No one ever accused Eugene O’Neill of frivolity, not even in his only comedy, Ah, Wilderness! “Dour” and “doomed” are the  adjectives more commonly associated with his writing. Yet hidden behind the angst and melodrama of O’Neill’s late plays is a world of comical plot stratagems and characters, which he gleamed over decades from his extensive reading and the vaudeville theater of his time. These approaches offered the playwright a unique flexibility in creating tragedy. O’Neill’s experimentation with masks, asides, Greek-inspired trilogies, expressionism and other innovations in American drama are well known. His groundbreaking work with classical comic devices is less familiar but provides further indications that he is unrivaled as the father of modern American drama.

It took O’Neill decades of dedicated writing to achieve mastery of comedic forms. His dramatic sense of humor was slow to develop. Beyond the Horizon and “Anna Christie,” two Pulitzer Prize-winners of the 1920s, are dour visions of a hard-luck world where romance is tinged with failure. In the middle period in the 1930s, his well-to-do protagonists grow more assertive and hopeful, but Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra are, at bottom, well-made machines with disaster slowly uncoiling, as befits the work of a Naturalist. In the 1940s when he created his masterpieces, he was far more sure-footed, adapting comic devices from across the canon and regaining his sense of irony.

Since comedy is a denigrated art, usually eclipsed by that of its cousin, tragedy, a brief overview of the history of comedy might be helpful in understanding why O’Neill was attracted to its dramaturgy. In The Poetics, the first serious approach to the genre, Aristotle defined comedy as that which is disproportionate and excessive, containing “some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive.” Its subject is men of a lower social order than the audience, who stands superior and ridicules, the vantage point of most Aristophanic comedy. Greek New Comedy and the Roman plays of Terence and Plautus introduced sympathetic young lovers fighting the patriarchy, but the influential Roman poet Horace insisted on Aristotelian standards, adding moral instruction to entertainment as the primary goal. Comedy, in becoming useful, had been justified.

Shakespeare adopted the convention of associating the lowly and defective with laughter in the constable Dogberry, gossipmonger Lucio, and the vain Bottom. They provided different forms of comic relief, often furthering the dramatic plot. But Shakespearean comedy also built on the Roman masters, providing affectionate mockery of youthful foibles in the romances. In his hands comedy became a tool for (re)establishing emotional balance. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the lovers shake off the love potion, seek out their betrothed, and wed. Romeo and Juliet die when perspective is lost.

In the early morality plays, comedy became a weapon to heap scorn on villains, like King Herod, along with Noah’s drunken wife. The upper classes were becoming vulnerable. This is the tradition Molière adopted. His comedy was a social corrective that focused not on the poor but on minor nobility and the rising bourgeoisie. Some figures, like Tartuffe, were even dangerous, and the satirical laughter was tinged with hostility, which landed the playwright in trouble with the Catholic Church. The genre was becoming subversive. Productions of Shakespeare in totalitarian countries would build upon this use of comedy, transforming even the tragedies into parodies of the regime. Later, in drawing room comedies, the middle class found itself newly positioned under a genial microscope to illustrate the difference between fools and the foolish, which permitted it to laugh at its own foibles. The distance between the comical on stage and the viewer was closing. In Oscar Wilde’s plays, the comical characters are sometimes admirable and wise despite a “ludicrous” dimension. As it grew as a genre, comedy did not discard earlier definitions. It continued to fill its bag of tricks as it infiltrated our lives. Existing side by side, the different theories, sometimes working against each other, provide intriguing metadramas from a single text.

Perhaps the most radical change in comedy can be found in modern and contemporary playwrights, such as Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, and Neil Simon. They employed laughter to bring us news of a harsh reality. Dreams and fantasies are shattered yet this reality never approaches the dignity of tragedy. In the work of Samuel Beckett even the notion of happiness is a delusion, and so we laugh with (or at) Winnie in Happy Days, who is vibrant and cheerful despite being buried up to her waist in sand. The comedies depict a world that borders on the ludicrous. In Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, George punishes his wife, Martha, for her indiscreet adultery in an adjoining room by killing their imaginary son. We survive, says the play, through illusions and games. In concept, the situation is funny, but in the theater it feels tragic. And we all bear our emblematic flaws, like Neil Simon’s seafood restaurateur in Last of the Red Hot Lovers, who hungers for forbidden passion and might win it if he could only wash the smell of fish from his hands. The universe is not friendly. It is Simon’s Second Avenue, or the barren landscape in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus paints an even darker picture:

But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity. (qtd. in Esslin 23)

