# Comedy: A Self-Study Guide to MIT 21L.021 (Spring 2022) *Based on MIT OpenCourseWare's course 21L.021 Comedy, taught by Dr. Wyn Kelley in Spring 2022:* *https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/21l-021-comedy-spring-2022/* --- ## How to use this guide **What this is.** MIT published this course's syllabus, schedule, a short summary of every class meeting, discussion prompts, essay assignments, and an interview with the instructor. It did **not** publish lecture notes or slides. So this guide does two things: 1. It follows the course exactly as it was taught: the same works, in the same order, with the same questions the instructor asked her class. 2. It fills in the "lecture" part with the standard background a literature class would give: historical context, plot summaries, and the comedy theories the course names (Aristotle, Frye, Bakhtin, Bergson, Freud, and others). The plot summaries, explanations, and example essay ideas are original to this guide. Where the guide reports what the MIT class focused on, it's drawn from the course's own published materials. **What you can't skip.** The summaries here are a map, not the territory. Comedy lives in timing, language, and performance, so read or watch the works themselves when you can. Most are free (see *Where to find everything* near the end). **How we'll go over it together.** Each unit ends with: - **Check yourself**: quick questions to see if the main ideas stuck - **Talk about it**: open questions with no single right answer, the kind the class discussed - **Try writing**: a short prompt modeled on the course's discussion-forum posts (100–200 words) There's a suggested 13-session plan for working through it together near the end. --- ## Table of contents 1. Course overview: what this class is really about 2. The Comedy Toolkit: core concepts and vocabulary 3. Theories of comedy: why we laugh 4. Unit 1: Comic Violence, Violent Comedy (Aristophanes, Spike Lee, Plautus, Billy Wilder) 5. Unit 2: Love and Mockery (Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, Jane Austen) 6. Unit 3: Modern Times (Melville, Wilde, Chaplin, Bechdel, stand-up) 7. Follow the food: the course's running joke 8. How to write about comedy (the course's essay method) 9. The assignments, with prompts and tips 10. A 13-session plan for going over this together 11. Where to find everything 12. Final review: big questions for the whole course --- ## 1. Course overview: what this class is really about The course description sums up its argument in a few moves. Comedy is the most *elastic* literary mode: it stretches into plays, novels, films, comics, and stand-up. Whatever the medium, comedy tends to do three things: - **Skewer artifice:** it mocks pretension, fake manners, and empty rituals. - **Topple authority:** fathers, magistrates, husbands, and aristocrats get tricked, dressed up, and deflated. - **Reverse expectations:** women run the city, servants outwit masters, the fool turns out wiser than the lord. And it does all this **"not with the fatal outcomes of tragedy but with laughter and festivity."** Two phrases from the course description shape the whole class: 1. **Comic insubordination.** The central interest is comedy as *rebellion*: people refusing their assigned place, at least for a while. A big recurring question is whether the rebellion sticks, or whether the ending (usually a wedding or a feast) snaps everyone back into order. 2. **"And food."** It's a joke, but it's also serious. Comedy is about the body and its appetites (hunger, sex, drink, sleep), and almost every work in the course features a meal, a feast, a missed dinner, or a fight over cake. (See section 7.) **The shape of the semester.** The course moves in roughly chronological order, in three units: | Unit | Theme | Works | |---|---|---| | 1 | Comic Violence, Violent Comedy | Aristophanes, *Lysistrata* (411 BCE); Spike Lee, *Chi-Raq* (2015); Plautus, *The Two Menaechmuses* (c. 200 BCE); Billy Wilder, *Some Like It Hot* (1959) | | 2 | Love and Mockery | Shakespeare, *The Taming of the Shrew* (c. 1590) and *Twelfth Night* (c. 1601); Aphra Behn, *The Rover* (1677); Jane Austen, *Pride and Prejudice* (1813) | | 3 | Modern Times | Herman Melville, *Moby-Dick* ch. 1–23 (1851); Oscar Wilde, *The Importance of Being Earnest* (1895); Charlie Chaplin, *Modern Times* (1936); Alison Bechdel, *Fun Home* (2006); stand-up by Andy Kaufman and Hannah Gadsby | Notice the pairing pattern: an old text is often set beside a modern film that uses the same machinery (*Lysistrata* with *Chi-Raq*, Plautus with *Some Like It Hot*). The course keeps asking: **what stays the same in comedy across 2,400 years, and what changes?** **What the class looked like.** It was a small discussion seminar (17 students) that met twice a week. Students posted short responses online, gave a 10-minute report, and wrote three essays plus a revision and a reflection. The instructor says students constantly brought in their own favorite stand-up and sketch comedy, and that flow between classic texts and contemporary comedy was "one of the great pleasures of the semester." So as you go, keep asking: *where have I seen this in comedy I actually watch?* ### Session 1: the opening question The first class asks you to name a piece of comic art you think is a great example of comedy, in any medium. The point is that comedy *seems* easy to define next to tragedy or horror, but turns out not to be. The optional readings for day one were about a 2018 debate set off by Hannah Gadsby's Netflix special *Nanette*. In it, a comedian argued that some comedy does harm and stopped telling jokes partway through the show. Critics argued about whether a comedy special must, above all, be funny. Keep that debate in your back pocket. The course returns to it at the very end. > **Talk about it** > - What's your example of great comedy? What makes it comedy and not just "something funny"? > - Can something be a comedy without being funny? Can something be funny without being a comedy? --- ## 2. The Comedy Toolkit: core concepts and vocabulary The discussion prompts mention "our glossary of comic terms and strategies developing over time." This is that glossary, organized so you can apply it to anything. ### Where the word comes from **Comedy** comes from the Greek *kōmos* (a drunken revel, a festive procession of singing and dancing) plus *ōidē* (song). Comedy was literally "the song of the revel." It grew out of festivals honoring **Dionysus**, god of wine, fertility, theater, and letting go. Those roots of feasting, sex, drinking, disguise, and turning the world upside down never left the genre. ### The big structural ideas | Term | What it means | Where you'll see it | |---|---|---| | **Old Comedy** | Athenian comedy of the 400s BCE: political, obscene, fantastical, with a chorus and direct attacks on real people. Aristophanes is its master. | *Lysistrata* | | **New Comedy** | Greek comedy after about 320 BCE (Menander), adapted by the Romans (Plautus, Terence): domestic plots, young lovers, mistaken identity, stock characters, little politics. | Plautus, and through him Shakespeare and most sitcoms | | **Plot vs. performance** | A key course idea. Some parts of a comedy move the *story* toward resolution. Others are *performance*: songs, dances, insults, bodily gags, set pieces that stop the story to enact ritual or just be fun. | Every unit | | **Invective vs. festive** | Two energies in comedy. **Invective** is attack: insult, mockery, satire. **Festive** is celebration: feasting, dancing, reconciliation, marriage. Most comedies blend both. | Aristophanes onward | | **Anagnorisis** | Aristotle's term for *recognition*, the moment a character discovers a crucial truth. In tragedy it's often devastating (Oedipus). In comedy it untangles everything: the twins finally meet, the disguised girl is revealed, the foundling learns his name. The course asks of every work: **what gets recognized, how does recognition happen, and why is it essential for resolving conflict?** | Every work | | **Blocking figure** | Someone who stands between the lovers and their happiness: a strict father, a jealous rival, a snob. | Baptista, Don Pedro, Lady Catherine, Lady Bracknell | | **Green world** | Northrop Frye's term for the magical, festive space in Shakespeare (a forest, a dream-country) where normal rules dissolve, identities shift, and problems get solved before everyone returns to society. | *Twelfth Night*'s Illyria; Naples at Carnival in *The Rover* | | **Carnival** | Mikhail Bakhtin's idea: festival time when hierarchy is suspended, everyone mocks authority, and the body (eating, drinking, sex) is celebrated. | *The Rover*, and everywhere | | **Ritual death and rebirth** | Comedy often stages a symbolic death (someone "dies," is mourned, is mistaken for dead) followed by a return to life. Behind it is the ancient festival pattern of winter yielding to spring. | *Lysistrata*'s Magistrate dressed as a corpse; Sebastian "drowned" in *Twelfth Night* | | **The comic ending** | Traditionally a wedding, feast, dance, or reconciliation: the community re-forms around the new couple. The course keeps asking who is *left out* of that happy circle. | Every work | ### Kinds of comedy | Term | Meaning | |---|---| | **Farce** | Comedy of physical chaos, accelerating confusion, mistaken identity, slammed doors, chases, and beatings. Farce intensifies comic transgression: it pushes bodies and social order to the breaking point. Characters are often types more than people. | | **Satire** | Comedy that attacks a target (folly, vice, institutions) in order to correct or expose it. *Horatian* satire is gentle and amused; *Juvenalian* satire is angry and biting. | | **Parody** | Imitation of a specific style or work for comic effect. | | **Sex comedy** | Comedy driven by desire, seduction, and frustration. | | **Comedy of errors** | A plot built on mistaken identity, usually twins. | | **Comedy of manners** | Witty social comedy mocking the codes and pretensions of a particular class. Restoration comedy, Austen, and Wilde all belong here. | | **Restoration comedy** | English comedy after the monarchy returned in 1660: