Comedy is a form of drama that deals with humorous or ridiculous aspects of human behavior. Most comedies have a playful mood and end happily.
In comedies of character, the humor comes from the major traits of the characters. Comedies of ideas deal primarily with social issues. Situation comedies rely on comic actions and events. Most comedies of manners are humorous treatments of the social codes of the upper classes. Most romantic comedies concern people who are in love. An exaggerated kind of comedy called farce is sometimes considered a separate type. But farce may be treated as a form of situation comedy.
The first important comic playwright was Aristophanes, who lived in Greece from about 445 to 385 B.C. Most of his comedies deal with public issues. The ancient Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence wrote situation comedies based on events from everyday life.
In the Middle Ages, farce was the major type of comedy. In the late 1500’s and early 1600’s in England, William Shakespeare wrote plays with almost every type of comedy, while Ben Jonson specialized in satiric comedies of character, with each character dominated by a single trait, such as greed. In the mid-1600’s, Molière became the most famous comic playwright in France, with plays similar to Jonson’s. In the late 1600’s, such English playwrights as William Wycherley and William Congreve raised the comedy of manners to a high level.
Many playwrights of the 1700’s wrote sentimental comedies. These dramatists included Sir Richard Steele of England and Pierre Marivaux of France. Later in the 1700’s, witty comedies were written by Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, both of England, and by Pierre de Beaumarchais of France.
In the early 1900’s, the British dramatist George Bernard Shaw proved a master of the comedy of ideas, which discusses moral or philosophical issues without interrupting the humor. Noel Coward wrote comedies of manners about England’s sophisticated society.
During the mid-1900’s, the Irish-born playwright Samuel Beckett and Romanian-born Eugene Ionesco pioneered in the Theater of the Absurd, in which bizarre comic events mingled with serious action. The dark comedies of Harold Pinter in England and Edward Albee in the United States are an offshoot of this school. Since the late 1900’s, a number of writers have specialized in situation comedies about everyday life. These writers included Alan Ayckbourn in England and Neil Simon in the United States.
