ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most striking thing about comedy is the immense variety and range of its forms. Historically, these forms have included narrative poems and plays, novels and short stories, comedia erudita and commedia dell’arte, slapstick and the comedy of manners, the jig, the droll, and the afterpiece, and pantomime, flyting, and farce.1Even within the more restricted fields of cinema and television, comedy is, and always has been, marked by its formal diversity. From the variety show to the short, from the sketch to the narrative feature, from cartoons to sit-coms and from double-acts to stand-up routines, the range of forms it can encompass is probably greater than that of any other genre.
