Prereading Questions
Assign these questions (some or all) to the students for discussion prior to the start of the unit.
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The basic dictionary definition of "comedy" is a work whose intent is to provoke laughter, but this is at best an incomplete and unsatisfactory definition. What provokes laughter? Are there some things that are always funny -- that is, are there some universal traits that are generally considered funny regardless of the passage of time or difference of cultures? If there are, why are some jokes unny if told by one person, but not so funny if told by another, even to the same audience? Why does comedy, especially slapstick, involve acts we would normally define as cruel or painful? Why do people -- even members of PETA -- laugh at the Coyote being smushed into a walking accordion by the machinations of the Roadrunner?
Woody Allen, the deeply problematic American comic filmmaker, once famously defined comedy as follows: "Comedy," he said, "is tragedy plus time." Allen's statement implies that in fact, comedy and tragedy are identical at their very base, and that the only difference resides in the distance and perspective time affords us in looking back at an event. Is that true? Is comedy just another form of tragedy -- or the reverse? "What, You Can't Take a Joke?" The problem with comedy often lies in its power to offend the sensibilities of the audience. Gender, race, religion, ethnicity, class, personal appearance -- those have been targets of comedy in cultures throughout the world from the earliest days. (Ancient Rome, especially in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, for example, featured a great deal of sexual and scatological humor -- as did ancient Roman graffiti.) Even more sophisticated forms of humor such as political satire, irony, or camp risk (or rely on) offending the norms of society. To put it another way, it's hard to be funny without ticking someone off. That's among the many reasons comedy has such potent power as a rhetorical force -- it rouses strong emotions, and in the right hands (or the wrong ones, depending on your perspective), comedy, especially satire, can be a powerful tool of social criticism and social change. Laughing Down the Powerful The relationship between humor and power is a fascinating one. Aristotle, in his Poetics -- a work that was central to the definition of drama in the Western world -- explored the nature of both tragedy and comedy, but his book on comedy has been lost since the Dark Ages and his ideas can only be inferred from Aristotle's other writings. [Note: For a fascinating discussion of Aristotle's lost book of comedy, see this page]. What seems clear about the nature of comedy, though, is that laughter fundamentally inverts a system of power. In a typical comedy, a foolish or silly protagonist rises in the world and experiences good fortune, often at the expense of his intellectual or cultural superiors (see Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School for one among many examples). The foolish protagonist often succeeds not despite, but because of his foolishness -- which becomes a form of power against those who would oppress him (see Plautus' trope of the clever employee, or more recently, National Lampoon's Animal House). In fact, humor is often used as a powerful form of social criticism, a way of speaking truth to power (see Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat, Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert's Colbert Report, and, of course Seth Rogen and James Franco's The Interview. Speaking Truth to Power In fact, one could argue that comedy, by its very nature, is the weapon of the disempowered against the powerful. Think about the comic hierarchical pyramid: When a comedian tells a joke about someone powerful -- a rich person, a celebrity, a president -- it's automatically much more funny than if a rich and powerful person mocked (for example) the homeless, the poor, or the helpless. (In fact, it is safe to say that such a joke would result in serious social punishment -- criticism, mockery, mean Tweets.) When comedy is used to expose injustice in society (see Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor especially), it has the power to expose hypocrisy, to reduce the inflatedly powerful to a more appropriate size, and above all, to use laughter as a form of persuasion. Ultimately, comedy requires readers to see the world through a complex lens. We need to keep in mind the real versus the apparent, the intended message versus the received one, the larger context versus the smaller picture. We need to remember that comic "seeds" planted in act I will often suddenly flower in act V. We need to read between the lines, to "hear" tone, and above all, not to take situations, words, or people entirely at face value. |
A particularly effective text as an introduction to this unit is the AP's rhetorical analysis passage taken from the satirical newspaper The Onion.
Directions
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Teaching Note: This essay prompt works well as an initial pre-test. Typically, students will have a number of large-scale problems with this text:
Bottom line, many students won't see that the purpose of satire is typically to expose and ridicule issues that are a problem in society, often having to do with inequities, injustice, hypocrisy, unfairness, or imbalance. Often, students will write thesis statements for the Magna-Soles prompt that fall into three major categories: Really Getting It, Sorta Gettiing It, and Whoops, They Bought the Magna-Soles. |
Really Getting It
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