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Dana F. Sutton. Catharsis of Comedy. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994. Pp. vii + 126. $18.95.
This book seeks to locate the pleasure peculiar to comic drama in a catharsis that is analogous to Aristotle's tragic catharsis through fear and pity. A view of ancient comedy possibly attributable to Aristotle serves as the cornerstone of this book. However, the author argues that the derivation of Western comedy from the classical tradition and his own emphasis on spectator psychology (which, he seems to assume, transcends culture) may give his theory wider utility.
Sutton notes that although tragic catharsis is better known, the catharsis of comedy is in fact more intuitive and may be pinpointed in "the good honest explosive laugh." If Aristotle had written about comic catharsis, the work has not survived, but a tenth-century manuscript that may reflect an Aristotelian theory of comedy, the Tractatus Coislinianus, is extant. According to the Tractatus, comedy accomplishes "by means of pleasure and laughter the catharsis of such emotions." Tragedy and comedy appear to offer two different kinds of catharsis: the former purges the spectator of bad feelings; the latter induces a surfeit of good feelings which bubble over into laughter. Thus the Tractatus seems to say that comedy makes us feel good by making us laugh.
Combining Aristotle's statement on tragic catharsis with that of the Tractatus on comedy, Sutton produces a definition of comic catharsis more complex than this solipsism. The definition depends on a reading of the ambiguous Greek at Poetics 1449b, ten ton toiouton pathematon katharsin, which Sutton takes to refer to a purgation not only of pity (which he understands as "anxiety") and fear, but of pity, fear, and other such feelings. In this reading he follows Jacob Bernays, who in Grundzuge der verlorenen Abhandlung des Aristotles her Wirkung der Tragodie (Breslau, 1857), describing the medical connotations of catharsis, suggested that tragedy provokes fear and pity in the spectator and induces a purgation of these and similar emotions much as an emetic causes a patient to vomit out both the emetic itself and the poison for which it had been taken. Thus, Sutton concludes, as tragedy employs pity and fear to achieve a catharsis of pity, fear, and similar feelings, so does comedy...