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    Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors": A Psycho-Semiotic Analysis
    Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors": A Psycho-Semiotic Analysis
    Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors": A Psycho-Semiotic Analysis
    Ebook179 pages1 hour

    Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors": A Psycho-Semiotic Analysis

    By Arthur Asa Berger

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    About this ebook

    Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors: A Psycho-Semiotic Analysis uses semiotics along psychoanalytic to offer a granular analysis of one of Shakespeare’s funniest and most interesting comedies. It is distinctive in that it offers a discussion of the basic techniques found incomic literature of all kinds and applies these techniques to events in the play.

    It also offers a discussion of the basic theories of humor and a syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis of the play.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAnthem Press
    Release dateSep 13, 2022
    ISBN9781839985003
    Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors": A Psycho-Semiotic Analysis
    Author

    Arthur Asa Berger

    Arthur Asa Berger is Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University, where he taught for 38 years. He is the author of numerous books and articles on tourism, media, popular culture and everyday life. Among his books on tourism are Vietnam Tourism, Thailand Tourism, The Golden Triangle, Deconstructing Travel and Bali Tourism. He has lectured in more than a dozen countries and his books have been translated into nine languages.

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      Book preview

      Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors" - Arthur Asa Berger

      Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors

      Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors

      A Psycho-Semiotic Analysis

      Arthur Asa Berger

      Anthem Press

      An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

      www.anthempress.com

      This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

      by ANTHEM PRESS

      75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

      or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

      and

      244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

      Copyright © Arthur Asa Berger 2022

      The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2022933614

      ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-498-3 (Pbk)

      ISBN-10: 1-83998-498-8 (Pbk)

      Cover image: Arthur Asa Berger drawing of Shakespeare

      This title is also available as an e-book.

      Contents

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      1 Introduction

      How Did I Get Here?

      My Books on Humor

      Takeaways

      2 Theories of Humor

      Why We Laugh

      Aristotle and Superiority Theories of Comedy

      Incongruity and Humor

      Psychoanalytic (Release) Theories of Humor

      Humor and Paradox

      Disposition Theory

      Benign Violation Theory

      3 Semiotics and Humor

      An Overview of Semiotics

      Metaphor

      Metonymy

      Language and Speech

      Codes

      Humor and Code Violations

      Syntagmatic Analysis of Texts

      Propp’s 31 Functions of Characters

      Paradigmatic Analysis of Texts

      4 Glossary: The 45 Techniques of Humor

      The 45 Techniques of Humor

      Basic Techniques of Humor Generation and Style

      A Note on Personality Types in Comedies

      5 The Comedy of Errors

      The Persons of the Play

      Synopsis of The Comedy of Errors

      What is Comedy?

      On the Psychoanalytic Significance of Doubles

      On Comedic Violence

      The Madness Scene

      The Resolution of The Comedy of Errors

      Basic Humorous Techniques in The Comedy of Errors

      A Paradigmatic Analysis of The Comedy of Errors

      A Syntagmatic Analysis of The Comedy of Errors

      6 Coda

      The Importance of Twins

      Semiotics and Comedy

      References

      About the Author

      Index

      This book is dedicated to my professors in the English department at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, who inspired a love of literature in me and an appreciation of literary criticism.

      Twinning Reaction: A number of psychoanalytic observers and clinicians […] have noted that children born as twins have a tendency to (1) polarize identity characteristics in order to buttress their own selves, and (2) blur the boundaries between them and feel incomplete upon being separated from each other. Such twinning reaction is, however, not restricted to biological twins and can, at times, be seen in siblings born less than two years apart, or even in individuals who are not siblings but have otherwise remained close over long periods of time (e.g., marital partners).

      Salman Akhtar

      Central to the workings of humour in comedy is the fact that the fictional discourse of films operates on two levels of communication: the inter-character level, representing the fictional participants’ interactions, and the recipient’s (i.e. the viewer’s) level, which concerns the viewer’s interpretation of the former, as carefully devised by the film production crew dubbed the collective sender (see Dynel 2011b and the references therein). A mass-mediated artefact, therefore, displays two layers: the characters’ fictional layer, by which recipients are enthralled, and the collective sender’s layer responsible for the construction of the former.

      Although numerous points of similarity can be found between real-life discourse and fictional discourse (see Dynel 2011c and references therein), the two display inherent divergences. This is relevant also to the nature of humour, whose manifestations may mirror those found in real conversations or may be typical solely of film discourse, which is orientated towards entertaining, yet not necessarily amusing, the recipient (Dynel 2011a). Entertainment is here seen as being a notion superordinate to amusement. Both concern viewers’ diversion and inducing their pleasurable experience, yet only the latter promotes humorous effects. Cinematic ploys and careful construction of characters’ interactions facilitate the occurrence of various humour forms sometimes based on communicative phenomena which would either be impossible in everyday discourse or, if materialised, would not carry any humorousness for any participant.

