COMEDY

type of drama or other art form the chief object of which, according to modern notions, is to amuse. It is contrasted on the one hand with tragedy and on the other with farce, burlesque, and other forms of humorous amusement. The classic conception of comedy, which began with Aristotle in ancient Greece of the 4th century BC and persists through the present, holds that it is primarily concerned with man as a social being, rather than as a private person, and that its function is frankly corrective. The comic artist's purpose is to hold a mirror up to society to reflect its follies and vices, in the hope that they will, as a result, be mended. The 20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson shared this view of the corrective purpose of laughter; specifically, he felt, laughter is intended to bring the comic character back into conformity with his society, whose logic and conventions he abandons when he slackens in the attention that is due to life. Here comedy is considered primarily as a literary genre, but also is considered for its manifestations in the other arts. The wellsprings of comedy are dealt with in the article humour. The comic impulse in the visual arts is discussed in caricature and cartoon and comic strip. in Western theatre, type of drama the chief object of which, according to modern notions, is to amuse. It is contrasted on the one hand with tragedy and on the other with farce, burlesque, and other forms of humorous amusement. Originally derived from Greek, the word comedy passed through various shades of meaning. In the European Middle Ages it meant simply a story with a happy ending. Thus some of Chaucer's tales are called comedies, and Dante used the term in that sense in the title of his poem La divina commedia. Subsequently the term was applied to mystery plays with a happy ending. The modern usage combined this sense with that in which Renaissance scholars applied it to the ancient comedies. The history of comedy shows it to be a form whose complexity cannot adequately be dealt with by any definition that sees it as aiming simply at exciting laughter. Still, laughter is undoubtedly associated with comedy, a condition that has led to the discussion of the two together, notably by Henri Bergson, Le Rire (1900; Laughter, 1911), J. Sully, An Essay on Laughter (1902), and George Meredith, The Idea of Comedy (1877). Meredith's thesis that comedy appeals to the intellect and not to the emotions and concerns the social group has been generally rejected as too narrow. Consideration of comedies as they actually exist suggests that what might be regarded as different kinds derive fundamentally from differences in the attitude of authors toward their subjects, and their intentions with these respectively. When, for whatever purpose, the intention is to ridicule, satirical comedy emerges; when ridicule is turned on persons, the result is the comedy of character; satire of social convention and within social convention creates the comedy of manners; social comedy concerns the structure of society itself; and satire of conventional thinking produces the comedy of ideas. Progress from troubles to the triumph of love in a happy outcome produces romantic comedy, and William Shakespeare's individual brand of this is suffused with a mellow humour rather than wit. The comedy of intrigue derives from a dominant intention of providing amusement and excitement with an intricate plot of reversals with artificial, contrived situations. Such is the comedy of Spain in Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and their fellows. Where the author wants to exploit potentially serious issues merely sentimentally, never really approaching anything like the true emotion of tragedy, sentimental comedy results. Tragicomedy combines elements of the tragic and the comedic. In the 20th century, so-called black comedy and absurdism reflected existentialist concerns. Musical comedy, in which true comedy is often subservient to broad farce and spectacular effects, has been popular in Great Britain and the United States since the late 19th century. Of course these kinds are not mutually exclusive; elements of one or more may appear in any. Additional reading C.L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (1959), Shakespearean comedy considered in relation to archetypal patterns of folk ritual and games; Lane Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy, with an Adaptation of the Poetics and a Translation of the Tractatus Coislinianus (1922), the only modern text of the Tractatus, with an introductory essay relating it to Aristotle's theory of tragedy, and a conjectural reconstruction of the lost treatise on comedy based on the example of the Poetics; F.M. Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914; ed. by T.H. Gaster, 1961), an account of the development of Greek comedy from primitive fertility rites, and of the survival of traces of these ceremonials in the extant plays of Aristophanes; Cyrus Hoy, The Hyacinth Room: An Investigation into the Nature of Comedy, Tragedy, and Tragicomedy (1964), an examination of the plays of Euripides, Shakespeare, Jonson, Molire, Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello, Beckett, and Ionesco; J.W. Krutch, Comedy and Conscience After the Restoration (1924, reprinted with a new preface and additional bibliographic material, 1949), a study of the decline of Restoration comedy and the rise of sentimental comedy at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century; K.M. Lynch, The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy (1926), the best available account of the relation of the plays of Dryden, Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve, and their contemporaries to their social milieu; A.W. Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb, Tragedy, and Comedy (1927; 2nd ed. rev. by T.B.L. Webster, 1962), and The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (1953; 2nd ed. rev. by J. Gould and D.M. Lewis, 1968), the definitive accounts of the origins of Greek comedy and tragedy; and F.H. Ristine, English Tragicomedy: Its Origin and History (1910), the only full-scale account of the subject through the 17th century.