Table Of ContentComedy, Seriously
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Comedy, Seriously
A Philosophical Study
Dmitri Nikulin
comedy, seriously
Copyright © Dmitri Nikulin, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-41513-4
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United
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NY 10010.
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is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered
in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire
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ISBN 978-1-349-49051-6 ISBN 978-1-137-41514-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137415141
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nikulin, D. V. (Dmitrii Vladimirovich)
Comedy, seriously : a philosophical study / Dmitri Nikulin, New School.
pages cm
1. Comedy—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Philosophy. I. Title.
PN1922.N55 2014
809'.917—dc23
2013046854
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Amnet.
First Edition: May 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xv
I History of Comedy
1 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: On the Ancient
Origins of Comedy 3
2 The Moderns: The Romantic Loss of Comedy 23
II Logic of Comedy
3 Everyone Joins the Fight: The Dialectic of Comic Action 47
4 Whatever Works: Structure and Topics of Comedy 69
5 The Catastrophe of the Good Ending 93
III Ethics of Comedy
6 Foolish Wisdom: The Philosopher as a Comic Figure 113
Conclusion 133
Notes 137
Bibliography 177
Index 185
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Preface
Philosophy likes to think of itself as confronting the most urgent challenges of
modernity and as addressing the fundamental questions of human existence.
Yet, while comedy plays an important role in shaping our lives, philosophy
has for too long neglected a significant discussion of it. Although there have
been many excellent critical studies of its history and poetics, of its different
aspects and genres, philosophy has yet to take comedy seriously. It is the aim
of the present text not only to offer a humble remedy to this omission but
also to reveal the essential relation between philosophy and comedy. As I will
show, comedy is in fact the very dramatization of philosophical reasoning,
and, as such, it deserves a central place as a subject of philosophical inquiry.
Already in antiquity, Plato and Aristotle were suspicious of comedy for its
depictions of people as vulgar and base. Nevertheless, as readers of Umberto
Eco’s The Name of the Rose will recall, Aristotle apparently dedicated a whole
book of his Poetics to comedy. But because this book was unfortunately lost to
posterity, philosophy still needs to produce a version of this text.
Not only was comedy neglected in ancient times—modern philosophy,
too, has tended to dismiss comedy. Here, the reasons have to do with the
modern preference for tragedy and its deep roots in the formation of modern
subjectivity. The modern Cartesian subject thinks of itself as autonomous and
fully rational. It constitutes itself as the center of all meanings, as the navel
of its own spiritual world. Yet the self-sufficiency apparently enjoyed by the
modern subject is characterized by solitude, monologue, and solipsism.1 The
“I” inevitably suffers in its isolation, even as it narcissistically takes this loneli-
ness as a mark of its own nobility and sublimity. For, behind its majestic and
heroic pretense, the isolated subject is petty and pathetic. In the tragic theat-
rical trial of its everyday life, the modern subject appears at once as accused,
prosecutor, defender, and judge.2 Similarly, as hero, producer, and director of
its own tragic drama within philosophy, the modern subject is both protago-
nist and sole actor.3 In this lonesome predicament, it always confronts its own
end and, consequently, is oriented toward death. The modern subject wants,
viii ● Preface
even needs, to die. And yet it cannot get rid of itself. Like Hamlet, the mod-
ern philosophical hero wants to commit suicide, but it cannot step outside of
itself to commit the deed. Still under the spell of the Romantics, we too tend
to define ourselves in terms of finitude and death.
The spell cast by the Romantics clouds our view of comedy in other ways.
Indeed, the Romantic view of civilization epitomizes what I see as our (mis)
understanding of both tragedy and comedy. Not only did the Romantics
understand civilization in terms of a “quarrel between the Ancients and the
Moderns,” but they also privileged the Greek world over the Roman world.
Figures such as August Schlegel and G. W. F. Hegel, for instance, argued
that ancient tragedy—through which they thought the Greek world was
revealed—was sublime but that comedy was not even beautiful. And in their
consideration of comedy, both Schlegel and Hegel thought Old Comedy
superior to New Comedy and Greek comedy superior to Roman comedy.
