A Comparison between Laughing and

Sentimental Comedy
by Oliver Goldsmith (1773)
The theatre, like all other amusements, has its fashions and its prejudices; and when satiated with
its excellence, mankind began to mistake change for improvement. For some years tragedy was
the reigning entertainment; but of late it has entirely given way to comedy, and our best efforts
are now exerted in these lighter kinds of composition. The pompous train, the swelling phrase,
and the unnatural rant are displaced for that natural portrait of human folly and frailty, of which
all are judges, because all have sat for the picture.
But, as in describing nature it is presented with a double face, either of mirth or sadness, our
modern writers find themselves at a loss which chiefly to copy from; and it is now debated,
whether the exhibition of human distress is likely to afford the mind more entertainment than that
of human absurdity?
Comedy is defined by Aristotle to be a picture of the frailties of the lower part of mankind, to
distinguish it from tragedy, which is an exhibition of the misfortunes of the great. When comedy
therefore ascends to produce the characters of princes or generals upon the stage, it is out of its
walk, since low life and middle life are entirely its object. The principal question therefore is
whether, in describing low or middle life, an exhibition of its follies be not preferable to a detail
of its calamities? Or, in other words, which deserves the preference? The weeping sentimental
comedy, so much in fashion at present, or the laughing and even low comedy, which seems to
have been last exhibited by Vanbrugh and Cibber?.
If we apply to authorities, all the great masters in the dramatic art have but one opinion. Their
rule is, that as tragedy displays the calamities of the great, so comedy should excite our laughter,
by ridiculously exhibiting the follies of the lower part of mankind. Boileau, one of the best
modern critics, asserts that comedy will not admit of tragic distress:
Le Comique, ennemi des soupirs et des pleurs,
N'admet point dams ses vers de tragiques douleurs.
Nor is this rule without the strongest foundation in nature, as the distresses of the mean by no
means affect us so strongly as the calamities of the great. When tragedy exhibits to us some great
man fallen from his height, and struggling with want and adversity, we feel his situation in the
same manner as we suppose he himself must feel, and our pity is increased in proportion to the
height from whence he fell. On the contrary, we do not so strongly sympathize with one born in
humbler circumstances, and encountering accidental distress: so that while we melt for Belisarius
, we scarcely give halfpence to the beggar who accosts us in the street. The one has our pity, the
other our contempt. Distress, therefore, is the proper object of tragedy, since the great excite our

pity by their all; but not equally so of comedy, since the actors employed in it are originally so
mean that they sink but little by their fall.
Since the first origin of the stage, tragedy and comedy have run in distinct channels, and never
till of late encroached upon the provinces of each other. Terence, who seems to have made the
nearest approaches, yet always judiciously stops short before he comes to the downright pathetic;
and yet he is even reproached by Caesar for wanting the ' vis comica'. All the other comic writers
of antiquity aim only at rendering folly or vice ridiculous, but never exalt their characters into
buskined pomp, or make what Voltaire humorously calls a tradesman's tragedy.
Yet notwithstanding this weight of authority, and the universal practice of former ages, a new
species of dramatic composition has been introduced under the name of 'sentimental comedy', in
which he virtues of private life are exhibited, rather than the vices exposed; and the distresses
rather than the faults of mankind make our interest in the piece. These comedies have had of late
great success, perhaps from their novelty, and also from their flattering every man in his
favourite foible. In these plays almost all the characters are good, and exceedingly generous; they
are lavish enough of their 'tin' money on the stage, and, though they want humor, have
abundance of sentiment and feeling. If they happen to have faults or foibles, the spectator is
taught not only to pardon, but to applaud them, in consideration of the goodness of their hearts;
so that folly, instead of being ridiculed, is commended, and the comedy aims at touching our
passions without the power of being truly pathetic. In this manner we are likely to lose one great
source of entertainment on the stage; for while the comic poet is invading the province of the
tragic muse, he leaves her lovely sister quite neglected. Of this, however, he is no way solicitous,
as he measures his fame by his profits.
But it will be said that the theatre is formed to amuse mankind, and that it matters little, if this
end be answered, by what means it is obtained. If mankind find delight in weeping at comedy, it
would be cruel to abridge them in that or any other innocent pleasure. If those pieces are denied
the name of comedies, yet call them by any other name, and if they are delightful, they are good.
Their success, it will be said, is a mark of their merit, and it is only abridging our happiness to
deny us an inlet to amusement.
These objections, however, are rather specious than solid. It is true that amusement is a great
object of the theatre; and it will be allowed that these sentimental pieces do often amuse us: but
the question is, whether the true comedy would not amuse us more? The question is, whether a
character supported throughout a piece with its ridicule still attending, would not give us more
delight than this species of bastard tragedy, which only is applauded because it is new?
A friend of mine, who was sitting unmoved at one of these sentimental pieces, was asked how he
could be so indifferent?
"Why, truly," says he, "as the hero is but a tradesman, it is indifferent to me whether he be turned
out of his countinghouse on Fish Street Hill, since he will still have enough left to open shop in
St. Giles's."

The other objection is as ill-grounded; for though we should give these pieces another name, it
will not mend their efficacy. It will continue a kind of mulish production, with all the defects of
its opposite parents, and marked with sterility. If we are permitted to make comedy weep, we
have an equal right to make tragedy laugh, and to set down in blank verse the jests and repartees
of all the attendants in a funeral procession.
But there is one argument in favor of sentimental comedy which will keep it on the stage, in spite
of all that can be said against it. It is of all others the most easily written. Those abilities that can
hammer out a novel are fully sufficient for the production of a sentimental comedy. It is only
sufficient to raise the characters a little; to deck out the hero with a riband, or give the heroine a
title; then to put an insipid dialogue, without character or humor, into their mouths, give them
mighty good hearts, very fine clothes, furnish a new set of scenes, make a pathetic scene or two,
with a sprinkling of tender melancholy conversation through the whole; and there is no doubt but
all the ladies will cry and all the gentlemen applaud.
Humor at present seems to be departing from the stage, and it will soon happen that our comic
players will have nothing left for it but a fine coat and a song. It depends upon the audience
whether they will actually drive those poor merry creatures from the stage, or sit at a play as
gloomy as at the Tabernacle. It is not easy to recover an art when once lost; and it would be but a
just punishment that when, by our being too fastidious, we have banished humor from the stage,
we should ourselves be deprived of the art of laughing.

Kinds of comedy in diverse historical periods

Old and New Comedy in ancient Greece
The 11 surviving plays of Aristophanes represent the earliest extant body of comic drama; what
is known of Greek Old Comedy is derived from these plays, the earliest of which, The
Acharnians, was produced in 425 bce. Aristophanic comedy has a distinct formal design but
displays very little plot in any conventional sense. Rather, it presents a series of episodes aimed
at illustrating, in humorous and often bawdy detail, the implications of a deadly serious political
issue: it is a blend of invective, buffoonery, and song and dance. Old Comedy often used derision
and scurrility, and this may have proved its undoing; though praised by all, the freedom it
enjoyed degenerated into license and violence and had to be checked by law.
In New Comedy, which began to prevail about 336 bce, the Aristophanic depiction of public
personages and events was replaced by a representation of the private affairs (usually amorous)
of imaginary men and women. New Comedy is known only from the fragments that have
survived of the plays of Menander (c. 342c. 292 bce) and from plays written in imitation of the
form by the Romans Plautus (c. 254184 bce) and Terence (195 or 185159 bce). A number of
the stock comic characters survived from Old Comedy into New: an old man, a young man, an
old woman, a young woman, a learned doctor or pedant, a cook, a parasite, a swaggering soldier,
a comic slave. New Comedy, on the other hand, exhibits a degree of plot articulation never
achieved in the Old. The action of New Comedy is usually about plotting; a clever servant, for
example, devises ingenious intrigues in order that his young master may win the girl of his
choice. There is satire in New Comedy: on a miser who loses his gold from being overcareful of
it (the Aulularia of Plautus); on a father who tries so hard to win the girl from his son that he
falls into a trap set for him by his wife (Plautuss Casina); and on an overstern father whose son
turns out worse than the product of an indulgent parent (in the Adelphi of Terence). But the
satiric quality of these plays is bland by comparison with the trenchant ridicule of Old Comedy.
The emphasis in New Comic plotting is on the conduct of a love intrigue; the love element per se
is often of the slightest, the girl whom the hero wishes to possess sometimes being no more than
an offstage presence or, if onstage, mute.
New Comedy provided the model for European comedy through the 18th century. During the
Renaissance, the plays of Plautus and, especially, of Terence were studied for the moral
instruction that young men could find in them: lessons on the need to avoid the snares of harlots
and the company of braggarts, to govern the deceitful trickery of servants, to behave in a seemly
and modest fashion to parents. Classical comedy was brought up to date in the plays of the
Christian Terence, imitations by schoolmasters of the comedies of the Roman dramatist. They
added a contemporary flavour to the life portrayed and displayed a somewhat less indulgent

attitude to youthful indiscretions than did the Roman comedy. New Comedy provided the basic
conventions of plot and characterization for the commedia eruditacomedy performed from
written textsof 16th-century Italy, as in the plays of Niccol Machiavelli and Ludovico
Ariosto. Similarly, the stock characters that persisted from Old Comedy into New were taken
over into the improvisational commedia dellarte, becoming such standard masked characters as
Pantalone, the Dottore, the vainglorious Capitano, the young lovers, and the servants, or zanni.

Rise of realistic comedy in 17th-century England

The early part of the 17th century in England saw the rise of a realistic mode of comedy based on
a satiric observation of contemporary manners and mores. It was masterminded by Ben Jonson,
and its purpose was didactic. Comedy, said Jonson in Every Man Out of his Humour (1599),
quoting the definition that during the Renaissance was attributed to Cicero, is an imitation of life,
a glass of custom, an image of truth. Comedy holds the mirror up to nature and reflects things as
they are, to the end that society may recognize the extent of its shortcomings and the folly of its
ways and set about its improvement. Jonsons greatest playsVolpone (1606), Epicoene (1609),
The Alchemist (1610), Bartholomew Fair (1614)offer a richly detailed contemporary account
of the follies and vices that are always with us. The setting (apart from Volpone) is Jonsons own
London, and the characters are the ingenious or the devious or the grotesque products of the
human wish to get ahead in the world. The conduct of a Jonsonian comic plot is in the hands of a
clever manipulator who is out to make reality conform to his own desires. Sometimes he
succeeds, as in the case of the clever young gentleman who gains his uncles inheritance in
Epicne or the one who gains the rich Puritan widow for his wife in Bartholomew Fair. In
Volpone and The Alchemist, the schemes eventually fail, but this is the fault of the manipulators,
who will never stop when they are ahead, and not at all due to any insight on the part of the
victims. The victims are almost embarrassingly eager to be victimized. Each has his ruling
passionhis humourand it serves to set him more or less mechanically in the path that he will
undeviatingly pursue, to his own discomfiture.
English comedy of the later 17th century is cast in the Jonsonian mold. Restoration comedy is
always concerned with the same subjectthe game of lovebut the subject is treated as a
critique of fashionable society. Its aim is distinctly satiric, and it is set forth in plots of Jonsonian
complexity, where the principal intriguer is the rakish hero, bent on satisfying his sexual needs,
outside the bonds of marriage, if possible. In the greatest of these comediesSir George
Ethereges Man of Mode (1676), for example, or William Wycherleys Country-Wife (1675) or
William Congreves Way of the World (1700)the premium is on the energy and the grace with
which the game is played, and the highest dramatic approval is reserved for those who take the
game seriously enough to play it with style but who have the good sense to know when it is
played out. The satiric import of Restoration comedy resides in the dramatists awareness of a
familiar incongruity: that between the image of man in his primitive nature and the image of man
amid the artificial restraints that society would impose upon him. The satirist in these plays is
chiefly concerned with detailing the artful dodges that ladies and gentlemen employ to satisfy