witty, sexually frank, full of rakes and clever women. *The Rover* is an example. | | **Slapstick** | Physical comedy: falls, blows, pratfalls. The name comes from a paddle made to make a loud slap on stage. | | **Tragicomedy** | A work that mixes or balances tragic and comic modes. Bechdel subtitles *Fun Home* "A Family Tragicomic," punning on the comic book. | | **Metacomedy** | Comedy that comments on comedy itself, examining jokes, audiences, and the act of performing. Andy Kaufman and Hannah Gadsby do this. | | **Anti-comedy** | Performance that deliberately frustrates the audience's expectation of jokes and punchlines. | ### Stock characters (from Greek and Roman comedy, still alive today) | Stock type | Description | Later descendants | |---|---|---| | **Senex** | The old man: a father, husband, or miser who blocks young love. | Baptista, Mr. Bennet (sort of), every grumpy sitcom dad | | **Adulescens** | The young man in love, often helpless. | Lucentio, Orsino | | **Servus callidus** | The clever slave or servant who runs the plot and outwits masters. | Messenio, Tranio, Maria in *Twelfth Night*, Jeeves | | **Parasitus** | The parasite or hanger-on who flatters for free meals. | Peniculus; Sir Toby Belch in his way | | **Meretrix** | The courtesan: witty, mercenary, sometimes sympathetic. | Erotium, Angellica Bianca | | **Miles gloriosus** | The bragging soldier who is actually a coward. | Sir Andrew Aguecheek (a cousin of the type) | | **The Fool** | A professional jester licensed to speak truth through jokes. | Feste in *Twelfth Night* | ### Tools of the trade | Tool | What it is | |---|---| | **Wit** | Quick, clever intelligence, in words (repartee, puns, epigrams) and in action (using your wits). A major course theme: who has wit, what it costs, whether it survives love. | | **Quibble / pun** | Wordplay on double meanings. Shakespeare's characters "quibble" constantly. | | **Repartee** | Rapid exchange of witty retorts, a verbal duel. | | **Irony** | A gap between what's said and what's meant, or between what a character knows and what we know. | | **Innuendo / bawdy** | Sexual double meaning. The course's advice for *Lysistrata*: "When in doubt, assume a bawdy reading." | | **Cross-dressing** | Characters disguising themselves as another gender. In ancient Greece and in Shakespeare's England, all actors were male, so there are layers on layers. | | **Code-switching** | Shifting between ways of speaking or identities depending on audience. The course uses this for Wilde's double lives. | | **Recognition scene** | The moment of anagnorisis, often deliberately drawn out for maximum comic suspense. | --- ## 3. Theories of comedy: why we laugh The course draws on several thinkers. Here's a short version of each, with the question each one helps you ask. ### The three classic theories (a useful frame for all of them) 1. **Superiority theory:** we laugh at others' misfortunes or flaws because they make us feel superior. Thomas Hobbes called laughter a "sudden glory." *Question it raises:* Who is the butt of this joke, and who gets to feel superior? 2. **Incongruity theory:** we laugh when something violates our expectations: two things that don't fit, a surprise twist. *Question:* What expectation is being broken here? 3. **Relief theory:** laughter releases built-up tension or forbidden energy. *Question:* What's being let out, and what was holding it in? ### Aristotle (Poetics, c. 335 BCE) Aristotle's surviving *Poetics* is mostly about tragedy. His book on comedy is lost, which is the premise of Umberto Eco's novel *The Name of the Rose*. What survives says that comedy represents people as *worse* than average. It isn't about full-blown evil, but about the *ridiculous*: a flaw or mistake that is ugly but not painful or destructive. His example is the comic mask, which is distorted but doesn't cause pain. He also defines **anagnorisis** (recognition) and **peripeteia** (reversal of fortune), terms the course borrows for comedy. *Use it to ask:* Is the flaw being laughed at harmless, or does the comedy flirt with real pain? ### Walter Kerr (Tragedy and Comedy, 1967) The course mentions Kerr's essay on "the tragic sources of comedy." Kerr, a drama critic, argued that comedy is not tragedy's opposite but its shadow. Comedy grows out of the same knowledge of human limits, failure, and death, and it depends on that dark material. We laugh *because* we know how bad things can get. *Use it to ask:* What tragedy is lurking underneath this comedy? (In *Lysistrata*, it's an actual war.) ### Northrop Frye ("The Argument of Comedy," 1948) Frye is the key theorist for Unit 2. His model of New Comedy: - A young couple wants to marry and is blocked by an older generation or society (the **old society**). - Through a twist (a disguise, a discovery, a recognition), the young couple wins. - A **new society** forms around them, usually celebrated with a wedding or feast. - Comedy tends to *include* rather than *expel*. Even the blocking figures are usually forgiven and brought into the celebration, though sometimes one character becomes a scapegoat who is driven out (Malvolio in *Twelfth Night*). Frye's other big idea is the **green world**: in Shakespeare's festive comedies, characters escape into a magical space (a forest, a fairy-haunted wood, Illyria) where identities blur and conflicts dissolve. They then return to the ordinary world renewed. Frye connects this to ancient rituals of death and rebirth, the triumph of summer over winter. *Use it to ask:* What's the "old society," what's the "new society," and who gets left out? ### Mikhail Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World, written 1940s, published 1965) Bakhtin studied the medieval and Renaissance **carnival**: festivals before Lent when ordinary hierarchy was suspended. Key ideas: - **Carnival laughter is universal.** Everyone participates; there's no audience separate from performers. - **It's ambivalent.** It mocks and celebrates at once, tearing down and renewing. - **The grotesque body:** carnival celebrates eating, drinking, sex, birth, and the lower half of the body, everything polite culture hides. - **Crowning and uncrowning:** a fool is crowned king for a day, then dethroned, showing that all authority is temporary. - **Masks and disguise** let people step outside their fixed identities. *Use it to ask:* Does this comedy's freedom last, or is it a safety valve that lets off steam so the old order can continue? ### Henri Bergson (Laughter, 1900) Bergson's famous formula: we laugh at **"something mechanical encrusted on the living."** When a human being acts like a machine (rigidly, automatically, repeating itself instead of adapting), we laugh. His examples include a man who trips because he keeps walking when the situation changed, a puppet on strings, and a jack-in-the-box that pops up again and again. Other key points: - Laughter requires a momentary **"anesthesia of the heart."** We have to stop feeling sympathy to laugh. - Laughter has a **social function**: it punishes rigidity and pushes people to stay flexible and alert. - His comic techniques include **repetition**, **inversion** (the robber robbed), and **reciprocal interference**, when one situation can be read two ways at once, which is the engine of mistaken-identity farce. *Use it to ask:* Where does a person become a machine? (This is *Modern Times*'s whole premise.) ### Sigmund Freud (Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 1905) Freud saw jokes as working like dreams: they compress (condense) meanings and displace them, sneaking forbidden thoughts past our internal censor. Key ideas: - **Innocent jokes** are just wordplay. **Tendentious jokes** have a purpose: they are either *hostile* (aggression) or *obscene* (sexual). - A tendentious joke usually involves **three people**: the teller, the butt, and the listener who laughs and becomes an ally. - The pleasure of a joke comes from **economy**: we save the mental energy normally spent holding back forbidden impulses, and that saved energy comes out as laughter. *Use it to ask:* What forbidden thing is this joke letting us say or feel? Who is the joke's victim, and who is its accomplice? --- ## 4. Unit 1: Comic Violence, Violent Comedy This unit asks how comedy handles **conflict**: war, gang violence, mob hits, marital battles, brawls. Comedy doesn't avoid violence. It *stages* it, ritualizes it, makes it absurd, and finds ways to resolve it. --- ### 4.1 Aristophanes, *Lysistrata* (411 BCE) **Context.** Athens has been at war with Sparta for twenty years: the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE). Two years earlier, Athens suffered a catastrophic defeat in Sicily that wiped out a huge army and fleet. The city is exhausted, broke, and politically unstable. Into this, Aristophanes puts a fantasy: what if the women of Greece simply *stopped* the war? Greek comedy was performed at religious festivals for Dionysus. All the performers were men, wearing masks and padded costumes. Male characters often wore large leather phalluses, which this play uses heavily. A **chorus** sang and danced. **Plot summary.** - **The plan.** Lysistrata, an Athenian woman, gathers women from across Greece, including the formidable Spartan Lampito. She proposes a **sex strike**: no woman will sleep with her husband until the men make peace. The women resist (they really don't want to give up sex), but they finally swear a comic oath over a bowl of wine. - **The occupation.** Meanwhile, the older women seize the **Acropolis**, where Athens keeps the treasury that funds the war. No money, no war. - **The choruses.** The play has two half-choruses: old men who try to smoke the women out with fire, and old women who douse them with water. Their battle is a running mock-war of insults, threats, and physical comedy. - **The Magistrate.** A government official comes to arrest the women. In a famous debate, Lysistrata explains how women would run the city the way they handle **wool**: wash out the dirt, pick out the burrs (the corrupt men), card everyone together into one basket of goodwill, then weave a cloak for the people. The women then dress the Magistrate in a woman's veil, give him a wool basket, and finally dress him like a **corpse** for a mock funeral. - **The temptation.