Comedy
Comedy is a form of entertainment meant to be humorous, whether in literature, television, film, or stand-up. The goal of most comedy examples is to induce laughter in the audience. There are many different forms of comedy, such as screwball comedy, black comedy, innuendo, parody, satire, pun, comedy of manners, romantic comedy, farce, burlesque, sarcasm, dramatic irony, and self-deprecation. Different forms of comedy are more popular in different cultures and in different eras.
Types of Comedy
Comedy appears in many art forms, including books, movies, plays, improvisation, and more. As a literary device, comedy features recurring formulas that appeal to readers. Some examples of these comedy types are:
- Romance and Romanticism :Romance, as pointed out, is a type of fiction, comprising idealized love, chivalry, obsessive association with somebody or some idea, and mysterious adventures. However, Romanticism is a specific movement and period in English literature during which poems, stories, and novels related to Romantic ideas were created. William Wordsworth, P. B. Shelly, Lord Byron, and John Keats are some of the most famous poets and writers of the Romantic period. However, Romances have been written since classical English period.
The comedy-of-manners genre originated in the New Comedy period (325–260 BC) of Classical Greece (510–323 BC), and is known from fragments of works by the playwright Menander, whose style of writing, elaborate plots, and stock characters were imitated by Roman playwrights, such as Plautus and Terence, whose comedies were known to and staged during the Renaissance.
In the 17th century, the comedy of manners is best realised in the plays of Molière, such as The School for Wives (1662), The Imposter (1664), and The Misanthrope (1666), which satirise the hypocrisies and pretensions of the ancien régime that ruled France from the late 15th century to the 18th century.
3. Comedy of Humours
The comedy of humours is a genre of dramatic comedy that focuses on a character or range of characters, each of whom exhibits two or more overriding traits or 'humours' that dominates their personality, desires and conduct.
This comic technique may be found in Aristophanes, but the English playwrights Ben Jonson and George Chapman popularised the genre in the closing years of the sixteenth century.
In the later half of the seventeenth century, it was combined with the comedy of manners in Restoration comedy.
In his Induction to Every Man out of His Humour (1599) Jonson explains his character-formula thus:In Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (acted 1598), which made this type of play popular, all the words and acts of Kitely are controlled by an overpowering suspicion that his wife is unfaithful; George Downright, a country squire, must be "frank" above all things; the country gull in town determines his every decision by his desire to "catch on" to the manners of the city gallant.
The comedy of humours owes something to earlier vernacular comedy but more to a desire to imitate the classical comedy of Plautus and Terence and to combat the vogue of romantic comedy, as developed by William Shakespeare. The satiric purpose of the comedy of humours and its realistic method lead to more serious character studies with Jonson’s 1610 play The Alchemist. The humours each had been associated with physical and mental characteristics; the result was a system that was quite subtle in its capacity for describing types of personality.
4. Sentimental ComedyThe characters in sentimental comedy are either strictly good or bad. Heroes have no faults or bad habits, villains are thoroughly evil or morally degraded. The authors' purpose was to show the audience the innate goodness of people and that through morality people who have been led astray can find the path of righteousness.
The plot usually centered on the domestic trials of middle-class couples and included romantic love scenes. Their private woes are exhibited with much emotional stress intended to arouse the spectator’s pity and suspense in advance of the approaching happy ending.
Lovers are often shown separated from each other by socioeconomic factors at the beginning, but brought together in the end by a discovery about the identity of the lower class lover.
Plots also contained an element of mystery to be solved. Verse was not used in order to create a closer illusion of reality. It was thought that rhyme would obscure the true meaning of the words and make the truth disappear.
5. Tragicomedy Comedy6. Dark Comedy or Black Comedy
Addresses typically distressing or taboo topics as a means of relieving the tension of being uncomfortable with humor.
Black comedy, also known as black humor, dark humor, dark comedy, morbid humor, edgy humor, or gallows humor, is a style of comedy that makes light of subject matter that is generally considered taboo, particularly subjects that are normally considered serious or painful to discuss.
Writers and comedians often use it as a tool for exploring vulgar issues by provoking discomfort, serious thought, and amusement for their audience.
Thus, in fiction, for example, the term black comedy can also refer to a genre in which dark humor is a core component.
Popular themes of the genre include death, violence, slavery, genocide, discrimination, disease, and human sexuality.
Black comedy differs from both blue comedy—which focuses more on crude topics such as nudity, sex, and bodily fluids—and from straightforward obscenity.
Whereas the term black comedy is a relatively broad term covering humor relating to many serious subjects, gallows humor tends to be used more specifically in relation to death, or situations that are reminiscent of dying.
Black humor can occasionally be related to the grotesque genre. Literary critics have associated black comedy and black humor with authors as early as the ancient Greeks with Aristophanes.
The term black humour (from the French humour noir) was coined by the Surrealist theorist André Breton in 1935 while interpreting the writings of Jonathan Swift.
Breton's preference was to identify some of Swift's writings as a subgenre of comedy and satire in which laughter arises from cynicism and skepticism, often relying on topics such as death.
In Shakespeare’s time, a comedy often included humor but more generally referred to a play in which characters get married rather than murdered in the end. Shakespeare’s comedies are more light-hearted than his tragedies, though sometimes there are moments of levity in his tragedies.
In Shakespearean comedies, as well as many other comedy examples, the characters end up in a better situation at the end than they were at the beginning, whereas in tragedies the characters end up worse than in the beginning (including ending up dead). However, the comedy definition continues to change its meaning and function, especially absurdist plays and narratives in which things do not change much for the characters at all or even get worse (such as in the television series “Seinfeld” or in Tom Stoppard’s absurdist play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead). There are many different understandings and meanings of humor in different cultures and throughout the ages.