Comedy and How It Works

Comedy and How It Works

Comedy is the result of the mechanical being encrusted upon the natural (human), or anytime rigidity (artificiality) is juxtaposed to mobility.

Three Conditions for Comedy to Exist

1.Comedy only relates to what is human or human-like.

2.There is an absence of feeling. The spectator is detached.

3.It cannot exist in isolation. There is a group, a conspiracy. There is social significance. It takes three to make a joke: the jokester, the butt of the joke, and the listener.

Comic Elements

•Momentum, speed

•Potential Violence

•Mechanical inelasticity

•Repetition

•Reversal

•Surprise

•Innocence

•Exaggeration

•Understatement

•Irony: audience knows something character doesn’t

Character

•Character is comic in direct proportion to his ignorance of himself.

•Comic face is rigid, a set expression, a mask

•Someone callous to social life, unaware of social world

•Focus on gestures not action. Gesture is not intentional but rather unaware.

•Automatism: things done automatically

•Types: generalities that can be imitated

•Vice: becomes comic when it is developed completely like it is a character itself, and it becomes the puppeteer pulling the strings of the character

•Obsession: deep rooted yet superficial

•Vanity

•Professional Solemnity

•Absentmindedness (rigidity of intellect)

Movements and Gestures

•Are comic in exact proportion as they remind us of machines (puppets).

•Can only imitate when gestures are mechanical or repetitious, when we cease to be ourselves and let an element of automatism creep in which is ludicrous.

•Repetition of gesture is mechanical

Principles of Construction

1.Repetition

• Scenes repeated in new environments
• Scenes repeated but with different characters
• Phrases, words, gestures
• Jokes happen in threes

2.Inversion

• Situations or characters are reversed: the child teaches the parent, the robber is robbed.
• Any reversal: the servant controls the master.

3.Reciprocal interference of a series

• Comic situation if it belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time: talking at cross purposes.
• An equivocal situation: a situation that is interpreted two different ways by two different characters.
• Becomes more humorous depending on how close playwright comes to dissolving the two worlds.
• One series of events might be from past: character hiding something from past that keeps cropping up.

Comic Elements in Situations and in Words

Any arrangement of acts and events is comic that gives us, in a single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement.

1.The Jack-in-the-Box

Two elements struggle, one of which is mechanical, one finally wins. A person starts to express and idea, it is repressed. He tries again, it is repressed again, etc.

2.The Dancing Jack

When a character thinks he is acting and speaking freely but is, from another perspective, merely a to in someone else’s hands.

3.The Snowball

One event causes another and another, etc. Picks up momentum. Can be circular at times. An object, a letter, a hat etc, triggers action. Add reversal an you have a circular farce where everything returns to the beginning.