** The strike strains: women keep trying to sneak away with ridiculous excuses. In the most famous scene, Myrrhine teases her desperate husband Kinesias. She keeps promising sex, then leaving to fetch a mattress, a pillow, a blanket, perfume, then vanishes and leaves him in agony. - **Peace.** A Spartan herald arrives, also visibly suffering. Ambassadors from both sides meet. Lysistrata brings out **Reconciliation**, personified as a beautiful naked woman, and the men divide up Greece by pointing to parts of her body like a map. Peace is made, followed by a **feast**, songs, and dancing. **What the MIT class focused on.** - **Ritual roots.** Greek Old Comedy grew out of Dionysian ritual: processions, fertility rites, ritual insults. Its dramatic structure grew out of those rituals. Old Comedy typically had: - **prologue:** the setup - **parodos:** the chorus's entrance - **agon:** a formal debate or contest - **parabasis:** the chorus steps out of the story and addresses the audience directly (*Lysistrata* notably adapts this) - **episodes** - **exodos:** the festive exit, often a feast or wedding procession - **Plot vs. performance.** Which parts move the peace plot forward, and which parts (the choral battles, the Kinesias scene, the dancing) are performance for its own sake, ritual or play? - **Invective vs. festive.** The play is full of attack: insults, gender warfare, mockery of politicians. But it ends in festivity. How does it get from one to the other? - **Recognition (anagnorisis).** There's no lost twin here, but there is recognition. The men come to *see* something: that the war is destroying what they actually want, and that the enemy is human. How is that recognition *staged*? (The naked Reconciliation is literally something to be looked at.) Why is recognition necessary for the conflict to end? - **Ritual death.** The Magistrate's mock funeral symbolically "kills" the old warlike authority in the middle of the play. - **The "Wool" speech** as a model of domestic, women's knowledge applied to politics. - **Key & Peele, "Substitute Teacher."** The class used this sketch to show how **ritual** (here, taking attendance) can express and contain conflict. A substitute teacher from an inner-city school mispronounces suburban white students' names with total confidence, flipping the usual power dynamic of who gets their name "wrong." **Lysistrata's comic conflicts.** The first essay prompt lists the play's many kinds of conflict. It's a good inventory of comic conflict in general: - **Verbal:** insult rituals, parody, punning - **Physical:** mock battles, domestic objects used as weapons - **Bodily:** sexual play, undressing, dressing, brandishing body parts - **Performed:** choral songs and dances - **Clever:** trickery, jarring contrast - **The deepest:** "perhaps most devastating of all, *unexpected kindness*." In one memorable moment, the old women's leader helps the old men's leader. She removes a bug from his eye and dries his tears, and their mock-war melts. Kindness disarms more completely than force. > **Check yourself** > 1. What two strategies do the women use to force peace? > 2. What's the difference between invective and festive comedy? Find one example of each in the play. > 3. What is anagnorisis, and what gets "recognized" in *Lysistrata*? > > **Talk about it** > - The play ends with peace, but did anything really change for women? Is the women's power temporary, a carnival inversion that ends when the men come home? > - Is the play anti-war, pro-women, or just using both as material for sex jokes? Can it be all three? > - How does comedy let Aristophanes say things about a real, ongoing war that would be dangerous to say directly? > > **Try writing** > Pick one small moment of conflict (one exchange of insults, one gesture) and describe exactly how it escalates or resolves. What does that tiny moment show about how the whole play handles conflict? --- ### 4.2 Spike Lee, *Chi-Raq* (2015) **What it is.** A modern film adaptation of *Lysistrata* set in Chicago's South Side, amid real gun violence. The title is a nickname for Chicago that compares its murder rate to the Iraq war. Two gangs, the Spartans and the Trojans, are at war. After a child is killed by a stray bullet, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris), girlfriend of the Spartan leader Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon), organizes the women into a sex strike under the slogan "No peace, no piece." The women also occupy an armory, echoing the seizure of the Acropolis. Much of the dialogue is in **rhymed verse**, a nod to the original's poetry and to hip-hop. A narrator (Samuel L. Jackson) acts as a one-man Greek chorus. **Why the class watched it.** Putting the 2,400-year-old play next to a contemporary American one shows: - How ancient comic structure (sex strike, gender war, ritual, festive resolution) can carry a story about real, ongoing violence. - The **tension between comedy and grief.** The film mixes broad farce and satire with real mourning for children killed by guns. Its tone is deliberately uneasy. - **Ritual and conflict.** A clip in class focused on how ritual (funerals, church services, oaths, dances) organizes and expresses conflict. The film was controversial. Some Chicago residents objected to using comedy and a "sex strike" premise to depict real violence and grief. That controversy itself raises a course question: **is there material too painful for comedy, or is comedy one of the oldest ways humans process unbearable things?** > **Talk about it** > - What does setting *Lysistrata* in modern Chicago reveal about the original that you might miss reading it alone? > - Does comedy make the film's message about gun violence stronger or weaker? > - Compare the endings. How is peace achieved in each, and is it believable? --- ### 4.3 Plautus, *The Two Menaechmuses* (*Menaechmi*, c. 200 BCE) **Context.** Plautus (c. 254–184 BCE) is the great Roman comic playwright. He adapted Greek **New Comedy**, which had dropped Aristophanes's politics and fantasy in favor of domestic plots: families, money, lovers, servants, and mistaken identity. The course traces the shift from Greek Old Comedy to New Comedy to Roman comedy. With Plautus, we meet **farce**, which the course says intensifies the comic transgression we saw in Aristophanes. Shakespeare loved this play and adapted it as *The Comedy of Errors*. The twin plot eventually feeds into *Twelfth Night* too. **Plot summary.** - **Backstory.** A merchant had identical twin sons. When they were seven, one twin got lost in a crowd at a festival and was kidnapped. He was taken to the city of Epidamnus, adopted by a rich man, and grew up wealthy and married. The family renamed the remaining twin, Sosicles, "Menaechmus" in memory of the lost brother. So both twins now have the same name. - **The arrival.** Grown-up Sosicles (Menaechmus II) has spent six years searching for his brother. He arrives in Epidamnus with his clever slave **Messenio**, not knowing his twin lives there. - **The Epidamnian twin.** Menaechmus I is unhappily married. To spite his wife, he steals her expensive mantle (dress/cloak) and gives it to his girlfriend, the courtesan **Erotium**, and arranges a lunch at her house. His hanger-on **Peniculus** (the parasite, whose name means something like "Little Brush" or "Sponge" because he sweeps up free meals) wants in on that lunch. - **Mistaken identity, round after round:** - Erotium sees Sosicles, thinks he's her lover, and invites him in. He's baffled but happily eats the lunch, enjoys her company, and walks off with the stolen mantle (she wants it altered). - Peniculus, furious at being cut out of the meal, tells the wife everything. - The wife confronts the wrong twin. Then Erotium confronts the *other* wrong twin. Everyone thinks Menaechmus is lying or **insane**. - Sosicles, cornered by the wife and her father, *pretends* to be mad to scare them off. A pompous doctor is summoned to treat madness. - **Recognition.** Messenio rescues "his master" from being dragged off, but it's actually the *other* twin. Finally both twins appear on stage together. Messenio cross-examines them (Where were you born? What was your father's name? Do you remember the festival?) until the truth is undeniable. - **The ending.** The twins are reunited. Messenio is freed as a reward. The Epidamnian twin decides to sell everything and move home, and Messenio announces an auction that includes the wife, if anyone wants to buy her. **What the MIT class focused on.** - **Continuities from Greek comedy:** masks, male actors in women's roles, sexual and bodily humor, festive endings. - **Differences:** no chorus, no politics, more realistic domestic setting, faster plotting. - **Farce** as a machine for confusion. Each mistaken encounter builds on the last, and the comedy accelerates. - **Comic masking** of a new kind. The *identical face* is itself a mask. Identity becomes unstable: if everyone mistakes you, are you still yourself? Characters keep wondering whether they're dreaming or mad. - **Dressing, undressing, and cross-dressing:** the stolen mantle travels from wife to husband (he wears it under his cloak) to courtesan to twin. Clothes carry identity, and stealing a woman's garment is a gender joke. - **Gender jokes**, including mockery of the nagging wife, a sour stock joke worth examining critically. - **Subordinate characters:** Peniculus the parasite and Messenio the clever slave are stock types. Notice how they get many of the best lines and how Messenio's reward (freedom) is a real stake that Plautus treats lightly. - **Transgression and restoring order.** In *Lysistrata*, breaking social rules is justified by war. What rules get broken here (marital fidelity, property, sanity), what are the stakes, and how is order restored? (Arguably, by the twins *leaving*.) > **Check yourself** > 1. What's the difference between Old Comedy and New Comedy? > 2. Name the two stock characters the course highlights in this play, and their roles. > 3. How does the final recognition happen? > > **Talk about it** > - Do any characters seem to have an inner life, or are they all types? Does farce need them to be types? > - The Epidamnian twin is ready to sell his wife at auction. Is that the play's joke on him, on her, or on marriage itself? > - Messenio wins his freedom almost as an afterthought. What does comedy do with the serious fact of slavery? --- ### 4.4 Billy Wilder, *Some Like It Hot* (1959) **What it is.