Comedy in Humanities

Comedy in Life

Humanities is the the academic study of human culture. When people usually hear the term humanity, they think it means what makes humans, human. How did we get here is usually the question associated with humanities. When I think about humanities I think about war, music, art, history, literature and comedy. Comedy though, isn't a topic that is closely related to humanities, since not many people associate comedy with humanities. However, the human race never would have grown quite like it had if it wasn't for the lightheartedness of comedy helping us relax and rewind day after day. What I propose in the paper is not to discuss events of the human race, but rather how comedy helped shaped our morals and ideologies and the way that comedy has grown and evolved many eras.

Comedy in Ancient Greek was speculated to began with the Komos. According to Simpson “The Komos was a curious and improbable spectacle in which a company of festive males apparently sang, danced, and cavorted rollicking around the image of a large phallus” (Simpson). Whether or not this depiction is accurate, comedy began in the Aristotle era, and since then it has grown and evolved, but one factor has always remained the same, a comedy isn't a comedy unless there is a happy ending. The theme for comedies seems to not take place on a battlefield. We leave that to a tragedy, a comedy is meant to take place in a happy setting, in Ancient Greece that was usually associated with the bedroom. That doesn't mean that sex is supposed to be funny, back then that was definitely the case, but a comedy is meant to have a happy ending and the bedroom was associated with that feeling in Aristotle's time.

In the Ancient Greek era, there were typically two types of scenarios in a comedic play; the comic hero, and then there are ordinary people. Both types very closely resembled each other but were completely different. The comic hero wasn't was we today would think him to be. Back then the...