Genres & Forms
Comedy
Comedy is a dramatic genre in which reality is depicted in a laughable, exposing light: through satire, humor, and irony it ridicules human vices, social shortcomings, and absurd situations; the conflict usually ends happily. One distinguishes the comedy of character, of situation, of everyday life, and of satire. The most important dramatist of ancient Greek Old Comedy was Aristophanes; unsurpassed examples were given by Molière (Tartuffe, The Bourgeois Gentleman), Carlo Goldoni, and Nikolai Gogol. In Ukrainian literature the classic comedy was created by Ivan Kotliarevsky (The Muscovite-Sorcerer), Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko (Courtship at Honcharivka), and Ivan Karpenko-Kary (Martyn Borulia, One Hundred Thousand, The Master — satirical comedies about the ruinous power of money), and in the 1920s by Mykola Kulish (Myna Mazailo — a satire on philistinism and Russification).
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Meaning, origins and distinction — side by side.
Distinction
Two poles of the dramatic kind, opposite in pathos and outcome. Tragedy shows the insoluble conflict of an exceptional personality with fate, society or their own nature, ending in the hero's suffering or death and the spectator's catharsis. Comedy ridicules flaws, incongruities and the absurdities of life, tends toward a happy, reconciling resolution and provokes laughter, not dread. Tragedy elevates and purifies through suffering; comedy exposes and corrects through laughter.