      Marta Dynel, Humorous Phenomena in Dramatic Discourse

      European Journal of Humour Research 1(1) 22 – 60

      Chapter 1

      INTRODUCTION

      How Did I Get Here?

      In writing this book I had to ask myself, "how does a person who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Al Capp’s comic strip, Li’l Abner, and spent fifty years writing about pop culture, end up writing a book on one of Shakespeare’s comedies?" The answer is that Li’l Abner was a humorous comic strip, and my dissertation, published in 1970 as Li’l Abner: A Study in American Satire, showed my early interest in the scholarly study of humor.

      Figure 1.1 William Shakespeare.

      My Books on Humor

      I have been writing about humor since 1970 and have written about humor in many articles and about humorous comic strips in my book, The Comic-Stripped American (1974) and humorous television shows in my book, The TV-Guided American (1975). I’ve also written about Jewish humor in my books The Genius of the Jewish Joke (Jason Aronson, 1997) and Jewish Jesters: A Study in American Popular Comedy (2001, Hampton Press). I’ve written about humor, in general, in four books: An Anatomy of Humor, The Art of Comedy Writing, Blind Men and Elephants: Perspectives on Humor and Humor Psyche and Society.

      An Anatomy of Humor was published in 1993 by Transaction Books and features what I describe as a Glossary of the 45 techniques of humor that I discovered in researching humor. The book also has chapters on jokes, Mickey Mouse, Huckleberry Finn, Twelfth Night and Jewish fools. I will say more about these 45 techniques later and offer a revised version of my glossary, since the techniques are central to my analysis of humorous texts. It has many jokes in the book that I analyze and I provide a list of humorous jokes and texts in a separate index in the book.

      My next book, Blind Men and Elephants: Perspectives on Humor (Transaction, 1995), has chapters on different disciplinary approaches to the subject: communications, sociological, semiotic, psychological and so on. It also has many jokes in the book and a separate index of jokes. My third book with Transaction (1997), The Art of Comedy Writing, deals with theatrical comedies and has a long chapter on the 45 techniques of humor which it then applies to a play by Plautus, Miles Gloriosus, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Sheridan’s The School of Scandal (1777) and Ionesco’s remarkable theater of the absurd play, The Bald Soprano. It is an analysis of elite culture texts and, as such, serves as a precursor to my book on Shakespeare.

      I also see myself as a humorist and have written some academic murder mysteries that are comedic in nature. In one of my mysteries, Postmortem for a Postmodernist (1997, AltaMira Press), I kill my victim, Ettore Gnocchi (potato dumpling), on the first page in four different ways. His wife was named Shoshana TelAviv. My detective in this novel is named Solomon (wisdom) Hunter. Many of my mysteries have Sherlock Holmes as the detective.

      My book, The Jewish Jesters, has chapters on Groucho Marx, Jack Benny, Henny Youngman, Rodney Dangerfield, Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, Jackie Mason, Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld—the most important Jewish comedians of recent, and not so recent, years. It also contains many jokes and humorous texts, since I believe that books about humor should also have lots of humor in them. So I’ve been writing about humor for many years and have a set of comedy techniques I can use in analyzing humor that I can apply to Shakespeare’s works. I also am a semiotician and that will play an important role in this book. I would consider my 45 techniques and my discussion of syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis as semiotic in nature and I will offer a discussion of semiotic theories and concepts in this book for readers not familiar with the subject.

      Takeaways

      When you read this book, you will learn about:

      Different theories of humor that deal with why we laugh: superiority theory, incongruity theory, release/psychoanalytic theory and cognitive theory.

      My typology of the 45 techniques of humor, which, I argue, is found in all forms of humor and humorous texts from Roman times to the present. Writers of comedies have learned these techniques over the course of their careers but, I believe, generally are not conscious of them.

      The techniques of humor that Shakespeare used so brilliantly in The Comedy of Errors and his other comedies. I point out in my analysis of The Comedy of Errors many places where Shakespeare has used one or another technique.

      Semiotic theory, including concepts such as signifiers and signifieds, codes, metaphor and metonymy and their importance in analyzing humorous texts.

      Psychoanalytic theories about twins.

      Psychoanalytic theories about comedy and humor.

      How to make a paradigmatic (from the work of Lévi-Strauss) and syntagmatic (from Vladimir

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