Essays on Comedy

Comedy has a way of making people laugh to certain subject that we struggle with in everyday life. They twist and turn it so that it is comfortable for people to laugh at and enjoy themselves. But what most people don’t know is that these...

Anton Chekhov fought with the famed Stanislavsky over staging his play The Cherry Orchard as a tragedy. According to Chekhov, the play about a well-to-do family forced to surrender its home and orchard to a man who began life as a mere serf on their...

Bertolt Brecht was born in Germany in 1898, were he was raised in a middle-class family. Had strong social and political views in which he believed, while he discovered his love of the theatre and began to write his own plays finding the perfect place...

Born A Crime is a humorous and serious memoir by Trevor Noah. The book begins in South Africa, where Noah is from, under apartheid, and continues throughout his childhood and adolescence, as South Africa rid itself of apartheid. Trevor and his mother go to church...

Sex and sexuality as historical constructs acquired new meanings in the Restoration, with them becoming the essential components of the economy of exchange. Situated amidst the popular libertine culture, the ideals of love, virtue and more importantly, the image of the woman was being redrawn,...

There are many texts that deal with the role of the individual male in society; their positions are discussed politically, socially and personally. However, in-depth discussion of the individual female role in society is often lacking during the Restoration period. Women are props, background objects,...

In the beginning, there was….well, depending on how far back in the beginning you want to go, the first situation comedy depiction most likely was animated storytelling around a fire in a cave at dinnertime, with a captive audience, exhausted from a long day of...

In both Le Barbier de Seville and Le Mariage de Figaro, Beaumarchais uses a variety of comic techniques, such as the parodying of existing forms, comedy of intrigue, satire and farce. However, Beaumarchais’ comedy is interweaved with more serious, and often tragic overtones, which often...

A musical comedy, “Sweet Charity,” based on [,featured] book by Neil Simon, earned nine Tony awards since its premiere on Broadway over 50 years ago. Originally choreographed and directed by the world-famous Bob Fosse, the musical is centric in the experiences of Charity Hope Valentine—a...

It does not seem a viable course of action to try to apply our modern developed ethics to a 16th Century mindset such as that which yielded Jonson’s The Alchemist. For example, as a civilisation would all at the very least, feel uncomfortable taking Kastril’s...

As a Restoration Comedy humour is central to Wycherley’s play. Like many other Restoration Comedies The Country Wife is characterised by farcical humour that runs throughout the whole play, generated through wit, sexual innuendo and a great deal of dramatic irony. However, Wycherley’s use of...

Ask someone when they last admitted their feelings to someone, and they will probably give a recent recount. Ask someone what that feeling of love means, and they go silent.Throughout our lives, molded by romantic literature and professor interpretations, we visualize, through rose-colored glasses, the...

Through his work, A Mad World, My Masters, Thomas Middleton challenges the viewer’s perspectives on adultery by portraying it as comical, rather than starkly reproachable. During the first four acts of A Mad World, My Masters, the play seems to encourage the audience to support...

The Rise and Fall of Little Voice is in many ways a ‘la piéce bien faite’ (translated as ‘well-made play’), which consists of a four point structure: an exposition; a complication and a climax followed by a denouement. Certainly, the exposition can be identified as...

The French Neoclassical Era was a time period that stood out to me throughout this semester. After researching Tartuffe further, I found that weakness and blindness were driving forces in the play and wanted to explore each character’s role in those flaws. It is human...

I desire / the learned and charitable critic to have so much faith in me / to think it was done of industry. –Ben Jonson, lines 110-112 of the prefatory epistle to Volpone Ben Jonson’s play Volpone, or “Sly Fox,” was performed for the first...

Throughout The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, Cartwright presents the character of Mari Hoff as irresponsible and vulgar, especially through his use of colloquial language. Scene Seven certainly supports this view, but also introduces her vulnerability: a trait that the audience must understand before...

“Tartuffe or The Impostor” is one of Moliere’s most famous plays, which premiered in 1664, but remains popular to this day. The name Tartuffe became a household name, denoting a deceiver, a prude, a hypocrite. Moliere is an outstanding satirist, a talented poet, but in...

A notoriously psychological composer of satire and comedy, Anton Chekhov employs The Cherry Orchard as a case study of an ensemble of ludicrous characters united in their inability to transform their behaviors or identities. Each character appears suspended in his/her separate concerns, each so self-absorbed...

“By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could only be given to traveling: namely, the strange” – Jane Jacobs. In both The Roaring Girl and The Witch of Edmonton the figure of ‘the other’ emerges through the female characters subversion of normative gender roles....

In Tartuffe by Molière, the hypocrisy of Tartuffe has completely confused Orgon. Although Orgon’s family has seen Tartuffe’s true face and try to hinder Orgon. But due to being so devout and obsessed, Orgon almost sabotaged his family. The first reason that Tartuffe can easily...

When Anton Chekhov began his play The Cherry Orchard in December 1902, he intended it to be a farce in four acts. Having written it during a particularly awful bout with emphysema, it took almost a year for him to send it out to Stanislavski...

It is imperative for drama to require much more consideration regarding the intended audience than other literary forms, since in the end, a play is meant to be a performance. In drama and its theatrical depiction, the spectators experience the authorial vision in a defined...

Moliere has written a Tartuffe play comedy that reflects the fact of human nature. The author clearly portrays the nature of the characters and especially Orgon and Tartuffe. Through this, we can find the two main reasons why Tartuffe can easily manipulate and exploit Orgon....

Patrick Hamilton represents women in such a misogynistic manner in Hangover Square that we do not get insight on a single positive portrayal of a woman that George, the novel’s protagonist, meets on his journeys. Instead, we only hear a remotely positive attitude about a...

In The Rover, Aphra Behn illustrates a world in which sex and economic exchange unite under the mandates of the patriarchy. In such a society, sexuality is commodified, and a woman is either sold into the marriage market (by her family, in an effort to...

Introduction William Shakespeare attained literary immortality through his exposition of the various qualities of human nature in his works. Such works include the romantic comedy, “The Merchant of Venice”, which displays the deliberate use of deception. This human quality is a tool utilised for many...

The English Restoration significantly impacted the work of the artists of the day. As England moved from a monarchy under Charles I, to a commonwealth under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, and then back again to a monarchy with Charles II on the throne, artists,...

‘Oh London…. Thou hast all things in thee to make thee fairest, and all things in thee to make thee foulest: for thou art attir’de like a Bride, drawing all that looke upon thee, to be in love with thee but there is much harlot...

Tom Stoppard’s ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’, a tragicomedy written in the 1960s, is a play that is a continuation of ‘Hamlet’, which expounds the events faced by both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern upon their arrival to England. The play ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’ is...