Comedy commonly conceived is a mere laugh riot. Well, if one were to hunt down the root of the word, etymologically, the word is rooted in the Greek version of 'revelry'. Hence the term basically seems to mean laughter.
When the family friend in the living room, aka television, became 24 x 7, maintaining, rather retaining, audience attention became tough. Most channels hence opted for slastick comedy for audience retention. Nothing wrong in it, per se, as comfy seemed the comedy.
The overdose of the laugh a minute often seems repetitive and hence boring, too. As a result, the audience may remember the alternative, rather the real, meaning of comedy. Actually, if one were to read the classical critical texts such as Aristotle's "Poetics", for instance, the alternative meaning, it would be realised, is the actual meaning of the term.
What then is comedy? It is basically the "happy ending", unlike the tragedies. Currently, may be, life has become so achingly tough that the "happy ending" seems both improbable and impossible (remember Aristotle?) even in art.
Comedy actually means this sunshine feel, the "happily they lived hereafter" end, so to say. That was the meaning across the tradition. Remember the title of Dante's great epic?
Why go so back in time? Well, almost till the 1990's, popular Hindi films were comedies because the rich hero got the poor heroine, or vice versa, as Daddy Cool finally relented with "ja, ji le apni zindagi".
May be, the twenty first century, full of so many difficulties, Y2K to the Lehmann crisis to the corona tragedies, seems to be so unhappy that this original meaning of the term comedy seems to be almost forgotten. Why, even the popular films are tragi-comedies mostly! As the century hurtles from difficulty to tragedy, how to get back the real meaning of 'comedy' in to daily lived lives, that is the question!
Pratima@Our very own "Natyashastra" by Bharat Muni, too, presents comedy thus, as the 'happy ending'. If you were to read up Sanskrit poetics and literary texts, you would realise that the comic, the hasyarasa, is one of the nine bhav/rasa, while comedy would always be the happy ending. Wish we could get it back in our reel and real lives!
No comments:
Post a Comment