British Comedy since the Shakespearean Age (Summer Term 2020)

This lecture serves a two-fold purpose: It will introduce students to concepts of humour and laughter on the one hand, and offer a diachronic discussion of the history of British stage comedy since the Shakespearean Age on the other.
The course will start with a systematic introduction to seminal theoretical texts including (but not limited to) Thomas Hobbes’s ideas about ridicule and the laughable (Leviathan, 1651), Henri Bergson’s work on the basic principles of comedy (Laughter, 1900), Sigmund Freud’s musings on laughter and its relation to psychic individuation and civilisation (Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 1905), as well as Arthur Koestler’s discussion of incongruity as the fundamental principle of comedy (The Act of Creation, 1964). Throughout the term, we will apply these theories to key texts from the history of British comedy, including William Shakespeare’s farcical plays about mistaken identity and romantic confusion, Restoration Comedy of the late 17th century (including the works of Aphra Behn and William Wycherley), and comedies written by contemporary authors like Lucy Kirkwood and Martin McDonagh.
We will also highlight several subgenres and modes of comedy, including farce (like Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, 1982) and the grotesque (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 1969ff.), as well as phenomena that are much harder to explain with traditional concepts. This includes the cringeworthy ‘comedies of awkwardness’ authored by Lucy Davis or Ricky Gervais, a trend that started on British television in the early 2000s.