nature and to remain within the pale of social decorum. Inevitably, then, hypocrisy is the chief
satiric target. The animal nature of man is taken for granted, and so is the social responsibility to
keep up appearances; some hypocrisy must follow, and, within limits, society will wink at
indiscretions so long as they are discreetly managed. The paradox is typical of those in which the
Restoration comic dramatists delight; and the strongly rational and unidealistic ethos of this
comedy has its affinities with the naturalistic and skeptical cast of late 17th-century philosophical
thought.

Sentimental comedy of the 17th and 18th centuries

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The Restoration comic style collapsed around the end of the 17th century, when the satiric vision
gave place to a sentimental one. Jeremy Colliers Short view of the Profaneness and Immorality
of the English Stage, published in 1698, signaled the public opposition to the real or fancied
improprieties of plays staged during the previous three decades. The business of plays is to
recommend Vertue, and discountenance Vice: so runs the opening sentence of Colliers attack.
No Restoration comic dramatist ever conceived of his function in quite these terms. It is the
business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of humankind, Congreve had written a
few years earlier (in the dedication to The Double-Dealer). Though Congreve may be assumed to
implyin accordance with the time-honoured theory concerning the didactic end of comedy
that the comic dramatist paints the vices and follies of humankind for the purpose of correcting
them through ridicule, he is, nonetheless, silent on this point. Colliers assumption that all plays
must recommend virtue and discountenance vice has the effect of imposing on comedy the same
sort of moral levy that critics such as Thomas Rymer were imposing on tragedy in their demand
that it satisfy poetic justice.

At the beginning of the 18th century, there was a blending of the tragic and comic genres that, in
one form or another, had been attempted throughout the preceding century. The vogue of
tragicomedy may be said to have been launched in England with the publication of John
Fletchers Faithfull Shepheardesse (c. 1608), an imitation of the Pastor fido, by the Italian poet
Battista Guarini. In his Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry (1601), Guarini had argued the
distinct nature of the genre, maintaining it to be a third poetic kind, different from either the
comic or the tragic. Tragicomedy, he wrote, takes from tragedy its great persons but not its great
action, its movement of the feelings but not its disturbance of them, its pleasure but not its
sadness, its danger but not its death, and from comedy it takes laughter that is not excessive,
modest amusement, feigned difficulty, and happy reversal. Fletcher adapted this statement in the
address To the Reader that prefaces The Faithfull Shepheardesse.

The form quickly established itself on the English stage, and, through the force of such examples
as Beaumont and Fletchers Phylaster (1610) and A King and No King (1611) and a long
sequence of Fletchers unaided tragicomedies, it prevailed during the 20 years before the closing
of the theatres in 1642. The taste for tragicomedy continued unabated at the Restoration, and its
influence was so pervasive that during the closing decades of the century the form began to be
seen in plays that were not, at least by authorial designation, tragicomedies. Its effect on tragedy
can be seen not only in the tendency, always present on the English stage, to mix scenes of mirth
with more solemn matters but also in the practice of providing tragedy with a double ending (a
fortunate one for the virtuous, an unfortunate one for the vicious), as in Drydens Aureng-Zebe
(1675) or Congreves Mourning Bride (1697). The general lines separating the tragic and comic
genres began to break down, and that which is high, serious, and capable of arousing pathos
could exist in the same play with what is low, ridiculous, and capable of arousing derision. The
next step in the process came when Sir Richard Steele, bent on reforming comedy for didactic
purposes, produced The Conscious Lovers (1722) and provided the English stage with an
occasion when the audience at a comedy could derive its chief pleasure not from laughing but
from weeping. It wept in the delight of seeing virtue rewarded and young love come to flower
after parental opposition had been overcome. Comedy of the sort inaugurated by The Conscious
Lovers continued to represent the affairs of private life, as comedy had always done, but with a
seriousness hitherto unknown; and the traditionally low personages of comedy now had a
capacity for feeling that bestowed on them a dignity previously reserved for the personages of
tragedy.
This trend in comedy was part of a wave of egalitarianism that swept through 18th-century
political and social thought. It was matched by a corresponding trend in tragedy, which
increasingly selected its subjects from the affairs of private men and women in ordinary life,
rather than from the doings of the great. The German dramatist Gotthold Lessing wrote that the
misfortunes of those whose circumstances most resemble those of the audience must naturally
penetrate most deeply into its heart, and his own Minna von Barnhelm (1767) is an example of
the new serious comedy. The capacity to feel, to sympathize with, and to be affected by the plight
of a fellow human being without regard for rank in the worlds esteem became the measure of
ones humanity. It was a bond that united the fraternity of humankind in an aesthetic revolution
that preceded the political revolutions of the 18th century. In literature, this had the effect of
hastening the movement toward a more realistic representation of reality, whereby the familiar
events of common life are treated seriously and problematically (in the phrase of the critic
Erich Auerbach, who traced the process in his book Mimesis [1946]). The results may be seen in
novels such as Samuel Richardsons Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (174748) and in middle-class
tragedies such as George Lillos The London Merchant (1731) in England; in the comdie
larmoyante (tearful comedy) in France; in Carlo Goldonis efforts to reform the commedia
dellarte and replace it with a more naturalistic comedy in the Italian theatre; and in the English
sentimental comedy, exemplified in its full-blown state by plays such as Hugh Kellys False
Delicacy (1768) and Richard Cumberlands West Indian (1771). Concerning the sentimental

comedy, it must be noted that it is only in the matter of appropriating for the bourgeoisie a
seriousness of tone and a dignity of representational style previously considered the exclusive
property of the nobility that the form can be said to stand in any significant relationship to the
development of a more realistic mimetic mode than the traditional tragic and comic ones. The
plots of sentimental comedy are as contrived as anything in Plautus and Terence (which with
their fondness for foundling heroes who turn out to be long-lost sons of rich merchants, they
often resemble); and with their delicate feelings and genteel moral atmosphere, comedies of this
sort seem as affected in matters of sentiment as Restoration comedy seems in matters of wit.
Oliver Goldsmith, in his A Comparison Between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy (1773),
noted the extent to which the comedy in the England of his day had departed from its traditional
purpose, the excitation of laughter by exhibiting the follies of the lower part of humankind. He
questioned whether an exhibition of its follies would not be preferable to a detail of its
calamities. In sentimental comedy, Goldsmith continued, the virtues of private life were
exhibited, rather than the vices exposed; and the distresses rather than the faults of humankind
generated interest in the piece. Characters in these plays were almost always good; if they had
faults, the spectator was expected not only to pardon but to applaud them, in consideration of the
goodness of their hearts. Thus, according to Goldsmith, folly was commended instead of being
ridiculed. Goldsmith concluded by labeling sentimental comedy a species of bastard tragedy,
a kind of mulish production, a designation that ironically brings to mind Guarinis comparison
of tragicomedy in its uniqueness (a product of comedy and tragedy but different from either) to
the mule (the offspring of the horse and the ass but itself neither one nor the other). The
production of Goldsmiths She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and of Richard Brinsley Sheridans
Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777) briefly reintroduced comic gaiety to the
English stage; by the end of the decade, Sheridans dramatic burlesque, The Critic (first
performed 1779), had appeared, with its parody of contemporary dramatic fashions, the
sentimental included. But this virtually concluded Sheridans career as a dramatist. Goldsmith
had died in 1774, and the sentimental play was to continue to govern the English comic stage for
over a century to come.

The comic outside the theatre

The great comic voices of the 18th century in England were not those in the theatre. No dramatic
satire of the period can exhibit anything comparable to the furious ridicule of human triviality
and viciousness that Jonathan Swift provided in Gullivers Travels (1726). His Modest Proposal
(1729) is a masterpiece of comic incongruity, with its suave blend of rational deliberation and
savage conclusion. The comic artistry of Alexander Pope is equally impressive. Pope expressed
his genius in the invective of his satiric portraits and in the range of moral and imaginative vision
that was capable, at one end of his poetic scale, of conducting that most elegant of drawing-room
epics, The Rape of the Lock (171214), to its sublimely inane conclusion and, at the other, of
invoking from the scene that closes The Dunciad (1728), an apocalyptic judgment telling what
will happen when the vulgarizers of the word have carried the day.

When the voice of comedy did sound on the 18th-century English stage with anything
approaching its full critical and satiric resonance, the officials soon silenced it. John Gays
Beggars Opera (1728) combined hilarity with a satiric fierceness worthy of Swift (who may
have suggested the original idea for it). The officials tolerated its spectacularly successful run,
but no license from the lord chamberlain could be secured for Gays sequel, Polly, which was not
staged until 1777. The Licensing Act of 1737 ended the theatrical career of Henry Fielding,
whose comedies had come under constant fire from the authorities for their satire on the
government. Fieldings comic talents were perforce directed to the novel, the form in which he
parodied the sentiment and the morality of Richardsons Pamelain his Shamela and Joseph
Andrews (1742)as brilliantly as he had earlier burlesqued the rant of heroic tragedy in Tom
Thumb (1730).
Comedy of the sort that ridicules the follies and vices of society to the end of laughing them out
of countenance entered the English novel with Fielding. His statement in Joseph Andrews
concerning the function of satire is squarely in the Neoclassic tradition of comedy as a corrective
of manners and mores: the satirist holds
the glass to thousands in their closets, that they may contemplate their deformity, and endeavour
to reduce it, and thus by suffering private mortification may avoid public shame.
Fieldings scenes of contemporary life display the same power of social criticism as that which
distinguishes the engravings of his great fellow artist William Hogarth, whose Marriage la
Mode (1745) depicts the vacuity and the casual wantonness of the fashionable world that
Fielding treats of in the final books of Tom Jones. Hogarths other series, such as A Rakes
Progress (1735) and A Harlots Progress (1732), also make a didactic point about the wages of
sin, using realistic details heightened with grotesquerie to expose human frailty and its sinister
consequences. The grotesque is a recurrent feature of the satiric tradition in England, where
comedy serves social criticism. Artists such as Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson worked in the
tradition of Jonson and the Restoration dramatists in the preceding century.
The novel, with its larger scope for varied characters, scenes, and incidents, rather than the
drama, afforded the 19th-century artist in comedy a literary form adequate to his role as social
critic. The spectacle of human society is regularly presented by the 19th-century novelist in
comedic terms, as in Vanity Fair (1848), by William Makepeace Thackeray and the Comdie
humaine (184255) of Honor de Balzac, and with the novels of Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope,
Charles Dickens, and George Meredith.

