What comedy actually is

Comedy is not defined by jokes. It is defined by shape and by social function. A working definition for the exam:

Comedy is the genre in which a society that has gone wrong is put right — usually by exposing folly, humbling pretension, and ending in reconciliation, feasting or marriage. Tragedy ends in a corpse; comedy ends in a wedding. Both are arguments about how a community should live.

• Comedy moves towards integration; tragedy moves towards isolation.
• Comedy characteristically ends with a new society forming around the young lovers, while the blocking figure is either converted or expelled.
• Comedy is fundamentally corrective: it laughs at deviation from a norm — which raises the sharp question of whose norm.

Northrop Frye's account of comic structure (in Anatomy of Criticism) is the standard critical reference: a repressive old order blocks the desires of the young, a period of confusion and disguise follows, and a renewed society emerges. It is a pattern you can apply to almost any comedy on any set-text list.

Defining the genre

The comic sub-genres

AQA expects you to identify what kind of comedy you are handling, because the sub-genre determines the target and the tone.

• Romantic comedy — desire obstructed, then satisfied. Interest lies in the obstacle: parents, class, law, disguise, the self.
• Satire — attacks a vice or an institution. Satire wants to reform, and it therefore has a target and a moral standard, even when it hides them.
• Comedy of manners — laughs at the codes of a class: wit, propriety, the marriage market. Epigram is the weapon.
• Farce — mechanical plot, mistaken identity, doors, timing. Character is subordinated to situation; humans behave like machinery.
• Absurd / dark comedy — the comic form is kept but the reconciliation withheld. Laughter with nothing under it.

Most set texts are hybrids, and saying so precisely is an easy way to sound like a critic: a play can be a comedy of manners whose romantic plot keeps threatening to turn satirical.

Name the sub-genre

The comic protagonist and the blocking figure

Comedy's cast is as codified as tragedy's:

• The comic protagonist — often less impressive than a tragic hero, and that is the point. He or she is fallible, appetitive, in love, and lucky. Comedy forgives its heroes.
• The blocking figure (Frye's alazon) — the puritan, the miser, the tyrannical father, the social climber. Rigid where the comic world is fluid; he must be humbled or converted.
• The witty servant / the trickster (the eiron) — the self-deprecating schemer who engineers the resolution, frequently from below the social hierarchy.
• The scapegoat — the figure who is excluded from the final happiness. This is the most examinable character in any comedy, because he or she is the price of the ending.

The high-mark question: comic resolutions are not free. Someone is usually humiliated, exiled or silenced so that everyone else may dance. Ask who pays, and whether the play knows it.

Exemplar, not syllabus: any text named here is only an illustration of the method. AQA rotates and revises its set-text lists, so swap in whatever your class studies. The examiner rewards your handling of the genre, not your loyalty to a particular book.

Who pays for the ending?

Sort the comic feature

Tap a feature, then tap the aspect of comedy it belongs to.

Comic structure: disruption, confusion, resolution

The comic arc, in the terms an examiner wants:

1. An obstructed world — a law, a father, a class barrier, a vow. Desire is illegal.
2. Escape to a licensed space — the wood, the country house, the holiday, the disguise. Identity becomes negotiable. (Critics call these green worlds or festive spaces, and link them to carnival — a temporary, sanctioned inversion of the normal order.)
3. Confusion — mistaken identity, cross-dressing, letters astray. The audience holds knowledge the characters lack, which is comic irony.
4. Anagnorisis, comic version — revelation, unmasking, the discovery of the true birth or the true feeling.
5. Resolution — marriage, feast, forgiveness. The green world is abandoned and the ordinary world resumes, supposedly improved.

Test the ending, always. Is the resolution earned or imposed? Are the couples convincingly matched? Does the reformed tyrant sound reformed? A comedy that ends too neatly is often saying something sceptical about neatness.

Reading a comic ending

The language of comedy

Convert every device into an effect:

• Wit and epigram — the compressed paradox. Wit is a class weapon: it demonstrates leisure, education and superiority, which is why comedies of manners are full of it.
• Puns and double entendre — meaning slipping loose from control. Sexual innuendo lets a play say what its society forbids it to say.
• Bathos — the sudden drop from the elevated to the trivial, deflating pretension in a single line.
• Irony (verbal, dramatic, structural) — the reader's superiority over the character. Comedy runs on managed superiority.
• Repetition and the mechanical — Henri Bergson's account of laughter (Le Rire, 1900) argued that we laugh at the mechanical encrusted upon the living: the human being who behaves like a machine. That single idea explains farce, catchphrases, and the humour of obsession.
• Register clash — high style on a low subject (mock-heroic), or low style in a high place.

Theories of laughter

Match the comic method to its effect

Tap a method on the left, then the effect it produces on the right.

Comedy, power and permission

Comedy is the most political of the genres, because laughter is licensed. AO3 questions worth asking:

• Who is allowed to laugh at whom? Satire directed upwards (at the powerful) does different work from ridicule directed downwards (at the poor, the foreign, the female, the unfashionable).
• Carnival — Mikhail Bakhtin argued that carnival temporarily inverts hierarchy: the fool is crowned, the body and appetite triumph over official piety. But the inversion is temporary and sanctioned, which is why critics argue about whether comedy is genuinely subversive or a safety valve that makes the hierarchy easier to bear.
• Reception — comedy ages faster than tragedy. Jokes that once punched up may now read as cruelty; a marriage plot once experienced as liberation may now read as a closing of options. That change is AO3, and it is not a flaw in the text.

The best single AO3/AO5 question in comedy: is this play's laughter subversive (it exposes the powerful) or conservative (it makes deviation ridiculous and sends everyone back to their place)? Both cases can be argued from the same play — and the strongest essays argue both.

Subversive or conservative?

The linked comparative essay

Section C asks you to connect two texts through an aspect of comedy. The method:

1. Open with a proposition about the genre, not with a text. Example: Comedy promises that folly is curable — and both texts are more interested in what has to be silenced to keep that promise.
2. Argue in aspect-paragraphs (the blocking figure; the green world; the ending; the scapegoat), each handling both texts.
3. Chase the difference. A Restoration comedy and a modern comedy may both end in marriage, but one treats marriage as a settlement of property and the other as a settlement of feeling — that gap is where the marks live.
4. Use the pre-1900 text as a genuine argument, not as background to the modern one.

Time discipline. Three sections, 25 marks each. Spend equal time. A brilliant Shakespeare passage answer will not rescue a rushed comparison.

Comparative structure

The big ideas to take into the exam

You now have a comic framework that works on whichever texts your course sets. Press Finish to see your score.