Report On Comedy Essay, Research Paper

Comedy is one the most popular forms of entertainment today. It makes us laugh and brings happiness into our lives. The first written comedies were staged in Athens, Greece, during the 5th century BC. Of the dozens of Greek comedies written, only those of the dramatists Aristophanes and Menander have survived. Staged in the afternoon during an annual winter festival. You may not have known that there are several types of comedy such as satire, slapstick, jokes, parodies, observational comedy, and sarcasm. Each type has it s own distinct form of expression and personality. And all are performed or expressed differently, but still each one has it s own way of being funny. Such an art can not be done without, and there will always be a place for it s movies in your VCR. Slapstick comedy is defined as comedy marked by loud or boisterous farce. Or in other words using physical bodies to create laughter such as falling out of bed, slapping your friend across the face, or any other act of inflicting pain on another person or yourself. Such actors as Charlie Chaplain and the Three Stooges made slapstick popular in the early 1900 s. It has been around long before that though in such plays as Midsummer Nights Dream, Romeo & Juliet, and many other Shakespearean plays. Today slapstick is still as popular as it was back then with such modern actors as Chris Farley, Jim Carrey, and John Candy. Slapstick can be found in some form or another in almost any movie. It s one the most funny forms of comedy, continues to gain popularity. Satire is the most widely used form of comedy, and can be found almost anywhere such as newspapers, magazines, or TV. It is defined as A prose or verse that employs it in the form of irony, innuendo, or outright derision to expose human wickedness and folly. The term is derived from the Latin satura, meaning a “medley” or “mixture,” and is related to the Latin adjective satur,”replete.” It originated during the Renaissance period in the14th century to 17th centuries. At first satires were intended to tax weaknesses and to correct corruption wherever found. Satire presents the weaknesses of humanity and makes fun of them. Jonathan Swift aimed his witty, imaginative, and often bitter satire at such subjects as politics, literature, and human society. Gulliver s Travels (1726), Swift s masterpiece, is commonly considered a children s story but was originally intended as a satire on humankind. Usually, satire attempts to cure the foolishness by making people laugh at it. Our next form of comedy is sarcasm, which is much more brutal than satire. This is a mocking or ironic remark such as ooo does it hurt? In a tone of basically I don t care. Actor David Spade uses sarcasm in all his routines. He appears in such movies as Black Sheep, and Tommy Boy. He also appears on such shows as Just Shoot Me, and Saturday Night Live. He has truly perfected this form of comedy and if you would like to see an example of this I recommend you find some of his works.

Humor of words takes many forms. It can be gentle and kindly, or it can be harsh and biting. There is no exact distinction between these various types of humor. Wit differs from most humors in being purely intellectual, rather than relying on incongruities that come up naturally. Most humors produce a smile, but wit usually causes people to break out in sudden laughter. Irony implies the opposite of what is apparently being stated. Irony may begin as a compliment or a simple statement, but it conceals a sting in the remark. It can also be funny when the opposite between what is expected and what actually happens. For example you re late for school, and your rushing to get there but you hit every red light. This is an example of irony when something could go wrong and it does. In the first quarter of the 20th century, silent motion-picture comedy developed naturally from these forms of comedy. And the comedy was preformed on stage in front of the entire world by radio, sound film, and television. By the 1930s Hollywood, the center of the film industry, had created an internationally recognized style and copied the techniques and comic types of ancient Greece and Rome. Following World War II, the United States witnessed the growth of the situation comedy (or sitcom) on television, which featured idealized families dealing with everyday problems. At the same time black or sick humor became popular in urban nightclubs, with attacks on social mores through shocking language and offensive imagery in the manner of Aristophanes. In the 1980s and 1990s these two trends had diminished because of immoral messages that it portrayed. Comedy is a great form of entertainment, could not be done without. I don t know what kind of world this would be if we didn t have some type of humor to make us laugh. From doing this report I learned the different forms of comedy and I can now identify each in movies or TV shows. This was a fun topic to research, and I now know the world would be a boring place if we didn t have comedy.