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Abhimanyu Sharma
Professor Louise Peacock
THTR-197
17th February 2016
What is comedy? And what makes this genre so popular that its traces can be dated back to
510 B.C.E, in Ancient Greece, which is referred to as “Old Comedy” now. Comedy has existed
throughout centuries and remained popular as it has always accustomed itself to the mainstream
culture of the time and been accessible to the audience. One can say that it adapts to its
surrounding and the period in which it subsists. Although all of this remains true and comedy and
its influence has grown massively over time, the basic foundation of comedy has remained the
same as it originates from the various techniques that have been used to depict the genre and its
forms ever since they have existed. These techniques are what define comedy and hence add the
humor element to it. They are termed on the basis of their function or how they stimulate humor.
Some of these include slapstick, cross-dressing, repetition, verbal irony etc. Slapstick for
example is a frequently used technique in various forms of comedy where there tends to be
exaggerated physical violence on one or several of the characters in the form. It is quite
commonly used in cartoons like Tom & Jerry and Roadrunner in recent times. It was also used in
other comedic forms throughout history. These forms of comedy throughout history like
Vaudeville, Commedia dell’arte, Comic Clowns, Pantomime imbibed these techniques and used
them to entertain audiences and pave the way for the future of comedy. One of the most widely-
known ones include Commedia dell’arte, a form of rehearsed improvised comedy, which
included and used a variety of comedy techniques like slapstick, satire, audience interaction etc.
Vaudeville, commonly known as Music Hall in the U.S.A which featured a mixture of specialty
acts such as burlesque comedy and song and dance, inculcated a lot of techniques in it like cross-
dressing, ethnic humor etc. We will examine how these comedic devices have shaped comedy to
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Abhimanyu Sharma
Professor Louise Peacock
THTR-197
17th February 2016
what it is today and how it has aged through time. One has to wonder though, what are these
techniques and why were they fundamentally considered funny?
Writers use literary devices in their works which support their material, give it a base and
a direction and incite desired responses from their target audience. Similarly, in comedy there are
techniques or comedic devices that are used to incite a response of laughter from the audience.
There are multitudes of comedic devices used in comedy that one often does not acknowledge
when simply viewing a piece of comedy for the sake of pleasure. But once one looks further in,
they realize that all forms of comedy are like a piece of cloth that is strung together with these
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