Bathos

"depth") is a literary term, first used in this sense in Alexander Pope's 1727 essay "Peri Bathous",[1] to describe an amusingly failed attempt at presenting artistic greatness.

Bathos has come to refer to rhetorical anticlimax, an abrupt transition from a lofty style or grand topic to a common or vulgar one, occurring either accidentally (through artistic ineptitude) or intentionally (for comic effect).

However, Pope describes how it might fall and, with the single word "stiffen", evokes the unnatural deadness that is a mark of failure even in this "low" genre: Many Painters who could never hit a Nose or an Eye, have with Felicity copied a Small-Pox, or been admirable at a Toad or a Red-Herring.

However, when an artist is unconscious of the juxtaposition (e.g., when a film maker means for a man in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet to be frightening), the result is bathos.

Arguably, some forms of kitsch (notably the replication of serious or sublime subjects in a trivial context, like tea-towels with prints of DaVinci's Last Supper on them or hand guns that are actually cigarette lighters) express bathos in the concrete arts.

"Several decades before Pope coined the term, John Dryden had described one of the breath-taking and magically extravagant settings for his Restoration spectacular, Albion and Albanius (1684–85): "The cave of Proteus rises out of the sea, it consists of several arches of rock work, adorned with mother of pearl, coral, and abundance of shells of various kinds.

Søren Kierkegaard, in The Sickness Unto Death, did the same thing, when he suggested that the "self" is easy to lose and that the loss of "an arm, a leg, a dog, or a wife" would be more grievous.