Dictionary:

comedy

  (kŏm'ĭ-dē)

1. 1. A dramatic work that is light and often humorous or satirical in tone and that usually contains a happy resolution of the thematic conflict.
   2. The genre made up of such works.
2. A literary or cinematic work of a comic nature or that uses the themes or methods of comedy.
3. Popular entertainment composed of jokes, satire, or humorous performance.
4. The art of composing or performing comedy.
5. A humorous element of life or literature: the human comedy of political campaigns.
6. A humorous occurrence.

comedy of errors

1. A ludicrous event or sequence of events: The candidate's campaign turned out to be a political comedy of errors.

[Middle English comedie, from Medieval Latin cōmēdia, from Latin cōmoedia, from Greek kōmōidia, from kōmōidos, comic actor : kōmos, revel + aoidos, singer (from aeidein, to sing).]

noun

The quality of being laughable or comical: comicality, comicalness, drollery, drollness, farcicality, funniness, humor, humorousness, jocoseness, jocosity, jocularity, ludicrousness, ridiculousness, wit, wittiness, zaniness. See laughter.

Definition: funny entertainment
Antonyms: tragedy

comedy, a play (or other literary composition) written chiefly to amuse its audience by appealing to a sense of superiority over the characters depicted. A comedy will normally be closer to the representation of everyday life than a tragedy, and will explore common human failings rather than tragedy's disastrous crimes. Its ending will usually be happy for the leading characters. In another sense, the term was applied in the Middle Ages to narrative poems that end happily: the title of Dante's Divine Comedy (c.1320) carries this meaning. As a dramatic form, comedy in Europe dates back to the Greek playwright Aristophanes in the 5th century BCE. His Old Comedy combines several kinds of mischief, including the satirical mockery of living politicians and writers. At the end of the next century, Menander established the fictional form known as New Comedy, in which young lovers went through misadventures among other stock characters; this tradition was later developed in the Roman comedy of Plautus and Terence, and eventually by Shakespeare in England and Lope de Vega in Spain. The great period of European comedy, partly influenced by the commedia dell' arte, was the 17th century, when Shakespeare, de Vega, and Jonson were succeeded by Molière and by the Restoration comedy of Congreve, Etheredge, and Wycherley. There are several kinds of comedy, including the romantic comedy of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (c.1596), the satire in Jonson's Volpone (1606) or in Molière's Le Tartuffe (1669), the sophisticated verbal wit of the comedy of manners in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), and the more topical ‘comedy of ideas’ in the plays of George BernardShaw. Among its less sophisticated forms are burlesque and farce. See also black comedy, comic relief, humours, tragicomedy. For a fuller account, consult W. Moelwyn Merchant, Comedy (1972).

For more information on comedy, visit Britannica.com.

1. Greek. The only Greek comedy we possess is Athenian. For that reason it is also known as Attic comedy (from the state of Attica, of which Athens was the chief city).

1. Background. Comedies at Athens, like tragedies, were produced under the auspices of the state and were a matter for competition (compare TRAGEDY 1). They were first produced at the annual festival of the City Dionysia in 486 BC and at the Lenaea (another Dionysiac festival) c.440 BC. Before and after the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), five comedies were performed annually at each festival; during the war the number is said to have been reduced to three for reasons of economy. Comic dramatists (often called comic poets because the plays were written in verse) who wished to have their plays performed ‘applied for a chorus’ to the magistrate in charge of the festival, who chose the successful applicants. The duty of providing a chorus fell upon rich citizens (see CHOREGIA). The dramatists, who received payment, usually presented only one play each, and were in competition for first prize, which may have been no more than a garland of ivy. At the Lenaea a prize seems also to have been given for the best comic actor, but not at the City Dionysia until the late fourth century. Ten judges were appointed by lot from among the citizens, according to an elaborate method designed to avoid corruption. It seems to be the case that no Greek wrote both tragedies and comedies; when, at the end of Plato's Symposium, Socrates forces Agathon, who wrote tragedies, and Aristophanes, who wrote comedies, to admit that the same man could write both, the admission was intended to be paradoxical (but see ION OF CHIOS).

2. The origin of Greek comedy. The earliest comedy we possess, the Acharnians of Aristophanes, was produced in 425 BC; we do not know how it differed from the earliest comedies performed in Athens, nor how comedy started in the first place.

3. Old Comedy (Aristophanic Comedy). The term ‘Old Comedy’ denotes the comedies produced in Athens in the fifth century BC. Of all these works the only complete plays surviving are eleven by Aristophanes, and of these the last two (Ecclesiazusae and Plutus) were written in the fourth century BC and are different in character from the rest, notably in the much reduced role of the chorus. Our knowledge of Old Comedy therefore depends upon Aristophanes' other nine plays, all produced in the last quarter of the fifth century. However, there are sufficient resemblances between these plays, late in the tradition though they are, and the fragments of the other playwrights (see 4 below), to allow cautious generalizations about the nature of Old Comedy.

An Aristophanic comedy is elaborate in structure and may be divided into the following parts (found with some variations in the first nine plays).

i. prologos, ‘prologue’, an expository opening scene before the entrance of the chorus.

ii. parodos, ‘the entry of the chorus’, a scene in which the chorus enters and is characterized and introduced to the audience; it is usual for it then to oppose either the hero or the hero's enemies with great vigour. The parodos ends with a short scene that effects a transition to the next section.

iii. agon, ‘debate’, between two adversaries with arguments for and against the crucial issue of the play.

iv. parabasis, ‘coming forward’. After the agon all the characters leave the stage, the chorus ‘comes forward’ and the chorus-leader addresses the audience directly in anapaestic tetrameters, the subject-matter having little to do with the plot. The anapaests end in a long sentence to be spoken in one breath (pnīgos, ‘the choke’).

v. Following the parabasis comes a number of episodes (epeisodia), separated by brief choral songs, sometimes carrying on the main plot, but usually only illustrating the conclusion arrived at in the agon.

vi. exodos, final scene, in which the predominant note is rejoicing, generally leading up to a feast or wedding. The play may conclude with a cordax or riotous dance.

A comedy required for its performance three or four actors, occasionally with the support of supernumeraries, and a chorus of twenty-four members (all men). The chorus was of primary importance. Many plays took their titles from the chorus (e.g. Acharnians, Wasps, Birds), whose costume and dances provided spectacle. The actors' costumes were an exaggeration of reality, with grotesque masks (which included hair) and body padding and, probably, a large phallus for male characters. The costume was consonant with the robust nature of Old Comedy, in which the jokes were much concerned with sex and excretion and expressed in uninhibited language. The comedy took as its starting point a fantastic scheme on the part of the hero, the achievement of which, wholly impossible in real life, constituted the plot. A few prominent citizens were mercilessly ridiculed; in some comedies they figure in major roles, either in their own names, e.g. Socrates in Clouds, Euripides in Thesmophoriazusae, or in thin disguise, e.g. Cleon as the Paphlagonian in Knights. Topical comment on personalities, events, and institutions of the day (e.g. the lawcourts in Wasps) was pervasive. The more extreme aspects of contemporary democratic politics, the more ridiculous developments in education, music, and literature, even the indignities of war, were seized upon and exaggerated for comic effect. The gods, or certain gods, were similarly treated with irreverence, but never in such a way as to deny their reality. It is difficult to see how far serious social comment lay behind the jokes. Altogether, Old Comedy was a humane blend of religious ceremony, satire and criticism (political, social, and literary), wit and buffoonery.

4. Authors of Old Comedy. Of the authors of Old Comedy other than Aristophanes we know little. The two greatest after Aristophanes, as the Greeks thought, were Cratinus and Eupolis. Only fragments survive.

