope is dashed when comedy dies, but as tragedy is devoid of hope, that prime disappointment can’t arise. Our reactions to tragedy might include items not normally a by-product of comedy such as stoic, clear-eyed realism.

Both are essential, but I know which I prefer!

“Notice I just mis-wrote ‘you are giving’, obviously because identification with the protagonist makes you feel that way. You are the one enduring the embarrassment the character is suffering. ”

If we are still talking about television or movies it is somewhat different though because there is not just the character and the other people like in real life. For instance, once going camping, I myself tripped and somehow somersaulted down the hill — as I was not at all hurt, and although I was somewhat embarrassed at being so klutzy in front of everybody, it was very surprising and quite funny and I didn’t so much mind laughing about it and telling it as a comical story.

But it is a bit different in television or movies because in the first place it is scripted and then you also have the director deciding things and the actors too and then all the technical things like taking different shots and cutting and editing (when I was very young it was a great disappointment to me to find that films were not made just like plays and scenes were filmed all in one long take)

So a comedy is a bit different than something comic.

And in comedy you have some comedies that are more kind hearted in tone, and some that are cruel and mocking in tone, and you have absurdism which is not wholly comic though having parts that are comic, and farce, and tap-dancing comedies and so forth. Probably you could decide on any of these forms to have an episode featuring a klutzy girl somersaulting down a hill. So the work’s content and responses to the work must be more to do with the form than the comic episode itself I would think, or else why would there be so many ways in which to tell things?

Probably there is some sort of more proper classificatory schema for the different types than the one I sketched. But then you would also have the different authors and so on within or betwixt the different classifications.

It does make me wonder about that book of screenwriting directives in the other OP – it seems rather dull that people follow these conventions all the time. But I suppose it is explicatory of a point that somehow processes of cultural sanction and caution influence which forms are dominant, rather than necessarily being entirely autonomous authorial decisions.

Horace makes this point even back when he was writing, linking changes in literary forms to social and political changes – earlier the simple and delicate flute gave the note to the chorus and accompanied it “where an audience small enough to be counted came together – simple, thrifty folk, modest and virtuous in their ways. But when a conquering race began to extend its territories , and cities grew in size… a greater freedom was allowed in the choice both of rhythms and melodies..”

Horace is quite strict in his literary criticism, it is quite lucky comment threads were not invented then, as I am sure he would have been very strict about how comment thread writing should be done too, and I fear much would meet with his censure and disapproval.

He seems to think subject rather than form distinguishes comedy from tragedy, as iambic writing is suitable for both since it drowns out the audience chatter so well, and both elevated and prosaic wording can also be used for both.

He says the core thing is not beauty but “charm” – but I am not sure this word charm is the right translation since how he expresses his sentiment is “Just as smiling faces are turned on those who smile, so is sympathy shown with those who weep. If you want to move me to tears, you must first feel grief yourself; then, Telephus and Peleus, your misfortunes will grieve me too, whereas if your speeches are out of harmony with your feelings, I shall either fall asleep or burst out laughing… [see, as I said, he is very strict indeed in his literary criticism] For nature has so formed us that we first feel inwardly any change in our fortunes; it is she that cheers us or rouses us to anger, she that torments us and bows us to the ground with a heavy burden of sorrow, and it is only afterwards that she expresses these feelings in us by means of the tongue”

Horace complains a good deal and then leaves off to say “What an ass am I to purge the bile out of my system as the season of Spring comes along”

I am sorry if any economists are reading — but I suppose if I am noting Horace’s strict literary criticism, then I will pass on that Horace also is very strict in his criticism of nation’s economics and blames the Roman enthusiasm for commerce as a corrosive influence on Roman writing as youngsters learn incessantly how to add and subtract and divide and multiply money, and how then can they hope to write a poem worth rubbing with cedar oil and storing in a cypress trunk?

I forgot to mention another comedy that was funny this year, it was the second season, non-Australians might not have heard of it, I missed some of the episodes but likely it will be on again. It is quite awkward I suppose.

http://youtu.be/PyMg-9ckXhI

“Why do good people like to watch bad things happening to good people, so long as it’s fictional?”

Is the “fictional” proviso warranted? Good people “enjoy” misery memoirs and holocaust documentaries. Pain is quite compelling.

I’m not much into genres except as occasions of performance (actually, I’d prefer “performing”). The comments here have been wonderful. Just saying, as I maneuver betwixt Aeschylus teaching and pie-crust making (with cranberry-sauce making thrown in — Aristophanes would appreciate! but then, so would Clytemnestra as she lords it over Cassandra), hope all here who so observe, may you have a good Thanksgiving. Thanks….