ENGL 207
Comedy Fall 2024 (also offered Spring 2025)
Division I Writing Skills

Is comedy necessary? What calls for comedy? And why does comedy often deal with topics that we think are no laughing matters? When we respond to comedy, whom are we laughing with, and whom are we laughing at? When does comedy become obsolete, and how do new comedic voices and figures emerge? How do old comedies find new audiences, and when they do, does that reflect a deep continuity between the context of its making and that of its reception? Or, can comedies leave their origins behind and find new meaning in radically different historical contexts? Answers to these questions differ wildly across comedies. In this course, we will look at comedies from various historical periods (ancient to contemporary), cultural traditions, and artforms (drama, fiction, film, stand-up). We will study their conventions, plots, props, jokes, and running gags (both physical and verbal). At times, we will try to approach the comedies from the inside by recreating some of its effects and come to understand how they are made. A variety of critical theories that will help us consider comedy’s connections to embodiment, ritual, sexuality, history, and racial difference. We will engage with comedic works by William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Richard Pryor, and Cheryl Dunye. Alongside the comedic works we will engage with the social and aesthetic theories of Anne Carson, Northrop Frye, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Saidiya Hartman.