Genre of Theatre : Comedy
Comedy as a popular meaning, is any humourous discourse generally intended to amuse.
Much comedy contains variations on the elements of surprise, incongruity, conflict, repetitiveness, and the effect of opposite expectations, but there are many recognized genres of comedy.
Satire and political satire use ironic comedy to portray persons or social institutions as ridiculous or corrupt, thus alienating their audience from the object of humor.
Comedy is one of the original four genres of literature as defined by the philosopher Aristotle in his work called Poetics.
Comedies also have elements of the supernatural, typically magic and for the ancient Greeks the gods.
Comedy includes the unrealistic in order to portray the realistic.
The oldest Greek comedy is Homer's Odyssey, the story of Odysseus and his crew's attempt to return home after the fall of Troy.
Comedy took on a different view with the advent of the Christian era.
The comedic genre was divided by Dante in his work The Divine Comedy, made up of the epic poems Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.
Dante's division of comedy into three sub genres still exist today in various forms. Inferno represents the darkest of all comedies, or what is known as dark or black comedy.
Purgatorio is light hearted, at least compared to Inferno, and yet one still does not achieve fully what one looks for.
Paradiso is the most traditional of the three in way of the Greek standard of comedy, the supernatural play a huge role in all three poems, but Paradiso ends the happiest of all three with the main character achieving his goal.