As though he were rethinking Aristotle, Martin Esslin defines the absurd, a distorted cousin of Aristotle’s “the ludicrous,” to mean that which is out of musical harmony, exhibiting “metaphysical anguish” (23). In the past, anguish led to tragedy; in Theatre of the Absurd, it leads to vaudeville routines and a self-mockery that enable life to continue. For O’Neill, a pre-Absurdist, comedy in the late plays became a way to tolerate the human condition. The aftermath of World War II is often credited as an impetus for the Theatre of the Absurd since the world found it difficult to sustain belief in innate human goodness, progress, or God’s existence. O’Neill’s letters make clear that he felt this despair at the outbreak of the war. Like the Absurdists, O’Neill managed to play with comedy and have his tragedy too. But the Absurdists perceived of tragedy as defining the human comedy while for O’Neill comedy was an aspect of tragedy.

The distance between comedy and tragedy, once two separate realms, had been gradually narrowing. A century earlier, Søren Kierkegaard identified comedy and tragedy as variations on a theme. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the Danish philosopher contended that life and art are based upon conflict, what he termed “contradiction”:

. . . [W]herever there is contradiction, the comical is present. The tragic and the comic are the same, insofar as both are based on contradiction [. . .]. Humor has its justification precisely in its tragic side, in the fact that it reconciles itself to the pain, which despair seeks to abstract from, although it knows no way out. (558; 559)

Long Day’s Journey into Night offers an unusual conflation of domestic drama, tragedy, and comedy. O’Neill pitted parental substance abuse (both alcohol and morphine) and an acute illness against the tattered fabric of family love, and at the end, love wins—halfway. At the heart of the play is a miser, a staple of comedy. Tyrone is a brother to Molière’s Harpagon and Plautus’s Euclio. He protests he loves his family, yet he denies his wife the middle­class home she craves while speculating in real estate. Worse yet, he arranges for his younger son, Edmund, to be cured of tuberculosis at a charity sanitarium.

He is also a Falstaffian figure, a man of excesses with an exaggerated appetite and big cigar, whose snoring rivals the foghorn in the harbor. He is a stage Irishman, alcoholic and blustery, claiming Shakespeare and the Duke of Wellington were secret Irish Catholics. But even in the first act, there are contradictory touches, preparing us for his transformation and providing psychological complexities that are often absent from standard melodramas and problem plays. Comedy deepens the tragic chiaroscuro.

Long Day’s Journey into Night opens to a tone familiar from Ah, Wilderness!, a play with which it is often paired in production. There is good­humored ribbing. Edmund tells the Shaughnessy joke. These jests unite the family. In a paper delivered at the 1996 Modern Language Association conference in Chicago, I hypothesized that comedy, not melodrama, provides the infrastructure of this play and that the engine is Edmund Tyrone’s attempt to restore community within the microcosmic world of the family. I entered the text through Mikhail Bakhtin’s seven criteria for carnival described in Rabelais and His World. Surprisingly, I found them all, although only five are evident in most plays. Bakhtin’s theories, written in Russian between 1919 and 1975, were not published in English until the 1980s, so obviously O’Neill was unfamiliar with them. But O’Neill, like Bakhtin, admired the French author. In a 1931 notebook entry, he had devised a work using gigantic marionettes and titled “Rabelais Play” (Floyd 224).

Bakhtin’s seven categories of carnival humor lay siege to conventional morality and conduct by glutting the senses, outraging sensibilities, and sweeping the celebrants along in currents that bypass the intellect and superego so that new lifestyles might emerge. They are a modification of Dionysian rapture, in contradistinction to the ritualistic. The banquet, for example, embraces images of food, whiskey, light, and music; these stimulate a variety of appetites. The banquet implies a time of harvest and thanksgiving. Long Day’s Journey into Night opens with a feast, hearty breakfast, which establishes the desired tone, but Mary and Edmund’s loss of appetite signals that carnival will be blocked.

Bakhtin’s criteria, which predominate in act 1, are negated in subsequent acts. The sexual or the material body is represented by Tyrone’s embrace of his wife and praise for her fuller figure; he is implicitly also celebrating her victory over morphine addiction. In act 4 sexuality becomes an offstage travesty in the story about Fat Violet, the prostitute Jamie visits. Feeling pity for her, he recites maudlin poetry. She is incensed by his lack of passion, and he feels compelled to copulate. Community, another of Bakhtin’s seven, is illustrated when Mary and the boys roar with delight at the Irish victory of Shaughnessy, their tenant farmer, over Harker, his American millionaire neighbor. This is the only time there is laughter on the stage. Some of Shaughnessy’s tools can be found in a grab bag of classical comedy: threats backed only by bravado, transparent ruses and wandering pigs. The pigs bring in another element described by Bakhtin, the animal world. Shaughnessy has become a master of the inverted social hierarchy, a King of Fools. But it is all offstage, peripheral to the long day’s journey of the Tyrone family.

