Abstract
The paper elucidates the “paradox of comedy”—a perpetual philosophical concern regarding the nature of theatrical/stage comedy—through a cross-cultural comparison between Bharatamuni’s (circa 500 A.D.) and Henri Bergson’s (1859–1941) theorization of the comic and thereupon, fathoms the Indian comic tradition in the canon of comedy studies. Bharata’s hāsya in Nāṭya Śāstra and Bergson’s Laughter become tenable for a comparative aesthetic study as they approach the stagecraft of the comic socio-aesthetically. The comic paradox implies the tension in the nature of comedy, which on one hand has to arouse emotion in the audience and simultaneously, has to detach them from the emotion for the comic manifestation. This is further elaborated through: the personal and social nature of the comic; the absence and presence of feeling; the degrees of the comic paradox through detachment and indifference; the identification and isolation of the character; the aim of the comedy. The authors argue for Bergson’s position of the comic as an ‘outward’ and Bharata’s as an ‘inward-outward’ operation. The study also includes an appendix, which validates Bergson’s approach to laughter as the earliest attempt to dedicate an elaborate study on the nature of the comic.
About the authors
Vishaka Venkat is a research scholar (Senior Research Fellow) in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. She is the co-author of Conversations with Indian Cartoonists: Politickle Lines (2019, Cambridge Scholars Publisher). She is working on the language and rhetoric of humour in Indian political cartoons. Her areas of interests include humour, political cartoons, popular culture and Indian aesthetics.
Vinod Balakrishnan is a Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. He is a practising poet, motivational speaker, reviewer of books and a yoga enthusiast. He was the General Editor of the 12-Volume Encyclopaedia of World Mythology (DC Books, 2013) in Malayalam. He is the co-author of Conversations with Indian Cartoonists: Politickle Lines (2019, Cambridge Scholars Publisher). His research interests include Somaesthetics, Politics of Representation, Film Studies, Life Writing and Narratives about India. Currently, he is working on "The Role of the Public Intellectual and the Future of the Humanities". His articles have appeared in the Journal of Creative Communications, Journal of Dharma, Pragmatism Today, Archiv Orientalni, a/b:auto/biography studies, LitCrit, Indian Literature, CIEFL Bulletin, Journal of English Language Teaching and Indian Express.
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| Year | Theory | Author | Work | Quoting Concept of Comedy/Humor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Around 4th Century B.C. | Superiority | Plato | Philebus | “When we laugh at the folly of our friends … we envy and laugh at the same instant” (2011: 97). |
| Around 380 B.C. | Superiority | Plato | Republic | “You may often laugh at buffoonery which you would be ashamed to utter, and the love of coarse merriment on the stage will at last turn you into a buffoon at home” (2010: 197). |
| Around 330–350 B.C. | Superiority | Aristotle | Poetics | “Comedy is…an imitation of characters of a lower type…the Ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive” (2008: 4). |
| Around 350 B.C. | Superiority | Aristotle | Nicomachean Ethics | “The person who goes to excess and is vulgar…These states are vices, but they do not bring opprobrium, because they are neither harmful to one’s neighbors nor particularly offensive” (2000: 66). |
| 1509 | Theorizing comic spirit through play | Desiderius Erasmus | In Praise of Folly | “But aided in part by ignorance, and in part by inadvertence, sometimes by forgetfulness of evils, sometimes by hope of good, sprinkling in a few honeyed delights at certain seasons, I bring relief from these ills” (2015: 41). |
| 1548 | Superiority | Francesco Robertollo | On Comedy | Expanded Aristotle’s concept comedy. |
| Around 1550's | Theorizing comic spirit through play | Nicholas Udall | Ralph Roister Doister | “Than mirth which is used in an honest fashion. For mirth prolongeth life, and causeth health, Mirth recreates our spirits and voideth pensiveness, Mirth…being mixed with virtue in decent comeliness” (Romanska and Ackerman 2017: 77). |
| 1598 | Theorizing comic spirit through human traits. | Ben Jonson | Every Man in his Humour | Comedy of humors |
| 1651 | Superiority | Thomas Hobbes | Leviathan | “Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves” (2016: 24). |
| 1698 | Superiority | Jeremy Collier | A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage together with the Sense of Antiquity on this Argument. | ‘A Comedian ought to imitate Life and Probability. The exposing of Knavery, and making Lewdness ridiculous, is a much better occasion for Laughter” (1698:47–157). |
| 1709 | Relief | Anthony Ashely Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury | An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour | “The natural free spirits of clever men, if they are imprisoned and controlled, will discover other ways of acting so as to relieve themselves in their constraint” (1709: 4–5). |
| 1750 | Incongruity | Francis Hutcheson | Reflections Upon Laughter, and Remarks Upon the Fable of the Bees. | “Cause of laughter is the bringing together of images which have contrary additional ideas” (1750: 19). |
| 1764 | Incongruity | James Beattie | “Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition” | “Laughter seems to arise from the view of things incongruous united in the same assemblage; I by juxta-position, II As cause and effect, III By comparison found on similitude; or IV United so as to exhibit an opposition of meanness and dignity” (Beattie 1779: 344). |
| 1773 | Theorizing comic spirit | Oliver Goldsmith | A Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy | “In ‘Sentimental comedy’ …the characters are good, and exceedingly generous. If they happen to have faults or foibles, the spectator is taught not only to pardon, but to applaud them…so that folly, instead of being ridiculed, is commended” (2007: 4–6). |
| 1790 | Incongruity | Immanuel Kant | Critique of Judgment | “Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing” (1914: 133). |
| 1818 | Incongruity | William Hazlitt | On Wit and Humour | “Man…is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. The essence of the laughable then is the incongruous” (1845: 1–32). |
| 1819 | Incongruity | Arthur Schopenhauer | The World as Will and Representation | “The phenomenon of laughter always signifies the sudden apprehension of an incongruity between such a conception and the real object thought under it, thus between the abstract and the concrete object of perception” (1969: 271). |
| 1822 | Theorizing comic spirit | Charles Lamb | On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century | “Comedy as a fantasy world that has no connection with life” (Park, 1979: 225–243). |
| 1846 | Incongruity | Soren Kierkegaard | Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments | “The tragic is the suffering contradiction, the comic is the painless contradiction” (2004: 32). |
| 1855 | Superiority | Charles Baudelaire | On the Essence of Laughter | “We shall find that at the very heart of the laughter’s thought a certain conscious pride” (1972: 140–162). |
| 1859 | Relief | Alexander Bain | The Emotions and the Will | “It is the coerced form of seriousness and solemnity without the reality that gives us that stiff position from which a contact with triviality or vulgarity relieves us, to our uproarious delight” (1865: 250). |
| 1877 | Theorizing comic spirit | George Meredith | An Essay on Comedy | “Whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit…the spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit” (1998: 140). |
| 1900 | Superiority and incongruity | Henri Bergson | Laughter: An Essay in the Meaning of the Comic | Laughter is “human”, “social” and is accompanied by an absence of feeling (2008: 4). |
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