The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy by Alexander Leggatt

Author:Alexander Leggatt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

8

EDWARD BERRY

Laughing at “others”

As a dramatic form, comedy can exist without laughter, but most of the plays that we consider comedies are engines of laughter, and one of the great pleasures of comic theatre is the feeling of exhilaration and release that laughter provides. Despite much theorizing, the causes of laughter and its significance in human life remain a mystery. The impulse to laugh, for one thing, is deeply equivocal. At times, as when we laugh “with” someone, laughter may be a mechanism by which we identify with another human being, a means of psychological and social bonding. At other times, as when we laugh “at” someone, the same physical reaction may be a form of aggressive self-assertion. The former kind of laughter, in which human and societal divisions are dissolved in communal merriment, we might call, loosely following Bakhtin, carnivalesque.1 The latter, in which such divisions are perversely reinforced, we might call Hobbesian, after Thomas Hobbes, who defined laughter as an expression of superiority, a feeling of “sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.”2 Both kinds of laughter, curiously, can strengthen certain kinds of social communion: the carnivalesque, by casting wide the net of community, implying that we are all, at some level, one; the Hobbesian, by affirming the superiority of one community in opposition to an individual or group outside it. Romantic and Saturnalian comedy tend towards carnivalesque laughter; satiric comedy, towards Hobbesian.

Theorists of laughter – Bergson, for example – often justify mockery of the Hobbesian kind as a form of social correction.3 By experiencing the humiliation of being laughed at, so the idea goes, the victim is led to recognize his or her social deviance and rejoins the community reformed. In this way, even satirical laughter can become carnivalesque, the sense of social communion widened by the inclusion of a character or group previously estranged. Such gestures, however, occur rarely in satiric comedy; more commonly, the comic butts targeted by satiric laughter are not reformed but merely mocked, humiliated, and even ostracized. Even when such characters do perceive the error of their ways, moreover, we may feel that the laughter evoked at their expense is less rehabilitative than malicious; in such cases, we feel uncomfortable about the motives of satirists and the subversive pleasure they incite in audiences like ourselves. In general, Hobbesian satiric laughter works towards limited social communion through exclusion, forging group solidarity among privileged insiders through the mockery of outsiders, whoever they may be.

Contemporary literary theorists have grappled earnestly with this exclusionary impulse, by which members of powerful elites, with or without laughter, define their identities and achieve group solidarity by derogating less powerful outsiders, such as women, black people, foreigners, and laborers. The discourses of contemporary feminism, racial and ethnic studies, and postcolonialism, in particular, have been characterized by sustained attention to this problem. Given the nature of the dominant ideology and social ethos of Elizabethan England, one is not surprised

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