Abstract

Kenneth Burke's theory of comedy is studied in three contexts: the comic elements of Burke's humanism; the comic theory of language and social relations Burke develops in Attitudes Toward History; and the transformation from tragic to comic motivation that Burke himself exemplifies in his career shift from literary to critical writings. The separate chapters present Burke as he appears in the "comic mirror" of his "flowerish": "In a shattered mirror showing bits of me--I still am one nature though distractedly" . Burke's "one nature" is his comic attitude, which, though it develops over the course of his career, remains forever unchanged in its commitment to key comic principles, namely, the "purification of war," often through indirect means; the comic discount; "forensic" complexity; "smiling hypochondriasis"; ongoing translation; and the proportionalizing strategy. Burke's perspective on comedy is intellectual, rhetorical, and ethical--that is, he formulates the principles of the comic frame, he pleads for more comedy as his "contribution to soteriology," to use William Knickerbocker's phrase, and he enacts his own comic theory in the process of his moral growth. Epistemologically, Burkean comedy leads not to truth, but to "maximum consciousness." Ethically, it leads not to the elimination of error but to the right use of error, as an educational device. Ultimately, Burke's comic position is meliorist: the knowledge gained through drama and catharsis can help individuals in society approximate the "good life" and forestall the self-destructive modes of purgation that language, in its tragic aspects, all too frequently encourages