comedy literary work that aims primarily to provoke laughter. Unlike tragedy , which seeks to engage profound emotions and sympathies, comedy strives to entertain chiefly through criticism and ridicule of man's customs and institutions.

Although usually used in reference to the drama (see drama, Western ; Asian drama ), in the Middle Ages comedy was associated with vernacular language and a happy ending. Thus, the term was also applied to such non-dramatic works as Dante's religious poem, The Divine Comedy.

Evolution of Comedy

Dramatic comedy grew out of the boisterous choruses and dialogue of the fertility rites of the feasts of the Greek god Dionysus. What became known to theater historians as Old Comedy in ancient Greece was a series of loosely connected scenes (using a chorus and individual characters) in which a particular situation was thoroughly exploited through farce , fantasy, satire, and parody, the series ending in a lyrical celebration of unity.

Reaching its height in the brilliantly scathing plays of Aristophanes , Old Comedy gradually declined and was replaced by a less vital and imaginative drama. In New Comedy, generally considered to have begun in the mid-4th cent. BC, the plays were more consciously literary, often romantic in tone, and decidedly less satirical and critical. Menander was the most famous writer of New Comedy.

During the Middle Ages the Church strove to keep the joyous and critical aspects of the drama to a minimum, but comic drama survived in medieval folk plays and festivals, in the Italian commedia dell'arte , in mock liturgical dramas, and in the farcical elements of miracle and morality plays.

With the advent of the Renaissance, a new and vital drama emerged. In England in the 16th cent. the tradition of the interlude , developed by John Heywood and others, blended with that of Latin classic comedy, eventually producing the great Elizabethan comedy, which reached its highest expression in the plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson . Shakespeare, whose comedies ranged from the farcical to the tragicomic, was the master of the romantic comedy, while Jonson, whose drama was strongly influenced by classical tenets, wrote caustic, rich satire.

In 17th-century France, the classical influence was combined with that of the commedia dell'arte in the drama of Molière , one of the greatest comic and satiric writers in the history of the theater. This combination is also present in the plays of the Italian Carlo Goldoni . After a period of suppression during the Puritan Revolution, the English comic drama reemerged with the witty, frequently licentious, consciously artificial comedy of manners of Etherege , Wycherley , Congreve , and others. At the close of the 17th cent., however, such stern reaction had set in against the bawdiness and frivolity of the Restoration stage that English comedy descended into what has become known as sentimental comedy. This drama, which sought more to evoke tears than laughter, had its counterpart in France in the comédie larmoyante.

In England during the later 18th cent. a resurgence of the satirical and witty character comedies was found in the plays of Sheridan . After an almost complete lapse in the early to mid-19th cent., good comedy was again brought to the stage in the comedies of manners by Oscar Wilde and in the comedies of ideas by George Bernard Shaw . In the late 1880s the great Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov began writing his subtle and delicate comedies of the dying Russian aristocracy.

Twentieth-Century Comedy

The 20th cent. has witnessed a number of distinct trends in comedy. These include the sophisticated and witty comedy of manners, initiated by Oscar Wilde in the late 19th cent. and carried on by Noel Coward , S. N. Behrman , Philip Barry and others; the romantic comic fantasy of such playwrights as James M. Barrie and Jean Giraudoux ; and the native Irish comedy of J. M. Synge , Lady Gregory , Sean O'Casey , Brendan Behan , and Brian Friel.

Also important are the musical comedy, which descends from 18th-century ballad operas and the comic operas of W. S. Gilbert and A. S. Sullivan (see musicals ) and the slick, satirical, and professional comedy of George S. Kaufman , Moss Hart , and Neil Simon . Strongly contrasting with these sunny styles are the nihilistic, highly unconventional comedy, containing both comic and tragic elements, of dramatists of the theater of the absurd such as Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett and the so-called black comedy, often concerning topics like racism, sexual perversion, and murder, of playwrights such as Joe Orton , Harold Pinter , and David Mamet .

Bibliography

See B. N. Schilling, The Comic Spirit (1965); J. W. Krutch, Comedy and Conscience after the Restoration (rev. ed. 1949, repr. 1967); W. Sorell, Facets of Comedy (1972); M. Gurewitz, Comedy (1975); M. Charney, Comedy High and Low (1978); H. Levin, Playboys and Killjoys (1988).

