Anglers, satyr-gods, and 'divine lizards': Comedy in excess

Through proliferating metaphors and images, this study investigates the way in which comedy can be a genre of excess--ragged boundaries, rapidly mutating meanings, and identities that fold and unfold.;The introduction delineates comedy's easy relationship with the malicious, with its amorality or unaccountability. It further delineates how a selected number of theorists (Bergson, Sypher, Bakhtin, and others) have dealt with this problem of comedy and how they have endeavored to account for what comedy in its immense variety might mean.;The dynamics of exclusion/inclusion, of how something is said to be comic or not, is the focus of the first half of chapter one. Issues raised about comedy that develop out of the contention in a recent work of criticism that Friedrich Nietzsche is not comic are examined. Following up on the resulting insistence on the centrality of catharsis to comedy, the second half of the chapter traces the possibility that the movement of the contradictions of comedy is more salient than catharsis, particularly in relation to Nietzsche's writings and their influence on contemporary theory.;From the Greek satyr, Dionysos, the transition is made to Amerindian trickster modes, with a focus on the Winnebago Cycle. Existing in the ambiguity-rich area between satyr and god as well as ambiguously encompassing both satyr and god, Trickster (Wakdjunkaga) is also a transformer and culture-hero who in his multiple roles and irreverent trickery confounds categories. Wakdjunkaga is a form-shifting figure of laughter.;Chapter three pursues the narrator's observation in Herman Melville's strange novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade that the work is "our comedy." Confidence in the genre is pushed to a conceptual stuttering through the darkly comic radical ambiguity. It is the product of the machinations of confidence, a mode of thought that displaces the reconciling dialectic between, among other matters, charity and greed, trust and distrust, good and evil, the literal and the figurative, and the comic and the not comic.;Excess and interpretation are the focus of the conclusion, specifically as they pertain to what is called responsibility.