“Comedy” Articles

If you asked me who my favorite contemporary comic poet is, I wouldn’t hesitate a second. It’s Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. Not that all his poems are comic—but those are the ones I keep returning to, the ones I’ll talk about in this post. Actually, comedy isn’t easy to talk about. But I think it will help if I offer you some of what I see as Collins’s favorite categories of poems.

In The Death of Rabelais, her recent verse play, J.C. Scharl has created something rare: an excellent comedy about death. It is, moreover, not only a comedy about death, but a comedy about comedy’s relationship with it. But the most impressive thing is that the play manages to take death seriously and, at the same time, be very funny.