Comedy (Booker)

Definition

Comedy is the fifth of the seven plots in Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots (2004). Booker means a plot, not humour: a play called a comedy need not be one in his sense, and a story with few jokes may be. Nor is it an archetype or a character. The name describes the shape of a whole story. A small world, a household, a court or a town, has fallen into confusion. Lovers are kept apart, identities are mistaken or disguised, and very often one person, possessed by egotism, holds everyone else in a false position. The tangle tightens until it seems it can only get worse. Then comes a recognition: the truth is brought to light, disguises fall, the person at the root of the trouble is exposed, reformed or sent away, and the right couples come together, often several at once, in a general celebration.

Booker says that Comedy cannot be summed up in quite the same way as his other plots, and he gives it two chapters, one historical and one on the plot hidden inside other forms. He reads it through Jung. The confusion is the state of a world in which people do not yet see themselves or each other truly; the recognition is a change from ignorance to knowledge, a term he takes from Aristotle; and the marriages at the end stand, in his scheme, for the coming together of masculine and feminine values in a balanced whole. That reading is his frame, not a finding.

History

Booker published the book in London with Continuum in November 2004; an American edition followed in 2005, the paperback was later reprinted under the Bloomsbury imprint, and a twentieth-anniversary edition with a preface by Nicholas Booker appeared in 2024. Comedy is chapters 6 and 7 of Part One, “The Seven Gateways to the Underworld”.

Chapter 6 tells the plot’s history in three stages, checked against the text of the paperback reprint. The first is Aristophanes, whose comedies turn on a conflict: in The Wasps (p. 109) a grim old father is liberated by his son. The second is the “New Comedy” of Menander and his Roman imitators, where lovers are kept apart by a misunderstanding or a blocking elder: Menander’s Epitrepontes, or The Arbitration (p. 111), and Plautus’s Aulularia, The Pot of Gold (p. 110), with its miser undone by the loss of his hoard. The third is Shakespeare, from the early comedies, The Taming of the Shrew (pp. 114–115) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (pp. 107, 115–116), whose lost lovers are sorted out in the wood, to the middle comedies, Much Ado About Nothing (pp. 118–119) and Twelfth Night (pp. 118–120), where the part of the dark figure falls to Malvolio. Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (p. 118) is set beside Shakespeare as the comedy of exposed rogues, and Mozart and Da Ponte’s The Marriage of Figaro (pp. 107, 125–129) receives a full reading.

Chapter 7, “The Plot Disguised”, follows Comedy into the novel, where the shape is harder to see: Fielding’s Tom Jones (pp. 132–133), Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Emma (pp. 133–135), and the long nineteenth-century novels Middlemarch and War and Peace (pp. 135–138), with Wodehouse and the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) as modern cases.

Booker credits the pattern to the stories and the meaning to Jung. The term “recognition” is Aristotle’s, as Booker says, and Michiko Kakutani (2005) observed that much of the rest of his theory was borrowed from earlier writers, not always with acknowledgement. The two-chapter scheme, the place of Comedy among seven plots and the Jungian reading are Booker’s, dated 2004.

The debate

What kind of thing is it? In the void the plot sits nearest the anima and animus, because it ends in the union of lovers, and the trickster, because it runs on confusion and disguise. It is none of them. The trickster is a figure who makes confusion; Booker’s Comedy is a sequence in which confusion, usually caused by someone’s egotism, is cleared by recognition. The site lists the seven as plots, by the editor’s decision.

Comedy also carries more of Booker’s thesis than its place in the list suggests. Kakutani (2005) reported his claim that five of the seven plots, all but Comedy and Tragedy themselves, can be placed under the larger umbrella of Comedy, since in their pure forms they all end happily, and Adam Mars-Jones (2004) put it more sharply: the book’s seven plots reduce to two master-narratives, comedy, in which proportion is restored and the ego overcome, and tragedy. Part Two of the book, “The Complete Happy Ending”, is built on that idea.

The reviewers found the scheme least convincing where it judged modern work by it. Kasia Boddy (2004) caught Booker summarising Middlemarch as ending when the lovers declare their love and walk liberated into the future, and asked whether he had read its final paragraph; she also noted his complaint that Austen’s Emma Woodhouse is cut off from her inner feminine. Mars-Jones listed The Cherry Orchard among the works Booker ends up condemning, and Kakutani quoted his charge that Chekhov’s people are never strong enough to take control of their own lives.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Booker’s Comedy as a category that texts or readers actually sort into. Reagan and colleagues (2016), who classified the emotional arcs of 1,327 Project Gutenberg works into six shapes, cite Booker and give A Midsummer Night’s Dream as his example of this plot, but state that an emotional arc is not a plot, so their result neither supports nor refutes his scheme.

Appearances

Writing guides use Booker’s Comedy mainly for romantic comedy and comedy of manners. Jericho Writers’ guide to the seven plots gives Austen’s novels, Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Chocolat as examples. Shmoop’s study guides file The Importance of Being Earnest, Tartuffe and Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale under the plot in their “Booker’s Seven Basic Plots Analysis” pages. These are later readings in Booker’s scheme, not his examples.

Sources

• Booker, C. (2004). The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. London: Continuum. ISBN 978-0-8264-5209-2. Part One, chs 6–7.
• Booker, C. (2004/2013). The Seven Basic Plots (paperback reprint, Bloomsbury). ISBN 978-0-8264-8037-8. Page numbers above are from this printing, checked in the Internet Archive copy: https://archive.org/details/sevenbasicplotsw0000book_v4w4
• Booker, C. (2024). The Seven Basic Plots (20th anniversary edition, preface by Nicholas Booker). Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-3994-1592-7. Chapter 6: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781399417440.ch-06
• Mars-Jones, A. (2004, 21 November). Terminator 2 good, The Odyssey bad. The Observer. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/nov/21/fiction.features
• Boddy, K. (2004, 21 November). Everything ever written boiled down to seven plots. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3632074/Everything-ever-written-boiled-down-to-seven-plots.html
• Kakutani, M. (2005, 15 April). The plot thins, or are no stories new? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/15/books/15book.html
• Reagan, A. J., Mitchell, L., Kiley, D., Danforth, C. M., & Dodds, P. S. (2016). The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes. EPJ Data Science, 5, 31. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0093-1 (appendix A, arXiv:1606.07772)
• Jericho Writers. How to write seven basic plots. https://jerichowriters.com/how-to-write-seven-basic-plots/
• Shmoop. Tartuffe: Booker’s Seven Basic Plots Analysis. https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/tartuffe/comedy-plot.html