COMEDY: KEY TERMS, CATEGORIES, AND DEFINITIONS

By Robert H. Bell 

                       

ACCEPTANCE: Comedy features and enjoys human follies without stringent judgement or strident indignation. For instance, Fielding’s comic perspective in Tom Jones conveys tolerance and advocates magnanimity: “A single bad Act no more constitutes a Villain in Life, than a single bad Part on the Stage . . . Upon the whole then the Man of Candour, and of true Understanding, is never hasty to condemn. He can censure an Imperfection, or even a Vice, without Rare against the guilty Party . . . The worst of Men generally have the Words Rogue and Villain most in their Mouths, as the lowest of all Wretches are the aptest to cry out low in the Pit” (VII.i.328-329).

ACCIDENT: A prominent force in comedy, catching and revealing everyone but rarely hurting the good characters seriously or irreparably. George Santayana finds in the comic “a conjunction of things mutually irrelevant, a chapter of accidents, a medley improvised here and now for no reason.”[1]  See also chance, fortune.

ALAZON: "A deceiving or self-deceived character in fiction, normally an object of ridicule in comedy or satire, but often the hero of a tragedy. In comedy he most frequently takes the form of a bragging soldier or a pedant."[2]  

ANTITHESIS: A contrast or opposition in the meanings of contiguous phrases or clauses, emphasized by a parallel in their grammatical structure. For example, from Byron’s Don Juan: "Tragedy ends in death; comedy, in marriage." See also contrast, juxtaposition, duality.

ARTIFICE: One line of comic fiction, beginning with Don Quixote, stresses its made-up nature, its status as fictive narration. Cervantes’s eighteenth-century English followers include Fielding and Sterne, and in the twentieth century, James Joyce, Nabokov, Borges, and John Barth.

AUTHORITY: Comedy usually distrusts authority and endorses liberty, especially the freedom of young lovers to evade or defy oppressive authority, such as the “sharp Athenian law” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that compels a girl either to marry according to her father’s command, or suffer the penalty of death or (what’s worse in a comedy) eternal chastity in a nunnery.  Comedy typically moves from “a society controlled by habit, ritual bondage, arbitrary law, and the older characters to a society controlled by youth and pragmatic freedom.”[3] See blocking forces. 

BATHOS: The inadvertent anti-climax that comes when an author, striving for elevation, trips and falls on his face. Hence, a "bathetic plunge," from the Greek word for "deep." The term bathos was first defined and made prominent by Alexander Pope in his mock treatise, Bathos: The Art of Sinking in Poetry. Inadvertent bathos is a great source of fun, as in the ardent lines of the Victorian Poet Laureate who described the illness of Prince Edward, “Over the wire the electric message came, / He is no better, he is much the same.”  Deliberate bathos, or sudden movement from the sublime to the ridiculous, is a staple of comedy.

BAWDY: A traditional subject of humor and a prominent element in comedy.

BEWILDERMENT/ILLUMINATION: Freud stressed the factors of bewilderment and illumination in humor.[4]  As often in Freud’s analysis of humor, the distinction between the perceiver of humor and the object of humor isn’t clear.  The audience of comedy moves from uncertainty or confusion to recognition or enlightenment; comic characters may or may not move from bewilderment to illumination. “A comic character is usually comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself.”[5]

BLOCKING FORCES: An absurd law, custom, or tradition barring young lovers from mating, erecting apparently insuperable obstacles to the hero or heroine's desire—like “the sharp Athenian law” at the opening of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Blocking forces are often personified, and in Tom Jones not only define themselves specifically as adversaries of innocence, sincerity, natural instincts and affections, but proudly proclaim their allegiance to stultification and petrification. Fielding's Thwackum announces, “When I mention Religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian Religion, but the Protestant Religion; and not only the Protestant Religion, but the Church of England” (III.iii.127). See authority.

