Comedy
Comedy (from the Greek: κωμῳδία, kōmōidía), in the contemporary meaning of the term, is any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or to amuse by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, television, film and stand-up comedy. This sense of the term must be carefully distinguished from its academic one, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters. The theatrical genre can be simply described as a dramatic performance which pits two societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye famously depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old", but this dichotomy is seldom described as an entirely satisfactory explanation. A later view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose obstacles to his hopes. In this struggle, the youth is understood to be constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to take recourse in ruses which engender very dramatic irony which provokes laughter.
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Some articles on comedy:
... The Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album was awarded from yearly 1959 to 1993 and then from 2004 to present day ... to the name of the award over this time From 1959 to 1967 it was Best Comedy Performance From 1968 to 1991 it was known as Best Comedy Recording From ... the award was restricted to spoken word comedy albums and moved into the "spoken" field ...
... Albert Ranft who in the early 20th century staged a large number of French and British comedy plays ... He had personal contact with many of the most popular European comedy playwrights at the time, including George Bernard Shaw, and successfully had a great number of contemporary ...
... His favorite mode was the "sentimental comedy," which combines domestic plots, rhetorical enforcement of moral precepts, and comic humor ... Cumberland first essayed sentimental comedy in The Brothers (1769) ... a compliment to Garrick, who helped the production of Cumberland's second comedy The West-Indian (1771) ...
... Emmy Awards Outstanding Comedy Series (1999–2005) 7 nominations Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series Ray Romano (1999–2003, 2005) 6 nominations Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series ...
... Weingarten May 28, 1918 – July 18, 1990) was a Canadian comedian and comedy writer best known for his work as part of the comedy duo Wayne and Shuster alongside ... Harbord Collegiate Institute, where he met his future comedy partner, and later the University of Toronto ...
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“The actors today really need the whip hand. Theyre so lazy. They havent got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)