The comic robotic : Tomkins’s flawed automaton and the comic character

Comedy narratives present us with flawed characters who make disastrous choices with enjoyable and mechanical regularity. The comic character is an exaggeration of the human personality and Silvan Tomkins’s Affect theory provides a useful model to describe the workings of the comic form. Of particular interest is his model of the hypothetical robot, the flawed automata that lends itself to Henri Bergson’s sense of the mechanical or rigidity in comic behaviour. Affect is the overlooked dimension of comic effect and this paper uses Affect theory to examine the comic personality and how its construction limits Affective responses to protect characters from suffering and engender positive Affective responses, the comic effect, in the viewer and reader of literary and screen comedy narrative.