BODY: Comedy usually affirms the body and often distrusts the spirit. The great goal of comedy, or what Frye identifies as its teleology, is emphatically physical: the sexual union of young lovers.  Skeptical of higher considerations--aesthetic, spiritual, intellectual-- comedy traditionally tolerates bodily functions and accepts appetites. "Woo me, woo me," exhorts Rosalind, Shakespeare’s archetypal comic heroine, "for now I am in a holiday humour." Human needs, however indecorous or improper, remain in comedy acceptable and inevitable, normal and natural.  Comedy takes place, figuratively, not at a law court or church but in a festival or carnival where bodies eat, drink, belch, fart, and screw. In polite discourse, the very verbs jolt, but the comic muse is sublimely tolerant.

BOMBAST: Verbose, inflated diction grossly disproportionate to the matter it expresses. From a word originally meaning "cotton stuffing."[6]  

BURLESQUE: “An incongruous imitation. Jocular, tending to raise laughter, by unnatural or unsuitable language or images” (Johnson’s Dictionary). Writing which apes the form or style of a higher, proper genre but does so lamely, on purpose, to make fun of the serious genre and to make fun generally. To be distinguished from the modern burlesque or strip-show. Burlesque and Mock Heroic differ in that the former makes its subject mean and absurd by directly cutting it down, the latter makes its subject ludicrous by inflating it.

CARICATURE: Fielding defines caricature as a kind of art whose “aim is to exhibit monsters, not men; and all distortions and exaggerations whatever are within its proper province, Now, what Caricatura is in painting, Burlesque is in writing, and in the same manner the comic writer and painter correlate to each other.”

CARNIVAL: Bakhtin says that “carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions . . . with the sense of the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities. We find here a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the ‘inside out,’ of the turnabout, of a continuing shift from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings” (Bakhtin, 10-11). See also festive, inversion, parody inflation/deflation.  

CHANCE: More or less synonymous with Accident.   Chance plays a major role in most comedy, for “Destiny, in the guise of fortune, is the fabric of comedy.”[7] Accidents or chance are farcically fortuitous:  characters arrive just in time to discover one another in the wrong bed, or depart pat on cue and just miss seeing something crucial. See also fortune, accident.

CHANGE: Humorous or flat characters are incapable of change but remain in that “perpetual possession of being well-deceived in which the comic essence consists.”[8]  If the secondary, flat or humorous characters are stubbornly static, the comic hero can develop and grow. The capacity for change is often a signal attribute of comic heroes, such as Odysseus, the man of many turns, Falstaff, and Tristram Shandy. Comedy abounds in sudden, sometimes implausible, transformations or conversions, and the degree of change, growth, or development in comic characters is often problematic and debatable

CHARACTER: See consciousness, flat and round characters.

CLOSURE: Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy are English fiction’s competing paradigms of comic closure, closed and open-ended. Fielding’s ending provides what most people expect and all of us want—the happy ending, where the good characters are recognized and rewarded, and the bad are exposed and punished. Like so many comedies, its festive nature is celebrated by a marriage and the promise of fecundity—ending, that is, with the guarantee that life will continue. Yet in another sense, Fielding’s resolution is the emphatically closed mode of comic romance, the tradition of As You Like It and Pride and Prejudice, where all’s well that ends well, because the protagonists’ lives have attained their shapes or fulfilled their essential destinies. Of this mode Henry James disapproved, because of its “distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks.”[9]  Comic closure regularly asks us to take a great deal on faith. Endings are proverbially happy in comedy, yet even in Shakespeare’s happiest comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night, there are indications of a rush to denouement, or a closure less than entirely inclusive and not wholly happy. See also denouement.

COMEDY: “A dramatic representation of the lighter faults of mankind” (Johnson’s Dictionary). Johnson also said that it was a term particularly "unpropitious to definers." (He also defined lexicographer as “a maker of dictionaries; a harmless drudge.”)

COMEDY OF INVENTORY: A term proposed by Hugh Kenner to characterize the epic catalogues of things, people, places, the Rabelaisian lists so prominent in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and in such comedies as Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, and The Sot-Weed Factor. One effect of this comedy of inventory is to spoof realism’s tendency toward or privileging of encyclopedic inclusiveness.

