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Plato says comedy should be tightly controlled if one wants to achieve the ideal state. Also in Poetics, Aristotle defined comedy as one of the original four genres of literature. The other three genres are tragedy, epic poetry, and lyric poetry. Literature, in general, is defined by Aristotle as a mimesis, or imitation of life. Comedy is the ...
Comedy is a genre of dramatic performance having a light or humorous tone that depicts amusing incidents and in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity. [1] For ancient Greeks and Romans, a comedy was a stage-play with a happy ending.
A burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects. [1] The word is loaned from French and derives from the Italian burlesco, which, in turn, is derived from the Italian burla – a joke, ridicule or mockery. [2] [3]
Classical literary criticism placed Aristophanes somewhere between the harshness of Cratinus and the smoothness of Eupolis. [12] All the Old Comedy writers worked within a highly structured format – parodos, agon, and parabasis – which paradoxically offered maximum scope for improvisatory flights of fancy. [13]
Humour (Commonwealth English) or humor (American English) is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement.The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which taught that the balance of fluids in the human body, known as humours (Latin: humor, "body fluid"), controlled human health and emotion.
The New Comedy influenced much of Western European literature, primarily through Plautus and Terence: in particular the comic drama of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Congreve, and Wycherley, [19] and, in France, Molière. [20] The 5-act structure later to be found in modern plays can first be seen in Menander's comedies.
A reader is not expected to 'find' or 'discover' a humorous moment within the reality of the text, rather, humor is the ongoing mood, like a comedy movie, rather than a movie that has some comedy or laughs within it. Literary scholars distinguish textual analysis on this basis; the theory being that a story by Mark Twain that is a satirical ...
Relief theory suggests humor is a mechanism for pent-up emotions or tension through emotional relief. In this theory, laughter serves as a homeostatic mechanism by which psychological stress is reduced [1] [2] [6] Humor may thus facilitate ease of the tension caused by one's fears, for example.