Comedy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The social sciences have led the way in the scholarship on humor, looking to social dynamics to explain what people find funny, and why they find it funny. This enquiry began with Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (1899), in which the French philosopher Henri Bergson, thinking as a social scientist might, explored how comedy depends upon the rupture of socialized standards of group behavior. A few years later, Sigmund Freud, in Der Witz und sein Beziehung zum Unbewussten (Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 1905), posited that it was the violation of social constructs (functions of the ego and superego) that makes people laugh.

Bergson would go on to cite “the worthless act” as a central component to laughter in the modern and mechanized world, explaining in “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic” (1911) that humor allows one to distance oneself from the dehumanizing effects of modern, civilized life. Modern scholarship might be said to begin an extension of this logic, looking not only to the essence of humor but also to its social functions. The Czech sociologist Antonin Obrdlik’s “Gallows Humor, a Sociological Phenomenon,” which first appeared in the March 1942 edition of the American Journal of Sociology, argued that “gallows humor” served as relief from the devaluation of human life at the hands of the Nazis.

Since World War II, the social sciences have continued to explore the social functions of humor, often contextualizing these functions by way of well-established theoretical models. In his introductory textbook Humor and Society (1988), Marvin R. Koller addresses the work of Obrdlik directly, examining gallows humor as an example of “relief theory.” Koller then contextualizes relief theory as one of four “macrotheories of humor,” the others being “ambivalence theory” (an embracing of a social construct while simultaneously holding it at arm’s length), “superiority theory” (excluding other social groups from human commerce by way of pronouncing one’s own their “betters”), and “incongruity theory” (reminding us of the perils in thinking we have codified our world more definitively than we have). As any seasoned sociologist will recognize, these theories are familiar approaches drawn from elsewhere in the discipline. Nonetheless, they are profitable means of categorizing and appreciating how humor is more than simply “funny.”

A second contribution to humor scholarship has come from the willingness of the social sciences to look at how what people find funny can be determined by the groups of which they are a part. The social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, have explored the nature of humor by gender, by medium (e.g., print, television, motion pictures), by region, by professional group, and by race. Surely the most impressive scholarship in this regard has explored the relationship between humor and ethnicity. The early work in this area often employed “conflict-aggression” interpretations of ethnic humor, depicting ethnic humor as a means of ranking ethnic groups in a social hierarchy. More recent work though has found the phenomena to be flexible, even fluid. Christopher Davies, in The Mirth of Nations (2002), suggests that Polish jokes, for instance, ebb when definable tensions between Poles and other groups are most pronounced. Conversely, Polish jokes flourish when tensions are lowest.

The reach of scholarship in the social sciences is at once broad and deep. The work is yet to be fully synthesized however. Initially spread across psychology, sociology, and anthropology, it is now also found in related fields such as philosophy, communications, folklore, and media studies. Hence, the most exciting scholarship is more often discovered in articles in interdisciplinary journals than in full-length books devoted to a particular social-science discipline.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bechtold, Robert Heilman. 1978. The Ways of the World: Comedy and Society. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Davies, Christie. 1998. Jokes and Their Relation to Society. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Davies, Christie. 2002. Mirth of Nations. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Koller, Marvin R. 1988. Humor and Society: Explorations in the Sociology of Humor. Houston, TX: Cap and Gown Press.

Jay Boyer

comedy, a stage play of a light and amusing character with a happy conclusion to its plot [OED]. In Greece it originated in the festivals of Dionysus, celebrated with song and merriment at the vintage; the Roman comedy of Plautus and Terence was imitated, with some native elements, from the Greek comedy of Menander and other dramatists of his period. Latin comedy continued to exercise an influence throughout the Middle Ages, particularly on the ‘Saints Plays’ which were often written to celebrate some merry saint and were largely comic with a concluding serious scene. The miracle plays of the later Middle Ages were also conducive to comedy rather than to tragedy, and as with the morality Plays were most independent in their comic parts, which were often separated from the main theme of the play. In Morality Plays the gradual rise of a humorous element is noticeable and the Vice in particular came to be recognized as a stock comic character.

