Comedy once meant happy endings, not only punch lines
Greeks and Romans reserved comedy for stage plays that ended well. Aristotle called it imitation of people worse than average—specifically ridiculous, a species of the ugly—while tragedy imitated people better than average. Laughter-first meaning arrived later.
Today comedy covers theatre, film, stand-up, television, radio, and books meant to amuse. Athenian comic poets already used political satire to sway voters, and Greek stage comedy pitted groups, ages, or societies against one another in an amusing agon. Northrop Frye cast the fight as a Society of Youth against a Society of the Old; a later reading sees a powerless young man tricking his way past social obstacles. Satire alienates audiences from corrupt targets, while parody twists genres without always condemning them.
The word tracks Greek kōmōidía, from kômos (revel) plus ōidḗ (song), then Latin comoedia and Italian commedia. Aristophanes, from 425 BCE, wrote some forty comedies, eleven surviving, growing out of obscene satyr plays. Around 335 BCE Aristotle’s Poetics tied comedy to phallic processions, admitted its origins were murky, and assigned it the Muse Thalia. He saw it as good for society because it aimed at happiness, and split it into farce, romantic comedy, and satire. Plato disagreed, warning that violent laughter overrode self-control.
Medieval Arabic readers of the Poetics—Abu Bishr, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes—tied comedy to hija satirical poetry, an art of reprehension rather than staged play. Dante called his poem La Commedia because it ended happily, and Elizabethan comedy still meant light tone and marriages rather than modern gags.
Mr. Punch, descended from Neapolitan Pulcinella, first appeared in England in 1662. British music hall from the 1850s trained Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel, and Dan Leno, and Fred Karno’s wordless sketches of the 1890s earned him credit as slapstick’s originator. Surreal humour reaches back to Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain, a signed urinal, was partly a joke.
Source: Comedy
