Volume 49, Number 12 · July 18, 2002
The Comedy Murder Case
By Jasper Griffin
The Death of Comedy
by Erich Segal
Harvard University Press, 589 pp., $35.00
Erich Segal is a remarkable man. Sometime professor of classics at Yale and other universities, and an expert on the Roman comic poets, he is perhaps better known as the author of Love Story. He now has written an erudite and entertaining history of comedy, from the beginnings to what he sees as its end. His aim is polemical: 'To illustrate comedy's glorious life cycle and ultimate destruction by the 'intellectuals' of the so-called Theater of the Absurd.' For comedy was an extraordinarily enduring form, 'a genre which flourished almost unchanged in the more than two millennia that followed Terence's death' (about 160 BCE).
Review, 4553 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |