Quick and Easy Reminder For Your Five Major Types of Comedy

The main trends of English comedy can broadly be classified into Five groups, namely ‘romantic comedy’, ‘comedy of manners’, ‘comedy of humours’, ‘sentimental comedy’ and the ‘tragi-comedy’ or ‘dark comedy’.

Romantic Comedy

The term ‘romantic comedy’ is a somewhat vague appellation, which denotes a form of drama is which love is the main theme and love leads to a happy ending. The team ‘romantic comedy’ is generally applied to plays developed by Shakespeare and some of his Elizabethan contemporaries. These plays are generally concerned with love affairs that involve a beautiful and idealized heroine; the course of this love does not run smooth, but ultimately overcomes all difficulties to end in a happy union. In the Anatomy of Criticism (P.P 182-183) Northrop Frye points out that some of Shakespeare romantic comedies involve a movement from the normal world of conflict and trouble into the ‘green world’ – the idyllic, pastoral world of the Forest of Arden as in As You Like It, on the fairy haunted wood of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – in which the problems and troubles of the real world are magically dissolved, enemies reconciled and true lovers united. Frye regards this phenomenon (together with other aspects of these comedies, such as their festive conclusion in the social – ritual of a wedding, a feast, a dance) as evidence that comic plots reflect Primitive myths and rituals celebrating the victory of spring over winter.

Comedy of Humours

Another important type of English comedy, conceived and popularized by Ben Jonson, is the ‘comedy of Humours’. The word ‘humours’ refers to bodily fluids to which medieval medicine attributed to the various types of human temperament according to the predominance of each within the body. Thus a preponderance of blood would make a person ‘sanguine’, while excess of phlegm would make him or her ‘plegmatic’, too much choler (yellow bile) would produce a melancholy one. In Jonson is ‘Comedy of Humours’ each of the major characters instead of being a well balanced individual, has preponderant humour that gives him a characteristic distortion or eccentricity of disposition. Jonson expounds in his theory in the ‘Introduction’ to the play Every Man In his Humour (1598) and exemplifies the mode in his later comedies as well. Jonson himself wrote in his ‘Introduction’ to Every Man Out of his Humour:

                As when some one particular quality

                Doth so possess a man that it doth draw

                All his affects, his spirits, and his power

                In their confluxions, all to run way,

                This may be truly said to be a humour.

For example in Every Man in his Humour, the rich merchant kitely has a young and pretty wife, of whom he is madly jealous; jealously is his humour, the passion that rules has whole life, the young hero’s father, Old Knowell, is always worried about his son’s safety; anxiety is his humour; captain Bobadill is the talkative but cowardly old soldier; boastfulness is his humour. In Bartholomew Fair, Jonson shows us how the humours of various types Londoners are taken advantage of by the quick witted market people.

Comedy of Manners

The Phrase ‘Comedy of manners’ is particularly applied in English to the plays of the Restoration dramatists, and especially to Congreve (1670 – 1729) and Wycherley (1640-1716), but is a type of comedy which can flourish in any civilized urban society and we see it again in Sheridan (1751-1816) and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). The ‘comedy of manners’ was early exemplified by Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour Lost and Much Ado About Nothing. This form deals with the relations and intrigues of gentlemen and ladies living in a sophisticated society. It relies upon comic effect in great part on the wit and sparkle of the dialogues, and to a certain degree, on the ridiculous violations of social conventions and decorum by stupid characters such as would be wives, jealous husbands, foppish dandies. Excellent examples are Congreve’s The Way of The World, Wycherley’s The Country Wife. The main thrust in The ‘comedy of Manners’ is to make fun not so much of individual human being as of social groups and their fashionable manner. It is generally more or less satirical, though in a good-natured way. It is how ever a highly artificial drama, full of verbal with and sometimes inclined to be cynical and hard. This type of comedy was revived in the 18^th century by Goldsmith (She stoops to Conquer) and Sheridan's The school for scandals and The Rivals). In the turn of the 19^th century, Oscar Wilde rejuvenated this form of comedy in plays like The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Winter Mere’s Fan.

Sentimental Comedy

A middleclass reaction against the immortality of situation and the frequent indecency of dialogue in the rise of the ‘sentimental comedy’ of the 18^th century. Jeremy Collier (1650-1726) protested against the permissiveness of the ‘comedy of manners’ specially those of Congreve and Vanbrugh, and wrote his treatise entitled Short View of The Immortality and Profaneness of The English Stage. One result of this was the appearance of the new ‘sentimental comedy’. This form achieved some popularity with respectable middle-class audiences of the 18^th century. It showed virtue rewarded by domestic bliss; its plots usually involved unbelievably good middle-class couple and emphasized pathos rather than humour. Pioneered by Richard Steele in The Funeral (1710) and more fully in The Concious Lovers (1722), it flourished in the mid-century with the French comedia larmoyonete (Tearful comedy) and in such plays as Huge Kelly’s False Delicacy (1768). The pious moralizing of this tradition also involved an element of preaching as a result of which the entertainment values of these plays was reduced.

Tragi-Comedy

There are many plays which do not totally subscribe to the spirit of comedy, nor do they embody the tragic emotions. In parts, they may be cheerful but they point to some darker aspects of life as well. But generally these plays are also classified as comedies. Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, for example, might both be called comedies but they have very little in common with the main stream of the English comedies. To these plays, the term ‘tragi-comedy’ or ‘black comedy’ or ‘dark comedy’ have been applied. Shakespeare’s later plays like The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline are ‘tragi-comedies’ with the pattern of sudden release from delay danger involved in the sudden release from delay danger involved in the plots. In modern drama, the term black comedy is often used to describe a kind of drama in which disturbing or sinister subjects like death, disease, or warfare are treated with bitter amusements usually in a manner calculated to offend and stock. Prominent in the ‘Theatre of The Absurd’, ‘black comedy’ is best represented in Beckett’s Happy Days and Joe Orton’s The Loot. 

Ardhendu De

Reference: Rees, R. J. (1973). English Literature:An Introduction for Foreign Readers. Macmillan.