Why We Don't Take Comedy Seriously

Back in the good old days of Greek drama, the arts were properly balanced between tragedy and comedy, argues Julian Gough. 

Unfortunately most of the comedies were lost, and only Aristotle’s rules of tragedy were preserved in the Poetics.  His rules of comedy were lost.

Then along came Christianity with an overbalance towards the tragic view of life. So 

western culture since the middle ages has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. We think of tragedy as major, and comedy as minor. Brilliant comedies never win the best film Oscar.

He doesn’t say it, but it’s not just Christians that are too serious.  Your average academic lefty is far too serious too.

And we know why.  When you want political power the last thing you would think of doing is to talk about the Human Comedy.  Power comes from frightening the people and then leading them to safety.

But there’s been plenty of good comedy down the ages.  Gough lists his favorites:

Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire, and on through to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the late Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5.

That’s all very well, of course.  I’d reply with Shakepeare’s comedies, Jane Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Dorothy Sayers, and Tom Wolfe.  That’s because I’m a guy who celebrates our shared human comedy rather than take a holier-than-thou ironic distance like Heller and Vonnegut.

The problem with the modern arts is, of course, that it has joined the establishment.  All those university professors of English and artists-in-residence create a distance between the creator and the audience.

Probably the best thing for the arts would be for it to be banished from the ivory tower and forced to work for a living.

But that would never happen, because art is too important to be left to the vagaries of the market, old chap.