How is comedy created

Menander was the most famous writer of New Comedy. During the Middle Ages the Church strove to keep the joyous and critical aspects of the drama to a minimum, but comic drama survived in medieval folk plays and festivals, in the Italian commedia dell'arte , in mock liturgical dramas, and in the farcical elements of miracle and morality plays.

With the advent of the Renaissance, a new and vital drama emerged. In England in the 16th cent. Shakespeare, whose comedies ranged from the farcical to the tragicomic, was the master of the romantic comedy, while Jonson, whose drama was strongly influenced by classical tenets, wrote caustic, rich satire.

This combination is also present in the plays of the Italian Carlo Goldoni. After a period of suppression during the Puritan Revolution, the English comic drama reemerged with the witty, frequently licentious, consciously artificial comedy of manners of Etherege , Wycherley , Congreve , and others.

Though comedy and tragedy are different, they are not in opposition to each other in the way that some readers might assume.

For example, most people associate humor with comedy and sadness with tragedy. However, most tragic literature features humor and comic literature often features elements of sadness. In general, there is a shared experience that results from viewing or reading comedy and tragedy, though they evoke different reactions and emotions.

Comedy tends to evoke laughter and a sense of likeness among humans, whereas tragedy often evokes suffering and isolation. In terms of the protagonist of a literary work, most main characters in a tragedy are complex and flawed. Comedy and tragedy also differ in their plot elements. Tragic plots typically involve suffering, a sense of inevitability, and allow for dramatic reflections.

Comedy is important as a literary device in that it typically uplifts readers through overall positivity. Humorous situations, word play , and other comedic devices evoke laughter which often results in an effect of happiness. Of course, comedy is a means of addressing lighthearted topics as well as more impactful and serious subjects. What matters that I was born a woman, if I can cure your misfortunes? I pay my share of tolls and taxes, by giving men to the State.

But you, you miserable greybeards, you contribute nothing to the public charges; on the contrary, you have wasted the treasure of our forefathers, as it was called, the treasure amassed in the days of the Persian Wars.

You pay nothing at all in return; and into the bargain you endanger our lives and liberties by your mistakes. Have you one word to say for yourselves?

Context is crucial to humour Credit: Getty Images. That they have a role in contemporary society beyond just making people laugh is undeniable; their work is evidence of the impact comedy can have more widely.

If we find a joke offensive, we protest by not laughing at it. In many ways, Quirk says, the sorts of observations made by comics such as Long are reinforced by her recent academic work, which has involved lengthy interviews with jobbing comics. While you do sometimes just need something silly to watch, comedy has much greater resonance than it tends to be given credit for.

The best comedians, he argues, are our most effective anthropologists and cultural critics. A good joke packs a harder punch than many other forms of dialogue, and it can reach people who would otherwise be unwilling to listen Credit: Getty Images. British comic Stephen K Amos sells out venues seating thousands, year in, year out, and has successful BBC Radio 4 programmes under his belt. And while it may be difficult to quantify, he says, the social and psychological impact of comedy warrants much greater recognition.

The research backs this up. Although the role of comedy is to be entertaining first and foremost, through interviewing comedians, Sharon Lockyer , a sociology lecturer and the director of the Centre for Comedy Studies Research at Brunel University, has identified a number of possible other functions. In the old days it was just about doing jokes. As an example of what comedy can do, Amos tells the story of a teenager who came up to him after a gig that featured Amos relaying his own tale of coming out as gay to his family.

And if that means challenging your preconceived ideas about who I am, great. We can run with that. It validates shared experiences, gets us to think more flexibly and reframe situations in this shared experience we call life. As the cop-turned-comedian Alfie Moore points out, "if they are laughing, they are listening" - meaning you can spread your message to more people Credit: Getty Images. People come to his shows with their own ideas about policing, Moore says, but can leave with their perceptions altered about what the job is and how it slots into society.

I had no influence. The Radio 4 show got 1. I had chief constables emailing me. Like Amos, Carr, who is also an actor and writer, says that to regard comedy merely as something frivolous would constitute a failure to comprehend its place in the world.

With a career spanning radio, television she currently stars in the hit drama Silent Witness , stand-up and sketch comedy, Carr was one of the pioneers in the flourishing arena of comics with disabilities. It is, she says, another example of how humour can be trained on even the most sombre of topics and prod people towards rethinking preconceived notions.