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Discuss the different kinds of humour in the play. Is it effective

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Discuss the different kinds of humour in the play. Is it effective today? What is its purpose?

Much ado about nothing is a comedy written by William Shakespeare.
There are many kinds of humour in the play. The first kind of humour we come across is the skirmishes of wit between Beatrice and Benedick.
Beatrice and Benedick are both sarcastic people and incidentally are sarcastic about each other. Sarcasm is a very good kind of humour, which is still effective to this day. Many people understand sarcasm and it's a good way of putting a point across. The main purpose of sarcasm is probably mockery. Sarcasm is usually used when you say something that you don't mean literally, the point of this particular sarcasm is to tell the …show more content…

In this quote
Dogberry is talking about the watch talking and not paying attention to their duty and so here he means to say intolerable. Again he says
"you, constable, are to present the princes own person" this is funny again as he misses out a key part of the word in which he is meaning to say represent. This humour with Dogberry continues constantly through the play. It is still effective today because we have an understanding of what he means to say and so it comes across as funny where as in Shakespeare's time it may not as been as funny as many people would have been poorly educated and so wouldn't perhaps understand. The main purpose of this is just basically adding a bit of extra humour to the play.

The final kind of humour in the play is probably deceit. This is where towards the end of the play Beatrice and Benedick are fooled by their friends into believing that they both love each other. Margaret and
Hero leave notes for Beatrice pretending them to be from Benedick telling Beatrice how much he loves her. Whereas Don Pedro and Claudio do the same for Benedick. They also leave notes for them both to meet up at the same time. Both Beatrice and Benedick start to believe it and change their views on each other. This is funny to the audience as they get to see how both Beatrice and Benedick ponder about these love letters they have

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