Excerpts from Ken Ludwig's "On Comedy"

When I was in my twenties I fell in love with a form of comic drama that I call the Great Tradition. It is a specific form of drama, as defined and ritualized in its was as the Noh drama of Japan or the masked drama of Greek Tragedy. It is not social comedy or the comedy of manners. It is not satire and it is not mere farce. It begins with Shakespeare’s great comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It, and continues to the present day. It does not included some of the best comedies ever written such as The Alchemist in the seventeenth century and Private lives in the twentieth. The comedies in the Great Tradition are simply different in kind and represent a specific way of looking at the world and expressing it on stage. All the plays in this tradition have a specific set of characteristics in common, and by identifying these characteristics we begin to get a feel for the genre.

First, all these plays are innately romantic. They are love stories and they are not cynical. Take the noisy, touching story of Sir Peter and Lady Teazle in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. It could have been another cynical tale of a young wife being unfaithful to an older husband; but Sheridan gives Lady Teazle a soul and a conscience and, more to the point, gives Sir Peter a sense of humor about himself. Sir Peter’s first speech in the play is as follows:

“When an old bachelor takes a young wife, what is he to expect!  Tis now six months since Lady Teazle made me the happiest of men, and I have been the miserablest dog ever since …”   Thus, from the first, we are rooting for the Teazles’ marriage.  Indeed, all the plays in the Great Tradition are marriage comedies, ending in single marriages, multiple marriages or remarriages.  (Interestingly, the first comedy in history to get to marriage via divorce is The Beaux’ Stratagem.).  

Second, the plays in this tradition often transport their characters outside the “real world” toward worlds that can be turned upside down, like the forest of Arden in As You Like It, or the remote country inn of She Stoops to Conquer. The town of Bath functions this way in Sheridan's The Rivals (as it does in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey); so do the country estates in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and Boucicault's London Assurance; and so does Hollywood in Kaufman and Hart's Once in a Lifetime. The moral seems to be "Leave home, find a little freedom and you will come home wiser." Usually this is found by going from the city to the countryside, but sometimes it is the other way around. 

Third, one of the main building blocks of comedy in the Western tradition is the effort of parents to thwart the sexual urges of their children. It is no coincidence that the main plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream opens with a father angrily declaring, “Full of vexation come I, with complaint/Against my child, my daughter Hermia.”Or that the opening line of The Matchmaker is “I tell you for the hundredth time you will never marry my niece."

Other characteristics of this genre of comedy include a ticking cock in the form of a time crunch that makes the action feel speeded up; strong comic premises, such as disguising a girl as a boy or having a character mistake a house for an inn; multiple plots; and the physical robustness of farce and slapstick. Another critical hallmark of this form of comedy is confusion and mistaken identity, often involving disguise and sometimes cross-dressing. Indeed, it is rare to find a comedy in the Great Tradition that does not contain some form of mistaken identity. 

Finally, in the end, I believe that what binds these plays together is a deep rooted sense of optimism. It has taken me a long time to understand this, and it is not a trivial observation. As the writer Louis Kronenberger says, "Comedy is not just a happy as opposed to an unhappy ending, but a way of surveying life so that happy endings must prevail." At the moment, of course, it is not fashionable to admire works of art of this kind. Yet all the works of art that I have just described contain not only a sense of humanity but, ultimately, a sense of hope for the possibility of joy. These plays, no matter how you slice them, leave us with a strong sense that with resolution, courage, and the right attitude to the wide world, we can survive anything that life throws at us. This notion is exhilarating, and the tradition behind it is continually inspiring.