Dark Comedy - General introduction

 

                In English literature, there are many plays which do not belong to Romantic comedy, comedy of manners, Comedy of Humours and Sentimental comedy, which may not even be funny or amusing or cheerful but it generally go under the name of comedy. 

              Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Eliot's The Cocktail Party both can be called comedies, but both have very little common with each other and even less with plays. Unhappy at having no readymade name to attach to this kind of play, critics and historians have used phrase like 'Tragi - comedy', 'Comic tragedy' and 'Dark comedy- black comedy'.

                   The best examples of the Dark comedy is Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida. Both are cynical; bitter and unpleasant. 

                 Troilus and Cressida is not the sort of play from which one can gets many 'good laughs', though some modern producers have tried hard to make it so. Anti- heroic, anti- romantic Troilus makes fun of human greatness. 

        "No man is a hero of his valet".

                 The whole story is about war over beautiful Helen. Though it's a very complex one, it is called as comedy.

                   Measure for Measure is an interest study of a man, who would now be called a 'sexual psychopath'. It contains much discussion of serious moral and intellectual problems.

                     Look Back in Anger is one of the best of work of Osborne. It's like the artificial "drawing- room" comedies that have always popular in the commercial theatre. The subject of  Look Back in Anger is basically the hidden class war between those who have grown up in comfortable bourgeois homes and those who have fought their way up the social stairs by their own intelligence. After Look Back in Anger the phrase 'angry young man' became popular. 'kitchen sink drama' is a phrase used by those who perhaps saw the dark comedy of the time as a sign of imminent social revolution.

              Wesker is the most important writer of the dark comedy. His play The kitchen was actually set in the kitchen of a London restaurant and showed the relation both tragic and comic between the people working there. His three plays, Chicken soup with Barely, Roots and I am talking about Jerusalem are concerned with the same Jewish family from the east End of land. The trilogy shows a group of people who are basically loving and idealistic, trying in a small way to improve the world and build a better life for themselves, but generally defeated and frustrated by the hard facts of life and human nature. This trilogy seems have the unusual mixture of comedy and tragedy, social consciousness and human warmth which one finds in writers like chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens.

           So, the Dark comedy generally means the mixture of comedy and tragedy. That is why it is called as a tragi- comedy.