The basic premise of this blog is that comedies spin worlds in which the human condition is mediated by a spirit, the Spirit of Comedy. It is intangible, and inexpressible except in the embodied forms of comedy. Above all, it is a mischievous trickster spirit. The Comic Spirit intervenes in the best-laid plans (actually, they are never really very well laid), creates misunderstandings, misinterpretations, tricks, traps, multiple realities, and mistaken identities; it scrambles intentions and inflates excesses. Most of all, it invests itself in the comic worlds’ objects, bodies, and language, jumping from spot to spot, from level to level, as it wishes. It is not malicious. It ultimately resolves the complications it generates (after attaining maximum allowable confusion among the world’s participants), reorganizing them in a harmony of interests that could never have been achieved by the will of the characters alone. Comedy as a plot-structure produces an image of freedom –- freedom from blocks of all kinds generated by human agents. It is an image like that of enlightenment, the freedom of discovering that one’s world and wishes are the product of collective delusions. Its laughter is the laughter of liberation –- physical, social, and metaphysical –- achieved simply through Comic Grace. What’s more, this dynamic Spirit infuses not only clearly designated art, it influences discourses that often try to keep their distance from art. Once one shifts one’s gaze a bit, it is easy, even natural, to see historical, psychological, social-scientific, and even natural-scientific writings, in fact every kind of explanation, from a comic perspective.
Whether we consider it a metaphor, a mood, or a living force, the Comic Spirit is the invisible driver of comedies. It sometimes appears as chance, but it is the kind of chance that specifically creates playful disruptions –- say, the odd coincidence that two identical twins who have not seen each other since birth happen to appear in the same location, wearing identical clothes, and accompanied by servants who are also identical twins, also wearing identical clothes.
It might appear as a zany plan that succeeds –- say, an Athenian disgusted with his taxes climbs to the land of birds and becomes its ruler.
It may appear as a stubborn absurdity –- a man, like Hopsy in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, insisting that a woman who is in fact the same woman he had a tangled affair with just months ago, and who is seeking revenge by pretending to be someone else despite clear evidence to the contrary, is too like the other one to be the same woman. Or the complementary absurdity, as Hopsy’s roughneck bodyguard, Muggsy, insists with absolute accuracy that she’s “definitely the same dame,” but is never believed.
The Comic Spirit can appear in names, in postures, in sentences, in debilities and enhancements, in absurd realities and dreamworks. It can appear in situations, or in global frameworks. In jokes, gags, tricks, mistakes, misprisions –- all of which can go any which way the Spirit wishes. These can lead to anxiety-producing frustrations of well thought-out plots, or miraculous resolutions of impossible double-binds. The Comic Spirit is always invisible. Even when the King of the Sprites decides on a comic plan, he is subordinate to the Spirit, who messes the whole thing up for the fun of it. Puck isn’t to blame. There was no way that plan was going to work –- not because of “reality,” but because the Comic Spirit complicates and resolves everything. Although Oberon gets his comic satisfaction, it’s not his will that delivers it. The Comic Spirit often appears as chance, but it is ultimately, reliably, bonne chance, chance indistinguishable from grace, a grace that is as temporary as it is certain. It creates bonheur — a happy hour.
In comedy, this Spirit is invisible because it is distributed through the network of objects that characters believe are under their control, or at least inert and neutral. Sometimes a deus ex machina may appear at the end of the play. The king resolves the frictions of Tartuffe; Jupiter decides to make everything right in Amphitryon. But this is rare, and the audience usually understands it’s an elegant sham that simply allows the theaters to stay open. Like most ghosts, the Spirit of Comedy cannot act directly. It must take temporary possession of things of the world that the characters consider natural; it must appear to be immanent. Accordingly, it invests its power to effect events in comedy’s essential vehicles: objects, bodies, and language.