Life is a comedy to him who thinks. A vocabulury of Comedy: BALLAD -OPERA: Modeled on Italian OPERA, which is burlesqued, it told its story in songs set to old tunes and appropriated various elements from farce andcomendy. BURLESQUE: A form of comedy characterized by ridiculous exaggeration and distortion: the sublime may be made absurd; honest emotions may be turned to sentimentality; a serious subject may be treated frivolously or a frivolous subject seriously. The essential quality that makes for burlesque is the discrepancy between subject matter and style. CARICATURE : Caricature more frequently is associated with drawing than with writing, because the related literary terms -- SATIRE, BURLESQUE, and PARODY -- are more commonlu used. Caricature, unlike the highest satire, is likely to treat merely personal qualities; although, like satire, it also lends itself to the ridicule of political, religious, and social foibles. A work of fiction, history, or biography that traffics in excessive distortion or exaggeration may be dismissed as a caricature. COMEDY OF HUMOURS: the special type of REALISTIC comedy that was developed in the closing years of the sixteenth century by Ben Jonson and George Chapman and that derives its comic interest largely from the exhibition of CHARACTER whose conduct is controlled by one characteristic or HUMOUR. Some single psychophysiological HUMOUR or exaggerated trait of character gave the important figures in the ACTION a definite bias of disposition and supplied the chief motive for their actions. COMEDY OF INTRIGUE: A comedy in which the manipulation of the action by one or more characters to their own ends is of more importance than the characters themselves are. Another name for COMEDY OF SITUATION. COMEDY OF MANNERS: A term designating the REALISTIC, often satirical, Comedy of the Restoration, as practiced by Congreve and others. It is also used for the revival, in modified form, of this comedy a hundred year later by Goldsmith and Sheridan, as well as for another revival late in the nineteenth century. Likewise, the REALISTIC COMEDY of Elizabethan and Jacobean times is sometimes called comedy of manners. In the stricter sense of the term, the type concerns the manners and the conventions of an artificial, highly sophisticated society. The stylized fashions and manners of this group dominate the surface and determine the pace and tone of this sort of comedy. COMEDY OF MORALS: A term applied to comedy that uses ridicule to correct abuses, hence a form of dramatic satire, aimed at the moral state of a people or a special class of people. Moliere’s Tartuffe (1664) is often considered a comedy of morals. TRAGIC COMEDY: Tragicomedy: A play that employs a plot suitable to TRAGEDY but ends happily, like a Comedy. The action seems to be leading to a tragic CATASTROPHE until an unexpected turn in events, often in the form of a DEUS EX MACHINA, brings about the happy DENOUMENT. In this sense Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is a tragicomedy. SENTIMENTAL COMEDY: Just as the COMEDY OF MANNERS reflected in its immortality the reaction of the Restoration from the severity of the Puritan code on the Commonwealth period, so the comedy that displaced it, known as sentimental comedy, or reformed comedy, sprang up in the early years of the eighteenth century in response to a growing reaction against the tone of Restoration plays.Because of the violence of its reaction, sentimental comedy became very weak dramatically, lacking humor, reality, spice, and lightness of touch. ROMANTIC COMEDY: A comedy in which serious love is the chief concern and source of interest, especially the type of comedy developed on the early Elizabethan stage by such writers as Robert Greene and Shakespeare. PARODY: A composition imitating another, usually serious, piece. It is designed to ridicule a work or its style or author. Often a parody is more powerful in its influence on affairs or current importance – politics, for instance – than and an original composition. FARCE: The word developed from Late Latin farsus, connected with a verb meaning to stuff. Thus, an expansion or amplification in the church liturgy was called a farse. Later, in France, farce meant any sort of extemporaneous addition in a play, especially jokes or gags, the clownish actors speaking more than was set down for them. In the late seventeenth century farce was used in England to mean any short humorous play, as distinguished from regular five-act comedy. COURT COMEDY: COMEDY written to be performed at a royal court. Love’s Labour’s Lost is a court comedy belonging to Shakespeare’s early period. Before Shakespeare, the Elizabethan court comedy had been developed to a high degree of effectiveness by John Lyly in such plays as Endimion and Alexander and Campaspe. HIGH COMEDY: Pure or serious comedy.High comedy appeals to the intellect and arouses thoughtful laughter by exhibiting the inconsistencies and incongruities of human nature and by displaying the follies of social manners. The purpose is not consciously didactic or ethical, though serious purpose is often implicit in the satire that is frequent in high comedy. Emotion, especially sentimentality, is avoided. If people make themselves ridiculous by their vanity or ineffective by their stupid conduct or blind adherence to tradition, high comedy laughs at them. LOW COMEDY: Low comedy has been called elemental comedy, in that it lacks seriousness of purpose or subtlety of manner and has little intellectual appeal. Some features are: quarreling, fighting, noisy singing, boisterous conduct in general, boasting, burlesque, trickery, buffoonery, clownishness, drunkenness, coarse jesting, wordplay, and scolding. In English dramatic history low comedy appears first as an incidental expansion of the action, often originated by the actors themselves, who speak more than is set down for them. Thus, in medieval religious drama Noah’s stubborn wife has to be taken into the ark by force, or Pilate or Herod engages in uncalled-for ranting. In the MORTALITY PLAYS, low comedy became much more pronounced, with the antics of the VICE and other horseplay. In Elizabethan drama such elements persisted, in spite of their violation of DECORUM, because the public demanded them; but playwrights such as Shakespeare frequently made them serve serious dramatic purposes (such as relief, marking passage of time, echoing main action). A few of the many examples of low comedy in Shakespeare are: the porter scene in Macbeth, Launcelot scene in As You Like It, and the Trinculo-Stephano-Caliban scene in The Tempest.
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 08:23:28 +0000
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