This project interviews people with expertise in different periods of comedy history.

Season 1:

• Ancient Greek Comedy

• Ancient Roman Comedy

• Chinese & European Jesters

• Mummers Plays

• Mystery Plays

• Shakespeare

• Molière

• British Pantomime

The idea of this project is not to be an exhaustive one-stop-shop, but to provide a starting point for anyone who’s interested in learning more about different periods in comedy history. Hopefully this material will be a springboard for people to find out more.

This project was inspired by Jason loving comedy films, and having a knowledge of some areas of comedy theatre history, and wanting to experience different things in today’s comedy. His thoughts were confirmed by an article in the L.A. Times and Wall Street Journal about how comedy movies struggled at the box office (2017 – present).

—

Sometimes we, or at least I, look at periods of history in isolation and don’t always see connections in different periods in history. Or sometimes I don’t always see the larger context of what else is going on historically. Here is a useful historical timeline to put some of this into a larger context: AP European History Timeline. Here’s Wikipedia’s list of time periods.