The Persons of the Play

Synopsis of The Comedy of Errors

Act I

Because a law forbids merchants from Syracuse to enter Ephesus, elderly Syracusian trader Egeon faces execution when he is discovered in the city. He can only escape by paying a fine of a thousand marks. He tells his sad story to Solinus, Duke of Ephesus. In his youth, Egeon married and had twin sons. On the same day, a poor woman without a job also gave birth to twin boys, and he purchased these as slaves to his sons. Soon afterward, the family made a sea voyage and was hit by a tempest. Egeon lashed himself to the main-mast with one son and one slave, and his wife took the other two infants. His wife was rescued by one boat, Egeon by another. Egeon never again saw his wife or the children with her. Recently his son Antipholus, now grown, and his son's slave Dromio left Syracuse to find their brothers. When Antipholus did not return, Egeon set out in search of him. The Duke is moved by this story and grants Egeon one day to pay his fine. That same day, Antipholus arrives in Ephesus, searching for his brother. He sends Dromio to deposit some money at The Centaur, an inn. He is confounded when the identical Dromio of Ephesus appears almost immediately, denying any knowledge of the money and asking him home to dinner, where his wife is waiting. Antipholus, thinking his servant is making insubordinate jokes, beats Dromio of Ephesus.

Act II

Dromio of Ephesus returns to his mistress, Adriana, saying that her “husband” refused to come back to his house, and even pretended not to know her. Adriana, concerned that her husband's eye is straying, takes this news as confirmation of her suspicions.

I distinguish between why people laugh and what makes people laugh. They are different matters. Nobody knows why we laugh, though over the millennia, philosophers, psychologists, sages and theorists of one kind or another have tried to answer this question. Aristotle suggested, for example, that we laugh at people made ridiculous, which suggests that superiority is the reason why we laugh. Other philosophers have suggested that incongruity is the basis of all humor; we expect something and get something else. You find this in the punch lines of jokes. Freud and many psychoanalytically inclined scholars suggest that masked aggression is the basis of humor. Gregory Bateson and others like him have argued that humor involves cognition and various forms of processing communication and meta-communications to generate humor. There are endless theories on why people laugh, but no general agreement on the matter, though I would say that incongruity theories tend to be dominant.

Why We Laugh

Humor is a subject that has attracted the attention and interest of some of our greatest minds, from Aristotle and Kant to Bergson and Freud. Humor has fascinated psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, linguists and many other kinds of scholars and thinkers. It has also fascinated and played an important part in the work of our greatest writers, such as Cervantes, Shakespeare, Moliere, Swift and Twain. One could cite many others. Yet, curiously, after thousands of years spent trying to understand humor, there is still a great deal of controversy about what humor is, what humor does, and why something is funny. On Google, under “Humor Theory,” we find 19,500,000 results and on Amazon .c om books we find over 10,000 books. (Accessed 10/20/2021).

There are, however, some important theories on this matter which I would like to discuss here. I will start with superiority theories.

Aristotle and Superiority Theories of Comedy

For Aristotle, comedy (and I will use the terms humor and comedy interchangeably, though comedy is, technically speaking, a literary form) is based on “an imitation of men worse than the average,” of people who are “ridiculous.” Hobbes, in a classic formulation, carried the same idea a bit further.

The semiotic theory of humor is allied to the cognitive theory. Semiotics asks how meaning is generated in daily life and, for our purposes, in any text. It seeks to answer this question by analyzing the signification found in a given text and by trying to elicit the polar oppositions (or sets of paired opposites) implicit in any work. It also seeks to understand the way the narrative functions (when there is one). These two operations involve investigating the paradigmatic (or oppositional) and the syntagmatic (or linear, narrative) aspects of the text. According to the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the syntagmatic analysis of a text tells us the manifest content, what the text (a joke or any other form of humor) is about, and the paradigmatic analysis tells us the latent content, what the joke “really” means. And this meaning is hidden; it is not the same as the subject of the joke or work of humor or text.

An Overview of Semiotics

Since many people are not familiar with semiotics, I offer here an overview of some of its basic concepts.

Ferdinand de Saussure's book, Course in General Linguistics, published in 1915 (and in an English translation in 1959) is not known to the general public. And Saussure is not a name that many people are familiar with—the way they are with Freud, Darwin, Einstein or Marx. But this book is, we now recognize, a seminal book, one of the most important books published in the twentieth century, and Saussure's ideas have influenced scholars not only in linguistics but in many other disciplines.

Saussure is the founding father of semiology—which means, literally, “words about” or “the study of” (logos, logy) signs (sēmeȋon). Sēmeîon is the Greek word for sign. An American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, developed a different theory of signs, which he called semiotics, and it is semiotics that is now accepted as the term to be used for the study of signs.

But what's a sign? And how do signs function? For our purposes, let me define a sign as “anything that can be made to stand for something else.

When I decided to write a book on Shakespeare's comedies, I did not know how I would proceed. I love Shakespeare's comedies but I soon realized that I would either have to write an enormous book with chapters on each of his 13 (by some critics) comedies or find a different way to organize my book.