** One of the most celebrated American film comedies. In Chicago in 1929, two broke jazz musicians, Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), accidentally witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, a real mob killing. To escape the gangsters, they disguise themselves as women, "Josephine" and "Daphne," and join an all-female band heading to a Florida resort. **The farce engine.** - Joe falls for the band's singer, **Sugar Kane** (Marilyn Monroe). He can't woo her as Josephine, so he adds a *second* disguise: a fake millionaire oil heir with a ridiculous upper-class accent. That's double disguise. - Jerry, as Daphne, is relentlessly courted by a real millionaire, Osgood Fielding III. Jerry starts getting carried away by the role and even "gets engaged." - The gangsters show up at the same hotel for a mob convention, and the farce becomes a chase. - The ending: Jerry finally confesses to Osgood that he's a man. Osgood, unbothered, replies with one of the most famous last lines in film: "Well, nobody's perfect." **Connections the class drew.** - **Cross-dressing goes back to the ancients.** In *Lysistrata* and *Menaechmi*, women were played by men, so visual gender comedy was likely built in. Inside the plays, men also get dressed in women's clothes: the Magistrate in a veil, Menaechmus sneaking out wearing his wife's mantle. - **Violence as backdrop:** not war (Aristophanes) but armed gang conflict (like *Chi-Raq*), with guns and bootleg alcohol. - **Character echoes:** Sugar Kane, the queen of seduction, recalls Myrrhine and Erotium. Joe, whose helplessness may be an act, recalls Kinesias and Menaechmus. - **Song and dance** as performance elements, like the choral numbers in Greek comedy. - **Recognition and ending.** Watch closely how each disguise is (or isn't) unmasked, and how unconventional the final "couples" are. The ending refuses to restore normal gender order. Osgood's line suggests the disguise doesn't matter, which is a strikingly open-ended resolution for 1959. > **Talk about it** > - Is the film's cross-dressing comedy mocking gender roles, reinforcing them, or both? > - Jerry seems to enjoy being Daphne. What does the film do with that? > - Compare the final line's effect to the ending of *Menaechmi*: does order get restored or playfully abandoned? --- ### Unit 1 wrap-up: the big ideas so far - Comedy grew from ritual, and ritual helps it **contain conflict**. - Comedy mixes **plot** (problem to solution) with **performance** (song, dance, insult, bodily gags). - **Invective and festive** energies coexist. - **Recognition** (anagnorisis) is how comic conflict gets resolved. - **Farce** accelerates confusion until identity itself becomes unstable. - **Clothing and cross-dressing** are tools for questioning gender and social roles. --- ## 5. Unit 2: Love and Mockery This unit tracks how comedy handles **romantic love**. The old comedies mostly mocked love and marriage. Starting with Shakespeare, romance moves to the center, but it has to coexist with farce, cruelty, and satire. The course's Essay 2 prompt puts it best: farce "maintain[s] an uneasy equilibrium with the civilizing influence of romantic love." **Love conquers all, but does the ending really solve the problems the comedy raised?** A second major thread is **wit**: who has it, what it costs, and whether it survives love. --- ### 5.1 Shakespeare, *The Taming of the Shrew* (c. 1590–92) **Plot summary.** - **The Induction (frame story).** A drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, passes out outside a tavern. A lord finds him and, as a prank, has him carried to a mansion, dressed in fine clothes, and convinced he is a nobleman who has been insane for fifteen years. A troupe of actors performs a play for him, and that play is *The Taming of the Shrew*. In most texts, the frame never closes: we never return to Sly. - **Padua.** The rich Baptista has two daughters. **Bianca** is gentle and swarmed by suitors. **Katherine** (Kate) is sharp-tongued and violent, and nobody wants her. Baptista refuses to let Bianca marry until Kate does. - **The Bianca plot (a New Comedy subplot).** Bianca's suitors use disguises. The young lover **Lucentio** poses as a tutor while his clever servant **Tranio** poses as Lucentio, Plautus-style. Lucentio and Bianca secretly elope. - **The Kate plot.** **Petruchio** arrives from Verona openly looking for a rich wife and agrees to court Kate. Their first meeting is a brilliant duel of insults and puns, the best repartee in the play. He announces they'll marry regardless of what she says. - **The taming.** Petruchio shows up to the wedding late and absurdly dressed, then drags Kate away before the feast. At his house, he "tames" her the way a falconer trains a hawk: he denies her food and sleep, always claiming it's for her own good (nothing's good enough for her), and contradicts reality to force her agreement. In the famous road scene, he insists the sun is the moon, and Kate learns to agree with whatever he says, even playfully overdoing it. - **The wager.** At Bianca's wedding feast, three husbands bet on whose wife is most obedient. Bianca and the widow refuse their husbands' summons. Kate comes and delivers a long speech lecturing the other wives on wifely submission. **What the MIT class focused on.** - **Connections back to ancient comedy:** gender reversals, ritual, invective and festive elements, breaking and restoring social norms (Aristophanes); farce, mistaken identity, sexual and physical comedy (Plautus and Wilder). - **The Induction as a mirror:** a man is "transformed" by others' manipulation into a lord. Kate is "transformed" into a wife. Both are about performance and imposed identity. What does it mean that the frame never closes? - **Kate's final speech: the great interpretive problem.** The class watched a clip from Franco Zeffirelli's 1967 film (Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton) and discussed different readings. In the Zeffirelli version, Kate delivers the speech and then walks out, leaving Petruchio to chase her. 1. **Sincere:** she's been "tamed," and the play endorses it. (Many modern readers find the play hard to stomach this way.) 2. **Ironic:** her performance is so over the top it's satire. She's playing a role, and the joke is on the men. 3. **A shared game:** she and Petruchio have discovered a private comic partnership, two wits teaming up to win the bet and humiliate everyone else. 4. **Frame reading:** it's all a play performed for a drunk tinker, a fantasy of male control, and the frame reminds us it's fiction. - **Looking ahead** to *Twelfth Night*, where love, sexuality, identity, and recognition get more complex. > **Talk about it** > - Is Petruchio's "taming" farce, cruelty, or both? Does calling it comedy make it acceptable? > - Does Kate lose her wit by the end, or redirect it? > - What's the effect of the Sly frame never returning? --- ### 5.2 Shakespeare, *Twelfth Night, or What You Will* (c. 1601) **The title.** Twelfth Night was the last night of the Christmas season (January 5–6): a festival of feasting, drinking, disguise, and misrule, when a "Lord of Misrule" might reign and the world turned upside down. The subtitle, "What You Will," means "whatever you like," and it also plays on "will" as desire. The play is a carnival in itself. **Plot summary.** - **Shipwreck.** Twins **Viola** and **Sebastian** are separated in a shipwreck off the coast of **Illyria**. Each believes the other drowned. Viola disguises herself as a young man, "Cesario," and becomes a servant to **Duke Orsino**. - **The love triangle(s).** Orsino is lovesick for the **Countess Olivia**, who refuses all suitors while mourning her dead brother. Orsino sends Cesario to woo Olivia for him, and Olivia falls in love with Cesario. Viola, meanwhile, falls in love with Orsino. So: Viola loves Orsino, who loves Olivia, who loves "Cesario" (Viola). - **The subplot: below stairs at Olivia's house.** - **Sir Toby Belch** is Olivia's drunken uncle, a carnival figure of appetite. - **Sir Andrew Aguecheek** is a foolish knight Toby is milking for money. - **Maria** is Olivia's clever waiting-gentlewoman. - **Feste** is Olivia's professional Fool. - Their enemy is **Malvolio**, Olivia's puritanical steward, who scolds their late-night partying. Sir Toby's response is the play's motto for festivity: "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" - **The gulling of Malvolio.** Maria forges a love letter in Olivia's handwriting, persuading Malvolio that Olivia loves him and wants him to smile constantly and wear yellow stockings, cross-gartered. He does, which is absurd. Olivia thinks he's mad, and the pranksters lock him in a dark room and torment him as a madman. - **Sebastian returns.** Viola's twin is alive, accompanied by **Antonio**, a sea captain who rescued him and is devoted to him. Olivia mistakes Sebastian for Cesario and hustles him into marriage. Confusion multiplies: Antonio thinks Viola is Sebastian and feels betrayed, and Sir Andrew picks fights with the wrong twin. - **Recognition.** The twins finally stand face to face and slowly confirm each other's identity. Orsino turns his affection to Viola, who is still in men's clothes. Malvolio is released, learns of the trick, and storms off vowing revenge on all of them. The play ends not with a wedding dance but with **Feste alone, singing a melancholy song** about growing up and the rain that "raineth every day." **What the MIT class focused on.** - **Festive "green world" comedy** (Frye): Illyria as a dreamlike space where gender and identity become fluid. - **Farce in uneasy combination with romantic love,** developed much more fully than in *Shrew*. - **Plautine twinning** (from *Menaechmi*) plus **Elizabethan Fools** (Feste, a professional truth-teller). - **Dressing, undressing, and fluid gender roles and sexuality.