In the research of the article, I realized that the evolution of comedy should be observed on a longitudinal timeline, so I began to search for information about ancient Greek comedy, the source of modern comedy, hoping to find evidence that comedy reflects society.
Ancient Greek new comedy refers to a form of comedy from 323 BC to 263 BC. It is developed on the basis of Chinese comedy. It mainly describes love stories and civic life, reflecting the social style and humanistic spirit of the Hellenistic period. The characteristics and development history of ancient Greek new comedy are as follows:
The representative writer of the new comedy in ancient Greece is Menander, who is known as the “king of comedy”. His works include “The World-Hater”, “The Female Robber”, “The Lucky Soldier”, etc. His style influenced the later Roman comedy and European comedy(Konstan, 1995).
The structure of the ancient Greek new comedy is relatively standardized, generally composed of five scenes, separated by the chorus between each song, the role of the song team is not much, only to play the role of embellishment and transition. The language of the new comedy is relatively popular, and the formula is relatively simple, which is easy to perform and enjoy.
The influence of ancient Greek new comedy on modern comedy is mainly reflected in the following aspects:
The new comedy of ancient Greece created a comedy mode that takes love as the main line, and finally reaches a happy ending through misunderstanding, conflict, twists and surprises. This mode is called “comedy routine”, which is widely used in modern comedies, such as 50 First Dates and Leap Year.
The new comedy of ancient Greece created some typical and universal comedy characters, such as farmers, merchants, slaves, diners, geisha, etc. These characters represented different social classes and human characteristics, and their personalities and behaviors were realistic, but also full of humor and irony. These characters also have many counterparts and references in modern comedies. Such as Friends, Modern Family, The Big Bang Theory and so on.
It can be found that there are some differences between modern comedy and ancient Greek comedy, such as the weakening of political criticism and the emergence of various humor strategies. After all, no one wants to watch the same kind of comedy and the comedy of teaching.
Knowing that a large part of modern comedy is derived from ancient Greek comedy, I began my attempt to separate the consciousness of “man” and “God” from that of the two. In Hennefeld’ s words（2022）, you can see a modern scholar’s deep understanding of today’s comedy film: a metaphysical madness, a volitional influence, providing a different emotional experience.
Finally, the research direction is determined, that is, based on these two points, two completely different types of modern and modern iconic films are compared, so as to reflect the society’s choice of comedy films.
Reference
Hennefeld, M., 2022. ‘The problem of film comedy in the twenty-first century’. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 20(1), pp.101-118.
Konstan, D., 1995. Greek comedy and ideology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.