My first exposure to comedy at an early age was through the medium of television. I fell in love with comedy in the form of I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners and movies like the “Ma and Pa Kettle” series, “Abbott and Costello” comedies, The Red Skelton Show, The Three Stooges, and the movies of Jerry Lewis. Much later I would enjoy the silent movies of Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennet, and Buster Keaton on video and DVD. I didn't know at the time that these performers all had the benefit of a tradition that has been handed down through the centuries
My intention in this essay is not to compete with Northrup Frye's extensive coverage of the subject of comedy in its broader spectrum. I would like to focus specifically on the way in which the specific type of comedy, which has been labeled “commedia dell'arte” and “commedia erudita,” was transferred and translated over many centuries from its origins in the Greeks and Romans. This comic tradition was preserved, in a concrete form, in the plays of the French actor/playwright/director Jean-Baptiste Poquelin or “Molière.” Today we have actors like Kevin Kline, Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Jim Carrey, Ben Stiller, Jackie Chan, Robin Williams, actresses like Lucille Ball, Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, Bette Midler, Meryl Streep, Debra Messing, and Meg Ryan, who are masters of the type of physical comedy that can be traced back to Moliere’s influence stemming from commedia dell'arte and even further back to Greek and Roman “old” comedy. Plays like Scapino (1974) on Broadway are highly representative of Molière's derivative works that borrowed heavily from the Italian commedia popular in his day. He transformed these Italian imports for his French speaking audiences in the 17th Century. The relatively new media of film and television has only incorporated and reworked the same types of stories, physical gags, and comic spirit that Molière had passed down to later generations. Recent films such as The Mask, Shanghai Noon, Bowfinger, Roxanne, A Fish Called Wanda, Mrs. Doubtfire, Death Becomes Her show the type of commedia style and broad, physical comedy style that made Moliere a superstar of the 17th century theatre. Even such recent movies as Ben Stiller's hilarious Tropic Thunder make use of the stock characters of the braggart soldiers, and his Meet the Parents is a direct reworking of the commedia scenario of the young man who has to surmount the obstacle of his fiancé's judgmental and controlling father.
I will also briefly touch on the way this same comedic “energy,” to borrow Stephen Greenblatt's term, spilled over from the Italian and French traditions into the works of English Renaissance writers like Shakespeare, John Fletcher and Restoration playwrights like Aphra Behn, William Congreve and others. This is not meant to be an exhaustive survey of all of the playwrights in every western country and every age who have been influenced by this style, but I hope to show a few examples that will support the idea that slapstick comedy has been a pervasive and possibly universal style of entertainment over the centuries. It certainly has endured and evolved without losing its “punch” (forgive a pun on the commedia Pulcinella character and its derivative Punch from the later English “Punch and Judy” puppet shows). This type of comedy is not prone to the danger of becoming unpopular or archaic in the same way as “topical” comedy or even “comedies of manners.”
The first commedia troupes began playing during the first half of the 16th century and the period “from the 1570's through about 1630 is often called the golden age of commedia dell'arte,” or the “theatre of the common people” (Lawner 75). In the acting companies that were made up of both men and women, actors would specialize in playing a specific role or character type, no matter what scenario they were to be acting at any given performance. These stereotyped characters were sometimes known as “masks.” In fact, the actors usually wore masks as part of their costumes. One of the main characters was a “master,” usually an old greedy or lusty merchant. This stock character, often called Pantalone, was usually involved in scenarios in which he either chased after a young girl or was a father, trying to keep his daughter away from her young lover. The companion to this first character was always a servant, a “zanni” named Arlecchino, Harlequin, Pedrolino, Brighella, or Pulcinella. This servant was either very smart and crafty and drove the intrigue of the show, or very stupid and clumsy and created chaos because of so many mistakes. Molière was to create the characters of Mascarille and Scapin as wily servants, while his Sganarelle was an example of the foolish servant (Nurse 36).
There was also the braggart soldier, often called Capitano, and a charlatan lawyer, called Dottore. The young lovers at the center of the story, called “innamorati,” did not wear masks and were not played as being funny characters. While the lower class servants (zannis) would speak in dialects, the young lovers spoke in refined Italian. Names used for the zannis can be recognized as used by many playwrights, including Shakespeare, down through the centuries in comedies: Rosalinda, Flaminia, Silvia, Ortensia, Florinda, and Isabella were females and Flavio, Ottavio, Orazio, Flaminio, Leandro and Lelio were males (Lawner 58).
Unlike the plays of the commedia erudita, the plays performed by the commedia dell'arte did not use a set script, but had the actors improvise lines based on a script outline or scenario. The term “improvisation” grew out of this type of acting which was known as commedia all'improviso (Nurse 36). In these shows, the plot is not as intricate or important as the comedy that is driven by the character types, who are always the same in all of the plays no matter what names they may be called. The plot, or intrigue only “exists as a pretext” and the story is episodic, “built around a series of comic turns or “lazzi” (36). Peter Nurse translates this term as being “links” which serve to hold the fragmented structure of the play together. He notes that the lazzi can be acrobatic tricks “requiring great physical agility” or linguistic gags, like “replying only in monosyllables.” The famous “Who's on First” gag done by Abbott and Costello falls into this category.
Commedia acting also includes “expressive gestures, mime, physical grace, the use of the whole body to evoke emotional responses” (36). The fact that these Italian troupes performed all over Europe was probably the reason for this very physical style of acting which would convey the story even if the audiences could not understand the language.
Molière was perhaps one of the first playwrights to incorporate the techniques of “indigenous French farce and Italian commedia dell'arte” in his work (Nurse 20). Molière's troupe performed at the Palais-Royale theatre in Paris at the same time as an Italian commedia troupe, whose famous leader was an actor named Scaramuccia Tiberio Fiorilli. The French called him Scaramouche. Molière's critics at the time accused him of plagiarism because his plays and even his acting style began to be directly inspired by the commedia troupe. Interestingly, on the English stage around a decade later, Aphra Behn would name the cunning servant “Scaramouche” in her commedia inspired play The Emperor of the Moon (1687). Scaramouche’s ruses help to get the young ladies of the house married to their sweethearts, despite the tyrannical old father, who acts as the obstacle to their choice of young men. I enjoyed reading the play when I did a research project on Behn last year and just now discovered the prototype for this play in a book called Harlequin on the Moon, a general history of commedia. It seems Behn's play was loosely based on a French play by Nolant de Fatouville called Harlequin, Emperor of the Moon written in 1684, which also inspired the title for Lawner's historical survey (25).
A fairly recent essay by David Bradley in “The Modern Language Review” documents the fact that Italian researchers in the last thirty years have challenged the notion that commedia dell'arte was a craft that relied more on mime and physical expression than text, or that actors invented their own dialogue. He says this was a stereotyped notion created out of the early research of 19th century writer Maurice Sand and Gustave Attinger in 1950. The term commedia dell'arte was not coined until after playwright Carlo Goldoni borrowed heavily from the earlier tradition to write his comedies (445). It has come to light that the actors in the original commedia troupes actually combed literary sources of the period to memorize portions of text and speeches that they could call up at will in order to “improvise” whatever play was being performed. This reminds me of the type of post-modern style that we think of today as being “new” in theatre, art and literature, that of pasting together many previous sources in order to come up with a collage or pastiche that can be either viewed as plagiarism or creative genius. Molière was accused of blatantly refashioning the Italian sources (who had based their plays on even earlier Greek and Roman comedies) to suit French audiences. Shakespeare was accused of the same thing, and Behn was also criticized. However, Behn was not the only Restoration playwright who was influenced by the French theatre during the time when Charles I and many aristocrats were in exile in France.
Theatre scholars in the last twenty years have put forward the thesis that Molière's work has less to do with revealing his personal problems, such as his unhappy marriage to a coquettish actress twenty years his junior, or even making a satirical social commentary on religious zealots and shallow courtiers in Paris, and more about simply creating entertainment for the sole purpose of pleasing an audience (Nurse 20). I would argue that these influences or inspirations for his work do not have to be mutually exclusive. It is most likely that all of these factors played a part in Molière's work, probably in varying degrees at different times during his career. Because Molière was not only a writer, but an actor and director, I would submit that whatever underlying factors inspired his plays, his primary intent was not for them to be studied and intellectually analyzed by scholars, but to be brought to life, embodied on a stage and fully enjoyed by an audience. Although Shakespeare's work has been endlessly analyzed by critics over the centuries and has delighted readers, I think his work is also most clearly revealed and illuminated when it is given life on the stage. Shakespeare originally designed it to be received this way, since he wrote specifically for an acting company and did not publish or preserve his own works. If it were not for the actors and editors who later gathered the acting sides and various draft versions, we would not have nearly the library of Shakespearean plays that has inspired so much scholarly attention. Still, for me, Shakespeare has never been so fully alive as when I have been able to see companies like New York’s Aquila Theatre perform The Comedy of Errors in the hilarious slapstick style, or the Actors From the London Stage, a British company that tours the U.S., performing The Taming of the Shrew.
Nurse says that this “pure comedy” argument was developed most succinctly by Harold Knutson in response to Northrup Frye's section on comedy in The Anatomy of Criticism. Specifically, Knutson argues that Molière dramatizes “the theme of the old generation—tyrannical parents or old men in love—defeated by the young and coming generation." And Molière had an influence on playwrights in the Restoration. One example is William Wycherly's adaptation of The Misanthrope as The Plain Dealer in 1674 (Nurse 21).
Nurse explains that Molière tried to write in the tradition of the popular comedies of intrigue of his day, or commedia erudita written by “scholars, who since the sixteenth-century Renaissance had sought to create a modern form of comedy that could rival the comedies of ancient greece and Rome, as exemplified in the work of Menander, Plautus and Terence” (33). Nicolo Machiavelli and Ariosto produced examples of this type of lover's intrigue, in which multiple obstacles are overcome, including hostile parents, mistaken identities, chance meetings, and other stock elements. Even Shakespeare used this type of formula in his plays, such as Comedy of Errors (33-34). This type of comedy was also called “commedia sostenuta,” because it was built on sustaining an intrigue as the primary emphasis of the plot, using stock characters that were taken originally from Plautus, the “senex amorosus or old man in love, the braggart soldier, the miser, etc.” (34).
Molière was also known to use the ancient Greek playwriting device of deus ex machina in his plays. At the end of The School for Wives when Agnes's lost father is revealed and in Tartuffe when the King's Officer comes in to save the day, it is much the same as when the Greek gods, the “deus” would be flown in on a crane the “machina” to tie up the plot very neatly. But the commedia erudita was only a partial influence on Molière.
In The Precious Maidens Ridiculed, Molière appears to have taken his plot from commedia scenarios that “feature two Spanish capitanos” or braggart soldiers, “two innamorate, and a Pantalone” (Bermel 39). The jokes date back to Plautus and the fabulae atellanae. Molière was writing this as a satire of the puffed up, superficial society in France at the time, supposedly taking shots at Madame de Scudery and Catherine de Vivonne, who threw parties called “salons” for women to engage in intellectual discussions. Bermel calls this his “first link as a farceur with Aristophanes,” since he was “targeting a specific corner of contemporary society” (39).
I. A. Schwartz maintains that Molière never mastered “the art of weaving an intrigue” in the true fashion of commedia erudita, but that his plays succeed mostly by capitalizing on the forms of commedia dell'arte. He says the first plays in which Molière mastered the fixed “type” or mask were The Precious Maidens, and Sganarelle or the Imaginary Cuckhold. Even though Molière later gives different names to his characters like Arnolfe, Harpagon, Tartuffe, or Alceste, these are all more or less still “type” characters and there is often “no denouement in Molière,” simply because these characters do not change by the end of the story (107-108).