** - A boy actor played Viola playing Cesario. - Olivia loves a woman in disguise. - Orsino is drawn to "Cesario" and loves Viola while she still wears men's clothes. She never changes back on stage. - Antonio's intense devotion to Sebastian. - **Courtly love and servitude:** the language of the lover as "servant" to the beloved overlaps with literal service. Viola is Orsino's servant, Malvolio wants to rise above his station, and Maria marries up by marrying Sir Toby. The play also relies on Plautine clever servants. - **Verbal wit and quibbles,** especially Feste's. - **Psychological depth:** longer speeches, lyrical language, and careful probing of every degree of love. - **Ritual death as a frame:** in *Lysistrata* the mock death happens symbolically in the middle (the Magistrate's funeral). Here the play *begins* with apparent deaths (the shipwreck, the brother Olivia mourns) and resolves when the "dead" brother returns. Spring after winter. - **Subplots mirroring the main plot,** much as the Induction mirrors the main plot in *Shrew*. Try mapping the play: Orsino's court and Olivia's household are two "kingdoms" ruled very differently. Who moves between them? Who stays put? - **States of mind:** dreams, madness ("Is this a dream?"), music, and poetry. Characters keep noticing when they are "not themselves." What happens to reality in an already unreal world? **Malvolio: the comedy's problem.** Malvolio is the scapegoat Frye describes, driven out of the festive society. Is his punishment funny or cruel? Many productions make his exit genuinely painful. The last word belongs not to the happy couples but to the Fool's rain-song: a reminder that the holiday is ending. > **Check yourself** > 1. Map the love triangle at its most tangled. > 2. What's the "green world," and how does Illyria fit? > 3. How does ritual death work differently here than in *Lysistrata*? > > **Talk about it** > - Is the ending happy? For whom? (Malvolio? Antonio? Sir Andrew?) > - Why does Viola stay in men's clothes until the very end? > - Feste is a professional fool. Is he the wisest character in the play? --- ### 5.3 Aphra Behn, *The Rover* (1677) **Aphra Behn (1640–1689).** The course's first female-authored text, and one from outside the ancient canon. Behn was one of the first Englishwomen to earn her living as a writer. She had a mysterious, adventurous life, including working as a spy for King Charles II in Antwerp. She wrote at a time when the culture valued women's work in performance and literature while also denigrating it. Actresses were new to the English stage (women's roles had been played by boys until 1660), and women writers were often called immodest. Virginia Woolf later argued that every woman writer owes Behn a debt for earning the right to write. **Context.** The play is set in the 1650s, when English royalists ("Cavaliers") lived in exile while England was ruled by the Puritan Commonwealth. Behn wrote it after the monarchy's return (the Restoration), when theater was bawdy, witty, and celebrated rakes. **Rakes** were charming, promiscuous gentlemen. **Plot summary.** - **Setting.** **Naples, during Carnival.** The streets are full of masks and costumes, and everyone is free to flirt, wander, and disguise themselves. - **Two sisters, two futures they reject.** - **Florinda** has been promised by her brother Don Pedro to a rich old man, but she loves the English colonel **Belvile**. - Her younger sister **Hellena** is destined for a convent and has other ideas. She puts on a mask and goes out to enjoy Carnival. - **The Rover.** **Willmore** is a reckless, charming, irresistible English sea captain who falls for Hellena. They spar in brilliant repartee, two "mad and merry" wits evenly matched. But Willmore constantly chases other women. - **Angellica Bianca.** A famous, expensive courtesan, Angellica hangs her portrait in public with a price of 1,000 crowns. Willmore wins her love *for free* with romantic talk, then abandons her for Hellena. Wounded and furious, Angellica later confronts him with a pistol. She is one of the most complex figures in the play: an older, marginalized woman who is the cost of the comedy's freedom. - **Blunt.** A naive English country gentleman, Blunt is robbed by a prostitute and dumped into a sewer in the farce of the play's subplot. Humiliated, he turns vengeful and **threatens sexual violence** against Florinda, whom he mistakes for a random woman. - **The darkness inside the carnival.** Florinda faces assault more than once, including from a drunken Willmore. The play treats this in a startling mix of farce and real threat. - **The ending.** Florinda marries Belvile. Hellena, often in men's clothes, outwits everyone and wins Willmore, but **on her own terms**, with her own fortune and her eyes open about his nature. Angellica is left alone. **What the MIT class focused on.** - Behn's life and the culture that both valued and denigrated women writers and performers. - Behn's development of **comic types and tropes** we've already seen: the clever woman, the rake, the courtesan, the blocking brother, disguise. - **New developments in farce and sex comedy,** and **transgressions against patriarchal order.** - **The economics of the marriage market:** like *Shrew*, the play exposes marriage as a financial transaction (Florinda sold to an old man, Angellica literally pricing herself), but it imagines **radical alternatives**. - **Carnival** (Bakhtin): masks and festival let characters cross lines of gender and class and say what they couldn't normally say. The class read Bakhtin's chapter on carnival alongside the play. - **Endings and marriage plots:** how Behn both satisfies and challenges the expectation that comedy ends in marriage. - **Wit and violence.** Wit belongs to the women. Watch where witty exchange **breaks down**: men, especially Willmore, keep breaking the equilibrium by courting Angellica, attacking Florinda, and exposing Belvile. Violence takes new forms here, including sexual violence against Florinda, which the class read alongside scholarly articles. **Comparisons the course suggests (great essay material).** - **Worlds without fathers** create sexual carnival, but **brothers** still matter (Sebastian in *Twelfth Night*, Don Pedro here). - **Paired couples:** a courtly-love pair (Florinda and Belvile, like Bianca and Lucentio in *Shrew*) and a pair of mad and merry pranksters (Hellena and Willmore, like Kate and Petruchio). What did *Twelfth Night* give us instead? - **The ending speech:** compare Kate's final speech in *Shrew* with Hellena's terms in *The Rover*. - **Anagnorisis without undressing:** Viola and Hellena both remain in men's clothes at the end. Why? - **An older, marginalized figure:** Feste in *Twelfth Night*, Angellica here. > **Talk about it** > - Is Willmore lovable or dangerous? Can he be both in a comedy? > - Does Hellena's victory change anything about the marriage market, or just win her a better deal inside it? > - What happens to Angellica, and what does her fate say about who comedy protects? --- ### 5.4 Jane Austen, *Pride and Prejudice* (1813) **The course's first novel.** Austen's novel owes a lot to theater: tight plotting, a limited set of settings, and the reliance on witty dialogue. It was published in three volumes. The course read one volume per class (chapters 1–23, 24–42, and 43–61 in editions that run them together). **Plot summary.** - **The problem.** The Bennet family has five daughters and no son. Their estate, Longbourn, is **entailed**: by law it will pass to the nearest male relative, the ridiculous clergyman **Mr. Collins**. If the girls don't marry well, they could end up poor. Mrs. Bennet's frantic matchmaking has real stakes. - **The first impressions.** Rich, amiable **Mr. Bingley** rents a nearby estate and falls for the eldest daughter, **Jane**. His proud friend **Mr. Darcy** insults the second daughter, **Elizabeth**, within her hearing at a ball, calling her not handsome enough to tempt him. Elizabeth, the novel's great wit, laughs it off and decides she despises him. - **Wickham's story.** Charming officer **Mr. Wickham** tells Elizabeth that Darcy cheated him out of an inheritance. She believes him instantly, because it confirms her prejudice. - **Proposals and refusals.** - Mr. Collins proposes to Elizabeth in a hilariously pompous speech. She refuses, and her practical friend **Charlotte Lucas** accepts him days later for financial security. - Darcy, despite himself, falls in love with Elizabeth and proposes, insultingly, emphasizing how far beneath him her family is. She refuses him furiously. - **The letter and the self-recognition.** Darcy writes Elizabeth a letter explaining the truth about Wickham, a seducer and liar who tried to elope with Darcy's fifteen-year-old sister for her money. Elizabeth realizes she has been completely wrong. This is her **anagnorisis**: "Till this moment I never knew myself." - **Pemberley.** Visiting Darcy's estate, Elizabeth sees a different man: generous, respected, changed. - **Crisis.** The youngest sister, **Lydia**, runs off with Wickham. That threatens the whole family's reputation. Darcy secretly finds them and pays Wickham to marry her. - **The blocking figure.** Darcy's aunt, the overbearing **Lady Catherine de Bourgh**, storms over to forbid Elizabeth from marrying Darcy. Elizabeth refuses to promise anything, which accidentally tells Darcy she might accept him now. - **The ending.** A second proposal, accepted. Jane marries Bingley. A comic ending with two weddings, but not everyone ends up happy: Charlotte is stuck with Collins, Lydia with Wickham. **What the MIT class focused on.** - **Gender roles, marriage and courtship practices, class, wealth, and property,** and why people in Austen's novels spend so much time *talking*. - **Austen in the comic tradition, not just the novel tradition.