Valerie Fliss - Aristotle's Poetics and Comedy

I like laughing - there it is. You know those commericals for that website ComedyFetish.com? Yeah, well, if ever I had a fetish, it would have to be for comedy.

So, you can imagine that I was more than a little excited to read what Aristotle had to say about comedy, but after I read it, I'm not entirely sure if I liked it. For Aristotle, while Tragedy aims to represent men as 'better than in actual life', Comedy is meant to represent them 'as worse'! My thinking was always that Tragedy represented people as worse than they really are, while Comedy merely commented on how things were! Not, as Mr. Aristotle says, "consists of some defect or ugliness." How come Comedy is supposed to be a negative thing? And since when did Tragedy become all lofty!?

But, then I started to think about it in terms of 'imitation', and how imitation plays a role in Aristotle's view of art. Comedy is an imitation of the world, but an 'ugly' distortion - it takes the world, its people and ideas, and makes it base, lewd, and ludicrous so that we can laugh at it. It is this distortion that makes things seem so darn funny, and how the art of comedy comes about. It makes us look at the world in a different way, and realize, learn something about the world we live in. Overall, I think Comedy is supposed to show us (humanity, that is) not to take ourselves too seriously. Someone once told me (or I read it somewhere, which is just about the same thing as being told) that if humans couldn't laugh, we would have killed ourselves years ago because life would just have been too much for us to take. And while I may still have mixed feelings about Tragedy, in looking at the purpose of Comedy, making men look worse than they are so that we can laugh, the purpose of Tragedy making men look better than they are so that we can cry, seems to make much more sense. The participation in these dramas, in these imitations becomes an almost epiphany, an experience in that ultimate experience of what it is to be a human.

I have no particular reason for including that banana comic, except that I thought it was funny.