I can’t recall a comedy ever winning an Academy Award. Maybe one did, but I don’t remember it. There’s a common understanding that comedy is lowbrow. Not serious stuff. And, indeed, calling comedy serious is a paradox. The whole point of comedy is not to take anything seriously.
I used to be publicly funny. I made jokes in school, made jokes in my professional life, made jokes in my social life–made jokes all the time, everywhere. And it didn’t serve me well. I think that people may have thought me unprofessional. And maybe I was. I was passed over for professional positions I wanted. And I now believe that it was my attitude that was responsible for it.
In ancient Greece, where drama originated in the west, there were two masks which captured the essence of drama. One mask was for tragedy and one mask was for comedy. One of Aristotle’s works is on theater, called Poetics. It lays out the principles of tragedy. But there’s no comedy in it. Scholars conjecture that the Poetics was meant to cover both aspects of theater: tragedy and comedy. But the part on comedy was lost. They even speculate about what Aristotle said in his missing work on comedy. And Plato himself has Socrates forcing Aristophanes and Agathon to admit that tragedy and comedy both come from the same causes, and that the same author could write both comedy and tragedy. He does this at a party where everyone else has passed out drunk. Perhaps this is why Blake writes, “Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.” Robert De Niro has successfully played tragedy and comedy.
In school I took a course in Comedy and the Christian Imagination. That’s where I learned that there’s nothing funny about comedy. It is a serious classical category. Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso is called the Divine Comedy, and there aren’t many funny parts in it. Shakespeare wrote both comedies and tragedies, and his comedies had funny parts in them. In fact, even in his darkest tragedy, Hamlet, there a really funny part in a graveyard. Some people think that I am a serious guy. My mother doesn’t understand how, after all my many years in graduate school, I can laugh at Super Troopers or Robin Hood: Men in Tights. I genuinely enjoy stupid comedies. I want to make the claim for comedy in our lives. I could produce some serious arguments as to how comedy functions, and what the prupose of comedy is. But that isn’t the point of this post. I merely want to say that there’s a place for funny in our lives. And even serious people can laugh, should laugh, at movies like Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
