Talk:High comedy
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The pages for high comedy and low comedy both claim that the subject of the page can be seen often in sitcoms. How can the main component of sitcom humor be both high and low comedy? 24.34.93.184 (talk)
Lol, I think both articles are written, or at least edited, by someone who is a bit of a comedy snob. My father's expressions of disdain for any sitcom created in the past 20 years have the exact same tone: an emphasis on contrasting "high" comedy from "low", i.e. comedy he likes and understands from comedy that he doesn't. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.165.252.219 (talk) 10:36, 7 April 2013 (UTC) .
I believe that the fact that George Meredith coined the term High Comedy in an 1877 essay on the idea of Comedy to be quite relevant especially though not exclusively because the article on Low Comedy mentions that John Dryden coined the latter term in his preface to an evening's love in 1670. Considering that it is not self-evident from the article who Meredith was and that Wikipedia actually has a page about him it is my intention to turn Meredith's name to an internal link. If you feel that my so doing disrupts your editing then please let me know in the talk page so that I know not to revert your later edits. Thank you.
Rewrite
I have almost entirely rewritten the article, which had no sources and seemed to consist of original research. I haven't referenced thoroughly, but everything in the article can be found in the references except the use of low culture elements satirically in a work of high culture. I think this is important because there is a common misunderstanding that where a work contains low culture elements, this makes it low culture. Sometimes this is a sort of ironic interpolation, and there is a comedic satire of comedy itself, which is of course highly sophisticated since the subtlety of a satire of a satire is impossible to exceed, and very difficult to appreciate. I think, for this reason, it is very rare. I think something like Verhoeven films are the best example of this, but also Team America: World Police would be a good example, because it is difficult to say whether it is itself attempting political satire or is parodying the political satire of reactionary blockbusters.
I couldn't see any references for this but I think it stands to reason so I included the line anyway. If high comedy is marked by satire, irony, and metatextual references, it must be possible for low comedy to be present in high comedy in order to achieve those things, in which case the element does not result in the work being any less a work of a high comedy, and in fact the usage of that element is itself a marker of high comedy (to the greatest degree, as mentioned above).
It would be good if somebody could find a source to discuss the ambiguity in the term and the subjectivity with which it may be used, because I think it is widely regarded that people will call things they find funny high comedy. Additionally, works of high comedy will often display characteristics of low comedy, and so there may be subjectivity in the judgment of whether work is high or low comedy.
The previous draft of the article said that pure comedy is an interchangeable term with high comedy. Perhaps it may be used that way but I would consider pure comedy to mean pure in terms of genre, i.e. in distinction to comedy-drama.
82.30.241.19 (talk) 14:12, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
- I also removed the reference to high comedy being coined by Meredith, because there is no source for this and it seems likely to me that it would have been used earlier, if low comedy was used 200 years previously. 82.30.241.19 (talk) 16:24, 27 September 2025 (UTC)