COMICITY AND HISTORY

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to provide the opportunity to get in touch with the theory of laughter and see it applied in the texts of the main comedy author of the first half of the 19th century in Brazil: Martins Pena. We resorted to Aristotle's postulates in order to theoretically support the reflections. In the same sense, modern foreign authors such as Wladimir Propp, Henri Bergson and Geroges Minois, and Brazilians such as Luiz Carlos Travaglia and Sírio Possenti served as a base. Naturally, we also resorted to classical Brazilian literature on theater (Sabato Magaldi, for example) and, for data analysis, we chose the critical edition that Darcy Damasceno produced for the work of Martins Pena. The analyzes provided a clear image of the types of comedy explored by the Brazilian comediographer. Without a doubt, comedies bring with them a series of sociocultural customs that reveal not only the social practices commonly carried out in a given time, but also expose aspects of a linguistic nature that mediate the interactions of the period in which they are inserted.