Tuesday, 3 April 2012

Day 3: Ashley

What is Comedy?

I sat unsmiling

through lectures on the plot-

centric nature of comedy.


Seriously, I studied the

exemplary works of

Aristophenes, Plautus, Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais

Shakespeare

Moliere, Sheridan, Wilde, Coward and Becket.


In solemnitude, I read

Sontag, Freud, Bakhtin and I

still have no answer to my question:

What is Comedy?

It’s time to ask Chubby McFat-Tits!

4 comments:

Nikki Magennis said...

Ta-boom *tish!

Great, Ash.

Ashley Lister said...

Cheers Nikki,

I'd been listening to a serious of fascinating comedy lectures on audiobook over the past week - which is what inspired the idea for this one.

Ash

Janine Bollée said...

Comedy is reading Bill Bryson's whatever:
it makes your eyes run and your sides itch and you have to close your eyes tightly or your eyeballs will fall out.
that is what comedy means to me.
I don't think you will find it on the stage or tv, or in Chaucer, for that matter.

Actually, I have never defined it to myself.
This poesie party is a blast.
I love the idea of the Blackpool poets writing together.

Please switch your verif off, or I won't be able to comment any more. It always takes me four go's.
[http://000april.blogspot.com/]

Ashley Lister said...

*** - a term doesn't go past in my classes without my dragging out a copy of a Bill Bryson title, just so we can have a giggle during our studies.

I was looking into the definitions of comedy because I've always been interested in the mechanics of such things and the academic interpretation.

But, ultimately, no matter how much they discuss old comedy, new comedy, scatological or the deviation from existing norms by an other, it all boils down to what makes the audience laugh.

And thanks for the head's up on the verifier. I'm going to go and address that issue on one of the other blogs I work on.

Ash