SENTIMENTAL COMEDY
- middle-class protagonists triumphantly overcome a series of moral trials
- aimed at producing tears, not laughter
- characters are inherently good but can be influenced by bad examples
- characters have a virtuous nature
LAUGHING COMEDY
- meant to produce laughter, not tears
- characters are of a lowly nature
- vices of characters exposed
There was one passage from Goldsmith's essay that we did not get to in class today. I'd like to use this blog post to get some of your thoughts on it:
"Humor at present seems to be departing from the stage, and it will soon happen that our comic players will have nothing left for it but a fine coat and a song. It depends upon the audience whether they will actually drive those poor merry creatures from the stage, or sit at a play as gloomy as at the Tabernacle. It is not easy to recover an art when once lost; and it would be but a just punishment that when, by our being too fastidious, we have banished humor from the stage, we should ourselves be deprived of the art of laughing."
Do you agree with Goldsmith? Do you think that sentimental comedies were a departure away from Aristotle's idea of a comedy? If sentimental comedies had continued to be as successful as they were in the late 18th century, do you think that we would have been "deprived of the art of laughing?"
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