Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An Essay on Comedy

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Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1995 - Počet stran: 387
"Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An Essay on Comedy is an exploration of narrative and dramatic comedy as a laughter-inducing phenomenon. The theatrical metaphors of mask, appearance, and illusion are used as structural linchpins in an attempt to categorize the many and extremely varied manifestations of comedy and to find out what they may have in common with one another. As this reliance on metaphor suggests, the purpose is less to produce The Truth about comedy than to look at how it is related to our understanding of the world and to ways of understanding our understanding. Previous theories of comedy or laughter (such as those advanced by Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Freud, and Bakhtin) as well as more general philosophical considerations are discussed insofar as they shed light on this approach. The limitations of the metaphors themselves mean that sight is never lost of the deep-seated ambiguity that has made laughter so notoriously difficult to pin down in the past." "The first half of the volume focuses in particular on traditional comic masks and the pleasures of repetition and recognition, on the comedy of imposture, disguise, and deception, on dramatic and verbal irony, on social and theatrical role-playing and the comic possibilities of plays-within-plays and "metatheatre," as well as on the cliches, puns, witticisms, and torrents of gibberish which betray that language itself may be understood as a sort of mask. The second half of the book moves to the other side of the footlights to show how the spectators themselves, identifying with the comic spectacle, may be induced to "drop" their own roles and postures, laughter here operating as something akin to a ventilatory release from the pressures of social or cognitive performance. Here the essay examines the subversive madness inherent in comedy, its displaced anti-authoritarianism, as well as the violence, sexuality, and bodily grotesqueness it may bring to light. The structural tensions in this broadly Hobbesian or Freudian model of a social mask concealing an anti-social self are reflected in comedy's own ambivalences, and emerge especially in the ambiguous concepts of madness and folly, which may be either celebrated as festive fun or derided as sinfulness. The study concludes by considering the ways in which nonsense and the grotesque may infringe our cognitive limitations, here extending the distinction between appearance and reality to a metaphysical level which is nonetheless prey to unresolvable ambiguities." "The scope of the comic material ranges over time from Aristophanes to Martin Amis, from Boccaccio, Chaucer, Rabelais, and Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton, John Barth, and Philip Roth. Alongside mainly Old Greek, Italian, French, Irish, English, and American examples, a number of relatively little-known German plays (by Grabbe, Tieck, Buchner, and others) are also taken into consideration."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Vyhledávání v knize

Obsah

Acknowledgements
9
Introduction
13
Play
16
Mask Illusion and Appearance
25
Mask and Repetition
33
Mask and Acting
45
Language as a Mask
64
Gibberish and Logorrhea
74
A Mad World
178
Nobodys Business
191
The Political Mask
213
The Woman on Top
228
The Ethical Mask
241
Taboo or not Taboo
253
Gone with the Wind
292
The Cognitive Mask
309

Wit and Wordplay
80
Wit and Puns
90
Wit and InversionReversalSubversion
100
Cracking the Mask
108
Rupturing the Illusion
128
Moments of DisIllusion
142
Discarding the Social Mask
161
Describing the Nondescript
318
Bottoms Up
342
Notes
351
Bibliography
369
Index
380
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Strana 84 - For, wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy ; judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully one from another ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude and by affinity to take one thing for another.
Strana 192 - It ascends me into the brain ; dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable shapes; which, deliver'd o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit.
Strana 155 - And let those that play your clowns, speak no more than is set down for them : for there be of them, that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too ; though, in the mean time, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that's villainous; and . shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.
Strana 42 - Sudden glory' is the passion which maketh those 'grimaces' called 'laughter'; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own that pleaseth them, or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.
Strana 46 - Now affectation proceeds from one of these two causes, vanity or hypocrisy; for as vanity puts us on affecting false characters, in order to purchase applause; so hypocrisy sets us on an endeavour to avoid censure, by concealing our vices under an appearance of their opposite virtues.
Strana 203 - For I believe the most sober men, when they walk alone without care and employment of the mind, would be unwilling the vanity and extravagance of their thoughts at that time should be publicly seen; which is a confession that passions unguided are for the most part mere madness.
Strana 272 - And in this, sir, I am of so nice and singular a humour, that if I thought you was able to form the least judgment or probable conjecture to yourself of what was to come in the next page, I would tear it out of my book.
Strana 194 - tis no matter; Honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if Honor prick me off when I come on ? how then ? Can Honor set to a leg ? No. Or an arm ? No. Or take away the grief of a wound ? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery then ? No. What is Honor ? A word. What is in that word, Honor ? What is that Honor ? Air. A trim reckoning ! Who hath it ? He that died o

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