With the recovery in the 15th cent. of twelve lost plays of Plautus and a renewed study of Terence, comedies on classical models came to be written. The plays of John Heywood and Rastell retain more of the elements of the Morality, but Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister (perf. c.1552) and Gammer Gurtons Nedle (acted 1566) are clearly based on classical models. These two plays are the first recognizable examples of modern English comedy. Throughout the 16th cent. this type of college or university play became gradually more popular, while the Morality passed out of fashion. Elizabethan comedy was lightened by a romantic element, as exemplified by Lyly and Greene, drawn from Italian and French romances. Lyly in particular explored the possibilities of prose dialogue and Greene showed great skill in his blending of plot and sub-plot. Shakespeare's comedies, which were nearly all written before 1600, owed much to these two predecessors. His comedies make no great attempt at moralizing or satirizing: their main essentials are a delightful story, in some romantic setting, arriving at a fortunate issue. The comedies of Ben Jonson, which are written almost entirely in prose, have a definite moral and satirical vein running through them, but Beaumont and Fletcher preserved the more romantic and less realistic tradition.

With the revival of drama after the Restoration, the influence of French comedy, and particularly of Molière, was predominant, while Jonson was regarded as the greatest English model. The characteristics of Restoration comedy, as exemplified in the plays of Wycherley, Etherege, Dryden, etc., are wit—rather than humour—and a great measure of licentiousness, but at the same time considerable polish and elegance. Prose was by this time recognized as the natural vehicle for comedy. The Restoration comedy reached its greatest heights in the works of Congreve at the end of the century, while Vanbrugh and Farquhar continued the same tradition, though with less wit and originality. After these, Steele, deprecating the immoral tone of contemporary plays, popularized what is known as the ‘sentimental comedy’. In such plays as his The Conscious Lovers (1722), the rewards attendant on virtuous behaviour are stressed and vices such as drinking and duelling are condemned. This type of play came to be dominant throughout the 18th cent. Steele and his followers had no doubt a salutary influence on the morals of their generation, but their plays on the whole lacked realism and dramatic intensity. Goldsmith in She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and Sheridan in The School for Scandal (1777) and The Critic (1779) deliberately and successfully recaptured the best features of Restoration comedy. Their plays were successful, but they found no followers of any distinction and, in general, few comedies of the 18th and 19th cent. have any place in literary history. Examples from the end of the 19th cent. include Wilde's The Importance of being Earnest, Lady Windermere's Fan, and A Woman of No Importance, the lighter plays of Shaw (You Never Can Tell), and the better plays of Pinero.

The 20th cent. saw various developments in comedy, including the Theatre of the Absurd, the drawing-room comedies of Coward and Rattigan, and the reaction against these in the kitchen sink school, and the black comedies of Orton, Pinter, Beckett, and others. (See also sentimental comedy.)

Comedy, in its modern sense, differs from tragedy in having a happy ending, and from farce in containing some subtlety and character-drawing. The word, meaning ‘revel-song’ from the Greek comos and ode, was applied to the satiric plays of Aristophanes and also to the fabulae of Terence and Plautus. By medieval times it merely indicated any tale with a happy ending, particularly one written in a colloquial style and dealing with the love affairs of lesser folk. The Renaissance brought the term back to the theatre, but without its former satiric connotation. Comedy by its very nature resists translation, for it depends far more than tragedy on local and topical interest; innumerable comedies, successful in their own day, have soon been forgotten.

The Comedy of Humours, as practised by Jonson and Fletcher, was influenced by classical models. The Comedy of Intrigue, subordinating character to plot, originated in Spain and was practised in England by Mrs Aphra Behn. With it may be classed Romantic Comedy, which also came from Spain and reached its highest point in France during the Romantic Revival led by Victor Hugo and the elder Dumas. It is marked by exaggeration and violence and by an overpowering use of local colour, costume, and scenery. The Comedy of Manners originated in France with Molière's Les Précieuses ridicules (1658), and Molière himself said that ‘the correction of social absurdities must at all times be the matter of true comedy’. Pushing it to its logical extreme, he produced the Comedy of Morals—the correction of abuse by the lash of ridicule—of which the greatest exemplar is Tartuffe.