Like the commedia troupes, Molière worked with a fixed acting company who could develop stock characters that reappeared in various plays. One of Molière's earliest farces called The Flying Doctor (1645) used a particularly funny commedia device in which the character of Sganarelle is playing a con game, pretending to be twins, who have to change clothes repeatedly, coming in and out of the scene in order to keep up the deception. Molière used the same plot twenty years later in his play The Doctor of Love. This gag is still used in plays and films today very successfully, especially in one example that I can recall most vividly from the restaurant scene in Mrs. Doubtfire with Robin Williams.
Another play by Molière that heavily relied on the theme and style of commedia was The Trickeries of Scapin. The plot, common in commedia as well as Shakespeares plays, depicts two young lovers overcoming the obstacle of a harsh parent with the help of a tricky servant. This type of story is also the “heir to Carnival, the festival that celebrates transgressive behavior: it is a world of reversals in which the people of lowest status (servants, actors) exercise greatest power and wit” to outsmart their masters or those of higher social status (Lawner, 23). Molière's play was revived under the name Scapino on Broadway in 1974, starring a physically expressive actor, Jim Dale.
Aphra Behn’s play, The Rover, employs the carnivalesque theme, placing the characters in Venice during Carnivale and deriving its comedy from mistaken identity, characters masquerading as the opposite sex, and male authorities who are overturned. The young women are determined to thwart the plans of their brother and father (Pantalone) who want them to join a convent or marry unsuitable men they don’t love. Eighteenth century Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni also relied on the works of commedia and Molière as inspiration. His classic A Servant of Two Masters (1745) depicts a wily servant, juggling and outwitting two masters. Goldoni's other plays, which were fleshed-out adaptations of earlier commedia scenarios, later became the sources, for “theater, opera, and ballet for over two centuries, a testament to commedia's perennial appeal” (Lawner 31). Some of his greats include The Love of Three Oranges, Turandot, The Stag King, and The Little Green Bird. Lawner also notes that the wily servant or “zanni” was the inspiration for the later writings of French playwright Beaumarchais, and Mozart's character of Figaro (36). Even the late Restoration comedy The Way of the World incorporated commedia elements in the use of the wily servant, Foible, and her male counterpart, Waitwell, who come in disguise as higher ranking characters to help Mirabell succeed in his plan to marry Millamant by outsmarting Lady Wishfort.
One other facet that I find intriguing is that the commedia theatre troupes utilized a small number of actors to play many different parts in the plays. The stories had to be adaptable and playable using very few actors, who each specialized in certain types of characters. Because smaller acting companies today do not have the big budgets to produce the huge cast spectacle or even realistic drawing room comedies and melodramas with large casts that were popular in the 19th and 20th centuries, the trend in modern plays seems to be to either use fewer characters to tell a story, or have the scenes written in such a way that a few actors can play many parts. The 1990’s musical I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, utilizes a small cast who played a wide range of comic roles in individual vignettes around the theme of love and marriage. Many times the characters are fairly one dimensional, stereotypical or stock characters as in the commedia tradition, using simple costume changes (effectively “masks”) and a highly theatrical style that allows for transformations in front of the audience. The five person troupe that I saw perform The Taming of the Shrew last year, and Aquila Theatre's compact acting ensemble, doing The Comedy of Errors are examples of this new theatrical convention that is actually only a revitalization of the commedia touring tradition.
Peter Nurse tells us that the popular Italian comedies were also called commedia a soggetto or thematic comedy (42). Molière's play The Imaginary Invalid is a perfect example of the way that these comedies are built on a unity of theme, rather than a well developed plot. So, even though the play may be episodic, it still gets across the theme that “imagination distorts the relationship between appearance and reality” (43). The main character, Argan, is seeing the world through his own obsessions, and this is why Molière calls him an “imaginaire.”
The origins of The Miser have not only been traced to commedia dell'arte but to earlier French playwrights, Chappuzea and Boisrobert, and most directly from a play by Plautus called The Pot of Gold in which a poor man named Euclio gets a pot of gold, but doesn't want to use the money to get himself out of poverty, because he fears that thieves and neighbors will try to get at the money if they know he has it. By the end of the play he gives the money away to get relief, but Molière's character of Harpagon does not make this change or character arc (Bermel 155-156).