20th-century tragicomedy
The best that the comic stage had to offer in the late 19th century lay in the domain of farce. The
masters of this form were French, but it flourished in England as well; what the farces of Eugne
Labiche and Georges Feydeau and the operettas of Jacques Offenbach were to the Parisian stage

the farces of W.S. Gilbert and the young Arthur Wing Pinero and the operettas that Gilbert wrote
in collaboration with Arthur Sullivan were to the London stage. As concerns comedy, the
situation in England improved at the end of the century, when Oscar Wilde and George Bernard
Shaw turned their talents to it. Wildes Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is farce raised to the
level of high comic burlesque. Shaws choice of the comic form was inevitable, given his
determination that the contemporary English stage should deal seriously and responsibly with the
issues that were of crucial importance to contemporary English life. Serious subjects could not
be resolved by means of the dramatic clichs of Victorian melodrama. Rather, the prevailing
stereotypes concerning the nature of honour, courage, wisdom, and virtue were to be subjected to
a hail of paradox, to the end of making evident their inner emptiness or the contradictions they
concealed.
Shaw dealt with what, in the preface to Major Barbara (1905), he called the tragi-comic irony
of the conflict between real life and the romantic imagination, and his use of the word
tragicomic is a sign of the times. The striking feature of modern art, according to the German
novelist Thomas Mann, was that it had ceased to recognize the categories of tragic and comic or
the dramatic classifications of tragedy and comedy but saw life as tragicomedy. The sense that
tragicomedy is the only adequate dramatic form for projecting the unreconciled ironies of
modern life mounted through the closing decades of the 19th century. Ibsen had termed The Wild
Duck (published 1884) a tragicomedy; it was an appropriate designation for this bitter play about
a young man blissfully ignorant of the lies on which he and his family have built their happy life
until an outsider who is committed to an ideal of absolute truth exposes all their guilty secrets
with disastrous results. The plays of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, with their touching and
often quite humorous figures leading lives of quiet desperation, reflect precisely that mixture of
inarticulate joy and dull pain that is the essence of the tragicomic view of life.
A dramatist such as August Strindberg produces a kind of tragicomedy peculiarly his own, one
that takes the form of bourgeois tragedy; it lacerates its principals until they become a parody of
themselves. Strindbergs Dance of Death (1901), with its cruelty and pain dispensed with robust
pleasure by a fiercely battling husband and wife, is a significant model of the grotesque in the
modern theatre; it is reflected in such mid-20th-century examples of what came to be called
black comedy as Eugne Ionescos Victims of Duty (1953) and Edward Albees Whos Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? (1962). Almost equally influential as a turn-of-the-century master of the
grotesque is Frank Wedekind, whose Earth Spirit (1895) and its sequel, Pandoras Box (written
18921901), though both are termed tragedies by their author, are as much burlesques of tragedy
as The Dance of Death. Their grotesquerie consists chiefly in their disturbing combination of
innocence and depravity, of farce and horror, of passionate fervour issuing in ludicrous incident
that turns deadly. Wedekinds celebration of primitive sexuality and the varied ways in which it
manifests itself in an oversophisticated civilization distorts the tragic form to achieve its own
grotesque beauty and power.

One great artist of the grotesque and of tragicomedy in the 20th century was the Italian Luigi
Pirandello. His drama is explicitly addressed to the contradictoriness of experience: appearances
collide and cancel out each other; the quest of the absolute issues in a mind-reeling relativism;
infinite spiritual yearnings are brought up hard against finite physical limits; rational purpose is
undermined by irrational impulse; and with the longing for permanence in the midst of change
comes the ironic awareness that changelessness means death. Stated thus, Pirandellos themes
sound almost forbiddingly intellectual, but one of his aims was to convert intellect into passion.
Pirandellos characters suffer from intellectual dilemmas that give rise to mental and emotional
distress of the most anguished kind, but their sufferings are placed in a satiric frame. The
incongruities that the characters are furiously seeking to reconcile attest to the comic aspect of
this drama, but there is nothing in it of the traditional movement of comedy, from a state of
illusion into the full light of reality. Pirandellos characters dwell amid ambiguities and
equivocations that those who are wise in the tragicomic nature of life will accept without close
inquiry. The logic of comedy implies that illusions exist to be dispelled; once they are dispelled,
everyone will be better off. The logic of Pirandellos tragicomedy demonstrates that illusions
make life bearable; to destroy them is to destroy the basis for any possible happiness.

