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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Comedy From Tragedy,
By Jim and Kate Musgrove (Lamoni, IA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Tragedy and Comedy (A Da Capo paperback) (Paperback)
Walter Kerr offers this exhaustive study into the nature of comedy for us to explore. He started out, by his own admission, trying to write a book about the nature of comedy only and not involving tragedy. As he went along, he realized that he could not do so for the very root of comedy is tragedy. Comedy is born through proper, high tragic elements and lets the viewer see the "behind the scenes" or the "truth" of an event. A tragic moment is a man stepping up to the microphone and letting you know that the president has been shot. The "truthful" or "comic" moment is the exact same scene, but you see the man stub his toe on the platform and whisper an expletive right when he gets into microphone range. It is a fantastic book and puts Walter Kerr up there with the top critics of modern times.
5.0 out of 5 stars
We all knew it was so, but who explained it better than Kerr...?,
By
This review is from: Tragedy and Comedy (A Da Capo paperback) (Paperback)
Comedy is related to tragedy. Isn't that common knowledge? I cannot have been more than ten years old when I first discussed with a friend, anxious with the notion that we had discovered something truthful, that humor more often than not derives from the misfortune of others; "It's not funny," we recognized, "when for instance someone gets well from the hospital." (If, on the other hand, someone gets well from the hospital only to be victim of an accident while walking down the outdoor steps...) However, in TRAGEDY & COMEDY, critic and playwright Walter Kerr goes much further than simply giving examples of comedy that is also tragic in essence. Beginning with the earliest Greek plays, pre-dating even Aristophanes, and gradually approaching our own time through discussion of Shakespeare, Molière, J.B. Shaw, Wilde, T.S. Eliot, Chaplin and Beckett, he explains how comedy actually is an direct exstension of tragedy, not just a relative. As with another, perhaps more famous book of his entitled THE SILENT CLOWNS, this book turns out to provide insights that are relevant not only with regard to the subject matter; Kerr has the persuading ability to enrichen the reader's understanding of human nature and behavior in itself, though he always remains very much on-topic. This is not to say that I always agree with him, for there were definitely times throughout the reading that I found my own viewpoints differing vastly from his, but one of the reasons why Kerr remains one of my favorite writers is that he, irrelevant of whether you agree with him or not, never fails to make you truly think, consider thoroughly what he has to say, and sometimes even relate it to other aspects of life. The book is inevitably a must-read to anyone interested in the evolution and mechanics of drama, but should also be of great interest to the aspiring writer, as Kerr also goes at length to cover the different genres found within the general terms of tragedy and comedy; when discussing fantasy, he states: "Take something away from the clogging complexity of man's daily journey, remove any single thread from the multicolored strait jacket man wears, and the consequent freedom of movement, however narrow or particular its channel may be, instantly opens the door to fantasy. There is now one cord that cannot coil about the clown's neck..."One occasional, slight difficulty with the book I found to be that Kerr generally expects the reader to be acquainted with the names and plays he discusses; this is not a problem when he's dealing with the more well-known personalities mentioned above, for instance, but there are also times when he brings more obscure things to light. On the other hand, this is really a minor problem in today's age of the Internet (I'd probably have found it more bothersome had I read the book when it was first published in -67). TRAGEDY & COMEDY is probably my favorite book of Kerr's so far; although I do love THE SILENT CLOWNS, it suffers occasionally from taking too little into account the different eras and creative circumstances of each comedian, which becomes more visible when considering all the new information about silent comedy that has been unveiled since the book was written. TRAGEDY & COMEDY, on the other hand, seems hardly to have been touched by the hands of age (except, of course, that Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis no longer define the comedy of our own era).
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