The thing that is inherently interesting about Molière is the fact that, while he was accused in his day of stealing all of his good ideas for plays, characters, and comedic gags from other sources, whether it was the Italian commedia erudita, commedia dell'arte, French farce or the classical works of Plautus, Menander, there is evidence that “at least twenty-four of his thirty-three” plays were used as grist for many other playwrights' works, especially in the English Restoration period (Bermel 265). Bermel asserts that Molière's work was so influential that even though Molina or Plautus might also be consulted for their earlier versions of Don Juan or Amphitryon, Molière's evolution of these classics would have been a strong pull in providing a source to emulate (265). He also acknowledges that the situation comedies that grew up on television in the 20th century owed a debt of gratitude to Molière's genius as they have merely chopped up his work and served it up as if it were brand new. On the other end of the spectrum, the author notes that more of Molière's plays are enjoying revivals on the stage, and they are just as fresh, topical, and enchantingly funny as they were over three hundred years ago.
Dave Madden has elaborated on the many ways that commedia has influence the great stars of the early silent film era, most importantly Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Chaplin discovered the importance of the costume as “mask” that played such a big role in the identification of stock characters in the commedia troupes. He is quoted as saying that his costume for the Tramp, “ignited all sorts of crazy ideas that I would never have dreamt of until I was dressed and made up as the Tramp” (114).
Madden's description of Keaton's “mask-like deadpan,” (Madden 2) reminds me that the commedia actors wore masks that set and defined their characters. Keaton's control of his facial expression had the same effect of the commedia mask in that it could be read in a broad sense. Even though the camera allowed for a “close up” view of an actor's face, Keaton's portrayal recalls the commedia tradition, whether or not it was consciously intended as such. Madden states that “A provocative comparison lies not in seeing detailed similarities-between characters, for instance—but in seeing certain character traits, story elements, comic routines, principles, and methods of comedy as common to both” (2). He argues that his focus is on silent film rather than later examples with sound because the spirit of commedia is for the most part an active, nonverbal projection of the stock characters. It is the physical form of the comedy that has been able to be passed down over the centuries fairly intact, retaining the intensity and spirit of comedy to appear as fresh as when it was originally conceived. Specific jokes and scenarios may or may not find resonance in different time periods and social settings, but the physicality of commedia never seems to get old.
Madden makes another point that connects commedia to the American silent film era. He reminds us that, with the exception of a few female impersonators, women played an integral part as actresses in commedia troupes, which corresponds to the the “emancipated” young Victorian women, like Mabel Normand, who appeared in silent films like a “reincarnated Renaissance Isabella” (46). Madden is talking about Isabella Andreini who was a famous commedia troupe with her husband Francesco, called Flaminio Scala, and later had their own company, I Gelosi. She was so well liked that her name was used later as a stock character name by other companies to honor her after her death. He likens the Keystone bathing beauties to the ballerinas of the commedia, both exemplifying a sexual freedom in the public display of women's bodies that was was groundbreaking in each of those time periods (46).
Madden notes that “the silent slapstick actors came from the ranks of the American minstrel shows, the circus clowns, the stage comics of the Victoria London Music Hall, the rubes and buffoons of vaudeville and burlesque” but “the rigid routines were given new freedom in silent slapstick” (138).
Slapstick stage business also can be traced back to the commedia troupes when it was called “lazzi” or ribbon, and since these comic bits weave in and out of the plot like a ribbon, the term is appropriate. We also get the term “slapstick” from Harlequin's bat, which was “a stick made of two limber pieces of wood bound at the handle” (Madden 60) that would make a large cracking noise when hit against an object or body but not harm the actor. This was used in scenes in which Pantaloon would give Harlequin beatings, or when Harlequin would get revenge and arrange beatings or accidents for his master (Madden 66). Madden clarifies that the lazzi was not just indiscriminate “horseplay” but “structured gags” rehearsed with “mathematical precision” in the “timing, pacing and spacing” so that even when audiences were familiar with the routines, the element of surprise and suspense was still there (62).