COMEDY OF MANNERS: Deals with "the relations and intrigues of men and women living in a polished and sophisticated society, relying for comic effect in great part on the wit and sparkle of the dialogue--often in the form of repartée, a witty conversational give-and-take--and to a lesser degree, on the ridiculous violations of social conventions and decorum by stupid characters, such as would-be wits, jealous husbands, and foppish dandies."[10]

COMIC ANALOGUE OF FEAR: Like any narrative, comedy provokes anxieties, arouses fears and sustains suspense, but with a difference; comedy simultaneously reassures us that nothing irreparable can or will happen to the good, innocent protagonists. What in a tragedy would be fearful indeed is in comedy a “comic analogue of fear,”[11] stoked but contained by our providential narrator.

COMIC ROMANCE: Fielding defines a comic romance as a “comic epic-poem in prose; differing from comedy, as the serious epic from tragedy; its action being more extended and comprehensive, containing a much larger circle of incidents, and introducing a greater variety of characters. It differs from the serious romance in its fable and action, in this; that as in the one these are grace and solemn, so in the other they are light and ridiculous: it differs in its characters by introducing persons of inferior rank, and consequently, of inferior manners, whereas the grace romance sets the highest before us: lastly, in its sentiments and diction, by preserving the ludicrous instead of the sublime.”[12]

CONFLUENCE: Confluence is a basic, ubiquitous force in many comedies, seen in its most familiar and purest form in Shakespeare’s comic romances, in which some beneficent spirit draws everybody to one place, such as the woods outside Theseus’ Athens, the forest of Arden, or Ephesus, and reshapes the configuration of characters. Confluence may also been seen as the ultimate tendency of comedy in which the banished hero or lost heroine is joyfully reintegrated into society. Frye says that the “theme of the comic is the integration of society, which usually takes the form of incorporating a central character into it.”[13]  See also integration, connection.

CONFUSION: Comedy thrives on confusion, especially mistaken identity and incredible imbroglio. Comedy also inclines, ultimately, to clarity or rectification, thus moving from “confusion to clarification.”[14]   To make an omelet, eggs get broken and glopped together.

CONNECTION: Beyond bringing people together generally and ultimately, comedy often reveals many kinds of connections between and among events, characters, and things in its view. Comedy discovers and creates connections everywhere. Laughter itself may express  a connection between author and reader, or among readers or members of the audience. Bergson thought that “laughter always implies a kind of secret free-masonry, or even complicity with other laughter, real or imaginary.”[15] See confluence.

CONTINGENCY: Comedy stresses contingency, the sense that things happen without known cause or by chance. Accidents, coincidences, fortuitous events regularly occur in comedy, often straining ordinary credibility. Comic life is fortuitous, subject to fortune that can change radically, quickly, and often. See accident, chance, fortune.

DEATH: “Tragedies end in death; comedies, in marriage” (Byron, Don Juan). Death threatens all mortals but occurs rarely in comedy, and then only to troublesome, wicked, or irrelevant characters.  Comic protagonists are more likely to experience figurative or symbolic deaths and revivals or “resurrections.”  See recovery.

DECORUM: As Cicero said, what we most laugh at is “the presentation of something offensive in an inoffensive manner.”[16]  

DENOUEMENT: See closure.

DEGRADATION: See inflation/deflation. Comedy, says Freud, often seeks “the degradation of the sublime.” 

DESTINY:  See also providence, fortune.

DEUS EX MACHINA: Literally, “god from a machine,” the descent of a deity to affect the action, such as Athena rescuing Odysseus.

DISCOVERY: The point of resolution of the action, where things are revealed as they really are. According to Aristotle, the “finest form of Discovery is one attended by Peripeties, like that which goes on with the discovery in Oedipus.”[17] Peripeties signifies a reversal of fortunes. By anagnorisis, usually translated as discovery or recognition, Aristotle means a change from ignorance to knowledge, and he distinguishes forms of discovery, ranging from simple signs or marks, to the most complex, “arising from the incidents themselves, when the great surprise comes about through a probable incident.”[18]  The model of tragic discovery is Book XXIV of the Iliad, the great scene between Priam and Achilles.

DUALITY: Humorous perception often regards things is dual aspects, like a pun. Bergson finds this duality essential to laughter: “A situation is invariably comic when it belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time.”[19]  It’s been said that every Fool is always two beings, never one.  Duality, or the rejection of singleness, is one of the most predominant comic conventions.  Bakhtin sees the “double aspect” in medieval festivity: “coupled with serious myths were comic and abusive ones; coupled with heroes were their parodies and doublets.”[20]    See contrast, incongruity, doubleness, juxtaposition, antithesis.

