Manifesto
Ridiculous Theater,
Scourge of Human Folly
by Charles Ludlam
Aim: To get beyond nihilism by revaluing combat.
Axioms to a theater for ridicule:
- You are a living mockery of your own ideals.
If not, you have set your ideals too low.
- The things one takes seriously are one's weaknesses.
- Just as many people who claim belief in God disprove
it with their ever act, so too there are those whose
every deed, though they say there is no God, is an
act of faith.
- Evolution is a conscious process.
- Bathos is that which is intended to be sorrowful but
because of the extremity of its expression becomes
comic. Pathos is that which is meant to be comic but
because of the extremity of its expression becomes
sorrowful. Some things which seem to be opposites are
actually different degrees of the same thing.
- The comic hero thrives on his vices. The tragic hero
is destroyed by his virtue. Moral paradox is the crux
of drama.
- The theater is a humble materialist enterprise which
seeks to produce riches of the imagination, not the
other way around. The theater is an event not an object.
Theater workers need not blush and conceal their
desperate struggle to pay the landlords their rents.
Theater without the stink of art.
Instructions for use:
This is farce not Sunday school. Illustrate hedonistic
calculus. Test out a dangerous idea, a theme that
threatens to destroy one's whole value system. Treat the
material in a madly farcical manner without losing the
seriousness of the theme. Show how paradoxes arrest the
mind. Scare yourself a bit along the way.
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