Types of comedy from ancient to modern times:romantic comedy - involves a love affair that does not run smoothly but ends happily.
Example: Shakespeare's
Midsummer Night's Dream the movie,
Pretty Woman manners - portrays upper-class society involved in witty repartee that focuses on their relationships and "affairs." A comedy of manners focuses on the behavior of men and women who violate the rules and manners of upper-class society.
Example: Oscar Wilde's
The Importance of Being Earnest farce - "low comedy" with lots of "belly laughs" that uses quick physical action to induce immediate laughter. The verbal humor is often crude or ridiculous.
Farce is sometimes based on incongruities of character and action; a character doing something that is completely unlike what we would expect of them.
Example: In Shakespeare uses farcical humor in his play,
Twelfth Night. Malvolio, a very prude, self-important character, is convinced to wear funny clothing and act like a fool (Meyer 900).
Most of Jim Carey's comedy is farce. His comedy is based on quick physical humor and often crude dialogue.
satire - mean jokes (barbs) are aimed at people, ideas or things in order to improve, correct, or prevent something.
Example: Again, the character Malvolio in Shakespeare's play,
Twelfth Night is a satirical character. He is held up for scrutiny and ridicule by other characters and the audience because of his self-important, pompous attitude. Shakespeare reveals Malvolio's faults, and shows him to be pathetic.
absurd (black) - unusual, some would say weird or uncomfortable, comedy that portrays the world as unstable. The action includes improbable events with highly unpredictable characters.
Black comedy is very different from other comedies in that this type tends to end unhappily.
http://depts.gallaudet.edu/englishworks/literature/drama.html#farceHmm - we think of the Baron as pathetic but I wonder - is that because times have changed and we have a different attitude, and expectation of fathers then was popular in Victioriana. I am thinking when I was young we thought the movie,
Life With Father was a Parody however today we would see it as a Satire because we would, in our heads take the story to the next step that made the wife a hero and we would expect the father to be left in a predicament where his social order would be
disintegrated.
