Howerd and Horace Go Live

When Carlson talks about Roman theories of theatre, he gets into comedy. Since I don't like comedy theatre that much, the work of an unknown fan of Aristotle, which delineates the structure and characters of comedy drama, was bound to drive me frantic. Carlson is probably looking at comedy because Latin only really produced any worthwhile playwrights in this genre and, as he notes, both Terence and Plautus would use their prologues to make a few points about the nature of the art.

Later, Frankie Howerd would use the prologue for a weekly laugh on his acclaimed hist-com, Up Pompeii. And in the same way that Howerd made a living out of ripping Plautus for undemanding 1970s TV audiences, Carlson is quick to remind the reader that Rome owed a great deal to the Greeks. Even when he gets onto Cicero (who had a few opinions on comedy, in the context of how to give a good speech), he suggests that Cicero's deft summing up of the genre - 'an imitation of life, a mirror of custom and an image of truth' - probably has a Greek source.

I doubt that. The meaninglessness of the words, which could apply to any performance, even the Live Art Happenings that passed for rhetoric in Cicero's time and the use of a tricolon makes this sound very much like the sort of thing a Roman would say. Especially one who was a master of the smoke and mirrors school of legal speech like The Big C.

When Carlson gets onto Horace, he observes that it is unlikely that the early Romans had read Aristotle. I envy them that, and wonder how it reflects on the works of Seneca. But there are bigger problems using Horace and Cicero as sources:  they are talking broadly about poetry. The idea of the text is being foregrounded. The actual performance, the theatricality, is being ignored.

I am also a little bit of a snob about comedy, too.

One of Aristotle's Lot Liked Jim Davidson

I'm jumping past Aristotle in Theories of the Theatre. I have had enough of The Unities and All That Jazz for the moment. When I taught Classics, it was assumed that Aristotle would be taught before the students were even allowed to look at an actual play. Never mind that his theories fail to hold up to the closest inspection. It's like being nagged until you admit that you love Oedipus more than he loved his mother.

So, onto the Romans: I love Latin literature, but they don't have any great playwrights. The consensus is that they basked in the Glory that was Greece. I reckon they had a choice - lions eating Christians or theatre. And lions eating Christians had more bang for the buck. It's the same problem for contemporary theatre when it comes up against Iron Man III.

My opposition to Aristotle is such that I was on the side of the bad guys in The Name of The Rose (they were trying to destroy Aristotle's lost work on comedy). Now it turns out that a late manuscript called the Tractatus Coislinuianus comes from the Roman era, and might even be that very text - more likely to have been a fanzine, though.

Aristotle's ponderous analysis is totally evident, alas: poetry is divided into the mimetic and the non-mimetic. The mimetic into narrative and dramatic... and so on. Comedy gets the definition it really needed.

Comedy is an imitation of an action that is imperfect and ludicrous... through pleasure and laughter effecting the purgation of the like emotions.

If that isn't the best justification for a Jim Davidson marathon, I am not sure I'll ever find a reason to buy the complete series of Big Break. And I mean it: Jimbo is certainly ludicrous and imperfect, and by laughing at his jokes, I am purging the emotions that they appeal to. It's obvious: all those jokes about Chalky were cleansing the United Kingdom of racism.