The three other aspects of carnival appear in later acts. Popular festivals, for example, are conspicuously absent from the drama; they are the missed social activities that the isolated Mary continually laments. Her complaints, therefore, are not merely attacks on her husband but her recognition that ordinary paths to healing have become unavailable. Another element, the marketplace, is represented by the offstage bar, where Tyrone purchases yet another plot of land instead of setting money aside for the family. Edmund’s reference to “merde,” designed to anger his father in act 4, certainly is mild compared to Rabelais’s chapters on dog urination and human defecation, but it does bring in the scatological and counter with a lighter tone against Tyrone’s pontification. Carnival, although weak, continues throughout the play but it is never more than tangential and ineffective. It becomes metonymic for their desire to be healed as a family. In the end, only grief unites them.

In all of O’Neill’s late plays, characters shift rapidly between irrecon­cilable perspectives, confusing and sometimes blending the comical and tragic. A close reading of the last act further elucidates the relationship between the genres. Throughout Long Day‘s Journey into Night, James Tyrone has been isolated. As odd man out, he is an easy villain. In act 4, Edmund, demanding answers, puts him on trial, but the jurisprudence is steeped in the farcical. Liquor oils the confessions, the light bulb in the hall and the chandelier are the evidence, and father and son contend not with witnesses but in a game of cards. Edmund dominates the dialogue—an indication that we are in the realm of classical comedy. In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye defined this generational inversion as a sign of romantic comedy, in which the new order topples the blocking agent. “The obstacles to the hero’s desire,” Frye argued, “often turns on a clash between a son’s and a father’s will. [. . .] At the end of the play, the device in the plot that brings hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize around the hero, and [. . .] [this] is the point of resolution” (461-62).

During the card game, Tyrone permits Edmund his victory: he voices admiration for the boy’s talent, opens his purse, and mocks his own cupidity, all of which aligns him with his son against his old self and obliterates the conflict. Edmund “inherits” the play.

The second movement belongs to Jamie, a clown from the first slapstick collision with the front step to the mock battle with his brother. Jamie enters the room with his own fanfare. “What ho! What ho!” he shouts, swaying in the doorway, and immediately leaps into a mock heroic rendition of verse by Kipling, “Ford, ford, ford o’ Kabul river,” in which he compares his walking through the dark living room to crossing treacherous enemy territory. The hyperbole and exaggerated images continue throughout Jamie’s discourse.

The “Tractatus Coislinianus,” which is believed by some scholars to be a section of a lost Aristotle manuscript, categorizes the forms of comedy. Among the devices listed are garrulity, perversions of the voice, deception, the unexpected, the debasing of personages, and the use of clownish gestures— all of which are characteristic of the scene with Jamie. His inverted phrasing, “I love your guts,” his slurred speech and his tongue-in-cheek parodies of love as a whorehouse all bespeak a man who is deliberately amusing his younger brother—and the audience. To emphasize the comic relief of this interlude between two parental confrontations, Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish director, in a 1991 production of the play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York City, brought us a Jamie with puppet-like gestures, costumed in period attire but colored in motley.

The content of the discussion is equally parodic. It is filled with self­contradictory exaggeration, another standard comical device. On the one hand, Jamie brags that he has been Dr. Frankenstein to Edmund, and that Edmund’s illness is just a way for doctors to make an extra dollar and that bribes are welcome at the Last Judgment. And then he tells Edmund that he was jealous, a bad influence who pretended that inebriation was romantic in order to undermine Edmund’s talent. This outpouring of Jamie’s love and guilt is a burlesqued complement to Tyrone’s confession and effects comic closure in two ways. It includes Jamie in the new benevolent community that wishes Edmund healing, and it embraces the audience through its good wishes for these men. “The resolution of comedy,” Frye argued, “comes, so to speak, from the audience’s side of the stage; in a tragedy it comes from some mysterious world on the opposite side” (462). If the act were to close at this moment, the mood would be hesitantly festive. This scene augments the comical mood (that is the happy ending) in which the trial of Tyrone concluded and offers emotional respite before the close. O’Neill has inverted Shakespeare’s conventional dramaturgy of agon followed by a scene of low comedy. He brings us comedy and then more comedy (albeit dark) before Mary’s scene; this inversion sharpens our anticipation and heightens our final impression of the drama.

