What is a comedy?

Answer 1

comedy is something amusing that makes the crowd laugh, something not serious, maybe something ironic. what ever makes you make the sound " haha" is comdey :)

Answer 2

Comedy has a classical meaning (comical theatre) and a popular one (the use of humour with an intent to provoke laughter in general). In the theater, its Western origins are in ancient Greece, like tragedy, a genre characterised by a grave fall from grace by a protagonist having high social standing. Comedy, by contrast, portrays a conflict or agon (Classical Greek ἀγών) between a young hero and an older authority, a confrontation described by Northrop Frye as a struggle between a "society of youth" and a "society of the old". A more recent development is to regard this struggle as a mere pretext for disguise, a comical device centered on uncertainties regarding the meaning of social identity. The basis of comedy would then be a plot mechanism conceived to engender misunderstandings either about a hero's identity or about social being in general. [1]

Comedy includes many things in a variety including things ranging from the funninest of Mrs. Theodore to words such as frikky-nikky. Returning to the popular term comedy, it is known to be difficult to describe. Humor being subjective, one may or may not find something humorous because it is either too offensive or not offensive enough. Comedy is judged according to a person’s taste. Some enjoy cerebral fare such as irony or black comedy; others may prefer scatological humor (e.g. the "fart joke") or slapstick. A common gender stereotype that plays on this convention is that men love the comedy of The Three Stooges, while women do not.[citation needed]

While hard to pin down, it can safely be said that most good comedy, as with a good joke, contains within it variations on the elements of surprise, incongruity, conflict, and the effect of opposite expectations. The audience becomes a part of the experience, if it is to be successful. Sometimes, it is the fulfillment of the expectation which is part of the experience, such as the long "take" of a Jack Benny, resolved, paradoxically, when the expected happens. Comedy is a serious business, and one only knows it when one sees it or hears it.

Comedy drama

Comedy is the term applied to theatrical dramas, the chief object of which are to amuse. It is contrasted on the one hand with tragedy and on the other with farce, burlesque, and so on. As compared with tragedy, it is distinguished by having a (the comedies).

Answer 3

The older definition, based on the distinction between comedy and tragedy, was that comedy has a happy ending; you relate to the characters and are happy when they arrive safely at the end of their troubles, no matter how convoluted they appear to be during the play. Example: Shakespeare's mistaken identity comedies, based on the Latin comedies of Plautus (echoed in Gilbert and Sullivan — e.g., HMS Pinafore, The Gondoliers; movie comedies, e.g. Gene Wilder and Donald Sullivan in Start the Revolution Without Me).

Tragedy, in contrast, involves deepening crisis, deterioration driven by faults in character of bad luck, unhappy endings (in melodrama, even great melodrama — Hamlet is melodrama with much deeper character aspects — the play ends when the stage is littered with bodies).

Today, however, comedy is in its varioius forms (stand up, stage comedy, movie comedy, TV comedy) something that makes people laugh, or see absurdity in life. See the definition in the Simple Wikipedia Encyclopedia: http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedy

Answer 4

A comedy is a work of litterateur; play, novel, ect. with a happy ending, usually at lest one of the characters will marry another. On the reverse side a in a tragedy at lest on characters will be dead by the end.