5. Middle Comedy. This term is used to describe Athenian comedy of the period c.400–c.323 BC (between Old and New Comedy), almost all of which is lost. It was a period of experimentation and no single type of play can be said to represent it exclusively. The defeat of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War (404 BC) was reflected in comedy by the evolution of a type that was cosmopolitan and less Athenian in character. Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae (probably 391) and Plutus (388) are thought of as typical early examples. The parabasis disappeared, the role of the chorus declined sharply, the padded costume and the phallus were given up. Plots based on mythology continued to be popular in the first half of the period, but political themes and comment gradually disappeared, to be replaced by satire of familiar types in society, the professional soldier and the courtesan, for example. Emphasis came to be put on the realities of ordinary life. We know the names of about fifty dramatists of this period, of whom the most famous (after Aristophanes) were Antiphanēs, Eubulus, and Alexis; but Aristophanes apart, no complete play survives, although we have a large number of fragments.

6. New Comedy. New Comedy is the name given to Athenian comedy of the period c.323–c.263 BC, that is, from the death of Alexander the Great to the death of Philemon, the last great dramatist of New Comedy. (The latter's death is memorably described in the Florida of Apuleius.) The plays of New Comedy adhere to a recognizable pattern which is a final development from Old Comedy. They were divided into five acts, separated by irrelevant choral interludes performed by a chorus which took no other part in the play and whose songs have not survived. Padded costume had been abandoned but masks were retained; in other respects the actors wore ordinary Athenian dress. The dramatists set their plays in Athens and were themselves based in Athens, but many of them were drawn there from other cities. They made few references to prominent Athenian citizens or politicians, and in general political comment was rare. Their plots were concerned with some stereotyped but relatively realistic episodes in the private life of the well-to-do family, cosmopolitan rather than narrowly Athenian. Their success lay in the delineation of character, especially as expressed by mood and feeling. These characteristics gave New Comedy a wide and long-lasting appeal, and the plays enjoyed great popularity for many centuries in the Graeco-Roman world. It is ironic therefore that the Attic Greek in which they were written, foreshadowing the international koinē (see DIALECTS (1) 3), was considered in the Byzantine age to be inferior to Attic speech of the fifth century BC, and thus unsuitable for the Byzantine schoolroom. As a result manuscripts of the plays were not circulated or copied and none has survived to the present day. However, a number of papyrus finds (see PAPYROLOGY) has restored to us large parts of several plays of Menander, and we have fragments of some other dramatists. Apart from Menander, the most famous was Philemon (c.361–263 BC). He was probably born in Syracuse, but became an Athenian citizen. Sixty titles are known and over two hundred fragments. His technique can be gathered from Plautus' adaptation of his plays. Dĭphilus from the Milesian colony of Sinopē on the Black Sea was another dramatist of the second half of the fourth century BC. Again, about sixty titles are known, and a few of his plays were adapted by Plautus.

