The best that the comic stage had to offer in the late 19th century lay in the domain of farce. The masters of this form were French, but it flourished in England as well; what the farces of Eugène Labiche and Georges Feydeau and the operettas of Jacques Offenbach were to the Parisian stage the farces of W.S. Gilbert and the young Arthur Wing Pinero and the operettas that Gilbert wrote in collaboration with Arthur Sullivan were to the London stage. As concerns comedy, the situation in England improved at the end of the century, when Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw turned their talents to it. Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is farce raised to the level of high comic burlesque. Shaw’s choice of the comic form was inevitable, given his determination that the contemporary English stage should deal seriously and responsibly with the issues that were of crucial importance to contemporary English life. Serious subjects could not be resolved by means of the dramatic clichés of Victorian melodrama. Rather, the prevailing stereotypes concerning the nature of honour, courage, wisdom, and virtue were to be subjected to a hail of paradox, to the end of making evident their inner emptiness or the contradictions they concealed.

Shaw dealt with what, in the preface to Major Barbara (1905), he called “the tragi-comic irony of the conflict between real life and the romantic imagination,” and his use of the word tragicomic is a sign of the times. The striking feature of modern art, according to the German novelist Thomas Mann, was that it had ceased to recognize the categories of tragic and comic or the dramatic classifications of tragedy and comedy but saw life as tragicomedy. The sense that tragicomedy is the only adequate dramatic form for projecting the unreconciled ironies of modern life mounted through the closing decades of the 19th century. Ibsen had termed The Wild Duck (published 1884) a tragicomedy; it was an appropriate designation for this bitter play about a young man blissfully ignorant of the lies on which he and his family have built their happy life until an outsider who is committed to an ideal of absolute truth exposes all their guilty secrets with disastrous results. The plays of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, with their touching and often quite humorous figures leading lives of quiet desperation, reflect precisely that mixture of inarticulate joy and dull pain that is the essence of the tragicomic view of life.

A dramatist such as August Strindberg produces a kind of tragicomedy peculiarly his own, one that takes the form of bourgeois tragedy; it lacerates its principals until they become a parody of themselves. Strindberg’s Dance of Death (1901), with its cruelty and pain dispensed with robust pleasure by a fiercely battling husband and wife, is a significant model of the grotesque in the modern theatre; it is reflected in such mid-20th-century examples of what came to be called black comedy as Eugène Ionesco’s Victims of Duty (1953) and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Almost equally influential as a turn-of-the-century master of the grotesque is Frank Wedekind, whose Earth Spirit (1895) and its sequel, Pandora’s Box (written 1892–1901), though both are termed tragedies by their author, are as much burlesques of tragedy as The Dance of Death. Their grotesquerie consists chiefly in their disturbing combination of innocence and depravity, of farce and horror, of passionate fervour issuing in ludicrous incident that turns deadly. Wedekind’s celebration of primitive sexuality and the varied ways in which it manifests itself in an oversophisticated civilization distorts the tragic form to achieve its own grotesque beauty and power.

One great artist of the grotesque and of tragicomedy in the 20th century was the Italian Luigi Pirandello. His drama is explicitly addressed to the contradictoriness of experience: appearances collide and cancel out each other; the quest of the absolute issues in a mind-reeling relativism; infinite spiritual yearnings are brought up hard against finite physical limits; rational purpose is undermined by irrational impulse; and with the longing for permanence in the midst of change comes the ironic awareness that changelessness means death. Stated thus, Pirandello’s themes sound almost forbiddingly intellectual, but one of his aims was to convert intellect into passion. Pirandello’s characters suffer from intellectual dilemmas that give rise to mental and emotional distress of the most anguished kind, but their sufferings are placed in a satiric frame. The incongruities that the characters are furiously seeking to reconcile attest to the comic aspect of this drama, but there is nothing in it of the traditional movement of comedy, from a state of illusion into the full light of reality. Pirandello’s characters dwell amid ambiguities and equivocations that those who are wise in the tragicomic nature of life will accept without close inquiry. The logic of comedy implies that illusions exist to be dispelled; once they are dispelled, everyone will be better off. The logic of Pirandello’s tragicomedy demonstrates that illusions make life bearable; to destroy them is to destroy the basis for any possible happiness.

