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Comic Collisions: Convention, Rage, and Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Susan Carlson
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Abstract

How can the socially critical aspects of comedy be reconciled with a ‘happy ending’ which seems to affirm the existing order of things? This perennial problem has become acute in a period when both playwrights and comic performers are increasingly conscious of the dangers inherent in the stereotyping – racial, sexual, and hierarchical – on which so much comedy depends. In this article, Susan Carlson looks at some recent ‘meta-comedies’ which have used the form, as it were, to expose itself – notably, Trevor Griffiths's Comedians, Peter Barnes's Laughter, Susan Hayes's Not Waving, and Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine – and analyzes their responses to comedy, which range from the despairing to the affirmative. She concludes that only Churchill has found a positive way of ‘connecting the painful recognitions of twentieth-century dissociations to comic hope’. Susan Carlson is Associate Professor of English at lowa State University. In addition to numerous articles on modern drama and the novel, she has published a full-length study of the plays of Henry James, and is currently working on a book about women in comedy.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 3 , Issue 12 , November 1987 , pp. 303 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

Notes and References

1. See Kerr, Walter, Tragedy and Comedy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967)Google Scholar, and Potts, L. J., Comedy (London: Hutchinson, 1948)Google Scholar.

2. Styan, J. L., The Dark Comedy: the Development of Modern Comic Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kerr, p. 334 and 339.

3. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘The Art of Failure: the Stifled Laugh in Beckett's Theatre’, in Bucknell Review: Theories of Reading, Looking, Listening, ed. Gavin, Harry R. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1981), p. 142Google Scholar.

4. Blau, Herbert, ‘Comedy since the Absurd’, Modern Drama, XXV (12 1982), p. 552, 561Google Scholar.

5. Henkle, Roger B., ‘The Social Dynamics of Comedy’, The Sewanee Review, XC (Spring 1982), p. 200–16Google Scholar.

6. McFadden, George, Discovering the Comic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Griffiths, Trevor, Comedians (New York: Grove Press, 1976), p. 33Google Scholar. Subsequent page references appear in the text.

8. Austin Quigley's study of stereotypes has provided a thorough and invaluable analysis of typing in the play. See ‘Creativity and Commitment in Trevor Griffiths's Comedians’, Modern Drama, XXIV (12 1981), p. 404–23.

9. Quigley, p. 414.

10. Blau, ‘Comedy’, p. 555.

11. Ibid., p. 559.

12. Griffiths, Trevor, ‘Transforming the Husk of Capitalism’, Theatre Quarterly, No. 22 (Summer 1976), p. 44Google Scholar.

13. Quigley, p. 420.

14. Quigley, p. 421.

15. See Cohn, Ruby, ‘Modest Proposals of Modern Socialists’, Modern Drama, XXV (12 1982) p. 460–1Google Scholar.

16. Griffiths, ‘Transforming’, p. 42. In his analysis of the play, Albert Wertheim suggests, similarly, that comedy and morality are inseparable issues: see his ‘Trevor Griffiths: Playwriting and Politics’, Essays on Contemporary British Drama, ed. Bock, Hedwig and Wertheim, Albert (Munich: Max Hueber Verlag, 1981), p. 273Google Scholar.

17. Barnes, Peter, Laughter! (London: Heinemann, 1978), p. 2Google Scholar. Subsequent page references appear in the text.

18. Bernard F. Dukore, ‘Peter Barnes’, in Essays on Contemporary British Drama, p. 103.

19. Quoted in Bly, Mark and Wager, Doug, ‘Theatre of the Extreme: an Interview with Peter Barnes’, Theatre, No. 12 (Spring 1981), p. 46Google Scholar.

20. Quoted in Bly and Wager, p. 46.

21. See , Dukore, The Theatre of Peter Barnes (London: Heinemann, 1981), p. 38Google Scholar.

22. Ibid., p. 39.

23. Ibid., p. 43.

24. Ibid., p. 44.

25. Hayes, Catherine, ‘Up to Now’, in Women and Theatre: Calling the Shots, ed. Todd, Susan (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 79Google Scholar.

26. Hayes, Catherine, Not Waving (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 11Google Scholar. Subsequent page references appear in the text.

27. Hayes herself contends that male and female writers do not write in different fashions. See ‘Up to Now’, p. 76.

28. Churchill, Caryl, Cloud 9 (London; New York: Methuen, 1984), p. 3Google Scholar. Subsequent page references appear in the text.

30. Cohn, p. 466.

31. Blau, ‘Comedy’, p. 559.

32. Blau, Herbert, ‘Ideology and Performance’, Theatre Journal, XXXV (12 1983), p. 453Google Scholar.

33. Cohn, p. 467.

34. Ibid.

35. See Bigsby, C. W. E., ‘The Language of Crisis in British Theatre: the Drama of Cultural Pathology’, in Contemporary English Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 19 (London: Arnold, 1981), p. 30Google Scholar; Thomsen, Christian, ‘Three Socialist Playwrights: John McGrath, Caryl Churchill, Trevor Griffiths’, in Contemporary English Theatre, p. 169; and Blau, p. 566Google Scholar.

36. Bigsby, p. 11–51.