<어린이> 게재 희곡의 희극적 요소 연구

Abstract

The plays in the modern children's magazine, <Children>, have not been studied closely enough until now though they took the lead in the script of modern children plays and educational plays. With these problems in mind, I studied the elements, the meaning and the effects which generate laughs, focusing on the comedy, the essence defining aesthetics of the plays in <Children>. The comedy is a comedic trait which triggers laughs and when they lead to an unexpected result by way of revealing human`s faults, the comedy is reinforced. The comedy in the object text is often generated by the traits of characters, the pun of them, and an irony structure. So I analyzed the comedy, depending on those elements. The traits of characters are the most important element. The body of characters, cognitive and psychological flaws and the misjudgement of them generate laughs. The body of characters is caused by the physical deformation like humps or goblins, the misjudgement and mistakes resulting from visual disorder, and the reification of humans through acting. Cognitive flaws result from the misjudgement and mistakes by not understanding the meaning. In other words, a fool, who is a typical character in a comedy, corresponds to someone with cognitive flaws. The object text is characterized by the fact that the character, who is not a real fool, pretends to be foolish or he is too young to understand the meaning. Psychological flaws are caused by disclosing contradictory attitudes resulting from greed or vanity. The pun of characters whose motif is a duel of wits is mainly performed by constructing illogic through climax, exaggeration, nonsense, and malapropism which makes use of homonym. Irony structure is caused by the unintended result, and it has the meaning of the punishment inflicted upon the character with a psychological flaw. In this case, the psychological flaw of the character, especially his or her greed, becomes the target for satire. While the subject of laugh criticizes the object of it, he or she expresses his or her moral sense. On the other hand, while another flaw comes to be the target of humor, the subject of laugh embraces the object of it and deepens the understanding for themselves and other people.