Steve Watson

Aristotle on Comedy

We do not have Aristotle’s work on Comedy promised to us in the Poetics, but we might be able to get a rough idea of what he would have said from clues in his surviving writings and commentaries from later ancient authors.

The principal evidence directly from Aristotle is the passage from Poetics  

As for Comedy, it is (as has been observed) an imitation of men worse than the average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others; the mask, for instance, that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain. (1449a31-36)

And concerning the contents of Comedy he tells us that

[O]f Athenian poets, Crates was the first to drop the Comedy of invective and frame stories of a general and non-personal nature, in other words, Fables or Plots. (1449b7-9)

There are also some references to humour in his Rhetoric, which are likely to be relevant to Comedy. At 1389b10 he says that “[W]it is well-bred insolence,” which suggests that he sees humour as depending upon an assertion of superiority in the amused one over the target of the witticism, while at 1412a25-30[1] he observes that a suddenly realised incongruity between expectations and events can also cause amusement. He gives as an example of this a line from an unknown Comedy:

And as he walked, beneath his feet were—chilblains 

Aristotle’s treatment of Comedy would likely have closely followed the model of his treatment of Tragedy; or, at least, that’s an assumption that we could make in order to increase the information that we have of his missing book. In his treatment of Tragedy, however, it can sometimes be unclear whether his intention is positive or normative, whether it is his intention to describe what is called Tragedy or to prescribe the things that make a drama a Tragedy. The confusion arises because Aristotle is doing both. He is acting here as a scientist and moving from description to prescription: he takes as given a certain class of dramas that are called Tragedies and inspects them for common elements and determines whether there is any overarching principle by which the class might be defined; then, having determined the principle involved, he adopts that principle as the definitive characteristic of the class of dramas. The same would doubtless be true for his treatment of Comedy.

In the case of Tragedy, the principle that he lands upon yields a partly functional definition of that genre. It is a given that all Tragedies are dramas and dramas are what they are because of a certain form that they have as representations (by mimesis) of human actions, but Tragedies are distinguished amongst dramas by the fact that in a Tragedy the drama results/should result in what he calls a catharsis of the particular emotions of pity and fear. The notion of catharsis is drawn from ancient Greek medicine where it refers to a purification of the humours (imagined as internal fluids that regulated the health and had to be kept in balance.) As a metaphor here it suggests that by ‘expressing’ the emotions aroused in the spectator there is a purification (of the psyche?) which is of some use to him.

In the Poetics Aristotle explicitly links the two emotions as referring to contemplation of a certain bad situation as affecting oneself (fear) or affecting an undeserving other (pity.)

The one emotion concerns an undeserved falling into bad fortune, and the other emotion concerns a likeness. Pity concerns the undeservedness and fear the likeness (1453a4-6).

[Many, many questions are raised by this theory. We might ask, for example, why this ‘purification’ should be of any use to anyone? Do these emotions, if left unexpressed, somehow accumulate and cause some sort of psychic damage? What is the actual proposed mechanism behind such a view? Does Aristotle think that there is a store of these emotions building up in the psyche somehow analogous to the fluidic humours in the same way that Freud’s hydraulic theory of the mind would have had it? Hardly. Aristotle had no such theory of mental states/traits/passions/etc. Similarly, we might reasonably ask why those emotions of pity and fear are first created in the spectators by the drama if they are harmful and simply need to be expressed and eliminated?]

By analogy, we could define Comedy as a drama that results in a catharsis of the particular emotions aroused by the dramatic actions, and the question then would be to determine which emotions are to be expressed. I think it’s pretty clear that when Aristotle talks about the Ridiculous as a species of the Ugly and the result of a mistake or a deformity, that he’s assuming that the emotion involved is the emotion that one gets from revelling in another’s inferiority. It is a species of contempt. By analogy, again, we could link the emotion of contempt that is felt in contemplating a bad situation (but not a painful or dangerous one) affecting an undeserving other with the emotion that we would feel contemplating the same situation affecting ourselves. The emotion we would feel in a situation in which we realise that others would regard us with contempt is shame. The comedic catharsis, therefore, would be a purgation of the emotions of contempt and shame.

Note that a functional definition of Tragedy does not justify the unities that Aristotle says are characteristic of the genre. Those unities are observed regularities for which Aristotle finds some justification in a theory of Art as a whole as being a form of mimesis/representation. Since, however, he explicitly acknowledges that Epic Poetry, at least, does not observe any such unities, we need to understand that the unities are not necessary elements of all drama – only preferred in some cases.

[1] Note that every reference I found to this gives it as 3.2, which, I suppose is initially from misreading a sighted reference to 3.11 as 3.II. Everyone who followed the initial writer simply copied the reference with the error. Does no-one check their references? See the final paragraph here too.