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Humour is a feeling of distance.
-(Brecht 2003, 27).1
ARE BRECHT AND COMEDY A NON SEQUITUR? IN THE ANGLOPHONE world his status as a "political artist," which in his case means a communist artist, does not resonate with notions of humor because neither politics nor the left is generally associated with comedy and laughter. His biting satires, grotesque parodies, and sharp irony may be aimed at eliciting laughter, but the emotional registers of shock, astonishment, and embarrassment are more likely to accompany the mockery, sarcasm, and ridicule one finds in his stage plays. If not the most prominent, Brecht certainly counts among the most important German writers of the twentieth century-a status he achieved, however, only after his death in 1956. And he is still characterized today by controversies generated in the competitive politics of the Cold War: is he first and foremost a political writer or a poet with political ideas? In fact, statistics reveal that through the 1990s he remained among the top four foreign language playwrights on American stages (next to Molière, Ibsen, and Chekhov), with the most frequently produced plays rotating from year to year among The Threepenny Opera, The Good Person of Szechwan, Mother Courage, The Life of Galileo, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle; the same is true for German-language stages in Europe (Weber 1993). While there is plenty of disagreement and controversy among scholars and aficionados as well as theater historians and practitioners as to what Brecht's theater is all about, there is consensus that he did not write comedies, certainly not in the technical sense of plays with happy endings that express a utopian desire for social harmony in the mode of Aristophanes, Shakespeare, or Molière. And even though Brecht actually called a small number of his plays comedies, those appellations tended to change as he typically revised and reworked the texts for production or publication. Thus, the subtitle of the manuscript version of Drums in the Night was "Komödie" (1920), which was later dropped for the subtitle "Drama" (1922), while he referred to different versions of Baal (in 1919 and 1920) either as a comedy or half-comedy. Other plays Brecht referred to as comedies are Man Equals Man (1926, "Lustspiel"), Puntila and His Man Matti (1940, "Volksstück"),...