In England, the Comedy of Manners is represented by the plays of Congreve, Farquhar, Vanbrugh, and Wycherley, later classed as Old Comedy but now generally known as Restoration Comedy. The Comedy of Manners revived under Sheridan with much with and less indelicacy, but even Sheridan tended to be influenced by the prevalence of Sentimental Comedy, a type of pathetic play best represented by the work of Steele, which reflected the sensibility of the rising 18th-century middle class. In France this led to the comédie larmoyante which, after blurring the distinction between tragedy and comedy and ousting them from the stage, was in its turn eclipsed by the drame bourgeois.

In the English-speaking theatre comedy during the 19th century was virtually replaced by farce; modern playwrights such as Alan Ayckbourn, Michael Frayn, Neil Simon, and Tom Stoppard use verbal wit and robust humour to examine basically serious contemporary topics. The lack of true comedy is supplied by frequent revivals of plays by Wilde and Coward (perhaps the last writers of English comedy) and Restoration comedies.

The playing of comedy makes heavy demands on the actor, who must be able to suggest elegance, leisure, and a nimble wit. Its broader forms may demand great mobility of countenance and a command of dialect. All comedy acting needs an impeccable sense of timing. In the 19th century comedy was regarded as a specialized art and comedian and tragedian rarely trespassed on each other's territory; but the ability to succeed in both fields is now highly regarded.

For Greek comedy see OLD, MIDDLE, and NEW comedy.

com·e·dy / ˈkämədē/ • n. (pl. -dies) professional entertainment consisting of jokes and satirical sketches, intended to make an audience laugh. ∎  a movie, play, or broadcast program intended to make an audience laugh. ∎  the style or genre of such types of entertainment. ∎  the humorous or amusing aspects of something. ∎  a play characterized by its humorous or satirical tone and its depiction of amusing people or incidents, in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity. ∎  the dramatic genre represented by such plays. Compare with tragedy (sense 2). DERIVATIVES: co·me·dic / kəˈmēdik/ adj.

comedy One of the two main types of drama. It differs from tragedy in its lightness of style and theme and its tendency to resolve happily. It originated in early Greek fertility rites and, in modern usage, refers not only to a humorous play or film, but also to the growing tradition of stand-up routines. As theatre has developed over the centuries, the once clear division between the two dramatic forms has been blurred, as fusions and a variety of sub-divisions of the two have been developed. See also Aristophanes; Greek drama

comedy professional entertainment consisting of jokes and satirical sketches, intended to make an audience laugh. Recorded from late Middle English (as a genre of drama, also denoting a narrative poem with a happy ending, as in Dante's Divine Comedy), the word comes via Old French and Latin from Greek kōmōidia, from kōmōidos ‘comic poet’, from kōmos ‘revel’ + aoidos ‘singer’.

comedy †narrative poem with a pleasant ending XIV; †miracle play or interlude with a happy ending XVI; light and amusing play XVII. — (O)F. comédie — L. cōmœdia — Gr. kōmōidíā, f. kōmōidós comic actor, comic poet, f. kômos revel.
So comedian comic writer XVI; comic actor, †stage-player XVII.

comedy •baddy, caddie, caddy, daddy, faddy, kabaddi, laddie, paddy •alcalde, Chaldee, Fittipaldi, Vivaldi •Andy, bandy, brandy, candy, dandy, Gandhi, glissandi, handy, jim-dandy, Kandy, Mandy, modus operandi, Nandi, randy, Río Grande, sandhi, sandy, sforzandi, shandy •cadi, cardy, Guardi, Hardie, hardy, jihadi, lardy, Mahdi, mardy, Saadi, samadhi, tardy, Yardie •foolhardy • autostrade •already, Eddie, eddy, Freddie, heady, neddy, oven-ready, ready, reddy, steady, teddy, thready •bendy, effendi, Gassendi, modus vivendi, trendy, Wendy •Monteverdi, Verdi •Adie, Brady, lady, milady, Sadie, shady •landlady • charlady • saleslady •beady, greedy, needy, reedy, seedy, speedy, tweedy, weedy •wieldy •biddy, diddy, giddy, kiddie, middy, midi •higgledy-piggledy •Cindy, Hindi, indie, Indy, Lindy, Rawalpindi, shindy, Sindhi, Sindy, windy •perfidy • raggedy • tragedy • remedy •comedy, tragicomedy •Kennedy • Cassidy • accidie • subsidy •bona fide, Heidi, mala fide, tidy, vide