Concept
Tragicomedy
Overview
Tragicomedy is a literary genre that blends aspects of both tragic and comic forms. Most often seen in dramatic literature, the term can describe either a tragic play which contains enough comic elements to lighten the overall mood or a serious play with a happy ending. Tragicomedy, as its name implies, invokes the intended response of both the tragedy and the comedy in the audience, the former being a genre based on human suffering that invokes an accompanying catharsis and the latter being a genre intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Related ideas
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
- Luigi Pirandello
- Drama
- Classical antiquity
- Samuel Beckett
- Masterpiece
- Tom Stoppard
- Aristotle
- United Kingdom
- World War II
- Poetics (Aristotle)
- Theatre of the absurd
Place in the tradition
Part of Existentialism.