Quotations about Comedy from Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Atheneum, 1966.
p. 44 "New Comedy normally presents an erotic intrigue between a young man and a young woman which is blocked by some kind of opposition, usually paternal, and resolved by a twist in the plot . . . At the beginning of the play the forces thwarting the hero are in control of the play's society, but after a discovery in which the hero becomes wealthy or the heroine respectable, a new society crystallizes on the stage around the hero and his bride [after the "comic discovery"].
p. 170 "The comic ending is generally manipulated by a twist in the plot . . . Happy endings do not impress us as true, but as desirable . . . something gets born at the end of comedy . . . Unlikely conversions, miraculous transformations, and providential assistance are inseparable from comedy."
p. 182 "Shakespeare's type of romantic comedy . . . [is] the drama of the green world, its plot being assimilated to the ritual theme of the triumph of life and love over the waste land . . . there is the . . .rhythmic movement from normal world to green world and back again"
183 "The green world charges the comedies with the symbolism of the victory of summer over winter . . .The green world has analogies, not only to the fertile world of ritual, but to the dream world that we create out of our own desires. This dream world collides with the stumbling and blinded follies of the world of experience"
184 "Thus Shakespearean comedy illustrates . . . the archetypal function of literature in visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from 'reality,' but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate. . . the usual form for the lower or chaotic world is the sea"
“The action of the comedy thus moves toward the incorporation of the hero into the society that he naturally fits. The hero himself is seldom a very interesting person."
p. 163 "The appearance of this new society is frequently signalized by some kind of party or festive ritual, which either appears at the end of the play or is assumed to take place immediately afterward. Weddings are most common . . "
164 "As the final society reached by comedy is the one that the audience has recognized all along to be the proper and desirable state of affairs, an act of communion with the audience is in order."
p. 168 "The principle of the humor is the principle that unincremental repetition, the literary imitation of ritual bondage, is funny... Repetition overdone or not going anywhere belongs to comedy, for laughter is partly a reflex, and like other reflexes it can be conditioned by a simple repeated pattern."