COMEDIC STYLES

1. PARODY SLAPSTICK COMEDIC STYLES FARCE COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE COMEDY OF MANNERS SATIRE

2. PARODY; similar to satire as it is a work that deliberately imitates another work for comic effect, sometimes delivering a message. • COMEDY OF MANNERS; literary, artistic works comprising sophisticated society satires. From 1660 to about 1700, these plays were also known as Restoration comedies (William Wycherley). The form was later revived in the 1770s (Richard Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith) and then again in the 1890s (Oscar Wilde) • FARCE; ridiculous, improbable situations. Media examples include Fawlty Towers and Monty Python.  • SLAPSTICK; knockabout, physical humour. Media examples include TheThree Stooges, The Marx Bros, Laurel and Hardy and Mr Bean.  • SATIRE; sends up people and events, ridiculing and mocking weaknesses to create the humour.  • COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE; historical, improvised physical comedy, originating in Italy around the year 1550. Stock characters, split between masters and servants.

3. ELEMENTS OF COMEDY • SURPRISE • TIMING • REPETITION • REVERSALS • MISTAKEN IDENTITIES • OPPOSITES • DISGUISES • HIDING • BLOCKING

4. KEY SKILLS IN COMEDY • TIMING • RHYTHM • CLARITY – OF VOICE AND MOVEMENT • TONE OF VOICE • MOVEMENT – BOTH SUBTLE AND EXAGGERATED • 2D PRESENTATION • SCHTICK • SINCERITY – NEVER SEE THE HUMOUR

5. COMEDY OF MANNERS • A Comedy of Manners is a play concerned with satirising society’s manners. A manner is the method in which everyday duties are performed, conditions of society, or a way of speaking. It implies a polite and well-bred behaviour. • Comedy of Manners is known as high comedy because it involves a sophisticated wit and talent in the writing of the script. In this sense it is both intellectual and very much the opposite of slapstick, which requires little skill with the script and is largely a physical form of comedy. In a Comedy of Manners however, there is often minimal physical action and the play may involve heavy use of dialogue. • A Comedy of Manners usually employs an equal amount of both satire and farce resulting in a hilarious send-up of a particular social group. Most plays of the genre were carefully constructed to satirise the very people watching them. This was usually the middle to upper classes in society, who were normally the only people wealthy enough to afford going to the theatre to see a comedy of manners in the first place. The playwrights knew this in advance and fully intended to create characters that were sending up the daily customs of those in the audience watching the play. The satire tended to focus on their materialistic nature, never-ending desire to gossip and hypocritical existence.

6. JACK WORTHING (ERNEST) • Jack Worthing, the play’s protagonist, was discovered as an infant in a handbag in the cloakroom of a railway station in London. • Jack has grown up to be a seemingly responsible and respectable young man, a major landowner and Justice of the Peace in Hertfordshire, where he has a country estate. Here he is known by what he imagines to be his real name, Jack, as a pillar of the community. He is guardian to Cecily, and has other duties and people who depend on him, including servants, tenants, farmers, and the local clergyman. • For years, he has also pretended to have an irresponsible younger brother named Ernest, whom he is always having to bail out of some mischief. In fact, he himself is the reprobate brother Ernest. • Ernest is the name Jack goes by in London, where he really goes on these occasions. The fictional brother is Jack’s alibi, his excuse for disappearing from Hertfordshire and going off to London to escape his responsibilities and indulge in exactly the sort of behaviour he pretends to disapprove of in his brother.

7. ALGERNON MONCRIEFF (BUNBURY) • Algernon, the play’s secondary hero, is closer to the figure of the dandy than any other character in the play. A charming, idle, decorative bachelor, Algernon is brilliant, witty, selfish, amoral, and given to making delightful paradoxical and epigrammatic pronouncements that either make no sense at all or touch on something profound. • Like Jack, Algernon has invented a fictional character, a chronic invalid named Bunbury, to give him a reprieve from his real life. Algernon is constantly being summoned to Bunbury’s deathbed, which conveniently draws him away from tiresome or distasteful social obligations. • Like Jack’s fictional brother Ernest, Bunbury provides Algernon with a way of indulging himself while also suggesting great seriousness and sense of duty. However, Jack does not admit to being a “Bunburyist,” even after he’s been called on it, while Algernon not only acknowledges his wrongdoing but also revels in it.

8. GWENDOLEN FAIRFAX • More than any other female character in the play, Gwendolen suggests the qualities of conventional Victorian womanhood. She has ideas and ideals, attends lectures, and is bent on self-improvement. She is also artificial and pretentious. • Gwendolen is in love with Jack, whom she knows as Ernest, and she is fixated on this name. • Gwendolen is so caught up in finding a husband named Ernest, whose name, she says, “inspires absolute confidence,” that she can’t even see that the man calling himself Ernest is fooling her with an extensive deception. In this way, her own image consciousness blurs her judgment. • She is strong-minded and speaks with unassailable authority on matters of taste and morality. She is both a model and an arbiter of elegant fashion and sophistication, and nearly everything she says and does is calculated for effect.

9. CECILY CARDEW • If Gwendolen is a product of London high society, Cecily is its opposite. She is a child of nature, as innocent and unspoiled as a pink rose, to which Algernon compares her. • However, her cleverness is belied by her fascination with wickedness. She is obsessed with the name Ernest just as Gwendolen is, but wickedness is primarily what leads her to fall in love with “Uncle Jack’s brother,” whose reputation is wayward enough to intrigue her. • Like Algernon and Jack, she is a fantasist. She has invented her romance with Ernest and elaborated it with as much enthusiasm as the men have their secret identities. Though she does not have an alter-ego as vivid or developed as Bunbury or Ernest, her claim that she and Algernon/Ernest are already engaged is rooted in the fantasy world she’s created around Ernest.