The formal embodiment of a comic view of experience in literary (or other artistic) form: typically, the drama. Although humour and laughter are often involved, comedy need not necessarily be funny. The term is contrasted with tragedy to indicate a play (or other work) with a happy ending, provided by clarification and reconciliation and often symbolized by marriage. Comedy derives from fertility rituals, which had a positive and celebratory function involving the whole community; hence despite proliferating forms in all cultures its general commitment is to the continuity and self-regulation of human society - to which (by contrast with tragedy) the individual interest is always subservient. The Old Comedy of Aristophanes and Menander exposed the weakness and wickedness of individuals and cliques against the social sanity of the chorus; the more tolerant if mechanical New Comedy of Plautus and Terence added a love interest to the stock comic deviations from the norm. The mediaeval miracle and morality plays had a crude, corrective, comic aspect. Ben Jonson recreated the best of classical comedy in Jacobean England, with intellectual but festive satires such as The Alchemist (1610); while the contemporary comedies of Shakespeare, such as Twelfth Night (1600) and Measure for Measure (1604), are formally and ethically more complex, at once profound and problematical. The succeeding Restoration comedies of Wycherley (1670s) and Congreve (1690s) were coarse in comparison, and the later sentimental comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan (1770s) superficial, although structurally accomplished. Meanwhile the prolific Lope de Vega and his successor in Madrid, Calderón, delineated the contradictions of the Spanish character, and Molière brought the comedy of manners to perfection at the court of Louis XIV in France. The rationalist 18th-c and idealizing Romantic age were not productive of comedy, but the dark dramas of Ibsen and the ambiguities of Chekhov introduce the modern problem comedy of relativistic values. In the 20th-c the comedy of ideas (Shaw), the theatre of the absurd (Ionesco, Beckett, Pinter), and black comedy (Orton, Albee) took the form in new directions.
Comedy, in contrast, portrays a conflict or agon (Classical Greek ἀγών) between a young hero and an older authority, a confrontation described by Northrop Frye as a struggle between a "society of youth" and a "society of the old". The basis of comedy would then be a plot mechanism conceived to engender misunderstandings either about a hero's identity or about social being in general.Returning to the popular term comedy, it is known to be difficult to describe.
While hard to pin down, it can safely be said that most good comedy, as with a good joke, contains within it variations on the elements of surprise, incongruity, conflict, and the effect of opposite expectations.
Comedy drama
Comedy is the term applied to theatrical dramas, the chief object of which are to amuse. As compared with tragedy, it is distinguished by having a (the comedies)".
Derivation
The word "comedy" is derived from the Classical Greek κωμῳδία, which is a compound either of κῶμος (revel) or κώμη (village) and ᾠδή (singing): it is possible that κῶμος itself is derived from κώμη, and originally meant a village revel.
In ancient Greece, comedy seems to have originated in bawdy and ribald songs or recitations apropos of fertility festivals or gatherings, or also in poking fun at other people or stereotypes.
Aristotle, in his Poetics, tells us the same: that comedy originated in Phallic songs and the light treatment of the otherwise base and ugly. He also adds that the origins of comedy are obscure because it was not treated seriously. Thus some of Chaucer's tales are called comedies, and in this sense Dante used the term in the title of his poem, La Commedia (cf. The modern usage combines this sense with that in which Renaissance scholars applied it to the ancient comedies.
The adjective "comic" (Greek κωμικός), which strictly means that which relates to comedy, is in modern usage generally confined to the sense of "laughter-provoking": it is distinguished from "humorous" or "witty" inasmuch as it is applied to an incident or remark which provokes spontaneous laughter without a special mental effort. Comedy, in contrast, portrays a conflict or agon (Classical Greek ἀγών) between a young hero and an older authority, a confrontation described by Northrop Frye as a struggle between a "society of youth" and a "society of the old".
User Comments Add a comment…