Comedy: A Very Short Introduction

Comedy: A Very Short Introduction studies written forms of comedy such as prose fiction, poetry, caricatures, and cartoons. There are also performance forms of comedy such as comic drama, pantomime, comic opera, silent cinema, popular music, Broadway shows, music-hall, stand-up and circus acts, rom-coms, sketch shows, sit-coms. To consider comedy in its incarnations is to raise diverse questions: what is humor, and how may it be used (or abused)? When do we laugh, and why? What is it that writers and speakers enjoy — and risk — when they tell a joke, indulge in bathos, talk nonsense, or encourage irony? Comedy is both a literary genre and a forum for a range of non-literary phenomena, experiences, and events.