Genre Criticism

A method for defining the comic genre by criteria of form, content and social context. It is of decisive importance that comedy is embedded in a Dionysiac festival and is thereby oriented towards the low, the corporeal and the grotesque. A simple plot serves to carry the comic farce and the jokes. There is no "dramatic illusion": the characters always speak with awareness of the audience. Comedy can make use of every kind of discourse in the world in which it lives, including literature, and is thus quintessentially intertextual, metatheatrical and parodic. The comic hero betakes himself, beyond the bounds of probability and in defiance of the laws of space and time, into another world, painted mainly in atavistic hues. The complementary scenarios form an experimental arsenal from which the spectator can fashion power to break the limitations of everyday life.