I want to argue, instead, that comedy speaks more acutely than tragedy
to human existential, moral, political, and erotic needs. However, by com-
edy I mean primarily New Comedy and not Old Comedy, which, however,
should not be altogether dismissed but rather radically reevaluated. As I hope
to show, it is neither Sophocles nor even Aristophanes who is truly mod-
ern. Rather, it is the main representative of Greek New Comedy, Menander,
and the Roman dramatists Plautus and, especially, Terence who established
the comic genre that is still meaningful and alive today. New Comedy has
survived throughout history, living on in the Renaissance and early moder-
nity in Shakespeare and Molière, up to contemporary existential comedy and
Woody Allen.
In what follows, when speaking about comedy, I thus refer to the type
created by New Comedy, as it was first established in Menander and Terence,
flourished in modern comedy, and still lives on in contemporary comedy. The
comedy I am discussing has a descriptive dimension, since it presents many
complexities and inequalities in our lives. It also has a normative dimension,
since it diagnoses problems and pathologies, allows for the rectification of
these problems, and eventually offers the possibility of achieving well-being
shared with others. Since many comedies use a mixture of genres and media
and keep experimenting with them, this understanding of comedy will not
match all existing comedies. Yet deviation from a norm is itself a comic norm,
which comedy often uses as a device.
Comedy is perennial because the very human condition is comical. For
comedy is the only genre that allows for the realization of human well-being
and freedom as being with others. Such freedom is never a given, yet it is
always possible—as a task that can be accomplished together with others.
Comedy is defined by its structure and by its ending—a good ending that
Preface ● ix
only comes about through a diligent, persistent, and often unexpected shared
action by everyone involved in a comedy. Well-being, then, is not an atempo-
ral or transcendent good, somehow always there just waiting to be discovered.
Rather, comic well-being, which is achievable, is an assertion of love and the
good life that comes as a resolution of a conflict at the end. Yet, as life itself,
this good is in need of constant reproduction, renewal, and reaffirmation.
Therefore, unlike tragedy, which is the celebration of death, comedy is the
celebration of life.
Yet the achievement of human good, the reliving of love, and the repro-
duction of life need a careful and consequential—“logical”—reasoning. This
is why, in my account, comedy is a profoundly philosophical enterprise and
philosophy is a comic enterprise. Unsurprisingly, however, modern philoso-
phy has missed its affinity with comedy. For, from its very inception, modern
philosophy was constituted as the monological thinking of a lonely self or as
the self-directed account of an isolated subject whose only determination was
thus being toward death, which is tragic. Nonetheless, as I aim to show, com-
edy is the reproduction of practical philosophical reason on stage. Because
of its affinity with philosophy, which, as a Socratic enterprise, is a dialogical
realization of being with others, comedy reproduces the structure of a philo-
sophical argument in its very plot. Beginning with a “problem” that comes as
a trespassing of the initial state of affairs, the action moves through a number
of steps that are interrelated through complicated yet coherent moves, which
result in the “solution” of the problem, not by an act of a deus ex machina but
by the careful calculation and mutually responsive action of the participants.
Yet among all the actors one figure becomes (often unwillingly) the center of
action: the comedian par excellence, the practical thinker responsible for tying
together all the loose ends and advancing the action toward the resolution
in the good ending. Paradigmatically represented by a slave, a servant, or a
maid, the central comic character enacts the “foolish wisdom,” distinctly rep-
resented in Socrates, who always fools around and, seemingly not knowing
anything, advances an argument toward a resolution. The main comic char-
acter is a philosopher onstage. Being in a socially subdued position, the comic
thinker becomes the one who makes the advancement toward the good end-
ing. Here, comedy displays its goodness once again in the comic practical
realization of justice, which comes as freedom that is reached only at the
end, and as a result of the unfolding of the comic action and plot, and which
becomes a treasured achievement of love and life and especially of personal
freedom for the dispossessed.
I have divided the book into three main parts.4 The first part is “his-
torical,” as it presents an overview of the existing approaches to comedy. I
begin in antiquity, moving from Aristotle to the fourth century CE Roman
