Ideas from Chapter 7, "Beyond a Joke"

In class on Tuesday, I gave everyone in class one of these quotes, and had everyone write about and discuss how they were relevant to the plays in question. Remember to use Bevis as the 'frame' for your presentation. Don't just stage a modern version of Shakespeare: think about what a modern version of Shakespeare can help you say/reveal about Shakespeare's comedies. Some of these passages from Chapter 7, which we didn't read for class, might help you think about your productions and implement some great comedic ideas. Here are the passages we discussed in class (though you can use anything from the previous chapters in your presentation as well):

From Bevis, Chapter 7: “Beyond a Joke”

Page 95: The world is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel…Tragedy is when I cut my little finger, Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die (Mel Brooks).

Page 96: Comedy does not preclude tragedy, it presupposes it…humour is the instinct for taking pain playfully.

Page 98: [Don] Quixote is one of comedy’s representative heroes because he reminds us that those lacking in imagination can be too healthy.

Page 100: Such deadpan ironies can make comedy the defender of the finer feelings against which it offends. Perhaps it even elicits these feelings in the reader by affecting to disregard them.

Page 100: Luigi Pirandello claims that humour is ‘the feeling of the opposite…’ almost a mirror in which feeling looks at itself.’ Modern comedy often stages mixed feelings about feelings themselves.

Page 102: Comedy is a kind of second glance, a moment in which somebody is caught hold of—or catches hold of themselves—as trivial yet also larger than life.

Page 104: ‘The essential achievement of modern art,’ explained Thomas Mann, ‘is that it has ceased to recognize the categories of the tragic and the comic…and sees life as tragicomedy”…

Page 104: Nell points out in Beckett’s Endgame (1957) that ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.’

Page 105: Thomas Nagel sees the absurd as a three-stage drama: armed with ideals, policing yourself with purposes, you are leading your life (or, rather, pursuing it); then, suddenly, you are caught off guard by a sense of your life’s idiocy, or triviality, or futility; and then, since you cannot do very much as a mere spectator of your life, you go back to living it…

Page 105: Our very sense of the absurd is an achievement because it shows that we are able to transcend ourselves in thought, yet also a predicament because it seems to involve falling into old mistakes in new ways.