Romantic comedy films are films with light-hearted, humorous plotlines, centered on romantic ideals such as that true love is able to surmount most obstacles. One dictionary definition is "a funny mov ...
The term "taboo" comes from the Tongan tapu or Fijian tabu ("prohibited", "disallowed", "forbidden"), related among others to the Maori tapu, Hawaiian kapu, Malagasy fady. Its English use dates to 177 ...
The comedy of manners is an entertainment form which satirizes the manners and affectations of a social class or of multiple classes, often represented by stereotypical stock characters. For example, ...
A convention is a set of agreed, stipulated, or generally accepted standards, norms, social norms, or criteria, often taking the form of a custom.Certain types of rules or customs may become law and r ...
The modern English word evil (Old English yfel) and its cognates such as the German ?bel and Dutch euvel are widely considered to come from a Proto-Germanic reconstructed form of *ubilaz, comparable ...
Ethnic jokes have been around since people first noticed they were different from one another, and ethnocentrism and a sense of ethnic identity appeared. Jokes feed upon difference and distinctions (n ...
Toilet humor, or scatological humor, is a type of off-color humor dealing with defecation, urination, and flatulence, and to a lesser extent vomiting and other body functions. It sees substantial cros ...
The term black humor (from the French humour noir) was coined by the surrealist theoretician André Breton in 1935, to designate a sub-genre of comedy and satire in which laughter arises from cynicism ...
Screwball comedy has proven to be one of the most popular and enduring film genres. It first gained prominence in 1934 with It Happened One Night, which is often cited as being the first true screwbal ...
According to Aristotle (Poetics, ii. 5), Hegemon of Thasos was the inventor of a kind of parody; by slightly altering the wording in well-known poems he transformed the sublime into the ridiculous. In ...
Descriptions of satire's biting effect on its target include 'venomous', 'cutting', 'stinging', vitriol. Because satire often combines anger and humor, as well as the fact that it addresses and calls ...
The word satire comes from the Latin word satur and the subsequent phrase lanx satura. Satur meant "full" but the juxtaposition with lanx shifted the meaning to "miscellany or medley": the expression ...
Irony is often used in literature to produce a comic effect. This may also be combined with satire. For instance, an author may facetiously state something as a well-known fact and then demonstrate th ...
Henry Watson Fowler, in The King's English, says "any definition of irony—though hundreds might be given, and very few of them would be accepted—must include this, that the surface meaning and the u ...
The term comes from the Greek διχοτομ?α dichotomia "dividing in two" from δ?χα dicha "in two, asunder" and τομ? tome "a cutting, incision".Usage The above applies directly when the te ...