The absurd
In their highly individual ways, both Samuel Beckett and Ionesco employed the forms of comedy
from tragicomedy to farceto convey the vision of an exhausted civilization and a chaotic
world. The very endurance of life amid the grotesque circumstances that obtain in Becketts
plays is at once a tribute to the human power of carrying on to the end and an ironic reflection on
the absurdity of doing so. Becketts plays close in an uneasy silence that is the more disquieting
because of the uncertainty as to just what it conceals: whether it masks sinister forces ready to
spring or is the expression of a universal indifference or issues out of nothing at all.
Silence seldom reigns in the theatre of Ionesco, which rings with voices raised in a usually
mindless clamour. Some of Ionescos most telling comic effects come from his use of dialogue
overflowing with clichs and non sequiturs, which make it clear that the characters do not have
their minds on what they are saying and, indeed, do not have their minds on anything at all. What
they say is often at grotesque variance with what they do. Beneath the moral platitudes lurks
violence, which is never far from the surface in Ionescos plays, and the violence tells what
happens to societies in which words and deeds have become fatally disjunct. Ionescos comic
sense is evident as well in his depiction of human beings as automata, their movements decreed
by forces they have never questioned or sought to understand. There is something undeniably
farcical in Ionescos spectacles of human regimentation, of men and women at the mercy of
things (e.g., the stage full of chairs in The Chairs or the growing corpse in Amde); the comic
quality in these plays is one that Bergson would have appreciated. But the comic in Ionescos
most serious work, as in so much of mid-20th-century theatre, has ominous implications that
give to it a distinctly grotesque aspect. In Ionescos Victims of Duty and The Killer (1959), as in
the works of his Swiss counterpartsFriedrich Drrenmatt, author of The Visit (performed 1956)

and The Physicists (1962), and Max Frisch, author of The Firebugs (1958)the grotesquerie of
the tragicomic vision delineates a world in which the humane virtues are dying, and casual
violence is the order of the day.
The radical reassessment of the human image that the 20th century witnessed is reflected in the
novel as well as in drama. Previous assumptions about the rational and divine aspects of humans
were increasingly called into question by the evidences of irrationality and sheer animality.
These are qualities of human nature that writers of previous ages (Swift, for example) have
always recognized, but hitherto they were typically viewed as dark possibilities that could
overtake humanity if the rule of reason did not prevail. Only in the mid-20th century did the
savage and the irrational come to be viewed as part of the normative condition of humanity
rather than as tragic aberrations from it. The savage and the irrational amount to grotesque
parodies of human possibility, ideally conceived. Thus it was that 20th-century novelists as well
as dramatists recognized the tragicomic nature of the modern human image and predicament, and
the principal mode of representing both was the grotesque. This took various forms: the
apocalyptic nightmare of tyranny and terror in Franz Kafkas novels The Trial (1925) and The
Castle (1926); the tragic farce in terms of which the Austrian novelist Robert Musil described the
slow collapse of a society into anarchy and chaos, in The Man Without Qualities (193043); the
brilliant irony whereby Thomas Mann represented the hero as a confidence man in The
Confessions of Felix Krull (1954); and the grimly parodic account of Germanys descent into
madness in Gnter Grasss novel The Tin Drum (1959). The English novel contains a rich vein of
the comic grotesque that extends at least back to Dickens and Thackeray and persisted in the
20th century in such varied novels as Evelyn Waughs Decline and Fall (1928), Angus Wilsons
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), and Kingsley Amiss Lucky Jim (1954). What these novelists had
in common is the often disturbing combination of hilarity and desperation. It had its parallel in a
number of American novelssuch as John Barths Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.s
Slaughterhouse Five (1969)in which shrill farce is the medium for grim satire. And the
grotesque is a prominent feature of modern poetry, as in some of the work of W.H. Auden.