Because It's There

A solitary rock is always attractive. All right-minded people feel an overwhelming desire to scale and sit upon it.

-Dorothy Sayers, Have His Carcase, 11.

Two Kingdoms of Comedy

The poet W. H. Auden writes, in a beautiful essay on Shakespeare, that there are actually two distinct genres, one might even say kingdoms, of comedy. The first he calls "classical" comedy, though it can be found in many cultures and in many periods of history. Classical comedy focuses on exposing people who think too highly of themselves or have some otherwise fantastic self-image and mocking them. "When the curtain falls" at the end of a classical comedy, Auden writes, "the audience is laughing and those on stage are in tears." The audience may laugh because they believe themselves to possess arete--"virtue," or more generally, "excellence"--which those on stage so demonstrably lack.

The other kind of comedy is best illustrated by Shakespeare's plays. Take Much Ado About Nothing, for instance: at the end of that play we see a motley collection of people, few if any of whom have behaved especially well. They have exhibited pride, wrath, jealousy, envy, treachery--most of the deadly sins and a sizable collection of venial ones--and a great deal of what can only be called sheer stupidity, especially on the part of the male lead, Claudio. Yet they are all celebrating, joyously, a double wedding...Auden calls this kind of story "Christian comedy," because it is "based upon the belief that all men are sinners; no one, therefore, whatever his rank or talents, can claim immunity from the comic exposure." This is a model of society and human nature that turns the Greek notion of arete on its head, because on this account the truest excellence is to know that you deserve the "comic exposure"--to know that you need forgiveness. When a play like this comes to its end, "the characters are exposed and forgiven: when the curtain falls, the audience and the characters are laughing together."

-Alan Jacobs, Original Sin, 271-272.

Misplaced Humility

What we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought no to assert -- himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt -- the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new skeptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn...The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

-G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 31-32 (Quoted by Alan Jacobs in Shaming the Devil).