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Why is comedy so easy to enjoy and so hard to think about? Is “the comic” a genre, a mode, an affective state, a social practice, or none/all of the above? What does comedy have to do with the body? What does it have to do with social location? What historical accidents, psychological barriers and cultural taboos must be re-considered in order to address these questions? Starting from classic texts in genre theory and psychoanalysis, this course try to put Aristotle and Freud into dialogue with recent early modern critical scholarship on affect, drama and the body. Possible texts/authors include: Aristotle’s Poetics; Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their relation to the Unconscious; Rosalie Colie The Resources of Kind; Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England; Will Stockton, Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy; Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection; Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In: On Comedy, and others. The historical spine of the course will be a weekly sequence of classical and early modern comic plays by Plautus, Terence, Aristophanes, Peele, Lyly, Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Wycherley, Etherege, and Behn.