From phaulos to “Jesters of God”: Aristotle and comedy into perspective

This chapter revisits the question of comedy in the Poetics, its inferiority compared to tragedy, in light of the Christian medieval perspective, where the role of comedy becomes, to a certain extent, predominant. What are the profound causes of this transformation? Why and when does what was considered less serious – comedy – become more relevant than tragedy, as Hegel and Bakhtin well understood? In contrast to the Platonic position, which considered the question of comedy exclusively from an axiological perspective, devaluing geloion, i.e., the ridiculous, as synonymous with “ugliness” (aischron), Aristotle’s Poetics reappraises geloion, which becomes an “imitation of men of lower quality (phauloi)” and can thus be placed ontologically as the zero degree of a process that led to the definitive affirmation of comedy in the Christian culture of the late Middle Ages, inherited by the Renaissance and modernity. At the origin of modern literature, one may find works like Dante’s Comedy and Rabelais’s comic novel, which reveal the deepest motives of this reappraisal because both, each in its own way, stem from the same Franciscan matrix: that of the “Jesters of God” who brought an end to medieval culture and prepared modern culture, imparting to comedy a “creatural” function, to say it with Auerbach, entirely foreign to the Aristotelian worldview.