How Lady Windermere’s Fan Fulfils the Requirements of a Comedy

A well-made play is a comedy of manners. A comedy of manners is laughing at words that are used. The plot usually focuses on intrigues among the upper class and focuses on witty language on witty language, clever speech, insults and put downs are traded between characters. Elements that make up a well-made play is a misunderstanding between characters, mistaken identities, secret information, romantic conflicts, lost or stolen documents, and artificial plotting as seen in the book of “The importance of being Earnest” and the television show Seinfeld.

“Humour is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement.” The term Humour has been derived from the Greek language, which teaches that humour is the balance of fluids in the human body. Humour is savoured by different taste-buds like: Anecdotal, Blue, Dark/Gallows/Morbid, Epigrammatic, Hyperbolic, Ironic, Satirical, Satirical, Situational and Slapstick. Franz Kafka, the author of the outright existential classic ‘The Metamorphosis’ uses depressing humour to deal with the bitter deathly truths of life.

Shows such as Impractical Jokers, where four lifelong friends compete against each other in absurd challenges, do not connect to current events. Still, as a viewer, I have spent many weekdays watching countless hours of Impractical Jokers as a way to relieve stress from the academic rigor I endure. Although shows like Impractical Jokers do not illustrate sensitive topics, I find shows similar humorous and a good distraction from the real world. The chief aim of shows like Impractical Jokers is not to state “dangerous or impossible” messages, but to give the audience a good

A comedic story can be summed up as one thing; a hero who triumphs over evil and wins the day. In these tales, our main character encounters around one hardship and overcomes it with much ease. The ancient Greek playwrights had a similar view on comedic tales: in order for something to be a comedy, the main character must reach a positive outcome. So no matter what comes their way, our hero will be in a better spot than he was at the beginning. Well-known comedies include A Midsummer Night 's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, and Cyrano de Bergerac. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Taming of the Shrew, the main character achieves their goal with few hardships. Yet, in Cyrano de Bergerac, our main character’s ambitions are never

The play, "An Inspector Calls", uses moralistic irony to reflect on achievements made today. He reveals the weaknesses and wickedness not only in society, but in the individual characters; which I explain

A comedic work of literature is often just one that was meant as pure enjoyment for the reader. Other times, comedy is meant to shed light on a serious situation or instance the public refuses or is uncomfortable talking about in a non-comedic setting. However, the greatest type of comedy is one that makes the reader think, one that provokes “thoughtful laughter” from them. “The Importance of Being Earnest”, a satirical play written during Victorian Era Britain by Oscar Wilde, is such a piece literature. By poking fun at the time period in which his characters live in during one particular scene, as well as illustrating the unsubdued hilarity of a character during that scene, Wilde is able to elicit thoughtful laughter from his audience, ultimately showing them that life is far too serious and needs to be taken more lightly.

From the start, there is a struggle for love between two couples mixed with deception, accusations, and counter-accusations. In order to maintain their interests, the characters have to use a brutal approach to their relationships. It signifies a kind of relationship between men and women in the Elizabethan world, when the play was written. Regarding the outer world, the use of violent speech language signifies what the society considers as normal relationship between men and women. The use of violence and brutality in competition for attention from women was a common practice. However, things have changed tremendously, and people can use other means to attract members of the opposite sex without being brutal and violent in speech and

The story Don Quixote is a burlesque, mock epic of the romances of chivalry, in which Cervantes teaches the reader the truth by creating laughter that ridicules. Through the protagonist, he succeeds in satirizing Spain’s obsession with the noble knights as being absurdly old fashioned. The dynamics of the comedy in this story are simple, Don Quixote believes the romances he has read and strives to live them out, and it is his actions and the situations that he finds himself in during his adventures that make the reader laugh. We can define comedy as something that entertains the reader and that makes us want to laugh out loud and Cervantes succeeds in doing this through his use of

The reason we still have theatre today is purely because of Roman and Greek dramas. Even just the term “play” comes from Latin’s “ludus” meaning to play. Nowaday we still use this entertainment to distract our people from surrounding issues. Comedy is

“ Life is a Tragedy for those who feel, and A Comedy for those who think” said Jean De La Bruyere. Like in Oedipus, Oedipus feels all the pain when he learned the truth. In The Wife of Bath, the knight had to think through his decision making when the old women ask him to pick a question. A tragedy is about human potentiality, while comedy is about the struggle between the youth and the old. Although comedy and tragedy both have character’s flaw, comedy and tragedy are complete contradictory. One starts off with a fall and another starts off with a raise. One story the main protagonist affect all of his people with his mistakes and the other does not. The ending in the genre also ends completely opposite from when it started.

Despite this there are some interesting anecdotal evidence that humor was used as a means to express wit and learning. Consider French writer Voltaire or even in relatively modem times Oscar Wilde and his extremely witty characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray. These writers used wit and humor to influence people, to stir emotions in their readers and their conversing abilities were fresh and exciting. Humor typically has an element of shock and awe and readers or listeners are shaken beyond their limits of self-control to burst into laughter. Uncontrollable laughter as related to humor was against the strict moral laws of Plato. Even Aristotle seemed to believe in some restrictions on humorous conversation. Humor was suited to a clown in restricted scenarios and serious self-respecting men and women did

In a comparison of comedy and tragedy, I will begin by looking at narrative. The narration in a comedy often involves union and togetherness as we see in the marriage scene at the end of Midsummer's Night Dream. William Hazlitt tells us that one can also expect incongruities, misunderstandings, and contradictions. I am reminded of the play The Importance of Being Ernest and the humor by way of mistaken identity. Sigmund Freud tells us to expect excess and exaggeration in comedy. Chekhov's Marriage Proposal displays this excess both in language and in movements. Charles Darwin insists that in a comedy "circumstances must not be of a momentous nature;" whereas, Northop Frye identifies

* Romantic Comedy. Perhaps the most popular of all comic forms--both on stage and on screen--is the romantic comedy. In this genre the primary distinguishing feature is a love plot in which two sympathetic and well-matched lovers are united or reconciled. In a typical romantic comedy the two lovers tend to be young, likeable, and apparently meant for each other, yet they are kept apart by some complicating circumstance (e.g., class differences, parental interference; a previous girlfriend or boyfriend) until, surmounting all obstacles, they are finally wed. A wedding-bells, fairy-tale-style happy ending is practically mandatory. Examples: Much Ado about Nothing, Walt Disney 's Cinderella, Guys and Dolls, Sleepless in Seattle.

The first theory otherwise known as Superiority theory, is the idea that people laugh at the misfortune of others. When people make a group of peers laugh it adds a sense of, “sudden glory,” to a person and allows people to feel dominant. The bases of superiority theory is people thrive for dominance and can use laughter to win dominance by getting everyone to admire or follow a person; by seeing someone else have a joke played on a person makes people feel better or superior. According to “Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,” “this theory holds two claims: the strong claim holds that humor involves a feelings of superiority, and the weak claim suggest that feelings of superiority

There are many characteristics that make up a comedy. Characteristics such as mistaken identity, battle of the sexes, and jumping to conclusions are what set the comedic story apart from the tragedy. Within a comedy, no matter how much fault, and dismay may appear within the story, there always seems to be the classic ending of “…and they all lived happily ever after…” Comedies capture the viewer with a sense of compassion and love for the characters in the story. Each character has their own essence, to which they pertain a flaw of some sorts, which the audience can relate to. With the relation to characters there is defiantly a certain interest that is grabbed by the actors, which sucks the audience into the