Each chapter of James V. Morrison’s Comedy in Literature and Popular Culture considers an important question in comedy studies. Morrison investigates these questions by juxtaposing ancient and later comic material. The conversational tone, explanatory textboxes, and not infrequent mention of his students and their experiences make this book an ideal fit for the undergraduate classroom; as a teacher of comparative ancient and modern comedy, I would certainly make use of it. The book’s primary originality lies in the exceptionally chosen comparisons. Morrison’s vivid descriptions of comic sketches highlight the performative nature of comedy and that it must be analyzed and understood as such. The comparative and performative focus of this book situate the undergraduate student reader broadly in the realm of current scholarship on ancient comedy, while at the same time serving as an introduction to age-old questions about this most weird of generic phenomena.
Comedy in Literature and Popular Culture has eight chapters. Chapter 1, “The world of comedy,” functions as an introduction. Chapter 8, “Modern performance of ancient comedy: Aristophanes’ Frogs,” is not a conclusion but does end with two short paragraphs of concluding remarks. Chapter 2, “Comic heroes in Aristophanes and Heller’s Catch-22” looks at the paradoxical brave-but-cowardly nature of the comic hero, asks whether in comedy plot or humor is more important, and addresses the oddity of using comedy to articulate the traumatizing experience of war. Chapter 3, “The extreme characters of comedy,” asks how far comedy can go (how extreme can its characters be, how many times can it repeat the same gag?) via a look at the stock characters of Menander, Plautus, and Molière. Chapter 4, “Socrates, memory, and the power of comedy,” investigates the relationship between satirical representation of a target and the reality behind it. Morrison aims to use an examination of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and various SNL sketches to gain insight into whether memory of Aristophanes’ Clouds affected the outcome of Socrates’ trial. Chapter 5, “Slaves, masters, and social inversion,” asks whether the master/slave inversion so prevalent in Roman comedy represents a real threat to the social order. Chapter 6 examines “surreal” scenarios in comedies involving twins (Plautus’ Menaechmi, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors) or doubles (Plautus’ Amphitryo) using politeness theory as a framework. Chapter 7, “Comedy in tragedy: King Lear, The Bacchae, and Waiting for Godot,” asks whether comic scenes in tragedies act as comic relief or serve to heighten the emotional experience of the tragedy. Finally, chapter 8 looks at issues facing directors in staging the humor of Aristophanic comedy today.
Chapter 2, “Comic heroes in Aristophanes and Heller’s Catch-22,” is broadly indicative of the pros and cons of Morrison’s approach. The chapter opens with a brief discussion of the oddity of the comic hero—ugly, often cowardly, sometimes brave (9)—and asks how we ought to explain this phenomenon. Morrison then describes the plot of Acharnians’ first half, summarizes the characteristics of Dicaeopolis as comic hero, and surveys types of humor found in Acharnians. At this point, Morrison asks one of his big questions: is humor that advances the plot more important than gratuitous humor? We return to Acharnians with a brief discussion of the parabasis. Here Morrison introduces the theme of seriousness which is then examined via analysis of the Megarian-at-the-market scene. Morrison briefly recounts the end of Acharnians and rounds off his discussion of Aristophanes with the introduction of another question: how does the audience know what to do at a comic performance? He answers the question with an endearing anecdote about taking students to a stand-up comedy show. Turning to Catch-22, Morrison describes Yossarian’s comic hero characteristics and the types of humor found in the novel. The chapter ends with a conclusion in three parts addressing war in comedy, the role of song, and the relationship between comedy and seriousness.
My outline of this chapter illustrates the pros and cons of Morrison’s book. As I read the chapter I am transported into an undergraduate classroom in the first weeks of class with a professor who a) knows an extraordinary amount about comedy in all its forms (in this chapter alone, Morrison mentions not only Aristophanes and Heller, but John Oliver, Molière, Swift, Monty Python, Stanley Kubrick, Tom Lehrer, and others); and b) knows exactly how to introduce the complexities and oddities of Attic Old Comedy and Acharnians to someone who has never encountered it before. From the outline above, note that there are a lot of pages dedicated to describing plot. Morrison diligently interweaves into this plot description necessary background and entertaining analogies to facilitate understanding of the geographically and temporally alien world of Aristophanic comedy: in recounting Aristophanes’ parody of the Telephus’ hostage-taking scene he writes that Aristophanes “has Dicaeopolis, who is accused by the Acharnians of betraying Athens, play the ‘Telephus’ role; his hostage will be something the Acharnians find very dear: charcoal. Hold on—it makes sense! Rural Acharnae was known for producing charcoal…So this would be like threatening lobsters if the chorus were from Maine or bourbon whiskey with a Kentucky chorus” (11). The biggest appeal of Morrison’s book is its entertaining accessibility for newcomers to the study of comedy. The classroom lecture-style can occasionally, however, be overwhelming. Transitions between different sections of a chapter can be abrupt, as if a student has interrupted the flow with a question (“The question may arise…,” 23). In chapter 2, the title and introductory remarks lead the reader to expect the paradoxical inconsistency of the comic hero to provide the main thrust of the chapter. But aside from the brief descriptions of Dicaeopolis and Yossarian’s comic/heroic characteristics, this theme fizzles, and the chapter redirects itself (as can so often happen in class) to other (more interesting) questions about comedy’s relationship to seriousness.
One of the questions Morrison raises in chapter 2 is whether jokes that contribute to plot are more important than (apparently) gratuitous jokes. He argues that all jokes are equally important in comedy because comedians constantly need to re-establish the comic context of their work. This is a fascinating observation and here—as so often throughout the book—the scholar in me wished for an in-depth analysis of the question. Morrison notes that, “it seems you can’t simply establish that ‘this is the comic world’ in the first hundred lines and then move onto the ‘more important’ aspects of the play such as the plot” (18). He illustrates the point with reference to John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight; why not connect the question to Aristophanes’ use of the parabasis? Does the lack of humor in a parabasis (so Morrison claims, anyway) indicate that Aristophanes is being serious? Or does the broader comic/ festival context continually affect how seriously we can take Aristophanes’ parabatic claims? When Morrison discusses the continual (re)establishment of the comic world, he notes that one effect of this is to create an emotional distance between audience and characters (“to encourage the audience to not care,” 18). How does this lack of empathy tally with the sympathy Morrison wants us to feel for the (very comic) Megarian at the market? If the comic elements create distance, can we grasp a serious point about the wretched situation in Megara in the real world? This relationship between comedy and seriousness or tragedy could have also fruitfully been linked to the discussion of comic scenes in tragedies in chapter 7.
Chapter 6 is the most argumentatively cohesive (and is adopted, I note, from a paper published elsewhere).[1] In this chapter, Morrison argues that the surreal situations generated by twins (Plautus’ Menaechmi, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors) or doubles (Plautus’ Amphitryo) are funny because, rather than an immediate breakdown of social niceties as is typical in comedy, these scenarios present characters’ futile efforts to maintain normal social interactions. Morrison’s framework of politeness theory makes for an effective argument but raises even more questions: Morrison intriguingly divides twin comedies into those, like Menaechmi, that are “weakly” surrealist; and those, like Comedy of Errors, that are “strongly” surrealist. Weakly surrealist comedies have characters doubting other people’s sanity but not their own; in strongly surrealist comedies, characters begin to doubt their own experiences and even suspect supernatural intervention. But is one funnier than the other? And how does the so-called tragicomedy Amphitryo, in which the surreal scenario is supernaturally generated, fit generically? For all that I might have wanted more analysis of the above-noted issues, I must acknowledge that Morrison’s book is not a scholarly monograph. Indeed, Morrison’s ability to highlight such questions and furnish texts that function as starting points for investigation will inspire both scholars and undergraduates to further research.
