Tractatus Coislinianus, the fragmented threatise

The Tractatus Coislinianus, with its content heavily based on Aristotle’s Poetics, is a fragment of a treatise on comedy. According to devoted scholars to its academic value, such as Lane Cooper, this fragment is dated no earlier than the first century BC. (An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy, with an Adaptation of the Poetics and a Translation of the Tractatus Coislinianus. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1927. 14.) The anonymous author of Tractatus Coislinianus asserts that “laughter is an essential element in the nature of comedy” (Figueroa-Dorrego & Larkin-Galiñanes 30).

[Comedy is] an imitation of an action that is ludicrous and imperfect, […] through pleasure and laughter effecting the purgation of the like emotion. It has laughter for its mother. […] [I]n comedies there should be a due proportion of laughter.--Tractatus Coislinianus *

The joker will make game of faults in the soul and in the body. […] Comedy differs from abuse, since abuse openly censures the bad qualities attaching [to men], whereas comedy requires the so-called emphasis [? or ‘innuendo’ ].--Tractatus Coislinianus *

*All quotes of Tractatus Coislinianus are translated by Lane Cooper.

By referring to Aristotle (Rhetoric, III, 11), Tractatus Coislinianus (the listing), and John Morreall (Taking Laughter Seriously. 16), Figueroa-Dorrego and Larkin-Galiñanes observe that there is a common interest which focuses on incongruity—failed expectations, disjointed narratives, deviations from patterns—as what causes laughter. Laughter is therefore not an experience of envy or malice; laughter is an experience of unexpected yet enjoyable incongruity which enables “a shift in focus from the emotional to the cognitive side of humour” (32).