Wednesday March 7

Comedy is all about community, it's a social matter. Unlike tragedy, which is all about the individual. Comedy however is usually at the expense of the individual. Comedy also tells us that there is nothing about human nature that is shameful. They usually makes fun of what the state holds sacred. Comedians can do anything, and they usually have a 'potty mouth.'

"Comedy brings everyone together onstage at the end, and usually they have a symbolic ritual of marriage" Like in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Malvolio from 12th Night , who tells people who are laughing, that they must stop. He wants "no more cakes and ale"

Lysistrata:

• least obscene of all Aristophane's plays
• he was the most personal of all writers
• he wanted peace, he was a dove
• he could write about politics because he was a comedic writer
• has a theme of 'death and rebirth'
• this is like the sitcoms of today (ie- Friends)

obscenity

Menander: a Roman man who was one of the first 'new comedy' playwrites

Neil Simon: wrote Odd Couple, and Barefoot in the Park

Star Wars: Han, Leia and Luke- the bother and the sister want eachother, but instead she gets together with the friend

Lysistrata's of Today:

• There's Something About Mary
• American Pie
• Little Miss Sunshine

The Feast of Fools: of, as in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" the 'Festival of Fools' and Quasimodo was crowned the 'king of the fools' ~YEAH!

"Literature is the process of neurotic people" ~ Freud

Freud believed that what you repressed came out on the stage

Comedy deals with people who are worse than they really are, people aren't usually that terrible. Except for maybe the people from Jackass...

comedy LOVES stupidity: like the phallic proessions, Aristophanes was obsessed with these

ithyphallic- eww!

priapus

the old men can't go up, and the young men can't go down ;)

Lysistrata is fully of happy ideas- the women want to stop the war, and at the end they do!

body and bawdy or Ribaldry

carnal: of or related to the flesh

"Comedy is not pretty" ~ Steve Martin