2. Roman

1. Background. Drama at Rome had its origin in the third century BC, but two centuries later there was disagreement as to how, when exactly, and where it arose. Livy's version of its origin (see below) is only one of several. He states (7. 2) that it began with the dances, accompanied by the flute, of players brought from Etruria in 363 BC to propitiate the gods because of an outbreak of plague. Young men of Rome imitated these dances, adding a dialogue in verse, roughly improvised and, according to Livy, similar to the Fescennine verses (whatever these may have been) which Horace saw as the origin of comedy. These entertainments were thought of as giving place to a somewhat more developed but still plotless dramatic performance, the satura or medley (see SATIRE), with appropriate musical accompaniment. Livius Andronicus (c.284–204 BC), a Greek from Tarentum, was the first, according to Livy, to abandon the satura and compose a play with a plot. With him a more serious and artistic form of drama became established. Probably several elements went to the development of Roman comedy: Etruscan mimetic dances (persona, ‘mask’, and scaena, ‘stage’, are Etruscan forms of the Greek words prosōpon and skēnē) and perhaps Fescennine dialogue; satura; and Atellan farce, familiar in Rome by the end of the third century BC, but perhaps imported much earlier. The mime too was known in Rome well before the end of the third century. With audiences prepared by these primitive dramatic forms, Greek (New) Comedy was first introduced by Livius Andronicus in translation in 240 BC and gained a temporary hold. Greek comedy found its first important native Italian exponent in Naevius, more than thirty of whose comedies have titles known to us, mostly, it would seem, translations of Greek New Comedy, but possibly including original comedies set in Italy. He was followed by Plautus, Caecilius Statius, and Terence, all imitators and adaptors of New Comedy; their plays were known in consequence as fabulae palliatae, ‘plays in Greek cloaks’. But some attempts were made, by the middle of the second century BC, to write comedies in which characters and scenes were Italian although the structure was Greek. These were called fabulae togatae, ‘plays in togas’. Unfortunately none of these plays survives, except for a few brief quotations. Lucius Afranius (b. c.150 BC) was the most famous of their authors. Roman comedy practically ceased to be written in the first century BC, supplanted by the more popular mime, which had no claim to literary merit. The last recorded revival at Rome of a comedy by Plautus, Pseudolus, was staged in Cicero's day.

2. Performance of Roman comedy. There had always been an audience at Rome for dramatic performances of one sort or another. From the third century BC days were set aside for stage performances at the public games (see LUDI), and besides regular festivals there were occasional performances at such events as the funeral games of distinguished men. Audiences were drawn from all social classes, but, in general, Roman audiences were less knowledgeable and appreciative than their counterparts in Athens, and had less respect for actors and for the occasion. Horace alleged that an audience will demand a bear or boxers in the middle of a play. Plautus in the prologue to Poenulus enumerates an amazing list of activities he would prefer the audience to desist from, of which letting the baby cry is the least. Roman actors, always men except in mimes, were generally slaves (see THEATRE), and if free men, were thought too disreputable to vote or to serve in the army (but see ROSCIUS). There was no strict limitation upon the number of actors, as there was in Greece, and many plays require at least five speaking actors. Oddly enough, it is not known for sure if masks were worn in Roman adaptations of Greek drama, but they were worn in the native Atellan drama. Though the texts of the plays of Plautus have been divided into five acts since the Renaissance, and those of Terence since ancient times, they were written to run continuously, and they did not employ a chorus, although they included parts that were declaimed or sung. The scenes of spoken dialogue were written in iambic senarii and are called dīverbia. All other parts are called cantica, and include (a) trochaic and iambic septenarii, forming melodramatic recitals, declaimed by the actor to a musical accompaniment, and (b) the lyric parts sung by the actor (or a concealed substitute) with a flute accompaniment. For the metre of Roman comedy see METRE, LATIN 2. (See also PANTOMIME and SOCCUS.)

1. Before 1700

The word comédie can be misleading in French. In the 17th c. it was used of all kinds of play; ‘aller à la comédie’ meant to go to the theatre, and comédien still means simply an actor in the 20th c. Even when used more technically, comédie did not necessarily imply laughter or amusement; Pierre Corneille gave to some of his serious plays with happy endings the label ‘comédie héroïque’.

If one were to judge by the use of the word, comedy did not exist in France before the 16th c., when its arrival was heralded in Du Bellay's Défense et illustration, with its call for the re-creation of comedy alongside other ancient forms such as ode or tragedy. But of course much drama in the Middle Ages (not to speak of other genres) is essentially comic [see Medieval Theatre]. Comic elements existed within the liturgical plays, the liturgy was shadowed by the parodic ‘fête des fous’, and the jongleurs maintained a tradition of open-air popular entertainment. As for the comic theatre proper, we still have the 13th-c. ‘jeux’ of Bodel and Adam de la Halle in Arras, and the numerous didactic or satirical soties, morality plays, or farces performed in the 15th and 16th c. by such groups as the Enfants sans Souci or the Basoche. Patelin is the best-known example of this entertaining popular theatre.

