On the Next Episode of Tempest Chat. . .

      It's Act 2 of The Tempest, and I am liking it.  Those crazy sailors crack me up!  I love how all the sailors are teasing Adrian and Gonzalo for talking so much.  Who hasn't had the pleasure of knowing some pompous old man who thinks he knows the solution to everything, and also thinks that everyone wants to hear him expound upon everything under the sun?  I'm sure Shakespeare knew just such a man, and modeled Adrian and Gonzalo after him.  And, if Shakespeare based these characters on people he knew, I would assume that Shakespeare himself would have been one of the men mocking them, like Antonio and Sebastian.

      I have always loved dialogue, be it in books, plays, TV shows, or movies.  Good dialogue, in my opinion, can either infinitely improve a work or ruin it entirely.  The dialogue between Adrian, Gonzalo, Antonio, and Sebastian is fast-paced, witty on several levels, and downright hilarious.  I watched a YouTube video of this scene and let me tell you, listening to the sailors bantering is much funnier than just reading it.  I laughed so loudly that it scared my roommate (I don't think she was impressed).  

      This kind of snappy dialogue is something that we see today in many of our favorite TV shows.  We have this scene from Act 2 of The Tempest:

ADRIAN:  It must needs be of subtle, tender, and delicate temperance. 
ANTONIO:  Temperance was a delicate wench. 
SEBASTIAN:  Ay, and a subtle, as he most learnedly delivered. 
ADRIAN:  The air breathes upon us here most sweetly. 
SEBASTIAN:  As if it had lungs, and rotten ones. 
ANTONIO:  Or as ’twere perfumed by a fen. 
GONZALO:  Here is everything advantageous to life. 
ANTONIO:  True. Save means to live. 
SEBASTIAN:  Of that there’s none, or little. 
GONZALO:  How lush and lusty the grass looks! How green! 
ANTONIO:  The ground indeed is tawny. 
SEBASTIAN:  With an eye of green in ’t. 
ANTONIO:  He misses not much. 

      And then we have this scene from my favorite TV show, Modern Family:

Cam: Why so much tape Jay?
Jay: Why are you wearing a sweater when it's 95 degrees out?
Cam: It's my Christmas sweater!
Jay: Based on those stains, you are the Christmas sweater.
Claire: Oh, thank goodness, here comes Phil and the butterball.

Manny: I have a name.

      Classic. 

      I don't have much experience with writers from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  Do a lot of their works have laugh-out-loud humor like many of Shakespeare's works do, or was Shakespeare one of the pioneers of this kind of comedic interplay?  Whatever the case, humor appears to be universal--I think both of these quotes, written centuries apart from each other, have a very similar type of humor.  This leads me to believe we can rest assured that what is funny in one era has a good chance of drawing a laugh a few centuries down the road.