DULCE ET UTILE: Horace said that literature should be dulce et utile, sweet and useful, meaning both enjoyable and instructive.  Horace’s classical ideal held sway through the neoclassical period of Fielding and Pope, lost favor in the Romantic era, and became dubious, moot, or anathema to many modernists. 

EIRON: "A self-deprecating or unobtrusively treated character in fiction, usually an agent of the happy ending in comedy and of the catastrophe in tragedy" (Frye, 366).

ÉLAN VITALE: The “life force,” energy, vitality, or gusto so prominent in comic protagonists from Odysseus down to Bottom, Tom Jones, and Byron’s Don Juan. The French term comes from Henri Bergson’s essay “De Rire.” Bergson argues that the absence or failure of élan vitale is that “rigidity or mechanical inelasticity,” that sense of “something mechanical encrusted upon the living.”[21]    See also mechanical inelasticity.

EPIC SIMILE: An extended comparison often found in Homer and Virgil and regularly imitated and parodied by mock-heroic writers like Pope, Fielding, and Byron. For example, Mrs. Deborah seeks the mother of the little bastard laid upon Mr. Allworthy’s bed: “Not otherwise than when a Kite, tremendous Bird, is beheld by the feathered Generation soaring aloft, and hovering over their Heads, the amorous Dove, and every innocent little Bird spread wide the Alarm, and fly trembling to their Hiding-places: He proudly beats the Air, conscious of his Dignity, and meditates intended Mischief” (I.vi.47).

EROS: Comedy looks favorably upon sexual love, especially when it is part of or leads to marriage. “The great symbol of pure comedy is marriage, by which the world is renewed, and its endings are always instinct with a sense of fresh beginnings. Its rhythm is the rhythm of the life of mankind, which goes on and renews itself as the life of nature does.”[22]

ERROR: Comic figures constantly misperceive, miscomprehend, and muddle things.  There is in comedy an analogue to hamartia, the tragic flaw that we recognize as error, confusion, misperception, blunder, or thoughtlessness.  See confusion

EXCESS: As Freud noted, in comedy we are often “laughing at an expenditure that seems too large.”  An excessive expenditure of energy can be physical or mental/verbal.

FAITH: Christopher Frye said that “comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair: a narrow escape into faith.”

FALLS: There are many tumbles, spills, descents, fall in comedy, but most of them are harmless; the hero and the heroine have a sort of protective aura. The comic pattern is continual falls and perpetual revivals, or, as Joyce puts it in Finnegans Wake, “Phall you will but rise you must.”

FARCE: If comedy is the poor stepsister of literature, farce must be the scorned scullery girl, admitted to the palace of art, if at all, only by the back door. L. J. Potts defined farce as “comedy with the meaning left out.”[23] Farce depicts a world even more determined and reductive than that of satire, where by definition wives are unfaithful, husbands are cuckolds, bachelors lechers, and every female an object of desire and source of corruption. All subtleties seem to be obliterated, along with any distinctions between reasonable and crazy behavior: everything is magnified to ludicrous proportions. The sudden appearance or exit, so crucial to the farcical rhythm, also signifies the farcical attitude, objective, impersonal, inhumanly detached. The whirligig of events restricts the characters to caricatured action and expression instead of the individuation of a fully rendered figure. Protagonists can afford this truancy from feeling, for their pain is illusory and transient, and danger always evaporates. “It is altogether a speculative scene of things,” said Lamb, “which has no reference whatever to the world that is” (417).

FEELINGS: Sometimes subordinated or treated less than solemnly in comedy. Walpole said that "Life is a tragedy to him who feels, a comedy to him who thinks."  Bergson spoke of comedy's "momentary anesthesia of the heart.”[24]

FESTIVITY:  Bakhtin sees festivity as a “peculiar quality of all comic rituals and spectacles of the Middle Ages” (8) and it is a central component of much comedy. Metaphorically,  “The feast,” according to Bakhtin, “had always an essential, meaningful philosophical content. Moments of death and revival, of change and renewal always led to a festive perception of the world”(8-9). The meaningful content of the feast may well be critical, attacking or repudiating ordinary norms and ideals; there is a fine, fluid line between reveling and reviling.   See also carnival.

FLAT VS.  ROUND CHARACTERS: A "round" character is complex, has multiple facets, dimensions, as we often find in real life, with the dynamic capacity to change or surprise us, to grow and develop. "Flat" characters resemble cartoons or caricatures. They may be vivid, even unforgettable, but are memorable for one or two traits they always exhibit. Flat characters are usually static, unable or unwilling to change.[25]  

FLYTING: From an archaic English word, “flite, or flyte,” meaning, “to contend in words, chide, wrangle” (OED). Flyting, the energetic exchange of insults, and verbal abuse, is a stock comic confrontation. The classic instance of comic flyting is the banter between Falstaff and Prince Hal in Henry IV, part one.

FOLLY: The state of being foolish, wanting good sense, engaging in unwise conduct; a foolish act, idea, or practice, a ridiculous thing. In eighteenth-century English architecture and landscaping, a “folly” was a costly ornamental structure considered useless, such as a sham castle or an antiquated facade.

FOOLS: To a comic writer, the number of fools is infinite.

FORTUNE: “Destiny, in the guise of fortune, is the fabric of comedy.”[26] See also, providence, destiny.

GROTESQUE REALISM:  Another term coined by Bakhtin. In grotesque realism “the bodily element is deeply positive . . . [without] severance from the material and bodily roots of the world; it makes no pretense to renunciation of the earthy, or independence of the earth and body . . . images of bodily life are fertility, growth, and a brimming-over abundance. . . The material bodily principle is a triumphant, festive principle, it is a ‘banquet for all the world.’ The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indisoluble unity . . . Degradation here means coming down to earth, the contact with the earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time.”[27] Attributes of the grotesque style feature exaggeration, hyperbolism, and excessiveness.  See also excess, body, bawdy.

HUMOUR: Its relatively modern meaning is, "the quality exciting amusement." Humour is related to "wit," but gentler, less intellectual, more likely to be tinged with geniality. An older meaning of “humour” is  "temperament" or "mood," as in good or bad-humoured. Medieval physiology held that  disposition was determined by balance or imbalance of  four "humours," or bodily fluids. The four basic humours were the choleric (bile), the sanguine (blood), the phlegmatic (phlegm), and the melancholy (black bile). In Renaissance drama by Shakespeare or Ben Jonson, a humourous character is a one-dimensional figure. By Fielding's time, people no longer believed personality was determined by "humours," but humorous types continue to populate stages and pages of novels.

INFLATION/DEFLATION: In comedy, what goes up must come down; pride goeth before a fall. As Fielding comments, “Heroes, notwithstanding the high ideas we have of them, or others may conceive of them, have more of mortal than divine about them.”

INCONGRITY: Humor often exposes or contrives a basic incongruity between appearance and reality, the ideal and the actual, the sublime and the ridiculous. Kierkegaard  said, “Wherever there is life there is contradiction, and wherever there is contradiction the comical is present.” Schopenhauer thought that laughter is “simply the sudden perception of incongruity.”

INFERIOR CHARACTERS: An Aristotelian distinction, between "superior" tragic figures and "inferior" comic ones. Tragic-epic characters tend to be larger-than-life, with extraordinary passions, visions, powers of articulation, etc. Comic characters are more ordinary, all-too-human.

INTEGRATION: See confluence. If integration is a principle of comedy, as often in comedy, the opposite is more-or-less equally true. Disintegration, what Beckett called "the slump in the human solid," the uncertainty of personal identity or the slipperiness of language, is a comic situation and emphasis.

INVERSION:  “Inversion involves a sudden, comic switching of expected roles: prisoner reprimands judge, child rebukes parent, wife rules husband, pupil instructs teacher, master obeys servant. The conventions of Roman New Comedy, with its clever children, wives, and servants pitted against dim-witted fathers, pedants, husbands, and masters provided generously for comedy of this kind; and the conventions are still strong in Elizabethan comedy.”[28] IRONIC: "A mode of literature in which the characters exhibit a power of action inferior to the one assumed to be normal in the reader or audience, or in which the poet's attitude is one of detached objectivity" (Frye, p.  ).

