Comedy has a popular meaning ( stand-up, along with any discourse generally intended to amuse), which differs from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in Ancient Greece. The theatrical genre can be simply described as a dramatic performance pitting two societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Comedy contains variations on the elements of surprise, incongruity, conflict, repetitiveness, and the effect of opposite expectations, and there are many recognized genres.
Satire and political satire use ironic comedy to portray persons or social institutions as ridiculous or corrupt, thus alienating their audience from the object of humor. Parody borrows the form of some popular genre, artwork, or text but uses certain ironic changes to critique that form from within (though not necessarily in a condemning way). Screwball comedy derives its humor largely from bizarre, surprising (and improbable) situations or characters. Black comedy is defined by dark humor that makes light of so called dark or evil elements in human nature. Similarly scatological humor, sexual humor, and race humor create comedy by violating social conventions or taboos in comedic ways. A comedy of manners typically takes as its subject a particular part of society (usually upper class society) and uses humor to parody or satirize the behavior and mannerisms of its members. Romantic comedy is a popular genre (also known as rom com or romcom) that depicts burgeoning romance in humorous terms and focuses on the foibles of those falling in love.
Felix the Cat is a cartoon character created in the silent-film era. His black body, white eyes, and giant grin, coupled with the surrealism of the situations in which his cartoons place him, combined to make Felix one of the most recognizable cartoon characters in the world. Felix was the first character from animation to attain a level of popularity sufficient to draw movie audiences based solely on his star power. Felix's origins remain disputed. Australian cartoonist and film entrepreneur Pat Sullivan and American animator Otto Messmer said that they created Felix. Some historians argue that Messmer ghosted for Sullivan. What is certain is that Felix emerged from Sullivan's studio, and cartoons featuring the character enjoyed unprecedented success and popularity in the 1920s. From 1922, Felix enjoyed sudden, enormous popularity in international popular culture. Felix's success was fading by the late 1920s with the arrival of sound cartoons. In 1929, Sullivan decided to finally make the transition and began distributing Felix sound cartoons through Copley Pictures. The sound Felix shorts proved to be a failure and the operation ended in 1930 with Sullivan himself passing away in 1933. Felix saw a brief three cartoon resurrection in 1936 by the Van Beuren Studios. Television would prove the cat's savior. Felix cartoons began airing on American TV in 1953. Joe Oriolo introduced a redesigned Felix in a new animated series for TV. The cat has since starred in other television programs and in a feature film.
A pun (or paronomasia) is a phrase that deliberately exploits confusion between similar words for rhetorical effect, whether humorous or serious. A pun may also exploit confusion between two senses of the same written or spoken word, due to homophony, homography, homonymy, polysemy, or metaphorical usage. For example, in the phrase, "There is nothing punny about bad puns", the pun takes place in the deliberate confusion of the implied word "funny" by the substitution of the word "punny", a heterophone of "funny". By definition, puns must be deliberate; an involuntary substitution of similar words is called a malapropism.
Jonathan Niven "Jon" Cryer (born April 16, 1965) is an American actor, screenwriter and film producer. He is the son of actress/singer Gretchen Cryer. He made his motion picture debut by starring in the 1984 romantic comedy No Small Affair, but gained greater fame by starring as "Duckie" in the John Hughes film Pretty in Pink. In 1998 he finished writing and producing the independent film Went to Coney Island on a Mission From God... Be Back by Five, which was well received. Even though Cryer gained some fame by starring in these movies, he had not found television success; the shows he had starred in ( The Famous Teddy Z, Partners and The Trouble with Normal) all did not last very long, until, in 2003, he was cast to portray Alan Harper on the CBS hit comedy series Two and a Half Men, opposite Charlie Sheen. To date, the actor has received three Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for his work on the show.
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Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
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