The Archetypical Morphology on Iranian Contemporary Comedy Characters Based on Northrop Frye's Theories

In addition to categorizing the four literary genres (tragedy, comedy, romance, and irony) into four mythoi (autumn, spring, summer, and winter), Northrop Frye, a contemporary structural critic, presents himself as an Odyssey critic who is enthusiastic about comedy. In addition to analyzing these four genres, he also considers their structural and character patterns. He believes in the mythological origin of comedy in ancient festivals celebrating the arrival of spring, and he presents a variety of theories on spring mythos and comedy. In this paper, which investigates character patterns in contemporary Iranian comedy, we have attempted to make comparisons between these patterns and the patterns presented by Northrop Frye regarding western comedy in order to identify and introduce them as a structure in contemporary Iranian comedy. Frye divides comedy characters into four categories: Agroikos, Alazon, Bomolochoi, and Eiron. Due to spatial limitations, this paper only explicates the first three categories of characters. Alazon is a charlatan who pretends to be something that he/she is really not. In other words, Alazon is the Bad Man and the antagonist of comedy who always hinders the protagonist from achieving his/her goals and getting to his/her sweetheart. Bomolochoi is a type of character that brings a festive and happy atmosphere and who does not participate in the progression of action. The oldest kind of this type of character is a parasite. Agrikos is a character with negative characteristics, yet his/her credulity causes Alazons abuse him/her. He/She is a stingy, selfish person who disrupts others’ pleasure. This paper recognizes these types of characters in contemporary Iranian comedy and expatiates on their comparative characteristics relative to the patterns presented by Fry. The research method for the paper is evaluation and morphology. This is done by sampling contemporary comedy scripts that were played and published during 1360-1390 in the solar calendar. The samples include seven contemporary comedy scripts. Sampling is done on three types of Iranian comedy: modern comedy, traditional comedy, and Laalehzaari comedy (boulevard comedy). Traditional comedy consists of traditional cheerful Iranian plays like “Siaahbaazi”, and modern comedy characteristically corresponds to New Comedy in the west. Out of the seven sample scripts, three are from modern comedy, three are from traditional comedy, and one is from Laalehzaari (boulevard) comedy. To attain reliable and standardized conclusions, this comparison is performed through a χ^2 one-tailed test with an error coefficient of 5%. In order to answer the main question of the research, we evaluate how closely the analyzed scripts match Frye’s theories. Finally, from a total of 35 data inputs for this research, 23 data inputs matched and 12 data inputs did not match Frye’s theories. This study’s results show that: 1. It is possible to use morphology on contemporary Iranian comedy characters by incorporating the critical pattern of Frye’s archetypical criticism. 2. Traditional, modern, and boulevard Iranian comedies are a little different in their character patterns from Frye’s patterns in western comedy.