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Comedy From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Comedies) This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (July 2007) Literature Major forms Epic · Romance · Novel Tragedy · Comedy · Drama Media Performance · Book Techniques Prose · Poetry History and lists Basic topics · Literary terms History · Modern history Books · Writers Literary awards · Poetry awards Discussion Criticism · Theory · Magazines Comedy has a popular meaning (standup, along with any discourse generally intended to amuse), which must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in Ancient Greece. The theatrical genre can be simply described as a dramatic performance pitting two societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye saw famously saw these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old" (The Anatomy of Criticism, 1957), but this dichotomy is seldom described as entirely satisfactory. A later 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 sense, the youth is understood to be constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to take recourse to ruses which engender very dramatic irony that provokes laughter (Marteinson, 2006). Much comedy contains variations on the elements of surprise, incongruity, conflict, repetitiveness, and the effect of opposite expectations, but there are many recognized genres of comedy. Satire and political satire use ironic comedy to portray persons or social institutions as ridiculous or corrupt, thus alienating their audience from the object of humor. Parody borrows the form of some popular genre, artwork, or text but uses certain ironic changes to critique that form from within (though not necessarily in a condemning way). Screwball comedy derives its humor largely from bizarre, surprising (and improbable) situations or characters. Black comedy is defined by dark humor that makes light of so called dark or evil elements in human nature. Similarly scatological humor, sexual humor, and race humor create comedy by violating social conventions or taboos in comedic 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 falling in love.