Comedy has an ancient and well respected theatrical role. It is, in its most basic form, expressed as follows. Comedy allows the audience to safely explore fantasies of social upheaval, without actually starting a revolution.
This is why comedy has been so popular for so long – and it is also why comedy is so hard to do. People often fall into the mistake of thinking that comedy is about making people laugh, by being over the top or knowingly “funny”. In fact, comic acting and comedy productions only work when every actor believes completely in his or her character, and plays things straight. It is the audience who find and dictate the laughter, not the people on the stage.
This is in many ways analogous to real life. We find things that happen to other people pretty funny: the people to whom they are happening may find it much less so. Take Top Hat the Musical tickets as an example.
In Top Hat, the object of the lead’s affections becomes convinced that he is having an affair with her best friend. Not unnaturally, she is very upset. We as audience members know this is not true – and so we find her predicament hilarious, and also laugh long and loud at the hapless hero as he tries to work out why the girl of his dreams has suddenly gone off him.
The thing is, if the events depicted when you’ve got hold of Top Hat the Musical tickets were true, or happening to us, we’d be very distressed. It’s comedy’s ability to turn the audience into an omniscient figure that transcends our pity emotions, and instead causes us to find the machinations of the play’s universe quite funny.
In a lot of ways, that’s the essence of comedy. You, the audience member, become akin to a classical god – looking down on the prevarications of mere mortals and chortling your head off. There is, after all, a reason why Dante referred to the struggle of basic human existence as “The Divine Comedy”.
This is why comedy has been so popular for so long – and it is also why comedy is so hard to do. People often fall into the mistake of thinking that comedy is about making people laugh, by being over the top or knowingly “funny”. In fact, comic acting and comedy productions only work when every actor believes completely in his or her character, and plays things straight. It is the audience who find and dictate the laughter, not the people on the stage.
This is in many ways analogous to real life. We find things that happen to other people pretty funny: the people to whom they are happening may find it much less so. Take Top Hat the Musical tickets as an example.
In Top Hat, the object of the lead’s affections becomes convinced that he is having an affair with her best friend. Not unnaturally, she is very upset. We as audience members know this is not true – and so we find her predicament hilarious, and also laugh long and loud at the hapless hero as he tries to work out why the girl of his dreams has suddenly gone off him.
The thing is, if the events depicted when you’ve got hold of Top Hat the Musical tickets were true, or happening to us, we’d be very distressed. It’s comedy’s ability to turn the audience into an omniscient figure that transcends our pity emotions, and instead causes us to find the machinations of the play’s universe quite funny.
In a lot of ways, that’s the essence of comedy. You, the audience member, become akin to a classical god – looking down on the prevarications of mere mortals and chortling your head off. There is, after all, a reason why Dante referred to the struggle of basic human existence as “The Divine Comedy”.