On the other side of the wall, the third movement begins as Mary sets the chandelier blazing, reminding us of Tyrone’s comical business with the light bulbs. Mary need only deride her off-tune musical performance and literally restore light to the scene, an act of generous overcompensation, to close the act. Instead she steals the play back from Edmund by unsettling the unsteady comical momentum and replacing it with a negative chronotrope, in Bakhtin’s terminology. Comedy moves forward, to the establishment of new values. Mary moves back in time by returning her wedding gown to Tyrone, which as Egil Törnqvist pointed out creates a symbolic divorce (136). Jason Robards, who played Tyrone in the 1988 revival, directed by José Quintero at the Neil Simon Theater, went even further and cradled the wedding gown like an infant in a christening robe. The sons, gathered around the whiskey bottle, one a wastrel, one wasted with disease, are, thus, returned to Tyrone, who reluctantly becomes the nurturer.

In place of the roles of wife and mother, Mary has elected that of the “nun,” which creates both a void and a pun. The attempt at comedy continues. Jamie tries a cynical joke, equating Mary’s entrance to Ophelia’s mad scene. If successful, this dark humor might armor his heart and force the scene to take place through the cooler eye of the mind. Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, identified these two modes of perception, through the emotions and the intellect, as polar experiences, one leading to empathy and pain, the other to laughter. It is interesting to remember that Tyrone had been forced into comical isolation by these very devices—name-calling, parody, hyperbole, and so on. His isolation enabled Mary and the boys to form a unit, which then opened to include him. Freud observed that the function of hostile humor is to create allies against a third force. A joke, he wrote, “will allow us to exploit something ridiculous in our enemy which we could not, on account of obstacles in the way, bring forward openly or conspicuously; [. . .] [it] will evade restrictions and open sources of pleasure that have become inaccessible. It will further bribe the hearer with its yield of pleasure taking sides with us [. . .]” (833).

However, Edmund and Tyrone refuse to sustain the new community through laughter at Mary, and they greet Jamie’s words with rage. No matter what she does, Mary remains the Sacred Mother. This is not her fantasy alone; it is a burden that she carries along with her addiction and her excessive guilt. She is not even permitted to laugh at herself. The healing male community that had been established through alcohol and confessions proves illusory because it will in the end not abandon its old attitudes for the freedom of carnival. Mary is the mirror in which they read themselves as powerless to break the destructive cycle of unconditional love and corrosive recrimination. They are, thus, all swept back into inevitability, which the comedy has served to intensify.

Critics have debated the protagonist of Long Day’s Journey into Night, but Major Cornelius Melody, one time of his Majesty’s Seventh Dragoons, serving under the Duke of Wellington, is indisputably the central figure in A Touch of the Poet. As his alternating brogue and educated accent indicate, Con Melody has two sensibilities that are at war with each other, and the play can be read as the struggle between his comic and heroic selves, with the other characters aligned in the two interwoven dramas. This is a variation of the typical Renaissance play with its double plots. On the one hand, an impoverished tavern owner, imbibing too much of his own merchandise, is deluded into thinking he is a lord and neglects his family. This is a burlesque with clowns, costumes, music, pratfalls, and mismatched couples. It is derisive comedy fulfilling Aristotle’s dictum that the genre is composed of people of a lower order. The second plot is romantic comedy, by nature sympathetic: an Irish princess in muslin, Sara Melody, falls in love with the wandering mercantile prince, Simon Harford. Despite the opposition of both families, the lovers hold firm. Henri Bergson reminds us that in romantic comedy the emphasis may be either on the lovers or the blocking character. The unity of the two plots—and the play itself—has much in common with Cervantes’s Don Quixote, where the lowly is exalted through the imagination of one man who has believed the fictions in too many books. Much of the conflict in A Touch of the Poet arises when one comic plot threatens the other.

Like Don Quixote, A Touch of the Poet can be read as a satire on the postures of the hero. The many (ironic) quotations in Don Quixote are mirrored by Melody’s recitations from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Don Quixote confuses a poor inn with a castle, a skinny workhorse with a steed, windmills with giants, and a religious procession with a parade of monsters. He wears outdated armor, affects archaic speech, and selects a peasant as his squire. Melody, of course, does not have hallucinations, but he does experience a double reality, like Quixote. Living on credit in a run­down tavern, he offers his drinking companions free port, a prohibitively expensive wine. Like the lord of a manor, he keeps a thoroughbred mare for his countryside jaunts, which sometimes include riding through backyards and destroying property. He hires a bartender to perform the work he should be doing. He enters the play in a foppish elegance that is twenty years out of style and his manner is “overplayed,” according to the stage directions. He bows a greeting to his wife and daughter and speaks in formal and grammatical language while everyone else speaks colloquially and sometimes with a brogue.