Madden's thesis connects the commedia slapstick to Charlie Chaplin's cane and also props like the cop with a stick or villain with a sword. This reminded me of a comedy by Murray Schisgal, A Need for Brussels Sprouts, that I directed at Kansas State University. A cop swings her nightstick threateningly and damages a prized antique table, producing a comic outcry by its owner. Obviously, the playwright was writing in the time honored slapstick tradition.
The physical comedy tradition of the silent film stars was passed down to one of the all time great comediennes, Lucille Ball. She had been a glamorous movie star playing “showgirls” and “gangster molls” early in her career, but in the mid-1940s, she worked in the comedy unit at Columbia Pictures (Brady 164). Under the tutelage of Buster Keaton at Columbia and great physical comedians like Red Skelton in the film Dubarry Was a Lady (1943), Lucy honed the comic timing and physical comedy skills that would define and highlight the rest of her illustrious career. She was a recipient in a long line of masters of commedia dell'arte stretching over the centuries from the provinces of Italy, to Molière's Palais Royale theatre in Paris, all the way to Hollywood’s silent film era and the present day post-modern sketch type comedies.
If there is a continuing theme in all of this, it might be that, as artists look to the great masters of earlier generations for inspiration to create their own works of art, they may not fully realize the extent to which their action is part of a continuum of “artistic energy” as opposed to Greenblatt's “social energy.” In effect, they are passing the torch of a tradition on to future generations of artists. The song lyrics by the late composer Peter Allen come to my mind for some reason, “Everything old is new again.” But as soon as I recall this song, I remember the reason perhaps for its popping into my consciousness. A few years back, I saw the Broadway show that depicted Allen's show business career. It began in his homeland of Australia and included a marriage to Liza Minelli as well as a cabaret act that featured his vibrant physical style of performance. The Boy From Oz starred Hugh Jackman in a phenomenally dynamic, exuberant physical performance that recalled for me another incredible performance over twenty years earlier by Kevin Kline in a musical with Imogene Coca called On the Twentieth Century. Both actors portrayed the style of acting that I'm sure was done so brilliantly by Molière, who, in turn, took after the greats of the commedia stage. There is no doubt that the plays themselves had to be tailored to showcase the highly skilled, high energy acting techniques that these actors utilized in their performances. Once you have seen this type of work in person, it is thoroughly mesmerizing, exhilarating and ultimately unforgettable. Jackman's performance was perhaps the thing that drew me back to the theatre, and to studying theatre after an absence of many decades. Discovering the works of Moliere, Aphra Behn and other like-minded playwrights has been an incredible treasure that I may not have had without the spark that was kept alive by actors, playwrights and directors in live theatre productions and evolved again in the media of film and television.
It was silent film star, Harold Lloyd, who said, “Comedy that is basic will live forever, because its language is universal” (Cahn 20). I have always had a strong attraction to this great tradition of comic zannis who were able to delight audiences hundreds of years ago. Molière, perhaps without realizing it, by appropriating and adapting ideas that inspired him in the comedy classics of an earlier era, was actually handing down to posterity the comic traditions that may continue to delight audiences for centuries to come.
Bibliography
Andrews, Richard. “Molière, commedia dell'arte, and the Question of Influence in Early Modern European Theatre.” The Modern Language Review, Vol. 100, No. 2 (Apr., 2005), 444-463. Modern Humanities Research Association. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3737608
Bermel, Albert. Molière's Theatrical Bounty, A New View of the Plays. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.
Bradby, David, and Andrew Calder, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Molière. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006
Brady, Kathleen. Lucille: the Life of Lucille Ball. New York: Hyperion, 1994.
Cahn, William. Harold Loyd's World of Comedy. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1964.
Gaines, James F., ed. The Molière Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002
Lawner, Lynne Harlequin on the Moon: commedia dell'Arte and the visual arts. New York: Abrams, 1998.
Lewis, D. B. Windham. Molière: The Comic Mask. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1959.
Madden, David. Harlequin's Stick, Charlie's Cane. Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1975.
Nurse, Peter Hampshire. Molière and the Comic Spirit. Geneva: Librairie Droz S.A., 1990.
