Bertolt Brecht, Politics, and Comedy

Abstract

While German dramatist Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) is well known for his biting satires, grotesque parodies, and sharp irony, his use of the comic goes far beyond notions of comedy in the technical sense of plays with happy endings that express a utopian desire for social harmony. For him, the comic is a structural principle underlying the conflict between desire and reality. Constructing these situations became his method for demonstrating the incongruities of the capitalist society, and in that sense the comic might even be equated with contradiction or the dialectic as such. Brecht's point of departure assumes that any representation of reality is always a construction of reality, and the goal of constructing a particular reality is to gain knowledge about it in order to undertake actions that can change it. That reality can be transparent and comprehended grounds his very notion of the comic, and yet Brecht's optimism has nothing to do with a utopian view of the coming revolution but rather evolves from his belief that one can understand reality and even change it through dialectical thinking. This article discusses some of the seminal influences on Brecht's ideas about the comic and offers an overview of the many ways he implemented comic strategies, especially in his dramas and staging practices.

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