Comedy Meaning

Comedy is a drama that ends happily. Divine Comedy was a comedy because it ended happily, but some dramas ending with happy note cannot be called comedy as Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressidaand All’s Well that Ends Well. So, an exact definition of comedy is hard to form.

Characteristics of Comedy

In plain words, it refers to play which has mirth and gaiety as its prime qualities. Some essential features of comedy can be as follows:

1. Comedy deals with familiar and domestic occurrences particularly of the middle class society. It is opposite to tragedy.

2. It deals with the democratic principle of quality of status. One or more characters gain importance over dwarf and other characters. In As You Like It, Orlando and Rosalind, Touchstone and Audrey, Celia and Oliver, Silvius and Phoebe are on the same level in comparison.

3. Comedy deals with types and classes and not with personalities and individuals as happens with tragedy. Comedy writer presents characters in gross who make us laugh. Shakespeare’s Dogherry and Verges suggest the representative of a class whose sense of morality, ethics and law has nothing to do with our own.

4. Comedy features insensibility towards audience. If audience feels sympathy towards character, their sense of mirth and jollity will evaporate. The sympathy can only be aroused when they are presented as living beings and not as types. Shylock was considered tragic hero because Shakespeare presented him to arise our sympathy. Comic dramatists often appeal to intellect rather than emotions.

5. It is a problem free genre of drama. A slight stigma of problem spoils the charm of the comedy. All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressidaare not pure comedies because they deal with complication of human life.

6. Presentation of unreality is another feature of comedy. The incidents there are not connected with the daily life. Nicoll says,

“In comedy as personalities are artificialized into types, so the situations are removed so far from the situations of actual life that there is no direct relation established between the two.”

7. Risibility is the last feature of comedy and the true source of risibility is incongruity which excites our laughter. It cannot be called fully comic unless it includes normal behavior, so producing laughter generating characters in an ordinary manner is the risibility in comedy. A. Nicoll says,

“No comedy can be a true comedy unless there is presented alongside of the humorous situation, words or character something that is more or less ordinary. A comedy full of eccentric types ceases largely to be a cause of merriment.”