Bentley Finds 'Misery' in Comedy, Compares It With Tragedy, Farce

Comedy, like tragedy, is based upon misery, said Eric Bentley last night in the last of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures. "Psychologists know that a patient's vehement 'no' means 'yes,'" and in the same way, carefree laughter at a comedy is a cover-up for anxiety.

Comedy indicates a "different temperament" from tragedy, Bentley said. "It prefers only to hint at the serious side," while tragedy confronts pain directly, "taking terror by the hand." Comedy "veils its feelings with eloquencies, while tragedy is a "long lament."

Nevertheless, he maintained, tragedy and comedy have the same goal--self-knowledge--and they use the same means to reach it. "In comedy the ego takes just as terrible a beating as in tragedy, even though knaves and fools are cut down, and not a hero." Since people in the audience can't identify themselves with the knaves and fools, they identify themselves with the author, he claimed.

Bentley criticized strongly comedy's "reputation for frivolity." "If a comedy attains grandeur, critics don't call it a comedy," he said. "Someone should collect all the plays that are called not a comedy, not a tragedy, and not a play. I am convinced that it would be the greatest collection of dramas ever made."

He also compared comedy with farce. "Pure aggression lies beneath the surface of farce.... The one simple pleasure is hitting someone in the jaw without getting hit back... There is no time to feel sorry; people are too bus punching noses."

Bentley devoted the last half of his lecture to discussing "revenge, justice, and bitterness" in all forms of drama. He traced revenge to its "leading role" in real life.

"We begin our lives by punishing our siblings. In adolescence we punish our parents. When we marry we continue the punishment by other means, till death do us part."

Justice a "Fraud"

"But the idea of revenge is not as welcome to the human race as the reality," Bently claimed. Men have to pretend it is "equitable punishment." They call it "justice a Fraud, both in private life and in the courts."

He applied this to the case of Adolf Eichmann. "Eichmann is one of the wickedest men that ever lived," he said, but suggested that "justice toward Eichmann" is really "sadistic pleasure in punishing." "Isn't this Eichmann's kind of pleasure?"