A Midwinter Night’s Laugh

Humor is a funny thing. Everyone has a sense of humor that develops as we grow. That has been the case since the beginning of time, however, as we move forward in time people’s perception of humor changes. Each generation seems to believe that the future generation’s sense of humor (and morals and ethics in general) are at a lower standard than their own generation or generation’s past. I disagree with this common perception, instead I believe that the standard has always been just that; a standard and the only thing that has change is the way humor has been conveyed.

(Sawahata, Y., Komine, K., Morita, T., & Hiruma, N. 2013) “A sense of humor is a common human characteristic that people in many cultures experience. Humor not only encourages social interaction, but also produces positive effects for the human body, such as healthy physiological changes. Comedians and movie directors work hard to stimulate humor in audiences.” In modern culture humor is all around us in the media and everyday conversation. Every show or movie on tv, whether it be drama, reality, action, or any other genre, will have some sort of comedic relief in it at some point. Many advertisements rely heavily on humor to convey their point. Humor surrounds modern society. But before we get any further in modern culture, lets take a step back and look at history. Back in the 14th and 15th centuries, instead of “comedians and movie directors” it was playwrights working hard to stimulate their audiences, and there was none better than William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare wrote a numerous plays in his time, and a good number of them were comedies, however almost all of them had comedic elements in them. Just like modern day entertainment, Shakespeare added humor to ...

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...enes illustrate what I meant about falling in love with anybody being comical as Shakespeare has the least likely characters falling in love because of this flower. In the first scene, out of the four characters the only two whom neither were interested in each other was Lysander and Helena, and now Lysander loves Helena. Titania is a queen who would never love anyone like Bottom, especially if he had his new head. Yet she ends up falling for him because of the flower. This is major situational irony just because of who these characters are and the fact that they’d never fall for each other. Irony is an important and essential tool in comedy.

In the next scene Puck returns to Oberon and tells him a very funny rendition of what had just happened ending with the line (3.2.33-34) “When in that moment, so it came to pass,/Titania waked and straightway loved an ass”.