A comedy album is an audio recording of comedic material from a comedian or group of comedians, usually performed either live or in a studio. Comedy albums may feature skits, humorous songs, and/or li ...
A comedy club is a venue, typically a nightclub, bar, or restaurant where people watch or listen to performances, including stand-up comedians, improvisational comedians, impersonators, magicians, ven ...
The official history of London's Comedy Store credits comedian and author Tony Allen with coining the term, though in his autobiography, the late Malcolm Hardee claims to have coined the term in 1978. ...
During the 1970s British television was awash with impressions of Frank Spencer, a character from a hugely popular British sitcom called Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. This may have been because Frank had ...
Further information: Poetics (Aristotle)In the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory, Poetics (c. 335 BCE), the Greek philosopher Aristotle deduces that character (ethos) is one of six qualitativ ...
"An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman" is the opening line of a category of joke popular in Ireland and the United Kingdom. The nationalities involved may vary, though they are usually restricted ...
In its original sense, a shaggy dog story is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax or a pointless pun ...
Blonde jokes are a class of jokes based on a stereotype of dumb blonde women.These jokes about people, generally women, who have blonde hair serve as a form of blonde versus brunette rivalry. They are ...
A one-liner is a joke that is delivered in a single line. A good one-liner is said to be pithy. Comedians and actors use this comedic method as part of their act, e.g. Rodney Dangerfield, Bruce Campbe ...
The origin of the word "clown" is uncertain. It first appears around the 1560s and may come from a Scandinavian linguistic root meaning "clumsy, boorish fellow" (Icelandic klunni and Swedish kluns). A ...
Bouffon (English originally from French: "farceur", "comique", jester") is a modern French theater term that was re-coined in the early 1960s by Jacques Lecoq at his L'?cole Internationale de Thé?t ...
The earliest well documented use of improvisational theatre in Western history is found in the Atellan Farce of Rome circa 391 BC. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, Commedia dell'arte performers im ...
In late 17th-century Italy, light-hearted musical plays began to be offered as an alternative to weightier opera seria (17th-century Italian opera based on classical mythology). Il Trespolo tutore (16 ...
Around 1850, the French composer Hervé was experimenting with a form of comic musical theatre that came to be called opérette. The best known composers of operetta were Jacques Offenbach from the 18 ...
Sketch comedy has its origins in vaudeville and music hall, where a large number of brief, but humorous, acts were strung together to form a larger programme.In the UK, it moved to stage performances ...