I had written an analysis of Twelfth Night that I used in my book, The Art of Comedy Writing and that made me think about twins. That led me to write a chapter on The Comedy of Errors, which has two sets of identical twins in it, and I concluded that a book about Shakespeare's comedies and one with two sets of identical twins was a good play to analyze in the book.

I decided to offer a chapter on different theories of humor and one on the semiotics of humor for those not familiar with academic discourse on these topics. I also considerably revised a list of techniques of humor that I had developed and written about in several of my books on humor, and that is found in my glossary chapter. I changed many of the examples of the techniques and substituted jokes and other texts for what I used in the original version. I’ve always felt that a book on humor should have lots of jokes and other kinds of humorous texts in it.

The Importance of Twins

Writing about plays is difficult because I believe it is important to quote relevant lines from the play to illustrate whatever topic I was writing about, which means I had to copy many lines of dialogue. This was a particularly difficult problem with The Comedy of Errors because in many cases I had to identify Antipholus of Syracuse or Antipholus of Ephesus and Dromio of Syracuse and Dromio of Ephesus, which resulted in my adopting a different format for this chapter, with the title of the speaker above the dialogue, so readers can know which Antipholus or Dromio Shakespeare was writing about.

Semiotics and Comedy

My analysis of the play is semiotically informed. We see this in my syntagmatic and paradigmatic analyses of The Comedy of Errors and in my discussion of someof the techniques of humor—some 45 that I’ve identified—that Shakespeare employed in writing the play.

The 45 Techniques of Humor

As the result of the research I conducted many years ago, on the techniques of humor, on what “makes us laugh,” I came up with 45 techniques that, I argue, generate humor in everything from jokes and cartoons to dramatic comedies. I wrote a book, The Art of Comedy Writing, in which I use these 45 techniques to analyze dramatic comedies (plays) from Roman times to the present. When I finished my research, I had 45 techniques of humor, found in the tables that follow, that I soon realized could be classified in 4 ways: humor based on language, logic, identity and action. Visual aspects of comedy are covered in various techniques involving identity.

Then I enumerated them to make it easier to apply them to texts.

Techniques numbered and in alphabetical order

In my analysis of Shakespeare's play, I will offer examples of the 45 techniques that, I argue, generate humor, mirthful laughter and pleasure in his works. I offer a more detailed analysis (and examples) of the 45 techniques below. When we critique literary works (or in the current jargon “texts”) we use the term “style” to represent what is distinctive and personal in an author's writing. We can also use the word “voice” to stand for the same thing. For great authors, this style or voice is easily recognizable; it has to do with how they use language, with their tone, and with how authors infuse their philosophy and knowledge about life into their works. Some authors adopt what might be described as “comedic style,” namely the techniques they use to generate mirthful laughter. To determine comedic style, we have to know something about the techniques of humor, the subject of this chapter.

I believe that most of these techniques are self-explanatory, but I will briefly explain how I interpret each term, and, in most cases, offer examples. I suggest that the choices an author makes from the techniques and the way an author uses them allow us to define an author's style and understand the humor in a more granular way than is possible with the “why” theories of humor.

There are several things about my list of techniques that should be considered:

I have listed as techniques satire and parody, which many critics see as styles or genres rather than techniques.

How Did I Get Here?

In writing this book I had to ask myself, “how does a person who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Al Capp's comic strip, Li’l Abner, and spent fifty years writing about pop culture, end up writing a book on one of Shakespeare's comedies?” The answer is that Li’l Abner was a humorous comic strip, and my dissertation, published in 1970 as Li’l Abner: A Study in American Satire, showed my early interest in the scholarly study of humor.

My Books on Humor

I have been writing about humor since 1970 and have written about humor in many articles and about humorous comic strips in my book, The Comic-Stripped American (1974) and humorous television shows in my book, The TV-Guided American (1975). I’ve also written about Jewish humor in my books The Genius of the Jewish Joke (Jason Aronson, 1997) and Jewish Jesters: A Study in American Popular Comedy (2001, Hampton Press). I’ve written about humor, in general, in four books: An Anatomy of Humor, The Art of Comedy Writing, Blind Men and Elephants: Perspectives on Humor and Humor Psyche and Society.

An Anatomy of Humor was published in 1993 by Transaction Books and features what I describe as a “Glossary” of the 45 techniques of humor that I discovered in researching humor. The book also has chapters on jokes, Mickey Mouse, Huckleberry Finn, Twelfth Night and Jewish fools. I will say more about these 45 techniques later and offer a revised version of my glossary, since the techniques are central to my analysis of humorous texts. It has many jokes in the book that I analyze and I provide a list of humorous jokes and texts in a separate index in the book.

My next book, Blind Men and Elephants: Perspectives on Humor (Transaction, 1995), has chapters on different disciplinary approaches to the subject: communications, sociological, semiotic, psychological and so on. It also has many jokes in the book and a separate index of jokes. My third book with Transaction (1997), The Art of Comedy Writing, deals with theatrical comedies and has a long chapter on the 45 techniques of humor which it then applies to a play by Plautus, Miles Gloriosus, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Sheridan's The School of Scandal (1777) and Ionesco's remarkable “theater of the absurd” play, The Bald Soprano.