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By Root 5155 0

burlesqued version of the contrast between a `lower' and `upper' world in Frank Loesser's Guys and Dolls (1953), set in the underworld of New York's gambling fraternity. Nathan Detroit is desperate for money to rent a venue for an illegal crap game, because several big gamblers are in town, including the hero, Sky Masterson. Masterson casually boasts that there is not a woman in New York he could not persuade to accompany him to Havana, known in those pre-Castro days as the morally unconstrained `fun city where New Yorkers could let their hair down. Detroit makes this boast the basis of a wager. He points to the most unlikely woman he can imagine, Sister Sarah, the pretty but prim young organiser of the local Save-A-Soul Mission (in relative terms, therefore, since she is so moral and straitlaced, an `above the line' character). Masterson propositions her, promising to produce `twelve genuine sinners' at her next meeting if she will come to Havana with him, but she merely slaps his face in disgust.

Then, however, the fearsomely dragonish General Cartwright arrives from headquarters, threatening to close down the mission unless Sarah's next meeting is packed with repentant sinners. The heroine therefore accepts Masterson's bargain and agrees to accompany him to the `inferior realm' of Havana, where she gets drunk in a nightclub and confesses that she loves him. She returns to New York and her straitlaced `above the line' persona, appalled at her fall from grace. But Masterson keeps his side of the bargain. Her next meeting is packed with seemingly `repentant' gamblers, General Cartwright is impressed and the mission is saved. But the heroine now learns to her horror that Masterson had only taken her to Havana for a wager. As the story moves to its climax, however, she then further discovers he has been telling everyone that he had lost his bet, and had not been able to persuade her to accompany him to Havana after all. She is so touched by his concern for her reputation that she rushes out to apologise for having misjudged him. They recognise their love for each other and the story ends, happily if implausibly, with their wedding.

However improbable and lightly treated the love element may be in such stories, it does at least provide the dominant thread of the tale. But we then come to that other modern derivation of the Comedy plot, the type of story where it is the humour which dominates, with the love interest playing only a rather embarrassed supporting role, if it survives at all.

Playing it for laughs

When we use the term `comedy' in the modern world we usually mean no more than something we are intended to find funny. It might seem odd to have taken so long to get round to what it is about Comedy which makes us laugh, because of course provoking an audience to laughter has always been inseparable from Comedy, right back to the days of ancient Greece. Only in comparatively recent times has this `comic' element emerged as something which can be looked on as wholly separate, in its own right. But ever since Aristophanes, the essence of Comedy has lain in exposing as ridiculous the state of self-delusion which affects human beings who have become isolated from those around them by their egocentricity. This is essentially what our human capacity for seeing something as funny is about. The chief function of humour is that it provides us with a more or less harmless way to defuse the social strains created by egotism. This is why comedy of any kind almost invariably centres on people who are in some way taking themselves too seriously, giving the rest of us the chance to see how foolish this makes them look. If a little old lady walking down the street trips up on a banana skin, we do not see this as funny. It arouses sympathy. If the same thing happens to a pompous man cocooned in self-importance we find it comical, precisely because we enjoy seeing his bubble of self-esteem being pricked, Almost all Comedy intended to make us laugh is thus centred on such a contrast between the self-regarding delusion of someone who