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Kamarck, Edward (ed.) / Arts in society: the arts of activism
(1969)
Holden, Joan
Part VI: Guerilla theatre: comedy and revolution, pp. [415]-[420]
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Page [415]
* A i an r 3 -- ^- I - - - t1\ftI\8 L I Iè J L . ,W I i *I RUZZANTE OR THE VETERAN by The San Francisco COMEDY AND REVOLUTION Photograph by Charles Bigelow by Joan Holden "Don't you find that your comedy gets in the way of what you are trying to say?" A question often posed by serious-minded members of the audience. There is a general prejudice that says that laughter is a diversion, a vacation from serious concerns. Among radicals this takes the form "That was fun but now let's get back to the revolution." Comic artists are accustomed to being treated as lightweights and generally don't bother to argue; however, the times, which everyone feels changing, oblige all artists to justify what they are doing, and here is an occasion. A defense of comedy as revolutionary art implies a theory of revolutionary art. It is easy enough to show - as F. M. Cornford, Freud, and Northrup Frye have done - that the concerns of comedy are as serious, indeed usually the same, as those of tragedy. THE TROJAN WOMAN and LYSISTRATA are opposite projections of a single reality: In the starkest terms, comedy and tragedy dramatize the struggle between life and death; in tragedy death wins, in comedy life. But this is precisely the Mime Troupe a: iu
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