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COMEDY (from Greek: komos, "songs of merrimakers"): In the original meaning of the word, comedy referred to a genre of drama during the Dionysia festivals of ancient Athens. The first comedies were loud and boisterous drunken affairs, as the word's etymology suggests. Later, in medieval and Renaissance use, the word comedy came to mean any play or narrative poem in which the main characters manage to avert an impending disaster and have a happy ending. The comedy did not necessarily have to be funny, and indeed, many comedies are serious in tone. It is only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that comedy's exclusive connotations of humor arose. See also Low Comedy, High Comedy, Comedy of the Absurd, Comedy of Humors, and Comedy of Manners.
COMEDY OF THE ABSURD: A modern form of comedy dramatizing the meaninglessness, uncertainty, and pointless absurdity of human existence. A famous example is Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Cf. existentialism.
COMEDY OF HUMORS: A Renaissance drama in which numerous characters appear as the embodiment of stereotypical "types" of people, each character having the physiological and behavioral traits associated with a specific humor in the human body. The majority of the cast consists of such stock characters. (See "humors, bodily" for more information.) Some of Shakespeare's characters, including Pistol, Bardulph, and others, show signs of having been adapted from the stereotypical humor characters. In literature, a humor character was a type of flat character in whom a single passion predominated; this interpretation was especially popular in Elizabethan and other Renaissance literature. See also stock character.
COMEDY OF INNOCENCE: We have two definitions here. (1) In anthropological terms, a comedy of innocence is a ritualized symbolic behavior (or set of such behaviors) designed to alleviate individual or communal guilt about an execution or sacrifice or to hide the blame for such an action. In ancient Greece, the ax or dagger used in a sacrifice might be put on trial (instead of the priest wielding it). The sacrificial animal might be required to "volunteer" by shaking its head or by walking up to the altar to eat the grain sitting on it. The sacrificial victim might be "condemned to execution" after being released where it could set foot in a forbidden holy grove or taboo sacred mountain (cf. Exodus 19:12-13 and Judges 11:30-40). In America, we see remnants of the comedy of innocence in customs such as the 19th-century's hangman's black mask (to erase the executioner's identity) or the custom of granting the condemned prisoner's last request or final meal (to alleviate any sense of cruelty on the jailer's part).
(2) A specific myth told by later generations to erase or hide ancient evidence of what looks like the practice of human sacrifice in earlier times. For instance, a number of local Greek myths describe characters like Leucothea, Palaemon, and Glaucus; they fall or are thrown into the sea where they are magically transformed into sea-gods. Given the relative insignificance of these gods in the Greek pantheon, it is likely this sort of tale either (a) developed out of local hero cults or (b) the tale alludes to an ancient or prehistoric belief that drowned sacrificial victims would live on as animistic spirits. Another common version of the comedy of innocence is the motif of a human sacrificial victim (usually a child) who is miraculously saved (deus ex machina) and an animal substituted in his or her place. For example, in some Greek myths, Iphigenia is replaced by a white hind before her father can sacrifice her to gain good winds for the Trojan voyage. Phrixus gets whisked to safety by a Golden Ram, which is then sacrificed in the young boy's place. In the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh stops Abraham from killing Isaac, and he directs Abraham's attention to a ram with its horns caught in a thicket (Genesis 22:9-13). Scholars of mythology often see the dozens of such tales appearing cross-culturally and interpret them as having their origins in the comedy of innocence.
COMEDY OF MANNERS: A comic drama consisting of five or three acts in which the attitudes and customs of a society are critiqued and satirized according to high standards of intellect and morality. The dialogue is usually clever and sophisticated, but often risqué. Characters are valued according to their linguistic and intellectual prowess. It is the opposite of the slapstick humor found in a farce or in a fabliau.
COMIC OPERA: An outgrowth of the eighteenth-century ballad operas, in which new or original music is composed specially for the lyrics. (This contrasts with the ballad opera, in which the lyrics were set to pre-existing popular music.)
COMIC RELIEF: A humorous scene, incident, character, or bit of dialogue occurring after some serious or tragic moment. Comic relief is deliberately designed to relieve emotional intensity and simultaneously heighten and highlight the seriousness or tragedy of the action. Macbeth contains Shakespeare's most famous example of comic relief in the form of a drunken porter.
COMING-OF-AGE STORY: A novel in which an adolescent protagonist comes to adulthood by a process of experience and disillusionment. This character loses his or her innocence, discovers that previous preconceptions are false, or has the security of childhood torn away, but usually matures and strengthens by this process. Examples include Wieland's Agathon, Herman Raucher's Summer of '42, Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. The most famous examples are in German. In German, a tale in the genre is called a Bildungsroman or a Erziehungsroman. Examples include Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers and Thomas Mann's Königliche Hoheit.
COMITATUS: (Latin: "companionship" or "band"): The term describes the tribal structure of the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic tribes in which groups of men would swear fealty to a hlaford (lord) in exchange for food, mead, and heriot, the loan of fine armor and weaponry. The men who swore such an oath were called thegns (roughly akin to modern Scottish "thane"), and they vowed to fight for their lord in battle. It was considered a shameful disaster to outlive one's own lord. The comitatus was the functional military and government unit of early Anglo-Saxon society. The term was first coined by the classical historian Tacitus when he described the Germanic tribes north of Rome.
COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE: A genre of Italian farce from the sixteenth-century characterized by stock characters, stock situations, and spontaneous dialogue. Typically, the plot is an intrigue plot and it involves a soubrette who aids two young lovers in foiling the rigid constraints of their parents. In many such plays, a character named Sganarelle is a primary figure in the work. Often there is a zani, or foolish-servant, who provides physical comedy in contrast to the anguish of the young lovers. In the end, the couple achieves a happy marriage. Commedia dell'arte may have influenced Shakespeare's comedies, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Moliere's plays, such as L'amour Medecin, commonly translated into English as Love is the Doctor.
COMMON MEASURE: Also called common meter, common measure consists of closed poetic quatrains rhyming ABAB or ABCB, in which the lines of iambic tetrameter (eight syllables) alternate with lines of iambic trimeter (six syllables). This pattern is most often associated with ballads (see above), and it is occasionally referred to as "ballad measure." Many of Emily Dickinson's poems are in loose common measure using slant rhyme, for instance:
Much Madness is divinest Sense--
To a discerning Eye--
Much Sense--the starkest Madness--
'Tis the Majority