High and Low Comedy

High and Low Comedy Maurice Charney, Comedy High and Low: An Introduction to the Experience of Comedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Pp. xvii + 203.

This amusing and provocative book serves as an introduction to comedy, broadly considered. It synthesizes a good deal of the theoretical literature on the subject (so notorious for its dullness), and is rich in illustration, ranging widely in an effort to "bridge the gap between comic literature, especially stage comedy, and the popular comedy of jokes, graffiti, and the grotesque happenings of daily life" (p. viii). For the author it is "axiomatic that there is a link between street comedy and the plays of Shakespeare and Moliere" (p. viii). Thus while this volume centers on stage comedy from Aristophanes, Plautus and Terence to Ionesco, Orton and Stoppard, its scope includes such diverse comedie forms as limericks, riddles, cartoons, epigrams and film. There are twenty illustrations, mainly stills from the era of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, but including Zero Mostel and Woody Allen. The book is most authoritative and polished in expression when it deals with English comedy from Shakespeare on, but Charney is quite successful in providing us with a vocabulary and framework for understanding very diverse manifestations of the comic spirit.

It is the initial chapter on the language and rhetoric of comedy and the final one on the comic hero which range most widely; the discussion of the ironic stance fundamental to comedy, for example, juxtaposes Socrates ("our first great comic martyr"), examples of Jewish humor, Oliver Jensen's parody of the Gettysburg Address in Eisenhow erese ("I haven't checked these figures but 87 years ago, I think it...