A comedy film is a category of film which emphasizes humor. These films are designed to make the audience laugh through the amusement. Films in this style traditionally have a happy ending. Comedy is one of the oldest genres in the film—and derived from the classical comedy in theatre. Some of the earliest silent films were comedies, as slapstick comedy often relies on visual depictions, without requiring sound. To provide drama and excitement to movies, live music was played in sync with the action on the screen, by pianos, organs, and other instruments. When sound films became more prevalent during the 1920s, comedy films grew in popularity, as laughter could result from burlesque situations but now also dialogue.
Joseph Addison was an English essayist, poet, playwright and politician. He was the eldest son of Lancelot Addison. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend Richard Steele, with whom he founded The Spectator magazine. His simple prose style marked the end of the mannerisms and conventional classical images of the 17th century.
Sir Richard Steele was an Anglo-Irish writer, playwright, and politician, remembered as co-founder, with his friend Joseph Addison, of the magazine The Spectator.
Events from the year 1672 in literature.
A shtick is a comic theme or gimmick. The word entered the English language from the Yiddish shtik (שטיק), related to German Stück and Polish sztuka, all meaning "piece", "thing" or "theatre play"; "Theaterstück" is the German word for play.
Bathos is a literary term, first used in this sense in Alexander Pope's 1727 essay "Peri Bathous", to describe an amusingly failed attempt at presenting artistic greatness. Today, bathos refers to rhetorical anticlimax, an abrupt transition from a lofty style or grand topic to a common or vulgar one, occurring either accidentally or intentionally. Intentional bathos appears in satirical genres such as burlesque and mock epic. "Bathos" or "bathetic" is also used for similar effects in other branches of the arts, such as musical passages marked ridicolosamente. In film, bathos may appear in a contrast cut intended for comic relief or be produced by an accidental jump cut.
Thomas Tickell was a minor English poet and man of letters.
Individual events in speech include public speaking, limited preparation, acting and interpretation are a part of forensics competitions. These events do not include the several different forms of debate offered by many tournaments. These events are called individual events because they tend to be done by one person unlike debate which often includes teams. This distinction however is not entirely accurate any more given the addition of duo interpretation events and forms of single person debate. Competitive speech competitions and debates comprise the area of forensics. Forensics leagues have a number of speech events, generally determined by geographical region or league preference. While there are several key events that have been around a long time, there are several experimental events around the country every year that can be limited to individual tournaments. Forensics leagues in the United States includes the National Speech and Debate Association, the National Christian Forensics and Communications Association, the American Forensics Association, the National Forensics Association, the Interstate Oratorical Association and Stoa USA. Organized competitions are held at the high-school and collegiate level. Outside of the rules for each event provided by the individual leagues, there are several cultural norms within each region that are not written into law but are almost always followed. Rules for time limits vary by event and by individual tournaments, but there are penalties in every event for exceeding the time limits though the severity of the penalty widely varies.
Charles Dudley Warner was an American essayist, novelist, and friend of Mark Twain, with whom he co-authored the novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.
CollegeHumor is an Internet comedy company based in Los Angeles. Aside from producing content for release on YouTube, it was also a former humor website owned by InterActiveCorp (IAC) from 2006 until January 2020, when IAC withdrew funding and the website shut down. Since then, CollegeHumor has continued to release content on YouTube and its streaming service, Dropout. The site featured daily original humor videos and articles created by its in-house writing and production team, in addition to user-submitted videos, pictures, articles and links. Created by Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen in 1999, CollegeHumor is operated by CH Media, which also operates Dorkly.com and Dropout.tv, and formerly operated Drawfee.com.
Justus van Effen was a Dutch author, who wrote chiefly in French but also made crucial contributions to Dutch literature. A journalist, he imitated The Spectator with the publication of the Dutch-language Hollandsche Spectator. He gained international fame as a writer of French periodicals and a translator from English into French, and he is also recognized as one of the most important Dutch language writers of the 18th century and an influential figure of the Dutch Enlightenment.
The Spectator was a daily publication founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in England, lasting from 1711 to 1712. Each "paper", or "number", was approximately 2,500 words long, and the original run consisted of 555 numbers, beginning on 1 March 1711. These were collected into seven volumes. The paper was revived without the involvement of Steele in 1714, appearing thrice weekly for six months, and these papers when collected formed the eighth volume. Eustace Budgell, a cousin of Addison's, and the poet John Hughes also contributed to the publication.
Roger deCoverley is the name of an English country dance and a Scottish country dance. An early version was published in The Dancing Master, 9th edition (1695). The Virginia Reel is probably related to it. The name refers to a fox, and the dance's steps are reminiscent of a hunted fox going in and out of cover.
Comedy is a genre of fiction that consists of discourses or works intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, film, stand-up comedy, television, radio, books, or any other entertainment medium. The term originated in ancient Greece: In Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by political satire performed by comic poets in theaters. The theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a dramatic performance pitting two groups, ages, genders, or societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old". A revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions posing obstacles to his hopes. In this struggle, the youth then becomes constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to resort to ruses which engender dramatic irony, which provokes laughter.
Robert Bisset was a Scottish writer, best known as the biographer of Edmund Burke and of Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and other contributors to The Spectator.
Joseph Andrews is a 1977 British period comedy film directed by Tony Richardson. It is based on the 1742 novel Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding.
The Hollandsche Spectator was an important Dutch language newspaper of the Enlightenment period.
Genevieve Stebbins was an American author, teacher of her system of Harmonic Gymnastics and performer of the Delsarte system of expression. She published four books and was the founder of the New York School of Expression.
The Tatler was a British literary and society journal begun by Richard Steele in 1709 and published for two years. It represented a new approach to journalism, featuring cultivated essays on contemporary manners, and established the pattern that would be copied in such British classics as Addison and Steele's The Spectator, Samuel Johnson's The Rambler and The Idler, and Goldsmith's Citizen of the World. The Tatler would also influence essayists as late as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. Addison and Steele liquidated The Tatler in order to make a fresh start with the similar Spectator, and the collected issues of Tatler are usually published in the same volume as the collected Spectator.
Literary costumbrismo is a minor genre of Spanish literature most popular in the 19th century. It is the literary counterpart to the artistic movement known as costumbrismo, which depicted social customs often without analysis or critique. Its style is similar to literary realism. In its most popular and least intellectual form, it describes the commonplace and ordinary aspects of daily life. Appearing in prose and hardly ever in verse, it reached its peak with the novel of manners and in the minor genre called custom picture in journalism. In theater it manifested in the comedy of manners and sainete, a continuation of the earlier entremés.
