The Death of Comedy :

Rating:
Summary: Question extreme reviewers
Review: Readers considering themselves well-versed in a subject are often overly critical of works that sacrifice a little depth for breadth of discussion. When someone is attempting to cover such a broad topic as comedy, it is impossible to escape some generalization and sketchiness. This is the case with Segal's text. It makes concessions to space (I doubt a 10,000 page text would please many publishers) and to readers with little background (supplying needed summary and biographical information). This background, including the authorial, increases one's understanding of the topic. Of course, analysis should move beyond this (as it does in Segal's work), but we shouldn't ignore these preliminaries completely just because we've learned of the 'biographical fallacy' in our introduction to literary criticism. If the reviewer from Oakland doesn't want this kind of text, perhaps he should check out some of Segal's scholarly articles, and perhaps he should give them more time and consideration than he did this book. Reading and judging a critical work of 600 pages within hours of receiving it might miss the bulk of its depth. A skim can pick out a lot of summary and background, can find plenty to criticize (especially if a mind is already made up after reading through the table of contents), but is likely to miss much of the worth. The same reviewer, quick to be critical, after calling the work flip and superficial, criticizes it again when it goes into greater depth concerning Roman comedy. Segal just can't win.

So read Segal for your self. This book is interesting and informative, though it is unable to cover all or be without mistakes. It proves readable for a variety of backgrounds and is at least a good start on the subject. Fellow educators have recommended this text to me, and I would recommend it to others.

Rating:
Summary: The Death of Criticism
Review: What a disappointment. I ordered this well-reviewed book from Amazon and just received it today. I was eager to read it, hoping for a well reasoned exegesis on the history of comedy, which is one of my favorite subjects. Instead it's a flip and superficial discussion of some famous comedies, heavy on the Roman side and hit-or-miss on comedy after that. Most essays seem to be plot summaries, heavily larded with quotations and not much else. The discussion of Moliere, for example, is scatter-shot, and unashamedly wallows in the biographical fallacy, offering cheap readings of the playwright as the protagonist of all his works (Moliere as Jourdain? as Tartuffe?). Cute chapter titles warn of the cliches that will be offered within. The translations of texts I'm familiar with, like "Se vuol ballare" from Mozart's *The Marriage of Figaro*, are sheer travesties of the originals. This from a classicist? Doesn't he know Italian? The varying conventions of comedy and what they imply for our humanity is such a fascinating and important subject matter. What a shame that Segal is completely unaware of the possibilities.