"Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel" said Walpole.
Comedy! This article is written to introduce very special and important subset of great literature. Comedy is not just playing light jokes or criticism. After every comedy, there is really seriousness introduced by an author. Comedy has changed very little through the generation. Writing comedy or playing it is an art. However it is found that most comedians are somber people at heart.
Comedy Literature
Plays, novels, narration, stories, tales, drama or poetries – none of them are left from the ‘Touch of Comedy’. William Congreve is an English dramatist, the greatest English master of pure comedy. "You must not kiss and tell." This familiar phrase is one of many written by him.
Characteristics of Comedy
A way of looking at the world in which basic values are asserted but natural laws suspended to underscore human follies and foolishness sometimes wry, rueful, hilarious.
1. suspension of natural laws
2. contrast between social order and individual
3. comic premise:
The idea or concept that turns the accepted notion of things upside down and makes it the basis of the play provides structural and thematic unity and can be a springboard for comic dialog, characters, and situations involves exaggeration and incongruity and contradictions--
Types of Comedy
There are basically five to six types of comedies involved in plays and dramas.
Farce
Farce is a comedy characterized by broad satire and improbable situations. It goes to extremes, dealing with the ridiculous, but not with physical impossibilities. Though farce need not necessarily be probable, still it should be put on a plausible basis and worked out as though probable.
Burlesques
It generally treats of a serious, and, perhaps, well-known subject, in an absurd, incongruous manner.
Satire
Ridicule of public institutions and figures.
Domestic Comedy
Involves home and hearth. It deals with humorous situations of every-day life—situations that may happen to the average individual.
Comedy of Manners / Wit
Similar to character and situation aristocratic and witty characters.
Extravaganza
It usually treats of unnatural and impossible situations. The superhuman activities of a character, or set of characters, usually supply the plot.
What does writer look into while writing a comedy?
Be Realistic
Life itself is a comedy. Take your realistic views from pages of lives. Inflame laughter at the incongruities you observe.
Mode of thought
Comedy is a mode of thought. Study man as social being. Get into social life. Play yourself as one of the social life’s roles. Observe others critically and analytically without loss of the real values of life.
After understanding ‘What the comedy is’, lets understand great play writer ‘Congreve’ and his time.
William Congreve
I am a fool, I know it; and yet, Heaven help me, I'm poor enough to be a wit.
- Love for Love (act I, sc. 1)
His first play ‘The Old Bachelor’ was an enormous success produced at the Drury Lane in 1693.
His second effort ‘The Double Dealer’ was not really his success and criticized by public.
At the moment he returned with ‘Love for Love’ to the public favor and his reputation improved still further with the production of his only tragedy, The Mourning Bride, in 1697.
The Way of the World (1700) was a story that revolves around a pair of lovers, Millamant and Mirabell, who establish a rather unconventional marriage arrangement based on their knowledge of the way of the world which, as they know, is inhabited primarily by intriguers, fops, and fools. It is his greatest work to comedy literature.
Congrave said, " I have designed some characters who appear ridiculous, not so much through a natural folly as through an affected wit, a wit which at the same time that it I affected, is also false."
The base of Congreve’s comedy is ‘affection’.
Congravian Idealism in Comedy
While writing play, either of three parts is paid attention - action, time or place. Congreve has not given importance to the action in his plays.
- Contrasted characters are presented in plays.
- ‘Affections’ were given stressed.
- Importance to literary beauty is center point in play.
- The theme mainly was: ‘Please and divert the audience’.
- Do not chastise and correct the affections of society.
- His ideal after play is intellectual, witty and cynical.
Restoration Comedy and Congreve
It is an English comedy of the period of the Restoration, stressing manners and social satire.
It follows the political and social turmoil of the English Civil War. The Restoration Age was characterized by a sense of loss and cultural disillusion coupled with efforts to restore social stability and cohesion. These conditions were associated with a diminishment in the influence of traditional institutions such as religion and the aristocracy and the rise of new institutions to replace them. The audience of the restoration was upper class. The plays of Congreve are considered the greatest achievement of Restoration comedy. They are comedies of manners, depicting an artificial and narrow world peopled by characters of nobility and fashion, to which manners, especially gallantry, are more important than morals.
Congreve's view of mankind is amused and cynical. His characters are constantly engaged in complicated intrigues, usually centering around money, which involve mistaken identities, the signing or not signing of legal documents, weddings in masquerade, etc.
What else!
Congreve’s plays are particularly famous for their brilliance of language; for verbal mastery and wit they have perhaps been equaled only by the comedies of Oscar Wilde.
