Sunday, May 2, 2021

Comedy- General Introduction

      

          In ordinary conversational english, the word Comedy and Comic are used for anything that is funny or laughable.



Comedy is generally defined as a literary work that is written to amuse or entertain a reader. In a comedy, characters can certainly suffer misfortune, but they are typically comedic situations with positive outcomes.

            Sometimes, for the comedy like Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale,  an uneducated people complain that it is not funny at all. They would be more disappointed by absence of laughter in Dante's Divine Commedia. The thing is that an ordinary people are not able to dig out the laughter which is hidden behind the  words and action. The truth is that we use the word comedy in confusing  way. When we are talking about comedy we generally mean a play which has a pleasant atmosphere  and happy ending. It's may not be make us laugh, it must at least be amusing or entertaining.

            There is a deep difference between comedy and satire, however both are closely related in the sense of of laughter. But the comedy however is found in other forms of literature. like...

  • Chaucer's Poetry
  • Dickens's novels
  • Plays                    

             In the widest sense much of the comedies has been written about the philosophy of laughter. Yet most of us would find it hard to explain why we laugh at all. But the certain questions may make us think that why some people or situation look always funny. So Let's find our some of the examples related this questions...

1. MOTHER-IN-LAW  have been figure of fun since the Roman comic dramatist Terence

2. An old man with the young wife seen as a comic figure, who make him fool by choosing young and handsome lover

3.  A blind man

               All the things which I have mentioned above are not that sort of things to laugh at. Sometimes it become bitter that how people can laugh at them who have some physical peculiarity.  The better side of their nature may tells them that mother-in-law, deceived husbands, blind man, lunatics and people with big ears are often very nice people- who deserve sympathy rather than laughter. In this sense laughter is like cruelty because comedy has no relationship whith this kind of laughter. It shouldn't be harmful for other and also it shouldn't deal with our moral sense. So it may be that Aristotle's theory of Catharsis applies to comedy as well as tragedy.

                  Another theory of laughter suggests that it is an expression of pleasure and thankfulness of one's own comparative good luck. For instance, we all laugh at a very fat lady and some kind of misfortune of other people because we have our own satisfaction that we are not like them and we ourselves are happy to be freed of them.It doesn't mean that laughter is always cruel or selfish. There is very wide distinction between laughing at someone and laughing with someone. 

                In english literature, there are really great comic figures which are lovable, we may laugh at them but we also laugh with them which we can observe in various works, like....

Cervantes's Don Quixote

Shakespeare's Falstaff

Dickens's Mr. Pickwick

 EXAMPLES OF SOME POPULAR COMEDIES:-

Ralph Roister Doister
Gammer Gurton's Needle
As you like it
Love's labour's lost
The Country wife
Man in his humour
The salient woman

     

                                                                                                                                    

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