Life & Wisdom Quote by Johann Georg Zimmermann

Zimmermann’s line lands like a neat Enlightenment-era side-eye at the stage: comedians, he suggests, don’t so much perform as parasitize performance. The sting is in the word “imitations.” It doesn’t mean comedians can’t act; it implies their craft is secondary, a copy of a copy. In an 18th-century intellectual climate that prized reason, moral instruction, and “serious” art, comedy was often tolerated as diversion but mistrusted as a low form that feeds on mimicry, exaggeration, and social weakness. Zimmermann turns that prejudice into a compact hierarchy: the actor embodies; the comedian shadows.

The subtext is less about technique than legitimacy. Acting, at least in its aspirational sense, claims access to interiority - to motive, dignity, tragedy, the full range of human character. Comedy, by contrast, is framed as an external art: surfaces, voices, tics, recognizable types. That’s why the line works rhetorically: it reduces an entire profession to a derivative mechanism, a mirror held up not to nature but to theatricality itself.

There’s also a sly awareness of how comedy operates as critique. If comedians are “imitations of actors,” they expose acting’s conventions - the poses, the grand emotions, the performative sincerity. That makes the quip double-edged: it dismisses comedians as lesser, yet accidentally credits them with a sharper tool. Mimicry is how authority gets punctured. Zimmermann may be trying to demote comedy, but he can’t help acknowledging its real power: it reveals that so much of “serious” performance is already imitation.