a form of drama imbued with comic spirit.
The term “comedy” in ancient Greece originally denoted revel songs. For a long time “comedy” implied the opposite of “tragedy,” that is, a work with an obligatory happy ending; its heroes, as a rule, were from the lowest stratum. Many theorists right up to the classicist N. Boileau defined comedy as the “lowest” genre and divided all drama into the respective poles of comedy and tragedy. This separation was consciously breached in the literature of the Enlightenment by the recognition of a “middle” genre—the drame bourgeoise. In the 19th century and particularly in the 20th, comedy has been a free multifaceted genre.
Primarily concerned with exposing the ugliness in life (the things that contradict a social ideal or norm), the comedist uses comic forms to do it. His protagonists are weak and inconsistent: they cannot live up to their status and position—to their own pretensions—and therefore fall victim to laughter. Blinded by vice (the vanity of a self-enamored person) or illusions, the protagonist does not fit in with his surroundings and is plunged into what Hegel called a “phantasmal life”; and this fantasy life, the “anti-ideal,” the opposite of true social human values, is shattered by laughter, which thus fulfills its “ideal” mission.
The range of criticism through comedy is extremely broad— from political satire to light vaudeville humor. However, even in sharp social comedy (A. S. Griboedov’s Woe From Wit) the portrayal of human suffering (Chatskii’s “million agonies”) must be limited or compassion will supplant laughter, transforming comedy into drama (The Affair by A. V. Sukhovo-Kobylin).
Laughter is a comedy’s unseen honest “face,” but the play’s positive theme is frequently presented directly and visually—for example, the “noble comic quality” of Beaumarchais’ Figaro, the wealth of human emotions of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, and the freethinking of Griboedov’s Chatskii. People in comedy are usually grotesque: the stress is not on the development but on the static features of the personality and not on the whole personality but on the traits being ridiculed, thus expressing the character’s narrowness and “doll-like” quality.
The centuries-old history of comedy engendered diverse genre variations that were distinguished by plot structure, character structure, and comic spirit—for example, comedy of characters, of manners, of morals, of situation, and of intrigue, as well as buffoon, lyric, heroic, and satirical comedy.
Traditional plot devices for creating comic effect include reversals in fortune, substitutions, and revelations. Comic circumstances are particularly important in comedy of situation, which is based on intrigue, and in vaudeville and farce. Comic personalities predominate in comedy of characters, particularly in the plays of Molière and Griboedov. Most classic comedies—for example, of Shakespeare, Goldoni, and Gogol—combine comic situations and characters. Dialogue is an extremely important device for comic effect; oral comedy is based on alogism, incongruous situations, contrast between words and speaker, parody, irony, and in recent comedy, on biting wit and paradox.
Aristophanes, the creator of sociopolitical comedy, is considered to be the father of comedy. Greek New Attic comedy (Menander) and Roman comedy (Terence and Plautus) dealt primarily with upheavals in the personal lives of its protagonists. Comedy in antiquity included such genres as the Roman atel-lana, mime, and folk comedy. The performance of classical comedy called for hyperbole, caricature, and buffoonery; the actors appeared in masks depicting traditional types.
In the Middle Ages laughter enlivened folk carnivals and crept into religious genres, giving rise to the farce, interlude, sotie, and Fastnachtspiel Definite forms of comedy emerged in Europe: 16th-century Italian commedia erudita and commedia dell’arte, which professionalized folk traditions and strongly influenced the development of European theater; the Spanish comedia de capa y espada (“of cape and sword”), particularly the works of Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón; and the “high comedy” of French classicism.
A wealth of moods permeates Shakespeare’s love comedies, which express a favorite Renaissance idea of the universal and invincible power of Nature over the human heart. Shakespeare interwove comic and poignant elements, narrowed the gap between the comic and the tragic, and combined the grotesque with life-affirming gaiety (Twelfth Night) and the beauty of strong and consistent characters (The Taming of the Shrew).
Molière blended folk comedy (farce and commedia dell’arte) with the Renaissance commedia erudita and a classicist analysis of character (the “passionate type”) with the liveliness of a folk spectacle. By elevating the ideological content of comedy to a tragic incandescence, he created the genre of “high comedy.”
Enlightenment comedy combined a sarcastic outlook with merry and sensitive positive heroes (the plays of Beaumarchais and Goldoni).
The 19th-century Russian realists (Griboedov, Gogol, Ostrovskii, Sukhovo-Kobylin, and L. Tolstoy) created models of satirical sociodidactic comedy; their plays made the comedy of characters more profound and frequently approached tragedy. A Russian realistic school of acting developed under the influence of Enlightenment comedy and later, the comedy of critical realism. Its leading exponents were M. S. Shchepkin, P. M. Sadovskii, and S. V. Shumskii.
New possibilities for comedy—for instance, diminished stress on intrigue, heightened psychological content, more complex characters, and intellectual sparring—were explored in the late 19th and early 20th century in Shaw’s “comedy of ideas” and Chekhov’s “comedy of moods.” Twentieth-century comedy has undergone diverse genre modifications, from social exposé (B. Nusic, Brecht, and O’Casey) to tragicomedy (Pirandello and Anouilh) and tragifarce (Ionesco), and has developed a multitude of theatrical forms and expressive means.
Soviet comedy is represented by numerous genre variations. Many writers have turned to the social comedy of manners, which combines satirical and dramatic motifs and uses the stylistic structure of the 19th-century realist classics; they include B. S. Romashov, M. M. Zoshchenko, A. E. Korneichuk, L. M. Leonov, S. V. Mikhailov, A. D. Salynskii, and Iu. Smuul.
“Merry,” or lyric, comedy is popular. It relies on vaudeville devices, and its models are still V. P. Kataev’s Squaring the Circle and V. V. Shkvarkin’s Someone Else’s Child.
Mayakovsky created his “stage caricatures” The Bedbug and The Bathhouse in a substantially different, rather grotesque style, which is characterized by a breach of everyday credibility, absurd comic situations (slapstick) and characters (hyperbole, parody, and buffoonery), the use of symbols and fantasy, and the exposure of conventionality.
A number of these grotesque elements appeared in N. R. Erdman’s satirical farce Mandate and in the plays of M. A. Bulgakov. The fairy-tale comedies of E. L. Shvarts created a theater of comic allegory and satirical symbolism that was laced with bright lyricism even in the most biting satires, such as The Dragon and The Naked King.
N. F. Pogodin intertwines a comedie streak with romanticism and presents pathos humorously in several of his plays, such as Tempo and Aristocrats. A comedie element is present in much of Soviet dramaturgy—for example, the plays of V. S. Rozov (Good Luck!, In Search of Joy, and Before Supper), A. M. Volodin (The Assignment), and L. G. Zorin. A. K. Gladkov’s A Long Time Ago is a heroic comedy. A. V. Sofronov writes social comedies of manners.
Soviet comedy is multinational. Comedies in various genres that have won recognition outside their republics were written by A. E. Korneichuk, I. K. Mikitenko, and V. P. Minko (Ukraine), K. Krapiva and A. E. Makaenok (Byelorussia), Iu. Smuul (Estonia), A. Kakhkhar (Uzbekistan), S. Rakhman (Azerbaijan), M. G. Baratashvili (Georgia), and D. K. Demirchian (Armenia).
L. V. CHERTOV