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King Ubu By Alfred Jarry: Mock The Social Norm

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What started out as a joke ended up being one of today’s most talked about plays towards modernism. King Ubu is a ridiculous comedy written by Alfred Jarry inspired by a school teacher he did not like very much. Later on in his life, Jarry decided to turn all the works he created into a five-act play about the teacher he disliked from his past and made him Pa Ubu – who in the play becomes king and does not listen to common sense or reason. This play also exhibits many references of great playwrights of the past. One that was very prominent to me was Shakespeare. This makes the play seem like a parody on these playwrights’ works. I think the reason Jarry put these references in was to mock the social norm and to shock people by making them …show more content…

People might laugh at this the way one would laugh at a ridiculous scary movie: where what is happening is scary but still pulls you so far out of reality that it starts being funny. With the addition of Shakespeare scenes this play quickly turns into a parody of these works, which does make the play its intended genre a type of comedy. This play started with Jarry being very young and foolish with need to escape from his reality - so he made this play. I think the intention when he decided to put it on the stage was meant to evoke this illusion of an alternate reality that Morphs society in a way that pulls us away from everyday realistic lives. That also teaches us the theatre does not always need to be as real or natural as it has been in the past and it can be an escape for …show more content…

I picture him with a drink in his hand, drunk, finding his old works from his younger years and putting it together. Drunkenly laughing and saying things like: if this doesn’t get them I don’t know what will. I don’t think it was for devilish reasons or to alter society I think he just wanted to be heard by someone with his little piece of theatre he’s been working on for a while. Jarry believed in the science of imaginary solutions and I think this is what this play was for modernism at this time. It got people thinking in a new way and was truly what the period needed to progress to what we see theatre as

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