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La Commedia

This document provides an overview of the origins and definitions of comedy. It discusses how comedy originated in ancient Greece as a dramatic performance that pitted two opposing groups against each other in an amusing conflict. Comedy was used as a form of political satire to portray people or institutions as ridiculous. The document traces how the definition of comedy has evolved over time, from Aristotle's definition of comedy imitating men worse than average to its modern association with any performance intended to induce laughter. It also examines different genres of comedy such as screwball comedy, black comedy, and romantic comedy.

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80 views1 page

La Commedia

This document provides an overview of the origins and definitions of comedy. It discusses how comedy originated in ancient Greece as a dramatic performance that pitted two opposing groups against each other in an amusing conflict. Comedy was used as a form of political satire to portray people or institutions as ridiculous. The document traces how the definition of comedy has evolved over time, from Aristotle's definition of comedy imitating men worse than average to its modern association with any performance intended to induce laughter. It also examines different genres of comedy such as screwball comedy, black comedy, and romantic comedy.

Uploaded by

Florin
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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n a modern sense, comedy (from the Greek: κωμῳδία, kōmōidía) is a genre of fiction that refers to

any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter,


especially in theatre, television, film, stand-up comedy, books or any other medium of entertainment.
The origins of the term are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian democracy, the public
opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters.
[1]
 The theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a dramatic performance which pits two
groups or societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye depicted these
two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old." [2] A revised view characterizes
the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal
conventions that pose obstacles to his hopes. In this struggle, the youth is understood to be
constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to take recourse in ruses
which engender very dramatic irony which provokes laughter.[3]
Satire and political satire use comedy to portray persons or social institutions as ridiculous or
corrupt, thus alienating their audience from the object of their humor. Parody subverts popular
genres and forms, critiquing those forms without necessarily condemning them.
Other forms of comedy include screwball comedy, which derives its humor largely from bizarre,
surprising (and improbable) situations or characters, and black comedy, which is characterized by a
form of humor that includes darker aspects of human behavior or human nature.
Similarly scatological humor, sexual humor, and race humor create comedy by violating social
conventions or taboos in comic ways. A comedy of manners typically takes as its subject a particular
part of society (usually upper-class society) and uses humor to parody or satirize the behavior and
mannerisms of its members. 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.
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".[5] Of this, the word came into modern usage through
the Latin comoedia and Italian commedia and has, over time, passed through various shades of
meaning.[6]
The Greeks and Romans confined their use of the word "comedy" to descriptions of stage-plays with
happy endings. Aristotle defined comedy as an imitation of men worse than the average
(where tragedy was an imitation of men better than the average). However, the characters portrayed
in comedies were not worse than average in every way, only insofar as they are Ridiculous, which is
a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of
pain or harm to others; the mask, for instance, that excites laughter is something ugly and distorted
without causing pain.[7] In the Middle Ages, the term expanded to include narrative poems with happy
endings. It is in this sense that Dante used the term in the title of his poem, La Commedia.
As time progressed, the word came more and more to be associated with any sort of performance
intended to cause laughter.[6] During the Middle Ages, the term "comedy" became synonymous
with satire, and later with humour in general.

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