Is he right? "Laughter was something considered for the lower orders" seems like a ridiculous claim to me...

Is he right? "Laughter was something considered for the lower orders" seems like a ridiculous claim to me, but it could be true.

How come Shakespeare wrote so many comedies, then?

Maybe in England. English elites were incredibly stuck up no fun allowed puritans while French writers were perfecting the art of irony.

Maybe at one point among the English aristocracy but I'm not an expert on that.

I do know a bit more than the average person about Scottish nobility and royals and since the early 15th century Scottish kings would pal around with common people and booze up and tell jokes and stuff. James V even owned a joke book. So his use of "British" is probably mistaken.

Well the British are pretty much lower classes: the nation, so it all makes sense.

Comedy was considered something extremely primitive, a cheap entertainment for plebeians and actors pretty much had the social status of prostitutes and beggars in the medieval world, not worshipped celebrities like nowadays.

If you go to /pol/ on infinitychan they will even tell you that comedy is a Jewish invention (it's really Greek, but I understand where they're coming from with that claim).

>comedy is a Jewish invention
Bullshit, but goddamn are they good at it.

I talk about the dark humor because it is the kind with the least consensus, contrary to the genre burlesque or grotestque.

You have a disrespect towards a thing (which makes you laugh) which is, in itself, not funny for most people, and even worse, a thing which is a pain for the person bearing the hardship. This is disrespect towards a sacred thing by somebody not involved. Ex: a famous massacre from WW2: the german soldiers cooked the local baker in his oven. The germans were hysterical. this is funny. It is so sad, that your indignation becomes coated in the ridiculous. Sometimes we can find sadism as well in a laugh. With dark humor, you trace a frontier between the event and your self. This is a revolt. If the sad person manages to have a laugh at his predicaments, it only shows a strong personality IMO.

Nonetheless, you can find a notion of respect as well. Let's recall that a (dis)respect always implies a step back, a distance, from a thing, of the person showing respect to that thing. The previous paragraph talked about a layer of humor tacked on some tragic, some horror, some misery. Some call this the bitter laugh instead of a dark humor. In other words, we attach a seriousness to the human condition, to the life, to the universe but choose to laugh about it. With the bitter laugh, we elevate ourselves from the reality for The reality is a serious business beforehand.
By the new definition of a dark humor, on the contrary, we could say that the reality is absurd, an absurdity that we cannot grasp in full and even bear.
There are two cases: to laugh when we should whine, to whine when we should laugh.
On the one hand, with the bitter laugh, we can laugh from something, but instead we should have cried about it. On the second hand, we cry about something whereas we should laugh about it, we should mock the reality, the human destiny. The tragic does not exist, it was mystification from the outset. This is the entry point of the respect.

They're good in producing low brow garbage for idiots, really. Think Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Rob Schneider, Mel Brooks (all Jews) etc, it's really pretty plebeian entertainment full of slapsticks, tranny jokes and fart jokes.

The only exception to this is Woody Allen and he comes off as pretentious if anything.

>only exception to this is Woody Allen