User talk:Akeeton

Comedy

Most commonly comedy can be defined as a work of fiction in which all materials used are to amuse an audience. Before the happy ending, characters in a comedy must face misfortunes or disasters that they must overcome. Rather than feeling concern for these characters we usually feel confident that the situation will not get any worse than it already is, we feel the intended humor behind the calamity and we always seem to know that such obstacles will not prevent the character's triumph in the end. The term comedy is mostly just used for plays or for motion picture films, but it is also used in prose fiction as well as in narrative poetry. Comedy can be any of the following types: romantic, satiric, a comedy of manners or farce (Abrams 38-40).

Comedy originated in Greece and came from the myth of Dionysus. The term has since then been associated with drama (except in the Middle Ages). Roman comedies mostly dealt with youthful love. Aristotle distinguished it from tragedy by saying that it deals in an amusing way with ordinary characters facing hard times in everyday situations (Cuddon 148-149).

In other words, a comedy is any type of literary composition whose cheif objective is to amuse and audience. Comedies mostly deal with everyday life and usually concern petty human failings rather than dealing with the insurmountable catastrophies found in tragedies. These happy and amusing stories are usually ended with happiness for it's characters. Comedy has had many famous authors from Aristophanes, who dealt with mischeif and mockery, to Shakespeare with his romantic comedies (Baldick 40).

Works Cited

    Cuddon, J.A. "The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory Fourth Edition"

London: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

    Abrams, M.H. "A Glossary of Literary Terms Eighth Edition" The Thompson Corporation. 2005

    Baldick, Chris. "The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms" Great Britian: Cox and Wyman Ltd. 1990