Comedy: The Irrational Vision

By Morton Gurewitch

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801408431
• ISBN13: 9780801408434
• Release Date: January 1975
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 245 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.3" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Of genius by genius.

Morton Gurewitch divides Comedy into four impulses--Irony, Satire, Humor and Farce--and examines their submanifestations. He relates literary and dramatic works to the comic theories to which they pertain. His thesis--that comedy is essentially irrational--is most easily demonstrated by farce, and it is farce that gets most of his attention.I wish he had included a taxonomy of the phyla he discusses (although I know why he didn't--too mechanistic, given his subject); that he had included more on Comedia; that he had referenced cinematic works; that he had examined timelines between theories and works they reference for pattern (are theorists always at least fifty years behind what they study?); and that he had used Adler and Maslow as well as Freud. I also wish that, after tracing adultery through Western literature, he had favored me with his view of this most conventional of unconventional behaviors, for there must be a satyr in those who study satyrs. But this book is a comprehensive analysis of comedy and its theorists in Western literature from Greece to now by one who has spent a lifetime studying both.The book makes academic history, too. While English Departments were committing academic suicide--by alienating the creative element of their profession with culture wars, puritanism, and even more spiritually debilitating forms of reductionism, one scholar was constorting with its essence, the idea that Literature should be enjoyed. His style is itself a revolt against monstrous monotony. He delights in turning a phrase, demonstrating how adjectives should be used, and baffling the befuddled with periodic sentences. But his main achievement is using concrete literary reference to build a coherent and comprehensive account of what comedy is and where it has been.A century ago, such a book would have made him famous, because it would have been read by intellectuals on three continents and hailed as a work of genius. Today, his reward is limited to whatever comfort his own theory can generate. There must be some. After all, he's writing about comedy in a culture that thinks satire is a hate crime.