Literary Criticism (1400-1800) | Molière (Vol. 64) - Stephen H. Fleck (essay date 1995)

Stephen H. Fleck (essay date 1995)

SOURCE: “Comic Theory, Molière, and the Comedy-Ballets,” in Music, Dance, and Laughter: Comic Creation in Molière's Comedy-Ballets, Biblio 17, 1995, pp. 21-43.

[In this excerpt, Fleck reviews comic theory from Aristotle to the twentieth century as a context for examining Molière's comic method in his comedy-ballets, focusing on notions of paradox and realism.]

I. MAJOR IDEAS ON THE COMIC: SOME CLASSIC VIEWS AND PROBLEMS

Comedy, the comic, and laughter constitute a famously problematic and ill-defined area of thought; one can scarcely discuss the three terms apart from each other, but each presents problems of definition. For Umberto Eco, the comic is an “umbrella term” covering a wide range of phenomena—irony and the grotesque among many others—and thus susceptible of no single definition (“Frames” 1). Western definitions of comedy as well as of the comic have generally...

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