The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendenci...es and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The comic imagination deals in miraculous transformations and instantaneous casting-off of burdens and sufferings. It releases sud...den floods of feelings and allows the purging of enmity in play. The comic sense can cause a sensation of wholeness and integrity of being, though one that is almost brief and passing. When we are in a festive mood and laughing, we seem to go out of our normally anxious, reflective selves into a different phase of being, and the comic flow within us dissolves our sense of limitation. Time stands still, and we feel ourselves to be the center of life. Mirth so intensifies the moment that it could be described as sanctifying life by the sheer unself-conscious vitality that it stimulates within us. No wonder, then, that the act of laughter and the surge of comic joy in a death-haunted, misery-prone creature could be, and sometimes has been, seen and felt as a natural intrusion of the miraculous into the self--as, that is, a religious experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Micawber] is not only the greatest of Dickens' comic figures, but, with the one exception of Falstaff, he is the greatest comic f...igure in the whole range of English literature, a literature supremely rich in such characters. Falstaff is greater because he is himself a comic genius; in him the two familiar types of characters, the comic rogue and the comic butt, are combined, for he is a comic rogue who is his own butt, and as such he is unique. To this must be added his extraordinary versatility, the teeming abundance of his wit and humour, ranging from crude horse-play to a kind of comic philosophy, which is only displayed within a comparatively small compass ... but makes him tower over every other comic character. Micawber must be included in quite another category, namely, that of the great solemn fools, who do not offer us their wit and humour but only themselves, who do not make jokes but are themselves one endless joke. If Micawber--and all the persons of his kind (and most of us have known a few)Mshould realise even for a moment that he is funny, he would be ruined for us; but happily he does not, and while we are actually in his presence--and what a presence--we too must be as solemn as he is, the greatest of all the great solemn fools.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whereas the comic confronts simply logical contradictions, the tragic confronts a moral predicament. Not minor matters of true and... false but crucial questions of right and wrong, good and evil face the tragic character in a tragic situation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My family's lives were not on television, not in books, not even comic books. There was a myth of the poor in this country, but it... did not include us, no matter how hard I tried to squeeze us in. There was an idea of the good poor--hard-working, ragged but clean, and intrinsically honorable. I understood that we were the bad poor ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What the Journal posits is not the tragic question, the Madman's question: "Who am I?", but the comic question, the Bewildered Man...'s question: "Am I?" A comic--a comedian, that's what the Journal keeper is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A tragic poet will never think of grouping around the chief character in his play secondary characters to serve as simplified copi...es, so to speak, of the former. The hero of a tragedy represents an individuality unique of its kind. It may be possible to imitate him, but then we shall be passing, whether consciously or not, from the tragic to the comic. No one is like him, because he is like no one. But a remarkable instinct, on the contrary, impels the comic poet, once he has elaborated his central character, to cause other characters, displaying the same general traits, to revolve as satellites round him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I'd bet I wouldn't lose 10% of my papers over the... next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today's comedian has a cross to bear that he built himself. A comedian of the older generation did an "act" and he told the audien...ce, "This is my act." Today's comic is not doing an act. The audience assumes he's telling the truth. What is truth today may be a damn lie next week.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Doubtless the main difference between the novel and the romance is the way in which they view reality. The novel renders reality c...losely and in comprehensive detail. It takes a group of people and sets them going about the business of life. We come to see these people in their real complexity of temperament and motive. Character is more important than action or plot, and probably the tragic or comic actions of the narrative will have the primary purpose of enhancing our knowledge of and feeling for an important character, a group of characters, or a way of life.... By contrast the romance, following distantly the medieval example, feels free to render reality in less volume and detail. It tends to prefer action to character, and action will be freer in a romance than in a novel, encountering, as it were, less resistance from reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »