By Cecilia J. Keehan

Seth Lerer, professor of English and comparative literature at Stanford University, spoke to the Morning Forum of Los Altos on April 2 and asked whether, given the times, comedy was still possible.

Lerer, who grew up in Brooklyn in the 1950s, joked that this in itself surely was a comic experience. Because of his background, he said, he was not really an American speaker. But he was jesting. Any traces of his youthful speech were long ago replaced by the language and diction of the professor that he is. His mother, a speech therapist, was pleased.

The professor teaches philology, the love of language and words, the history of language and literature and the understanding of social experience. He said we learn through literature and books how to relate to others.

Many think of comedy as jokes and humor, but comedy is really a structure involving characters using a certain language in a certain setting, he said.

To explain, he gave the example of a woman and her husband who were at Jones Beach in New York when the husband was swept away by the tide.

Hours later, Lerer related, the body was brought to the beach. The wife looked at it and looked at the police, and said, “He had a hat!”

Comedy arises from social relations when something unexpected happens and we respond to it with laughter, Lerer said.

For the theory of comedy, he said, we must rely on the great theorist Sigmund Freud, who said that jokes are much like dreams, rich in symbolism. The goal of comedy is to be a reflection of society itself, he said.

He described caricature as an exaggeration of an element, quality or physical feature. It often emerges in political cartooning, where certain features of the individual inevitably become icons.

Parody depends on a previously known text or thing. The thing being parodied must be known, Lerer said. Carol Burnett did “Gone With the Wind” dressed as Scarlett O’Hara, wearing a brocade garment made of drapes. The humor was evident when she was shown still wearing the curtain rods.

Old comedy, Lerer said, included the ancient Greek theater of Aristophanes, featuring burlesque figures, the use of obscenity and risqué jokes, characterized by a series of engagements and the wild mockery of important social reform. Comedies have many different stock characters, from the prissy secretary and the overbearing boss to the ingenue trapped in a set of circumstances she can’t handle, he said.

During the Roman period, a new domestic plot-driven comedy emerged that was all about uniting lovers. Plautus, he noted, was responsible for the modern musical, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

There is a history of comedy and a comic sensibility that is adaptive to a changing world. Children learn there is a buddy system at camp, and Lerer said that much of literature hinges on the buddy system. In master-servant relationships, invariably it is the servant who is more knowledgeable about what is going on than the master, he said.

The tragicomedy of our time that can help us live through difficult times, Lerer said, is Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” He said that Vladimir and Estragon were a great pair of buddies from the past.

We enjoy “home comedy” in situations we identify with, such as “I overdrew the check book” or “I burned the roast.”

The Mary Tyler Moore and the Dick Van Dyke shows are examples of such comedies, in which home or office problems are resolved to the amusement of television viewers within the 22 minutes allotted, he said.

Turning to the successful “Seinfeld” show, Lerer recalled that when Jerry Seinfeld was asked what his show was about, he said that it was a show about nothing.

What is really comic, Lerer observed, is that the problems of our own lives are really about nothing.