The step has been taken by Samuel Beckett and to some extent by Eugène Ionesco, but both stop short at tragi-comedy, or rather at a macabre comedy which is very well, very intense, very real, but narrow-a sort of precarious elevation into universality of the sick story. The next step is of course to exploit the comedy of metaphysics.
Mae West herself informs us I have maintained a deep interest in metaphysics.
Somehow or other everything has become so solemn and sacred that even the single comedian is developing, on top of being lovable, a dire streak of dignity. Even the comedy of morals and manners has lapsed into a comedy of harmless eccentrics, and even that has narrowed down to the comedian who is his own butt-surely the safest and most inoffensive subject possible. It is lamentable that just when all these subjects are much funnier intrinsically and more disproportionate to the ordinary mind than they have ever been before, popular comedy treats them circumspectly if at all, merely glancing at their most trivial aspects, and dwells rather on domestic situations which have no great bearing beyond the stage or screen. Our popular comedy has grown smaller and smaller in force and scope, ever more timid, avoiding the bulk of any such issues as religion, war, sex, money, politics, age, science, philosophy. At least the Aristophanic art-which Plato had in mind-is as high and wide and heroic as any tragic view of the world, and we have appreciably declined from that.
The pleasures of lamenting the decline of tragedy among us have perhaps gone stale, so for a change we might lament the decline of comedy, and quite as loudly, since we have no less an opinion than Plato’s that the tragic know-how and the comic know-how may be much the same, which makes their declines about equally affecting.
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