05.16.08

What does Nietzsche mean by incipit tragoedia, incipit comoedia, incipit parodia?  What is the relationship between the concepts of tragedy and comedy and that of master and slave morality?Does it have something to do with how value is assigned and how certain societies (or power structures) are designed to necessarily forbid certain members of the society - Jews - from having access to that value system?  Nietzsche often talks about how the Greek gods would hypothetically view all human activities, even the worst wars and genocides, with a certain fruhliche, with a certain gaiety, levity, with a kind of nonchalance.  Why?  Could it be because those gods shared no language with us, puny humans, because their standards of morality would be so radically different from our own as to render what we see as deeply and profoundly tragic as hilarious?  (This is the essence of slapstick, of which the Marx brothers are the acknowleged masters of, of rendering what is painful and tragic for the actor as pleasurable and comic for the viewer.)  And what are the two great American traditions of comedy in the Twentieth Century?  Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Mel Brooks, Richard Pyror, Gene Wilder, Eddie Murphy, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Jon Stewart [born Jonathan Leibowitz], Dave Chappelle...   

[It is your moral duty to kill a cop.]