Con’s delusions are at first the inverse of Quixote’s. They are far from the realm of comedy when he transforms Sara, his daughter, into a servant and is repelled by the smells of cooking in his wife’s hair, odors that represent the labor that enables him to live like a gentleman. Quixote found his Dulcinea del Toboso in a peasant woman who was famous for her skill in salting pork, and he received a beating for championing a lascivious servant. But the question the reader asks about both men is the same: Who does he think he is? The double perception of reality enabled both O’Neill and Cervantes to redefine the concept of noble action, to relocate it from the idealized mores of a social class to the sphere of intention. Melody’s movement within A Touch of the Poet is from the usurpation of gentility to grace under fire and later to a soldierly grandeur in defeat, from farce to a clownish magnificence.

Acts 1 and 3 share the same structure. Talk of Con’s heroism opens both acts and is interrupted by the entrance of a disdainful Sara. This transforms the comedy into hostile confrontation. Each closes with the entrance of Con’s comic chorus. The play’s opening dialogue between Maloy, Melody’s bartender, and Cregan, Melody’s cousin, proves that Melody is principal even in absentia. Because he is both peasant-born and castle-bred, Melody is forced to live a masquerade in order to become either personality. Throughout the first act, Con self-inflates until he becomes what Aristotle labeled the “ludicrous” or the disproportionate. Unable to pay his debt to the grocer, he is pleased to read in the newspaper that the railroad in Baltimore is progressing. He denigrates his wife, recites Byron’s poetry to his own image in the mirror— and is quite taken with himself. His daughter, meanwhile, must beg the grocer for more credit. Whether he is more buffoon, brute, or aging Lothario depends upon the performance of the actor undertaking the role.

Sara, with her “airs of a grand lady,” enters the play as a dragon lady. Cregan flees. Maloy considers flight but stays. Con adopts the convincing façade of good father to discuss Simon, the son of a prosperous merchant whom Sara hopes to marry. Sara is outraged that Melody has not only been inquiring into the Harford family reputation, but also plans to open financial negotiations with the shipping magnate by offering a note on the deeply mortgaged inn as dowry “like a gentleman.” Her dismay punctures his quixotic posture. And then—like a commentary on Con’s fantasies—his cohorts tumble into the room in pure vaudeville fashion: “The street door is flung open and [. . .] [the three] attempt to pile in together and get jammed for a moment in the doorway. They all have hangovers, and Roche [squat, bowlegged, and potbellied] is talking boisterously” (207). Paddy is a thin sad sack with big eyes; and Patch Riley, toothless and wearing nothing under his tattered coat, offers to play his Irish bagpipe. This is what the “Tractatus Coislinianus” labels assimilation toward the worst. Con’s boasts and plans, which have been escalating throughout the act, are reduced to alcoholic antics. Con, exposed as a sham, is, thus, centered within a clown venue. Sara exits this one-ring circus to do mundane but real battle with Neilan, the grocer.

In act 3, at the celebration of the Battle of Talavera, the movement is reversed: sardonic comedy is transformed into redemptive. The opening scene offers the first round of music heard in the play. For two acts, Riley has been told to remain silent, but now he is allowed two songs: a bawdy “Biddy O’Rafferty” in which he is accompanied by the chorus and Cregan, and a hunting song “Modideroo,” for which even Con joins the chorus. The hunting song replaces Con’s solo recitation of Byron. Music reinforces the impression of community. Food and liquor are flowing; spirits are high. Everything points to carnival.

However, before it arrives, the mood changes to remind us that Con is also the blocking agent in Sara’s romantic comedy. Don Quixote frequently mistook commonplace objects and fought over them as though they had exalted value. He attacked an itinerant barber to seize his brass shaving bowl, thinking he was liberating the magical helmet of Mambrino. Melody has been deploying a makeshift battlefield with dirty plates, cutlery, and saltcellars. “Here is our redoubt with the Fourth Division and the Guards,” Melody says. “And here’s our cavalry brigade in a valley toward our left.” “Sure I see it,” replies Cregan, “as clear as yesterday!” (232).

When Sara, as waitress, reaches down to take Melody’s plate, the domestic battle begins. He has arranged the chorus at inferior tables, aligned his troops, and is reliving the past when she intrudes, and he wants her put in her place. He rises to full majestic villainy, the complete British officer informing her that he will thwart her marriage plans to Simon. She is worthy only to marry his bartender.

