Comedy

The term originated in ancient Greece: In Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by political satire performed by comic poets in theaters.

[1] The theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a dramatic performance pitting two groups, ages, genders, or societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict.

[2] A revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions posing obstacles to his hopes.

In this struggle, the youth then becomes constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to resort to ruses which engender dramatic irony, which provokes laughter.

Romantic comedy is a popular genre that depicts burgeoning romance in humorous terms and focuses on the foibles of those who are falling in love.

Dean Rubin says the word "comedy" is derived from the Classical Greek κωμῳδία kōmōidía, which is a compound of κῶμος kômos "revel" and ᾠδή ōidḗ "singing, ode".

[4] The adjective "comic" (Greek κωμικός kōmikós), which strictly means that which relates to comedy is, in modern usage, generally confined to the sense of "laughter-provoking".

[8] In the late 20th century, many scholars preferred to use the term laughter to refer to the whole gamut of the comic, in order to avoid the use of ambiguous and problematically defined genres such as the grotesque, irony, and satire.

[9][10] Starting from 425 BCE, Aristophanes, a comic play and satirical author of the Ancient Greek theater, wrote 40 comedies, 11 of which survive.

[12] In ancient Greece, comedy originated in bawdy and ribald songs or recitations apropos of phallic processions and fertility festivals or gatherings.

[13] Around 335 BCE, Aristotle, in his work Poetics, stated that comedy originated in phallic processions and the light treatment of the otherwise base and ugly.

A Shakespearean comedy is one that has a happy ending, usually involving marriages between the unmarried characters, and a tone and style that is more light-hearted than Shakespeare's other plays.

[19] British comedians who honed their skills in music hall sketches include Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel and Dan Leno.

Constructions of surreal humour tend to involve bizarre juxtapositions, incongruity, non-sequiturs, irrational or absurd situations and expressions of nonsense.

Under such premises, people can identify precursors and early examples of surreal humour at least since the 19th century, such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which both use illogic and absurdity (hookah-smoking caterpillars, croquet matches using live flamingos as mallets, etc.)

For example, The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World (1871) is filled with contradictory statements and odd images intended to provoke amusement, such as the following: After a time they saw some land at a distance; and when they came to it, they found it was an island made of water quite surrounded by earth.

[24]In the early 20th century, several avant-garde movements, including the dadaists, surrealists, and futurists, began to argue for an art that was random, jarring and illogical.

American cinema has produced a great number of globally renowned comedy artists, from Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope and Phyllis Diller during the mid-20th century, to performers like George Carlin, Bill Cosby, Joan Rivers, Robin Williams, and Eddie Murphy toward the end of the century.

British television comedy also remains influential, with quintessential works including Fawlty Towers, Monty Python, Dad's Army, Blackadder, and The Office.

[33] For example, on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart uses the "comic frame" to intervene in political arguments, often offering crude humor in sudden contrast to serious news.

In a segment on President Obama's trip to China, Stewart remarks on America's debt to the Chinese government while also having a weak relationship with the country.

For example, in the United States, parodies of newspapers and television news include The Onion, and The Colbert Report; in Australia, shows such as Kath & Kim, Utopia, and Shaun Micallef's Mad As Hell perform the same role.

The deliberate use by Menard of the term 'le rire' rather than 'l'humour' reflects accurately the current evidency to incorporate all instances of the comic in the analysis, while the classification in genres and fields such as grotesque, humour and even irony or satire always poses problems.

The terms humour and laughter are therefore pragmatically used in recent historiography to cover the entire spectrum.That Comedy sprang up and took shape in connection with Dionysiac or Phallic ritual has never been doubted.