In beginning such a unit as this, the first question we ask ourselves is what exactly is comedy? It is tempting to answer simplistically - comedy is 'something funny that makes us laugh.' But comedy is far more complex than this. To begin with comedy takes many forms - farce, satire, vaudeville, black comedy, absurd comedy, slapstick, parody, to name but a few.

Aristotle argued that comedy is not stories of the great and their weaknesses, for indeed, rather, that is tragedy. Rather, comedy is made up of stories of the common, the everyday, the mundane. In a past discussion on the essence of comedy, Professor John O'Toole (Griffith University) writes:

Watching comedy, the further our cruel laughter is distanced from ourselves, the more power it gives us over them... simultaneously we laugh and identify, we feel that recognition that makes us sympathise and therefore pity. We laugh at ourselves too, and there is both relief (that our predicament is common) and anguish in the humour.

Comedy is the official meeting place for humour and drama. Both can lead to significance, new imaginative insights and meaning; both can peter out in triviality - or literally and figuratively, meaninglessness. Both can lead to reassurance and the reinforcement of accepted values and power structures; on the other hand, both have a small but potent ability to subvert the overturning cant and convention, to create unease, challenge power, create relationships of equality and liberate the underdog - humour and satire are always feared by the very powerful.

Consider these other musings about comedy:

Comedy is rebellious against authority or a character dominated by a ruling passion

Comedy is the conflict between reality and illusion

Ionesco suggests that comedy is the expression of the unusual, the absurdity of life that can spring from the dullest and ordinary of life. Ionesco adds nothing surprises me more than banality; the surreal is there, within our reach, in our daily conversation.

Comedy oscillates between life and art

Charney (1978) although a dated reference offers us some worthwhile insight into the essence of comedy in arguing that the metaphysics of comedy falls under six distinct areas:

1. The Discontinuous : Comedy depends on breaking the laws of rational order and causality. Perspective may be shifted and juxtaposed with separate pieces of action as if they belong to each other. Time sequence is flexible and subject-object relations may be reversed. An overall feeling of confusion is rendered.

2. The Accidental: Overall we like to have faith in the validity and significance of random experience, the fortuitous and the unanticipated. Any event then may have rich comic possibility - a walk in the park, eating at a restaurant, sitting at a bus stop.

3. The Autonomous: Things have a life of their own. The distinction between the organic and inorganic worlds is false. Material things can be animated. Clowns have always tried to imitate the inanimate world.

4. The Self-Conscious: The intense and minute awareness of the body is a vital source of comedy. To be a human being is inherently comic. Can we be reconciled to our own organic disgust?

5. The Histrionic: The human being is an actor playing a clownish role. We are intensely aware of the meaningless of our attempts to communicate. Language is a fallible instrument and words float freely in a magic reality. Words offer a life of their own for comic exploitation.

6. The Ironic: Everything can also mean its opposite. Comedy trains us to expect the pie in the face. Language is rife with ironic possibilities. Irony lies at the heart of the comic technique. All comedy is a manipulation of deceptive appearances, (Carney, pgs. 5-7, 10)

Types of Comedy

Essentially, comedy can be separated into three main categories

1. Farce: zaniness, slapstick humour, hilarious improbability. The fantastic, the absurd, the ridiculous. Wild coincidences, twists and complications. Confusion abounds. Deception, mimicry, disguise and mistaken identity. (Three Stooges, Marx Brothers)

2. Romantic Comedy: the love plot, separation and reconciliation, lovers kept apart by complicated circumstances until overcoming all. (Much Ado about Nothing, Cinderella)

3. Satire: Human vice and folly. Con artists, criminals, tricksters, deceivers, dealers, two-timers, fortune seekers and their gullible dupes, knaves, cuckolds.

Comic Characters: Types and Conventions

Comedy deals in stereotypes rather than fully rounded, three-dimensional living human beings. (adapted from Charney, pg.52) There is generally a comedic hierarchy, the high, middle and low characters. Comedy deals not with representative types but with extremes and caricatures. (pg.69)

High: kings, queens, lords and ladies, the wealthy

Middle: those more like ourselves, the middle classes, a 'middle of the road' comic character

Low: Many comic types come from this category. Clowns, tramps, outcasts etc. Considered to be more 'classless' than lower class.

The Structure of Comedy

Comedy has form and structure. Usually comedies begin with type characters in comic situations that develop into unconventional and sometimes wild and frenzied ways. (adapted from Charney, 75)

The structure of comedy can be understood in the following ways:

· Often jokes and plot are twists on jokes and plots we are already familiar with - a new formula is simply applied.

· Depends on an optimistic tone - all will be resolved somehow, a sense of inevitability.

· Usually begin with some kind of startling pronouncement or outrageous situation.

· We are not asked to suspend disbelief in the same way that tragedy demands.

· The comic chord is meant to shock us in some way.

· The comic spirit is meant to prevail over technicalities and needs these to get it moving along.

· Comedy is committed to plot in a way that tragedy is not. Comedy is committed to the idea of magical transformations and metamorphoses.

· The comic action is developed by repetition, accumulation and snowballing

· Comedy often questions identity and mistaken identity is a popular comic device.

· Comedies are expected to in some way, end happily with great celebration, a restoration of harmony, common sense and civilized behaviour.

(Reference: Charney, M. 1978, Comedy, High and Low. New York: Oxford University Press).