** In English classes, *P&P* is often read as an early **bildungsroman** (coming-of-age novel) or **marriage plot**: the heroine grows, matures, and is rewarded with love and fortune. But what if we read Austen as an heir of comedy and eighteenth-century satire, a tradition that often *mocked* love and marriage? Then the novel looks sharper, funnier, and more critical of the marriage market. - **Wit,** the unit's thread since *Shrew*. The course's questions: - What are the costs and benefits, limits and advantages of wit? - How does wit work for women versus men, or for those with more or less status? - How does verbal wit relate to risk, pleasure, and success? - Does **wit itself** have a life story? Does it go through trials, sacrifice and rebirth, recognition and celebration, the way comic heroes do? - Where does wit **fail** in *Pride and Prejudice*? (Elizabeth's wit misleads her about Darcy and Wickham. Mr. Bennet's ironic detachment leaves Lydia unsupervised.) Does it recover? - **Wit and self-recognition,** with special attention to the ending. - **The 1940 film** (Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson) is "generally more comic" than recent versions. It even turns Lady Catherine into a secret ally at the end, which is a telling change. **Wit in *P&P*: a quick guide.** - **Elizabeth:** playful, sharp, generous, and sometimes wrong. Her wit is a form of independence, and it's also how she protects herself from hurt. - **Mr. Bennet:** the novel's most cutting wit, and its biggest failure. His irony is a way of not doing his job as a father. - **Darcy:** not witty at first. He's stiff and proud, a Bergsonian rigidity that must be laughed out of him. Elizabeth teases him into flexibility. - **Mr. Collins and Mrs. Bennet:** targets of satire, people who are funny because they have no self-awareness. > **Check yourself** > 1. What is an entail, and why does it matter to the plot? > 2. What is Elizabeth's moment of anagnorisis? > 3. Name three marriages in the novel and what each says about marriage. > > **Talk about it** > - Is *Pride and Prejudice* a romance with jokes, or a satire with a romance? > - Are wit and love compatible? Does Elizabeth have to give up some wit to marry Darcy? > - What happens to disruptive characters (Lydia and Wickham, Lady Catherine) by the end? --- ### Unit 2 wrap-up: the big ideas - Romantic love moves to the center of comedy, but **farce never goes away**, and the two sit uneasily together. - **Wit** is a source of power, especially for women, and also a risk. - **Disguise** (especially women in men's clothes) gives freedom, and how and when it's taken off matters. - **The ending** (usually marriage) is where the work's real attitude shows. Look at who is excluded, unhappy, or unresolved. - **Frye's model** (old society blocks lovers, new society forms) fits all four works, and each bends it. --- ## 6. Unit 3: Modern Times This unit asks what happens to comic patterns in the **modern world**: industrial labor, new ideas about identity and sexuality, mass media, and art that questions itself. The themes introduced here include social class, identity, gender and sexuality, the nature of art, and the body and its appetites. All of them enter comic patterns we've already seen. --- ### 6.1 Herman Melville, *Moby-Dick*, Chapters 1–23 (1851) **Why it's here.** It would be hard to call *Moby-Dick* a comedy. It becomes an epic tragedy of obsession at sea. But the first 23 "land chapters," before the ship sails, are full of comic patterns. The instructor calls them **classic sex comedy**, complicated because the "couple" is two men and because Melville heightens the comedy by making one of them a tattooed Pacific Islander. Students seldom reckon with the book's humor. (Note: the instructor had to drop this reading in 2022 to catch up on schedule, but kept it on the syllabus.) **What happens in chapters 1–23.** - **"Call me Ishmael."** The narrator, a restless, broke, slightly melancholy young man, decides to go to sea whenever he feels gloomy. His tone is ironic and self-mocking. - **The Spouter-Inn.** In New Bedford, the only bed available must be shared with a harpooneer who is out late "peddling his head." Ishmael lies awake dreading his bedmate. Then **Queequeg** comes in: a tattooed South Sea islander who carries a tomahawk-pipe and sells shrunken heads. There's a panicked bedroom farce, and the landlord has to calm both men down. Ishmael concludes it's better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. - **The "marriage."** Ishmael wakes with Queequeg's arm thrown over him in a loving embrace, which Melville describes in the language of a wedding. The two become "bosom friends." Queequeg declares them married in his country's terms and shares his money and his idol with Ishmael. - **Father Mapple's sermon** on Jonah and the whale: the solemn, dark counterweight. - **Chowder at the Try Pots** in Nantucket: clam and cod chowder for every meal. (Food!) - **Signing on.** Ishmael signs on with the *Pequod*. Its two Quaker owners, **Peleg** and **Bildad**, haggle comically over his tiny share of the profits. - **Ominous notes.** The ship's captain, Ahab, is unseen and mysterious. A ragged prophet named Elijah warns them off. Comedy darkens toward tragedy as the ship sails. **Comic patterns to spot.** Bedroom farce; a "marriage" plot between two men; the comedy of cultural difference (who is really the "savage"?); the comic narrator; feasting; mock-heroic language. These chapters also set up themes we'll see in Wilde and Bechdel: same-sex intimacy hidden in plain sight, disguise, and coded meanings. > **Talk about it** > - What makes the bed-sharing scenes funny? Who is the butt of the joke: Queequeg, Ishmael, or Ishmael's prejudices? > - How does Melville use comedy to explore intimacy between men in 1851? --- ### 6.2 Oscar Wilde, *The Importance of Being Earnest* (1895) **Context.** Wilde was the most famous wit in London. The play's subtitle is "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People." Just weeks after it opened to great success in 1895, Wilde was put on trial for "gross indecency" with men, convicted, and imprisoned. The play's jokes about double lives and secret identities read very differently in that light. **Plot summary.** - **Two double lives.** - **Jack Worthing** lives respectably in the country as guardian of his young ward **Cecily**. To escape to London, he invents a wild younger brother named "Ernest," and in town he goes by Ernest himself. - His friend **Algernon Moncrieff** has invented an invalid friend, "Bunbury," whose constant illnesses let him escape to the country whenever social duties bore him. "**Bunburying**" is the play's word for leading a secret double life. - **The romances.** Jack ("Ernest") proposes to Algernon's cousin **Gwendolen**, who adores him mainly because his name is Ernest. She has always dreamed of marrying someone named Ernest. - **The blocking figure.** Gwendolen's mother, **Lady Bracknell**, interrogates Jack as a suitor. When he admits he's an orphan who was found as a baby **in a handbag at Victoria Station**, she is appalled. She tells him to acquire some parents. Her outraged delivery of "A handbag?" is one of the most famous moments in English theater. - **Algernon's turn.** Algernon goes to the country pretending to be Jack's wicked brother "Ernest" and meets Cecily. She has already imagined an entire romance and engagement with "Ernest" in her diary, and she too loves the name. - **Collisions.** - Both women believe they're engaged to Ernest. - Gwendolen and Cecily have a ferociously polite tea-party battle: sugar and cake as weapons. - Both men arrange to be re-christened "Ernest" by the local clergyman. - **The revelation.** - Cecily's governess, **Miss Prism**, turns out to be the nurse who, decades ago, absent-mindedly put the manuscript of her novel in the baby carriage and the baby in her handbag. - The baby was Lady Bracknell's nephew, which makes Jack Algernon's older brother. - When Jack checks the army records, his real name turns out to be **Ernest**. He'd been telling the truth all along without knowing it. - Three couples embrace, and Jack has learned "the vital Importance of Being Earnest." **What the MIT class focused on.** - **A return to farce in drama,** in a world less realistic than Austen's but just as concerned with the follies of the aristocracy and landed gentry. - **Wit,** both verbal (Wilde's epigrams turn proverbs inside out) and wit of action (using your wits to get out of trouble). - **Disguise and unmasking.** The recognition scene is a parody of every foundling plot in comedy since Menander. - **Young lovers vs. blocking figures,** and by extension **desire and appetite vs. ritual and convention.** The play is full of food: Algernon devours the cucumber sandwiches meant for Lady Bracknell, eats muffins in a crisis, and the tea fight weaponizes cake. - **Code-switching:** characters play different roles and shift parts depending on where they are and who is watching. - **Wilde's queer aesthetics.** Wilde never publicly declared himself homosexual, but he worked hard to make the beautiful and the "trivial" into a standard to live by, defying late-Victorian social and sexual norms. "Bunburying," double lives, and the importance of the *name* (earnest, meaning sincere) all take on a coded second meaning. - **A clip from the 1952 film** (dir. Anthony Asquith), with Edith Evans's legendary Lady Bracknell. > **Talk about it** > - The play mocks earnestness (seriousness and sincerity) while its title praises it. Which side is Wilde on? > - Is "Bunburying" just a joke, or a coded way of talking about secret lives? > - How does Wilde's wit compare to Elizabeth Bennet's? Who is it for, and what does it protect? --- ### 6.3 Charlie Chaplin, *Modern Times* (1936) **What it is.** Chaplin's last appearance as his famous **Little Tramp**, in a mostly silent film made years after "talkies" took over. It has music, sound effects, and machine voices, but almost no spoken dialogue from the main characters. **What happens.** - **The factory.** The Tramp works on an assembly line, tightening bolts so relentlessly that his body can't stop twitching in the same motion even after he leaves the line. He's used as the test subject for a "feeding machine" designed to feed workers so they don't need a lunch break. It goes horribly wrong. He has a breakdown and gets literally swallowed into the gears of a giant machine. - **A string of accidents.