The absurd

In their highly individual ways, both Samuel Beckett and Ionesco employed the forms of comedy—from tragicomedy to farce—to convey the vision of an exhausted civilization and a chaotic world. The very endurance of life amid the grotesque circumstances that obtain in Beckett’s plays is at once a tribute to the human power of carrying on to the end and an ironic reflection on the absurdity of doing so. Beckett’s plays close in an uneasy silence that is the more disquieting because of the uncertainty as to just what it conceals: whether it masks sinister forces ready to spring or is the expression of a universal indifference or issues out of nothing at all.

Silence seldom reigns in the theatre of Ionesco, which rings with voices raised in a usually mindless clamour. Some of Ionesco’s most telling comic effects come from his use of dialogue overflowing with clichés and non sequiturs, which make it clear that the characters do not have their minds on what they are saying and, indeed, do not have their minds on anything at all. What they say is often at grotesque variance with what they do. Beneath the moral platitudes lurks violence, which is never far from the surface in Ionesco’s plays, and the violence tells what happens to societies in which words and deeds have become fatally disjunct. Ionesco’s comic sense is evident as well in his depiction of human beings as automata, their movements decreed by forces they have never questioned or sought to understand. There is something undeniably farcical in Ionesco’s spectacles of human regimentation, of men and women at the mercy of things (e.g., the stage full of chairs in The Chairs or the growing corpse in Amédée); the comic quality in these plays is one that Bergson would have appreciated. But the comic in Ionesco’s most serious work, as in so much of mid-20th-century theatre, has ominous implications that give to it a distinctly grotesque aspect. In Ionesco’s Victims of Duty and The Killer (1959), as in the works of his Swiss counterparts—Friedrich Dürrenmatt, author of The Visit (performed 1956) and The Physicists (1962), and Max Frisch, author of The Firebugs (1958)—the grotesquerie of the tragicomic vision delineates a world in which the humane virtues are dying, and casual violence is the order of the day.

The radical reassessment of the human image that the 20th century witnessed is reflected in the novel as well as in drama. Previous assumptions about the rational and divine aspects of humans were increasingly called into question by the evidences of irrationality and sheer animality. These are qualities of human nature that writers of previous ages (Swift, for example) have always recognized, but hitherto they were typically viewed as dark possibilities that could overtake humanity if the rule of reason did not prevail. Only in the mid-20th century did the savage and the irrational come to be viewed as part of the normative condition of humanity rather than as tragic aberrations from it. The savage and the irrational amount to grotesque parodies of human possibility, ideally conceived. Thus it was that 20th-century novelists as well as dramatists recognized the tragicomic nature of the modern human image and predicament, and the principal mode of representing both was the grotesque. This took various forms: the apocalyptic nightmare of tyranny and terror in Franz Kafka’s novels The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926); the tragic farce in terms of which the Austrian novelist Robert Musil described the slow collapse of a society into anarchy and chaos, in The Man Without Qualities (1930–43); the brilliant irony whereby Thomas Mann represented the hero as a confidence man in The Confessions of Felix Krull (1954); and the grimly parodic account of Germany’s descent into madness in Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum (1959). The English novel contains a rich vein of the comic grotesque that extends at least back to Dickens and Thackeray and persisted in the 20th century in such varied novels as Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (1928), Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954). What these novelists had in common is the often disturbing combination of hilarity and desperation. It had its parallel in a number of American novels—such as John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969)—in which shrill farce is the medium for grim satire. And the grotesque is a prominent feature of modern poetry, as in some of the work of W.H. Auden.