So, I haven't posted in a while. You may be wondering why. I'm here to explain that.
I am a sloth. Pronounced "slowth", because I'm lazy in the British way. I just forget to do things and continually put them off until I elect Boris Johnson and that makes everything worse.
That is beyond the point. I'm here to talk to you about Dante's Inferno. Is it a comedy?
Obviously, yes it is, but that raises a bigger question; what is a comedy? We have the definition in the reference book. a story that deals with the internal affairs of a person (I'm heavily paraphrasing), but is that what a comedy is today?
Comedy is, in my (and in many others) view, an unspoken truth revealed to an audience by a performer. Take my lovely impression of Mr. Adair at a funeral. We all KNOW that that is what he would do, but you didn't know that you knew it until I revealed it to you.
This definition doesn't extend to everything as easily. My favorite movie, Mel Brooks's The Producers has very few unspoken truths revealed. It is more absurdist in some parts, and yet it is still hilarious.
I've waxed philosophic for long enough. What do you all define comedy as?
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According to the Webster's Dictionary the definition of a comedy is generally some sort of literary work that ends in a happy ending. HOWEVER, according wikipedia, a good modern definition of comedy is "a genre of fiction that refers to any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, television, film, stand-up comedy, or any other medium of entertainment." I believe what makes something a comedy in our modern society is something that makes us laugh. So if we go by the wiki definition (which I prefer) then Dante's Inferno is not a comedy. So far, I have not laughed once.
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