The mid-16th c. saw the humanists attempting to create a more literary type of comedy. Rejecting native farce, they looked for models to the Latin New Comedy (Plautus, Terence) and more directly to the Italians. Classical French comedy is above all Italian in origin. The theories adumbrated by Peletier du Mans, Larivey, and others anticipated 17th-c. doctrine, and plays such as Jodelle's Eugène (still close to the medieval farce in some respects), Grévin's Les Ébahis and La Trésorière, and the skilfully written comedies of Larivey suggested future directions for the comic theatre. They failed, however, to find a real theatrical public [see Theatres And Audiences].

Throughout the ancien régime farce and other forms of popular theatre continued to attract crowds. The trio of farceurs at the Hôtel de Bourgogne [see Farce], Tabarin on the Pont-Neuf, Bruscambille, and the white-faced Jodelet all performed amusing short pieces. Companies from Italy played commedia dell'arte, at first in their own language, but eventually in French, with an ample element of slapstick [see Comédie-Italienne]. And from the late 17th c. the théâtres de la foire attracted mixed audiences to varied entertainments in which farce mingled with music and spectacular effects. Some of these currents flowed together in the 18th c. to create the genre of opéra-comique.

Meanwhile a more literary form of comedy established itself on the Parisian stage during the first third of the 17th c. The Italian pastoral plays, imitated by Hardy, Racan, and Mairet, were a formative influence. Du Ryer, Rotrou, and Desmarets among others made significant contributions, but the essential figure was Pierre Corneille, whose early comedies transfer the pastoral love intrigue to a nicely observed contemporary urban reality. His Illusion comique is an exceptional tour de force.

The years between 1640 and 1660 saw the consolidation of ‘la grande comédie’, literary comedy of manners and intrigue in five acts and in verse. Although less discussed by theorists than tragedy, it was shaped according to similar precepts to those governing its more serious elder sister. From about 1640 Spanish theatre exerted a powerful influence, seen notably in Pierre Corneille's Le Menteur and the plays of Rotrou, Scarron, and Thomas Corneille.

Many new comedies were written in the years after 1660 by authors including Quinault, Donneau de Visé, Racine (Les Plaideurs), and Hauteroche, but the comic stage at this time was dominated by Molière. Supported by the king, the ‘premier farceur de France’ combined elements from popular and learned theatre, together with court spectaculars (comédies-ballets) in an unparalleled creation which appealed equally to la cour and la ville, to the honnêtes gens and the ordinary people. Molière became the standard model proposed to subsequent comic playwrights. Unfortunately, however, critics from Boileau on tended to concentrate on a small number of Molière's more ‘serious’ comedies ( Le Misanthrope, Le Tartuffe, Les Femmes savantes, etc.), neglecting the more lively elements in the name of literary decorum, and making of him the champion of ‘la comédie de caractère’.

2. After 1700

The century following Molière's death was a golden age for comedy, which occupied a central position in the French literary culture of the time. Before and after 1700 Regnard, Dancourt, Dufresny, Lesage, and others produced witty, cynical comedies of intrigue and social observation. Of these, Turcaret is the finest example. Marivaux, working mainly for the Comédie-Italienne, developed a brilliantly original type of comedy, founded on the elegant and subtle exploration of amorous feeling. Some of his later plays show a tendency to a more moralizing or sentimental strain, which can be seen equally in the work of Voltaire (L'Enfant prodigue and Nanine), Gresset (Le Méchant), Piron (La Métromanie), and above all Destouches, whose plays (notably Le Glorieux) combine fashionable sensibility and comic verve. This line was further developed in the comédie larmoyante of La Chaussée and the drame of Diderot or Sedaine; here comedy takes second place to emotion and instruction.