** - Released, he picks up a red flag that fell off a truck and waves it to return it, just as a protest march forms behind him. He's arrested as a communist leader. - In prison, he accidentally consumes smuggled cocaine and, high, foils a jailbreak. - **The Gamine.** He meets a homeless orphan girl, "the Gamine" (Paulette Goddard), and they dream of a little home together. - **Odd jobs.** He tries one job after another. As a department store night watchman, he roller-skates blindfolded at the edge of a drop. Later he's a singing waiter who loses the lyrics written on his cuff and improvises a nonsense song in made-up gibberish. That's the first time audiences ever heard Chaplin's voice on film, and he uses it to say nothing at all. - **The ending.** The couple walks down an open road toward the horizon, the Tramp encouraging her to smile. **What the MIT class focused on.** - **Bergson and Freud** as theorists of laughter in the context of modernity: factory labor and capital accumulation. *Modern Times* is almost a direct illustration of Bergson's "mechanical encrusted on the living." The comedy comes from a human body forced to behave like a machine. - **The Tramp as both wit and target.** As in earlier comedy, the protagonist is wittier than everyone else, with silent-film wit expressed through the *body* rather than words. But he's also the butt of the joke, someone who "embodies or performs a mechanism for creating laughter," like Plautus's or Wilde's characters. - **Film's own tools:** visual gags, editing, music, and the deliberate refusal of synchronized speech. > **Talk about it** > - Where in the film does a person become a machine? Is it funny, frightening, or both? > - Why do you think Chaplin made a nearly silent film in 1936? What does the gibberish song say about speech? > - Is the ending happy? Compare it to other comic endings: no wedding, no feast, just the road. --- ### 6.4 Alison Bechdel, *Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic* (2006) **What it is.** A graphic memoir (a nonfiction comic book) about Bechdel's childhood in small-town Pennsylvania and her father, Bruce. "Fun Home" is the family's nickname for the **funeral home** her father ran. He was also a high school English teacher and an obsessive restorer of their Victorian house. Bechdel discovers that her father was a closeted gay man who had relationships with teenage boys, shortly after she herself comes out as a lesbian in college. Weeks later, he is killed by a truck in what may have been suicide. **Why it's in a comedy course.** The subtitle is a double pun: *tragicomic* (a mix of tragedy and comedy) and *tragi-COMIC* (a comic book). The book doesn't strictly fit the comic forms we've studied, but those forms provide a useful framework for reading it. It's full of irony, wry humor, absurd family life, and literary jokes. It's also the course's most literary text: Bechdel reads her family through Greek myth (Daedalus and Icarus), James Joyce, Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Albert Camus. Late in the book, Oscar Wilde, including *The Importance of Being Earnest*, comes to the fore. **What the MIT class focused on.** - **The technical form of comics.** Pay attention to Bechdel's visual effects: - **frames, panels, and grids:** how the page is divided - **splash panels:** full-page images, often with titles - **gutters:** the blank space between panels, where the reader fills in time and meaning - **thought balloons vs. narrative text:** what characters say vs. what adult Alison narrates - **sound effects, color, and ink:** Bechdel uses a single blue-gray wash - These visual elements often provide a **festive counter-text** to a narrative full of stress and sadness. - **Connections to the whole course:** gender and sexuality, disguise and revelation, appetite, social class, inversion and repetition. There's even the "effeminacy" theme, reversed: the father is aesthetic and feminine, the daughter wants to be butch. That's a gender inversion straight out of the comic tradition. - **Wilde and *Earnest*:** secret double lives, the importance of names and identities, unmasking. > **Talk about it** > - Where does *Fun Home* make you laugh, and why does laughter feel possible alongside so much sadness? > - How do the words and the pictures sometimes tell different stories? > - Is coming out a kind of anagnorisis? Whose recognition, of what? --- ### 6.5 Stand-up and metacomedy: Andy Kaufman and Hannah Gadsby The course ends where it began, with the debate over what comedy is and does. **Andy Kaufman (1949–1984).** Kaufman's 1977 HBO special is a masterclass in **anti-comedy**. He often performed as "Foreign Man," a nervous, heavily accented character who told awful jokes and did terrible impressions, until he suddenly launched into an uncannily perfect Elvis impersonation. His most famous bit elsewhere, on the first season of *Saturday Night Live*, was standing stiffly beside a record player playing the *Mighty Mouse* theme, waiting to lip-sync his one line. Kaufman's comedy made audiences unsure whether they were supposed to laugh, whether the performance was going wrong, and whether any of it was real. The joke is often on the audience's expectations. That's **metacomedy**: comedy about comedy. **Hannah Gadsby.** An Australian comedian whose 2018 Netflix special *Nanette* broke the rules of stand-up: - **Self-deprecation.** Gadsby announced they were quitting comedy because, as a queer person, self-deprecating humor amounted to humiliation. - **Tension without release.** They argued that jokes work by building tension and then releasing it with a punchline, and that the release lets audiences off the hook. So in the second half, Gadsby builds tension with real, painful stories, including violence they experienced, and refuses to release it. - **The follow-ups.** The class also watched Gadsby's 2019 TED talk ("Three Ideas. Three Contradictions. Or Not.") and material from their 2020 special *Douglas*, about being diagnosed with autism. Both continue that reflection on how a mind and a culture shape what's funny. *Nanette* split critics and comedians. Some called it a masterpiece. Others argued it wasn't comedy at all, or that comedy should be judged by whether it's funny. Those are the debates from the course's first-day readings. **Why end here?** Kaufman and Gadsby both use **metacomic** technique to reflect on comedy as an art: its mechanics (Freud's tension and release), its victims (Hobbes's superiority), and its audience. After a semester of comedy from 411 BCE to 2006, students can see that these "radical" modern experiments rework very old questions about who gets laughed at, what laughter releases, and whether comedy can carry pain. > **Talk about it** > - Is *Nanette* a comedy? Use the course's terms (invective, festive, recognition, tension and release) to argue either way. > - Kaufman frustrates his audience on purpose. Is that comedy, performance art, or a prank, and does the distinction matter? > - Gadsby's critique of self-deprecation: does it apply to any of the characters we've read (the butt of the joke who is also the hero)? --- ### 6.6 The festive conclusion The last class was a party. Students brought something festive to share (a joke, a clip, a song, a story) to end the semester the way comedies end: with celebration and community. The point is serious: comedy, in the course's view, is ultimately about the **comic spirit**, which makes enjoying it together part of understanding it. --- ## 7. Follow the food: the course's running joke The course description ends with "And food." Here's why it's not just a joke. In every work, appetite (for food, drink, sex) is the body's rebellion against rules, and comedy sides with the body. | Work | Food moment | What it does | |---|---|---| | *Lysistrata* | The peace ends with a feast, and the oath is sworn over a wine bowl | Festivity seals reconciliation; appetite (sexual and otherwise) drives the plot | | *Menaechmi* | The lunch at Erotium's, and Peniculus the parasite, who lives for free meals | Appetite causes mistaken identity; a meal turns into a battle | | *Some Like It Hot* | Bootleg liquor, the train party, the mob "banquet" | Prohibition-era appetite, and the mob convention dinner turns deadly | | *Taming of the Shrew* | Petruchio starves Kate; the wedding feast is skipped; the final banquet | Food is withheld as control, then restored as celebration | | *Twelfth Night* | "Cakes and ale" | The festive party crowd versus the puritan who would ban pleasure | | *The Rover* | Carnival feasting and the open city | Appetites of all kinds run free | | *Pride and Prejudice* | Balls, suppers, and dinner invitations as social warfare | Who eats with whom is how social rank is negotiated | | *Moby-Dick* | Chowder for every meal at the Try Pots | Comic abundance before the tragic voyage | | *Earnest* | Cucumber sandwiches, muffins, the cake-and-sugar tea fight | Appetite as rebellion against manners; tea as warfare | | *Modern Times* | The automatic feeding machine | Industrial society tries to mechanize even eating (Bergson in action) | | *Fun Home* | Family meals in a house run like a museum | Appetite and control in a home ruled by the father's aesthetic | > **Try writing:** pick any work and argue what its food *means*. --- ## 8. How to write about comedy (the course's essay method) This course was "communications intensive." Students wrote 5,000 words of polished prose. Its writing advice applies far beyond this class. **1. Go small.** Focus on a single character, scene, or even a single passage. Don't try to argue about "the whole play." **2. Close reading.** Look at language in detail: word choice, repetition, sentence structure, rhythm, rhyme, meter, imagery. (Remember that Aristophanes and Plautus come to us in translation, so be careful with claims about individual words.) For films, use specific visual details: framing, gesture, costume, editing, sound. **3. Make an arguable claim.