COMEDY

GLOSSARYBathos a descent from the elevated to the ludicrous, a sense of deflation.Burlesque in the British theatrical tradition, a satirical play that parodiescontemporary or well-known dramas, beginning in the Restorationperiod with the Duke of Buckingham’s play The Rehearsal (1671),lampooning the heroic drama of Dryden. Burlesque comedies were atthe height of their popularity in the Victorian period, and someburlesque revues ran into the twentieth century. In American theatricalparlance, a burlesque is a sexthemed comedy and variety revue withits origins in the second half of the nineteenth century, often featuringstriptease.Camp Susan Sontag defines camp as a ‘way of seeing the world as anaesthetic phenomenon…not in terms of beauty but in terms of thedegree of artifice, of stylization’ (Sontag, 1982:106). Camp refers toa certain kitsch or trashy aesthetic, an elevation of elements of popculture to a status beyond that deserved by its content according totraditional categories of taste.Carnival the period of feasting immediately prior to Lent, but forMikhail Bakhtin and others, a conceptual category that describes thepotential of popular literary and festive forms to disrupt the dominantorder, express dissent, and provide a framework for the celebration ofunsanctioned or ‘unofficial’ modes of being. ‘Carnivalesque’ refers totexts, events, or practices that epitomize the spirit of carnival, oftenassociated with the gratification of bodily desires, but possessing thepotential to be read as an expression of the voice of the plebeian class.City comedy a popular form of drama in the Jacobean and Carolinetheatre and associated with the playwrights Ben Jonson, ThomasMiddleton, John Marston, and Philip Massinger. City comedy is basedon the principles of Roman New Comedy, but brings its satiric eye tobear on the financial dealings and sexual immoralities of a newlyemergent mercantile class, active in the burgeoning city of London inthe first half of the seventeenth century.Commedia dell’arte a form of improvised comedy first recorded in Italyin 1545, and flourishing from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth