Thomas Coryat, the Sesqui-superlative Traveler

 

 

 

References in brackets are to endnotes, those in parentheses to the 1905 Macmillan reprint of the original edition of Coryat’s Crudities in two volumes, accessible on archive.org.

 

  

 

         "OH to what height will love of greatnesse drive/ Thy leavened spirit, Sesqui-superlative?" (37)  With these mock-heroic lines, John Donne salutes Thomas Coryat, the author of Coryat’s Crudities (1611) [1].  While “height” and “leavened spirit” refer to conventional ideas of sublimity dating from Longinus, the over-ingenious invention of the nonce word “sesqui-superlative” introduces a hyperbolic tone that implies satire.  Donne concludes on a witty and clearly ironic note.  "Thy Gyant wit o'erthrowes me, I am gone;/ And rather then reade all, I would reade none." 

     The work that inspired this dubious tribute is a curious object even before the reader opens the book.  Whatever can the name mean, since the volume offers neither improper jokes nor salad recipes?  The title page explains that it instead contains Coryat’s observations as a traveler “hastily gobled up in five Moneths,” then “newly digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset, and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling Members of the Kingdome.”  Apparently he meant by the term crudities to refer to the rushed pace of his trip in  which he covered five countries in  as many months, much of the time walking.  Apart from the fact that a raw diet was at the time thought prone to upset the stomach, the notion of eating material that has been already digested  and then dispersed by another is enough to induce aa slight nausea [2].

     In fact the book is entertaining, a readable if offhand travel narrative that in some ways anticipates Robert Byron or Bruce Chatwin.  Whereas most earlier accounts of distant places were either by explorers who had visited very remote or exotic locations, relating history and sometimes legend, about sites the reader would never visit, Coryat provides information useful for future travelers, precisely like the guidebooks of more recent times.  His own journey was a prototype for the Grand Tour which became de rigeur for the sons of the wealthy for two hundred years following the publication of the Crudities [3].

     To Coryat are attributed the importation of the use of the table fork and the word umbrella from Italy as well as the popularization of the Swiss story of William Tell.  The contemporary reader may be more impressed, however, with the book’s elaborate presentation, preceded by multiple layers of text that condition the reader’s first acquaintance with the author’s actual trip.  The inclusion of these apparently extraneous materials reveals a great deal about the intentions of the work and, more broadly, the literary values of the age.   

     Before coming to the first of the author’s impressions of the Continent his reader must make his way through a number of preliminary stages amounting to over a hundred and fifty pages.  This leisurely route leads first to the title page, a grand mélange of Baroque decoration [4].  Architectural elements structure the space with the title and a portrait of the author surrounded by vignettes from scenes described within while bits of Latin and a few words of Greek are strewn about as further ornaments. 

     While this design layout suggests formality and serious purpose, the incidents illustrated depict the author in less than flattering moments.  In the lower right corner Coryat appears as he escapes in a gondola while a Venetian prostitute pelts him with eggs, implying quite a different tone.   Known as an eccentric – his lengthy treks on foot are enough alone to justify the term – he had occupied a position in the court of Prince Henry, son of James I as a kind of jester or buffoon.  In private life among his peers in the “right Worshipful Fraternitie of Sireniacal Gentlemen” that met at the Mermaid Tavern, he held a similar position as a joker who is as well the butt of others’ teasing [5].  He was doubtless something of an odd duck who gained access to elite gatherings by playing the fool.  He was surely cultivating this identity when he distributed his book by visiting aristocrats with his copies borne by a donkey who carried a sign saying “asinus portans mysteria” [6].

     This reputation was preserved by Thomas Fuller’s account: “He carried folly (which the charitable called merriment) in his very face.  The shape of his head had no promising form, being like a sugar-loaf inverted, with the little end before, as composed of fancy and memory, without any common sense.”  He was popular because “Sweetmeats and Coryate made the last course at all court entertainments.  Indeed, he was the courtiers’ anvil to try their wits upon.” [7]

     At any rate the first feature of his book is a series or verses which he describes in his characteristically metaphorical manner as “Certaine Opening and Drawing Distiches, to be applied as mollifying Cataplasmes to the Tumors, Carnosities, or difficult Pimples, full of matter, appearing in the Authors front, conflated of Stiptike and Glutinous Vapours arising out of the Crudities : The heads whereof are particularly pricked and pointed out by letters for the Readers better understanding.”  If the digestive analogies of his title had made some queasy, the notion of his content as tumors and pimples seems designed to unsettle the rest.

     Though beginning a book with commendatory verses was a common convention, here the praise is ironic at best.  The tone of mockery is evident from the first couplet in a group described as “an explication of the emblems of the frontispiece” attributed to Laurence Whitaker.

 

First, th' Author here glutteth Sea, Haddocke and                Whiting

With spuing, and after the world with his writing.       

      (xv)                                                                                    

 

A second group of rhymes providing humorous commentary on the title page is signed by Ben Jonson.  One concerns the Venetian affair illustrated on the title page.

 

 A punke here pelts him with egs. How so?

For he did but kisse her, and so let her go.     (xix)

 

     Then succeeds a second title page, noting that, in addition to the travel reportage (the “crudities”) the volume contains a translation of “a most elegant Oration” by a certain learned Professor Hermannus Kirchnerus as well as a concluding section containing the “Posthume Poems of the Authors Father, coming as neere Kinseman to the worke, being next of blood to the Booke, and yonger brothers to the Author himself.”  Next follows a six-page dedication to Coryat’s patron, Prince Henry.  In the fulsome manner of such addresses he calls Henry “the Orient Pearle of the Christian world” and refers to his work as “green” and “silly,” signing himself “Your Highnesse poore Observer, Thomas Coryate, Peregrine of Odcom.”

     Next one finds an “Epistle to the Reader” signed T. C. “The Odcombian Legge-stretcher” teeming with Latin tags and seeking to justify his publishing “the abortive fruits of my travels” (7). 

     Then comes a sketch of “the Character of the Author,” now called “Odcombian, or rather Polyptopian” by Coryat’s “charitable Friend” Ben Jonson who calls him an “odde Joviall Author” (19) and teases him gently: “He is alwaies Tongue-Major of the company, and if ever the perpetuall motion be to be hoped For, it is from thence.” (18)  Jonson concludes with an exercise in ingenuity, an acrostic spelling Coryat’s name.

     The reader is still remote from the start of the book proper to reach which it is first necessary to make way through a hundred and seven pages of “encomiastick and panegyrick Verses” by fifty-five poets including Ben Jonson, John Donne, Inigo Jones, and Sir John Harington [7], preceded by an introduction which boasts that such a collection of blurbs constitute “a great multitude of Verses as no booke whatsoever printed in England these hundred years” (20).  Many of the tributes seem little like praise, and Coryat drily comments that many had felt free to make “free and mery jests” to such an extent that he must ask that the reader “to suspend thy censure of me till thou hast read over my whole booke.” (21)  He pleads that the prince himself had mandated these tongue-in-cheek tributes which cast the entire work in an ironic light.

     The tone of many may be evident from the first, its writer concealed behind a Greek pseudonym, which says that grammarians “stand in feare” when they hear his “uncouth” coinages (22).  He seemed to his courtly peers an odd man out.

    

His name is Coryate I wis,

But whether he be flesh or fish,

I cannot yet decide.    (23)

 

Several make jokes about his weight [9].  Lewes Lewknor mentions that, during the five months Coryat spent writing the book “he seldome changed his shirt or shoes” (28).

     Some of the poetry is remarkable enough in other ways.  Donne contributed a macaronic poem using no less than five languages (39).  Laurence Whitaker contributed bits in both Latin and French (40-43), Hugo Holland in Greek and Italian (43-44), Joachim Vadian (Glarianus Vadianus) in Spanish, Italian, French, and Latin.  Several poems, those by Peacham, Glareanus Vadianus (tentatively John Sanford), and Hoskyns approach nonsense.

     An essay “In Praise of Travel” by the German poet and lawyer Hermann Kirchner is next included in which travel (like poetry) is said to provide both “incredible utility” and “admirable sweetness.”  There is, he says, “no nearer way to the attayning of true wisedome” (123).  The traveler is “of a facill nature, modest, courteous, loving, gentle, kind in entertainment, and by the very bent of vertue inclined to good discipline,” (131).  Travel is in fact our very nature since “surely all living creatures that are to be found in this most wide and vast world are delighted with running abroad & free motion.” (141)

     The patient reader has, after this learned disquisition, still not reached Coryat’s account of his travels.  An “Elogie of the Booke” by Laurence Whitaker is the next feature, included by Coryat “though the Author thereof be disposed in some places to be merry with me.” (149)  Indeed Whitaker notes that, though in “this garment were found some rent, in this garden some weeds, in this ship some trash” there is yet in it “no disgrace” (150).

     Then succeeds the actual book, but the apparatus is not yet exhausted.  At the end is appended the Latin poems, by George Coryat, the author’s father, which have no relation tom the rest of the volume apart from the fact that some describe English, Scots, and Irish scenes. 

     As the book was privately published under the patronage of Prince Henry, he and the author presumably had control over the contents, but they may not have entirely agreed.  Coryat mentions that he had preferred to omit a good many of the “encomiastick” verses but the great lord “gave me a strict and expresse commandement to print all” (21).  Much of the poetry as well as Jonson’s “Character of the Author” and Whitaker’s “Elogie” depend on Coryat as a comic figure, yet this is not the sole appeal of the substantial added elements which do indicate his acquaintance with prominent figures of the court as well as (in Kirchner’s essay) a serious apologia for recreational travel.  

     The use of a variety of languages and of elaborate conceits is exhibited throughout the book.  To illustrate the playful tone and ingenious use of metaphor as well as Coryat’s own self-mocking rhetorical play a single passage from Coryat’s first page relating his seasickness on the crossing will suffice.

 

 

I had varnished the exterior parts of the ship with the excrementall ebullitions of my tumultuous stomach, as desiring to satiate the gormandizing paunches of the hungry Haddocks {according as I have hieroglyphically expressed it in the front of my booke) with that wherewith I had superfluously stuffed my selfe at land, having made my rumbling belly their capacious aumbrie.” (152)

 

That final word, which denotes a storage place or cupboard, particularly in a church, is an example of Coryat’s fondness for out-of-the-way words and neologisms such as hyperaspist, refocillated, and tatterdemalion. 

     There is indeed a certain leisurely relaxation to Coryat’s prose.  As Chapman’s tribute notes, “Here is not stifled much stuffe in few wordes;/ His little matter many lines affordes.” (72)  His delight in lush verbiage, so familiar to readers of Shakespeare, recalls the ancient and medieval figure of amplificatio, the restatement of a given idea multiple times, weaving what was thought a sumptuous texture, but would now seem tedious to many.  A similar taste underlay Euphuism, and later Baroque and rococo ornamentation [10].

     Like his elaborate syntax and his references to Classical literature and history, these lexical choices contribute to representing Coryat as a particular type of the comic character, the slightly absurd oddball professor [11].  The introductory materials reinforce this role, allowing the reader to identify with his presumably normative critics even before the first word of the text proper.  Apart from the comic stereotype, the very profusion of classical allusions, bookish vocabulary, and figurative language creates a high-spirited ludic verbal texture.  Keeping up with the often oblique signification becomes an entertainment in itself, something like constantly working crossword puzzles or rebuses.  Subject to a whirl of images and words, the reader exercises his hermeneutic abilities recreationally, exhilarated with the richness of the world and the language, while all the time maintaining the distance that allows for comedy.  We are like Coryat, but not to his ridiculous degree, and laughter is the end result.  The book appeals to those with a taste either for travel or laughter, according to one of the introductory verses (72), for both are pure amusements as is, very often, reading, even, might I dare say, reading literary criticism, for otherwise the gracious reader and I would never have met. 

  

 

 

1.  The author’s name is variously spelled Coryate and Coriat. 

2.  Further discussion of the medical usage of “crudities” is found in Katharine A. Craik, “Reading ‘Coryats Crudities’ (1611),” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 44, No. 1, The English Renaissance (Winter, 2004).  

3.  Also influential was the trip a few years later of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel who traveled with Inigo Jones as cicerone and who assembled a magnificent art collection.  The convention remained strong until the nineteenth century when European tourism became more available to the middle class. 

4.  The version reproduced above cannot show sufficient detail, but the image is readily viewable online.

5.  His role was similar to that of a παράσιτος in Greek symposia, a scurra at Roman feasts or a jester in a court. 

6.  Philip S. Palmer, “'The progress of thy glorious book': material reading and the play of paratext in ‘Coryats Crudities’ (1611),” Renaissance Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3 (June 2014).

7.  In A History of the Worthies of England (1662) George Allen & Unwin, 1952,  p. 502.

8.  Harington is the celebrated inventor of the water closet.

9.  See the poems by Henricus Nevill de Abergevenny in which he is said to have a “grievous bulke” (23) and by Henricus Goodier which speaks of the difficulty of lifting him (27).

10.  The rhetorical manuals were often repetitive or imprecise.  Similar figures are sometimes called commoratio or expolitio.  In other countries similar post-Renaissance movements were called by different names: culteranismo in Spain, Marinismo in Italy, and préciosité in France. 

11.  Some might be reminded of Athenaeus or Robert Burton though in these cases the humor is far more understated.  Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh is a later parallel.

 

 

Convention and Comedy in Plautus’ Menaechmi

 

Actors wearing comic masks from a frieze in Herculaneum

     The Menaechmi is not only Plautus’ most popular play, it is as well solidly in the mainline of European comedy, adapted as it is from Greek New Comedy and influencing in turn Shakespeare and Molière.  Across the centuries dramatists from various countries have employed some of the same literary devices to generate humor, including conventions that provide distancing by foregrounding the artificiality of the aesthetic object.

     Fundamentally, of course, the very word art asserts that anything so labeled is artificial. The point about every poem, painting, or composition is that it is unnatural, not simply a record of direct experience.  No one moves like a ballet dancer or speaks in verse without the conscious intention of making something beautiful, something which I presume even Oscar Wilde did not do every moment of the day.  Yet works have varying degrees of verisimilitude. Though all art depends on illusion and the “willing suspension of disbelief,” Coleridge’s “poetic faith," still some paintings and some narratives give the impression that they represent reality more or less directly while others make no attempt to mirror everyday life.

     Comedy in particular depends on limiting emotional engagement.  Since we cannot simultaneously mock and empathize with a character, comic drama tends toward the explicitly contrived.  Far more people in silent films slip on banana peels or push a pie in the face of an antagonist than ever do such things in reality.  The acts are silent film conventions, recognizable to viewers as signals to laugh.  The viewer knows that nobody gets hurt; it is all a game.  In the cartoon genre Wile E. Coyote may be smashed flat as a pancake, but he will instantly rise to fight the next round. 

     In the Menaechmi and other comedies of Plautus detachment is built in part through the use of recognizable conventions, including highly unlikely coincidences that would be jarring in a realistic drama.  The circumstance of twins, separated since childhood but eventually reunited is considerably more common in folktale and legend than in reality.  While the classic denouement for comedy is marriage, in the Menaechmi the brothers’ finding each other is an equally joyful expression of love and affirmation.  Surely watching such a spectacle offers viewers an imaginative experience of victory just as tragedy rehearses the spectator’s own defeat and dissolution.  Their memory of their own defeats and suffering, however, as well as the implausibility of the play’s plot reminds them that the play is a fantasy, generating thereby a dialectic suggesting the interdependence of joy and sorrow, yet nonetheless offering a few laughs at the human predicament along the way. 

     Apart from that principal story arc, the plot of Plautus’ comedy depends throughout on the most unbelievable coincidence.  The brothers were apparently not only identical twins; they must in addition have dressed exactly alike to be taken for each other.  The Syracusan just happens to wander by Erotion’s house and Peniculus later happens to encounter him after the dinner.  His decision to feign insanity, while necessary for the plot, is unlikely.  Here and in romances (which are similarly unrealistic) there can only be a happy ending.  In both genres the reader’s sympathetic satisfaction at the story’s conclusion is mitigated by the artificiality of the narrative which suggests that such desirable resolutions are more the stuff of fables than of most human experience.  Thus one relishes the pleasure of victory over circumstance in imagination while conceding that events rarely fall out so neatly in reality.

     Apart from the conventional narrative pattern, Plautus in this play and in all his work makes use of stock characters and formulae.  The doddering father-in-law, for instance, is more ridiculous than pathetic, a figure at whom the audience laughs rather than feeling sympathy.  Messenio the slave is, rather than an example of injustice, a calculating agent, working often in his own interest.  The courtesan Erotium is portrayed more as a manipulator than as a victim. The doctor is perhaps as much quack as healer. 

     These stereotyped characters, like Pantalone, the dottore, and Arlecchino in commedia dell’arte, create emotional distancing while generating comedy by portrayals of these characters as types who act foolishly by nature and lack the audience’s awareness of critical circumstances, in the Menaechmi, that the men are twins.  Though the figures on stage may be unrealistic, they nonetheless arise from common experience. The difficult wife reflects gender rivalry, the tricky parasite and slave suggest the uneasiness of social hierarchy, the dubious doctor anxiety about health, and the calculating courtesan unease about sex for money.  It is a measure of the dehumanization that supports the humor that at the end, when Messenio says the auction of the belongings of the Epidamnian brother may include his wife, it is nothing but a laugh line.

     With the elements in place of an assured positive outcome and a cast of characters who are more reductive types than fully rounded personalities, Plautus is enabled to use the other classic sources of comedy to make his audience laugh.  With this foundation, jokes then emerge through the constant wordplay (which complicates the already impossible task of the translator), the emphasis on appetitive desire, and the revelation of human weakness, but the viewer’s sense of the scene’s unreality is a precondition. 

Cell Phones

     I suppose whether I like it or not it is generational, but I can't understand people's attachment to their cell phones. When I'm in the supermarket it seems like everyone else has a phone to the ear while poking through the kale. I feel as though I must be the most insignificant person on earth since apparently everyone else has important business to transact at every moment of the day. Everyman has attained the status of a broker at the beach wearing a Bluetooth with his Speedo.
     But that is not necessarily so. Perhaps all these connected shoppers are receiving orders. Perhaps they must buy stewed tomatoes and they are forever uncertain they have remembered the correct brand. It may be that the overlords on the other end of the phone conversation don't trust their minions to keep their errands straight unless they are being constantly monitored and instructed.
     They have the furtive look of addicts, like cigarette smokers outside an office building, and, like other addicts, they are never satisfied. If for any reason the connection is broken, through a failure in the system or in the individual device, anxiety amounting to panic ensues.
     I did acquire a smart phone, though years later than everyone else. It has proven very slow to share its secrets with me. I know about a half of per cent of its nature, probably less. It is like an acquaintance for some reason reluctant to tell me his surname. The device has looked on me with its minute camera and judged that I am unready to be initiated into the mysteries. It is willing to allow me a telephone call or two, but further intimacy is forbidden.
     It clearly has a secret life of which I know nothing. I can understand its lack of interest in me, but in what might it be interested instead? Crunching numbers derived from international weather reports? Hatching nefarious plans with Russian hackers? A long distance electronic affair with a garage door opener in Dubuque? I haven't the slightest idea.
     If, as John Scotus Erigena said, God is what we do not know, perhaps this little device is divine. So how would devotees worship such a deity? Clearly Apple is a jealous god demanding constant attention. But all followers fall short. No one can be gazing at the device twenty-four hours a day, but the pious approach as closely as possible to that ideal. Soon there may be communities of contemplatives who spend all their waking hours gazing at the little screens. Hoping to be themselves digitalized and in that way immortal, the poor limited humans do their best to appease the all-powerful microcircuits.
     The blasphemous might object that humans in fact invented the iPhone, but of course precisely the same is true of Jupiter and Jehovah. And in the realm of the imagination where these conceptual deities contend, the contemporary Apple must be identical to the apple that wrought such havoc in the Garden of Eden. We are surely the same Adam and Eve ready for any attractive deception that catches our eyes.

Idea of Comedy

     Unable after searching to recover my notes for a course I taught during the eighties on the idea of comedy, I have here attempted to set down my views in summary. Though these notes lack much in the way of illustrations, authorities, and documentation, they represent my current thinking.



     All art brings beauty and pleasure, but comedy brings gaiety and joy as well. Thematically, in the broadest sense, comedy represents a positive response to life, an affirmation, a celebration, a delight. This is neither more nor less accurate (that is, true to experience) than the pity and fear of tragedy or the simpler sympathy of sentiment and melodrama; it is their complementary counterpart. At the conclusion of the Symposium, when the partiers are for the most part, passed out, Socrates is maintaining the equivalence of the two [1].  Don Quixote, Pantagruel, and Falstaff are certainly as profound to readers as Agamemnon or Hamlet, and likely to be more moving than any hero in Racine. When we momentarily feel successful (or even indifferent) in dealing with the terms of existence, or when we choose to play at feeling such victory, we laugh.
     Aristotle tells us that tragedy provides catharsis through pity of the other (compounded, I would add, of charitable love for fellow humans and Schadenfreude at witnessing someone else’s misfortunes). Fear arises since every member of the audience is aware that the fate of every individual is inevitably tragic. Looking at life straight on with open eyes may naturally elicit a tragic response. But a later ancient text which may preserve Aristotelian theory says that comedy “through pleasure and laughter” effects “the purgation of like emotions” [2].  In other words, ultimately the functions of tragedy and comedy are precisely parallel; both enable one to go on in spite of the intolerable conditions of life.
     In comedy, the self is generally normative, observing with a critical eye the foolishness of those on every side. Thus humor requires a butt and comedy is often quite aggressive [3]. The characters in American half-hour comedy television shows pass their lives insulting those around them; in Oscar Wilde, the benighted Philistine is put down; in Huckleberry Finn America is lacerated without mercy. Here comedy is close to its roots in the ancient κῶμος, Old Comedy, and the modern Carnival with ridicule of prominent people, a trend that continues unbroken into the present [4].
      At the same time, though, comedy can seem amoral, when it tends to view faults abstractly as incongruity, as oddly amusing grotesque distortions in a formal pattern rather than as the source of pain and suffering. In caricature the lovesick youth, the miser, the braggart, the macho man and all other endless varieties of human folly appear as sideshow attractions rather than psychological, spiritual, or social pathologies causing real harm. Bergson insists on “the absence of feeling,” what he calls “a momentary anesthesia of the heart” required for comedy, itself “wholly intellectual” [5].  According to Aristotle, the ridiculous must never be “painful nor destructive.” Of course, Wile E. Coyote is never injured, though he may be smashed like a pancake or blown into the sky, he returns ever undiminished. So the whole competition between him and the Roadrunner, between the Signifying Monkey and the lion, between Chaplin and the bushy-browed Eric Campbell, all contention seen through a comic lens is finally a game, a pretense, a sport to while away at least a portion of a lifetime.
     Paradoxically, though, comedy does in the end care a great deal about consequences, for every comedy must end happily. Every situation comedy ends in the restoration of a harmonious family, every romantic comedy ends in marriage. Human beings are such social animals that the endangerment of the social group by an individual’s violations of convention is seriously disturbing. Harmony must be reconstituted, if only through the sympathetic magic of drama.
     Aristotle notes that comedy is “an imitation of characters of a lower type,” portraying as “ludicrous” “some defect or ugliness” [6].  The viewer will feel superior to the comic figures (though suspecting that the difference may be uncomfortably small) just as he feels inferior to the heroes of tragedy (while knowing that their fate is his in the end).  Comedy finds amusement in every vice and failing – selfishness, libertinism, paranoia, vanity most all. Every fault is in fact a sort of vanity and ignorance – with a clear and objective view (like the reader) one would never behave in a ludicrous fashion [7].    By defining lapses, one defines norms. Comedy has been considered fundamentally conservative by some and inherently subversive by others because it is equally likely to criticize a present offender by calling for a return to earlier ideals or by denouncing the outdated values of the present and proposing radical new ones.
     Apart from character faults, comedy exploits our physicality. Faults which are body-based such as gluttony and lust are a rich source of laughter, but moral failing need not come into the picture -- perfectly ordinary facts will work as well: sex, excretion, farts, belches, sleepiness, sweating, slipping on a banana peel. In fact, commonality lies behind the comic impetus to deflate the pompous with such expressions as “he thinks his shit don’t smell” or “he puts on his pants like the rest of us, one leg at a time.” However, this basis for universal sympathy can equally serve to stigmatize individuals. Any anomaly, including physical defects or simply unusual characteristics such as short stature, red hair, or minority racial identity, can be fair game, as every elementary school child knows [8].
     The incongruity that inspires laughter may be of any sort, in Aristotle’s language “that which is out of time and place, without danger.” It may arise from exaggeration or disproportion [9], indeed from any difference. A phrase whose meaning shifts between two possibilities, a sucking puppy among the piglets, a soldier out of step, an Amish rap singer, the possibilities are endless. According to Emerson [10] “The balking of the intellect, the frustrated expectation, the break of continuity in the intellect is comedy.”
     Comedy is clearly associated in particular with topics about which people are anxious, such as sex, drunkenness, and social propriety in general. Laughter brings a simultaneous physical relief of tension and restraints and the intellectual assurance that reassurance that our own trials may, like those of comic characters, be overcome. Laughter has a social function [11], chastening nonconformists and creating a sense of shared values and feelings in the audience.
     The deepest roots of comedy are surely in the rituals of springtime, the joy of the earth’s regreening, the acceptance that welcomes the replacement of the old with the new. The promise of the spring and the reappearance of fresh produce must have been associated with high spirits [12].
     There is finally a sort of cosmic comedy, reflected in the daily laughter among Tibetan monks, or that of altogether mythic figures as Durga who roars with laughter as she decapitates Mahishasura. Nietzsche provides a secular analogue in his story about Zarathustra coming across a shepherd with a snake in his throat. Horrified, Zarathustra urges the man to bite the serpent’s head off. When the shepherd does, he suddenly becomes “changed, radiant, laughing.” “Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he laughed. Oh my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter; and now a thirst gnaws at me, a longing that never grows still. MY longing for this laughter gnaws at me.” [13] This is nothing less than the laughter in reaction to the absurdity of existence. “The deeply wounded have Olympian laughter; one has only what one needs to have.” [14]
     Emerson makes a similar point sparing the symbolic apparatus. “The whole of nature is agreeable to the whole of thought, or to the Reason; but separate any part of nature and attempt to look at it as a whole by itself, and the feeling of the ridiculous begins. The perpetual game of humor is to look with considerate good nature at every object in existence, aloof as a man might look at a mouse, comparing it with the eternal Whole; enjoying the figure which each self-satisfied particular creature cuts in the unrespecting All, and dismissing it with a benison. Separate any object, as a particular bodily man, a horse, a turnip, a flour-barrel, an umbrella, from the connection of things, and contemplate it alone, standing there in absolute nature, it becomes at once comic; no useful, no respectable qualities can rescue it from the ludicrous.” [15]


1. More precisely, he claims that at a gifted tragedian should also be able to write comedy.

2. From the Coislinian Tractate, an anonymous condensation of a work from the first century B.C.E. Proclus and Iamblichus also treat comedy as catharsis. In the twentieth century Elder Olson revived the term katastasis as a comic analogue to catharsis, defining it as the “restoration of the mind to a pleasant, or euphoric, condition of freedom from desires and emotions; conversion of the grounds of concern into nothing.”

3. See the Philebus, particularly 48-50. To Plato, comedy works through phthonos or malice, "being pleased at the misfortunes of our neighbor" (Philebus 48a).

4. The same principle occurs worldwide. For instance, the ancient Irish kings feared being lampooned in a glam dicenn (satire-poem). Of course, in the Middle Ages poets were considered so close a thing to magicians that they were also believed to be able to bring real boils to the face of a victim. In West Africa, the Ibo “moon-songs” sometimes ridicule individuals who have violated group norms.

5. In “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic,” translated by Cloudesley Brereton L. es L. (Paris), M.A. (Cantab) and Fred Rothwell B.A. (London). Bergson says, “It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion.” Also, “to produce the whole of its effect . . . the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple.”

6. Chapter V of the Poetics, Butcher’s translation. He is followed by the Coislinian Tractate and by Cicero who, in “On the Character of the Orator,” says “turpitudine.” In the twentieth century Northrup Frye used Aristotle as the basis of his analysis of the “low mimetic mode” in Anatomy of Criticism.

7. Plato says comedy springs from “ignorance of self.”

8. There is a reference to a dancing dwarf in the court of Neferkere during the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt (Third Millennium B.C.E.).

9. Cicero in On the Character of the Orator uses the term “deformitate.”

10. In “The Comic.”

11. This is Bergson’s third principal point.

12. Some authorities would link the customs associated with All Fool’s Day with the old medieval New Year just before.

13. Emphasis in the original from Walter Kaufmann’s translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 3rd Part, “On the Vision and the Riddle.”

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, fragment 1040.

15. From “The Comic.”