** "Your essay has a point about which someone might take a different view." "Kate's speech is ironic" is arguable. "Kate gives a speech at the end" is not. **4. Don't summarize.** Write for people who have read the work. They don't need a plot report. **5. Avoid the five-paragraph formula.** Instead of a mechanical structure, "engage your reader in dialogue with your process." Let the essay show you thinking: entertain problems, even contradictions. **6. Write the introduction last.** The course's method: 1. Draft your detailed reading of the passage first. 2. Once you understand what you've found, write an opening that poses a question or claim. 3. Then add topic sentences and transitions to structure the argument. **7. Open up the conclusion.** Don't just summarize, and don't pretend the subject is closed. End by opening the analysis to further reflection: what new question does your reading raise? **8. Revise for real.** The course's revision assignment says a revision should be "a new, not simply improved, paper." That means refining the thesis, adding evidence, deepening the argument, expanding the conclusion. Writing a cover note explaining your revision process is a great habit. **9. Cite properly (MLA).** Page or line numbers in parentheses after quotations, and a Works Cited list at the end. **10. Give it an evocative title.** ### The in-class report formula (useful for any presentation) Ten minutes, with a one-page handout (about 250 words): 1. **Brief, salient context** about the author, director, or work 2. **A close look at one passage or clip** 3. **Discussion questions the audience can actually answer** The course's own example of the difference: "Why does Shakespeare use clowns?" is too big to answer. "How does Shakespeare's use of clowning in this scene shape our reading of a theme or character?" works, as long as you've given your audience enough information. Practice so you can talk *to* people instead of reading your slides. --- ## 9. The assignments, with prompts and tips These are the course's real essay assignments, summarized, with example approaches. The example claims are mine, offered as models, not answers. ### Essay 1: Comic Conflict (*Lysistrata*), 1,000 words **Prompt (summary):** The play enacts many kinds of rhetorical and physical conflict. Choose one brief example of a verbal or physical battle and analyze it in detail. How does it begin, escalate, and get resolved? How does it reflect off-stage conflicts such as war, politics, or greed? **Possible approaches:** - The old men vs. the old women (fire vs. water): the mock-battle parodies real war, and its resolution through a small kindness models the peace the whole play wants. - The Kinesias–Myrrhine scene: the "battle" is erotic delay. Myrrhine's household props (mattress, pillow, perfume) become weapons, turning domestic life into military strategy. - The Magistrate scene: dressing him as a woman and then a corpse is a ritual "uncrowning" of authority (Bakhtin). ### Revision of Essay 1, 1,000 words A genuinely *new* paper. You may bring in later works (Plautus, Wilder, Shakespeare) to extend the argument. ### Essay 2: Comic Love (*Twelfth Night*, *The Rover*, or *Pride and Prejudice*), 1,500 words **Prompt (summary):** Farce (clowning, mistaken identity, trickery, verbal play, violent transgression) sits in uneasy balance with romantic love. Look closely at the ending of one work: how does it resolve, or fail to resolve, tensions around romantic love? The course's leads: - What happens to disturbing secondary characters (Malvolio, Sir Toby, Angellica, Lydia and Wickham, Lady Catherine)? - Who gets the last word, and how does it resonate with the lovers' happiness? - Does place matter? How has the meaning of Illyria, Naples, or Pemberley changed by the end? - What does the ending say about women's wit? Are wit and satire compatible with love? **Possible approaches:** - Feste's closing rain-song shifts *Twelfth Night* out of holiday time into ordinary weather. The comedy acknowledges its own limits. - Hellena's terms with Willmore: wit survives marriage, but only because she has money. - Mr. Bennet's last appearance: the father's wit, which failed his family, gets a quiet comeuppance while Elizabeth's matures. ### Essay 3: Modern Times (Melville, Wilde, Chaplin, or Bechdel), 1,500 words **Prompt (summary):** More independent options for content, medium, or format. Focus on a particular passage, scene, character, or turning point, and you may compare with an earlier work. Themes include social class, identity, gender and sexuality, the nature of art, and the body and its appetites. For films, use visual details from a specific scene. **Possible approaches:** - The feeding machine in *Modern Times* as Bergson's theory made literal. - The handbag in *Earnest* and the coffin in *Fun Home*: containers of hidden identity. - The Spouter-Inn bedroom farce as a revision of the comic marriage plot. ### Discussion posts: 100–200 words each, on at least 10 authors or directors The course's advice for any post: - Keep it **brief and pointed**, and **quote the text**. - It's okay to be confused. Someone else probably is too. - Go back to a spot where you **stopped reading**, whether you lost the thread, were amazed, or hit something unfamiliar, and figure out why it caught your attention. - Connect to theory (Aristotle, Kerr, and so on) or to the upcoming essay. ### Reflection: 750 words, in any medium An assessment of your own learning. You can write it as an essay, or make it a poem, video, photo series, or art piece with an artist's statement. --- ## 10. A 13-session plan for going over this together | # | Topic | Read or watch first | Our focus | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | What is comedy? | Sections 1–3 of this guide, plus a comedy you love | The three theories; your favorite example | | 2 | *Lysistrata* | The play (free) | Ritual, invective vs. festive, recognition | | 3 | *Chi-Raq* + Essay 1 practice | The film | Old structure, new violence; draft a close reading | | 4 | Plautus and *Some Like It Hot* | *Menaechmi* (free) and the film | Farce, twins, cross-dressing | | 5 | *The Taming of the Shrew* | The play (free) | Kate's last speech: four readings | | 6 | *Twelfth Night* | The play (free) | Green world, Malvolio, Feste's song | | 7 | *The Rover* | The play (free) | Carnival, wit vs. violence, Hellena vs. Kate | | 8 | *Pride and Prejudice* I | Ch. 1–23 | Wit, first impressions, marriage as economics | | 9 | *Pride and Prejudice* II | Ch. 24–61 | Self-recognition; the ending; Essay 2 ideas | | 10 | *Moby-Dick* 1–23 and *Earnest* | Both (free) | Sex comedy, double lives, wit | | 11 | *Modern Times* + Bergson and Freud | The film | People as machines | | 12 | *Fun Home* | The book | Comics form, tragicomedy | | 13 | Kaufman, Gadsby, and a festive finale | Clips | Metacomedy; reflection; bring a joke | For each session we can do the **Check yourself** questions, argue the **Talk about it** questions, and, if you want, you can try a **Try writing** post and I'll respond the way the course's instructor would: brief, and pointed toward a paper topic. --- ## 11. Where to find everything **Free, public-domain texts:** - *Lysistrata*: Project Gutenberg (search "Lysistrata Aristophanes") - *Menaechmi*: Project Gutenberg, in older English translations of Plautus's comedies - Shakespeare: the Folger Shakespeare Library website (folger.edu) has free texts of every play, with notes - *The Rover*: Project Gutenberg (read Part 1) - *Pride and Prejudice*: Project Gutenberg - *Moby-Dick*: Project Gutenberg, or the Melville Electronic Library - *The Importance of Being Earnest*: Project Gutenberg **Films (rental, streaming, or library):** *Chi-Raq* (2015), *Some Like It Hot* (1959), *The Taming of the Shrew* (Zeffirelli, 1967), *Twelfth Night* (Nunn, 1996), *Pride and Prejudice* (Leonard, 1940), *The Importance of Being Earnest* (Asquith, 1952), *Modern Times* (Chaplin, 1936). **Other:** *Fun Home* (library or bookstore); Hannah Gadsby's *Nanette* and *Douglas* (Netflix) and TED talk (YouTube); Andy Kaufman's 1977 HBO special (clips on YouTube); Key & Peele's "Substitute Teacher" (YouTube). **Theory (library):** Aristotle, *Poetics*; Northrop Frye, "The Argument of Comedy" (also in his *Anatomy of Criticism*); Mikhail Bakhtin, *Rabelais and His World*; Henri Bergson, *Laughter* (free on Project Gutenberg); Sigmund Freud, *Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious*; Walter Kerr, *Tragedy and Comedy*. **The course itself:** https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/21l-021-comedy-spring-2022/, which includes the syllabus, calendar, class summaries, discussion prompts, essay prompts, and grading rubrics. --- ## 12. Final review: big questions for the whole course If you can talk about these, you've got the course. 1. **Definition:** Comedy seemed easy to define on day one. What's your definition now, and which work in the course tests it hardest? 2. **Insubordination:** In which work does comic rebellion actually change something, and in which does the ending put everyone back in their place? 3. **Recognition:** Pick three works and compare their anagnorisis. What gets recognized, how, and why does it resolve the conflict? 4. **Love vs. farce:** Does romantic love "civilize" comedy, or does farce keep breaking through? Where is the tension most visible? 5. **Wit:** Trace wit from Lysistrata to Kate to Hellena to Elizabeth to Wilde's characters. Who gets to be witty, and what does it cost them? 6. **The body:** How do cross-dressing, appetite, sex, and physical comedy challenge social rules across the course? 7. **Who's left out?** Name the characters left outside the festive ending: Malvolio, Angellica, Antonio, Charlotte Lucas. What does each exclusion say about comedy? 8. **Old and new:** For each pairing (*Lysistrata* and *Chi-Raq*, Plautus and Wilder, Wilde and Bechdel), what stays the same and what's new? 9. **Comedy and pain:** From war in *Lysistrata* to suicide in *Fun Home* to Gadsby's refusal to release tension, can comedy carry real suffering? Should it? 10. **Theory:** Which theorist (Aristotle, Kerr, Frye, Bakhtin, Bergson, or Freud) best explains the work you laughed at most? Which one explains the least?