A more light-hearted comedy persisted, not only in the popular theatre but in the ‘théâtres de société’, private theatricals which enjoyed a great vogue in the 18th c. Here the proverbes dramatiques of Carmontelle or the plays of Collé were performed, together with parades, of which Gueullette made a speciality [see Farce, 2]. Beaumarchais too wrote parades, as well as drames, and elements of both combine with comedy of intrigue and socio-political satire in Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro. These two plays were the great events of French comic theatre in the last quarter of the 18th c.

Comedy continued to be performed in France during the Revolutionary, Napoleonic, and Restoration years. It was largely based on existing models (Fabre d'Églantine, Pigault-Lebrun, L.-B. Picard (1769-1828), Delavigne, etc.). This period also saw the remarkable rise of the quintessentially French vaudeville, the most popular form of theatre throughout the 19th c. After 1820 the comic theatre was dominated by two figures, Scribe and Musset. The tightly crafted if shallow comédies-vaudevilles of the former provided a model of the well-made play for successors such as Sardou (and Ibsen). Musset's far more interesting plays, on the other hand, are full of charm, variety, and poetic fantasy; some execute variations on the proverbe dramatique, others, such as Les Caprices de Marianne or On ne badine pas avec l'amour, come close to the world of tragedy or drame.

There is indeed a growing tendency, from the early 19th c. onwards, for the once-separate theatrical genres to merge. Tragedy no longer exists in a recognizable form; comedy, the more flexible form, combines with tragedy and drame in many different ways, from the comédie sérieuse of Dumas fils, Augier, and Becque to the 20th-c. comédie poétique of Giraudoux, Anouilh, or Schéhadé [see Drama In France Since 1789].

On the other hand, a relatively pure comic tradition does persist, notably in the farces or vaudevilles of Labiche, Feydeau, Courteline, or Romains (Knock, 1923), the comic operettas of Meilhac and Halévy, the sharp social observation of Porto-Riche and Jules Renard, and the 20th-c. Boulevard comedies of writers such as Aymé, Achard, Pagnol, Sacha Guitry, and André Roussin (b. 1911, the great supplier of the post-World War II Boulevard).

In a quite different vein, following Jarry's Uburoi, the avant-garde theatre contains a strong element of grotesque comedy or farce; this is evident in the work of Cocteau, Apollinaire, Vitrac, and the Belgians Crommelynck and Ghelderode. It culminates in the far from light-hearted comedy of Ionesco and other writers associated with the Theatre of the Absurd.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• P. Voltz, La Comédie (1964)

Narratives or performances that emphasize the ridiculous and the absurd in human life, or that expose pretensions and hypocrisy, causing laughter and delight. Comedy tends to get a bad press compared to the loftier and nobler genre of tragedy, but arguably contains as much or more wisdom, substituting the earthy facts of existence for the inflated ideals of tragedy. See also laughter.

A work — play, story, novel, or film — that ends happily for the main character (or protagonist) and contains humor to some degree. A comedy may involve unhappy outcomes for some of the characters. Shylock, for example, in The Merchant of Venice, a comedy by William Shakespeare, is disgraced in the play. The ancient Greeks and Romans produced comedies, and great numbers have been written in modern times.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - lystspil, farce, komik

Nederlands (Dutch)
een komisch(e) film/ toneelstuk etc., het komische genre, komedie

Français (French)
n. - comédie, le genre comique

Deutsch (German)
n. - Komödie, Lustspiel, komischer Vorfall

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - κωμωδία

Italiano (Italian)
commedia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - comédia (f)

Русский (Russian)
комедия

Español (Spanish)
n. - comedia, simulación, teatro

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - komedi, komik

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
喜剧, 喜剧性事件, 喜剧性, 喜剧成分

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 喜劇, 喜劇性事件, 喜劇性, 喜劇成分

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 희극 , 유머

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 喜劇, 喜劇的な要素

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) تمثيليه مضحكه ساخرة‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮קומדיה‬

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