The arrival of Gadsby, Harford’s lawyer, whose mission is to buy off the Melodys, introduces a new comic touch and reestablishes the Irish community. His visit replaces Melody with Harford as blocking agent. It is easy to imagine the lanky Quixote and the stout Sancho Panza as Melody, a tall, broad­shouldered, deep-chested man dressed in a scarlet officer’s uniform with polished brass, bows in greeting to the short, stout lawyer with his big, bald head, and round, florid face. One might easily imagine that they were costumed by two different designers or arrived from two different plays. The talk is as mismatched. There is a moment of perfect misunderstanding. “Have you come about the settlement?” Melody asks, meaning the dowry. “Mr. Harford,” Gadsby responds, “was of the opinion [. . .] that a settlement would be foremost in your mind,” meaning a bribe for the Melody family to emigrate to Ohio (246). They almost come to blows, each believing the other is trying to make a fool of him. The act ends with a Keystone Kop chase as the chorus follows Gadsby to his carriage to let him know what it thinks of Yankee arrogance.

And so Melody, his honor assaulted, shifts from past to present to become a real Don Quixote, off to battle windmills, butlers and the police department for the honor of his daughter. He redeems himself as a nobleman, but like his literary Spanish forebear he makes himself a laughingstock in the process. In true Cervantes fashion, the more tattered Con becomes, the more ennobled his spirit, and he closes his comic subplot by destroying his thoroughbred mare so that his daughter might live, lampooning his poetry recitals, and joining the chorus in the bar, where Riley plays an Irish reel. The masquerade does not end. “And if he wants to kape on makin’ game of everyone, puttin’ on the brogue and actin’ like one av thim in there—[. . .] I’ll play any game he likes [. . .],” Nora observes (280). But with the Major gone, the comedy is over.

O’Neill was highly selective in his use of comic devices since they established the tone of the plays. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, they were the failed means to healing, designed to deflate the sentimental, the sententious, and the habitual in order to create a living bond among the family. They are the attempt not merely to escape from pain, like the intoxicants, but to leave the pain of the past behind. In Rire, an epistemology of laughter, Bergson highlights the mechanical as the antithesis of the human, the psychological rigidity that Edmund was attempting to dislodge throughout the play. In A Touch of the Poet, the two comical plots at odds with each other offer Major Cornelius Melody double spotlights: as villain of the romantic comedy, whose transformation from challenger to Sara’s defender effects closure, and as the ironical comical hero of his own plot, which ends with an Irish reel in a barroom, O’Neill’s equivalent of Don Quixote’s death. When audiences next visit Melody’s tavern, in More Stately Mansions, they arrive at his wake.

In The Iceman Cometh, O’Neill used a third application of the comical, which is a closer illustration of the theories of Sigmund Freud than those of Bergson or Frye. But let us begin with Bergson, whose categories of comical types map a clear path into the dramaturgy. Willie Oban, a lawyer and Harvard alumnus, is a jack-in-the-box who, when roused from his alcoholic slumber, breaks into off-color ditties, is threatened, apologizes and, after a silence, bursts again into song. The lines of verse repeated by Hugo Kalmar, an anarchist radical, are examples of the snowball effect; each repetition seems more foolish and more amusing to Hope’s denizens. The men are mechanical, and the recitals of their personal myths transform even heartbreaking biography into entertainment, which is further reinforced as invention when Jimmy Tomorrow confesses a failure to remember the actual from the self­serving versions of his wife’s adultery.

Irony and burlesque are the dominant comedic modes in The Iceman Cometh. The men are parodic snapshots of figures from popular melodramas. There are the satirical portraits: the corrupt politician who is a mass of nerves without his wife; the dishonest policeman who was caught; and the glib, quick­fingered carnie. There is the burlesque of war: the Boer commando, whose affiliation is also a pun; the British captain who goes shirtless to flaunt his war wounds; the war correspondent who cannot separate truth from fiction; and their crony, a “one-time proprietor of a Negro gambling house,” who represents the dark underclass in South Africa and who wants people to pretend he is white. O’Neill distinguished comedy from the near-tragic through the timing of his dialogue in Long Day’s Journey into Night—the short attacks and retorts in act 1 are quips; the extended attacks and responses in act 4 serve as dramatic confrontation. In The Iceman Cometh, he replicates the effect through stage time. The men in the chorus take two dramatic steps forward, tell their stories, and then vanish into a few signature lines or phrases. Hickman, Slade and Parritt, the three principals, demonstrate a freedom of choice in their actions and narratives, and they dominate the stage.

