ELEMENTS & TYPES OF COMEDY

TAKEN FROM THE WEBSITE http://www.answers.com/topic/comedy

ELEMENTS
Comic Timing: Comic timing is use of rhythm and tempo to enhance comedy and humor. The
pacing of the delivery of a joke has a strong impact on its comic effect; the same is also true of more physical comedy such as slapstick. A beat is a pause taken for the purposes of comic timing, often to allow the audience time to recognize the joke and react, or to heighten the suspense before delivery of the expected punch line. Sometimes those outside the comedy business assume that there must be some set period of silent time "that's funny." Aside from a few comedic pauses intended only to heighten an already established tension, nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, pauses are one of the clues we use to discern subtext or even unconscious content - that is, what the speaker is really thinking about. Jack Benny and Victor Borge are two comedians famed for using the extended beat, allowing the pause to itself become a source of humor above the original joke. George Carlin and Rowan Atkinson are two other stand-up comedians well known for superior timing.

Pregnant Pause: A pregnant pause is a technique of comic timing used to accentuate a

comedy element. Refined and perfected by Jack Benny, the pregnant pause has become a staple of stand-up comedy Examples: David Letterman: "Congratulations are in order for Woody Allen. He and Soon-Yi have a brand-new baby daughter." (Pause) "Its all part of Woodys plan to grow his own wives."

Slapstick: Comedy characterized by broad humor, absurd situations, and vigorous, often violent
action. It took its name from a paddlelike device, probably introduced by 16th-century commedia dell'arte troupes that produced a resounding whack when one comic actor used it to strike another. Slapstick comedy became popular in 19th-century music halls and vaudeville theatres and was carried into the 20th century by silent-movie comedians such as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops and later by Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and the Three Stooges.

TYPES OF COMEDY
Black Humor:
In literature, drama, and film, grotesque or morbid humor used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world. Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. Black humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic farce. For example, Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963) is a terrifying comic treatment of the circumstances surrounding the dropping of an atom bomb, while Jules Feiffer's comedy Little Murders (1965) is a delineation of the horrors of modern urban life, focusing particularly on random assassinations. The novels of such writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth contain elements of black humor.

Satire:
Term applied to any work of literature or art whose objective is ridicule. It is more easily recognized than defined. From ancient times satirists have shared a common aim: to expose foolishness in all its guisesvanity, hypocrisy, pedantry, idolatry, bigotry, sentimentalityand to effect reform through such exposure. The many diverse forms their statements have taken reflect the origin of the word satire, which is derived from the Latin satura, meaning dish of mixed fruits, hence a medley.

Term:
In literature, a work in which the style of an author is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule. Differing from both burlesque (by the depth of its technical penetration) and travesty (which treats dignified subjects in a trivial manner), parody mercilessly exposes the tricks of manner and thought of its victim and therefore cannot be written without a thorough appreciation of the work it ridicules. Examples date from as early as ancient Greece and occur in nearly all literatures and all periods.

Irony:
Figure of speech in which what is stated is not what is meant. The user of irony assumes that his reader or listener understands the concealed meaning of his statement. Perhaps the simplest form of irony is rhetorical irony, when, for effect, a speaker says the direct opposite of what she means. Thus, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, when Mark Antony refers in his funeral oration to Brutus and his fellow assassins as honorable men he is really saying that they are totally dishonorable and not to be trusted. Dramatic irony occurs in a play when the audience knows facts of which the characters in the play are ignorant. The most sustained example of dramatic irony is undoubtedly Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus searches to find the murderer of the former king of Thebes, only to discover that it is himself, a fact the audience has known all along.