In Paris in 1684, Louis XIV’s troupe of commedia dell’arte performers staged scenes in French alongside their improvised Italian-language comedy routines in Arlequin, Empereur dans la lune [Harlequin, Emperor in the Moon]. The playwright Anne Mauduit de Fatouville composed and contributed these scenes, appropriating the era’s vocabulary of astronomy. These scenes take up, scramble up, and redeploy contentious ideas about the moon and stars in a satirical attack on astrology and pedantic stargazers. Fatouville’s writing, coupled with standout performances by actors like Domenico Biancolelli, helped make the production an immense success. This article suggests that the show’s achievement also grew out of three main comedic strategies that it used to create a singular psychological impact on its first audiences. These theatrical devices led certain viewers to confront, laugh at, and temporarily repress anxiety about possible omens in the starry sky, and imagined extraterrestrials lurking on the moon.

1684 年在巴黎，路易十四的喜剧表演团在Arlequin , Empereur dans la lune上演法语场景以及他们即兴创作的意大利语喜剧套路[丑角，月亮上的皇帝]。剧作家 Anne Mauduit de Fatouville 创作并贡献了这些场景，挪用了那个时代的天文学词汇。这些场景在对占星术和迂腐的观星者的讽刺性攻击中占据、争夺并重新部署了关于月亮和星星的有争议的想法。Fatouville 的写作，再加上 Domenico Biancolelli 等演员的出色表演，帮助这部作品取得了巨大的成功。这篇文章表明，该节目的成就也源于它用来对第一批观众产生独特心理影响的三种主要喜剧策略。这些戏剧性的装置导致某些观众面对、嘲笑和暂时压制对星空中可能预兆的焦虑，并想象潜伏在月球上的外星人。