THE DEATH OF COMEDY.

By Erich Segal. Harvard Univ. Press. 589 pp. $35

"I fart at thee!" The motto on the Farrelly brothers’ crest? Nope. It’s the first line of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610), and just a trace of the abundant evidence in Segal’s book that the comic theater has always had a rude streak. A lewd streak too, right from the start in ancient Athens, where the comic actors wore outsized phalluses and the nimble theatergoing citizens divided their time between feeling patriotic and feeling randy—or, when roused by Aristophanes, feeling both at once.

Segal traces the history of dramatic comedy from A (Aristophanes in the fifth century b.c.) to B (Samuel Beckett in the 20th century a.d.). He first describes comedy’s origins in Greek festival and ritual, especially rituals of rebirth, erotic renewal, regeneration, and reconciliation, and he then recounts how the Western tradition took hold of those elements and ran with them for two and a half millennia. Comedy lost its breath when the absurdist playwrights of the 20th century—Jarry, Ionesco, Cocteau, and Beckett—substituted head for heart and willfully destroyed the classical forms. Whereas the great heroes of comedy take on the world with extravagant gestures and profligate language, Beckett’s characters are all but immobile, out of words and out of energy.

Segal, a classicist, a best-selling novelist, and a veteran of the theater, movies, and television, is an engaging and immensely wellinformed guide through the literature. He believes in the virtues of old-fashioned chronology, and his major figures take the stage comfortably on cue: Aristophanes, Euripides (the tragedian with a comic gene), Menander, Plautus, Terence, Machiavelli (between the preceding two comes a 1,500-year intermission during which comedy bides its time, "with steely churchmen preaching against the diabolical dangers of all stage plays"), Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare, and Molière. The book grows thick with Segal’s summaries of individual plays. He’s generous with his citations, and free—wanton even— with his translations.

Yet you may not laugh, or even smile, at much of what’s here. That’s because an awful lot of comedy travels about as well as six-yearold kids. Consider Menander, about whose plays, from the Greek comic theater of the late fourth century b.c., it was easier to be enthusiastic when we could also be wistful: We had only fragments of them until a complete play, Dyskolos (The Grouch), was found in 1957. The excuse then became that we had found the wrong play. And yet, for centuries, both Greeks and Romans thought Menander peerless. "O Menander and life," wrote one ancient commentator, "which of you is imitating which?"

In terms of influence, Segal deems Menander "arguably the single most important figure in the history of Western comedy." Why? Because he excelled at putting realistic characters from life—young lovers, ill-tempered old fathers, cooks, soldiers, slaves, virgins, prostitutes—on stage, where they have remained, and multiplied, ever since. Menander’s quintessential plot is motivated by love, usually at first sight, and driven by ingenious (mechanical?) complications and giddy (inane?) misunderstandings, such as rapes that aren’t rapes after all because in due course the parties legally unite. The misunderstandings are resolved; a marriage occurs; progeny are in prospect. Sound familiar? Were he around today, Menander would be writing for TV. Not The Simpsons or Malcolm in the Middle; maybe Dharma and Greg.

Thank goodness Segal knows that a play lives a sheltered life, at best, on the page. His heart is on stage with the players, and he’s not afraid to sink to—no, sink below—the jokey level of his subject. When tradesman Ben Jonson gives up manual labor for playwriting, Segal has him "throwing in the trowel." And near-miss incest is "Oedipus interruptus." Twice. It’s not every scholar who can also do Mel Brooks.

—James Morris