Comedy! This article is written to introduce very special and important subset of great literature. Comedy is not just playing light jokes or criticism. After every comedy, there is really seriousness introduced by an author. Comedy has changed very little through the generation. Writing comedy or playing it is an art. However it is found that most comedians are somber people at heart.
Comedy Literature
Plays, novels, narration, stories, tales, drama or poetries – none of them are left from the ‘Touch of Comedy’. William Congreve is an English dramatist, the greatest English master of pure comedy. "You must not kiss and tell." This familiar phrase is one of many written by him.
Characteristics of Comedy
A way of looking at the world in which basic values are asserted but natural laws suspended to underscore human follies and foolishness sometimes wry, rueful, hilarious.
1. suspension of natural laws
2. contrast between social order and individual
3. comic premise:
The idea or concept that turns the accepted notion of things upside down and makes it the basis of the play provides structural and thematic unity and can be a springboard for comic dialog, characters, and situations involves exaggeration and incongruity and contradictions--
Types of Comedy
There are basically five to six types of comedies involved in plays and dramas.
Farce
Farce is a comedy characterized by broad satire and improbable situations. It goes to extremes, dealing with the ridiculous, but not with physical impossibilities. Though farce need not necessarily be probable, still it should be put on a plausible basis and worked out as though probable.
Burlesques
It generally treats of a serious, and, perhaps, well-known subject, in an absurd, incongruous manner.
Satire
Ridicule of public institutions and figures.
Domestic Comedy
Involves home and hearth. It deals with humorous situations of every-day life—situations that may happen to the average individual.
Comedy of Manners / Wit
Similar to character and situation aristocratic and witty characters.
Extravaganza
It usually treats of unnatural and impossible situations. The superhuman activities of a character, or set of characters, usually supply the plot.
What does writer look into while writing a comedy?
Be Realistic
Life itself is a comedy. Take your realistic views from pages of lives. Inflame laughter at the incongruities you observe.
Mode of thought
Comedy is a mode of thought. Study man as social being. Get into social life. Play yourself as one of the social life’s roles. Observe others critically and analytically without loss of the real values of life.
After understanding ‘What the comedy is’, lets understand great play writer ‘Congreve’ and his time.
William Congreve
I am a fool, I know it; and yet, Heaven help me, I'm poor enough to be a wit.
- Love for Love (act I, sc. 1)
His first play ‘The Old Bachelor’ was an enormous success produced at the Drury Lane in 1693.
His second effort ‘The Double Dealer’ was not really his success and criticized by public.
At the moment he returned with ‘Love for Love’ to the public favor and his reputation improved still further with the production of his only tragedy, The Mourning Bride, in 1697.
The Way of the World (1700) was a story that revolves around a pair of lovers, Millamant and Mirabell, who establish a rather unconventional marriage arrangement based on their knowledge of the way of the world which, as they know, is inhabited primarily by intriguers, fops, and fools. It is his greatest work to comedy literature.
Congrave said, " I have designed some characters who appear ridiculous, not so much through a natural folly as through an affected wit, a wit which at the same time that it I affected, is also false."
The base of Congreve’s comedy is ‘affection’.
Congravian Idealism in Comedy
While writing play, either of three parts is paid attention - action, time or place. Congreve has not given importance to the action in his plays.
- Contrasted characters are presented in plays.
- ‘Affections’ were given stressed.
- Importance to literary beauty is center point in play.
- The theme mainly was: ‘Please and divert the audience’.
- Do not chastise and correct the affections of society.
- His ideal after play is intellectual, witty and cynical.
Restoration Comedy and Congreve
It is an English comedy of the period of the Restoration, stressing manners and social satire.
It follows the political and social turmoil of the English Civil War. The Restoration Age was characterized by a sense of loss and cultural disillusion coupled with efforts to restore social stability and cohesion. These conditions were associated with a diminishment in the influence of traditional institutions such as religion and the aristocracy and the rise of new institutions to replace them. The audience of the restoration was upper class. The plays of Congreve are considered the greatest achievement of Restoration comedy. They are comedies of manners, depicting an artificial and narrow world peopled by characters of nobility and fashion, to which manners, especially gallantry, are more important than morals.
Congreve's view of mankind is amused and cynical. His characters are constantly engaged in complicated intrigues, usually centering around money, which involve mistaken identities, the signing or not signing of legal documents, weddings in masquerade, etc.
What else!
Congreve’s plays are particularly famous for their brilliance of language; for verbal mastery and wit they have perhaps been equaled only by the comedies of Oscar Wilde.
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