Fictional Worlds IV: Comedy & The Extraordinary (Storytelling on Screen)

Following the suspense of Fictional Worlds III: Tragedy & Mystery, the next part, Fictional Worlds IV: Comedy & The Extraordinary, crosses into the domain of laughter. This book is also a guide to farcical story reversals and for writing an effective comedy. The last installment of the four-part Fictional Worlds set, it contains the Conclusion titled “The Future of Storytelling: Homer and Hamlet on the Holodeck.” This book is preceded by three books, which explore such subjects as symbolic storytelling, genres, action-adventure and fantasy, as well as drama, tragedy, mystery, and film noir. Each of the books in the set is self-sufficient, has its own focus, and can be read independently. Yet each subject can be more profoundly understood as part of a cultural system when the four books are studied in sequence.

The sections of Fictional Worlds IV include: Fools on Top in Reversible Worlds; Comic Reversal and Their Cultural Functions; Laughing through Tears, at Ourselves; The Munchausen Effect; Odysseus-Ulysses-Bloom: Everyman as a Mythic Hero; The Future of Storytelling: Homer and Hamlet on the Holodeck; and Twenty (Most) Effective Narrative Strategies and Story Types. Fictional Worlds IV: Comedy & The Extraordinary serves as “comic relief” and “catharsis” for the Fictional Worlds set. Exploring why we laugh, this book discusses the “upside-down” worlds and the carnivalesque protagonists of comedy – clowns, tricksters, ritual fools, and blissfully confused ordinary people, while investigating the laws of symbolic inversions that make comedy “funny.”

The story premises and formulas analyzed here will interest both writers and readers. How can one write amazing new stories without understanding the comic symbolic inversions, pranks, “mix-ups,” and confusions that create hilarity and release the tensions of everyday life? The universal topsy-turvy techniques of comedy amuse us, but also enlighten us about the human condition. The exploration of comedy in Book Four is followed by the explorations of “the extraordinary” in storytelling, which encompasses characters, situations and astonishing artistic measures, used by writers and film directors to support their characters. This discussion concludes with the hypotheses about the poetics of tomorrow and transmedia storytelling.

This book will help readers and viewers more knowingly follow the journeys of figures – the heroic, antiheroic, tragic, comic, absurd – they encounter in fictional worlds, and understand how they influence symbolic processes of world culture. Case studies include the genres of tragicomedy and tragic farce associated with Shakespeare and Chaplin; the fictional worlds of comic horror and the parables about humanity, created by the Coen Brothers; and a spectrum of stories about the spirited underdog characters, who survive many ordeals, winning at the end. This volume also serves as a “gathering place” for all the Journeying Men, who have been wandering across Fictional Worlds, the book; and now meet “face to face” as symbolic figures of the world’s storytelling traditions.

The content of this four-book digital set is also available in a print edition Fictional Worlds: Traditions in Narrative and the Age of Visual Culture (which contains all four parts under one cover). Read books I-IV to enjoy the Hero’s Journey and meet this book’s protagonist Odysseus-Ulysses; to learn about the wisdom of the dramatic arc and dramatic resolution; to discover the links between tragedy, mystery and the new enigmatic genre behind the phenomenon of film noir; as well as to explore the symbolic figures of Private Investigator, the Femme Fatale, the Ritual Fool, and the Extraordinary Ordinary People.