Let them eat.... comedy?!

Anyone who has read enough Shakespeare will laugh at the jokes, puns, and slapstick that Shakespeare threw into his comedies. Shakespeare was after all writing for his audience, selling tickets meant money, and comedy was a way to draw people into the theater.
M.M. Bakhtin’s essay, Rabelias and His World, talks about laughter and the middle ages. He states that laughter was something that was excluded from “proper life” (i.e. anything religious, ceremonial) but that it was inserted into the festivals (73, 82). The use of comedy in this way is much like the use of films during WWII, it becomes escapism.
The theater was positioned outside of London’s city limits for legal reasons. But this positioning of the city fits the description of the audience being able to leave this bustling, economic world for just a bit to escape into theater. Many apprentices would play hooky and see a play in the afternoon. The theater also had the reputation of having women who sold oranges and other things there as well. It became a place of pleasure, something that I am sure that most people needed without the luxuries of running water or sewers!
The theater was not just for the poor or the rich. In fact, the globe was set up to accommodate everyone who came to see the plays. The rich would often sit up in the balconies and the poor would crowd into the space in front of the stage. Comedy helped Shakespeare draw in the large crowd. Bakhtin also wrote of the universality of comedy, laughter. Every human laughs and most people laugh at similar things. Bergson says, “…the comic foes not exist out the pale of what is strictly human,” (Bergson 62). Laughter is something was created for and by humans. Both Bakhtin and Henri Bergson, in his essay Laughter, wrote about how comedy is often dependent on the body. The body is something universal (as we all have one) and unites the crowd. As long as the person we are laughing at on stage is not in any real harm, we will laugh at him.
Bergson’s view on laughter is a bit more rigid than just every person laughing at someone when they fall down. He says that humans laugh at someone else who is unaware of their surroundings and who is ultimately socially unacceptable, (156). However, Shakespeare seems to take normal people and place them in extraordinary situations, such as the brothers and servants in Comedy of Errors. Twin brothers are normal. Siblings who are separated is normal. What is not normal is the act of the separation and how they are reunited. The brothers are laughed at for having the same body and for being unaware of their surroundings, that the other brother is in the same city. Shakespeare plays on this humor and creates a snowball of situations where people are talking to someone who they think is someone else. The brothers are being rather social in the city; they are not unsociable just unaware. Also, the play ends in the normal happily ever after that Shakespeare loves so much.
Shakespeare saw how comedy brought an audience to the theater. He capitalized on it. He wrote what they wanted to see. For two to three hours he let the audience escape into the show and laugh at the characters on the stage until a happy ending. Even if he didn’t write the plays on his own, he was good at seeing what the people wanted and supplying them with it. It just so happens that the people wanted comedy.