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Analyse the presence of wit and humour in ‘Arms and the man’.

Or.

Write a short note in the use of wit, humour and fun in ‘Arms and the man’.

GB.Shaw has successfully reconciled wit and humour in his drama Arms and the man. He was well known to its distinction. As Chesterton says, “The man who sees the consistency in things is a humorist, he is brilliant without being illuminating. For Bernard Shaw sees consistency nowhere, and yet Chesterton classes him as a wit with Voltaire. The fact is that Bernard Shaw’s intellectual consciousness brings home him the ridiculous irrationality of human beings, and rouses in him the spirit of satire. In the expression of this, his wit becomes scorching, devastating, distressing, and man becomes a pitiful weakling floundering in the quagmire of unreason and making an ass of himself.

G.B.shaw has proved that wit is a rapier that can pierce any defence, and the importance which he attaches it has enabled him to combine a reputation greater than what was enjoyed by Shakespeare at any time during his carrier, or for a century after his death with a popularlity equal to that of Nat Gould of Edger wallace. It is not she brilliant effrontery of Shaw nor the reputation of Shaw as a thinker, nor the eloquende of has serious style, that is the main factor in his success. The principal factor is his wit. “Wit is the very essence of Shavian comedy, in which the dramatist, standing outside the world he creates sees it with an impish detachment. From the days of Widower’s Houses Shaw’s wit sparkles through his plays: with Arms and the Man it began to have great prominence.

Humour-“humour”, says Aristotle is the only test of gravity!….. for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and jest which will not bear examination is false wit’ perhaps this sums up the basis of Shaw’s humour better than any. “Shaw’s humour does not arise form a sense of sympathy with man. It is an acute sense of the ridiculous difference between man’s principles and profession, of the unconscious hypocrisy of human nature that is so laughably exposed in the real affairs of life, of the unconscious unreason that guides our conscious actions. We are all playing our parts which unconscious self-righteousness; all writers of comedy feel the pity of it to be so acute as to be led to relieve it through laughter, Shakespeare also felt this with the boisterous vigour of his elemental common sense.”

“The great root and source of Shaw’s laughter is the clash of the point of view. The old fashioned people laugh at the moderns and vice versa. This sense of intellectual superiority and aloofness, this ability to see the greatness and smallness, at once, of each of the two opposite points of view, is the most characteristics feature about the laughter of Shaw. The element of unexpectedness is another cause of laughter. The fantastic element often produces grotesque and starting contrasts. To achieve the ridiculous, he has resorted to a ceaseless flow wit, and uses with greate precision the weapon of satire. His use of paradoxes and epigrams is a contributory cause of lau The absurd to psy-turvy whimsicality with which he stands the world on its head, is his most attractive gift. He is, perhaps, too much in the earnest to be genuinely humorous. Humour is a product of emotions, wit springs from the mind. Consecuently, Bernard Shaw is more witty than humorous.