Join fellow Yalies for a delightful luncheon speaker whose talk is titled, “What’s So Funny, A Romp through Comic Theory”. It will be presented by Yale Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism, Catherine Sheehy, ’92 MFA, ’99 DFA, from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and Resident Dramaturg at Yale Repertory Theatre. Using theories from Aristotle to Steve Allen, from Bergson to Mel Brooks, Professor Sheehy will help us examine works from Aristophanes to Archer, from Shakespeare to The Simpsons, to discern how comedy actually operates. Why do we laugh at what we laugh at when we laugh? For that matter, what do we mean by “we”? And what does all this have to do with how we load printer paper?
Professor Sheehy teaches Criticism Workshop, Comic Theory, Satire, Restoration & 18th-Century British Comedy, and American Comedy on Stage and Screen. Her most recent Yale Rep dramaturgy credits include the pandemic-interrupted Testmatch, Happy Days, Elevada, These Paper Bullets!, In a Year with 13 Moons, and The Winter’s Tale.
She is a founding member of New Neighborhood, theater and television company, and currently a member of Dwight Street Book Club, production company. She has worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Theater for a New Audience, the Berkshire Theatre Group, The Public Theater, Signature Theatre Company, O’Neill Playwrights Conference, in New York and Ireland with the late Joseph Chaikin, at Baltimore’s Center Stage, for four seasons as Festival Dramaturg at Shakespeare Santa Cruz, and as research consultant HBO’s Perry Mason. Her adaptation of Pride and Prejudice was produced at Asolo Repertory Theatre and Dallas Theater Center. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Village Voice, Playbill, Theater Three, and Parnassus. She has also written guest articles for numerous regional theater programs. She is a former associate editor of American Theatre Magazine and a former editor of Theater magazine.
She received her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University. After completing her M.F.A., she received her doctorate from Yale’s David Geffen School of Drama in 1999 for her dissertation: If You Care to Blast for It: Excavating the Lost Comic Masterpieces of the American Canon.