In some chapters, however, Morrison’s argumentation is less persuasive, resulting above all from a problematic engagement with his comparative material. First, a word on the comparative material generally: every chapter features a chronologically diverse range of comedy and satire. Morrison’s vivid, performance-focused descriptions of plots and premises certainly fulfil his stated aim of introducing “wonderful comic works that readers may be unfamiliar with” (2). The choice of texts to juxtapose demonstrates the author’s breadth of expertise in the history of comedy and the range of media is commendable—plays, movies, tv shows, sketches, novels, satirical cartoons. Given this, one might wish for more varied ancient material, which is heavily skewed towards the plays of Aristophanes and Plautus with no mention of Terence, only a brief nod to Horace, and nothing on Juvenal or Persius. The pairing of ancient with later material is sometimes expected (Plautus’ Menaechmi and Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors) and sometimes surprising yet effective (Shakespeare’s King Lear and Euripides’ Bacchae).
However, Morrison models an oversimplistic methodology in his use of comparisons. Chapter 5 is particularly problematic in this regard. Morrison asks whether master/slave reversals in Plautus represent a threat to the social order. The chapter examines aspects of hierarchy reversal in Pseudolus and Wodehouse’s Wooster and Jeeves novels. Despite noting in the introduction that Plautus’ slave comedy “only makes sense when set in its historical context of ubiquitous slavery which pervaded the ancient world” (103), Morrison does not consider the vastly different circumstances in 1950s England. He says only that “the Wooster and Jeeves stories present a modern analog to Plautus’ world of social inversion” (118). At the end of his discussion of Plautus, Morrison concludes that comedy can “accomplish more than one goal at a time” (117), so “slaves such as Pseudolus portraying themselves as conquering generals may well have elicited laughter from aristocratic Romans for its absurdity, while slaves in the audience may have identified with such aspirations” (118). Yet the chapter ends with the following remark: “As was the case with Plautus’ Pseudolus, much of the humor in Wodehouse is based on the reversal of power and social roles, yet from the upper-class perspective this is a ‘safe’ inversion. After all, Jeeves is on Bertie’s side and supports him…It’s hard to see the seeds of social revolt here” (131). The methodological implication—and I do not think the author intends this, but the reader may very easily misconstrue it as such—is that because Wooster and Jeeves presents no threat to the aristocratic reader, therefore we can conclude the same about Plautus. Particularly for the undergraduate reader a clearer account of exactly how the comparison is functioning seems necessary here.
Morrison’s bibliography is wide-ranging and replete not only with the expected scholarly works but also comic theory (e.g. Bergson; Bakhtin is noticeably missing) and practitioner autobiography (e.g. Charlie Chaplin). When it comes to Classics scholarship, most often when I thought “he should cite x here,” sure enough I would find it in the endnotes. In chapter 5, Morrison lays out a clear literature review in miniature on the question of whether master/slave reversal in Plautus can be read as a social threat or not. In other chapters, the scholarly conversation is less robustly presented. In chapter 7, on whether the function of comic scenes in tragedy is to relieve tension or heighten the emotional experience, Morrison’s overall argument that in King Lear Shakespeare uses comedy to create an emotional whiplash effect that heightens the tragedy (155-6) is compelling, but the counterargument of comic relief is not fully articulated and quickly dismissed. Here—as elsewhere—a chapter 5-style review of the scholarly debate would have been helpful for scholar and student alike.
Morrison’s book had two aims: to introduce the reader to new comic texts and to use them to explore key questions in comedy studies. Morrison achieves both aims. What Morrison leaves unsaid—for all that I might want to know his thoughts—offers space for students to do their own analytical work. Scholarship on ancient comedy can too often forget that comedy is supposed to be funny. No such critique can be levelled at Morrison.
Notes
[1] In Pratt, L.H., and Sampson, C.M., 2018. Engaging Classical Texts in the Contemporary World: From Narratology to Reception. Ann Arbor: 113-32.