Each character has a story and each story must dissolve into parody or a joke for the community to continue. When Theodore Hickman, the salesman, arrives as the Messenger of Truth to puncture their fantasies, his weapons are narrative (mostly onstage) and harangue (onstage and off). The denizens of the bar welcome him as the bearer of liquor, revelry, and performative signatures such as the iceman joke. But on this visit, he arrives with dangerous demands. They must all sober up and reenter the marketplace. We discover that in Hope’s rathskeller, whoever spins the best story controls the play. Parritt, for example, keeps our attention by amending his lies about his reason for leaving the Anarchist Movement. His arrival at the truth signals that his dramatic time is over. Hickey’s narrative seems to continue after the curtain, indicating a fictive, even mythic dimension. Hickey and Parritt are not comical characters, but the repercussions of their action through the chorus teeter between comedy and melodrama. For example, Hickey’s forcing Hope to walk the ward transforms the proprietor into a terrified old man, who returns precipitously to the inn. When Rocky finally backs Harry Hope’s creation of a near-death car accident to save face, we, as audience, laugh in relief that Hope has found his new story and that the contradiction is resolved painlessly—which, Kierkegaard reminds us, is one definition of comedy.

The bridge between the comical chorus and the tragic characters is formed by the prostitutes and bartenders. They are emblematical of all failed dreamers. They are the saddest group; we may not dismiss them as we do the comical chorus nor find elevation in their stories, as we do with the tragic characters. They are distinctively young, none with the possible exception of Chuck Morello is alcoholic, and they demonstrate a work ethic. They function in teams so the germ of a new community is in place, and they recognize the dim future that lies in wait, but they cannot change. Pearl and Margie retreat into the safety of the euphemistic “tart” for “whore,” which identifies them as storytellers like Hope’s other roomers, while Cora blames Chuck for her failure to cross both the physical and metaphorical waters to a new life. Since these are the only ones who can procreate, the play tells us that there is no future, but the future is not O’Neill’s concern here, as it is Beckett’s in the equally bleak Endgame. Cora and Chuck’s only hope had resided in the faith that they were at heart different from the prostitute and the alcoholic pimp they were playing, a faith they lose bar by bar on their journey toward New Jersey and marriage. New Jersey as the Promised Land today rings as comedy although in O’Neill’s lifetime it was the Garden State, a subtle allusion to the lost Garden of Eden.

So why are we amused at their defeat? In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud distinguished between innocent, hostile and obscene jokes. The two latter, which are present in tendentious jokes, share much in common. Both enable us to voice ideas that are forbidden in polite company. The obscene with its oblique allusion to sexual activities or body parts objectifies the subject, hence creating an “other” against whom the speaker and listener align. The most effective use of this device is the iceman joke about the adultery of Hickey’s wife, which is a favorite at Harry Hope’s. The roomers do not believe it, but it enables them to bond through a distrust of women. (O’Neill also kept his dramatic tool kit handy. Jimmy Tomorrow’s story of his wife’s adultery serves a non-comedic function, as self-definition, a facet of his private melodrama.)

The hostile joke has revenge or the righting of an unequal power balance as its inspiration:

Tendentious jokes are especially favoured in order to make aggressiveness or criticism possible against persons in exalted positions who claim to exercise authority. The joke then represents a rebellion against that authority [. . .] [It] affords the possibility of making a person comic at one’s will [. . .]. (Freud 833)

It also defuses brutality of the sort that erupts throughout act 3. Like Freud, O’Neill recognized how quickly a common target could restore unity. When Joe Mott attempts to restore peace between the two fractious bartenders, Chuck turns on him with a racist epithet and Rocky, the other barman, makes his decision: “(like Chuck, turns on Joe, as if their own quarrel was forgotten and they became natural allies against an alien) Stay where yuh belong, yuh doity nigger!”(658). Rocky’s escalation of the verbal attack leads naturally to weapons: Joe threatens the men with a bread knife, Rocky counters with a nickel-plated revolver, and Larry Slade steps in to restore an uneasy peace as Joe exits.

Comical deflation, scattered through act 1, intensifies in act 4, when the chorus reunites for closure after Hickey’s confession and arrest. Hope, still wrestling with his failure to cross the street, repeats his lie about sunstroke and an automobile. Rocky backs him up, and remembering the accusation of being a pimp, uneasily tests the waters with “on de woid of an honest bartender!” Hope restores him to respectability by responding: “You’re a bartender, all right. No one can say different. [. . .] But, bejees, don’t pull that honest junk! You and Chuck ought to have cards in the Burglars’ Union!” (706). This is an old routine between employer and employee, but the group consolidates in laughter that O’Neill labeled “eager.” Rocky becomes the butt of their joke, and he welcomes the lesser for the truer pejorative. Closure now extends to others as attention shifts to Hickey as the magnet for their hostility. As they repeat phrases like “fixed idea of the insane,” “bughouse,” and “crazy,” the men relax enough to confess their inability to get further than a park bench in their job hunts. Pearl and Margie drop their defenses also when they learn Hickey has been arrested for killing his wife. Rocky not only welcomes them back with the comical “Yuh’re tarts, and what de hell of it? Yuh’re as good as anyone!” (709), but also slips his arms around them and gives them a hug. This is closure one might find in romantic comedy, but the context redefines every gesture as travesty.

