The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy

'Laughter', says Eric Weitz, 'may be considered one of the most extravagant physical effects one person can have on another without touching them'. But how do we identify something which is meant to be comic, what defines something as 'comedy', and what does this mean for the way we enter the world of a comic text? Addressing these issues, and many more, this is a 'how to' guide to reading comedy from the pages of a dramatic text, with relevance to anything from novels and newspaper columns to billboards and emails. The book enables you to enhance your grasp of the comic through familiarity with characteristic structures and patterns, referring to comedy in literature, film and television throughout. Perfect for drama and literature students, this Introduction explores a genre which affects the everyday lives of us all, and will therefore also capture the interest of anyone who loves to laugh.

List of illustrations	p. vii
Preface	p. ix
Introduction: Thinking about comedy	p. 1
First things	p. 1
Play	p. 3
What is comedy?	p. 7
Something to make us laugh?	p. 8
Happy endings	p. 10
The world brought down to earth	p. 12
Summing up before moving on	p. 18
Reading comedy	p. 20
'What kind of world is this?'	p. 20
Formal and textual elements	p. 23
Entering the world of comedy	p. 26
Comedy in the end	p. 35
Comedy's foundations	p. 39
Back to (what we call) the beginning	p. 39
The fingerprints of Old Comedy	p. 42
Our old friend, New Comedy	p. 50
New Comedy in Roman hands	p. 58
Comedy's devices	p. 63
Towards a study of comic traits	p. 63
Humour and its mechanics	p. 63
Humour and the dramatic text	p. 69
Mine the gap: the reader's view	p. 72
Mine the gap: the spectator's access	p. 86
Comedy in the flesh	p. 93
Comedy for the stage of the mind	p. 93
Performance fabric and outlining	p. 95
Reading comic bodies and voices	p. 96
The commedia dell'arte	p. 102
The clown	p. 110
Reading comic character (mask)	p. 114
Reading comic dialogue (lazzi)	p. 120
Comic metaphysics	p. 127
Comedy's range	p. 131
Dramatic texture and the comic	p. 131
The comic and the tragic	p. 132
The deadly serious treated playfully	p. 140
The comic beyond the 'realistic'	p. 142
Comic latitude in production	p. 161
Comedy and society	p. 171
Comedy's associates	p. 171
Comedy's politics	p. 190
Notes	p. 207
Further reading	p. 222
List of texts	p. 224
Bibliography	p. 227
Index	p. 237
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy

Summary

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials