The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [76]
• secret assignations when the `wrong person' turns up;
• scenes in which characters are hastily concealed in cupboards or behind furniture, only for their presence to be inevitably and embarrassingly discovered.
Indeed we know that the general chaos of misunderstanding is likely only to get worse, until the knot the characters have tied themselves and each other up into seems almost unbearable. But finally, and to universal relief, everyone and everything will get miraculously sorted out, bringing a deliriously happy ending.
In fact Comedy is a very specific kind of story. It is not simply any story which is funny. Some very funny stories have quite different kinds of plot. Indeed, as we shall see, a story may follow the plot of comedy without it being intended to be funny at all. Even the fact that an author describes his story as a'comedy' (e.g., Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard) does not necessarily mean that it is a Comedy in plot terms. But just what it is that shapes the plot of Comedy, that provides the common factor between say, a Marx Brothers film and a play by Shakespeare, an American musical and a novel by Jane Austen, a Mozart opera and a story by P. G. Wodehouse, requires a little careful unravelling. In fact it leads us on to one of the most rewarding puzzles literature has to offer.
Comedy - Stage one: Aristophanes
Not the least unusual thing about Comedy is that, unlike any other kind of plot, we can actually see it taking shape historically. All the other basic types of story, when we first come across them in the history of storytelling, appear, as it were, fully formed. But when we look back over the history of Comedy we can see it evolving, through three distinct stages. Nevertheless, as we come to grasp the fundamental principle on which the plot rests, we can see that the basic plot itself has not really changed: all that has happened is that aspects of the story originally only implicit have been developed and brought out, to give a sharper focus on what the story is really about.
No one knows for certain whether Comedy began, as legend has it, in the village revels of ancient Greecel - although there is nothing inconsistent between a spirit of festive revelry and the mood which has prevailed at the conclusion of so many comedies since. What is certain is that, when we first come across specific examples, in the so-called `Old Comedy which, between 425 and 388 BC, made Aristophanes for nearly 40 years one of the leading playwrights in Athens, we still see the plot at an early stage of its development. We see some of the ingredients which later went to make up the fully-formed Comedy plot, but by no means all.
At the heart of Aristophanic comedy lay an agon or conflict between two characters or groups of characters. One is dominated by some dark, rigid, life-denying obsession. The other represents life, liberation and truth. The issue is ultimately decided, of course, in favour of the latter. In Lysistrata (the most popular of the comedies in recent times because of its `feminist, anti-war' theme), the first group is represented by the men of Athens, full of martial ardour and always away from the city making war; the second by their unhappy wives, stuck at home, determined to cure their menfolk of their warlike obsession. The women hit on the device of retreating to the Acropolis and refusing to have anything to do with their husbands (in particular refusing them their `conjugal rights') until the men agree to give up their love of war. For a time confusion reigns, until the men recognise where their inmost priorities lie and surrender to the women's demands. There is a final scene of universal reconciliation, as each man is reunited with his `other half', and all go off for a joyous celebration.
In The Wasps Aristophanes shows us the grim figure of Procleon, an old man who is obsessed with serving on juries, passing judgement on his fellow citizens and invariably finding them guilty. His son Anticleon determines to liberate him from this dark obsession. He persuades his father that