IRONY: To say one thing and mean another, or the art of saying something without really saying it. The following categories are derived from Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction.[29]

STABLE IRONY: The narrator says one thing and means another, and the text gives the reader a standard of value against which to measure and judge. The context fixes firmly defined values. "Normative" because it posits a norm. UNSTABLE IRONY: also known as free-floating, metaphysical, or cosmic irony. Here the narrator says something--and we're not sure how to take it. Unstable irony is prevalent in 20th century literature. A way to convey multiple impressions or possibilities. A darker vision, where we're no longer sure of old verities and virtues. The cosmos, or language, seems so absurd, there is no way to know anything. Meaning is uncertain, requires multiple or infinite number of deconstructions and constructions.

            Four Types of Irony.

1.      Situational or Accidental Irony: the irony of daily life, discrepancy between common-sense expectations and what happens; the point of many anecdotes.

2.       Verbal Irony: irony of articulation, in literature or clever formulation.

            3. Dramatic Irony: where the audience knows something important the character does not know, or a character says something which has one meaning for him but quite another for the audience.

            4. Structural Irony: text juxtaposes planes of reference or sustains a comparison to say more than one simple thing. Tom Jones as "proasi-comi-epic" frequently compares ordinary activity to classical, mythic, or literary models.

JUXTAPOSITION: See antithesis, contrast, antithesis.

LAUGHTER: a physiological response, sometimes provoked by comedy or humor. Notoriously subjective, one man's meat being another man's poison. George Meredith said, "Comedy awakens thoughtful laughter" and sometimes it does, when it isn’t doing something else.

LEVELLING: “Here the emphasis is not so much upon reversal of roles or the triumph of a natural underdog” as in comic inversion,  but “upon the artificiality of all social distinctions in the face of human passion and incompetence. . . Levelling comedy is comedy of unmasking, comedy which reveals unexpected and embarrassing brotherhood in error, comedy which (temporarily at least) stuns, disables, and humbles its protagonists; comedy which eyes ironically the proposition that our social superiors are also our moral superiors.”[30]

MALAPROPISMS: Named after Sheridan’s character Mrs. Malaprop, who regularly misuses words, especially high-falutin’ language. Fielding, like Shakespeare, delights in malapropisms, especially those committed by simple people aspiring beyond their range, such as Mrs. Slipslop in Joseph Andrews mentioning “the Christian specious” (JA, IV,6).

MECHANICAL INELASTICITY: Henri Bergson’s term for the rigidity of humorous characters, perfectly illustrated by Fielding's Thwackum: “When I mention Religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian Religion, but the Protestant Religion; and not only the Protestant Religion, but the Church of England” (III.iii).  See also élan vitale.

MIRTH: Perhaps the primary attribute of comedy is that it must be fun, at least some of the time, and probably ultimately.

MOBILITY: A Byronic term. Byron’s Don Juan, like Tom Jones and many comic heroes, has exceptional mobility, freedom of movement, remarkable geographical range, a sense of openness in space and time.

MOCK-EPIC, MOCK-HEROIC: Treating someone or something contemporary and ordinary, or worse, in grand style, in the manner of epic or heroic poetry. Fielding presents the brouhaha in the churchyard as “A Battle sung by the Muse in the Homerican Stile, and which none but the classical Reader can taste” (IV.viii.177). Fielding characterizes his project as “Prosai-comi-epic Writing” (V.1.208), and in Joseph Andrews speaks of his “comic epic in prose.”

MULTIPLICITY: Comedy exploits the subjectivity and multiplicity of perspective; no single value or viewpoint is maintained very long or very rigorously, except by foolish characters. 

MUTABILITY: In comedy nothing is permanent or irreversible; fortunes change, situations alter, characters convert. See fortune, chance.

ORDER: Comedy, especially the traditional comedy of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Fielding, tends to question yet reestablish “order,” usually with improvements, so that things end “as they should be” and “as we like it.”  The old order may be corrupt or unfair but it can and will be redeemed. See also design, symmetry.

