Comedy, Tragedy, and Religion - Softcover

Morreall, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0791442063 ISBN 13: 9780791442067

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 1999

Synopsis

Explicates the worldviews of comedy and tragedy, and analyzes world religions, finding some to be more comic, others more tragic.

Comedy, tragedy, and religion have been intertwined since ancient Greece, where comedy and tragedy arose as religious rituals. This groundbreaking book analyzes the worldviews of tragedy and comedy, and compares each with the world’s major religions. Morreall contrasts the tragic and comic along twenty psychological and social dimensions and uses these to analyze both Eastern and Western traditions.

Although no religion embodies a purely tragic or comic vision of life, some are mostly tragic and others mostly comic. In Eastern religions, Morreall finds no robust tragic vision but does find significant comic features, especially in Taoism and Zen Buddhism. In the Western monotheistic tradition, there are some comic features in the early Bible, but by the late Hebrew Bible, the tragic vision dominates. Two millennia have done little to reverse that tragic vision in Judaism. Christianity, on the other hand, has shown both tragic and comic features―Morreall writes of the Calvinist vision and the Franciscan vision―but in the contemporary era comic features have come to dominate. The author also explores Islam, and finds it has neither a comic nor a tragic vision. And, among new religions, those which emphasize the personal self come close to having an exclusively comic vision of life.

About this title

About the Author

John Morreall is Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Religious Studies Department at the University of South Florida. Among his many works are Taking Laughter Seriously and The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, both published by SUNY Press.

From Publishers Weekly

How does a comic vision of life fit into a religious worldview? Doesn't a tragic vision of life better suit a religious vision? Morreall (Taking Laughter Seriously) provides an accessible survey of the roles that comic visions and tragic visions play in various religions. The author opens his study by examining what he sees as the connections between tragedy, comedy and religion. He argues that all three focus on the incongruities of life and the "disparity between the way things are and the way things should be." Thus, he notes, irony is a prominent feature in the attitudes of comedy, tragedy and religion toward the world. Morreall discusses the nature of tragedy and the nature of comedy, respectively, in two short chapters. He concludes that tragedy "recommends that we be emotionally engaged with incongruities and that we overcome and solve them." Comedy, on the other hand, "encourages an emotional disengagement from our own problems... and playfulness and laughter are comic paradigms for responding to real-life incongruities." The author asserts that religion uses elements of both comic vision and tragic vision to address the incongruities of life. In a series of five chapters on Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, he demonstrates the various ways in which each religion appropriates both comic and tragic features in its teachings and practices. For example, he argues that Eastern religions lack a tragic vision of life because they do not focus on an individual struggling amid suffering, while Western religions, on the other hand, do. After a thorough study of the uses of comedy and tragedy in religion, Morreall's engaging little primer concludes that humor "not only fosters virtue, but is best seen as itself a virtue... an intellectual and moral excellence of the highest order." (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0791442063
• ISBN 13: 9780791442067
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 188