The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [286]
Comedy: The dark and sentimental versions
What happens when the ego takes over the archetype of Comedy? A truly dark version of this lightest of plots might seem a contradiction in terms. In fact such stories have played a much more important role in the development of storytelling over the past 200 years than might be supposed. The only reason why this is not generally appreciated is that, when Comedy turns truly dark, we no longer recognise it as Comedy. We saw earlier how Othello is a play which in plot terms shows many of the ingredients of a Comedy; although when there is no 'recognition; and the hero thus ends up smothering his anima and turning his dagger on himself, it becomes arguably the darkest play Shakespeare ever wrote. For similar reasons, we shall not be looking at some of the best-known examples of what happens to Comedy when it turns dark until the next chapter.
The most obvious fate of Comedy when, like the other plots, it became detached from its true archetypal foundations was what we saw happening in the plays and light operas of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the operettas of Johann Strauss and Lehar, in Gilbert and Sullivan, the plays of Wilde and Feydeau and many later examples, we see the outward form of the plot preserved but emptied of its deeper significance, so that Comedy becomes a mere burlesque of itself. In this sense, Die Fledermaus or The Importance of Being Earnest or The Merry Widow represent the sentimentalisation of Comedy, enjoying the superficial fun it can provide without bothering about its more serious message.
What also happened to Comedy, as we saw earlier, was that it split into two separate types of story. On one hand are those which so concentrate on its `comic' element that this becomes an end in itself, producing stories which concentrate just on its potential to make us laugh. Here we have all that vast range of comic films, novels, plays and TV `situation comedies, from the films of Laurel and Hardy to such popular British television series as Fawlty Towers, Yes, Minister, Dad's Army, Till Death Do Us Part or Steptoe and Son, all of which are still essentially based on the humour to be derived from exposing the contrast between reality and the self-deluding pretensions of egotism.
Entertaining though such modern comedy may be, it has travelled a long way from the archetype's original purpose, which is to show not just the puncturing of the illusions of the human ego, but also the liberating effect of the shift to that other, deeper centre in the psyche, the Self. This was why, after its beginnings in the Athens of Aristophanes, the Comedy plot became so centred on the bringing together of a man and a woman, hero and anima, heroine and animus, as the ultimate image of human wholeness. Similarly, nothing is more illuminating in Comedy than how it shows the effect of one person's egotism on everyone else around. We see how the blind egotism of an Almaviva or Leontes throws a whole household or community into shadow, so that no one is free to relate properly to anyone else. Then, when recognition comes and the dominating source of egocentricity is removed, we see how the shadows lift and the whole community can emerge into the light.
It was all this which tended to get lost when the humorous element in Comedy became split off from its more serious foundations, although these too, as we saw, took on a life of their own by turning into stories of romantic love without much necessity for humour. Since this has produced many profound and