PARODY: "Writing in which the words of an author or his thoughts are taken, and by a slight change adapted to some new purpose," usually humorous” (Johnson’s Dictionary). Parody generally lowers the level of its original; it is a device of ridicule, though sometimes of self-ridicule. Many comic writers, from Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, and Austen began their literary careers are parodists.

PASTORAL: Narratives set in idealized, often artificial, rural or rustic surrounding, featuring shepherds, or people imitating shepherds. A popular classical and neo-classical form, spoofed by Shakespeare, Fielding, and Sterne.

PICARESQUE: The adventures of a rogue's life, usually told in the first person; an episodic account of wanderings, adversity, and ingenious role-playing. A popular form of early prose fiction, first in Spain, later in England. Usually satirical in perspective.

PLAGIARISM: In certain kinds of comedy, advocating rather than exposing folly, like Tristram Shandy, plagiarism is regarded as play-giarism, part of the great game of writing, spoofing authority, and looking out for number one.

PLAY:  See the great study by Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). .

PLEASURE:  Comedy encourages the pleasure principle, tolerates unruly, appetitive behavior. The body is a site of pleasure, not humiliation and mortification. Comedy often features a blatant Kill-Joy like Malvolio in Twelfth Night, or Jaques in As You Like It.

PLOT: Comedy tends to stress plot and subordinate character. In tragedy, character is destiny; in comedy, accidents rule. Eventually the arbitrary nature of the plot is revealed to be providential design. Comedy typically moves from “a society controlled by habit, ritual bondage, arbitrary law, and the older characters to a society controlled by youth and pragmatic freedom.”[31]

PROVIDENCE: The world of comedy seems to have or obey a providential design: accidents are farcically fortuitous; characters arrive just in time to discover someone in the wrong bed, or depart pat on cue just in time to miss something crucial. See also destiny, fortune, accident.

PUN: Another low form of humor much favored by comic writers. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce gleefully deplores those "grisley old psychos who have done their bits on alices when they were yung and easily freudened."

RAILLERY: Mocking, bantering, ragging. See also flyting.

RECOGNITION SCENES:  See also, discovery.

REALITY, “THE REAL”:  Comedy is more thoroughly rooted in reality than other literary genres, and demonstrates the law of gravity: what goes up must come down. “When we wish to be pure discarnate spirit or pure discarnate intellect, the comedian asks us to remember the objective, material conditions of life with which we must make out peace, if we are to retain our sanity.”  When a Fielding character loses sight of the essential ground of being, our mere humanity with its persistent, clamorous physicality, the character will be exposed comically, brought down to earth literally and figuratively. See also, truth, inflation/deflation.

RECOVERY: Recoveries abound in comedy. Comic characters have a supple resilience and bounce back from misfortune or injury. The archetype is Falstaff rising from apparent death in battle after Hal’s  elegy for him. In a larger sense, the whole community in comedy is revived by the reorganization of the society around the hero, the heroine and their better values. Susanne K. Langer defines comic action as “the upset and recovery of the protagonist’s equilibrium, his contest with the world, and his triumph by wit, luck, personal power, or even humorous, or ironical, or philosophical acceptance of mischance.”[32]

RELATIVITY:  Comedy tends to show that what you see and believe depends very much on where you stand. And that multiple perspectives are more likely than permanent truth. In this regard, comedy differs sharply from satire, which “asserts the validity and necessity of norms, systematic values, and meanings,” where “evil and good are clearly distinguishable . . . and standards of judgment are indubitable.”[33]  The degree of relativity emphasized in comedy differs considerably, with Tom Jones  asserting the validity and necessity of norms, values and meanings much more forcefully than Tristram Shandy   and other antic, carnivalesque, and anarchic humor. Comic heroes like Tristram Shandy, Falstaff and Don Juan illustrate and preach the comic relativism of the world.  See also multiplicity, truth, the real.

RESOLUTION: See also closure. “The essential comic resolution . . . is an individual release which is also a social reconciliation. The normal individual is freed from the bonds of a humorous society, and a normal society is freed from the bonds imposed on it by humorous individuals.”[34]

RIDICULE: "Wit of that species that provokes laughter; to expose to laughter, to treat with contemptuous merriment" (Johnson’s Dictionary).

