comedy

Literary genre that aims to make its audience laugh. Drama, verse, and prose can all have a comic aim. Stereotypically, comedy has a happy or amusing ending, as opposed to tragedy, but it can also embody a far subtler structure and purpose. Traditional comedy, like tragedy, has human weakness as its primary focus but, instead of being destroyed, in comedy the characters are mostly rescued from their faults and often learn from them. The laughter is typically provided by ‘licensed fools’, whose role is to expose and develop the flaws of the characters who take themselves too seriously, are silly, or are mistaken. The fool may ironically prove to be the saviour of the other characters. The final act in a comedy resolves all conflict, with the common exception of a single bitter character, who provides dramatic contrast.

The comic tradition has undergone many changes since its Greek roots; the earliest comedy developed in ancient Greece, in the topical and fantastic satires of Aristophanes. Great comic dramatists include the English William Shakespeare Irish George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, Italian Carlo Goldoni, and the French Molière and Pierre de Marivaux. Genres of comedy include pantomime, satire, farce, black humour, and commedia dell'arte.

In medieval times, the Vices and Devil of the morality plays developed into the stock comic characters of the Renaissance comedy of humours with such notable villains as Ben Jonson's Mosca in Volpone. The comedies of Shakespeare and Molière were followed in England during the 17th century by Restoration comedy writers such as George Etherege, William Wycherley, and William Congreve. Their coarse but lively comedies were toned down in the later Restoration dramas of Richard Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith. Sentimental comedy dominated most of the 19th century in England and the USA, though little of it is remembered or revived today. The close of the century in England brought the realistic tradition of Shaw and the elegant social comedies of Wilde. ‘Slapstick comedy’ went from the stage to silent films from 1900 to 1930. The polished comedies of the English writers Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan were performed on stage and in talking films from the 1920s to 1940s. These were eclipsed during the late 1950s and the 1960s by a trend towards satire and cynicism as seen in the works of the English writers Joe Orton and Peter Nichols, alongside Theatre of the Absurd by Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Tom Stoppard. From the 1970s ‘black comedy’ was dominant in England and the USA, with Alan Ayckbourn dominating the English stage and the political satires of Dario Fo affecting the radical theatre, although situation comedy, like that written by the US dramatist Neil Simon, continued to win audiences of stage, film, and television during the 1970s and 1980s.