Attention must be paid to Arthur Miller as a comedian, argues the drama scholar Susan C. W. Abbotson. Playwright Miller (1915–2005) is of course best known as the author of Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953), the former a tragedy of the common man, the latter a tragedy of mass hysteria. Miller’s other well-known works include All My Sons (1947), with its two suicides, and A View from the Bridge (1955), which ends with a murder.

These are serious works, but as in Shakespeare’s tragedies, they’re not without their light moments. As an example, Wendell Pierce’s recent turn as the ill-fated Willy Loman in the most recent Broadway revival of Salesman was noted for the laughs he elicited. Miller himself said that if you stood in the back of a theater putting on one of his strictly serious plays, “you’d be surprised by how often people are laughing. It’s just that they’ve forgotten the funny parts by the time they’re heading for the exit.”

“The genius of comedy is the same as the genius of tragedy,” says Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, so “the writer of tragedy ought to be a writer of comedy also.” Abbotson, one of the preeminent Miller scholars, explains how Miller’s career began on the lighter side.

“Prior to his stage plays,” Abbotson writes,

there were a series of comedic radio plays such as his tongue-in-cheek tale about a forger of Shakespeare who fabricates and alternative happy ending for King Lear, called William Ireland’s Confession (1939), also the outrageous fantasy satire The Pussycat and the Expert Plumber Who Was a Man (1940) in which a wily tomcat gets voted in as mayor, or a deliberately jokey one-hour version of Pride and Prejudice (1945) that needed no zombies to elicit laughter.

But after his early successes on stage, Miller’s reputation solidified as a serious playwright, though “he chafed at being [so] labeled.” His persecution by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which led to a contempt of Congress conviction (later overturned) in 1956 added to the sense of gravitas around his reputation and adds even more layers of meaning onto The Crucible, which has become one of the world’s more produced plays.

He did, in fact, write plays that were comedies or had major comedic components: The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), Mr. Peters’ Connections (1998), Resurrection Blues (2002), and Finishing the Picture (2004). None of these has been as successful as the big four of Sons, Salesman, Crucible, and Bridge. While the 2017 revival of The Price earned the belly-laugh-inducing Danny DeVito a Tony Award, Abbotson writes that “critics and audiences just do not know how to accept or understand Miller the comedian.”

Abbotson writes that she’s seen only one performance of The Creation of the World and Other Business, which retells the comedy gold of the first four books of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. This performance was put on by a community college and the “audience was howling with laughter. Many of them had never heard of Arthur Miller, and perhaps that helped.”

Producers thinking of putting on an Arthur Miller are more likely to go for the tragedies because that’s what he’s known for and those are what have sold tickets in the past. It becomes a self-fulling loop.

“Comedies need to be seen to have the best impact, for it is often hard to read on the page, so this lack of production is a factor that keeps this intriguing aspect of his canon away from the critical radar,” Abbotson writes.

In “Tragedy and the Common Man,” a 1949 essay, Miller wrote, in Abbotson’s paraphrase, that “tragedy always seemed more optimistic than comedy in that it displays humankind’s potential to be better. Comedy tends to do the opposite, but it can be no less instructive.”

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