RIDICULOUS: Fielding wrote, in his preface to Joseph Andrews, “The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is affectation, [which] proceeds from one of these two causes, vanity or hypocrisy. . . From the discovery of this affectation arises the Ridiculous—which always strikes the reader with surprise and pleasure; and that in a higher and stronger degree when the affectation arises from hypocrisy, than when from vanity." ROMANCE: "A fictional mode in which the chief characters live in a world of marvels (naive romance), or in which the mood is elegiac or idyllic and hence less subject to social criticism than in the mimetic modes" (Frye, p.   ). "A tale of wild adventures in war or love" (Johnson). Johnson also defines "romantick" as “improbably, false, fanciful."

SATIRE: The use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc. 2. A literary composition, in verse of prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule. 3. A literary genre comprising such compositions. (From the Latin satura, medley.) Satire is a term “applied to any work of literature or art whose objective is to ridicule. It is more easily recognized than defined” notes The Columbia Encyclopedia. M. H. Abrams defines satire as “The literary art of diminishing a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, indignation, or scorn. It differs from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter as an end in itself, while satire 'derides'; that is, it uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt existing outside the work itself. That butt may be an individual (in 'personal satire'), or a type of person, a class, an institution, or even (as in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, especially Book IV), the whole race of man. The distinction between the comic and satiric, however, is a sharp one only at its extremes.”[35] "Satire posits an ideal condition of man or decency, and then despairs of it; and enjoys the despair."[36]

SELF-REFLEXIVITY:  This is the tendency of the author to regard himself and his creation as artificial, created, made-up. It is an element in much comic narration, such as Don Quixote, Tom Jones, and Tristram Shandy, and is a central feature of much post-modern fiction from Joyce’s Ulysses through Nabokov and Pynchon, to John Barth and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

SENSIBILITY: See also sincerity.

SEX: See also eros, body.

SLAPSTICK: Boisterously low comedy of the roughest kind.

SPECTACLE: “Comedy presents us with life apprehended in the form of spectacle rather than in the form of experience.”[37] By contrast, tragedies tend to situate us for long periods of time with solitary protagonists like Hamlet or Achilles.

SUBLIME: Comedy generally distrusts anything very high-minded, grand, abstract, idealistic, or sublime. Its purpose is to test the extraordinary by the ordinary, and in comedy, “From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.” An example of the Fieldingesque sublime is his invocation to muse, first enunciated in blank verse, then crashing the the mundane and ridiculous: “Come bright Love of Fame, inspire my glowing Breast: Not thee I call, who over swelling Tides of Blood and Tears dost bear the Heroe on to Glory . . . And thou, much plumper Dame, whom no airy Forms nor Phantoms of Imagination cloathe: Whom the well-season Beef and Pudding richly stained with Plumbs delight” (XIII.i.683-684). 

SYMMETRY: See also contrast, duality, juxtaposition .

SYMPATHY:  A central value in some comedy, in the sense of generosity, empathy, or magnanimity, sympathy  is a crucial element in any comedy, often in relationship to its opposite, ridicule. Northrop Frye says that, ‘In tragedy, pity and fear, the emotions of moral attraction and repulsion, are raised and cast out. Comedy seems to make a more functional use of the social, even the moral judgment, than tragedy, yet comedy seems to raise corresponding emotions, which are sympathy and ridicule, and cast them out in the same way.”[38]  E. B. White says of great humorists, “It is sympathy, not contempt or derision, that makes their characters live.”[39]   George Meredith wrote, “to love comedy you must know the real world, and know men and women well enough not to expect too much of them, though you may still hope for good . . . Contempt is a sentiment that cannot be entertained by the comic intelligence.”[40]

TOPSY-TURVY:  Comedy inverts, reverses, turns topsy-turvy.

VULGARITY: The charge laid upon much humor and comedy, including Tom Jones. "I am shocked to hear you quote from so vicious a book," Samuel Johnson said to Hannah More. "I am sorry to hear that you have read it: a confession which no modest lady should ever make. I scarcely know a more corrupt work."

WIT: a verbal formulation designed to be amusing.