Comedy for the stage of the mind

We enter the many possible worlds of comedy by reading its ultraviolet signals, urging us from behind the words of a text toward some playful vision of the world we know. We have discerned some prototypical features that tend to confirm our presence in these types of worlds, and noted some of the patterns, devices and configurations that serve one of their prized purposes: to make us laugh. We have seen in particular how a clever reassignment of a situation, event or utterance to a relative but teasingly inappropriate framing marks many a comic construction. And we have inspected the humour gadgetry of set-up and reversal, with its resulting gap to be bridged always drawing from deeper down the well of experience than we can articulate.

With this chapter, we embark on a vital next step in learning to feel at home in comic territories: now that we know more of what comedy looks like on the page, we shall shift our attention to what it looks like in the mind. As observed previously, this act of concretization, or filling in the blanks generated by a written text, carries different implications for dramatic reading and for literary.

We saw in Chapter 1 some approaches taken by writers of literary texts, in which comic tones feed upon a disparity between the narrative register and the strip of experience being described.