"Hilarious downfall : comic affect and the shared grammar of literary and screen comedy narratives"

Abstract

This thesis examines the operating principles of comedy narratives across literary and screen forms and describes how we can feel a positive affective response, or comic affect, towards characters we identify with in darker comedy narratives that end in failure. This is not as negatively affective as it may sound. Our bodies fall apart, people are annoying and the world doesn't care if we fail, but our suffering is all fuel for comedy. Comedy narratives, as a general audience expectation, often end in success but failure is a fundamental narrative driver. The failure of the comic character, for various reasons examined in this research, will pilot this thesis on comic affect and its operation in the comedy narrative. Psychologist Silvan S. Tomkins writes of human suffering that "the distance between aspiration and achievement is a perennial source of distress" (313). And this distance is failure, the gap between aspiration and explosion, a permanent condition of the comedy mode. Comic affect takes our distress and places it at some distance from ourselves, giving us room to laugh, a positive affect. I have selected comedy narratives for analysis across a range of media and format as exemplars that value failure as an essential truth about human existence. I also contend that comic affect in both literary and screen comedy narratives is achieved by creating comic distance between the reader or viewer and the narrative. Furthermore the characters of literary and screen comedy narratives are defamiliarised by their comic subjectivity and limitations through the operating principles of exaggeration, comedic incongruity, and the abstraction of violence.

Date of Award	2018
Original language	English