Abstract

The following is a study of the relation between the rational and the comic in modern comedy in terms of recurring types of human behavior, patterns of rational attitude and their problems. As all great analysts of the comic have argued, laughter, the ridiculous, thesatyrical, the ironical, and the like, both in life and in literature, are inextricably related to rationality. Without indulging in extensive definitions, it is clear that comic phenomena are generated by “disturbed relations” to certain historically-given types of rationality. Where there is a comic personality, there is also rationality. Otherwise, there would be no way to gauge the ‘disturbed relation’ to rationality in the artistic world.