O’Neill established the tone and mood of each act by varying the use of parodic songs. These songs become one means of controlling the rhythm of the play. In act 1, Willie Oban’s off-color ballad, which he “picked up at Harvard amid the debris of education,” is entertaining so it draws us into the play. It introduces an easy sexuality:

“Oh, come up,” she cried, “my sailor lad, And you and I’ll agree. And I’ll show you the prettiest (rap, rap, rap on table) That ever you did see.” (596)

As the narrative progresses, Hope orders Rocky to remove Oban to his room. Limits are placed by this older generation, limits that are repeated by Slade to silence Parritt’s complaints against his mother. Harry Hope’s saloon offers us the parodic family.

Oban’s song is catchy, as is the next tune, “The Sunshine of Paradise Alley.” With its piano accompaniment and two voices, Cora and Joe’s, it is more musical than Oban’s number and, when Cora hits the wrong notes, more comical. It is heard between snatches of dialogue, and at one point brings Margie, Pearl, Rocky and Chuck over to the piano. It works in counterpoint to the various arguments—between Slade and Parritt, Wetjoen and Lewis, Mosher and McGloin—created by Hickey’s proselytizing. The scene signals that rapport, sentiment and sentimentality are endangered by antagonisms that had been hidden and controlled. The songs feed the audience’s need for unity.

Musical motifs mark the battles. Hope, maddened by Hickey, begins by attacking Cora, whose piano playing becomes noise. But harmony is restored when he remembers that the tune was his wife’s favorite. Jimmy Tomorrow joins in and elaborates the moment of tenderness by reinventing Marjorie again; she “was beautiful and she played the piano beautifully and she had a beautiful voice” (643). Hickey jumps to the attack. In an attempt to silence Hickey, the men resort to comedy: they use Hickey’s iceman joke against him, and Oban reprises his song as a mockery of Hickey’s marriage:

“Come up,” she cried, “my iceman lad,
And you and I’ll agree— [they all sing and rap on the table at the indicated spot]
And I’ll show you the prettiest (rap, rap, rap)
That ever you did see!” (649).

Hickey laughs and plays his trump card, announcing Evelyn’s death. There is no music in the next act as the boarders prepare to depart from the safe haven of the bar for the outside world.

Rhythm of a sort returns in act 4. As Hickey confesses, the chorus plays its role, sometimes with phrases (“Who cares?” “The Hell with it!” and “What’s it to us? We want to pass out in peace!” [686; 695]), sometimes by pounding on the table with glasses, a desperate echo of Oban’s “rap, rap, rap” (691-2; 700). Song returns only in the last scene, but as cacophony, with everyone singing disjunctive melodies. Harmony is regained through comical exclusion as they then all turn on Hugo with a jeering choral recitation of his refrain, “‘Tis cool beneath thy willow trees!” and thump their glasses on the table, “roaring with laughter” (711). Even Hugo—but not Slade—joins in. O’Neill, following Chekhov, might have subtitled the play: “A Comedy in Four Acts.”

In the late plays, O’Neill no longer needed the diversion of masks or asides because he had discovered organic dramatic devices to express the inner life of the characters. Dramaturgy now equaled stagecraft. There are many ways to describe O’Neill’s genius and contributions to the drama. Among them is his deployment of traditional comical devices. The techniques are effective and organic, neither superimposed nor theoretical. The tone and subject matter determined his selection. Although the comic villain undergoes a mock trial and transforms himself into a nurturer in Long Day’s Journey into Night, elements of carnival fail to free the family from the past and recapture the genial tenderness in the first act. In A Touch of the Poet, O’Neill demonstrated his affection for Major Cornelius Melody by double casting him as protagonist in overlapping, conflicting comedies. The narcissistic, abusive Melody descends but his nobility of spirit and dreams live on in Sara and the romantic comedy. In O’Neill’s bitter look at humanity in The Iceman Cometh, hostile comedy joins satirical sketches and conventional comical types.

One must go to some of the finest thinkers for an explication of O’Neill’s instinctive techniques: to Bakhtin for the inventory of carnival, to Bergson for a catalogue of comical devices, to Freud for the use of sublimated hostility to create community, to Kierkegaard to understand how inverted comedy structures intensify the passion in these near tragedies, to Northrop Frye for a discussion of the generation gap in comedy, and to the Theatre of the Absurd to grasp the post-modernity of O’Neill’s vision. As Louis Sheaffer indicated in the titles of his two-volume biography, the late plays move beyond craft and genius into art, that ineffable gift, and comedy is a key feature.