Comedy, Tragedy and Religion

By John Morreall

Book Overview

Explicates the worldviews of comedy and tragedy, and analyzes world religions, finding some to be more comic, others more tragic.

CHOICE 2000 Outstanding Academic Title

Comedy, tragedy, and religion have been intertwined since ancient Greece, where comedy and tragedy arose as religious rituals. This groundbreaking book analyzes the worldviews of tragedy and comedy, and compares each with the world's major religions. Morreall contrasts the tragic and comic along twenty psychological and social dimensions and uses these to analyze both Eastern and Western traditions.

Although no religion embodies a purely tragic or comic vision of life, some are mostly tragic and others mostly comic. In Eastern religions, Morreall finds no robust tragic vision but does find significant comic features, especially in Taoism and Zen Buddhism. In the Western monotheistic tradition, there are some comic features in the early Bible, but by the late Hebrew Bible, the tragic vision dominates. Two millennia have done little to reverse that tragic vision in Judaism. Christianity, on the other hand, has shown both tragic and comic features-Morreall writes of the Calvinist vision and the Franciscan vision-but in the contemporary era comic features have come to dominate. The author also explores Islam, and finds it has neither a comic nor a tragic vision. And, among new religions, those which emphasize the personal self come close to having an exclusively comic vision of life.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0791442063
• ISBN13: 9780791442067
• Release Date: May 1999
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Length: 188 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.2"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Useful even in a sociology of religion course

As a graduate student teacher, I use this book because it offers a non-threatening method of showing how different groups in a society can come up with alternative worldviews even if they share the same sacred texts and experiences. Specifically, I love how the author shows that cultural values are more influenced by how a group recounts a story in a comic or tragic manner rather than what the details of a story are. Just because the story may involve a nuclear war or a holocaust or the crucifixion of a leader does not mean that the story must espouse tragic/negative views of human nature.