Old Comedy and New

Russ McDonald has this shrewd comment about the combination of slapstick comedy and satisfied resolution in MSND : “Even as we anticipate a happy ending, we take pleasure in watching shenanigans, pretension, and the well-aimed custard pie. This tension amounts to a contest between the end and the middle: The resolution provokes the laughter of satisfaction; the comic conflict, the laughter of scorn.” This, I think, is a wonderful way to describe the difference between the old comedy of Aristophanes and the comedy of Christian literature. The latter does not delete the slapstick, the scorned, or the satirical; but it embeds this in a larger framework where what James Wood has called the comedy of forgiveness reigns.